It sounds like there were many people recording this particular appearance. Surely the Republican party would not have a legal leg to stand on with regards to pulling clips made by multiple people. I could understand if the Polk Cnty. Republicans wanted to pull their particular recording, but what if somebody else were to release the clip that they made into the public domain? IANAL, so if somebody could explain that to me, I'd really appreciate it.
If it were a private event, then yes one has the right under copyright law to restrict clips made by people attending. This is how the NFL and music bands restrict people from publishing their own videos and pictures of games and concerts.
However, if something happens which makes the clip newsworthy, then it qualifies under the fair use section of copyright law and people are allowed to disseminate the clip for news reporting purposes. If a player or guitarist got killed at a game or event, then you could publish your video of it as a news report and there's nothing the NFL or the band could do to stop you. The Congressman's comments about "struggling" to get by on $174k have become newsworthy, so the clip is free to reproduce for news reporting purposes. He still retains copyright to it - you can't include it in DVDs you sell of "Dumbest Things Politicians Have Said" without getting his permission first. But if you're reporting news (or spreading the word, such as news reporting has become in today's world of Youtube videos, blogs, tweets, and Facebook updates), you're free to duplicate it.
I say this as a conservative: The Congressman hasn't got a leg to stand on. The news reporting fair use exception to copyright law was put there to prevent exactly what he's trying to do.
The definition of celebrity is "Someone who is known by more people than they know" - of course Charlie Sheen is followed by more people than he follows.
Hmm, that actually points out a numerical use for this. I've long felt that the Internet was a great equalizing force on the social landscape. No longer do TV and movie studios have a monopoly on world-wide fame and celebrity. With the Internet, anyone who comes up with something interesting or catchy enough can become famous worldwide.
The problem was, I always thought that was a nigh unprovable hypothesis. How do you measure "celebrity" in an objective, numerical manner? Number of twitter followers actually might work. If the hypothesis is right, that 0.05% should increase as the years go by, indicating fame is becoming a more evenly distributed commodity.
Wikipedia is expert hostile. There is no procedures for evaluating merit
If you think about it, this is the problem with democracy too. The expert who has researched a certain topic as a career for 30 years gets one vote; the crack addict living in a box who never even knew the topic existed until you asked him gets one vote. You get around the problem by using a representative system - rather than all individuals directly voting on an issue, they elect "experts" who (in theory) devote all of their time studying an issue before voting on it.
The problem with Wikipedia is that the "experts" aren't elected, they're self-selected by being the most stubborn, argumentative, hostile, and uncompromising individuals to have "contributed" to Wikipedia.
Microsoft effectively killed the netbook when they quit releasing versions of XP and forced everyone to move to Windows 7, which had higher memory and drive requirements. By the time you were done with a system that could run Windows 7 well, it wasn't that much cheaper than a regular laptop.
You'll also notice that Windows-based netbooks are dying, but the market niche they abandoned when they switched to Windows - a simplified device which runs just a few core apps like browser, email, video/music player, etc - is still thriving. It's just switched to tablets as the hardware of choice.
Microsoft and the techies who disparage tablets (and disparaged netbooks when they first came out) need to get it into their heads - there is a market for tens if not hundreds of millions of these simple devices. The simple fact is, most people aren't techies. They don't care about running Eclipse, or SQL, or Photoshop, or even Excel or Word. They just want something small and simple which lets them browse the web, access Facebook/Twitter, email, IM, and music/videos.
The only strategy left is to hope it all goes away soon, and denegrating that part of the market is the only commentary they can make to help that along.
Kinda reminds me of Gates dismissing the Internet as a passing fad, and refusing to put a TCP/IP stack in Windows 3.1. He bet on subscription-based walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe, setting up MSN based on that model.
Well duh. Because when they put their ruler on the chart and extended the line out all the way to 2050, it said Windows Mobile would have 200% of the market by then. Even they knew there was something fishy about that number.
I have serious difficulty figuring out what scenario was in play that required this particular data to be on a laptop in the first place. Some mobile sales guy needed the data to plug in at a hotel conference room and make a presentation? Some jet-setting bigwig needed to massage the data and do some data-mining while on a trans-oceanic flight?
The obvious use that comes to mind would be a field agent going out to a town meeting where claimants are asked to come and discuss any issues they have with their individual claim. He doesn't know ahead of time which claimants are going to be there, and he doesn't know if he'll have Internet access or if it'll be fast enough for him to VPN into BP's servers to pull the data from there on an as-needed basis. So he needs a copy on his laptop so he can look up the details of each individual claim. I remember similar meetings being done after the Exxon Valdez spill, between Exxon and local fishermen. Well, minus the laptops; those weren't that common back then.
Not saying that's what's happened here. The scenarios you give are certainly possible too. Just saying that putting the data on a laptop isn't quite so far-fetched.
