So when do they got to jail? Or is that only for mentally ill UK UFO enthusiasts who look at websites in more detail than their hosters expect and find a few holes? I predict the law will not apply to these people, only to people with less criminal intent and less able to defend themselves.
To be fair the stuff about "unlicensed" coal mines, is more about corruption than opposing land use models.
That's how land ownership works in that place no matter what label you put on it - for it to be corruption it needs to be outside the usual rules in such a place. Where it's "might makes right" it's just the price of doing business because there is no real operating law that trumps the will of whoever is governing. Unpleasant but not corruption.
A tragic recent example of confusion about what people occupying land really own is when a farmer in a state near me murdered a government official who had come to investigate excessive land clearing on the pastoral lease that the farmer occupied. The farmer was of the opinion that he could do anything he liked on "his" land such as clear all the trees in a water catchment and that he could shoot trespassers.
Now if billions were to be made from running a canal through where you live what do you think would happen? Most likely there would be fair compensation but the end result is clear, your government which really owns the land you live on would take whatever steps it sees fit to move you off it.
Clueless nuclear fanboys ? I'm yet to find such people
Look at earlier posts on this site - especially the ones when the extent of damage to Fukushima was still emerging.
You probably mean the professional nuclear engineers
Most definitely not. I've worked with three professional nuclear engineers and had a fourth as a Masters student. None of them were cargo-cult-cloud-cuckoo-landers such as some of the idiots that have come out of the woodwork on this site when somebody dares to suggest the any form of nuclear technology is less than perfect.
If you want to get just enough education to see the nuclear facts
Or I could read a shitload of papers on the topic like I have for the last few decades.
It's been amusing me ever since the pyramid scheme started by a mysterious recluse emerged. It's astonishing how many have taken the bait and hope to cash out before the early adopters take all value there is and it crumbles. I try to warn people but I just get a response of a lot of bleating from lambs that are happy to be slaughtered.
All you'd accomplish is screwing over normal people
In case you haven't noticed yet that is what Bitcoin is FOR.
It's a blockchain. It's know what portions were stolen. Send a message out to all people involved in this scheme to not accept them. Oh right - that would undermine the illusion of "freedom".
At least this weeks compulsory Bitcoin story is sort of amusing.
Why are you lecturing me on this? I know all of that and was pointing out that ownership is relative and not absolute, and ultimately at the whim of the state. Subsurface rights are not the only example where a government can demonstrate very clearly who really owns the land, it's just a very dramatic one where landowners find they can't do anything to stop an oil pump in their back paddock and they only get financial benefit out of it if the owners of the pump want to purchase a bit of goodwill. The Chinese "unlicenced" coal mines also show that in some ways to occupiers of the land "own" it more than farmers in Virginia do - no matter whether it's freehold, leasehold or whatever. Also "the Chinese model" varies wildly since it's a very big place with just a slight nod to the rule of law. Consider it like mix of the carpetbagging US South in the bad old days, Mob run Chicago, very highly regulated by the book stuff somewhere else and whatever the hell they are doing in California after filling up their government on crack - I suppose anything goes man - keep all that growth without firebreaks man, I can see you've got too much money for rules to do anything to you man and keep that good stuff flowing to the local party members man.
Come on. Even for those readers that didn't go to high school they've surely seen one of those weather maps with high and low pressures and can get some idea of what happens to air between them. The "no wind" argument only holds up if you only have windmills in one location. There are plenty of downsides to wind (small unit size, high maintainance, not cheap) but do you really think the readers here are so utterly stupid as to fall for that one? It's a bit insulting that you are trying that on.
He wasn't working as a scientist and it was a newsletter article (later used as source material for a Scientific American article) and not a paper. Alex Gabbard was one of the administrators at ORNL and started in that position on the strength of his military experience. He does have a science degree but he has never published a peer reviewed paper. He has published some fiction, a joke book and some books about NASCAR. The newsletter article (which is out on the net somewhere) is blatant propaganda and ends with sillyness about terrorists potentially building nuclear bombs out of fly ash. I didn't hear about the stupid thing until it surfaced on this site around 2000 - I'd spent a chunk of the 1990s looking at fly ash without seeing anything radioactive from SEM backscatter so I laughed a great deal.
