It also assumes a host of other things such as...
[...]
4)Time doesn't matter. Notice that none of the economic equations have a t factor.
Not true; those for time value of money are the most trivial of such, although there are others (oft related). But you're right, quick-and-dirty supply and demand equations don't usually model this. It can be sort of modeled by factoring in the non-zero costs of information, time delay of propogation of information and resources, and time value cost contributions of the results... but it's not a nice simple "x"-shaped graph. More essential here is the standard assumption of:
5) Low cost of market entry
...which we don't have. Starting a national ISP isn't cheap. Thus, cartels and monopolies are a danger... requiring intervention by Government, the local monopoly on Use Of Violence. Alternatively, you can figure out an easy way to reduce costs of entry enough to make peer-to-peer backbone viable. Have fun.
Seriously wouldn't manipulating the orbit of the asteroid into one around earth or in one of our L points make a lot of sense in the creation of orbiting settlements. Rather than simply blowing the sucker up.
The asteroid's orbit goes out past Mars, and in almost to Mercury. The delta V required would be probably be comparable to just take a hunk of rock from Earth's surface to L4/L5; I'd guess within a natural magnitude, and maybe in favor of lifting from sea level.
Admittedly, it's easier to justify using quick-and-dirty Orion-style nuclear propulsion to move stuff when you stay outside a biosphere. OTOH, lifting from the lunar surface would be way cheaper than either plan, and also not involve a biosphere.
To be exempt, classified materials that are exempt (A) specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and (B) are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order.
The question is, can documents indicating the president ordered illegal activity properly be classified? This is round one. Round two is when the NYT makes the legal staff of the DOD go before a judge and explain why things that weren't released, weren't released. With a straight face. Of course, the DOD and DOJ get to make motions about this sort of thing before the judge without the NYT getting to hear or argue specifics... but the judge isn't guaranteed to agree with the DOD. At which point the appeals start, from either side. And if the appeals judges are pissed enough, this might hit SCOTUS level before Bush leaves anyway in 2008. Or it might not.
While it's not likely to suceed, it has a better chance than anything else the NYT can try at this point. And it at least sells papers. =)
You'd need to modify DNS naming convention slightly. Right now, references to resolves formally to the unique , the final period indicating it is off of the One True Root domain — not that most people bother with the final dot, unless your crack-smoking DNS administrator has configured the server to resolve <*.com> addresses off of a locally created subdomain first. (Don't laugh. I know an admin who had to prevent this where he worked.)
So, now there are two root servers. Ergo, you need to indicate which one you want. If you don't care, you use the current convention of <www.google.com> or <www.google.com.>, and your DNS server takes care of it. If you explicitly want your DNS server to take care of it, you use <www.google.com.[0]>. Since the US-run root server group was established first (and because I'm an imperialist American slob), you use <www.google.com.[1]> to talk to the US One True Root; for China's, use <www.google.com.[2]>. Now all you need to do is patch every OS on the planet to work with the final naming convention. That should be doable by say, Thursay, right?
Yes, I know this exact scheme won't work as-is, but a standard like this could be developed... assuming anyone cares to put in the effort to make it work. Which China might not. I'll also point out that China could have gotten the same result without breaking DNS by mandating that all DNS servers in China listen to the national <dns.cn.> DNS server as their prime authority, which in turn would be configured more-or-less as <dns.cracksmoker.com.> is in my example above. Ergo, I conjecture breaking DNS was a design criterion in the Chinese government's efforts.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, this will only break DNS, leaving virtual hosting companies hanging; the Internet at large and direct IP address URI's will still work fine. Demand increase, supply constant: expect the price of a static IP address to go up for a while, until IPv6 changes the supply.
Of course, if the Chinese really want to break the Internet, all they have to do is start handing out IP address blocks that have already been allocated outside of China for use within China.
I am free to make a movie about a car salesman in North Dakota who tries to kidnap his own wife for the ransom money from his rich father-in-law and whose plan goes south because of two stupid henchmen and a very persistent (and very pregnant) cop, as long as I don't use any film, music, lines, or titles from "Fargo".
Well, you're not quite completely free. And in the case you describe, since Fargo is still under copyright, you'd be giving your lawyer an uphill battle.
