The whole article is GARBAGE, pure and simple. And people discuss how the price of Thorium affects the viability of this scheme.
"When thorium is heated it becomes extremely hot and causes heat surges allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines producing steam that can then be used to generate electricity. It also helps that it has a very large liquid range between melting and boiling point."
Newsflash: when iron is heated it becomes extremely hot! Let's power our cars by bars of steel heated by lasers!
You are not going to get additional energy out of thorium unless you start a nuclear chain reaction (discounting its minuscule decay heat). And to start it you need to make it critical. Critical mass of a Thorium sphere is about 20kg. And while you might lower it a bit by compressing it, I somehow doubt that you're going to have Jupiter-core-level pressure to make 8g of Th dense enough to support the chain reaction.
And even if you do, you'll get a non-trivial amount of energy in form of such nice things as gamma rays and neutrons. And remember, it takes about 1000 Joules of gamma ray energy to kill you. That's about 0.05 seconds of output of 20kW engine.
Typical profit margin for a company is around 15%-20%. A company with profit margin of 1-3% is unusual, not impossible, certainly, but unusual.
Then the next issue is the distribution of income. Ok, your company might expend 99% of its income on labor cost. But if uses 90% of its income to pay to one top manager and 9% for everyone else then we have a problem.
And that's actually what happens right now - the gap between lowest paid and highest paid workers widens with almost lightspeed.
Most of Iceland debt was/is owned by overseas companies. So Icelanders themselves were not directly affected by this. They were affected by the collapse of their lucrative banking industry, however, which was more than enough. In the US case most of the debt is owned by Americans themselves. So a bank failures would hurt Americans themselves mostly. And that's not good for us all.
Mind you, I'm not against punishing banks for their behavior. They should have been nationalized and their management should have been fired (preferably into the Sun using a cannon).
It's OK to be slightly less powerful than competitors if you offer creativity.
However, if you are TOO MUCH underpowered then you're not going to compensate it with better _anything_. And iPhone is also a nice general-purpose computer - you can even make phone calls with it!
Well, "Everglade preservation" is not kinda the same as "the preservation of human species". And unlike Osama you won't need to search for him - we can just go genocidal on the whole species (well, we are sort of doing this already).
There are different levels of threats. Some monkeys in forests scores pretty low.
Now imagine that these monkeys were, say, confirmed agents of biological apocalypse. Then they'd be dead within _hours_. Personally, I'd just surround the woods, evacuate people and then just use chemical weapons to kill everything that breathes.
Imagine that your phone only runs signed software. And the hypervisor continuously checks that all executable code in RAM is signed.
Now what? You can exploit an application, but it will be immediately detected by the hypervisor. Embedded firmware might dodge it, but it won't be able to do much - all the traffic that goes in/out of NIC is already untrusted.
It'll take a couple of generations of hardware to achieve this. But ultimately it WILL be done.
We're talking about microsecond-accuracy clocks. Even good quartz clocks drift too fast.
There's the same problem in synchronous optic networks - endpoints _must_ be perfectly synchronized or it doesn't work at all. That's why communication companies are the biggest buyers of precise atomic clocks.
The problem is, a lot of endpoints now use simple GPS receivers and not atomic clocks.
And you're wrong - there are provably secure operating systems.
Then there are just plain scarily secure operating systems: QNX and (to lesser extent) VxWorks. QNX in particular has just about 2000 lines of kernel-level code which is highly audited, tested and probably damn near bug-free.
Similar approaches are already used in hypervisors. It's certainly possible to make a provably secure hypervisor, for example.
Actually, Germany is one of the REASONS that a lot of economies in the Western/Eastern Europe have high unemployment.
Countries lose ability to influence currency exchange rates when they join the Eurozone. And also a question of credit ratings applies - the German banks are major holders of Greek debt, for example.
First, the days of delayed salary are gone. Now it's incredibly easy for a worker to get salary from their employer, even if it bankrupts the employer.