The total amount of radioactive material put out by a coal power plant is actually larger
Why just accept that crap churned out an an Oak Ridge administrator, and later author of joke books, who managed to force his unreviewed bullshit into an issue of Scientific American without actually thinking about it first? Since coal is mostly plant material and radioactive carbon decays quickly in geological terms how is that even possible? Since power stations now have scrubbers, bag filters and other stuff to prevent solid material going up into the air how is that even possible? Gravity also does stuff to heavy elements remember, plus they tend to have very high melting points and are difficult to reduce. It's an easy and cunning answer. You just consider an ideal nuclear plant, on paper, not a real one, over a short time span - not long enough to change fuel. The amount of radioactive material put out by such a theoretical plant is zero. You then compare it to background radiation - DIVIDE BY ZERO ERROR - suddenly ANYTHING is infinitely worse. So by the trick used to devise the statement you've regurgitated your own body is putting out more radioactive material, per unit of energy produced, than a nuclear power plant. It's a pointless and annoying trick played by Alex Gabbard, the manipulative prick that also went as far as declaring that terrorists could build nuclear bombs from fly ash. If it's that easy don't you wonder why Iran is having so much trouble? After all these years it's still finding credulous suckers willing to eat that shit and spew it up again all over the place.
but trying to get people to talk about nuclear in a rational way is difficult.
Because the discussion is framed by years of "too cheap to meter" propaganda it tends to divide out into clueless fanboys and people calling them out as liars with the scientists and engineers quietly keeping their heads down somewhere in the middle (or getting attacked by both sides).
the world has seen two catastrophic nuclear power plant accidents (chernobyl and fukushima)
I seem to remember rather a lot of bleating on this website about how Fukushima was not a catastrophe.
right now, we have the anti-nuclear people
Also on this site I managed to be labelled one of those "anti-nuclear people" for suggesting we use proven waste disposal methods such as synrok and for daring to suggest that 1970's civilian nuclear technology is not the pinnacle of perfection and safety.
If you think you really own land somewhere else try digging a mine or drilling for oil without asking the government (or try to stop someone else doing that on "your" land). Governments own all the land, they just give people on it different rights in different situations. Funny thing is the above example is more likely to work in some parts of China (hence all the "unlicenced" coal mines) than in the USA. The think to keep in mind about China (and the US in some cases), is because it's about "might makes right" instead of the rule of law you will find that rules only apply (or not) if you know the "right" people. So what you can do on your land, or someone else's without their permission, depends on how much political influence you have.
These kinds of concerns are why the high speed rail "project" (I hesitate to call it that.. more like "pipe dream")
It's a bit depressing that the still unrealised "city of the future" was pretty well demonstrated at Expo 70 in Japan, and never left, but has not yet manifested itself in the US. Forget the "flying car" - a 1968 fast train still seems like the stuff of science fiction:(
Probably an even longer lifespan than 15 with the plastic money, however I see this electronic currency replacing debit/credit cards plus transport cards etc as used now instead of cash in all cases. I already use a replacement for cash to get on a train - why not debit the account on a phone directly instead of having to fill up the digits on an RFID or whatever every few weeks?
Too many decent potential scientists and engineers are following the money and playing complicated accounting tricks on others similarly wasted in positions where they add no value to society. Take a look at the Enron debacle for a well documented situation. Plenty of very intelligent hard working people were doing nothing but creating smokescreens for scams. Don't misunderstand or turn me into a strawman - accounts and finance people have an important role in society but highly creative ones building complicated artifices designed to mislead (or HFT people who do it via man in the middle attack) are a drain on society and a waste of potential talent. Pick just about anything else in society and they'd contribute better there. So while it's very attractive for the bright to become tricksters and while the media portrays scientists and engineers in a very negative light we're only going to get the people who are driven or import people from other places where they don't mock scientists.