Frankly, I think White Wolf's case over Underworld was roughly the same caliber as this one for the DaVinci code, and WW were not-quite laughed out of court by the judge.
Um? 1.5GB is piddling compared the the 4 to 20 GB on a standard commercial release DVD-ROM, so your expectation of both a "full res" and "DivX" version (with a hope for "bonus features" to boot!) is most accurately characterized with, well, various rude words, noises, and gestures. A combo DVD/UMD player is also over optimistic; such multi-type players cost more to make, and ergo to sell, and rarely do well outside of the small high end prosumer market. As for a UMD burner, you've obviously not been paying attention to Sony's previous bit control attempts, or their struggle to lock down the firmware, or other recent activities.
If you use DVD-Shrink at maximum compression, reauthor to remove most of the alternate languages, menu chrome, and other bonus features, you can sometimes squeeze a regular release DVD down to a single 1.4GB 80mm DVD-R. Sometimes not, if the movie runs a little long, but OTOH it's usually quite practical if you're only taking a single TV episode from a collection that puts several on each retail disk.
Of course, one could use a different codec besides VOB/MPEG2... but that loses compatibility with many non-computer DVD players. And, of course, many codecs are covered by patents, which adds to the costs if you want to make a retail product, and there are definite trade offs with the video quality. But if the whole problem was easy, someone would have solved it by now.
The Government wanted blood, legal or otherwise. Mind you, so did Mr. Washington - Ghandi he was not.
Actually, it was more Adams and Jefferson who were out for blood. Washington and Franklin were a bit more moderate. However, when Parliment and the Crown were disinclined to grant the colonials their rights assured by the Magna Carta, they were willing the settle for blood.
I'd say it's very arguable that a reasonable man would indeed highlight by whatever means possible a clear violation of both trust and law. Indeed, to not do so would likely have made him an accessory to the crime.
That's not so clear to me. From the summary, it sounds like the lawyers were saying "what you're doing this may be illegal; we need to figure out how to get your asses back within the law before they get handed to you." That is, the lawyers were trying to help Diebold stop breaking the law, while avoiding Diebold getting convicted of anything. This is expected conduct for a lawyer as within the Bar's accepted ethical guidelines as I understand them. (However, IAmNotALaywer either.)
Attorney-client privilege exists in part so that clients can get advice on how to avoid breaking the law, allowing (as a not-so-random example) a lawyer to write the client telling them that what they're doing might be unlawful. The papers were covered under the ACP as a legal work product. Presumably this privilege is retained even though the papers were seen by a non-attorney worker at the firm (IE: the "word processor", aka typist). To break the ACP, you would need to show that the lawyers were activly conspiring to help Diebold break the law, EG: "when you applied these patches the software violated the law; you need to destroy all record that the software used wasn't the original software approved". Only then would those at the firm be liable as co-conspirators. There is nothing suggesting such misconduct by the law firm; ergo, the release was illegal.
Barring evidence of such unlawful conduct by the lawyers, the actions by the typist should have consequences; it was a clear breach of legal ethics. The breach of confidentiality should get the typist fired if the firm weren't idiots in drafting their NDA. For the violation of client trust, no law firm in the country should be willing to hire him ever again. And the released papers look ripe for a motion to supress if anyone tries to use them in any court prosecution of Diebold. (Of course, Diebold can't do squat about their being admitted to legislative hearings....)
But prosecution of the poor typist, for a crisis of conscience and putting the public interest above the client and the law firm? Hack, no. It's crap that starts making kookery about lawyers being an unconstitutional aristocracy sound less kooky.
A juries job is to decide if a defendant is guilty of a crime. The crime is defined by a law.
It is universally agreed under Anglic law that the job of the jury is to return a verdict according to the factual evidence in the particular case before them. It is a matter of contention as to whether and to what extent the law itself should be judged by a jury. Most judges and lawyers consider outright nullification an irremediable error, and hold the view that it is the function of the judge to decide the questions of law, and the jury to only decide the questions of fact. Proponents of the right of jury nullification disagree, with considerable US historical precedent. Both sides feel that any flaws of the current arrangement are less than those of any proposed alternative to correct them.
