That would have resulted in no more than the most local and confined consequences if it had been a coal, gas, or oil plant, or a skyscraper, but nukes are dramataically and rather uniquely less well bounded in terms of potential effects.
Well... No. Had it been an oil plant, it had needed fuel. Since Japan is an island, that means oil tankers. Those have rather spectacular failure modes. Gas? The same problem. Coal? It needs to be mined, and the waste is released into the atmosphere, which causes horrible consequences even when everything works okay. A scyscraper? What does that have to do with power production?
The difference between nuclear and fossil energy is that nuclear causes bad consequences when it goes wrong, but fossils cause bad consequences whether they go right or wrong.
Or, of course, unless you devise a way to efficiently store the energy - wouldn't using the batteries of millions of parked electric cars be a suitable option? Just wondering.
Are you going to buy me an electric car, and pay to replace its batteries as they wear down prematurely due to constant loading and unloading? And loan me your own when mine is out of power because you wanted to watch TV on a non-windy day?
Why do you think we have the electoral college? It's not because it's impossible to apply the populations votes directly toward a candidate once they've already been counted. It was meant to be another check on the mob to keep them from electing some populist bimbo that had duped the citizenry into voting for him even though they weren't qualified.
Which is a nicer way of saying that it's to ensure the elite don't lose their grip on power.
But really, what would you expect from people who made grandious declarations about inalienable rights granted by the Creator himself yet kept slaves who were denied said rights?
Anything humans do, and a lot of events not traceable to humans, have an ecological effect. You have to weigh the benefits against the costs. Not all impacts are negative impacts. A dam reduces habitat for ground plants and animals, but increases it for aquatic organisms. Wind turbines, solar, coal, and gas plants all have an impact. It's for goddam sure nuclear has an impact. A really unimaginable one when something goes wrong, and a huge one even when nothing goes wrong.
Really now? Perhaps you might enlighten me, what is this huge impact? Because the only impact I know of is dumping heat energy into the environment, and frankly, that's completely insignificant - and also unavoidable in any plant using heat to generate electricity.
Fukushima will probably not be so bad as it could have been, but had things gone worse it may have been necessary to abandon large portions of the country of japan for generations.
That didn't happen even when actual nuclear weapons were used - both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabited today.
I find thus statement along with the quoted figures a tad misleading. Does it take into account the largely immeasurable risks (both to human health and the environment) associated with containment of long lived nuclear waste?
If it's "immeasurable", it's impossible to take into account, one way or the other. That's what "immeasurable" means. That doesn't stop Greenpeace and their ilk from scaremongering by substituting wild guesses for measurements.
Whilst I'm no fan of coal (and have for along time been a fence sitter w.r.t. nuclear), coal power doesn't leave future generations with tonnes of highly radioactive and long-lived waste to manage and dispose of.
Which is precisely why we should be investing in nuclear technology: breeder reactors can burn radiactive waste.
Even if we had perfect fusion/solar/wind/zero-point power today, we'd still need those breeder reactors simply to get rid of the accumulated nuclear waste. We can as well kill two flies with a single strike and replace some coal power with electricity from those reactors while we're at it, too.
Whilst coal power does leave future generation with a significant environmental burden (atmospheric contaminants and greenhouse effects) there is at least the prospect of clean coal and carbon capture on the horizon. There is no such equivalent for today's generation of nuclear fission (unless you count the possible, and as of yet unproven, ameliorative effects that the thorium cycle might have on the lifetime of nuclear waste).
So relying on things that are "on the horizon" is okay with coal but not with nuclear?
According to this review, it's not just that it doesn't compete with Call of Duty -- it doesn't even compete favorably with Duke Nukem 3D.
It doesn't. It starts well, with a fight against a giant alien, and then becomes a really long interactive cutscene of Duke living in a casino. And then, just when it seems like the action is about to start again, you get shrunk into a damn weaponless action figure driving around on a toy car.
So you are asserting that a teen experimenting with cocaine is a good thing?
I'm asserting that teens learning about cocaine would be a good thing, because that would make stupid strawmen like yours less likely to be used in these conversations.
Ratings and segregation aren't the best, but they are better than the alternative and even with "good parenting" children will stumble across that which you would wish they wouldn't (whether online or from some kid at school or such).
And that's a good thing for both the kids and the rest of us who have to deal with them once they're grown up.