Because back in the day we were disparaged as engineers and not real computer scientists if we worried about memory and addressing things at the processor level. Real computer scientists apparently used things like Modula-2 and then Java instead of that messy C and FORTRAN that only lowly engineers like myself should touch.
As far as I know only LG makes the plastic display and only the Russian vendor Wexler has a consumer device built around it - the "FlexOne", which looks nice but it's nowhere near as large as the 9.7 inch Boox. So IMHO the answer is to keep treating the larger displays like glass. While I would like the big Sony display I can just turn my Boox sideways and look at half of a page at a time.
Because, of course, every last man, woman, and child in Ecuador has a PC or other digital currency device, right?
You may not have noticed, but since about 2000 a lot of people have been getting hand held telephones with plenty of processing power. If it can decode voice from a digital signal it's got the CPU power to be an electronic wallet. It's not iPhone territory. It's cheap Chinese Nokia knockoff from ten years ago territory - and such things seem to be everywhere on the planet. So probably a large chunk of the adult population of Ecuador has access to a potential "digital currency device" already. We are already seeing banks push slowly towards using phones like credit cards. I heard of people buying fuel from the pump using their phones with an electronic payment system in Italy in 2001 FFS - and now it's 2014! It's about time a country started thinking about doing something like this.
However, if it's backed by gold, US dollars, or some other reasonably-stable commodity
Such as enough land to make up an entire country! It's funny how people don't consider such a resource before yelling FIAT! Bitcoin is a fiat currency because some shadowy recluse said so, and others in the scheme agreed. If a promise is backed by someone with resources and a promise that it will commit those resources then it's backed by more than just "their will", so by definition it's not a fiat currency.
Bitcoin has poisoned the well a bit on this site so I suggest people think instead of the fictional example of a digital currency in "cryptonomicon" which was backed by gold. The digital bit is about creating a mechanism so you can be sure it's really money issued by the whoever is supposed to be issuing it. Now that so many people have mobile phones it makes perfect sense to print less banknotes and use phones as digital wallets.
It looks to me as if it's just about printing less banknotes and using phones etc as electronic wallets. It's nothing like bitcoin. It's more like what some banks are starting to do with payment apps on phones, only instead of having backend mechanisms in the bank to make sure the dollars are there it's about having identifiers on the currency so it can be checked for legitimacy.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the thing with illusions isn't it? They are not real.
So when do they got to jail? Or is that only for mentally ill UK UFO enthusiasts who look at websites in more detail than their hosters expect and find a few holes?
I predict the law will not apply to these people, only to people with less criminal intent and less able to defend themselves.
That's how land ownership works in that place no matter what label you put on it - for it to be corruption it needs to be outside the usual rules in such a place. Where it's "might makes right" it's just the price of doing business because there is no real operating law that trumps the will of whoever is governing. Unpleasant but not corruption.
A tragic recent example of confusion about what people occupying land really own is when a farmer in a state near me murdered a government official who had come to investigate excessive land clearing on the pastoral lease that the farmer occupied. The farmer was of the opinion that he could do anything he liked on "his" land such as clear all the trees in a water catchment and that he could shoot trespassers.
Now if billions were to be made from running a canal through where you live what do you think would happen? Most likely there would be fair compensation but the end result is clear, your government which really owns the land you live on would take whatever steps it sees fit to move you off it.
Look at earlier posts on this site - especially the ones when the extent of damage to Fukushima was still emerging.
Most definitely not. I've worked with three professional nuclear engineers and had a fourth as a Masters student. None of them were cargo-cult-cloud-cuckoo-landers such as some of the idiots that have come out of the woodwork on this site when somebody dares to suggest the any form of nuclear technology is less than perfect.
Or I could read a shitload of papers on the topic like I have for the last few decades.
In case you haven't noticed yet that is what Bitcoin is FOR.
It's a blockchain. It's know what portions were stolen. Send a message out to all people involved in this scheme to not accept them.
Oh right - that would undermine the illusion of "freedom".
At least this weeks compulsory Bitcoin story is sort of amusing.
