I'm sure that there are lots of people who behave like it's a religion. On the other hand, the 'scripture' of environmentalism has hard science to back it up.
Not always. Many of the environmentalists who are currently calling attention to global warming will either ignore or vehemently deny that nuclear energy has any role to play in the solution. They want 'green' technology but are willing to doublethink their way into supporting solar (which requires heavy industry and lots of really nasty chemical) and wind (which is even less predictable than solar and takes more materials) but then go on and on about the dangers of nuclear (which has already been working for the last 50 years).
They're right on some issues and have the lab results to prove it, but on others the standard response is pure dogma. They even excommunicate people by popular opinion. Ask an environmentalist about Patrick Moore and you'll probably hear about how he's biased and a lackey to the nuclear industry.
Money is a representation of resources and as such those things that cost more inherently consume more resources. Forcing people to switch to CFL is not of any environmental savings because the energy 'savings' (as represented by money) often cannot cover the extra resource cost (as represented by money in the price of the unit). I've seen the math on CFL packages that says they pay for themselves but I've also noticed that CFLs don't last nearly as long as they're supposed to. They also contain mercury and plastic and a PCB along with electronics, none of which incandescent have.
This leads to the conclusion that while CFL may appear to help reduce our impact on the environment (reducing emissions at the power plant) they actually do the opposite by speeding the consumption of resources. In addition, enforcing bans on incandescent bulbs consumes even more resources (money) which ultimately must be factored into the cost of CFLs or other alternative lighting.
So, how to help the environment? Take all that money that is to be spent on the CFL ban and put it into researching better CFLs or alternatives that can compete with incandescent cost-wise. Once they can compete in cost then the energy savings will truly be an savings, instead of just switching the pollution from the power plant to the plastics plant (or the mercury mine, or the glass works, etc).
I am also fully aware of that, so you are very much correct.
I was simply pointing out that OP's comment was probably referring to the number of countries (and prominent ones like Germany and Austria at that) which do have official censorship of opinion. Perhaps I could have been a little more clear on my intent.
Also, why was my comment modded Offtopic and the parent Insightful? They're both on the same subject. People with mod points should keep in mind that there is no "-1 I don't like what you said" and "-1 Offtopic" or "-1 Flaimbait" are not acceptable substitutes.
Are you unaware of the number of countries in Europe in which it is downright illegal to deny the holocaust? I think holocaust deniers are full of shit, but that doesn't mean they should be thrown in jail. They have a right to their opinion whether I like what they have to say or not.
That's what free speech is all about.
The fact of the matter is the US has none of these arbitrary restrictions.
Sure, some games are great without them, but in general, classes make games better because they can serve as thematic shorthand, prevent you from making choices that hobble yourself through ignorance about the system, and most importantly, provide simple balance controls that allow the game designers to concentrate more on content than mechanics.
The thematic advantage I already acknowledged, but for the others, classes do nothing of the sort. It's particularly *because* of classes that I've felt hobbled in many games (you're a mage, they don't wear those) throughout the entire game. In trying to protect the player from making the 'wrong' choice of skills (there shouldn't be a 'wrong' choice to begin with anyway) you prevent them from making meaningful choices in skills. You also keep saying "it gives designers more time to create content" as if repeating it is going to make it true. It isn't. All you are doing when you make classes is arbitrarily grouping skills and attributes. It's like taking five dissimilar skill and attribute choices in a classless system and saying, "Well, the player obviously won't want to make any characters other than these" and going on from there.
Like I said in the beginning, it's entirely possible to make games just as well with classed or classless systems. It's just class systems, like WWII games, are being done to death and have nothing to offer at the moment other than familiarity (which is a bad thing half the time, really).
First, most games without classes do not have over or even close to one hundred skills. The larger of the two I mentioned (Fallout) has less than thirty and could have been compacted more if the designers wanted to. Second, one does not need to balance every possible combination skills. That's thinking of skill combinations like classes, which they aren't. One would only need to create a world where every skill is useful rather than having solutions pre-set for every class. Both Fallout and Deus Ex did this wonderfully. Arguably you'd need to make every class skill useful anyway, so there's no advantage for classes there.