The average ID fraud in 2009 was for over $4000. They had open access to CC details for 8 months! Even the out of pocket expenses per fraud victim is over $600, so if there were 200 victims as a result of this company's lax security, the fine isn't even on par with the individual cost of those affected, which is absurd.
So by your reasoning, the fine should have been 200*$50 = $10,000. (From reading TFA it sounds like there were a lot more than 200 victims. But I just wanted to make the point that there's a huge difference between credit card theft and identity theft).
That's pretty much the conclusion I've reached. By cost, solar (20-45 cents per kWh) is currently nonviable except for places with extraordinarily high electricity costs (e.g. the more remote islands of Hawaii) or extraordinarily strong and consistent sunshine (e.g. the desert Southwest U.S.). Wind is getting there, down to about 7-12 cents per kWh wholesale, compared to 3-5 cents for coal.
But the biggest problem I think people are overlooking for wind is the sheer scale of the wind farm you need to replace a decent-sized power plant. Roscoe Wind Farm is the largest wind farm in the U.S., with 781.5 MW peak capacity, 627 turbines, covering 400 km^2. Note however that that's peak capacity - how much electricity the farm generates under ideal conditions if each turbine is running at maximum power and efficiency. In practice, the average power generation from land-based wind farms has been about 20%-25% of peak. Be generous and go with the high 25% capacity factor. So 627 turbines and 400 km^2 gives you 195.4 MW of power on average.
A single AP1000 nuclear reactor generates 1154 MW. Figure maintenance and other reasons will drop that to about 90% capacity factor, or about 1000 MW. A plant will typically have at least two so one can remain operational while the other is shut down, so 2000 MW for the plant. How big would the wind farm need to be to replace that?
2000 / 195.4 = 10.3x bigger. To replace two AP1000 reactors will require nearly 6500 turbines covering over 4000 km^2. Each turbine requires 100-200 tons of steel, so that's around a million tons of steel. I don't even want to think about the transmission lines needed to string them all together. And wind turbines cost about $1.2 - $2.6 million per MW of peak capacity. Since this hypothetical wind farm has ~8000 MW of peak capacity, that's $9.6 - $20.8 billion in construction costs. The AP1000 reactors are estimated to have a total construction cost of about $4-$5 billion each. So $10 billion for two of them would actually line up with the low end of an equivalent wind farm's construction costs.
4000 km^2 is about 1% the land area of California. In 2010 California generated about 200 TWh of electricity, or an average of 22 GW. So even if you assumed lots of areas are as wind-productive as Roscoe Wind Farm, and that we developed some technology which could store 100% of generated electricity for later use, California would need to cover 11% of its land area with wind turbines to replace its current electricity generation with wind. That's a bit far-fetched to say the least.
Wind and to a lesser extent solar are not the panacea a lot of people seem to think they are. They're going to primarily be supplemental power generation technologies for a long, long time. My hopes had been on deep well geothermal, but that's run into significant problems of its own.
Enough hydrogen was also produced within the reactor vessel by the interaction between water and hot fuel to cause an explosion at each unit when this was vented to the secondary containment. For units 1 and 3 this removed the top part of the reactor building. At unit 2 this may have taken place in the torus, causing damage there.
They've been suspecting they have a containment breach in reactor #2 for about two weeks now, in or near the torus / suppression pool which is connected to but sits beneath the main containment vessel. So the presence of highly radioactive water underneath it isn't really a surprise. No need for the core to melt through the steel containment vessel for that to happen.
The mystery right now is the burns the three workers suffered a few days back. They were working on reactor #3, not #2. #3 was also suspected to have a leak in containment, but their latest readings say that the containment vessel is not losing pressure, which would seem to imply there is no leak. So where did that radioactive water come from?
Bury the whole damn thing in concrete, and be done with it. This crisis would have been resolved two weeks ago if TEPCO wasn't more interested in repairing and reusing the reactor than the public safety.
Each reactor was written off the moment they pumped seawater into it. The corrosive nature of salt means the steel containment vessels will never pass inspection to allow them be used again to house an active reactor. Reactors #1, #2, and #3 will never be used again. TEPCO deserves criticism for waiting too long to pump in seawater (long enough to allow the rods to become exposed and melt), but refusing to use concrete has nothing to do with it.
They aren't encasing it in concrete because doing so would compromise their ability to continue cooling, and thus practically guarantee the core melting through the steel containment vessel.. TFA is speculation that this has already happened based on one industry expert's interpretation of the reports he has seen. He's apparently forgotten that reactor #2 suffered a hydrogen explosion inside containment early on (near or in the suppression pool, or "torus"). They've been suspecting for a while that they have a containment breech there, allowing water from the core to leak out. The high radiation readings from the water near that area are consistent with that scenario.
Nearly all of the world's population growth is in developing nations. Europe right now is very close to zero population growth, and is expected to go negative into population decline before 2050.
Not really - the space race was more about technology than science. Scientifically the problem was solved: there was no problem calculating the physics involved to go to the Moon - the problem was developing the technology capable of doing so.
