They look only at raw costs, not at opportunity costs. If we got rid of the Internet, then Greenpeace's announcement that the Internet creates too much CO2 would be printed on paper and shipped around in gas-powered vehicles. Their press conference announcing it would have to be covered by reporters who burn fuel driving there and back. It's virtually guaranteed to have a higher CO2 footprint the old way.
Same goes for nuclear power. People always look at just the downsides of nuclear power all on their own. They never get around to comparing it to alternative power sources. If you do that, nuclear ends up being the safest and cleanest power source per TWh available to us.
Cars are actually one of the few topics where people get it right. Nobody looks at an EV and is aghast that it requires 35 kWh to go 100 miles (more than your house uses in an entire month). They compare it to their gasoline car and see that its energy is only 1/3rd the cost for the same distance.
When you're comparing to zero instead of alternatives, everything looks bad. Even breathing.
It's not at all interesting that it's happening on Android. Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock the last decade knows that Google's entire business model is based on tracking what its users are doing and talking about. That's the Faustian bargain you make when you decide to use google search, gmail, google apps, or android.
Apple OTOH has been marketing itself as anti-Big Brother since the 1984 commercial. Their entire rationale for the iPhone and App Store's walled garden is that they're going to be the benevolent policeman who protects you from the bad people who write viruses and stuff that will make your phone do things that you don't want happening. That makes it a very interesting story when Apple does this stuff.
What is even worse, is scientific shows like Mythbusters use BOTH systems. ...
There is no consistency, and that alone can give rise to errors
It's a pre-recorded show. How can there be any errors?
They're just trying to introduce the metric system to viewers. If they were to use completely Imperial units, viewers wouldn't be learning anything about the metric system. If they were to use completely metric units, U.S. viewers would be discouraged and stop watching. By mixing the units up, they're keeping people engaged and interested, while throwing the occasional metric curve their way to get people acclimated and interested in the different units. (That and I suspect some of the cast use metric while others use Imperial units.)
Forget to write down the unit once, and it's guesswork that's left.
Speaking as an engineer, if you forget to write down a unit, that in itself is a critical error completely independent of your measurement system. You're only thinking of the case of forgetting to write down a measurement in inches or cm. But you can also forget to write down a measurement in cm or mm. Both Imperial and metric systems are vulnerable to errors originating from forgetting to write down a unit.
Fractions are quite possibly the dumbest incarnation of math we humans could have ever invented; I could understand if it actually made things easier, but it does not.
Fractional units come from back in the days when you couldn't buy a calibrated ruler at the corner store. If you don't have a ruler, the best you can do is take an object of known measure (say 1 yard of cloth) and divide it into equal parts (fold it into thirds to get three 1-foot segments). This is probably easiest to see with measures of volume. The English system goes by powers of 2. 1 gallon is 4 quarts (missing unit in between). 1 quart is 2 pints. 1 pint is 2 cups. 1 cup is 2 gills. Why powers of 2? If you don't have calibrated beakers, how do you divide a volume of liquid into even parts? You split it in half (by weight) over and over. So it makes sense for your units of measurement to coincide with dividing in half over and over.
So back in the day when measuring was the hard part, fractions made sense. Today, measuring is the easy part, and calculating with the measurements afterward is the (relatively) hard part. So metric units (powers of 10) make more sense.
It's amusing how a CDMA superiority has become spun as a GSM advantage, or a "limitation" of CDMA. CDMA scaled well enough that you could use the same radio for low-bandwidth transmissions (voice) and high-bandwidth transmissions (3G data). Consequently, CDMA carriers rolled out 3G service 1-2 years before GSM carriers. Unfortunately, since voice and data use different protocols, you couldn't do them simultaneously using the single radio. But hey, at least you could do 3G.
GSM OTOH uses time-domain multiplexing (basically the phones take turns talking to the tower). That's ok for voice, but horribly wasteful of bandwidth for data. Consequently, GSM providers had to develop an entirely new system and protocol for data, which is why it took them 1-2 years to catch up to CDMA's 3G data. When they finally did roll it out, it needed an entirely separate radio (you had to upgrade phones), which added to the complexity, cost, and power consumption of the phone. But a second radio carries with it the advantage of doing voice and data simultaneously. In terms of use, there are very few times when you actually need to use them simultaneously. The CDMA carriers didn't package a second dedicated 3G data radio in their phones simply because there wasn't enough demand for it. It only became an issue when Verizon and AT&T got into an advertising war.
Fast forward to today. The 4G on CDMA carriers uses a different technology for data and, just like GSM phones, a different radio than that used for voice. If your CDMA phone has a 4G connection, it can do simultaneous voice and data just fine. It has nothing to do with CDMA or GSM, everything to do with how many radios are on your phone. (The same is why phones can do simultaneous voice and WiFi. 802.11b/g/n uses yet another different radio.)