Myself, I believe it is a right akin to that of the right to take arms against the government for purpose of establishing a new one: not justicable when sucessful, but the exercise of this right indicates a major problem in society (one way or another), and should be done neither lightly nor casually. That said, the prosecutor would have his work cut out extracting a "guilty" verdict out of me given the surrounding circumstances of this case, and the DA would also have no hope of extracting my vote for his re-election.
Those interested in the topic should read the oddly named Sparf v. US in its entirety. (No, it's not the trial of a Thundercat.)
On PSP (available at Best Buy). I've also saw 80mm DVD versions of a few movies on sale at Sam's Club around Xmas; I haven't looked since, so I don't know whether it was just a trial balloon, or whether they're available anywhere else.
I can't help thinking the authorities are still way too star-struck by tech and don't value human intel enough.
Unfortunately, getting quality human intel isn't simple, and there can be problems with overvaling it, too. There are problems when you start only looking for evidence supporting what you expect to find.
Tech-based intel is too limited in coverage; humans go places machines don't. Human intel has low accuracy; machines don't lie for their own benefit (yet). You need a mix of both.
Rolling all of your points together so I can give a glib response I just thought of, the cautious position boils down to:
Using uranium to generate electricity has various potential drawbacks; we'd better make bombs with it so we don't have to worry. That way we'll be all set to fight over the remaining oil.
=)
Well, "therefore we'll make bombs with it" would be more accurate; I consider that the expected result, but it isn't one I advocate. I'd advocate using uranium to very carefully start implementing a Th-U(Pu) breeder cycle, finding some nice deep geologically stable repositories for the waste products, transition over to a hydrogen/electric hybrid fueled transport system (using nuclear power to make both), and put more research into biogenerated feedstocks suitible for plastics production. However, I don't have the ears of anyone in the current White house; they seem more inclined towards the expected plan.
Global warming is just icing on the cake.
I'd disagree. The others you mention, while doing property damage and killing people, are not a threat of the survival of the human species as a whole. The climate changes from global warming, and associated change in habitat ranges for other species (eg: malaria) is the best chance for the carbon mongers to wipe out the human race. Nuclear power has a better potential — if people are stupid enough with it — to wipe out our species outright. I don't think it's very probable, but it's a finite risk... and I may be badly underestimating the stupidity (or perversity) of the species.
We have a finite supply of nuclear fuel, sure. On the other hand, if we reprocess nuclear waste and take advantage of existing Thorium reserves, our finite supply will last over a hundred thousand years.
Note that you need to not only reprocess, but use a breeder cycle, which has yet to be done in a commerically viable manner. Without breeders, using current methods, the Uranium supply extractable at under $250/kilo is only equivalent to about thirty times the worlds current annual energy demand.
Of course, when the price per kilo goes high enough, oceanic uranium extraction makes the supply effectively infinite... but at that point you need to start explicitly calculating energy costs in the process.
It's just that you might have to accept $500/kg uranium rather than $40/kg as it was as of the survey.
Also, when you hit the $2000/kg threshold, the supply goes into the multi-century range, even with exponentially rising demand; oceanic uranium become econmically recoverable at that level.
Worry more about running out of concrete for the shielding.
We have already solved the nuclear waste issue. It's called the breeder reactor
Wrong, on two counts. First, breeder reactors only take advantage of transuranic wastes (or, yes, thorium) and make more fuel. To use radiocobolt and other suburanics as reactor fuel, you need either a passive thermal-gradient based system — which does NOT cause the radioactives to go away any faster, but merely uses the released energy — or an particle accelerator based reactor, which still has a number of challenges. (Not that breeders are routine engineering, either.)
And Second, the main "nuclear waste issue" is SOCIAL problems; NIMBY and radiological terrorism aren't anywhere near solved yet.
Plutonioum takes 500.000 years to become harmless. What kind of storage facility do you think will outlast that? Who will warrant a 500.000 year commitment?
A more reasonable standard (and the one currenly aimed for) is for the waste to become as harmless as the original unprocessed uranium ore that the waste ultimately came from.... which, I will point out, was not "stored" with any care. It also becomes simpler if you reprocess, and separate out the longest and shortest lived wastes by type. That brings it down to about a 10ky timeframe, which while a difficult criterion for a repository, looks achievable.
Hey, if mother nature can manage the problem, humanity ought to be able to figure it out.
I agree that nuclear waste is currently a very real problem. However, I believe in the ingenuity of people and am confident that in the next 100 years we will have sol[v]ed the nuclear waste issue.