To further back that up, of the 12 people who got to walk on the moon, 11 were pilots. The only scientist to go was a geologist on the very last mission.
Photosynthesis in sugar cane is 7%-8% efficient and compared to this is practically free (needs water and land, but so does this). The stuff manufactures itself for crying out loud, we don't even have to invent nanomachines to construct it for us.
The whole point of photovoltaic panels is that they convert the sunlight directly into electricity for our applications which need electricity. If instead you're going to convert the sunlight into a hydrogen-based fuel like this device, just plant some vegetation and convert its cellulose into alcohol-based biofuel and burn that instead. It's a helluva lot cheaper. The fuel is liquid at room temperature and 1 atmosphere, so is a helluva lot easier to store, transport, and handle than pure hydrogen. And even though burning alcohol fuels releases carbon, it's still carbon neutral since making it consumes the exact same amount of carbon from CO2.
Unless you're in a weight-sensitive application like the space program, or they can get this thing's efficiency up to about 20%-40%, I don't see what the big deal is. Biofuels are much more practical than hydrogen for most applications.
Here the link to the wind-related death stats. To the wind industry's credit, they have been improving and their fatality rate in the last decade is down significantly from the 1990s. But the average fatality rate comparisons extend before the 2000s because if you left out 1986 (Chernobyl), the anti-nuclear people would throw a fit.
For the U.S. specifically, nuclear power currently generates about 20% of our electricity and has had zero fatalities in over 50 years of commercial power generation (maybe 2 or 3 if you accept the outside high estimates of the consequences of Three Mile Island). Wind generates less than 1% of our electricity, and has had 13 fatalities since the 1970s. Scale wind power up to the amount of electricity currently generated by nuclear in the U.S. and you're looking at about 125 wind-related deaths per year.
Several of the radioactive elements they're finding have half lives of a few hours (I-134 and Ag-108 are less than an hour). For those decay products to be found in significant quantities 2 weeks after shutdown indicates the source of the water has a large concentration of these decay products. This would suggest a leak in the reactor's containment, rather than residual run-off from the water dumping/spraying operations. Reactor 2 sustained a hydrogen explosion inside containment, probably within the torus/suppression pool. So this isn't really a surprise.
Reactor 3 had no reports of a similar explosion, but they are inferring that containment is breached based on higher than expected radiation measurements. That is the more worrisome one, since it's using a MOX fuel rather than plain uranium. However, they are reporting that reactor 3 isn't losing pressure, so maybe there isn't a leak.
If you check my post history, you'll see I'm adamantly for nuclear power. But we shouldn't downplay what these reports are telling us.
But no, it's not about the instant deaths. It's the increase in cancer deaths and the billions of years of contamination of the nearby land, and the worldwide reach of the fallout that people don't like. If a wind farm gets hit by a tsunami in Massachusetts, you won't die of cancer in 20 years in Iowa.
This is pretty typical of how most people analyze things. Unfortunately, it's wrong, as it doesn't take into account opportunity costs.
You can't compare the consequences of nuclear power to a world where there are no cancer deaths, no radioactive "contamination", and no worldwide "fallout". Getting rid of nuclear power would not result in such a world because nuclear provides a significant portion of the world's electricity. Get rid of nuclear power and the need for that electricity would still remain. To do a proper comparison, you have to consider what the alternative choices are. Right now the only viable replacement for nuclear power is coal. Oil is too valuable as a transport fuel, gas is difficult to capture and transport, hydro is pretty much tapped out, geothermal seems to be stuck, and I wish solar and especially wind could provide base load but they can't. So the primary alternative to nuclear is coal.
Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium. Consequently, coal plants pump more uranium into our atmosphere as part of their ash than our entire nuclear industry uses as fuel. Coal emissions are estimated to kill 1 million people each year worldwide, primarily through lung cancer deaths. They are (now) largely responsible for the mercury contamination of our oceans which makes certain fish too dangerous to eat. And the emissions from a coal plant in Massachusetts spread throughout the entire world, just like the fallout from a nuclear accident.
So it isn't simply a matter of avoiding nuclear because of its dangers. It's a matter of using nuclear because it's considerably less dangerous than its primary alternative - coal.
Similarly, if you're going to consider every little negative consequence of using nuclear power, you have to do the same for wind. No the wind turbine in Massachusetts won't kill someone in Iowa if it's destroyed by a hurricane. But to replace a single 3-4 GW nuclear plant's annual power generation with wind, you'll need to build about 7,000 turbines (2 MW turbines * 25% capacity factor * 7000 turbines = 3.5 GW). Each turbine needs about 100-200 tons of steel, so all-told you'll need ~1 million tons of steel. To provide that steel, coal needs to be burned to melt the iron (either directly or via coal plants producing electricity) and provide the carbon to turn it into steel. Consequently, the coal emissions needed to build those 7,000 turbines in Massachusetts will cause people in Iowa to die of cancer in 20 years.
