It is interesting that these are all uploading examples. It's not bandwidth per se that't the problem, but uploading. Clearly Comcast would rather leave content distribution to the big boys (itself), and has built their asymmetrical network to fulfill that (questionable) vision.
Is the backend of their network really asymmetrical though? The cable segments obviously are, but the backend? I would assume that they have an equal amount of incoming/outgoing bandwidth at the edge.
What's more interesting is that all of these examples are cable providers. Has anybody had a DSL provider pull this? The telcos aren't in the business of content distribution so I'd tend to think they'd care less about somebody uploading last weeks episode of 24.
If you're the only person on that segment using a cable modem, you get it all
Umm, not exactly. The downstream channel in DOCSIS is about 42mbits as I recall. But even if you are the only customer you can't use all of that. Your cable modem itself is typically capped at a set speed. My area Roadrunner capped them at 5mbits. I've heard they go up to 10mbits in areas with FiOS. In any case you'll never exceed this cap even if your segment is totally unused.
As others join in, it gets divided up evenly among all, so your bandwidth goes down as others join in
This can happen if they put too many customers on one segment. Your ping times will also tend to go through the roof.
I have a business account with Verizon DSL, never been more satisfied.
I have a residential Verizon DSL account and I've never had an issue. Back in August I downloaded a 46 gigabyte torrent. Took about 7 days during which I was running about 80kb/s down. I've been seeding it ever since at full speed for a total of about 600 gigs. And I haven't heard one word from them.
Because even small bandwidth caps (like 5GB a month) are impossible to sustain if more than a small percentage of users decide to push their connection to the limit every single month without fail.
You seem pretty sure of that. My city has 21,089 households. Let's assume that they all have broadband and that they all use 5GB a mo. 5GB / 30 = 0.1667GB a day = 2,071 bytes per second (easily attainable on a friggen dial-up). 2KB/sec * 21,000 = 42,000KB/sec = a little over half of an OC-12. Do you really think that kind of connectivity is out of bounds for a company like Verizon, Time Warner or AT&T? That's nothing to them. And that's just an easy example using my own small town.
Higher and higher limits are just going to make it harder and harder to provide the same level of service to everyone
Again, that would be the free market at work. Build out your network to provide the service that your customers want or lose them to your competitor. What's the problem here?
Just imagine a national ISP with a 90GB/month cap and as little as 1000 leeches using up every drop of it, every single month. I don't know how much 90TB of traffic costs an ISP, but it's probably more than the $40K they'd collect from the leeches.
Well, when you start talking about "national" ISPs you are usually talking about the telcos. Seeing as how the telcos own the infrastructure I would doubt that it costs them $40,000 to move 90TB of traffic. In fact that works out to less then half a day on a OC-48. How many OC-48s do you suppose that Verizon or AT&T own?
Now if you want to make the argument that if everybody "leeched" that they'd need to invest money in network upgrades you might be more successful. But I don't see how that justifies the practice of advertising something as unlimited and using fine print to limit it. If they can't provide an unlimited service then they have no business advertising it as such.
Now think about how a company like Verizon is going to act when there's no Net Neutrality. How long you think it's going to take before you are so limited by their TOS that you can ONLY do email and web browsing, and only using their email and approved web sites?
They'll probably sell unlimited access to websites that are 'IN' and charge you $0.015/kb for all other sites. If their brainwashed customer base for voice is any indication ("I don't want to talk to you because you aren't IN and I'm too cheap to pay for enough minutes") they'd probably get away with it too.
I disagree. The term "unlimited", as we've seen, can be open to interpretation
Which is why we need to kill all the lawyers.
People go over cell phone limits all the time, and those limits use a metric (time) that is very easy for everyone to grasp. With an Internet connection, we're talking about data transfer limits, which aren't plainly obvious and which most people wouldn't know how to monitor and would have no clue as to how they can effectively limit their usage
Your worrying about Grandma going over her bandwidth quota? That doesn't seem very likely. I would make the argument that anybody doing enough on the computer that they would go over a large limit (the grandparent said 90GB IIRC) is probably also smart enough to monitor and check that usage. And how hard would it be for the ISP to provide you with a website that you could visit to check your usage? The cellular providers don't seem to have a problem doing this for minutes and SMS. E-mail or SMS reminders when you approach the limit would also be trivial to setup.
Now the ISPs could plainly advertise GB/month limits, but what's going to happen then? An "arms race" of sorts where ISPs compete by ratcheting up the limit
How would that arms race a bad thing? I think that's called competition and is how the free market is supposed to work.