The biggest problems with nuclear waste are more sociological than technical. If think you can solve both "NIMBY" and terrorism, you should be explaining how to everyone right now. It's been two thousand years since a guy who suggested being nice to each other got nailed to a tree for it, and there hasn't been diddly-squat progress since.
in fact there's are a number of reasonably sound solutions in the first case (e.g. bury it back in the mines where you dug up the nuclear material in the first place)
There are sound solutions, but that's not one of them. Nuclear reactions cause changes in radioactive toxicity and in chemical reactivity; a large chunk of the nuclear waste is more toxic than the starting uranium. Glassification isn't a bad idea, but you want to find a hole not likely to have groundwater issues for a few hundred years.
Ignoring the facts, such as the fact that any coal fired plant that's running releases radioactive gasses (14-CO2) at levels that would be considered an "incident" in a nuclear plant
IIR, it's the traces of thorium and uranium in most coal that's the bulk of the activity-- although you're partly right. Those release levels from a nuke plant would cause a permanent NRC shutdown five minutes after discovery, and that if the coal ash waste came from a nuclear plant instead, it would have to be treated as "high end" low-level nuclear waste.
Adroitly dodging regulation while imposing absurd regulatory burdens on nuclear power, and then using this to claim that nuclear isn't as cheap as promised.
Fact: even if you were willing to run mindbogglingly stupidly unsafe designs, it would never be as cheap as they promised back in the 50's and early 60's. "Too cheap to meter" was a dumb slogan even then. Yes, some of the nuclear safety requirements are excessive. Most are reasonable, based on probable cost/benefit calculations. Of course, those for fossil fuels are generally unreasonably low....
Nuclear power may not be perfect, but even the horror stories are better than what we're drifting into by letting the fossil fuel industry lead us down the garden path.
No; the horror stories include Chernobyl. OTOH, Chernobyl included design flaws that the US had prohibited since early small scale learning experiences.
About the worst disaster the carbon mongers will inflict is global warming. While the "risk" of that is judged near-certainty by everyone outside of the current White House, even worst case, that won't cause humanity to go extinct... just modern civilization. I contrast, widespread nuclear disasters are much less likely, and easier to avoid by design... but do have the potential to kill off humanity if we're stupid enough.
Myself, I'm pro-nuclear... but not blindly so. I understand why some people are nervous, and fission is only likely to solve the energy problem for a hundred years or so. The biggest problem I have is the people who insist we shouldn't use nuclear power because it isn't perfectly safe. Nothing in life is perfectly safe; you just have to make careful choices of calculated risks.
The fact is that they agreed to a set of rules which included not making non-DRM players, and they decided to go ahead and make a player that is for all intents and purposes non-DRM. They will be hit with a penalty, no doubt.
Well, not much doubt. Conceivably they might get lucky with a "No judge or jury would ever convict me!" situation. A more interesting question is whether the region coding agreement was legal, or whether the scheme (as some hotheads have muttered) constitutes an anti-trust violation. If the underlying agreement is illegal, the doctrine of unclean hands says that the other companies can't go to the courts to enforce it. It's the same principle that keeps you from suing the hitman you hired to kill your wife to try and get your money back if he doesn't do it, or the hooker you refused to pay afterwards from suing you. (Disclaimer: IAmNotALawyer.) I don't know if Samsung will have the nerve to raise this at trial; they would be more likely during settlement talks to threaten to open the issue in court, in hopes that the other players would decide they'd rather have that can of worms left unopened.
But it's never a certainty until all of the appeals are over...
Unless some higly specialised entities have developed quantum computers and kept it a secret, they won't be able to break it in any time frame suitable for mass communication snooping.
True; but if variouscorporateproposals go through, your encrypted traffic might travel cross country at sub 56kbps rates with multi-second latency. Which does bad things to a torrent.