But absorption has to be balanced with water-retention and a host of other factors. If absorbing more of the spectrum is good, then why aren't all plants on earth black?
The prevalence of green plants in all environments from arid to extremely humid would tend to discount your water-supply based theory. I would assume it's a simple energy balance that's the main culprit. On our planet, the energy cost of evolving/manufacturing a green-absorbing chlorophyll exceeds the energy a plant would get from it. If the planet were getting energy from two suns, that would shift the energy balance in favor of a more-expensive-to-manufacture chlorophyll which absorbs the green part of the spectrum.
To further substantiate this, green is the strongest part of the visible spectrum that we receive from the sun. That plants do not absorb this indicates it must be significantly cheaper to manufacture red- and yellow-absorbing chlorophyll. Enough so to offset the lesser amount of red and yellow light in the spectrum here.
You have to be logged into a google service, click on a link in the search results, go back, then just that link will have the "Block" button. It took me a few tries before it worked for me.
Ah ha! That's why it stopped working for me a couple days after Google implemented it. I don't use the back button, I open up Google search results in new tabs. So my Google search page was never being refreshed.
Generally I'm agreed. However, safety measures need to be scaled to the actual level of risk involved. Due to the high-publicity nature of nuclear accidents, the nuclear industry already faces much stricter safety standards than any other energy technology. The radiation alarms at nuclear plants will trigger if you bring in certain substances anyone can buy at the corner drugstore. Per TWh of electricity generated, wind and solar have killed more people than nuclear. Coal kills hundreds of times more people each year than Chernobyl did. And the deadliest power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure. Yet people accept all those risks without a second thought. It's only nuclear which gets raked over the coals.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be trying to improve nuclear safety. But if our goal is to save lives, our money and worrying would be much better spent improving the safety of the other power technologies, instead of concentrating on the one which generates the most media coverage when there's an accident. The latter is the very definition of hysteria. Level of fear generated is a lousy metric to use for risk assessment (though it is a legit measure for PR).
I wonder WTF their contingency plan is if a big tsunami hits now
This is something I've been harping on over and over though it hasn't been getting as much favorable moderation here. When people do risk assessment, too often they only consider independent events. The risk of a generator failing to start is (say) 10%, so just put a half dozen generators there and you have 99.9999% reliability, right? This fails to account for the possibility of a single event, like oh, I dunno, a tsunami? wiping out all your generators at once. Likewise, the probability of a two large tsunamis is not just the probability of one large tsunami squared. If an earthquake generated a large tsunami, it's almost certain to generate several large or larger aftershocks (technically the 9.0 quake was an aftershock to an 7.2 a few days prior). And along with it comes a high probability that one of those aftershocks could generate another large tsunami. So important structures in tsunami-prone regions should be designed to withstand two successive tsunamis. Not just one.
The boiling temp of water rises with pressure. So under pressure, water can be above 100 C and still liquid (ignoring partial pressure of course). The submersible Alvin had a close encounter with this when they discovered the first deep water thermal vents. They were trying to move in for a closer look, when someone glanced at the temperature gauge and realized the water temperature at the manipulator arm (>400 F) was hotter than the melting point of the Plexiglas windows (320 F).
What's magic about 100 C is that even if a pipe bursts and you lose pressure, the system is guaranteed to remain stable. With a rapid depressurization, the temperature will drop (think of a can of compressed air getting colder as you use it). So if your initial temp is 100 C under pressure, the final temp after depressurization will be below 100 C. If it were above 100 C, some or all of the water would flash into steam if a pipe burst.
The USA is only screwed if China says, you can't owe us in US dollars any more. It has to be paid in Euro or RMB.
This is the part of the theory I never understand. Why would China (or anyone) ever ask to be paid in Euros instead of US Dollars?
Look at the money supply of the USD vs. the Euro.
From 2000 to 2010, the USD M1 went from about $1.1 trillion to $1.8 trillion, a 60% increase.
From 2000 to 2007, the Euro M1 went from about $2 trillion to $3.8 trillion, a 90% increase.
From 2000 to 2010, the USD M2 went from about $5 trillion to a bit less than $9 trillion, a 80% increase.
From 2000 to 2007, the Euro M2 went from about $4.2 trillion to $7.2 trillion, a 80% increase.
I think it's safe to say if you extrapolate the Euro's money supply out to 10 years, the percentage of new Euros created far exceeds the number of US Dollars created.
The Euro is a weaker currency than the US Dollar. Don't get me wrong, I think the vast amounts of debt and the reckless printing of new money by both currencies is bad. But if you're going to call the U.S. dollar out on it, you need to do the same for the Euro.
If we cut that back to 1/6th of our spending on military, we'd still be the top spender in the world.