Why are you lecturing me on this? I know all of that and was pointing out that ownership is relative and not absolute, and ultimately at the whim of the state. Subsurface rights are not the only example where a government can demonstrate very clearly who really owns the land, it's just a very dramatic one where landowners find they can't do anything to stop an oil pump in their back paddock and they only get financial benefit out of it if the owners of the pump want to purchase a bit of goodwill.
The Chinese "unlicenced" coal mines also show that in some ways to occupiers of the land "own" it more than farmers in Virginia do - no matter whether it's freehold, leasehold or whatever.
Also "the Chinese model" varies wildly since it's a very big place with just a slight nod to the rule of law. Consider it like mix of the carpetbagging US South in the bad old days, Mob run Chicago, very highly regulated by the book stuff somewhere else and whatever the hell they are doing in California after filling up their government on crack - I suppose anything goes man - keep all that growth without firebreaks man, I can see you've got too much money for rules to do anything to you man and keep that good stuff flowing to the local party members man.
It's radioactive decay so just about anything lighter than the fuel, which makes waste management so damn hard and was the reason to develop Synrok.
Come on. Even for those readers that didn't go to high school they've surely seen one of those weather maps with high and low pressures and can get some idea of what happens to air between them. The "no wind" argument only holds up if you only have windmills in one location. There are plenty of downsides to wind (small unit size, high maintainance, not cheap) but do you really think the readers here are so utterly stupid as to fall for that one? It's a bit insulting that you are trying that on.
He wasn't working as a scientist and it was a newsletter article (later used as source material for a Scientific American article) and not a paper. Alex Gabbard was one of the administrators at ORNL and started in that position on the strength of his military experience. He does have a science degree but he has never published a peer reviewed paper. He has published some fiction, a joke book and some books about NASCAR.
The newsletter article (which is out on the net somewhere) is blatant propaganda and ends with sillyness about terrorists potentially building nuclear bombs out of fly ash. I didn't hear about the stupid thing until it surfaced on this site around 2000 - I'd spent a chunk of the 1990s looking at fly ash without seeing anything radioactive from SEM backscatter so I laughed a great deal.
Why just accept that crap churned out an an Oak Ridge administrator, and later author of joke books, who managed to force his unreviewed bullshit into an issue of Scientific American without actually thinking about it first?
Since coal is mostly plant material and radioactive carbon decays quickly in geological terms how is that even possible? Since power stations now have scrubbers, bag filters and other stuff to prevent solid material going up into the air how is that even possible? Gravity also does stuff to heavy elements remember, plus they tend to have very high melting points and are difficult to reduce.
It's an easy and cunning answer. You just consider an ideal nuclear plant, on paper, not a real one, over a short time span - not long enough to change fuel. The amount of radioactive material put out by such a theoretical plant is zero. You then compare it to background radiation - DIVIDE BY ZERO ERROR - suddenly ANYTHING is infinitely worse.
So by the trick used to devise the statement you've regurgitated your own body is putting out more radioactive material, per unit of energy produced, than a nuclear power plant.
It's a pointless and annoying trick played by Alex Gabbard, the manipulative prick that also went as far as declaring that terrorists could build nuclear bombs from fly ash. If it's that easy don't you wonder why Iran is having so much trouble? After all these years it's still finding credulous suckers willing to eat that shit and spew it up again all over the place.
Because the discussion is framed by years of "too cheap to meter" propaganda it tends to divide out into clueless fanboys and people calling them out as liars with the scientists and engineers quietly keeping their heads down somewhere in the middle (or getting attacked by both sides).
I seem to remember rather a lot of bleating on this website about how Fukushima was not a catastrophe.
Also on this site I managed to be labelled one of those "anti-nuclear people" for suggesting we use proven waste disposal methods such as synrok and for daring to suggest that 1970's civilian nuclear technology is not the pinnacle of perfection and safety.
If it's a tangible promise and not "because I say so" then it is not a fiat currency.