Mind you, this still won't stop file sharing. As an example of the alternatives: someone in my apartment complex has a non-internet wireless access point, "Blacknet". It's an "open" network, DHCPing on a 10/8 space. Any DNS query resolves to the IP address of a single server, "OneTrue.blacknet."; and yes, that's the whole FQDN; any traffic to any other IP and any DNS name routes to and is intercepted by OneTrue. OneTrue's apache server redirects any URL not using OneTrue by name to OneTrue's home page. OneTrue also speaks IMAP and POP (any account name and password accepted, any mailbox you check has only one email message directing you to http://onetrue.blacknet/ telnet and ssh (assuming you're stupid enough to accept the key....), and even gopher. On the web server proper, there's about 200GB of MP3's, about 3TB of movies (uncompressed DVD ISO). They have a submissions page if you want to upload MP3s. An "about" page claims the server has over 10TB of space. Games? There's... er, NetHack. For all of the OSes listed at Nethack.org; hm. "We'll put up more games once we get back with the Amulet of Yendor."
They're fucking nuts. Not that I have room to complain, mind you....
And here I thought that in Finland one is being kicked up in considerably less time.
That depends on whether you count time from permit approval, from when the permit was first applied for, or when the application planning begins. IIR, the Finn's reactor is expected to go on-line in 2009, the permit was approved for in 2002, and first applied for in about 1993. Not sure when they started the planning, but that was sped up by having two more reactors already on the site. And, of course, that's assuming the reactor is completed on time. Of course, we could theoretically speed the political part up a lot (say, by having everyone who starts chanting "N-I-M-B-Y" summarily taken out and shot...), but taking a gigawatt-range plant from design to completion can't be gotten below nine years without taking MAJOR safety risks.
Any Finns around here know the Olkiluoto dates for sure?
Slashdot Mirror
[...]
4)Time doesn't matter. Notice that none of the economic equations have a t factor.
Not true; those for time value of money are the most trivial of such, although there are others (oft related). But you're right, quick-and-dirty supply and demand equations don't usually model this. It can be sort of modeled by factoring in the non-zero costs of information, time delay of propogation of information and resources, and time value cost contributions of the results... but it's not a nice simple "x"-shaped graph. More essential here is the standard assumption of:
5) Low cost of market entry
Oh, and did I mention the RIAA isn't keen on it?
The asteroid's orbit goes out past Mars, and in almost to Mercury. The delta V required would be probably be comparable to just take a hunk of rock from Earth's surface to L4/L5; I'd guess within a natural magnitude, and maybe in favor of lifting from sea level.
Admittedly, it's easier to justify using quick-and-dirty Orion-style nuclear propulsion to move stuff when you stay outside a biosphere. OTOH, lifting from the lunar surface would be way cheaper than either plan, and also not involve a biosphere.
The question is, can documents indicating the president ordered illegal activity properly be classified? This is round one. Round two is when the NYT makes the legal staff of the DOD go before a judge and explain why things that weren't released, weren't released. With a straight face. Of course, the DOD and DOJ get to make motions about this sort of thing before the judge without the NYT getting to hear or argue specifics... but the judge isn't guaranteed to agree with the DOD. At which point the appeals start, from either side. And if the appeals judges are pissed enough, this might hit SCOTUS level before Bush leaves anyway in 2008. Or it might not.
While it's not likely to suceed, it has a better chance than anything else the NYT can try at this point. And it at least sells papers. =)
So, now there are two root servers. Ergo, you need to indicate which one you want. If you don't care, you use the current convention of <www.google.com> or <www.google.com.>, and your DNS server takes care of it. If you explicitly want your DNS server to take care of it, you use <www.google.com.[0]>. Since the US-run root server group was established first (and because I'm an imperialist American slob), you use <www.google.com.[1]> to talk to the US One True Root; for China's, use <www.google.com.[2]>. Now all you need to do is patch every OS on the planet to work with the final naming convention. That should be doable by say, Thursay, right?
Yes, I know this exact scheme won't work as-is, but a standard like this could be developed... assuming anyone cares to put in the effort to make it work. Which China might not. I'll also point out that China could have gotten the same result without breaking DNS by mandating that all DNS servers in China listen to the national <dns.cn.> DNS server as their prime authority, which in turn would be configured more-or-less as <dns.cracksmoker.com.> is in my example above. Ergo, I conjecture breaking DNS was a design criterion in the Chinese government's efforts.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, this will only break DNS, leaving virtual hosting companies hanging; the Internet at large and direct IP address URI's will still work fine. Demand increase, supply constant: expect the price of a static IP address to go up for a while, until IPv6 changes the supply.