Why does everyone try to compare military spending on a flat dollar basis? That's like complaining that you living alone spend 100x more on food each month than a family of 12 living in Bangladesh, and that you should cut down your food spending to something closer to their levels. It completely ignores differences in population, economic productivity, and local prices.
The correct comparison is as a % of GDP, which takes into account differences in population, economic productivity, and cost of domestic goods and services. If we cut back our military spending to 1/6th of its current 4.7% GDP, we'd be the 20th lowest in the world. We'd be spending less than Japan does on defense even though Japan has its defense needs provided by the U.S. by treaty. The proper target for the U.S. alone would be about a 40% reduction in defense spending to match the world average. If you factor in Japan (we're obligated by treaty to defend them), the proper target would be about a 25%-30% reduction in defense spending.
The RIAA studios are corrupt organizations which have completely gamed the current royalty system to work for them and against the artists. Most of the artists only see a few % royalties from CD / MP3 sales once you factor in paying for production costs out of their share. So even if you were to cut the cost of music to, say, 1/4 what it is now, there would still be plenty of overhead to raise artist royalty shares.
It's not even $50 billion. Peak sales were in 2000 at $37 billion. Dollar sales have been down since then, but units shipped have been consistently up - precisely the pattern you would expect to see in an industry which is experiencing a revolutionary reduction in cost to ship its product, while demand remains relatively fixed (you can only listen to so many hours of music a day).
The RIAA (and to a lesser extent the MPAA) is literally the tail wagging the dog. Sony (a tech company which bought a music label) has already paid dearly for the mistake of picking DRMed music over a desirable MP3 player.
Ah yes, the "we have to think in terms of the worst case" argument. Are you aware the worst power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure? More people died from that than in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. So by your reasoning, clearly with such a horrific worst case, we should immediately start dismantling all our hydroelectric plants because they're simply too dangerous to risk using, right?
Nothing is perfectly safe. But to properly account for risk, you have to multiply the severity of a possible accident with how likely it is to happen When you do that, MWh per MWh, the long-term track record of nuclear power establishes it as the safest power generation technology man has ever invented. Safer than wind, solar, hydro, and a helluva lot safer than oil, gas, or coal. Commercial wind power, despite its minuscule contribution to the power grid, has already killed more people in the U.S. than commercial nuclear power. To raise nuclear's deaths/TWh figure above wind over the last 25 years would require the Fukushima accident to kill something like 10,000 people (more than twice as many as Chernobyl). Wind's fatality figures are only low because it generates so little of the world's power. To make nuclear worse than coal would require it to kill several tens of millions.
But if it fails you probably won't need to evacuate between 10 and 50 miles from the site.
Make it large enough to generate as much power as Fukushima and the area 10-20 miles around it would be permanently evacuated. All that land area would be covered with mirrors.
In addition, there are ongoing maintenance costs while operating that are probably far lower to take care of a bunch of mirrors than for a nuclear plant requires.
You think the cost of keeping clean 14.5 km^2 of mirrors and keeping their aiming machinery running is cheaper than for running a nuclear power plant that generates 20-30x more energy per year? I see this over and over - people compare a nuclear plant to a solar panel, or a windmill as if they were somehow equivalent. They completely ignore the huge difference in scale between the power generated. When you compare equivalent MW generation, you're talking about hundreds of square km of solar panels/mirrors or wind turbines to compare to a single nuclear reactor much less an entire nuclear plant. Comparing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to Roscoe Wind Farm (largest in the U.S.) after accounting for capacity factor results in an equivalent wind farm larger than the state of Delaware. The renewables actually have far higher maintenance costs than nuclear simply because they are (except for hydro and geothermal) so dispersed.
Place blame squarely where it belongs: lending providers and others who use the SSN as some sort of magic key to an individual's identity. All it takes is a simple law and this shit could stop next week.
No it won't. Like it or not, there's a need for a unique individual identifier in the credit industry. If you can prove you pay your bills, you're less of a risk, and can get lower rates from them. A lender does not need a SSN to lend you money. It's just that all of them choose to require it and a credit check to minimize their risk. If you feel this is wrong, feel free to start your own lending company which does not require SSNs nor credit checks, and tell us how that works out for you.
If it became illegal to use SSNs for this purpose, then everyone would get lumped in the same risk pool. People who are good about paying their bills on time would see their rates and fees go up. People who are deadbeats and delinquents would see their rates and fees go down. Pretty obviously, that'd be bad for the economy as a whole. So what would happen is a different unique identifier would come into being to fill this need, and we'd be right back where we are now. Only instead of some state comptroller accidentally releasing the unique numbers, it would be some credit bureau accidentally releasing the numbers.
