Maybe the solution is to have the #1 energy user in the US scale down and cut back, the US government.
If the US government leads the way with solar panels, compact flourescent light, and simply cutting consumption and waste, I wouldn't mind doing my part to help.
On the other hand, if the government would spend a whole lot less, and tax a whole lot less, maybe I could afford to buy those solar panels and get my house off the grid. If enough people do this, the prices would drop overall.
Until then, I'll support nuclear power as part of the US generating portfolio.
2000 MW 2-unit plant generates power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Average downtime = 50 days every 1.5 years (refueling cycle) or 33 days per year (very conservative #).
Generation = ((365-33)*24*2000=15,936,000 GWh produced in a year.
You pay how much per KWh? 5 cents?
15.9 million GWh * 1000KW/GW * $.05/KW = 795 million
No 2-unit plant in this country costs 795 million per year to operate. Actual total costs are more in the 250-400 million range, depending on capital expenses.
Nuclear power often subsidizes the rest of a utilities power portfolio. If not for mandates for x% of wind and solar, those projects would never happen since the economics just can't compete.
Also, nuclear fuel is far less volatile in pricing than natural gas. The real costs for nuclear are in overhead and employee wages, much less in fuel costs. Fuel is also purchased years in advance. And the bulk of high level waste for 25 years of many millions of Gigawatt hours of production fits in a pool smaller than you would find at any community college.
Yes - nuclear power can be highly profitable and cheap.
"Killing babies, though... man. That's a moral issue, not a religious one. Even the most vocal proponent of "choice," which is just a euphamism for "death," Mrs. Roe is now wishing that she hadn't had an abortion. Not only is it mindless killing, it is also a psychological burden to most would-have-been mothers. "
Sometimes, raising an unwanted child, giving that child up for adoption, or trying to raise a child when you are in school and having to drop out can also create a "psychological burden".
As far as the burden goes, individuals should be free to assess what they think will be the greatest impact on them psychologically and make their own choice.
The other part of the argument is a matter of personal moreal belief, so I won't go into it here.
"Cowards. The plant at Diablo Canyon sits near to a few fault lines (about two miles away for the closest) and it still runs, even after recent quakes in the area including the San Simeon 6.5 quake last year."
The San Simeon quake was much closer to Paso Robles - which is about 50 miles away. While it shook things, it never posed any real challenge to safety systems. In fact, the forces measured at the plant were low enough that the plant did not even experience an automatic reactor trip.
Diablo Canyon was designed to safely handle a much higher magnitude quake from a much closer fault line (~7 mi away, Hosgri fault).
There are fault lines all over the country. Parts of the US get tornadoes. Some parts are more susceptable to hurricanes.
The recent earthquakes are certainly not a reason to shut down Diablo Canyon. Why do you think so? Or are you just using your fears or those of others to dictate a position that is wholly unsupported by any scientific or engineering information.
Diablo Canyon produces over 2200 MW continuously 24-7, most of the time when not refueling. And the power is relatively cheap to produce. What would you propose as an alternative? More natural gas plants? More coal? Wind turbines? They aren't exactly environmentally friendly, if you are a bird. Solar? Neither wind nor solar are cheap nor reliable enough for baseload.
Aside for there being no rational reason to shut down Diablo Canyon, the economics of replacement power do not make any sense.
Both towers of the WTC did take direct hits from airplanes and survived.
It was the burning fuel that weakened the columns or if you believe the conspiracy theorists, the government blowing up the towers that caused them to collapse.
The WTC and containment domes are hardly the same thing. Additionally, testing has been done both simulated and real with containment domes.
"The point of levels would be that people would be able to quickly determine which level would be suitable for their task. If there is a standardized convention, if you will, then levels will be similar across the board and not vary wildly from manufacturer to manufacturer. I think it's a good idea, but tough to implement."
I think it is a bad idea because programs rarely have uniform requirements that fit a "level". Some programs require a lot of graphics power, but not so much CPU power. Others are the opposite.