Of course, if the Chinese really want to break the Internet, all they have to do is start handing out IP address blocks that have already been allocated outside of China for use within China.
Well, you're not quite completely free. And in the case you describe, since Fargo is still under copyright, you'd be giving your lawyer an uphill battle.
Now, if you want to start from a work no longer under copyright, and use that to base your movie on, your lawyer will have to put in a lot fewer billable hours. What he invoices may be another story, but that's between him, the FBI, and Grisham's copyright lawyer.
Frankly, I think White Wolf's case over Underworld was roughly the same caliber as this one for the DaVinci code, and WW were not-quite laughed out of court by the judge.
If you use DVD-Shrink at maximum compression, reauthor to remove most of the alternate languages, menu chrome, and other bonus features, you can sometimes squeeze a regular release DVD down to a single 1.4GB 80mm DVD-R. Sometimes not, if the movie runs a little long, but OTOH it's usually quite practical if you're only taking a single TV episode from a collection that puts several on each retail disk.
Of course, one could use a different codec besides VOB/MPEG2... but that loses compatibility with many non-computer DVD players. And, of course, many codecs are covered by patents, which adds to the costs if you want to make a retail product, and there are definite trade offs with the video quality. But if the whole problem was easy, someone would have solved it by now.
Actually, it was more Adams and Jefferson who were out for blood. Washington and Franklin were a bit more moderate. However, when Parliment and the Crown were disinclined to grant the colonials their rights assured by the Magna Carta, they were willing the settle for blood.
I'd say it's very arguable that a reasonable man would indeed highlight by whatever means possible a clear violation of both trust and law. Indeed, to not do so would likely have made him an accessory to the crime.
That's not so clear to me. From the summary, it sounds like the lawyers were saying "what you're doing this may be illegal; we need to figure out how to get your asses back within the law before they get handed to you." That is, the lawyers were trying to help Diebold stop breaking the law, while avoiding Diebold getting convicted of anything. This is expected conduct for a lawyer as within the Bar's accepted ethical guidelines as I understand them. (However, IAmNotALaywer either.)
Attorney-client privilege exists in part so that clients can get advice on how to avoid breaking the law, allowing (as a not-so-random example) a lawyer to write the client telling them that what they're doing might be unlawful. The papers were covered under the ACP as a legal work product. Presumably this privilege is retained even though the papers were seen by a non-attorney worker at the firm (IE: the "word processor", aka typist). To break the ACP, you would need to show that the lawyers were activly conspiring to help Diebold break the law, EG: "when you applied these patches the software violated the law; you need to destroy all record that the software used wasn't the original software approved". Only then would those at the firm be liable as co-conspirators. There is nothing suggesting such misconduct by the law firm; ergo, the release was illegal.
Barring evidence of such unlawful conduct by the lawyers, the actions by the typist should have consequences; it was a clear breach of legal ethics. The breach of confidentiality should get the typist fired if the firm weren't idiots in drafting their NDA. For the violation of client trust, no law firm in the country should be willing to hire him ever again. And the released papers look ripe for a motion to supress if anyone tries to use them in any court prosecution of Diebold. (Of course, Diebold can't do squat about their being admitted to legislative hearings....)
But prosecution of the poor typist, for a crisis of conscience and putting the public interest above the client and the law firm? Hack, no. It's crap that starts making kookery about lawyers being an unconstitutional aristocracy sound less kooky.
It is universally agreed under Anglic law that the job of the jury is to return a verdict according to the factual evidence in the particular case before them. It is a matter of contention as to whether and to what extent the law itself should be judged by a jury. Most judges and lawyers consider outright nullification an irremediable error, and hold the view that it is the function of the judge to decide the questions of law, and the jury to only decide the questions of fact. Proponents of the right of jury nullification disagree, with considerable US historical precedent. Both sides feel that any flaws of the current arrangement are less than those of any proposed alternative to correct them.
Myself, I believe it is a right akin to that of the right to take arms against the government for purpose of establishing a new one: not justicable when sucessful, but the exercise of this right indicates a major problem in society (one way or another), and should be done neither lightly nor casually. That said, the prosecutor would have his work cut out extracting a "guilty" verdict out of me given the surrounding circumstances of this case, and the DA would also have no hope of extracting my vote for his re-election.