The problem is not with them using the SSN. The problem is that except for a few new state laws regarding personal info loss and theft, there's very little incentive for them to protect your SSN. When they lose your personal (or a few million of them), they suffer no harm, but you do. So although having your SSN become public is a big deal for you, it's not a big deal for them, and so they don't really go out of their way to prevent it from happening. What's needed is to jack up the penalties for losing an SSN so that it's as expensive for them as it is for you (or better yet, for them to just pay your expenses for getting any identity theft cleared up). Then they'll take seriously the need to protect their customers' private info.
As an outsider looking in, it's obvious to me the government really needs to cut military funding.
It's only "obvious" if you're only listening to the people who absolutely refuse to cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. Don't listen to them, don't listen to me, listen to the Congressional Budget Office - the division of the U.S. government tasked with predicting what is going to happen to the budget and how to fix it:
"In the past several decades, the country paid for increases in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending through cuts in defense spending relative to the size of the economy. That approach is not feasible in the future. Instead, significant changes will be needed in taxes or spending directly visible to many Americans." - CBO - Fiscal Policy Choices March 8, 2010 (PDF)
The graph that illustrates the minimal impact that cutting defense would have on the problem is on page 12 of this CBO report from Jan 10, 2010 (PDF). Here's a link to just the graph if you dislike PDFs. Basically, just the growth in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from 2000-2020 is about equivalent to adding a second entire defense budget. In terms of the graphic you linked to, the entire defense budget with Iraq and Afghanistan funding included accounts for only about half the deficit in your graphic. You could eliminate all defense spending right now and we'd still be almost a trillion dollars short this year.
The CBO has been saying basically the same thing since before 2000. We need to rethink and restructure Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to get the budget under control. Paying for increases in those by cutting other parts of the budget is a losing battle. At the rate these are projected to grow, do nothing and by about 2050 they will consume 20% of GDP (the historical average of all Federal tax revenue). They must be cut in order to balance the budget.
Any clue how this 'hybrid turbo-electric engine' is supposed to work? Jet fuel is a good two orders of magnitude more dense than conventional batteries. Even taking account for projected advances in nanowire batteries, and the inefficiencies of gas turbine engines
Like you, I'm a little skeptical the energy savings will be worth the additional weight. But that's why this is a research project. They'll probably build one to see how well reality matches up with theoretical calculations they've done.
From TFA: "We havenâ(TM)t negotiated rights for our programs to be viewed on anything other than a real TV. The question remains, what constitutes a real TV?"
That's the content industry and their artificial distinctions again. Like somehow a program you watch on your HDTV is different from the very same program watched on your 27" computer monitor.
The TV is irrelevant. What matters is that they have a show, and a customer who wants to watch it. Where, when, or on what the customer watches it is completely irrelevant. The content industry is trying to create this artificial distinction so they can charge each person multiple times for the same product. In their fantasy world, if you had a copy of a song on CD, on your laptop, on your MP3 player, on your home theater media station, and in your car's built-in MP3 player, you would need to pay them 5 times for the same song.
requires the FDR (Flight Data Recorder) to withstand sea water immersion for 30 days, and says nothing about pressure at the depths we are talking about here other than the FDR will withstand crushing forces of 5,000 LBF (22.25 kN) for 5 continuous minutes.
I flipped through the PDF and the crushing force you quoted is " a static crush force of 22.25 kN (5,000 lbf) applied continuously but not simultaneously to each of the three axes in the most critical direction, for a period of 5 minutes." In other words, it's not a pressure test, it's a uni-axial crush test.
Its unlikely that after this time the FDR nor the CVR are still sealed.
They very well could be. Based on the debris collected so far it looks like the plane crashed belly-first into the ocean, so there's a good chance the housing of the recorders was not damaged by the crash impact. The thing about deep-sea pressure is that it's a compressive force, not a tensile force. So as the FDR and CVR sink down, it increases gradually and uniformly. Unless there's a puncture or a significant amount of air trapped inside, any metal housing should gradually crush down without necessarily creating any breach for seawater to get in. Things like rubber seals can actually perform better under compression (though from talking with guys at Benthos, it will deform the rubber enough to destroy it making it useless for future use)..
Even if the box itself isn't sealed, the ICs which make up the memory should be themselves sealed in something like epoxy to improve their impact resistance. Only the interface pins or contacts would be exposed to corrosion, and they're probably gold plated. The biggest danger I would think would be an air pocket around the solid state memory suddenly collapsing when the metal housing fails due to the pressure, leading to mechanical impact forces damaging the memory.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more than enough heat to cause the seals to fail.
Jeeze Louise. On March 15, reactor 2 experienced a hydrogen explosion inside containment which may have cracked the suppression pool. The press was all over that one for a while since it contained the magic words "loss of containment". But now that an even more disastrous scenario has been proposed, they conveniently forget their earlier favorite scenario in order to make the new one seem more likely.
Right now it's impossible to determine with certainty which theory is correct. But given that we know that reactor 2's containment at the suppression pool experienced a pressure drop following a internal hydrogen explosion (which the workers heard so it definitely did happen), Occam's razor would favor the radioactive water coming from a simple crack in or around the suppression pool.