In the USA there is a battle cry to reduce wages... Damned greedy teachers teaching for a super rich salary of $52,000 a year... OMG you can buy gold plated Mazaratis for that kind of coin!
Not gonna comment on the rest, but low teacher salaries are just the public education system trying to spin their atrocious performance the best way they can. Currently the U.S. spends about $10,000 per student on public education, which is among the highest in the world and up nearly 4-fold since the 1960s in inflation-adjusted dollars. So a teacher in charge of a class of 25 students actually represents an expenditure of a quarter million dollars every year. The problem is most of that money is being squandered on administration, rather than in the classroom. It's incredibly difficult to fix this problem when any attempt to address it is immediately characterized as an attack on underpaid teachers, whose salaries represent less than 20% of expenditure.
Statistically, nuclear is the safest power generation technology Watt-hour for Watt-hour. Hydroelectric power accidents kill about 40x more people, wind power accidents about 4x more people, than nuclear accidents (projected, since most of the deaths from Chernobyl are cancer deaths that haven't happened yet). If you remove Banqiao and Chernobyl from the statistics (both were outdated and dangerous designs), both hydro and wind kill about 100x more than nuclear . Solar is a bit trickier to nail down because most of the deaths associated with it are classified as construction deaths (falling off rooftops), and not attributed to solar directly. But the linked-to site makes a decent attempt and solar comes out worse than wind.
The statistical comparison to fossil fuels is completely off the scale. Coal plant emissions are estimated to kill 1 million people each year (primarily by inducing lung cancer - basically the same mode of death as the majority of the deaths attributed to Chernobyl). That's like 250 Chernobyls every year. Yet people want to hold off on nuclear plants because "they're too dangerous" when the only viable alternative is more coal plants. It's madness.
And for the folks who say that average statistics aren't important, you have to look at what the worst-case potential devastation is, the worst power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure. Chernobyl was pretty much a worst-case nuclear accident (active core completely exposed to the environment accompanied by a fire and a government which disregarded the safety of nearby residents), and Banqiao was much, much worse. So by those folks' reasoning, we should be getting rid of hydro in favor of nuclear.
Basically people interact with water, hunger, and disease every day, they're not freaked out by the prospect of death by dam failure. Radiation on the other hand is something they don't deal with every day (or at least they don't think they do, as they eat a banana split on their granite counter-top after getting home on a transatlantic flight from Europe). The mere mention of the R-word even with no deaths attached completely freaks them out.
In a six-month period â" from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times.
Germany had a data retention law requiring all phone data logs be saved for 6 months. It was ruled unconstitutional on March 2, 2010. So during the time period of the records in question, Deutsche Telekom was simply complying with German law.
Metered billing is the model of perpetual stagnation. It gives the ISP an incentive to never upgrade because the more scarcity there is, the more they can charge for it. Why on Earth would they make a capital investment to alleviate a supply shortfall, the result of which would be lower prices to customers? They certainly have no real competition to make them do it.
Your last sentence is key. What you're saying is true only if there's inadequate competition. If there's competition, then metered billing is the way to go. Everyone pays based on how much they use. If an ISP's customers want to use more than the ISP can provide, the ISP has a financial incentive to pay to increase its bandwidth. Otherwise they start losing customers to a competitor.
The other question I'd ask is: if not metered billing, then what? We already know a flat fee for unlimited bandwidth is unworkable. Either the ISP has to throttle to effectively share bandwidth and you can nail them for false advertising; or the ISP limits each person's bandwidth to an equal share of the network, resulting in horribly slow speeds per customer while leaving average utilization down between 1%-10%. So if they can't charge you a flat fee, and if they can't charge you based on how much you use, how the heck are they supposed to charge you?
Then Nielsen is fucking stupid, and by extension so are the execs for the channels that are accepting what Neilsen says.
I agree it's stupid, but it's not really Nielsen's or TV stations' fault. It's the fault of advertisers who will only accept TV viewing stats based on what channel the TV is tuned into. They have decades of data correlating their TV advertisements to Nielsen ratings and marketing success. They have no data correlating their TV advertisements to streaming ratings and marketing success. So they cover up their eyes and pretend that streaming doesn't exist in order to stick with the tried and true.
Let me start by saying, flat out, that I'm not trying to troll or start a war here, but what exactly would you have them cut?
It's a fact that most fiscal conservatives, when asked what they would have the government cut can't name a single program to cut that is both A) large enough to have an impact, and B) not political suicide to cut.
We already know exactly what we have to cut. We have a whole branch of the government (the CBO) whose main purpose is to answer that question, and they've been telling us the same thing since 2000. All we need are leaders with the will and courage to do it. Yes it may be political suicide to make those cuts. But not making those cuts is economic suicide. You see in the news how the EU is struggling with the bankruptcy or impending bankruptcy of Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Ireland? That is our economic destiny if we don't make the necessary cuts.