The result will be programs will have to overstate the true requirements which would exclude more of their market.
The only way I could see this working is with a separate "level" for the CPU/motherboard/memory separate from the video card.
And then you would still have to specify disk space and other hardware limitations.
My experience is quite different. You first have to realize that not all digital is the same. For instance, the digital from my local cable company is overly compressed. I switched from Dish Network, to cable, back to Dish (1 month later). The picture quality for the cable was pretty bad - the first 100 analog chaneels were very fuzzy. The digital channels were better but not as good as I got off my satellite (near DVD quality). Others in my family have DirecTV which appears to me to not be as clean of a picture (less resolution from compression). Different people will get different results from their local cable co.
The picture quality and sound I get from the HDTV satellite feeds (Dish Network) are excellent. My HDTV tuner can also tune in the digital and analog over the air signals. HDTV OTA signals are the best of all since they are the least compressed and have the highest resolution, way better than DVD.
Be careful when comparing analog to digital. Digital has the capability to be better than analog in both picture quality and sound. The market will decide if we want more channels or fewer higher quality ones.
They rich pay the exact same proportion on their taxes that I do and sometimes less (for equal amounts earned). For the first 10k earned, we pay the same amount. For the next 20k earned, we also pay the same amount. This is true for all levels of income.
So for someone that makes 50k vs someone that makes 350k, both pay the same tax for the first 50k earned. Percentage wise, the wealthier person may contribute a higher percentage due to the progressive nature, but they are also keeping a much greater amount overall.
Often, the wealthy pay less since they have access to more tax deductions and writeoffs (much like the poor), and the ones that get screwed are the middle class.
I support the tax cuts, that effect the first 100k in income. The wealthy would get the same tax break that everybody gets due to the progressive nature of taxes, but would not get breaks that most of us never earn enough to see.
"Even if some RAM manufacturers managed to unfairly fatten their pockets, so what? A free market will not let any cartel keep their prices artificially high for any length of time."
The so what is that companies can use their market power to kill any competition and keep their prices high. By not doing anything to deter this practice, you are actually encouraging it since it is so efficient when you unfairly control the market.
Unregulated monopolies can be self sustaining at the cost of the consumers. It doesn't make it right if they unfairly take even a small amount of undue profit, when they do it to over millions of transactions.
"Do powerplants output at a constant rate? Or do they dynamically scale up and down according to demand?"
Nuclear power is normally run at 100% capacity all the time. Ideally, nuclear plants would, after ramping up to 100%, run until the next refueling outage (18-24 months).
Other power plants can scale the output, like hydro and natural gas. Although hydro is often environmentally constrained.
In California, the power usage tend to range from 22000MW to 44000 MW from night to day with the peak between 12-6pm.
"When Real's shit breaks on iPod, the users will view it as Apple's fault."
The blame would be well placed, if Apple intentionally breaks the interoperability as many have suggested they will do.
Apple is not worried that Real music will not function with their Ipods, they are more worried that it will, and they will be blamed for their intentional anti-competetive actions.
What you buy will need to be based on your budget. While the Nvidia cards were "made for Doom 3", the ATI cards supposedly run Half Life much better. Of course, since the game has been delayed, we have seen new cards from both ATI and Nvidia.
My money would be with the X600 line from ATi for ~$200. Of course, you could just wait until HardOCP gets a copy and does a hardware guide for Half Life.
(Another thing to consider - people with ATI cards are getting considerable boosts in performance in Doom3 by setting a memory allocation line of some sort - can someone add details?)
If it is tested out first on politicians, police, judges, insurance execs, and highway patrol officers (just like new invasive style laws should be) with the information made publically available.
Also, the formulas for determining your insurance should be available to you so you can change your behavior accordingly.
It is a lot cheaper if your goal is to only store for a fixed amount of time, like a month. Once the hardware is purchased, you could use it over and over again until failure.
With high volume, storage will be well under $1 a GB.
If you had 100 million customers, a few million up front in equipment fees would be a drop in the bucket.