We found that if you take a bunch of sterilized rocks, water, CO2, Methane, etc (stuff that's here, and great quantities in other places in the universe, even in our own solar system), and zap in with static electricity (lightning, which we know happens elsewhere i.e. Mars has it) a bunch of times amino acids form. (The building blocks of life).
So why isn't there life on Mars? You are refuting your own point here.
I would say, as a living entity, that I'm not very surprised that I'm alive. Rather, I'm surprised that anyone believes the odds that life would emerge cold no be very good without the assistance of a God. To these such people, I say: "I forbid you from using any hashing algorithms beyond MD5" I say, we should force them realize their folly in dismissing the birthday paradox...
The problem here is, it's not sufficient to get the same molecule - any molecule - twice to get life started (which is what birthday paradox refers to). You need to get a molecule within a limited set, and even self-replicating molecule might be insufficient - I'd say you need to get to at least primitive bacteria before you have sufficient complexity to guarantee further evolution.
Life: Birthday paradox. Simples.
Life: an extremely complex phenomenom, which is not currently sufficiently well understood to say anything definitive about the forms it might take, the chances of its emerging randomly, or the preconditions for such emergency.
That's about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You think that if you make drugs legal that all the cartel employees who've lived the life of doing whatever they want, whenever they want while making tons of money doing so will suddenly get jobs at Hardees working 30 hours a week for minimum wage?
No, he's saying that if you end the War on Drugs, all the drug cartel employees will suddenly find themselves out of a job.
Regardless of whether you think the drug war is - as a whole - working against the interest of the public good, don't hold (or worse - spread) the idiotic notion that all these criminals will do anything other than branch out into other profitable criminal activities. They're already doing so in many cases (kidnapping, extortion, mass thievery, government official corruption, murder for hire) as they find things that are easier or more profitable than the drug trade, or in cases where their particular market is saturated.
You can run a huge black market because everyone there has a good reason to keep it under cover. That's not true for an extortion racket.
And Mafia, like any other enterprise, will exand to anything that's profitable. The choice is not between extortion and drugs; the choice is between doing both extortion and drugs or just extortion. Making drugs legal will make Mafia less profitable, which means it has harder time paying its members and thus also attracting new ones. It wouldn't surprise me if Mafia was lobbying for continued harsh War on Drugs for exactly this reason.
The way to make money (or more accurately, not lose money) is to have a strict rule of selling as soon as a stock drops a certain amount in value, say 5%. Sure, you may miss out on a subsequent rally and doubling in price, but you can never lose more than 5% of your initial stake, and over the long term you should come out ahead.
Actually, you could easily lose your entire initial stake. You have to find a buyer, after all - and all potential buyers see the price falling.
Investing is gambling, and you should never gamble more than you can lose. And "investing" into a speculative bubble is gambling against the house, in a casino that cheats (millisecond traiders). Don't do it.
And there is the crux: things are only worth what people are willing to pay. If people are willing to pay a lot for diamonds or gold, then they are worth a lot.
That's only true in a perfectly efficient market, where everyone has access to all information and "processor time" to make the best possible use of it. In our imperfect market "a fool and his money are soon parted", so you can't determine worth solely based on what some fool paid.
Suddenly losing value all at once is senseless; it should follow a decay function. We'll call it "inflation."
But how do you determine the optimal (or even sub-optimal) decay ramp to use, especially since it may vary from situation to situation? I don't think you can, in a system so dependent on human behaviour as economics. It would be nice if you could adjust this "inflation" rate as needed - which, obviously, rises the question of who should be able to adjust it, and for who's benefit? A government agency of some kind, perhaps?
This is starting to sound dangerously close to some darn communist talk where the government controls the economy, rather than the other way around!
PNG's gamma correction is one big mess making it an almost impossible format to work with in web design.
From what I understand, that has less to do with the format and more with browsers applying weird color transformations to PNG files without a colorspace specified.
Suit yourself in your assessment of me; it's entirely possible that I'm just an Epsilon-Minus Sub-Moron shifting the elevator up and down, while the guy who troll-mods me is truly brilliant.
"Troll" is the closest to "stupid and pointless" moderation Slashdot has, and your "Whatever, Pollyanna" certainly qualifies for that.
Also, judging by your comment about weeding out the worthless you certainly are either a troll or a genuine psycho. Either way, it seems obvious that you have nothing of worth to say, besides complaining about having to pay your share for the maintenance of the society. Good bye.
But if you think witch hunts can't happen in educated society, you really need to take Psych 101. Or study history. Or both.
