BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.
Add to that the excessive cost of litigation filed against each and every nuclear powerplant that was built in the late 60's and 70's. When the court gives you an order to hold up on construction and weather effects destroy what little you've built to date, you then have to go through the additional costs of getting the permits to demolish what you've built, the cost of demolition and disposal, and the new cost to rebuild what you had to destroy because it now doesn't meet code. Case in point, the Perry Nuclear Powerplant, reasonably familiar to me as I was living in the Cleveland area from '77 through '97. Took them 9 years to build it while navagating through a swamp of litigation, and they only did half the project, as they determined that the added expenses of finishing the 2nd reactor wouldn't be cost effective due to said litigation.
Thoriumfueled reactors seem to be safer and all around better to build than plutonium/uranium reactors, plus there's no nuclear explosives involved.
On a side note... I would think that "stealing" mp3s would open up a whole new can of worms. What are you going to do when your "buddy" down the street refuses to "return" your music library, call the police?
Surely it would be possible to provide a system whereby as the original owner you can reclaim the files ?
Thing is, the media companies claim the files belong to them. By cutting off the keyservers, they 'reclaim' the files by disallowing your use by claiming the act of shutting down the keyserver means all licenses are revoked without compensation. Haven't read your EULAs lately?
Lets just hope the RIAA doesn't try to enforce IP with a 10^34 J laser. Frankly though, it would be consistent with their historical level of subtlety.
Don't expect them to ever give up their legal sledgehammers. They'll just use the lasers on hardened targets that the sledgehammers bounce off of...
Have wealthy patrons, or the government, pay for music production. The results are freely copyable. The advantage of this is that the public can consume all the music it wants. The disadvantage of this is that the public doesn't really have a say in what is produced--they get what the patrons or the government wants.
You're not allowing for the development of technology. Producing a music album can be dirt cheap these days. What costs is, promoting and advertising said album, but with all the webpages out there showcasing different bands, even promotion costs are dropping.
Don't worry, Marx & Engles missed that train, too, which is why Marx took forever to finish Das Kapital; he knew his assumptions went south when you add in technology and just didn't wanna bite the Twinkie and ride the train to its logical conclusion.
Unless you're on a no-fly list you're going to able to fly out of the country. There's no outbound passport control in the US.
And if you're on the no-fly list you're not going anywhere unless you're driving. (Then you could drive to Canada or Mexico)
Yes, there is. You need a passport to go to Canada or Mexico these days. No passport? You don't get out. They wanna keep you in the US, all they gotta do is cancel your passport. They don't have to give you a reason upfront.
I'd rather have all the CCTV in the world than giving my entire identity, credit cards and all, to any DHS cocaine addict who happens to need a fix. At least CCTV can't read my passport and credit cards.
What, they trying to elicit a charge of perjury or something based on the answers to these questions? If so, why not ask people "Have you stopped beating your wife? [Y/N]'
No, they want their cake and eat it too. Additionally, they want to also sell you their cake, have you eat it, regurgitate it, give it back again for resale so they can rinse and repeat until the 2nd Coming of Elvis.
Look for iPod sales in Buffalo and Seattle and Vermont to increase.
Look for massive shipments of iPods going through the Seaway Reserve as the Mohawks enjoy their cross-border rights and 'just happen' to bring back a few hundred iPods when they do this...
It's Canada we are talking about, where a health-care bill is guaranteed never to force you into bankruptcy.
So you get sick. You run your own company. You can't work while waiting 9 months for surgery + recovery time. Result: Bankruptcy. Don't delude yourself that socialism can work.
But at least the doctor bills didn't add insult to injury like they would here in the States...
i'd be for this if thr fee was to pay for piracy. it makes sense and is roughly fair though perhaps not individually fair. piracy is a problem for producers. there is no simple way to correct this that is fair. there are tonnes of unkowns like the fact that for somw artists piracy is helpful and for some it is not. while the cost of reproduction is negligible you still need some artificial scarcity to fairly compensate the reasonable revenue the artist should have.