I see lots of calls to cut defense spending, and I completely agree there's a lot of fat in there which can be trimmed. But defense is not what's killing our budget. Medicare and Medicaid are. The budget problem is spiraling out of control because half the country refuses to believe that, and thinks cutting defense will solve all our woes. News flash: If we dropped our defense spending to zero - completely eliminated the DoD and our armed forces - growth in Medicare and Medicaid would consume all of that savings in roughly 20-25 years. We are not going to fix this mess until we start addressing the real problem. Read the CBO reports.
How much more do trucks damage the road than a car?
Pretty much all the damage to our roads are caused by trucks (and weather). When you design a road to withstand the loading that a truck puts on it, a car running over it is pretty negligible. Just look at any 3+ lane highway. Trucks are required by law to only use the two right-most lanes. Unless the road is newly paved, there's always a huge difference in damage between those two right lanes and the other lanes.
Now how much worse is the truck's mileage?
Trucks actually get better mileage per ton than cars, but that's beside the point. OP is correct that car fuel taxes are subsidizing roads for trucks, and thus choking off the country's rail transport system. Unfortunately the system has been in place for so long that changing it would impact the livelihoods of millions of truckers. Any change to it is going to have to be done slowly, over decades, to give those people time to retire/divest from their investment in their big rigs and find other work.
Slashdot Mirror
If it were a private event, then yes one has the right under copyright law to restrict clips made by people attending. This is how the NFL and music bands restrict people from publishing their own videos and pictures of games and concerts.
However, if something happens which makes the clip newsworthy, then it qualifies under the fair use section of copyright law and people are allowed to disseminate the clip for news reporting purposes. If a player or guitarist got killed at a game or event, then you could publish your video of it as a news report and there's nothing the NFL or the band could do to stop you. The Congressman's comments about "struggling" to get by on $174k have become newsworthy, so the clip is free to reproduce for news reporting purposes. He still retains copyright to it - you can't include it in DVDs you sell of "Dumbest Things Politicians Have Said" without getting his permission first. But if you're reporting news (or spreading the word, such as news reporting has become in today's world of Youtube videos, blogs, tweets, and Facebook updates), you're free to duplicate it.
I say this as a conservative: The Congressman hasn't got a leg to stand on. The news reporting fair use exception to copyright law was put there to prevent exactly what he's trying to do.
Hmm, that actually points out a numerical use for this. I've long felt that the Internet was a great equalizing force on the social landscape. No longer do TV and movie studios have a monopoly on world-wide fame and celebrity. With the Internet, anyone who comes up with something interesting or catchy enough can become famous worldwide.
The problem was, I always thought that was a nigh unprovable hypothesis. How do you measure "celebrity" in an objective, numerical manner? Number of twitter followers actually might work. If the hypothesis is right, that 0.05% should increase as the years go by, indicating fame is becoming a more evenly distributed commodity.
If you think about it, this is the problem with democracy too. The expert who has researched a certain topic as a career for 30 years gets one vote; the crack addict living in a box who never even knew the topic existed until you asked him gets one vote. You get around the problem by using a representative system - rather than all individuals directly voting on an issue, they elect "experts" who (in theory) devote all of their time studying an issue before voting on it.
The problem with Wikipedia is that the "experts" aren't elected, they're self-selected by being the most stubborn, argumentative, hostile, and uncompromising individuals to have "contributed" to Wikipedia.
You'll also notice that Windows-based netbooks are dying, but the market niche they abandoned when they switched to Windows - a simplified device which runs just a few core apps like browser, email, video/music player, etc - is still thriving. It's just switched to tablets as the hardware of choice.
Microsoft and the techies who disparage tablets (and disparaged netbooks when they first came out) need to get it into their heads - there is a market for tens if not hundreds of millions of these simple devices. The simple fact is, most people aren't techies. They don't care about running Eclipse, or SQL, or Photoshop, or even Excel or Word. They just want something small and simple which lets them browse the web, access Facebook/Twitter, email, IM, and music/videos.
Kinda reminds me of Gates dismissing the Internet as a passing fad, and refusing to put a TCP/IP stack in Windows 3.1. He bet on subscription-based walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe, setting up MSN based on that model.
Well duh. Because when they put their ruler on the chart and extended the line out all the way to 2050, it said Windows Mobile would have 200% of the market by then. Even they knew there was something fishy about that number.
The obvious use that comes to mind would be a field agent going out to a town meeting where claimants are asked to come and discuss any issues they have with their individual claim. He doesn't know ahead of time which claimants are going to be there, and he doesn't know if he'll have Internet access or if it'll be fast enough for him to VPN into BP's servers to pull the data from there on an as-needed basis. So he needs a copy on his laptop so he can look up the details of each individual claim. I remember similar meetings being done after the Exxon Valdez spill, between Exxon and local fishermen. Well, minus the laptops; those weren't that common back then.