The only concrete advantage I've ever seen with classes is that they approximate archetypes represented in the works of JRR Tolkien. This is, of course, a major advantage due to the popularity of Tolkien-esque fantasy, but it also means that the current preference for classes is only a preference, rather than a necessity.
Like others in this thread I wish video games would forget about D&D for a while. Just a little bit. Not permanently, just enough to let other ideas have their time in the light.
There's a reason why I'm hesitant to buy any medieval-looking RPG nowadays. It's because I know, absolutely know that when I start up the game the first thing I'm going to have to do is choose to play a fighter guy, a magic guy, a stealth guy and or a ranged attack guy. Why in God's name, during the age of computers, do we still have to pick classes?. There is no need for this abstraction. Anything you can do with classes you can do with simple attributes or skills. Furthermore, many things that are done with classes make no sense ("I'm sorry, you can't wear that shirt, you're a mage, mages only wear the purest right-spun Italian cotton"). Role playing games work well with out them. Fallout1/2 and Deus Ex. Both great RPGs. A huge variety in play, enabled by simple attributes and skills. No fucking classes. Game designers: Please stop using classes, at least for a bit.
Also, why do most games have ludicrously low numbers of hit points? Most games out there (including Fallout and Deus Ex, I might add) I only allow the player one, maybe two hundred hit points. There is an almost infinite difference between a bullet to the brain and pricking your finger. Again, with computers a character could have 100,000 hit points instead of 100 and it wouldn't cause any disruption in game play. All it would do is allow the game to represent a greater variety in levels of damage. The same attack by an enemy could do a wide variety of damage depending on where it hit. Eg. arrow to the cranium vs. arrow stopped by chain mail (yes, that would hurt). Low hit points work well when they need to be tracked by hand and the calculations that go into them are fairly simple, but when a computer can do them automatically faster than you can blink, low hit points do not make sense.
D&D is fun. That's why it's popular, it's just also possible for things other than D&D to be fun too, and I'd like to see more of that.
agree with them, why give some company everything they need to make record breaking profits
If Indonesia had everything the needed to make the vaccine they would be doing it themselves. The fact of the matter is that Indonesia is only providing samples of the virus for scientist to work with. The companies that developed and manufacture the vaccine are doing the vast majority of the work in this case and taking the vast majority of the risk. That is what is rewarded in record breaking drug company profits. It know it's perennially in vogue to rally against anyone who might make a profit out of medicine but if there was no profit we wouldn't have penicillin, or birth control pills, or anti-depressants, or anti-psychotics.
Indonesia is only providing the starting point for making a vaccine.
I have an idea! why don't all of you write some great stories for Sc-FI channel to make into movies and they can charge you $29.95 to watch them.
That actually happens. Ever heard that joke about the brain-dead starlet? She was so stupid she slept with the writer. Writers also only provide the starting point in Hollywood and television. Guess who gets the least money on the project? The writer! Why? Because there are a very large number of people who get in on the project after him who are far more important to the final outcome than he is. Things can be re-written by another writer but there's only one Jack Nicholson.
The drug companies take the risk and provide the infrastructure, the knowledge and expertise to make a vaccine out of the raw material provided.
We have a right to privacy, free speech, and so on. We don't have a right to indiscriminately destroy the environment to suit our convenience.
The right to privacy is a right to prevent the government or other individuals from interfering in one's personal affairs. What the government of California is saying here is "we have the authority to tell you how you can and cannot light your house." As a corollary, they're also saying "we have the authority to tell you what you can and cannot spend your money on."
Remember back when it was legal to light your house with whale oil? We're getting by without that; I'm sure we'll adapt to life without incandescents as well.
I'm sure it still is legal to light your house with whale oil in California. It's a completely natural, renewable resource, after all.