At 36.4 cents a mile in taxes, with much lower miles per gallon, large SUVs are paying their share of damage to the road. They may even be paying part of your share as well.
Wasn't it reported just a week or two ago that the MPG numbers reported on the stickers are not realistic, and in some cases, the hybrid vehicles get worse gas mileage than their non-hybrid counter parts?
This is due to the way the government calculates the gas mileage - analyzing exhaust and applying calculations which are not at all accurate.
My wife used to drive a Hyundai Santa Fe. It was comparable in size to an escape, looked a lot nicer, had a good amount of power, and got decent gas mileage. The 4WD version is under 30k.
It sounds like NBC is trying to restrict your rights to view television broadcast in other countries to maintain their monopoly.
Does this have any first amendment implications?
Next thing you know, they will make it illegal to buy DVDs from other countries. (not just try through technological means, but with criminal penalties).
Perhaps someone could write a series of books about the seldom praised benefits and other positive aspects of being stalked, molested and abused, throw in a chapter on NAMBLA...
and title the books Katiesplace.org and katiet.com, and then suggest they donate the websites, or sue them for ownership. If Katie T doesn't appreciate the association, tough.
It took a long time for NWN to go Gold, it should be no surprise that it took some time for persistent worlds to develop and mature. These are side projects that other people do without any compensation.
One of the great benefits of user created content is that it does not have to be marketed to the most average user. People can find niche worlds that fit their play style...
Like this one www.theunderdark.com An excellent world, constantly updated and improved, with personalized service and changes for $0.00 a month. Lots of effort goes into these so others can enjoy. Anything that provides people with more options to create and edit is a good thing.
When Apple sells you hardware, it is yours to do with as you wish. They may wish to be the sole provider of software (music files) that works on their hardware, but they have no legal right to lock down their product. They can try, so long as they are not a monopoly.
Real is not requiring or even asking Apple to support real media files. They simply reverse engineered things so the ipod would now also work with real media files.
If Apple chooses to attempt to break outside formats from working on the ipod through updates, they will have to answer to their customers. They don't want to have to do this and face the backlash.
How would you feel if Microsoft released a security patch that disabled Netscape, Mozilla, and any other browser application in the interest of security or just as a side effect of a benign update?
What if Ford could update the computers in your car to disable the CD player from playing burnt CDs, or keep you from turning off the "Go to Ford Dealer" light?
I understand why Apple would want to keep other formats out of their player $$$$, but they should not be able to use the law to enforce their business model. The market should decide whether real media or any other files are desirable, and whether the iPod is still as good as competing products when Apple forces customers into product updates which break compatability. If they do break compatability, Real and any other company or individual can try again.
Nader is not the Libertarian candidate. You're just repeating the Democratic propaganda that a vote for anybody other than Kerry is a vote for Bush.
A vote for Nader is a vote for Nader, and a vote for Michael Badnarick www.lp.org is a vote for Michael Badnarik, and their respective parties.
Neither Kerry nor Bush is entitled to my vote. If either wants it, they need to recognize the important issues of third party candidates and decide if they are going to cater to any of our ideals (if our vote is of any value to them).
I just don't understand the liberals that keep whining about how scary the government is and yet they want to disarm the people.
xxxxxx
"I'll vote Libertarian.
I'm sorry to hear that. You're voting in a voting system that is designed to make your vote worthless if you make such a move.
After voting reform (with, say, preferential voting) it makes sense. Trying to get Nader to beat Bush under the existing system? It's a pipe dream, and simply counts as half a vote for Bush."
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Maybe the solution is to have the #1 energy user in the US scale down and cut back, the US government.
If the US government leads the way with solar panels, compact flourescent light, and simply cutting consumption and waste, I wouldn't mind doing my part to help.
On the other hand, if the government would spend a whole lot less, and tax a whole lot less, maybe I could afford to buy those solar panels and get my house off the grid. If enough people do this, the prices would drop overall.