Second, double bookkeeping in Russia is essentially gone now. Mostly because it's ridiculously easy to detect.
Third, Hryvnia (UAH) is fairly stable against the USD. It crashed exactly once in 10 years, because of the global financial crisis. Certainly, most organizations don't pay their workers in USDs. Why would they? You can't spend USD in Ukraine without exchanging them into UAH and employer can generally negotiate substantially better rate than at street currency exchanges.
PS: I'm an employer in Ukraine. And yes, I pay salary on time. No, it's not "black" salary.
"Classic Keynesian-speak! The problem is: this essentially Keynesian idea (although it existed before Keynes' writings) has not been working for the last 80 years. So why should it work now? "
Classic non-Keynesian-speak! The problem is: this essentially Keynesian idea has worked since the Paleolithic times!
In other words, starting your post with sentences like: "It's widely known that Jane Q. Public is a pedophile" is a non-starter. You have to at least give us a link why you think that Jane Q. Public is a pedophile.
As it is, neo-Keynesian economy works fine. It has predicted everything essentially correct in this crisis. While competing theories are being discredited, as we're not seeing: 1) Hyperinflation. 2) Surging rates.
Nope. 70-s introduced another piece of the equation: resource prices. It turns out it's possible to have high inflation and stagnation simultaneously if resource prices preclude the use of unused resources. And it can even be self-sustaining.
So Keynesian economists changed the theory to fit the facts. That's a usual course of action in science, you know.
"And the Keynesian solution for it? "Quantitative Easing"... which is another name for inflationary spending."
That's not a part of Keynesian solution. That's a part of _monetarist_ solution promoted by MMT types. Which right now simply doesn't work - we need FISCAL stimuli, not monetary ones.
What's the difference? It's actually easy to explain.
Right now any influx of money doesn't help because companies are already sitting on record-high piles of cash which they are not investing because there's no demand for their products. And simply adding more money (monetary stimulus, essentially) to their cash piles won't help. We've seen this proven with the QE1 and QE2.
We need to drive up the demand. There are several ways to do it. First, one can simply give everybody a $1000 check to spend on anything, and that would actually work pretty well right now. Second, one can try to reduce the unemployment by directly creating government jobs (in construction, green energy, etc.). Third, one can work to reduce the debt burden holding a lot of Americans down - it mostly comes from inflated household prices. For example, a law requiring banks to refinance mortgages for the houses at the current market prices would also help.
Needless to say, nobody is serious about any of these solutions. So the Lesser Depression goes on and on and on while all the non-solutions ('cut the taxes!!, balance the budget!!!') are being tried again and again without any effect.
"It amazes me that schools are still teaching (and they are) parts of Keynesian economics that have been disproven beyond any reasonable doubt."
It amazes me that cretins continue to spew garbage about the Keynesian economic theory without bothering to learn it first.
If you directly employ people from the unemployed pool you'll by definition reduce the unemployment.
Now, in NORMAL times that'd mean that money for their salaries has to come from higher taxes and/or borrowing (which drives up rates). And that can lead to more unemployment.
However, notice the word NORMAL. Our times most definitely are not normal - government can borrow at exceptionally low level and unemployment is high. So spending money on infrastructure problems RIGHT NOW would not lead to inflation and more unemployment.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole article is GARBAGE, pure and simple. And people discuss how the price of Thorium affects the viability of this scheme.
"When thorium is heated it becomes extremely hot and causes heat surges allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines producing steam that can then be used to generate electricity. It also helps that it has a very large liquid range between melting and boiling point."
Newsflash: when iron is heated it becomes extremely hot! Let's power our cars by bars of steel heated by lasers!
You are not going to get additional energy out of thorium unless you start a nuclear chain reaction (discounting its minuscule decay heat). And to start it you need to make it critical. Critical mass of a Thorium sphere is about 20kg. And while you might lower it a bit by compressing it, I somehow doubt that you're going to have Jupiter-core-level pressure to make 8g of Th dense enough to support the chain reaction.