Joking aside, we don't light our houses with by burning whale oil because we light our houses by burning fossil oil. We just burn it all together in one spot called a "power plant" and consume it in our houses in a form called "electricity".
Then we get into the sticky issue of the actual environmental benefit of CFL. The fact that it's more expensive means it consumes more resources (time, energy, materials, effort, etc). So, if the government of California really wanted to help the environment they'd be better off encouraging the development of CFL that can compete with incandescent and let the invisible hand take care of the rest.
Your argument seems to revolve around finding reasons to justify doubt. Doubt is irrational and if mere doubt of a system were all that was needed to write off implementing it then we'd never get anywhere. The fact of the matter is the reactor failed safe despite everything that happened.
Nuclear power not only works but has been working to generate the electricity you use for the last forty to fifty years. France gets 80% of it's electricity from nuclear power. The United States ~20%. The 'questions' you've been raising about nuclear power aren't questions but actualizations of irrational fear.
If you're going to argue this further please start finding reasons that don't start with "Yeah, but what if...".
Did you miss the part of my post about "safety first"?
Chernobyl happened because virtually everything came before safety when it was designed. The reactor type was chosen because the Soviets wanted to produce plutonium for bombs. The fact that it was an inherently unsafe design was put secondary to plutonium production. A containment building was not built around the reactor because of both cost and because the Soviets wanted to boast how 'safe' their reactors were ("HA! We don't *need* containment buildings"). The 'test' that resulted in the explosion was done against all standing safety regulations at the plant.
In contrast, commercial reactors in North America and Europe are designed with safety first and foremost in mind. They are designed with multiple negative feedback loops (loss of coolant results in a decrease in reactor power, for instance). They are built inside containment buildings which are certified (x-ray, ultrasound) along with the reactor itself. The plants are run and inspected to meet very strict standards (other than the reactor core, rainwater is more radioactive than the inside of nuclear plants).
Although aberrant and highly undesirable, events like TMI show that reactors built to N. American and European standards are safe and function as intended (if they fail they fail to a safe state) even in a worst case scenario.
There's also the question of how to deal with storing the all the nuclear waste.
Most waste is simply spent fuel. That should be stored so when less expensive methods of reprocessing become available it can be recycled into more fuel. The actual waste (~2% of burnt fuel) can be fused into glass and disposed of in places like Yucca Mountain.
History contradicts you. The US, France, UK, Canada, Australia and Japan have been using nuclear power 'correctly' for as long as it's been around. It's relativly easy to use nuclear power responsibly. "Safety first" pretty much covers it.
Spending more money on solar power than what it saves or generates doesn't mean it has a bigger environmental cost, it means you won't have that money so buy a 75 inches TV and a PlayStation 3.
Ultimately, any money spent on anything got it's value from some productive activity. Sometime this value is created by resource extraction, sometime it's created by R&D, sometimes it's good old-fashioned manual labor, but ultimately it took a certain amount of resources to create the value behind that money. Spending more money on a less efficient method of energy production is ultimately spending more resources for less gain.
Therefore, the environmental cost of solar is higher than other alternatives (like nuclear) simply because it costs more money to produce any given unit of energy.
No, it actually makes our food and housing industries possible.
Canada's housing and food industries work just fine without illegal Mexican immigrants.
If the US stopped illegal immigration there'd be a slight depression on the housing market until population pressure forced it to start growing again. With housing more expensive people will not buy houses until they really need them. Landscaping styles would become simpler since they would be cheaper to maintain. Deporting/stopping illegal Mexican lettuce pickers will result in the invention of a mechanical lettuce picker. Manufacturing automatic mechanical car washes would become a growth industry for a while.
US employers only use illegal Mexican workers because they are cheaper than other available alternatives. Once they become scarce or unavailable those employers will turn to other methods and consumers will start choosing less expensive alternatives.
As to their treatment of US based staff - shouldn't you be attacking those who don't provide basic rights rather than praising those that do?