Not saying that's what's happened here. The scenarios you give are certainly possible too. Just saying that putting the data on a laptop isn't quite so far-fetched.
From TFA, it sounds like the only customer info on the compromised system was credit and debit card numbers. Cardholder liability for fraudulent use of their credit card is limited to $50 by U.S. law. Similarly, Massachusetts law limits cardholder liability for debit cards to $50.
So by your reasoning, the fine should have been 200*$50 = $10,000. (From reading TFA it sounds like there were a lot more than 200 victims. But I just wanted to make the point that there's a huge difference between credit card theft and identity theft).
That's pretty much the conclusion I've reached. By cost, solar (20-45 cents per kWh) is currently nonviable except for places with extraordinarily high electricity costs (e.g. the more remote islands of Hawaii) or extraordinarily strong and consistent sunshine (e.g. the desert Southwest U.S.). Wind is getting there, down to about 7-12 cents per kWh wholesale, compared to 3-5 cents for coal.
But the biggest problem I think people are overlooking for wind is the sheer scale of the wind farm you need to replace a decent-sized power plant. Roscoe Wind Farm is the largest wind farm in the U.S., with 781.5 MW peak capacity, 627 turbines, covering 400 km^2. Note however that that's peak capacity - how much electricity the farm generates under ideal conditions if each turbine is running at maximum power and efficiency. In practice, the average power generation from land-based wind farms has been about 20%-25% of peak. Be generous and go with the high 25% capacity factor. So 627 turbines and 400 km^2 gives you 195.4 MW of power on average.
A single AP1000 nuclear reactor generates 1154 MW. Figure maintenance and other reasons will drop that to about 90% capacity factor, or about 1000 MW. A plant will typically have at least two so one can remain operational while the other is shut down, so 2000 MW for the plant. How big would the wind farm need to be to replace that?
2000 / 195.4 = 10.3x bigger. To replace two AP1000 reactors will require nearly 6500 turbines covering over 4000 km^2. Each turbine requires 100-200 tons of steel, so that's around a million tons of steel. I don't even want to think about the transmission lines needed to string them all together. And wind turbines cost about $1.2 - $2.6 million per MW of peak capacity. Since this hypothetical wind farm has ~8000 MW of peak capacity, that's $9.6 - $20.8 billion in construction costs. The AP1000 reactors are estimated to have a total construction cost of about $4-$5 billion each. So $10 billion for two of them would actually line up with the low end of an equivalent wind farm's construction costs.
4000 km^2 is about 1% the land area of California. In 2010 California generated about 200 TWh of electricity, or an average of 22 GW. So even if you assumed lots of areas are as wind-productive as Roscoe Wind Farm, and that we developed some technology which could store 100% of generated electricity for later use, California would need to cover 11% of its land area with wind turbines to replace its current electricity generation with wind. That's a bit far-fetched to say the least.
Wind and to a lesser extent solar are not the panacea a lot of people seem to think they are. They're going to primarily be supplemental power generation technologies for a long, long time. My hopes had been on deep well geothermal, but that's run into significant problems of its own.
They've been suspecting they have a containment breach in reactor #2 for about two weeks now, in or near the torus / suppression pool which is connected to but sits beneath the main containment vessel. So the presence of highly radioactive water underneath it isn't really a surprise. No need for the core to melt through the steel containment vessel for that to happen.
The mystery right now is the burns the three workers suffered a few days back. They were working on reactor #3, not #2. #3 was also suspected to have a leak in containment, but their latest readings say that the containment vessel is not losing pressure, which would seem to imply there is no leak. So where did that radioactive water come from?
Each reactor was written off the moment they pumped seawater into it. The corrosive nature of salt means the steel containment vessels will never pass inspection to allow them be used again to house an active reactor. Reactors #1, #2, and #3 will never be used again. TEPCO deserves criticism for waiting too long to pump in seawater (long enough to allow the rods to become exposed and melt), but refusing to use concrete has nothing to do with it.
They aren't encasing it in concrete because doing so would compromise their ability to continue cooling, and thus practically guarantee the core melting through the steel containment vessel.. TFA is speculation that this has already happened based on one industry expert's interpretation of the reports he has seen. He's apparently forgotten that reactor #2 suffered a hydrogen explosion inside containment early on (near or in the suppression pool, or "torus"). They've been suspecting for a while that they have a containment breech there, allowing water from the core to leak out. The high radiation readings from the water near that area are consistent with that scenario.
Nearly all of the world's population growth is in developing nations. Europe right now is very close to zero population growth, and is expected to go negative into population decline before 2050.
To further back that up, of the 12 people who got to walk on the moon, 11 were pilots. The only scientist to go was a geologist on the very last mission.
Photosynthesis in sugar cane is 7%-8% efficient and compared to this is practically free (needs water and land, but so does this). The stuff manufactures itself for crying out loud, we don't even have to invent nanomachines to construct it for us.