And even if you do, you'll get a non-trivial amount of energy in form of such nice things as gamma rays and neutrons. And remember, it takes about 1000 Joules of gamma ray energy to kill you. That's about 0.05 seconds of output of 20kW engine.
Typical profit margin for a company is around 15%-20%. A company with profit margin of 1-3% is unusual, not impossible, certainly, but unusual.
Then the next issue is the distribution of income. Ok, your company might expend 99% of its income on labor cost. But if uses 90% of its income to pay to one top manager and 9% for everyone else then we have a problem.
And that's actually what happens right now - the gap between lowest paid and highest paid workers widens with almost lightspeed.
The problem is in scale and in debt ownership.
Most of Iceland debt was/is owned by overseas companies. So Icelanders themselves were not directly affected by this. They were affected by the collapse of their lucrative banking industry, however, which was more than enough. In the US case most of the debt is owned by Americans themselves. So a bank failures would hurt Americans themselves mostly. And that's not good for us all.
Mind you, I'm not against punishing banks for their behavior. They should have been nationalized and their management should have been fired (preferably into the Sun using a cannon).
This schoolkid now is more likely to get iPhone/Androidphone than mobile phone _and_ DS. That's the point.
It's OK to be slightly less powerful than competitors if you offer creativity.
However, if you are TOO MUCH underpowered then you're not going to compensate it with better _anything_. And iPhone is also a nice general-purpose computer - you can even make phone calls with it!
Certainly not.
I'm talking about a case where some species represent an existential threat to humans.
Well, "Everglade preservation" is not kinda the same as "the preservation of human species". And unlike Osama you won't need to search for him - we can just go genocidal on the whole species (well, we are sort of doing this already).
There are different levels of threats. Some monkeys in forests scores pretty low.
Now imagine that these monkeys were, say, confirmed agents of biological apocalypse. Then they'd be dead within _hours_. Personally, I'd just surround the woods, evacuate people and then just use chemical weapons to kill everything that breathes.
Imagine that your phone only runs signed software. And the hypervisor continuously checks that all executable code in RAM is signed.
Now what? You can exploit an application, but it will be immediately detected by the hypervisor. Embedded firmware might dodge it, but it won't be able to do much - all the traffic that goes in/out of NIC is already untrusted.
It'll take a couple of generations of hardware to achieve this. But ultimately it WILL be done.
Well, there _are_ provably secure OSes (seL4, Coyotos).
QNX is not formally proven to be secure, but in practice it is - I'm not aware of any vulnerabilities in its microkernel.
Here's a link to implementation: http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/
You can also check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyotos
We're talking about microsecond-accuracy clocks. Even good quartz clocks drift too fast.
There's the same problem in synchronous optic networks - endpoints _must_ be perfectly synchronized or it doesn't work at all. That's why communication companies are the biggest buyers of precise atomic clocks.
The problem is, a lot of endpoints now use simple GPS receivers and not atomic clocks.
And you're wrong - there are provably secure operating systems.
Then there are just plain scarily secure operating systems: QNX and (to lesser extent) VxWorks. QNX in particular has just about 2000 lines of kernel-level code which is highly audited, tested and probably damn near bug-free.
Similar approaches are already used in hypervisors. It's certainly possible to make a provably secure hypervisor, for example.
Actually, Germany is one of the REASONS that a lot of economies in the Western/Eastern Europe have high unemployment.
Countries lose ability to influence currency exchange rates when they join the Eurozone. And also a question of credit ratings applies - the German banks are major holders of Greek debt, for example.
By using metamoderation and karma system.
Kinda like on Slashdot. Plus a little more accountability and a special conflicts board, formed from elected officials.
Stop spewing crap.
First, the days of delayed salary are gone. Now it's incredibly easy for a worker to get salary from their employer, even if it bankrupts the employer.
Second, double bookkeeping in Russia is essentially gone now. Mostly because it's ridiculously easy to detect.