If you think you really own land somewhere else try digging a mine or drilling for oil without asking the government (or try to stop someone else doing that on "your" land). Governments own all the land, they just give people on it different rights in different situations. Funny thing is the above example is more likely to work in some parts of China (hence all the "unlicenced" coal mines) than in the USA. The think to keep in mind about China (and the US in some cases), is because it's about "might makes right" instead of the rule of law you will find that rules only apply (or not) if you know the "right" people. So what you can do on your land, or someone else's without their permission, depends on how much political influence you have.
It's a bit depressing that the still unrealised "city of the future" was pretty well demonstrated at Expo 70 in Japan, and never left, but has not yet manifested itself in the US. Forget the "flying car" - a 1968 fast train still seems like the stuff of science fiction :(
Probably an even longer lifespan than 15 with the plastic money, however I see this electronic currency replacing debit/credit cards plus transport cards etc as used now instead of cash in all cases. I already use a replacement for cash to get on a train - why not debit the account on a phone directly instead of having to fill up the digits on an RFID or whatever every few weeks?
Too many decent potential scientists and engineers are following the money and playing complicated accounting tricks on others similarly wasted in positions where they add no value to society.
Take a look at the Enron debacle for a well documented situation. Plenty of very intelligent hard working people were doing nothing but creating smokescreens for scams. Don't misunderstand or turn me into a strawman - accounts and finance people have an important role in society but highly creative ones building complicated artifices designed to mislead (or HFT people who do it via man in the middle attack) are a drain on society and a waste of potential talent. Pick just about anything else in society and they'd contribute better there.
So while it's very attractive for the bright to become tricksters and while the media portrays scientists and engineers in a very negative light we're only going to get the people who are driven or import people from other places where they don't mock scientists.
I did assembly in high school in the 1980s FFS and now you guys are not even touching it in a degree?
Because back in the day we were disparaged as engineers and not real computer scientists if we worried about memory and addressing things at the processor level. Real computer scientists apparently used things like Modula-2 and then Java instead of that messy C and FORTRAN that only lowly engineers like myself should touch.
As far as I know only LG makes the plastic display and only the Russian vendor Wexler has a consumer device built around it - the "FlexOne", which looks nice but it's nowhere near as large as the 9.7 inch Boox.
So IMHO the answer is to keep treating the larger displays like glass. While I would like the big Sony display I can just turn my Boox sideways and look at half of a page at a time.
You may not have noticed, but since about 2000 a lot of people have been getting hand held telephones with plenty of processing power. If it can decode voice from a digital signal it's got the CPU power to be an electronic wallet. It's not iPhone territory. It's cheap Chinese Nokia knockoff from ten years ago territory - and such things seem to be everywhere on the planet. So probably a large chunk of the adult population of Ecuador has access to a potential "digital currency device" already.
We are already seeing banks push slowly towards using phones like credit cards. I heard of people buying fuel from the pump using their phones with an electronic payment system in Italy in 2001 FFS - and now it's 2014! It's about time a country started thinking about doing something like this.
I was amused when it was called the Euro since that's the name for a large marsupial I've seen hopping around:
http://www.rootourism.com/fsheet28.htm
Such as enough land to make up an entire country!
It's funny how people don't consider such a resource before yelling FIAT! Bitcoin is a fiat currency because some shadowy recluse said so, and others in the scheme agreed. If a promise is backed by someone with resources and a promise that it will commit those resources then it's backed by more than just "their will", so by definition it's not a fiat currency.
Bitcoin has poisoned the well a bit on this site so I suggest people think instead of the fictional example of a digital currency in "cryptonomicon" which was backed by gold. The digital bit is about creating a mechanism so you can be sure it's really money issued by the whoever is supposed to be issuing it.
Now that so many people have mobile phones it makes perfect sense to print less banknotes and use phones as digital wallets.
It looks to me as if it's just about printing less banknotes and using phones etc as electronic wallets. It's nothing like bitcoin. It's more like what some banks are starting to do with payment apps on phones, only instead of having backend mechanisms in the bank to make sure the dollars are there it's about having identifiers on the currency so it can be checked for legitimacy.