Those two are contra-positive.
the homogenisation of the world by the bland and vacuous.
What's wrong with homogenization? It's consistent and efficient. It creates useful certainties. That's what people want. They want to focus on those things they know will yeld results. They dont want to have to waste time figuring out how to get the cup of coffee they want (ironic that we're talking about Starbucks here).
Is it bland? Tastes fine to me. Is it vacuous?... umm... well... *checks dictionary*... not really, it's just empty of things other than the product. Who the hell savors the subtle culinary nuances of local spiced coffee while slogging to Calc 101 at 8:30am? I never. I wanted I.V. caffeine and an extra-large double-double was as close as it got. The 'extras' were never a factor and wouldn't have been no matter which city I lived in.
They also have a huge advertising budget.
Nobody is forced to obey advertising. If people really don't want something, they won't buy it.
Its danger lies in the toxicity of dust particles that may be ingested, since it's a heavy metal.
The World Health Organization thinks that most DU ingested will be eliminated from the body rather quickly.
-About 98% of uranium entering the body via ingestion is not absorbed, but is eliminated via the faeces. Typical gut absorption rates for uranium in food and water are about 2% for soluble and about 0.2% for insoluble uranium compounds. -The fraction of uranium absorbed into the blood is generally greater following inhalation than following ingestion of the same chemical form. The fraction will also depend on the particle size distribution. For some soluble forms, more than 20% of the inhaled material could be absorbed into blood. -Of the uranium that is absorbed into the blood, approximately 70% will be filtered by the kidney and excreted in the urine within 24 hours; this amount increases to 90% within a few days
So which are you? We're 'natural' and so is everything we do, and when we're done killing every other species on this planet off it will have been inevitable. Or, we're 'human', we have a responsibility to account for our actions, to ensure that we don't kill everything on this planet (including ourselves) out of sheer ignorance.
Both.
As humans, we have the ability (and responsibility, I think) to maximize the length of time current resources will sustain us. At the same time, arguments against harvesting resources because doing so is 'artificial' or 'not natural' are blatantly false and reek of self-loathing.
Also, the idea that humans could possibly kill every other species on the planet is either hyperbole or arrogance. Even with nuclear arms we lack the ability to wipe the earth clean - clean of *us* perhaps - but not clean of life.
Does it make sense to go straight to an urban environment when only four constestants even managed to finish the last challenge?
They didn't need everyone from the last challenge to have finished it. They only need one.
The fact that they got four finishers last time means the cross-country technology works. Now that removing the remaining bugs and improving cross-country technology is just a matter of time and money they can move onto the next step: urban driving.
That's saying that you don't have to comply with the will over the democratically elected government.
No, you don't if that government is tyrannous. When the machinery of government turns against the voter, the voter has a moral obligation to his fellow citizens to turn against the government. If you have even the faintest knowledge of history you know of at least one tyrannical dictatorship that was voted into power. (which then proceeded to disarm the populace. I wonder why?)
It's saying that if you don't like the law, yu're going to become a terrorist.
Because we know there's no middle ground on the continuum of "model citizen ----> terrorist".
That you would rather just become a terrorist than elect people who are going to protect your rights in the first place.
You're ignoring that democracy doesn't work perfectly all the time. Voters are not perfectly informed. Candidates are not perfectly honest. If someone gets elected on an 'rights' platform and then turns around and does the exact opposite who's at fault? Not the voters.
Voters need a means by which gross miscarriages of democracy can be corrected, a means by which they can ultimately hold control over the country. That means is guns. The scarrier and more powerful the better.
How many times have you heard someone say "We need guns to protect our rights!" and then say "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear!"
The only time I've heard people say that is in sarcasm when they're trying to characterize thier opponents as ignorant.
Truly, the people who want to keep their guns for protection against the government are the same people who want to keep the government from being able to find out about their guns.
How about instead of letting people say "Elect me, and I won't take away your guns!", you elect people who say "Elect me, and I'll repeal the Patriot Act!"