Keeping in mind that I'm not Canadian, I could almost go for something like this, except that the *AA consider downloading as 'theft' and 'piracy'. Piracy is when you crank out a bunch of CDs and/or DVDs of copyrighted media when you don't own the copyright and offer it for sale. If I were to download something and keep it for myself, where's the 'piracy'? Where's the 'profit'?
And it goes without saying I'd want an accounting of where the money goes. Do the artists really get the 'media piracy fees' or does some asshole in a suit that can't make it in the real world get it? But then, I'm not Canadian. I'm American, and I know exactly where *AA puts the money it 'wins' in court and extorts from citizenry: right back into new lawsuits and buying more politicians to make their strongarm tactics legal.
If I go to my government saying "hi I have a business plan but I need you to pass these laws for it to work" it would likely not go far.
Yeah, you'd have to be a 'name' artist for that to happen so you could afford to buy all the Sonny Bono clones you'd need to put said law into effect.
From where I sit, it's starting to look possible that somebody's gonna wanna put a license and a meter on my radio so that I pay a fee for each minute I spend listening to the radio, payable by credit card. And I gotta pay for the meter and the installation. God help us when they come up with ways to read people's thoughts and catch me remembering a song or 3, they'll want paid for that too.
Combining 2 roles in one launcher is not waste, it's versatility. Developing 2 different rockets is always more expensive than developing one and using it for both roles. Plus, with one rocket launching twice, instead of two being launched once, economies of scale brings the per-launch cost down twice as fast for DIRECT than it does for Ares.
Multimissioning a booster for unmanned cargo runs and manned capsuals with some cargo underneath seems to me to be a Swiss Army knife solution. Yeah, you can use it for a tool if you rilly gotta do it, but you're better off with the right tool for the job. Current Shuttle launches max out at about 3Gs, whereas unmanned launches can hit 20Gs when you're going for max efficiency. I'm a fan of a man-rated 'spam can' booster AND a 'big dumb booster' for cargo launches. Just makes sense to me...
If you remove the SRBs then you will have to design a whole new engine, in the class of the Apollo era F-1s since each SRB puts out the equivalent thrust of almost TWO F-1 rocket engines each.
Or you could just buy RD-171s.../blockquote>
Gotta admit, the Russkis knew what they were doin when they built that Energia.
I always thought that the goal of Ares was to provide a method of finally killing the shuttle program: by promising a successor which would maintain the shuttle program jobs, they would have the political clout to close down the shuttle support manufacturing (external tanks, etc) to ensure that it couldn't fly past 2010 and then they would close down Ares once its job was done.
OK, so why am I getting the feeling that somebody, somewhere, is busy printing out their 'Mission Accomplished!" banner to fly when they cancel Ares once and for all?
Far be it for me to piss on NASA's fire, but dammit, bout the only thing they've done in the last 25+ years is make space safe for robots. We got to the Moon in '69 by the quick & dirty method: throwing enough money at engineers til it worked. Problem with that solution was, it didn't leave a thing to do next. If we'd worked on a single stage to orbit reuseable vehicle, built a real space station for construction, and built a reuseable lunar probe there at the space station, we coulda had a goddamned lunar colony already and been ready to head for Mars. Instead, we got a space truck that's about to come apart if you breathe on it hard, and a 'habitat' in a bad orbit that costs a mint to maintain, doesn't do much real science, and just makes our international partners look good while we pour more money down the rat hole. Oh, and we're gonna deorbit it within a year or so of shutting down our space truck program.