It seems to me a real DNT track system would be client-side only, and the setting would instruct the browser to accept and instantly (or after the session) delete the cookie, without giving any indication of the activity to the server.
That's basically what Cookiesafe and Cookie Monster" do. Firefox's default cookie manager does it a bit more clumsily, and is missing the option to allow a site to leave cookies for just the current session, not future sessions. Your only choices are always deny, allow persistent cookies, or always allow cookies for a session.
What good is a privacy feature when it rests on the compliance of those who have conflicted interests in the matter?
Why not make it so if you have DNT set and a site ignores it, a big notice pops up saying "This site does not honor your Do Not Track setting. If you proceed, information about your behavior while visiting this site will be tracked and collected, and may be used in a manner you find objectionable. Are you sure you wish to continue?" No, Always Allow, Allow this one time.
Personally, I just run with a extension which allows me to allow, block, allow for session, or temporarily allow for session cookies on a site-by-site basis. (The last category is the important one missing from Firefox's default cookie manager - if I usually visit a site with cookies blocked, but a video or something requires cookies, I want to allow it to set a cookie this time but not next time.)
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They look only at raw costs, not at opportunity costs. If we got rid of the Internet, then Greenpeace's announcement that the Internet creates too much CO2 would be printed on paper and shipped around in gas-powered vehicles. Their press conference announcing it would have to be covered by reporters who burn fuel driving there and back. It's virtually guaranteed to have a higher CO2 footprint the old way.
Same goes for nuclear power. People always look at just the downsides of nuclear power all on their own. They never get around to comparing it to alternative power sources. If you do that, nuclear ends up being the safest and cleanest power source per TWh available to us.
Cars are actually one of the few topics where people get it right. Nobody looks at an EV and is aghast that it requires 35 kWh to go 100 miles (more than your house uses in an entire month). They compare it to their gasoline car and see that its energy is only 1/3rd the cost for the same distance.
When you're comparing to zero instead of alternatives, everything looks bad. Even breathing.
It's not at all interesting that it's happening on Android. Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock the last decade knows that Google's entire business model is based on tracking what its users are doing and talking about. That's the Faustian bargain you make when you decide to use google search, gmail, google apps, or android.
Apple OTOH has been marketing itself as anti-Big Brother since the 1984 commercial. Their entire rationale for the iPhone and App Store's walled garden is that they're going to be the benevolent policeman who protects you from the bad people who write viruses and stuff that will make your phone do things that you don't want happening. That makes it a very interesting story when Apple does this stuff.
It's a pre-recorded show. How can there be any errors?
They're just trying to introduce the metric system to viewers. If they were to use completely Imperial units, viewers wouldn't be learning anything about the metric system. If they were to use completely metric units, U.S. viewers would be discouraged and stop watching. By mixing the units up, they're keeping people engaged and interested, while throwing the occasional metric curve their way to get people acclimated and interested in the different units. (That and I suspect some of the cast use metric while others use Imperial units.)
Speaking as an engineer, if you forget to write down a unit, that in itself is a critical error completely independent of your measurement system. You're only thinking of the case of forgetting to write down a measurement in inches or cm. But you can also forget to write down a measurement in cm or mm. Both Imperial and metric systems are vulnerable to errors originating from forgetting to write down a unit.
Fractional units come from back in the days when you couldn't buy a calibrated ruler at the corner store. If you don't have a ruler, the best you can do is take an object of known measure (say 1 yard of cloth) and divide it into equal parts (fold it into thirds to get three 1-foot segments). This is probably easiest to see with measures of volume. The English system goes by powers of 2. 1 gallon is 4 quarts (missing unit in between). 1 quart is 2 pints. 1 pint is 2 cups. 1 cup is 2 gills. Why powers of 2? If you don't have calibrated beakers, how do you divide a volume of liquid into even parts? You split it in half (by weight) over and over. So it makes sense for your units of measurement to coincide with dividing in half over and over.
So back in the day when measuring was the hard part, fractions made sense. Today, measuring is the easy part, and calculating with the measurements afterward is the (relatively) hard part. So metric units (powers of 10) make more sense.
It's amusing how a CDMA superiority has become spun as a GSM advantage, or a "limitation" of CDMA. CDMA scaled well enough that you could use the same radio for low-bandwidth transmissions (voice) and high-bandwidth transmissions (3G data). Consequently, CDMA carriers rolled out 3G service 1-2 years before GSM carriers. Unfortunately, since voice and data use different protocols, you couldn't do them simultaneously using the single radio. But hey, at least you could do 3G.