The whole point of photovoltaic panels is that they convert the sunlight directly into electricity for our applications which need electricity. If instead you're going to convert the sunlight into a hydrogen-based fuel like this device, just plant some vegetation and convert its cellulose into alcohol-based biofuel and burn that instead. It's a helluva lot cheaper. The fuel is liquid at room temperature and 1 atmosphere, so is a helluva lot easier to store, transport, and handle than pure hydrogen. And even though burning alcohol fuels releases carbon, it's still carbon neutral since making it consumes the exact same amount of carbon from CO2.
Unless you're in a weight-sensitive application like the space program, or they can get this thing's efficiency up to about 20%-40%, I don't see what the big deal is. Biofuels are much more practical than hydrogen for most applications.
Here the link to the wind-related death stats. To the wind industry's credit, they have been improving and their fatality rate in the last decade is down significantly from the 1990s. But the average fatality rate comparisons extend before the 2000s because if you left out 1986 (Chernobyl), the anti-nuclear people would throw a fit.
For the U.S. specifically, nuclear power currently generates about 20% of our electricity and has had zero fatalities in over 50 years of commercial power generation (maybe 2 or 3 if you accept the outside high estimates of the consequences of Three Mile Island). Wind generates less than 1% of our electricity, and has had 13 fatalities since the 1970s. Scale wind power up to the amount of electricity currently generated by nuclear in the U.S. and you're looking at about 125 wind-related deaths per year.
Several of the radioactive elements they're finding have half lives of a few hours (I-134 and Ag-108 are less than an hour). For those decay products to be found in significant quantities 2 weeks after shutdown indicates the source of the water has a large concentration of these decay products. This would suggest a leak in the reactor's containment, rather than residual run-off from the water dumping/spraying operations. Reactor 2 sustained a hydrogen explosion inside containment, probably within the torus/suppression pool. So this isn't really a surprise.
Reactor 3 had no reports of a similar explosion, but they are inferring that containment is breached based on higher than expected radiation measurements. That is the more worrisome one, since it's using a MOX fuel rather than plain uranium. However, they are reporting that reactor 3 isn't losing pressure, so maybe there isn't a leak.
If you check my post history, you'll see I'm adamantly for nuclear power. But we shouldn't downplay what these reports are telling us.
This is pretty typical of how most people analyze things. Unfortunately, it's wrong, as it doesn't take into account opportunity costs.
You can't compare the consequences of nuclear power to a world where there are no cancer deaths, no radioactive "contamination", and no worldwide "fallout". Getting rid of nuclear power would not result in such a world because nuclear provides a significant portion of the world's electricity. Get rid of nuclear power and the need for that electricity would still remain. To do a proper comparison, you have to consider what the alternative choices are. Right now the only viable replacement for nuclear power is coal. Oil is too valuable as a transport fuel, gas is difficult to capture and transport, hydro is pretty much tapped out, geothermal seems to be stuck, and I wish solar and especially wind could provide base load but they can't. So the primary alternative to nuclear is coal.
Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium. Consequently, coal plants pump more uranium into our atmosphere as part of their ash than our entire nuclear industry uses as fuel. Coal emissions are estimated to kill 1 million people each year worldwide, primarily through lung cancer deaths. They are (now) largely responsible for the mercury contamination of our oceans which makes certain fish too dangerous to eat. And the emissions from a coal plant in Massachusetts spread throughout the entire world, just like the fallout from a nuclear accident.
So it isn't simply a matter of avoiding nuclear because of its dangers. It's a matter of using nuclear because it's considerably less dangerous than its primary alternative - coal.
Similarly, if you're going to consider every little negative consequence of using nuclear power, you have to do the same for wind. No the wind turbine in Massachusetts won't kill someone in Iowa if it's destroyed by a hurricane. But to replace a single 3-4 GW nuclear plant's annual power generation with wind, you'll need to build about 7,000 turbines (2 MW turbines * 25% capacity factor * 7000 turbines = 3.5 GW). Each turbine needs about 100-200 tons of steel, so all-told you'll need ~1 million tons of steel. To provide that steel, coal needs to be burned to melt the iron (either directly or via coal plants producing electricity) and provide the carbon to turn it into steel. Consequently, the coal emissions needed to build those 7,000 turbines in Massachusetts will cause people in Iowa to die of cancer in 20 years.
Not gonna comment on the rest, but low teacher salaries are just the public education system trying to spin their atrocious performance the best way they can. Currently the U.S. spends about $10,000 per student on public education, which is among the highest in the world and up nearly 4-fold since the 1960s in inflation-adjusted dollars. So a teacher in charge of a class of 25 students actually represents an expenditure of a quarter million dollars every year. The problem is most of that money is being squandered on administration, rather than in the classroom. It's incredibly difficult to fix this problem when any attempt to address it is immediately characterized as an attack on underpaid teachers, whose salaries represent less than 20% of expenditure.