Third, Hryvnia (UAH) is fairly stable against the USD. It crashed exactly once in 10 years, because of the global financial crisis. Certainly, most organizations don't pay their workers in USDs. Why would they? You can't spend USD in Ukraine without exchanging them into UAH and employer can generally negotiate substantially better rate than at street currency exchanges.
PS: I'm an employer in Ukraine. And yes, I pay salary on time. No, it's not "black" salary.
"Many people I know were turned off by the amount of attention the Postgres requires."
What. The. Fuck???
PostgreSQL is as close to zero-administration database as anything else. It definitely requires LESS administration than MySQL.
Reprocessing doesn't require breeders. There's quite a bit of plutonium and U-235 in regular waste.
So? Has your wage gone up with the price of food? No? When why are you talking about the inflation?
Talk to your government about biofuels driving up the prices of food, about efficiency standards, etc.
"Classic Keynesian-speak! The problem is: this essentially Keynesian idea (although it existed before Keynes' writings) has not been working for the last 80 years. So why should it work now? "
Classic non-Keynesian-speak! The problem is: this essentially Keynesian idea has worked since the Paleolithic times!
In other words, starting your post with sentences like: "It's widely known that Jane Q. Public is a pedophile" is a non-starter. You have to at least give us a link why you think that Jane Q. Public is a pedophile.
As it is, neo-Keynesian economy works fine. It has predicted everything essentially correct in this crisis. While competing theories are being discredited, as we're not seeing:
1) Hyperinflation.
2) Surging rates.
Nope. 70-s introduced another piece of the equation: resource prices. It turns out it's possible to have high inflation and stagnation simultaneously if resource prices preclude the use of unused resources. And it can even be self-sustaining.
So Keynesian economists changed the theory to fit the facts. That's a usual course of action in science, you know.
"And the Keynesian solution for it? "Quantitative Easing"... which is another name for inflationary spending."
That's not a part of Keynesian solution. That's a part of _monetarist_ solution promoted by MMT types. Which right now simply doesn't work - we need FISCAL stimuli, not monetary ones.
What's the difference? It's actually easy to explain.
Right now any influx of money doesn't help because companies are already sitting on record-high piles of cash which they are not investing because there's no demand for their products. And simply adding more money (monetary stimulus, essentially) to their cash piles won't help. We've seen this proven with the QE1 and QE2.
We need to drive up the demand. There are several ways to do it. First, one can simply give everybody a $1000 check to spend on anything, and that would actually work pretty well right now. Second, one can try to reduce the unemployment by directly creating government jobs (in construction, green energy, etc.). Third, one can work to reduce the debt burden holding a lot of Americans down - it mostly comes from inflated household prices. For example, a law requiring banks to refinance mortgages for the houses at the current market prices would also help.
Needless to say, nobody is serious about any of these solutions. So the Lesser Depression goes on and on and on while all the non-solutions ('cut the taxes!!, balance the budget!!!') are being tried again and again without any effect.
"It amazes me that schools are still teaching (and they are) parts of Keynesian economics that have been disproven beyond any reasonable doubt."
It amazes me that cretins continue to spew garbage about the Keynesian economic theory without bothering to learn it first.
>No, infrastructure spending doesn't increase employment.
Whut?
If you directly employ people from the unemployed pool you'll by definition reduce the unemployment.
Now, in NORMAL times that'd mean that money for their salaries has to come from higher taxes and/or borrowing (which drives up rates). And that can lead to more unemployment.
However, notice the word NORMAL. Our times most definitely are not normal - government can borrow at exceptionally low level and unemployment is high. So spending money on infrastructure problems RIGHT NOW would not lead to inflation and more unemployment.
And if a LOT of stuff accumulates there - you get a new moon. Eventually.
That's how we got our favorite Luna, probably.
Why would you _store_ energy on the station? It gets all the energy it needs from the Sun!
The problem is storing _impulse_. And it looks like it's going to be solved soon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket#Testing_on_the_space_station
Plane change maneuvers are expensive like hell. They can actually be comparable to launching the space vessel anew.