Yes, some cool shit's been done with unmanned probes like the Mars Rovers, the Cassini Probe, the Hubble telescope, et. al. Done on a shoestring cause 99% of NASA's budget's tied up in the ISS. We've learned a lot about keeping unmanned probes alive and kicking way past their bedtimes. We've learned the Shuttle ain't the best vehicle for heavy lifting (the Russians coulda told us that if anybody'd bothered to ask 'em), that solid fuel boosters ain't that safe when trying to lift a man-rated vehicle (can't turn the damned thing off once you light it up), and that we've got a long way to go to relearn what we used to know to make a man-rated stack to put somebody back into orbit again once we finally put the Shuttle in a museum someplace. And we've learned that the only people going into space for real are gonna be military-trained pilots, ubergeek 'mission specialists' with decent security clearance, high ranking Federal politicians, and the occaisional uberrich guy willing to shell out a few million for a vacation he can brag about to anybody who cares to listen at his country club. As for the rest of us, we're stuck here on the ground, and my big question is, have we missed the window of opportunity to conquer space right?
Look, there's a lot of stupidity on slashdot too, like how everyone wants to completely dismantle the government and heaven forbid you mention UFOs or 9/11, because the nutters will come out of the woodwork.
Difference is, when the nutters come out on Slashdot, at least they're borderline entertaining and good for a laugh, they don't hurt anybody or anything by their actions.
And for the life of me, I can't remember ever seeing anything about UFOs on Slashdot, & I've been here a few years before finally breaking down & signing up.
Vandalism of what amounts to a public resource for political ends is either civil disobedience or domestic terrorism. If it's the latter, they deserve prison time. If it's the former, they should demand to go to jail and wear their prison garb as a badge of honor. As long as the individuals who did this stay in hiding they are nothing but cowards.
Ah, but if the 'leaders' of these 'ecowarriors' go to jail, who will lead the 'troops'? You send the 'troops' to jail, but keep the 'leaders' free to inspire more and more violent actions in the name of ELF, etc.
ELF, btw, is 'descended' from an outfit called Earth First!, who include people like convicted arsonist Rod Coronado as sterling examples of the 'best' that they offer. No wonder PETA likes nutjobs like him, they make PETA look 'moderate'.
I was talking with an ecofreak once who told me that the 'carrying capacity' of Earth for humans is on the order of 500 million tops. So, with about 7 billion people on the planet at the moment, seems 13 of 14 need to die & join the compost heap. I'd asked the ecofreak if he was volunteering to be one of the first into the compost heap. He told me 'Of course not, they need me to show them the way'. Seems I hear similar things from any of the econutters out there; they're the only ones who can save us from ourselves as long as we do what they say.
It's copyright infringement, not theft. If I hotwire your car and drive it off, that's theft as I've deprived you the use of the car. If I make a copy of your notes and leave you your notes, I haven't stolen them. If they're copyrighted Cliff notes, I've infringed on their copyright. The difference is, I have your car, but you still have your notes, and I have a copy of them.
3) The rant about examining only 1,176 people for the study - in which case the same kind of tv viewer statistics and other studies are made in what case.
So could someone please explain *why* is it a questionable research.
Because if there were actually 33 million people online in the UK and they only surveyed 1176 people, they only sampled 0.003563% of the people online. Anybody who has even slight exposure to statistics can tell you, a sample size of.003563% of the whole is statistically irrelevant. When you start looking at 1% or greater, you start getting relevance. 1% of 33 million is 330,000 people.
Mirrors only work against a small range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Everyday mirrors reflect visible light. This type of laser probably is not visible. Probably in the ultraviolet or higher bands. It'd melt through any surface short of a perfect blackbody.
I don't think you mean "perfect blackbody", since that's an object that ABSORBS all radiation incident on it -- which is exactly what you don't want to do.
Yeah you do, as long as that perfect blackbody isn't the intended target, but is the defense instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Add to that the excessive cost of litigation filed against each and every nuclear powerplant that was built in the late 60's and 70's. When the court gives you an order to hold up on construction and weather effects destroy what little you've built to date, you then have to go through the additional costs of getting the permits to demolish what you've built, the cost of demolition and disposal, and the new cost to rebuild what you had to destroy because it now doesn't meet code. Case in point, the Perry Nuclear Powerplant, reasonably familiar to me as I was living in the Cleveland area from '77 through '97. Took them 9 years to build it while navagating through a swamp of litigation, and they only did half the project, as they determined that the added expenses of finishing the 2nd reactor wouldn't be cost effective due to said litigation.