Those interested in the topic should read the oddly named Sparf v. US in its entirety. (No, it's not the trial of a Thundercat.)
On PSP (available at Best Buy). I've also saw 80mm DVD versions of a few movies on sale at Sam's Club around Xmas; I haven't looked since, so I don't know whether it was just a trial balloon, or whether they're available anywhere else.
Use medium denomination unmarked nonsequential bills while having an unmemorable appearance, and remember your history.
HTH. HAND.
Try looking up Apophenia; there's a fine line between creative genius and madness. Not that the twilight between can't be entertaining.
Unfortunately, getting quality human intel isn't simple, and there can be problems with overvaling it, too. There are problems when you start only looking for evidence supporting what you expect to find.
Tech-based intel is too limited in coverage; humans go places machines don't. Human intel has low accuracy; machines don't lie for their own benefit (yet). You need a mix of both.
Try eating a purple fungus.
=)
Well, "therefore we'll make bombs with it" would be more accurate; I consider that the expected result, but it isn't one I advocate. I'd advocate using uranium to very carefully start implementing a Th-U(Pu) breeder cycle, finding some nice deep geologically stable repositories for the waste products, transition over to a hydrogen/electric hybrid fueled transport system (using nuclear power to make both), and put more research into biogenerated feedstocks suitible for plastics production. However, I don't have the ears of anyone in the current White house; they seem more inclined towards the expected plan.
Global warming is just icing on the cake.
I'd disagree. The others you mention, while doing property damage and killing people, are not a threat of the survival of the human species as a whole. The climate changes from global warming, and associated change in habitat ranges for other species (eg: malaria) is the best chance for the carbon mongers to wipe out the human race. Nuclear power has a better potential — if people are stupid enough with it — to wipe out our species outright. I don't think it's very probable, but it's a finite risk... and I may be badly underestimating the stupidity (or perversity) of the species.
Note that you need to not only reprocess, but use a breeder cycle, which has yet to be done in a commerically viable manner. Without breeders, using current methods, the Uranium supply extractable at under $250/kilo is only equivalent to about thirty times the worlds current annual energy demand.
Of course, when the price per kilo goes high enough, oceanic uranium extraction makes the supply effectively infinite... but at that point you need to start explicitly calculating energy costs in the process.
Also, when you hit the $2000/kg threshold, the supply goes into the multi-century range, even with exponentially rising demand; oceanic uranium become econmically recoverable at that level.
Worry more about running out of concrete for the shielding.
Wrong, on two counts. First, breeder reactors only take advantage of transuranic wastes (or, yes, thorium) and make more fuel. To use radiocobolt and other suburanics as reactor fuel, you need either a passive thermal-gradient based system — which does NOT cause the radioactives to go away any faster, but merely uses the released energy — or an particle accelerator based reactor, which still has a number of challenges. (Not that breeders are routine engineering, either.)
And Second, the main "nuclear waste issue" is SOCIAL problems; NIMBY and radiological terrorism aren't anywhere near solved yet.
A more reasonable standard (and the one currenly aimed for) is for the waste to become as harmless as the original unprocessed uranium ore that the waste ultimately came from.... which, I will point out, was not "stored" with any care. It also becomes simpler if you reprocess, and separate out the longest and shortest lived wastes by type. That brings it down to about a 10ky timeframe, which while a difficult criterion for a repository, looks achievable.
Hey, if mother nature can manage the problem, humanity ought to be able to figure it out.
The biggest problems with nuclear waste are more sociological than technical. If think you can solve both "NIMBY" and terrorism, you should be explaining how to everyone right now. It's been two thousand years since a guy who suggested being nice to each other got nailed to a tree for it, and there hasn't been diddly-squat progress since.
There are sound solutions, but that's not one of them. Nuclear reactions cause changes in radioactive toxicity and in chemical reactivity; a large chunk of the nuclear waste is more toxic than the starting uranium. Glassification isn't a bad idea, but you want to find a hole not likely to have groundwater issues for a few hundred years.
Ignoring the facts, such as the fact that any coal fired plant that's running releases radioactive gasses (14-CO2) at levels that would be considered an "incident" in a nuclear plant
IIR, it's the traces of thorium and uranium in most coal that's the bulk of the activity-- although you're partly right. Those release levels from a nuke plant would cause a permanent NRC shutdown five minutes after discovery, and that if the coal ash waste came from a nuclear plant instead, it would have to be treated as "high end" low-level nuclear waste.