Until then, I'll support nuclear power as part of the US generating portfolio.
Generic example:
2000 MW 2-unit plant generates power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Average downtime = 50 days every 1.5 years (refueling cycle) or 33 days per year (very conservative #).
Generation = ((365-33)*24*2000=15,936,000 GWh produced in a year.
You pay how much per KWh? 5 cents?
15.9 million GWh * 1000KW/GW * $.05/KW = 795 million
No 2-unit plant in this country costs 795 million per year to operate. Actual total costs are more in the 250-400 million range, depending on capital expenses.
Nuclear power often subsidizes the rest of a utilities power portfolio. If not for mandates for x% of wind and solar, those projects would never happen since the economics just can't compete.
Also, nuclear fuel is far less volatile in pricing than natural gas. The real costs for nuclear are in overhead and employee wages, much less in fuel costs. Fuel is also purchased years in advance. And the bulk of high level waste for 25 years of many millions of Gigawatt hours of production fits in a pool smaller than you would find at any community college.
Yes - nuclear power can be highly profitable and cheap.
"Killing babies, though... man. That's a moral issue, not a religious one. Even the most vocal proponent of "choice," which is just a euphamism for "death," Mrs. Roe is now wishing that she hadn't had an abortion. Not only is it mindless killing, it is also a psychological burden to most would-have-been mothers.
"
Sometimes, raising an unwanted child, giving that child up for adoption, or trying to raise a child when you are in school and having to drop out can also create a "psychological burden".
As far as the burden goes, individuals should be free to assess what they think will be the greatest impact on them psychologically and make their own choice.
The other part of the argument is a matter of personal moreal belief, so I won't go into it here.
"Cowards. The plant at Diablo Canyon sits near to a few fault lines (about two miles away for the closest) and it still runs, even after recent quakes in the area including the San Simeon 6.5 quake last year."
The San Simeon quake was much closer to Paso Robles - which is about 50 miles away. While it shook things, it never posed any real challenge to safety systems. In fact, the forces measured at the plant were low enough that the plant did not even experience an automatic reactor trip.
Diablo Canyon was designed to safely handle a much higher magnitude quake from a much closer fault line (~7 mi away, Hosgri fault).
There are fault lines all over the country. Parts of the US get tornadoes. Some parts are more susceptable to hurricanes.
The recent earthquakes are certainly not a reason to shut down Diablo Canyon. Why do you think so? Or are you just using your fears or those of others to dictate a position that is wholly unsupported by any scientific or engineering information.
Diablo Canyon produces over 2200 MW continuously 24-7, most of the time when not refueling. And the power is relatively cheap to produce. What would you propose as an alternative? More natural gas plants? More coal? Wind turbines? They aren't exactly environmentally friendly, if you are a bird. Solar? Neither wind nor solar are cheap nor reliable enough for baseload.
Aside for there being no rational reason to shut down Diablo Canyon, the economics of replacement power do not make any sense.
Both towers of the WTC did take direct hits from airplanes and survived.
It was the burning fuel that weakened the columns or if you believe the conspiracy theorists, the government blowing up the towers that caused them to collapse.
The WTC and containment domes are hardly the same thing. Additionally, testing has been done both simulated and real with containment domes.
"The point of levels would be that people would be able to quickly determine which level would be suitable for their task. If there is a standardized convention, if you will, then levels will be similar across the board and not vary wildly from manufacturer to manufacturer. I think it's a good idea, but tough to implement."
I think it is a bad idea because programs rarely have uniform requirements that fit a "level". Some programs require a lot of graphics power, but not so much CPU power. Others are the opposite.
The result will be programs will have to overstate the true requirements which would exclude more of their market.
The only way I could see this working is with a separate "level" for the CPU/motherboard/memory separate from the video card.
And then you would still have to specify disk space and other hardware limitations.