Thorium fueled reactors seem to be safer and all around better to build than plutonium/uranium reactors, plus there's no nuclear explosives involved.
He was refering to this actually. Great episode...
Thing is, the media companies claim the files belong to them. By cutting off the keyservers, they 'reclaim' the files by disallowing your use by claiming the act of shutting down the keyserver means all licenses are revoked without compensation. Haven't read your EULAs lately?
Don't expect them to ever give up their legal sledgehammers. They'll just use the lasers on hardened targets that the sledgehammers bounce off of...
You're not allowing for the development of technology. Producing a music album can be dirt cheap these days. What costs is, promoting and advertising said album, but with all the webpages out there showcasing different bands, even promotion costs are dropping.
Don't worry, Marx & Engles missed that train, too, which is why Marx took forever to finish Das Kapital; he knew his assumptions went south when you add in technology and just didn't wanna bite the Twinkie and ride the train to its logical conclusion.
Agreed. I got 10 Euros on the pigeon as well. God bless offshore betting parlours...
Yes, there is. You need a passport to go to Canada or Mexico these days. No passport? You don't get out. They wanna keep you in the US, all they gotta do is cancel your passport. They don't have to give you a reason upfront.
Oh? And RFID-chipped documents is a good thing???
What, they trying to elicit a charge of perjury or something based on the answers to these questions? If so, why not ask people "Have you stopped beating your wife? [Y/N]'
'Research data'. That what they're calling pr0n these days? If so, I've got a few gigs of 'research data' myself that needs backing up...
Oh, it's not for me, it's for my girlfriend.
Yeah, that's the ticket...
If I was Gordon Lightfoot, I'd be plenty pissed right aboot noo...
I checked that link, seems to me that none of the original members are still with Allister, it's a whole new thing...
No, they want their cake and eat it too. Additionally, they want to also sell you their cake, have you eat it, regurgitate it, give it back again for resale so they can rinse and repeat until the 2nd Coming of Elvis.
Look for massive shipments of iPods going through the Seaway Reserve as the Mohawks enjoy their cross-border rights and 'just happen' to bring back a few hundred iPods when they do this...
But at least the doctor bills didn't add insult to injury like they would here in the States...
Keeping in mind that I'm not Canadian, I could almost go for something like this, except that the *AA consider downloading as 'theft' and 'piracy'. Piracy is when you crank out a bunch of CDs and/or DVDs of copyrighted media when you don't own the copyright and offer it for sale. If I were to download something and keep it for myself, where's the 'piracy'? Where's the 'profit'?
And it goes without saying I'd want an accounting of where the money goes. Do the artists really get the 'media piracy fees' or does some asshole in a suit that can't make it in the real world get it? But then, I'm not Canadian. I'm American, and I know exactly where *AA puts the money it 'wins' in court and extorts from citizenry: right back into new lawsuits and buying more politicians to make their strongarm tactics legal.
Yeah, you'd have to be a 'name' artist for that to happen so you could afford to buy all the Sonny Bono clones you'd need to put said law into effect.
From where I sit, it's starting to look possible that somebody's gonna wanna put a license and a meter on my radio so that I pay a fee for each minute I spend listening to the radio, payable by credit card. And I gotta pay for the meter and the installation. God help us when they come up with ways to read people's thoughts and catch me remembering a song or 3, they'll want paid for that too.
Multimissioning a booster for unmanned cargo runs and manned capsuals with some cargo underneath seems to me to be a Swiss Army knife solution. Yeah, you can use it for a tool if you rilly gotta do it, but you're better off with the right tool for the job. Current Shuttle launches max out at about 3Gs, whereas unmanned launches can hit 20Gs when you're going for max efficiency. I'm a fan of a man-rated 'spam can' booster AND a 'big dumb booster' for cargo launches. Just makes sense to me...