And if there was a politician who said both of those they'd win in the largest landslide victory ever. However, from what I've seen of US politics, it tends to be either one or the other.
The logic of voting for the pro-gun candidate is that while repealing the patriot act wont protect anyone from future threats to democracy, keeping guns around will. Furthermore, if the patriot act is used tyrannically, guns can protect the voter from that too. The pro-gun voter is maximizing his options.
If their RIGHTS were really what is important to them, they'd vote for people who wanted to protect their rights instead of people who wanted to protect their guns.
One's guns protect one's rights. They are protecting thier rights.
But that's not what happens. Search you without a warrant? Listen in to your phone calls? Arrest and detain you, even if you're a US citizen, without access to courts or a lawyer? Torture people?
Do you actually think you weren't already subject to all of those?
Every government does as it please to a certain extent. If the government wanted to search your house they'd do it. (Where the hell is the Watergate Hotel, anyway?) If the US didn't want to listen to all of your overseas/domestic phone calls they'd ask Canada to do it for them (as a non-Canadian we can do this to you, and vice versa).
Do you think the CIA's Cold-War-holdover detention centers in Europe were created recently?
Don't be so naive. Many of the powers GWB is exercising were created by other presidents so they could do what they wanted. And they did. You lived, perfectly happily, through all those administrations because in reality, they didn't care who you were, what you did, where you went, who you screwed or what you said. They held no malice toward you.
Guns are necessary for the day when a president *does* hold malice toward the US population.
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Not always. Many of the environmentalists who are currently calling attention to global warming will either ignore or vehemently deny that nuclear energy has any role to play in the solution. They want 'green' technology but are willing to doublethink their way into supporting solar (which requires heavy industry and lots of really nasty chemical) and wind (which is even less predictable than solar and takes more materials) but then go on and on about the dangers of nuclear (which has already been working for the last 50 years).
They're right on some issues and have the lab results to prove it, but on others the standard response is pure dogma. They even excommunicate people by popular opinion. Ask an environmentalist about Patrick Moore and you'll probably hear about how he's biased and a lackey to the nuclear industry.
Money is a representation of resources and as such those things that cost more inherently consume more resources. Forcing people to switch to CFL is not of any environmental savings because the energy 'savings' (as represented by money) often cannot cover the extra resource cost (as represented by money in the price of the unit). I've seen the math on CFL packages that says they pay for themselves but I've also noticed that CFLs don't last nearly as long as they're supposed to. They also contain mercury and plastic and a PCB along with electronics, none of which incandescent have.
This leads to the conclusion that while CFL may appear to help reduce our impact on the environment (reducing emissions at the power plant) they actually do the opposite by speeding the consumption of resources. In addition, enforcing bans on incandescent bulbs consumes even more resources (money) which ultimately must be factored into the cost of CFLs or other alternative lighting.
So, how to help the environment? Take all that money that is to be spent on the CFL ban and put it into researching better CFLs or alternatives that can compete with incandescent cost-wise. Once they can compete in cost then the energy savings will truly be an savings, instead of just switching the pollution from the power plant to the plastics plant (or the mercury mine, or the glass works, etc).
I am also fully aware of that, so you are very much correct.
I was simply pointing out that OP's comment was probably referring to the number of countries (and prominent ones like Germany and Austria at that) which do have official censorship of opinion. Perhaps I could have been a little more clear on my intent.
Also, why was my comment modded Offtopic and the parent Insightful? They're both on the same subject. People with mod points should keep in mind that there is no "-1 I don't like what you said" and "-1 Offtopic" or "-1 Flaimbait" are not acceptable substitutes.
Are you unaware of the number of countries in Europe in which it is downright illegal to deny the holocaust? I think holocaust deniers are full of shit, but that doesn't mean they should be thrown in jail. They have a right to their opinion whether I like what they have to say or not.
That's what free speech is all about.
The fact of the matter is the US has none of these arbitrary restrictions.