GSM OTOH uses time-domain multiplexing (basically the phones take turns talking to the tower). That's ok for voice, but horribly wasteful of bandwidth for data. Consequently, GSM providers had to develop an entirely new system and protocol for data, which is why it took them 1-2 years to catch up to CDMA's 3G data. When they finally did roll it out, it needed an entirely separate radio (you had to upgrade phones), which added to the complexity, cost, and power consumption of the phone. But a second radio carries with it the advantage of doing voice and data simultaneously. In terms of use, there are very few times when you actually need to use them simultaneously. The CDMA carriers didn't package a second dedicated 3G data radio in their phones simply because there wasn't enough demand for it. It only became an issue when Verizon and AT&T got into an advertising war.
Fast forward to today. The 4G on CDMA carriers uses a different technology for data and, just like GSM phones, a different radio than that used for voice. If your CDMA phone has a 4G connection, it can do simultaneous voice and data just fine. It has nothing to do with CDMA or GSM, everything to do with how many radios are on your phone. (The same is why phones can do simultaneous voice and WiFi. 802.11b/g/n uses yet another different radio.)
The prevalence of green plants in all environments from arid to extremely humid would tend to discount your water-supply based theory. I would assume it's a simple energy balance that's the main culprit. On our planet, the energy cost of evolving/manufacturing a green-absorbing chlorophyll exceeds the energy a plant would get from it. If the planet were getting energy from two suns, that would shift the energy balance in favor of a more-expensive-to-manufacture chlorophyll which absorbs the green part of the spectrum.
To further substantiate this, green is the strongest part of the visible spectrum that we receive from the sun. That plants do not absorb this indicates it must be significantly cheaper to manufacture red- and yellow-absorbing chlorophyll. Enough so to offset the lesser amount of red and yellow light in the spectrum here.
Ah ha! That's why it stopped working for me a couple days after Google implemented it. I don't use the back button, I open up Google search results in new tabs. So my Google search page was never being refreshed.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be trying to improve nuclear safety. But if our goal is to save lives, our money and worrying would be much better spent improving the safety of the other power technologies, instead of concentrating on the one which generates the most media coverage when there's an accident. The latter is the very definition of hysteria. Level of fear generated is a lousy metric to use for risk assessment (though it is a legit measure for PR).
This is something I've been harping on over and over though it hasn't been getting as much favorable moderation here. When people do risk assessment, too often they only consider independent events. The risk of a generator failing to start is (say) 10%, so just put a half dozen generators there and you have 99.9999% reliability, right? This fails to account for the possibility of a single event, like oh, I dunno, a tsunami? wiping out all your generators at once. Likewise, the probability of a two large tsunamis is not just the probability of one large tsunami squared. If an earthquake generated a large tsunami, it's almost certain to generate several large or larger aftershocks (technically the 9.0 quake was an aftershock to an 7.2 a few days prior). And along with it comes a high probability that one of those aftershocks could generate another large tsunami. So important structures in tsunami-prone regions should be designed to withstand two successive tsunamis. Not just one.
Liquid nitrogen is less effective than water at extracting heat. I ran through the calcs a few weeks ago:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2039038&cid=35501128
The boiling temp of water rises with pressure. So under pressure, water can be above 100 C and still liquid (ignoring partial pressure of course). The submersible Alvin had a close encounter with this when they discovered the first deep water thermal vents. They were trying to move in for a closer look, when someone glanced at the temperature gauge and realized the water temperature at the manipulator arm (>400 F) was hotter than the melting point of the Plexiglas windows (320 F).
What's magic about 100 C is that even if a pipe bursts and you lose pressure, the system is guaranteed to remain stable. With a rapid depressurization, the temperature will drop (think of a can of compressed air getting colder as you use it). So if your initial temp is 100 C under pressure, the final temp after depressurization will be below 100 C. If it were above 100 C, some or all of the water would flash into steam if a pipe burst.
This is the part of the theory I never understand. Why would China (or anyone) ever ask to be paid in Euros instead of US Dollars?
Look at the money supply of the USD vs. the Euro.
From 2000 to 2010, the USD M1 went from about $1.1 trillion to $1.8 trillion, a 60% increase.
From 2000 to 2007, the Euro M1 went from about $2 trillion to $3.8 trillion, a 90% increase.
From 2000 to 2010, the USD M2 went from about $5 trillion to a bit less than $9 trillion, a 80% increase.
From 2000 to 2007, the Euro M2 went from about $4.2 trillion to $7.2 trillion, a 80% increase.
I think it's safe to say if you extrapolate the Euro's money supply out to 10 years, the percentage of new Euros created far exceeds the number of US Dollars created.
The public debt of the Euro nations as of 2009 was about 74% their GDP.
The public debt of the US as of 2010 was about 60% of US GDP.
The Euro is a weaker currency than the US Dollar. Don't get me wrong, I think the vast amounts of debt and the reckless printing of new money by both currencies is bad. But if you're going to call the U.S. dollar out on it, you need to do the same for the Euro.