Of course they can, and have. However, they are less likely, tend to be less destructive when they do happen (since burning people at stake is illegal in most places), and are brought to end eventually.
Apparently American murderers and rapists(check out Okinawa American base in Japan) can get away scott-free, while US authorities decide as per need, whether diplomatic immunity laws do or do not apply, irrespective of International laws and norms.
All laws are either backed by force or meaningless. As the US is the closest to a world policeman, laws are what it says they are - and since it's corrupt, the laws are also applied corruptly.
The international stage is currently as individual countries used to be, and many still are: ruled by whoever holds the most firepower at the moment. This might change some day, just like it did for many countries, but that would require establishing an international body with a monopoly on violence - a World Government capable of enforcing its laws. And that has huge risks; in history, governments without competition have usually stalled in their development.
But, for now, America acts as it pleases, and every other nation would in its position.
You know how often that discussion comes up on/. about how portrayal of computing is soooo unrealistic in the movies. Besides the point that most things are unrealistic in movies, this is very close to that "repeatedly zooming in pixelized images" effect often used, which people say it is impossible because the information isn't there.
It is. This has nothing to do with that, but is about giving a nicer representation to information that is there. All this does is removes jagged corners that result from up-scaling.
Just create a version of this specialized in different subjects, e.g. faces.
You got the electricity. I didn't get a public education. See the difference?
Your parents (and you) get to live in a society where everyone receives at least basic education. Not only is this absolutely necessary to maintain a technological civilization (which is why there's things like electricity or "median income" rather than a few lords and a lot of serfs), but it also means someone trying to, say, start a witch hunt has a harder time doing so, because they have at least vague recollection that something like that has happened before and wasn't so good.
Of course, judging by your comment about "weeding out the worthless", which you seem to equate with disagreeing with you, the difficulty of starting a witch hunt in an educated population might count as a negative. Also, judging by the same comment, your parents didn't really get their money's worth from your private education.
I had a professor who would have True/False tests where you had to justify your answer. You could answer either true or false to the question as long as long as your justification was correct.
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Well... No. Had it been an oil plant, it had needed fuel. Since Japan is an island, that means oil tankers. Those have rather spectacular failure modes. Gas? The same problem. Coal? It needs to be mined, and the waste is released into the atmosphere, which causes horrible consequences even when everything works okay. A scyscraper? What does that have to do with power production?
The difference between nuclear and fossil energy is that nuclear causes bad consequences when it goes wrong, but fossils cause bad consequences whether they go right or wrong.
Are you going to buy me an electric car, and pay to replace its batteries as they wear down prematurely due to constant loading and unloading? And loan me your own when mine is out of power because you wanted to watch TV on a non-windy day?
Which is a nicer way of saying that it's to ensure the elite don't lose their grip on power.
But really, what would you expect from people who made grandious declarations about inalienable rights granted by the Creator himself yet kept slaves who were denied said rights?
Really now? Perhaps you might enlighten me, what is this huge impact? Because the only impact I know of is dumping heat energy into the environment, and frankly, that's completely insignificant - and also unavoidable in any plant using heat to generate electricity.
Yes, it has.
That didn't happen even when actual nuclear weapons were used - both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabited today.
It turned into a de facto natural reservation?
If it's "immeasurable", it's impossible to take into account, one way or the other. That's what "immeasurable" means. That doesn't stop Greenpeace and their ilk from scaremongering by substituting wild guesses for measurements.
Which is precisely why we should be investing in nuclear technology: breeder reactors can burn radiactive waste.
Even if we had perfect fusion/solar/wind/zero-point power today, we'd still need those breeder reactors simply to get rid of the accumulated nuclear waste. We can as well kill two flies with a single strike and replace some coal power with electricity from those reactors while we're at it, too.
So relying on things that are "on the horizon" is okay with coal but not with nuclear?
Come on.
It doesn't. It starts well, with a fight against a giant alien, and then becomes a really long interactive cutscene of Duke living in a casino. And then, just when it seems like the action is about to start again, you get shrunk into a damn weaponless action figure driving around on a toy car.
Chrome is developed by a company who's very business model is to keep track of you. Of course it doesn't make it easy to block such surveillance.
I'm asserting that teens learning about cocaine would be a good thing, because that would make stupid strawmen like yours less likely to be used in these conversations.
And that's a good thing for both the kids and the rest of us who have to deal with them once they're grown up.
Apparently what it means ;).
So why isn't there life on Mars? You are refuting your own point here.