The thematic advantage I already acknowledged, but for the others, classes do nothing of the sort. It's particularly *because* of classes that I've felt hobbled in many games (you're a mage, they don't wear those) throughout the entire game. In trying to protect the player from making the 'wrong' choice of skills (there shouldn't be a 'wrong' choice to begin with anyway) you prevent them from making meaningful choices in skills. You also keep saying "it gives designers more time to create content" as if repeating it is going to make it true. It isn't. All you are doing when you make classes is arbitrarily grouping skills and attributes. It's like taking five dissimilar skill and attribute choices in a classless system and saying, "Well, the player obviously won't want to make any characters other than these" and going on from there.
Like I said in the beginning, it's entirely possible to make games just as well with classed or classless systems. It's just class systems, like WWII games, are being done to death and have nothing to offer at the moment other than familiarity (which is a bad thing half the time, really).
I'd like designers to think outside the mage.
First, most games without classes do not have over or even close to one hundred skills. The larger of the two I mentioned (Fallout) has less than thirty and could have been compacted more if the designers wanted to. Second, one does not need to balance every possible combination skills. That's thinking of skill combinations like classes, which they aren't. One would only need to create a world where every skill is useful rather than having solutions pre-set for every class. Both Fallout and Deus Ex did this wonderfully. Arguably you'd need to make every class skill useful anyway, so there's no advantage for classes there.
The only concrete advantage I've ever seen with classes is that they approximate archetypes represented in the works of JRR Tolkien. This is, of course, a major advantage due to the popularity of Tolkien-esque fantasy, but it also means that the current preference for classes is only a preference, rather than a necessity.
Like others in this thread I wish video games would forget about D&D for a while. Just a little bit. Not permanently, just enough to let other ideas have their time in the light.
There's a reason why I'm hesitant to buy any medieval-looking RPG nowadays. It's because I know, absolutely know that when I start up the game the first thing I'm going to have to do is choose to play a fighter guy, a magic guy, a stealth guy and or a ranged attack guy. Why in God's name, during the age of computers, do we still have to pick classes?. There is no need for this abstraction. Anything you can do with classes you can do with simple attributes or skills. Furthermore, many things that are done with classes make no sense ("I'm sorry, you can't wear that shirt, you're a mage, mages only wear the purest right-spun Italian cotton"). Role playing games work well with out them. Fallout1/2 and Deus Ex. Both great RPGs. A huge variety in play, enabled by simple attributes and skills. No fucking classes. Game designers: Please stop using classes, at least for a bit.
Also, why do most games have ludicrously low numbers of hit points? Most games out there (including Fallout and Deus Ex, I might add) I only allow the player one, maybe two hundred hit points. There is an almost infinite difference between a bullet to the brain and pricking your finger. Again, with computers a character could have 100,000 hit points instead of 100 and it wouldn't cause any disruption in game play. All it would do is allow the game to represent a greater variety in levels of damage. The same attack by an enemy could do a wide variety of damage depending on where it hit. Eg. arrow to the cranium vs. arrow stopped by chain mail (yes, that would hurt). Low hit points work well when they need to be tracked by hand and the calculations that go into them are fairly simple, but when a computer can do them automatically faster than you can blink, low hit points do not make sense.
D&D is fun. That's why it's popular, it's just also possible for things other than D&D to be fun too, and I'd like to see more of that.
If Indonesia had everything the needed to make the vaccine they would be doing it themselves. The fact of the matter is that Indonesia is only providing samples of the virus for scientist to work with. The companies that developed and manufacture the vaccine are doing the vast majority of the work in this case and taking the vast majority of the risk. That is what is rewarded in record breaking drug company profits. It know it's perennially in vogue to rally against anyone who might make a profit out of medicine but if there was no profit we wouldn't have penicillin, or birth control pills, or anti-depressants, or anti-psychotics.
Indonesia is only providing the starting point for making a vaccine.