My experience is quite different. You first have to realize that not all digital is the same. For instance, the digital from my local cable company is overly compressed. I switched from Dish Network, to cable, back to Dish (1 month later). The picture quality for the cable was pretty bad - the first 100 analog chaneels were very fuzzy. The digital channels were better but not as good as I got off my satellite (near DVD quality). Others in my family have DirecTV which appears to me to not be as clean of a picture (less resolution from compression). Different people will get different results from their local cable co.
The picture quality and sound I get from the HDTV satellite feeds (Dish Network) are excellent. My HDTV tuner can also tune in the digital and analog over the air signals. HDTV OTA signals are the best of all since they are the least compressed and have the highest resolution, way better than DVD.
Be careful when comparing analog to digital. Digital has the capability to be better than analog in both picture quality and sound. The market will decide if we want more channels or fewer higher quality ones.
For more info, check out www.ilovehdtv.com
I used to think like that...
They rich pay the exact same proportion on their taxes that I do and sometimes less (for equal amounts earned). For the first 10k earned, we pay the same amount. For the next 20k earned, we also pay the same amount. This is true for all levels of income.
So for someone that makes 50k vs someone that makes 350k, both pay the same tax for the first 50k earned. Percentage wise, the wealthier person may contribute a higher percentage due to the progressive nature, but they are also keeping a much greater amount overall.
Often, the wealthy pay less since they have access to more tax deductions and writeoffs (much like the poor), and the ones that get screwed are the middle class.
I support the tax cuts, that effect the first 100k in income. The wealthy would get the same tax break that everybody gets due to the progressive nature of taxes, but would not get breaks that most of us never earn enough to see.
"Even if some RAM manufacturers managed to unfairly fatten their pockets, so what? A free market will not let any cartel keep their prices artificially high for any length of time."
The so what is that companies can use their market power to kill any competition and keep their prices high. By not doing anything to deter this practice, you are actually encouraging it since it is so efficient when you unfairly control the market.
Unregulated monopolies can be self sustaining at the cost of the consumers. It doesn't make it right if they unfairly take even a small amount of undue profit, when they do it to over millions of transactions.
"Do powerplants output at a constant rate? Or do they dynamically scale up and down according to demand?"
Nuclear power is normally run at 100% capacity all the time. Ideally, nuclear plants would, after ramping up to 100%, run until the next refueling outage (18-24 months).
Other power plants can scale the output, like hydro and natural gas. Although hydro is often environmentally constrained.
In California, the power usage tend to range from 22000MW to 44000 MW from night to day with the peak between 12-6pm.
"When Real's shit breaks on iPod, the users will view it as Apple's fault."
The blame would be well placed, if Apple intentionally breaks the interoperability as many have suggested they will do.
Apple is not worried that Real music will not function with their Ipods, they are more worried that it will, and they will be blamed for their intentional anti-competetive actions.
What you buy will need to be based on your budget. While the Nvidia cards were "made for Doom 3", the ATI cards supposedly run Half Life much better. Of course, since the game has been delayed, we have seen new cards from both ATI and Nvidia.
My money would be with the X600 line from ATi for ~$200. Of course, you could just wait until HardOCP gets a copy and does a hardware guide for Half Life.
(Another thing to consider - people with ATI cards are getting considerable boosts in performance in Doom3 by setting a memory allocation line of some sort - can someone add details?)
If it is tested out first on politicians, police, judges, insurance execs, and highway patrol officers (just like new invasive style laws should be) with the information made publically available.
Also, the formulas for determining your insurance should be available to you so you can change your behavior accordingly.
The insurance company always has the right to drop you as well.
"By comparing that with a clock in the TripSense device, the device figures how far the car goes, mapping it against the time of day"
Another reason they may want this info is to determine if you are actually driving the same amount of mileage you estimate that you drive in a year.
This is an open invitation for the insurance companies to check the odometer on a regular basis, something that is not otherwise practical.
If, like many people, you estimate the largest amount of driving on the cheapest vehicle, you won't be able to do this anymore.
By changing my estimated usage by 25%, my rates changed noticeably.