Adroitly dodging regulation while imposing absurd regulatory burdens on nuclear power, and then using this to claim that nuclear isn't as cheap as promised.
Fact: even if you were willing to run mindbogglingly stupidly unsafe designs, it would never be as cheap as they promised back in the 50's and early 60's. "Too cheap to meter" was a dumb slogan even then. Yes, some of the nuclear safety requirements are excessive. Most are reasonable, based on probable cost/benefit calculations. Of course, those for fossil fuels are generally unreasonably low....
Nuclear power may not be perfect, but even the horror stories are better than what we're drifting into by letting the fossil fuel industry lead us down the garden path.
No; the horror stories include Chernobyl. OTOH, Chernobyl included design flaws that the US had prohibited since early small scale learning experiences.
About the worst disaster the carbon mongers will inflict is global warming. While the "risk" of that is judged near-certainty by everyone outside of the current White House, even worst case, that won't cause humanity to go extinct... just modern civilization. I contrast, widespread nuclear disasters are much less likely, and easier to avoid by design... but do have the potential to kill off humanity if we're stupid enough.
Myself, I'm pro-nuclear... but not blindly so. I understand why some people are nervous, and fission is only likely to solve the energy problem for a hundred years or so. The biggest problem I have is the people who insist we shouldn't use nuclear power because it isn't perfectly safe. Nothing in life is perfectly safe; you just have to make careful choices of calculated risks.
Well, not much doubt. Conceivably they might get lucky with a "No judge or jury would ever convict me!" situation. A more interesting question is whether the region coding agreement was legal, or whether the scheme (as some hotheads have muttered) constitutes an anti-trust violation. If the underlying agreement is illegal, the doctrine of unclean hands says that the other companies can't go to the courts to enforce it. It's the same principle that keeps you from suing the hitman you hired to kill your wife to try and get your money back if he doesn't do it, or the hooker you refused to pay afterwards from suing you. (Disclaimer: IAmNotALawyer.) I don't know if Samsung will have the nerve to raise this at trial; they would be more likely during settlement talks to threaten to open the issue in court, in hopes that the other players would decide they'd rather have that can of worms left unopened.
But it's never a certainty until all of the appeals are over...
Better phrasing: "For us, there is nothing so holy that it may not be mocked."
True; but if various corporate proposals go through, your encrypted traffic might travel cross country at sub 56kbps rates with multi-second latency. Which does bad things to a torrent.
Mind you, this still won't stop file sharing. As an example of the alternatives: someone in my apartment complex has a non-internet wireless access point, "Blacknet". It's an "open" network, DHCPing on a 10/8 space. Any DNS query resolves to the IP address of a single server, "OneTrue.blacknet."; and yes, that's the whole FQDN; any traffic to any other IP and any DNS name routes to and is intercepted by OneTrue. OneTrue's apache server redirects any URL not using OneTrue by name to OneTrue's home page. OneTrue also speaks IMAP and POP (any account name and password accepted, any mailbox you check has only one email message directing you to http://onetrue.blacknet/ telnet and ssh (assuming you're stupid enough to accept the key....), and even gopher. On the web server proper, there's about 200GB of MP3's, about 3TB of movies (uncompressed DVD ISO). They have a submissions page if you want to upload MP3s. An "about" page claims the server has over 10TB of space. Games? There's... er, NetHack. For all of the OSes listed at Nethack.org; hm. "We'll put up more games once we get back with the Amulet of Yendor."
They're fucking nuts. Not that I have room to complain, mind you....
That depends on whether you count time from permit approval, from when the permit was first applied for, or when the application planning begins. IIR, the Finn's reactor is expected to go on-line in 2009, the permit was approved for in 2002, and first applied for in about 1993. Not sure when they started the planning, but that was sped up by having two more reactors already on the site. And, of course, that's assuming the reactor is completed on time. Of course, we could theoretically speed the political part up a lot (say, by having everyone who starts chanting "N-I-M-B-Y" summarily taken out and shot...), but taking a gigawatt-range plant from design to completion can't be gotten below nine years without taking MAJOR safety risks.
Any Finns around here know the Olkiluoto dates for sure?