That actually happens. Ever heard that joke about the brain-dead starlet? She was so stupid she slept with the writer. Writers also only provide the starting point in Hollywood and television. Guess who gets the least money on the project? The writer! Why? Because there are a very large number of people who get in on the project after him who are far more important to the final outcome than he is. Things can be re-written by another writer but there's only one Jack Nicholson.
The drug companies take the risk and provide the infrastructure, the knowledge and expertise to make a vaccine out of the raw material provided.
Joking aside, we don't light our houses with by burning whale oil because we light our houses by burning fossil oil. We just burn it all together in one spot called a "power plant" and consume it in our houses in a form called "electricity".
Then we get into the sticky issue of the actual environmental benefit of CFL. The fact that it's more expensive means it consumes more resources (time, energy, materials, effort, etc). So, if the government of California really wanted to help the environment they'd be better off encouraging the development of CFL that can compete with incandescent and let the invisible hand take care of the rest.
Your argument seems to revolve around finding reasons to justify doubt. Doubt is irrational and if mere doubt of a system were all that was needed to write off implementing it then we'd never get anywhere. The fact of the matter is the reactor failed safe despite everything that happened.
Nuclear power not only works but has been working to generate the electricity you use for the last forty to fifty years. France gets 80% of it's electricity from nuclear power. The United States ~20%. The 'questions' you've been raising about nuclear power aren't questions but actualizations of irrational fear.
If you're going to argue this further please start finding reasons that don't start with "Yeah, but what if...".
Did you miss the part of my post about "safety first"?
Chernobyl happened because virtually everything came before safety when it was designed. The reactor type was chosen because the Soviets wanted to produce plutonium for bombs. The fact that it was an inherently unsafe design was put secondary to plutonium production. A containment building was not built around the reactor because of both cost and because the Soviets wanted to boast how 'safe' their reactors were ("HA! We don't *need* containment buildings"). The 'test' that resulted in the explosion was done against all standing safety regulations at the plant.
In contrast, commercial reactors in North America and Europe are designed with safety first and foremost in mind. They are designed with multiple negative feedback loops (loss of coolant results in a decrease in reactor power, for instance). They are built inside containment buildings which are certified (x-ray, ultrasound) along with the reactor itself. The plants are run and inspected to meet very strict standards (other than the reactor core, rainwater is more radioactive than the inside of nuclear plants).
Although aberrant and highly undesirable, events like TMI show that reactors built to N. American and European standards are safe and function as intended (if they fail they fail to a safe state) even in a worst case scenario.
Most waste is simply spent fuel. That should be stored so when less expensive methods of reprocessing become available it can be recycled into more fuel. The actual waste (~2% of burnt fuel) can be fused into glass and disposed of in places like Yucca Mountain.
I must have misread something somewhere then. Thank you for the correction.
History contradicts you. The US, France, UK, Canada, Australia and Japan have been using nuclear power 'correctly' for as long as it's been around. It's relativly easy to use nuclear power responsibly. "Safety first" pretty much covers it.
Ultimately, any money spent on anything got it's value from some productive activity. Sometime this value is created by resource extraction, sometime it's created by R&D, sometimes it's good old-fashioned manual labor, but ultimately it took a certain amount of resources to create the value behind that money. Spending more money on a less efficient method of energy production is ultimately spending more resources for less gain.
Therefore, the environmental cost of solar is higher than other alternatives (like nuclear) simply because it costs more money to produce any given unit of energy.
Canada's housing and food industries work just fine without illegal Mexican immigrants.
If the US stopped illegal immigration there'd be a slight depression on the housing market until population pressure forced it to start growing again. With housing more expensive people will not buy houses until they really need them. Landscaping styles would become simpler since they would be cheaper to maintain. Deporting/stopping illegal Mexican lettuce pickers will result in the invention of a mechanical lettuce picker. Manufacturing automatic mechanical car washes would become a growth industry for a while.
US employers only use illegal Mexican workers because they are cheaper than other available alternatives. Once they become scarce or unavailable those employers will turn to other methods and consumers will start choosing less expensive alternatives.