Why does everyone try to compare military spending on a flat dollar basis? That's like complaining that you living alone spend 100x more on food each month than a family of 12 living in Bangladesh, and that you should cut down your food spending to something closer to their levels. It completely ignores differences in population, economic productivity, and local prices.
The correct comparison is as a % of GDP, which takes into account differences in population, economic productivity, and cost of domestic goods and services. If we cut back our military spending to 1/6th of its current 4.7% GDP, we'd be the 20th lowest in the world. We'd be spending less than Japan does on defense even though Japan has its defense needs provided by the U.S. by treaty. The proper target for the U.S. alone would be about a 40% reduction in defense spending to match the world average. If you factor in Japan (we're obligated by treaty to defend them), the proper target would be about a 25%-30% reduction in defense spending.
The RIAA studios are corrupt organizations which have completely gamed the current royalty system to work for them and against the artists. Most of the artists only see a few % royalties from CD / MP3 sales once you factor in paying for production costs out of their share. So even if you were to cut the cost of music to, say, 1/4 what it is now, there would still be plenty of overhead to raise artist royalty shares.
It's not even $50 billion. Peak sales were in 2000 at $37 billion. Dollar sales have been down since then, but units shipped have been consistently up - precisely the pattern you would expect to see in an industry which is experiencing a revolutionary reduction in cost to ship its product, while demand remains relatively fixed (you can only listen to so many hours of music a day).
The RIAA (and to a lesser extent the MPAA) is literally the tail wagging the dog. Sony (a tech company which bought a music label) has already paid dearly for the mistake of picking DRMed music over a desirable MP3 player.
Ah yes, the "we have to think in terms of the worst case" argument. Are you aware the worst power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure? More people died from that than in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. So by your reasoning, clearly with such a horrific worst case, we should immediately start dismantling all our hydroelectric plants because they're simply too dangerous to risk using, right?
Nothing is perfectly safe. But to properly account for risk, you have to multiply the severity of a possible accident with how likely it is to happen When you do that, MWh per MWh, the long-term track record of nuclear power establishes it as the safest power generation technology man has ever invented. Safer than wind, solar, hydro, and a helluva lot safer than oil, gas, or coal. Commercial wind power, despite its minuscule contribution to the power grid, has already killed more people in the U.S. than commercial nuclear power. To raise nuclear's deaths/TWh figure above wind over the last 25 years would require the Fukushima accident to kill something like 10,000 people (more than twice as many as Chernobyl). Wind's fatality figures are only low because it generates so little of the world's power. To make nuclear worse than coal would require it to kill several tens of millions.
Make it large enough to generate as much power as Fukushima and the area 10-20 miles around it would be permanently evacuated. All that land area would be covered with mirrors.
You think the cost of keeping clean 14.5 km^2 of mirrors and keeping their aiming machinery running is cheaper than for running a nuclear power plant that generates 20-30x more energy per year? I see this over and over - people compare a nuclear plant to a solar panel, or a windmill as if they were somehow equivalent. They completely ignore the huge difference in scale between the power generated. When you compare equivalent MW generation, you're talking about hundreds of square km of solar panels/mirrors or wind turbines to compare to a single nuclear reactor much less an entire nuclear plant. Comparing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to Roscoe Wind Farm (largest in the U.S.) after accounting for capacity factor results in an equivalent wind farm larger than the state of Delaware. The renewables actually have far higher maintenance costs than nuclear simply because they are (except for hydro and geothermal) so dispersed.
No it won't. Like it or not, there's a need for a unique individual identifier in the credit industry. If you can prove you pay your bills, you're less of a risk, and can get lower rates from them. A lender does not need a SSN to lend you money. It's just that all of them choose to require it and a credit check to minimize their risk. If you feel this is wrong, feel free to start your own lending company which does not require SSNs nor credit checks, and tell us how that works out for you.
If it became illegal to use SSNs for this purpose, then everyone would get lumped in the same risk pool. People who are good about paying their bills on time would see their rates and fees go up. People who are deadbeats and delinquents would see their rates and fees go down. Pretty obviously, that'd be bad for the economy as a whole. So what would happen is a different unique identifier would come into being to fill this need, and we'd be right back where we are now. Only instead of some state comptroller accidentally releasing the unique numbers, it would be some credit bureau accidentally releasing the numbers.
The problem is not with them using the SSN. The problem is that except for a few new state laws regarding personal info loss and theft, there's very little incentive for them to protect your SSN. When they lose your personal (or a few million of them), they suffer no harm, but you do. So although having your SSN become public is a big deal for you, it's not a big deal for them, and so they don't really go out of their way to prevent it from happening. What's needed is to jack up the penalties for losing an SSN so that it's as expensive for them as it is for you (or better yet, for them to just pay your expenses for getting any identity theft cleared up). Then they'll take seriously the need to protect their customers' private info.