I would say, as a living entity, that I'm not very surprised that I'm alive. Rather, I'm surprised that anyone believes the odds that life would emerge cold no be very good without the assistance of a God. To these such people, I say: "I forbid you from using any hashing algorithms beyond MD5" I say, we should force them realize their folly in dismissing the birthday paradox...
The problem here is, it's not sufficient to get the same molecule - any molecule - twice to get life started (which is what birthday paradox refers to). You need to get a molecule within a limited set, and even self-replicating molecule might be insufficient - I'd say you need to get to at least primitive bacteria before you have sufficient complexity to guarantee further evolution.
Life: an extremely complex phenomenom, which is not currently sufficiently well understood to say anything definitive about the forms it might take, the chances of its emerging randomly, or the preconditions for such emergency.
No, he's saying that if you end the War on Drugs, all the drug cartel employees will suddenly find themselves out of a job.
You can run a huge black market because everyone there has a good reason to keep it under cover. That's not true for an extortion racket.
And Mafia, like any other enterprise, will exand to anything that's profitable. The choice is not between extortion and drugs; the choice is between doing both extortion and drugs or just extortion. Making drugs legal will make Mafia less profitable, which means it has harder time paying its members and thus also attracting new ones. It wouldn't surprise me if Mafia was lobbying for continued harsh War on Drugs for exactly this reason.
Actually, you could easily lose your entire initial stake. You have to find a buyer, after all - and all potential buyers see the price falling.
Investing is gambling, and you should never gamble more than you can lose. And "investing" into a speculative bubble is gambling against the house, in a casino that cheats (millisecond traiders). Don't do it.
That's only true in a perfectly efficient market, where everyone has access to all information and "processor time" to make the best possible use of it. In our imperfect market "a fool and his money are soon parted", so you can't determine worth solely based on what some fool paid.
But how do you determine the optimal (or even sub-optimal) decay ramp to use, especially since it may vary from situation to situation? I don't think you can, in a system so dependent on human behaviour as economics. It would be nice if you could adjust this "inflation" rate as needed - which, obviously, rises the question of who should be able to adjust it, and for who's benefit? A government agency of some kind, perhaps?
This is starting to sound dangerously close to some darn communist talk where the government controls the economy, rather than the other way around!
Given that tobacco users can be easily identified by their smell while heroin users can't, there seems to be a bit of a bias here.
From what I understand, that has less to do with the format and more with browsers applying weird color transformations to PNG files without a colorspace specified.
"Troll" is the closest to "stupid and pointless" moderation Slashdot has, and your "Whatever, Pollyanna" certainly qualifies for that.
Also, judging by your comment about weeding out the worthless you certainly are either a troll or a genuine psycho. Either way, it seems obvious that you have nothing of worth to say, besides complaining about having to pay your share for the maintenance of the society. Good bye.
Of course they can, and have. However, they are less likely, tend to be less destructive when they do happen (since burning people at stake is illegal in most places), and are brought to end eventually.
All laws are either backed by force or meaningless. As the US is the closest to a world policeman, laws are what it says they are - and since it's corrupt, the laws are also applied corruptly.
The international stage is currently as individual countries used to be, and many still are: ruled by whoever holds the most firepower at the moment. This might change some day, just like it did for many countries, but that would require establishing an international body with a monopoly on violence - a World Government capable of enforcing its laws. And that has huge risks; in history, governments without competition have usually stalled in their development.
But, for now, America acts as it pleases, and every other nation would in its position.
It is. This has nothing to do with that, but is about giving a nicer representation to information that is there. All this does is removes jagged corners that result from up-scaling.
Sorry, but that's just plain not going to work.
Your parents (and you) get to live in a society where everyone receives at least basic education. Not only is this absolutely necessary to maintain a technological civilization (which is why there's things like electricity or "median income" rather than a few lords and a lot of serfs), but it also means someone trying to, say, start a witch hunt has a harder time doing so, because they have at least vague recollection that something like that has happened before and wasn't so good.
Of course, judging by your comment about "weeding out the worthless", which you seem to equate with disagreeing with you, the difficulty of starting a witch hunt in an educated population might count as a negative. Also, judging by the same comment, your parents didn't really get their money's worth from your private education.
Your parents paying property taxes isn't donating any more than me paying for electricity is.
In the real world, it almost never matters whether you're right or not, as long as you can bullshit convincingly.
Let me guess: you were studying economics?
The problem extends to adults too. This raises some obvious suggestions about what should be thought ASAP.
But how to effectively taught self-manipulation?