Does it matter? It's not like you have a choice.
Those two are contra-positive.
What's wrong with homogenization? It's consistent and efficient. It creates useful certainties. That's what people want. They want to focus on those things they know will yeld results. They dont want to have to waste time figuring out how to get the cup of coffee they want (ironic that we're talking about Starbucks here).
Is it bland? Tastes fine to me. Is it vacuous?... umm... well... *checks dictionary*... not really, it's just empty of things other than the product. Who the hell savors the subtle culinary nuances of local spiced coffee while slogging to Calc 101 at 8:30am? I never. I wanted I.V. caffeine and an extra-large double-double was as close as it got. The 'extras' were never a factor and wouldn't have been no matter which city I lived in.
Nobody is forced to obey advertising. If people really don't want something, they won't buy it.
The World Health Organization thinks that most DU ingested will be eliminated from the body rather quickly.
Strawman. A willful act of a single person toward another person is not equivalent to the collective acts of a species toward other species.
Both.
As humans, we have the ability (and responsibility, I think) to maximize the length of time current resources will sustain us. At the same time, arguments against harvesting resources because doing so is 'artificial' or 'not natural' are blatantly false and reek of self-loathing.
Also, the idea that humans could possibly kill every other species on the planet is either hyperbole or arrogance. Even with nuclear arms we lack the ability to wipe the earth clean - clean of *us* perhaps - but not clean of life.
They didn't need everyone from the last challenge to have finished it. They only need one.
The fact that they got four finishers last time means the cross-country technology works. Now that removing the remaining bugs and improving cross-country technology is just a matter of time and money they can move onto the next step: urban driving.
Will additional points be awarded if they successfully navigate the LA aqueducts, find Sarah Conner?
For your sake I sincerely hope your country's politicians are every bit as much afraid as you are.
No, you don't if that government is tyrannous. When the machinery of government turns against the voter, the voter has a moral obligation to his fellow citizens to turn against the government. If you have even the faintest knowledge of history you know of at least one tyrannical dictatorship that was voted into power. (which then proceeded to disarm the populace. I wonder why?)
Because we know there's no middle ground on the continuum of "model citizen ----> terrorist".
You're ignoring that democracy doesn't work perfectly all the time. Voters are not perfectly informed. Candidates are not perfectly honest. If someone gets elected on an 'rights' platform and then turns around and does the exact opposite who's at fault? Not the voters.
Voters need a means by which gross miscarriages of democracy can be corrected, a means by which they can ultimately hold control over the country. That means is guns. The scarrier and more powerful the better.
The only time I've heard people say that is in sarcasm when they're trying to characterize thier opponents as ignorant.
Truly, the people who want to keep their guns for protection against the government are the same people who want to keep the government from being able to find out about their guns.
And if there was a politician who said both of those they'd win in the largest landslide victory ever. However, from what I've seen of US politics, it tends to be either one or the other.
The logic of voting for the pro-gun candidate is that while repealing the patriot act wont protect anyone from future threats to democracy, keeping guns around will. Furthermore, if the patriot act is used tyrannically, guns can protect the voter from that too. The pro-gun voter is maximizing his options.
One's guns protect one's rights. They are protecting thier rights.
Do you actually think you weren't already subject to all of those?
Every government does as it please to a certain extent. If the government wanted to search your house they'd do it. (Where the hell is the Watergate Hotel, anyway?) If the US didn't want to listen to all of your overseas/domestic phone calls they'd ask Canada to do it for them (as a non-Canadian we can do this to you, and vice versa).
Do you think the CIA's Cold-War-holdover detention centers in Europe were created recently?
Don't be so naive. Many of the powers GWB is exercising were created by other presidents so they could do what they wanted. And they did. You lived, perfectly happily, through all those administrations because in reality, they didn't care who you were, what you did, where you went, who you screwed or what you said. They held no malice toward you.
Guns are necessary for the day when a president *does* hold malice toward the US population.