It's only "obvious" if you're only listening to the people who absolutely refuse to cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. Don't listen to them, don't listen to me, listen to the Congressional Budget Office - the division of the U.S. government tasked with predicting what is going to happen to the budget and how to fix it:
"In the past several decades, the country paid for increases in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending through cuts in defense spending relative to the size of the economy. That approach is not feasible in the future. Instead, significant changes will be needed in taxes or spending directly visible to many Americans." - CBO - Fiscal Policy Choices March 8, 2010 (PDF)
The graph that illustrates the minimal impact that cutting defense would have on the problem is on page 12 of this CBO report from Jan 10, 2010 (PDF). Here's a link to just the graph if you dislike PDFs. Basically, just the growth in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from 2000-2020 is about equivalent to adding a second entire defense budget. In terms of the graphic you linked to, the entire defense budget with Iraq and Afghanistan funding included accounts for only about half the deficit in your graphic. You could eliminate all defense spending right now and we'd still be almost a trillion dollars short this year.
The CBO has been saying basically the same thing since before 2000. We need to rethink and restructure Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to get the budget under control. Paying for increases in those by cutting other parts of the budget is a losing battle. At the rate these are projected to grow, do nothing and by about 2050 they will consume 20% of GDP (the historical average of all Federal tax revenue). They must be cut in order to balance the budget.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1740906&cid=33119430.
Like you, I'm a little skeptical the energy savings will be worth the additional weight. But that's why this is a research project. They'll probably build one to see how well reality matches up with theoretical calculations they've done.
That's the content industry and their artificial distinctions again. Like somehow a program you watch on your HDTV is different from the very same program watched on your 27" computer monitor.
The TV is irrelevant. What matters is that they have a show, and a customer who wants to watch it. Where, when, or on what the customer watches it is completely irrelevant. The content industry is trying to create this artificial distinction so they can charge each person multiple times for the same product. In their fantasy world, if you had a copy of a song on CD, on your laptop, on your MP3 player, on your home theater media station, and in your car's built-in MP3 player, you would need to pay them 5 times for the same song.
I flipped through the PDF and the crushing force you quoted is " a static crush force of 22.25 kN (5,000 lbf) applied continuously but not simultaneously to each of the three axes in the most critical direction, for a period of 5 minutes." In other words, it's not a pressure test, it's a uni-axial crush test.
They very well could be. Based on the debris collected so far it looks like the plane crashed belly-first into the ocean, so there's a good chance the housing of the recorders was not damaged by the crash impact. The thing about deep-sea pressure is that it's a compressive force, not a tensile force. So as the FDR and CVR sink down, it increases gradually and uniformly. Unless there's a puncture or a significant amount of air trapped inside, any metal housing should gradually crush down without necessarily creating any breach for seawater to get in. Things like rubber seals can actually perform better under compression (though from talking with guys at Benthos, it will deform the rubber enough to destroy it making it useless for future use)..
Even if the box itself isn't sealed, the ICs which make up the memory should be themselves sealed in something like epoxy to improve their impact resistance. Only the interface pins or contacts would be exposed to corrosion, and they're probably gold plated. The biggest danger I would think would be an air pocket around the solid state memory suddenly collapsing when the metal housing fails due to the pressure, leading to mechanical impact forces damaging the memory.
Jeeze Louise. On March 15, reactor 2 experienced a hydrogen explosion inside containment which may have cracked the suppression pool. The press was all over that one for a while since it contained the magic words "loss of containment". But now that an even more disastrous scenario has been proposed, they conveniently forget their earlier favorite scenario in order to make the new one seem more likely.
Right now it's impossible to determine with certainty which theory is correct. But given that we know that reactor 2's containment at the suppression pool experienced a pressure drop following a internal hydrogen explosion (which the workers heard so it definitely did happen), Occam's razor would favor the radioactive water coming from a simple crack in or around the suppression pool.
That's basically what Cookiesafe and Cookie Monster" do. Firefox's default cookie manager does it a bit more clumsily, and is missing the option to allow a site to leave cookies for just the current session, not future sessions. Your only choices are always deny, allow persistent cookies, or always allow cookies for a session.
Why not make it so if you have DNT set and a site ignores it, a big notice pops up saying "This site does not honor your Do Not Track setting. If you proceed, information about your behavior while visiting this site will be tracked and collected, and may be used in a manner you find objectionable. Are you sure you wish to continue?" No, Always Allow, Allow this one time.
Personally, I just run with a extension which allows me to allow, block, allow for session, or temporarily allow for session cookies on a site-by-site basis. (The last category is the important one missing from Firefox's default cookie manager - if I usually visit a site with cookies blocked, but a video or something requires cookies, I want to allow it to set a cookie this time but not next time.)