Statistically, nuclear is the safest power generation technology Watt-hour for Watt-hour. Hydroelectric power accidents kill about 40x more people, wind power accidents about 4x more people, than nuclear accidents (projected, since most of the deaths from Chernobyl are cancer deaths that haven't happened yet). If you remove Banqiao and Chernobyl from the statistics (both were outdated and dangerous designs), both hydro and wind kill about 100x more than nuclear . Solar is a bit trickier to nail down because most of the deaths associated with it are classified as construction deaths (falling off rooftops), and not attributed to solar directly. But the linked-to site makes a decent attempt and solar comes out worse than wind.
The statistical comparison to fossil fuels is completely off the scale. Coal plant emissions are estimated to kill 1 million people each year (primarily by inducing lung cancer - basically the same mode of death as the majority of the deaths attributed to Chernobyl). That's like 250 Chernobyls every year. Yet people want to hold off on nuclear plants because "they're too dangerous" when the only viable alternative is more coal plants. It's madness.
And for the folks who say that average statistics aren't important, you have to look at what the worst-case potential devastation is, the worst power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure. Chernobyl was pretty much a worst-case nuclear accident (active core completely exposed to the environment accompanied by a fire and a government which disregarded the safety of nearby residents), and Banqiao was much, much worse. So by those folks' reasoning, we should be getting rid of hydro in favor of nuclear.
Basically people interact with water, hunger, and disease every day, they're not freaked out by the prospect of death by dam failure. Radiation on the other hand is something they don't deal with every day (or at least they don't think they do, as they eat a banana split on their granite counter-top after getting home on a transatlantic flight from Europe). The mere mention of the R-word even with no deaths attached completely freaks them out.
Most of the replies are concentrating on the lucrative finance side of this, but that isn't all that's going on. We also have a visa program which serves to lower engineering salaries at the behest of tech companies.
Germany had a data retention law requiring all phone data logs be saved for 6 months. It was ruled unconstitutional on March 2, 2010. So during the time period of the records in question, Deutsche Telekom was simply complying with German law.
Your last sentence is key. What you're saying is true only if there's inadequate competition. If there's competition, then metered billing is the way to go. Everyone pays based on how much they use. If an ISP's customers want to use more than the ISP can provide, the ISP has a financial incentive to pay to increase its bandwidth. Otherwise they start losing customers to a competitor.
The other question I'd ask is: if not metered billing, then what? We already know a flat fee for unlimited bandwidth is unworkable. Either the ISP has to throttle to effectively share bandwidth and you can nail them for false advertising; or the ISP limits each person's bandwidth to an equal share of the network, resulting in horribly slow speeds per customer while leaving average utilization down between 1%-10%. So if they can't charge you a flat fee, and if they can't charge you based on how much you use, how the heck are they supposed to charge you?
I agree it's stupid, but it's not really Nielsen's or TV stations' fault. It's the fault of advertisers who will only accept TV viewing stats based on what channel the TV is tuned into. They have decades of data correlating their TV advertisements to Nielsen ratings and marketing success. They have no data correlating their TV advertisements to streaming ratings and marketing success. So they cover up their eyes and pretend that streaming doesn't exist in order to stick with the tried and true.
We already know exactly what we have to cut. We have a whole branch of the government (the CBO) whose main purpose is to answer that question, and they've been telling us the same thing since 2000. All we need are leaders with the will and courage to do it. Yes it may be political suicide to make those cuts. But not making those cuts is economic suicide. You see in the news how the EU is struggling with the bankruptcy or impending bankruptcy of Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Ireland? That is our economic destiny if we don't make the necessary cuts.
I see lots of calls to cut defense spending, and I completely agree there's a lot of fat in there which can be trimmed. But defense is not what's killing our budget . Medicare and Medicaid are. The budget problem is spiraling out of control because half the country refuses to believe that, and thinks cutting defense will solve all our woes. News flash: If we dropped our defense spending to zero - completely eliminated the DoD and our armed forces - growth in Medicare and Medicaid would consume all of that savings in roughly 20-25 years. We are not going to fix this mess until we start addressing the real problem. Read the CBO reports .
Pretty much all the damage to our roads are caused by trucks (and weather). When you design a road to withstand the loading that a truck puts on it, a car running over it is pretty negligible. Just look at any 3+ lane highway. Trucks are required by law to only use the two right-most lanes. Unless the road is newly paved, there's always a huge difference in damage between those two right lanes and the other lanes.
Trucks actually get better mileage per ton than cars, but that's beside the point. OP is correct that car fuel taxes are subsidizing roads for trucks, and thus choking off the country's rail transport system. Unfortunately the system has been in place for so long that changing it would impact the livelihoods of millions of truckers. Any change to it is going to have to be done slowly, over decades, to give those people time to retire/divest from their investment in their big rigs and find other work.