OK, so why am I getting the feeling that somebody, somewhere, is busy printing out their 'Mission Accomplished!" banner to fly when they cancel Ares once and for all?
Far be it for me to piss on NASA's fire, but dammit, bout the only thing they've done in the last 25+ years is make space safe for robots. We got to the Moon in '69 by the quick & dirty method: throwing enough money at engineers til it worked. Problem with that solution was, it didn't leave a thing to do next. If we'd worked on a single stage to orbit reuseable vehicle, built a real space station for construction, and built a reuseable lunar probe there at the space station, we coulda had a goddamned lunar colony already and been ready to head for Mars. Instead, we got a space truck that's about to come apart if you breathe on it hard, and a 'habitat' in a bad orbit that costs a mint to maintain, doesn't do much real science, and just makes our international partners look good while we pour more money down the rat hole. Oh, and we're gonna deorbit it within a year or so of shutting down our space truck program.
Yes, some cool shit's been done with unmanned probes like the Mars Rovers, the Cassini Probe, the Hubble telescope, et. al. Done on a shoestring cause 99% of NASA's budget's tied up in the ISS. We've learned a lot about keeping unmanned probes alive and kicking way past their bedtimes. We've learned the Shuttle ain't the best vehicle for heavy lifting (the Russians coulda told us that if anybody'd bothered to ask 'em), that solid fuel boosters ain't that safe when trying to lift a man-rated vehicle (can't turn the damned thing off once you light it up), and that we've got a long way to go to relearn what we used to know to make a man-rated stack to put somebody back into orbit again once we finally put the Shuttle in a museum someplace. And we've learned that the only people going into space for real are gonna be military-trained pilots, ubergeek 'mission specialists' with decent security clearance, high ranking Federal politicians, and the occaisional uberrich guy willing to shell out a few million for a vacation he can brag about to anybody who cares to listen at his country club. As for the rest of us, we're stuck here on the ground, and my big question is, have we missed the window of opportunity to conquer space right?
Difference is, when the nutters come out on Slashdot, at least they're borderline entertaining and good for a laugh, they don't hurt anybody or anything by their actions.
And for the life of me, I can't remember ever seeing anything about UFOs on Slashdot, & I've been here a few years before finally breaking down & signing up.
Ah, but if the 'leaders' of these 'ecowarriors' go to jail, who will lead the 'troops'? You send the 'troops' to jail, but keep the 'leaders' free to inspire more and more violent actions in the name of ELF, etc.
ELF, btw, is 'descended' from an outfit called Earth First!, who include people like convicted arsonist Rod Coronado as sterling examples of the 'best' that they offer. No wonder PETA likes nutjobs like him, they make PETA look 'moderate'.
I was talking with an ecofreak once who told me that the 'carrying capacity' of Earth for humans is on the order of 500 million tops. So, with about 7 billion people on the planet at the moment, seems 13 of 14 need to die & join the compost heap. I'd asked the ecofreak if he was volunteering to be one of the first into the compost heap. He told me 'Of course not, they need me to show them the way'. Seems I hear similar things from any of the econutters out there; they're the only ones who can save us from ourselves as long as we do what they say.
I say, compost 'em first.
It's copyright infringement, not theft. If I hotwire your car and drive it off, that's theft as I've deprived you the use of the car. If I make a copy of your notes and leave you your notes, I haven't stolen them. If they're copyrighted Cliff notes, I've infringed on their copyright. The difference is, I have your car, but you still have your notes, and I have a copy of them.
Because if there were actually 33 million people online in the UK and they only surveyed 1176 people, they only sampled 0.003563% of the people online. Anybody who has even slight exposure to statistics can tell you, a sample size of .003563% of the whole is statistically irrelevant. When you start looking at 1% or greater, you start getting relevance. 1% of 33 million is 330,000 people.
Yeah you do, as long as that perfect blackbody isn't the intended target, but is the defense instead.