It is a lot cheaper if your goal is to only store for a fixed amount of time, like a month. Once the hardware is purchased, you could use it over and over again until failure.
With high volume, storage will be well under $1 a GB.
If you had 100 million customers, a few million up front in equipment fees would be a drop in the bucket.
-Edit 36.4 cents a gallon-
At 36.4 cents a mile in taxes, with much lower miles per gallon, large SUVs are paying their share of damage to the road. They may even be paying part of your share as well.
Wasn't it reported just a week or two ago that the MPG numbers reported on the stickers are not realistic, and in some cases, the hybrid vehicles get worse gas mileage than their non-hybrid counter parts?
This is due to the way the government calculates the gas mileage - analyzing exhaust and applying calculations which are not at all accurate.
My wife used to drive a Hyundai Santa Fe. It was comparable in size to an escape, looked a lot nicer, had a good amount of power, and got decent gas mileage. The 4WD version is under 30k.
It sounds like NBC is trying to restrict your rights to view television broadcast in other countries to maintain their monopoly.
Does this have any first amendment implications?
Next thing you know, they will make it illegal to buy DVDs from other countries. (not just try through technological means, but with criminal penalties).
Perhaps someone could write a series of books about the seldom praised benefits and other positive aspects of being stalked, molested and abused, throw in a chapter on NAMBLA...
and title the books Katiesplace.org and katiet.com, and then suggest they donate the websites, or sue them for ownership. If Katie T doesn't appreciate the association, tough.
It took a long time for NWN to go Gold, it should be no surprise that it took some time for persistent worlds to develop and mature. These are side projects that other people do without any compensation.
One of the great benefits of user created content is that it does not have to be marketed to the most average user. People can find niche worlds that fit their play style...
Like this one www.theunderdark.com
An excellent world, constantly updated and improved, with personalized service and changes for $0.00 a month. Lots of effort goes into these so others can enjoy. Anything that provides people with more options to create and edit is a good thing.
One such world that is excellent,
Apparently, we've already researched elerium-115. We simply need more scientists for UFO Power Source, and the power suits should be up and running.
No way is Apple in the right here...
When Apple sells you hardware, it is yours to do with as you wish. They may wish to be the sole provider of software (music files) that works on their hardware, but they have no legal right to lock down their product. They can try, so long as they are not a monopoly.
Real is not requiring or even asking Apple to support real media files. They simply reverse engineered things so the ipod would now also work with real media files.
If Apple chooses to attempt to break outside formats from working on the ipod through updates, they will have to answer to their customers. They don't want to have to do this and face the backlash.
How would you feel if Microsoft released a security patch that disabled Netscape, Mozilla, and any other browser application in the interest of security or just as a side effect of a benign update?
What if Ford could update the computers in your car to disable the CD player from playing burnt CDs, or keep you from turning off the "Go to Ford Dealer" light?
I understand why Apple would want to keep other formats out of their player $$$$, but they should not be able to use the law to enforce their business model. The market should decide whether real media or any other files are desirable, and whether the iPod is still as good as competing products when Apple forces customers into product updates which break compatability. If they do break compatability, Real and any other company or individual can try again.
Nader is not the Libertarian candidate. You're just repeating the Democratic propaganda that a vote for anybody other than Kerry is a vote for Bush.
A vote for Nader is a vote for Nader, and a vote for Michael Badnarick www.lp.org is a vote for Michael Badnarik, and their respective parties.
Neither Kerry nor Bush is entitled to my vote. If either wants it, they need to recognize the important issues of third party candidates and decide if they are going to cater to any of our ideals (if our vote is of any value to them).
I just don't understand the liberals that keep whining about how scary the government is and yet they want to disarm the people.
xxxxxx
"I'll vote Libertarian.
I'm sorry to hear that. You're voting in a voting system that is designed to make your vote worthless if you make such a move.
After voting reform (with, say, preferential voting) it makes sense. Trying to get Nader to beat Bush under the existing system? It's a pipe dream, and simply counts as half a vote for Bush."