Actually, no. It does not matter where the power is being used. All of it turns into heat regardless.
Yes, but not all of that heat is helpful to me. The photons leaving my monitor that escape through the glass of my window and go into my neighbors house aren't doing very much for me;)
IANAL, but last I checked, perjury was lying under oath. You don't answer a question, no lie can be possible.
And that's what I'm wondering. Because AWAIK (and IANAL) if you refuse to answer a question during a civil proceeding you can be held in contempt. Can you invoke your right against self-incrimination in a civil proceeding? That was my original question. If you can't then your choice is between contempt or perjury.
In civil cases in the US both sides are essentially required to turn over all relevant evidence to each other
What happens if that evidence may prove that I'm guilty of a crime? I.e: They want my computer to inspect for copyright infringement (civil matter), but it's loaded with kiddie porn * (criminal matter)? If I willingly turn it over to them I might as well walk down to the local police station and confess. Seems to violate the spirit of the 5th amendment, if not the actual text.
Likewise, what happens if they are deposing me and ask a question that would force me to incriminate myself? Do I still have the right to decline to answer even though it's a civil proceeding and not a criminal one? Or is my choice between perjury or self-incrimination?
* Before the PC police jump on this one, I'm not advocating kiddie porn. Just asking the question about self-incrimination and that's the easiest example to make.
Doesn't TCP imply that they need your permission (i.e: completed handshake) to shove something up your anus? This seems more like a UDP flood to me. Without lube.
But it wasn't that heavily skewed against them(somalians), I think.
Well, they had rifles, RPGs and sheer numbers. We had air power, training, communications and technology.
I'm kinda surprised that he took my comment as a pissing contest. I was just making the observation that I wouldn't find a lot to be cheerful about in that movie if I was a Somali. Is there anything in "Tora, Tora, Tora" to be cheerful about if you are an American?
Please continue acting as if the American way of life wasn't negotiable
The last time I checked Americans don't have a monopoly on eating meat. You ignored my comment about China and India and went on a rant about the greenhouse gas life cycle analysis of moving my arm? You also ignored my question of "What do you want to change?" I'll ask it again: What exactly are you purposing? Thus far your posts seem to be a lot of rant and very little practical suggestion.
won't get us much farther if we don't change our point of view.
Change it to what, exactly?
So please understand today that everything we do has an impact
Have I once denied this? All I've advocated is doing everything possible to reduce that impact. Getting rid of it altogether and maintaining the advantages of modern society is impossible. Replacing our fossil fuel fired power plants with nuclear would reduce carbon emissions drastically. Instead of focusing on this goal that might actually be achievable (the French have done it, the Indians and Chinese are trying to do it) you are ranting about the greenhouse footprint of eating meat. Do you really think that's the biggest problem we have? Do you really think that's the easiest to solve?
and that producing electricity without producing a net-gain of CO2 is a mindview!
Would it make you feel better if we transported the uranium on bicycles? Oh, wait, I forgot, farming produces CO2. Again: What exactly are you advocating for or purposing?
Moving your arm produces CO2 (ever heard about Life Cycle Analysis???)
Moving my arm doesn't contribute to global warming unless I obtained that carbon atom from some sequestered source that wasn't part of the environment (i.e: oil or gas that has been buried for a long time). If you are seriously looking at it that way then biomass is a non-starter as well.
So sure, fissioning an atom do not directly imply CO2 release, but building 5m wide concrete walls & bringing uranium from Australia do.
Again, that may be the case today but I would be hopeful that if our electric can be generated without producing a net-gain of CO2 (i.e: nuclear, solar, wind, biomass) then carbon-neutral energy storage schemes like hydrogen, fuel cells or batteries will replace fossil fuels for mobile (trucks, ships, aviation) applications.
Once again, I love technology and I'd love to see it helps us going happily through this century, but IPCC is pretty sure that won't do if we don't change our way of life. And you'd better trust 2000 scientists telling you something, or you'll never trust anyone else!
So what do you want to change? What are you advocating? That we abandon personal transportation, live off rice and give up A/C? I'm sorry but I don't think that's realistic. Even if you could talk hundreds of millions of Europeans and North Americans into doing it, what happens with China and India? Are you going to force them at gunpoint to reduce carbon emissions and stop developing?
I'm not trying to be mean or trollish about this -- just a realist.
Nuclear power really has to stand on it's own merits other than the childish "Jimmy is being bad too" argument we see with distressing frequency in a lot of areas.
I would make the argument that it stands on it's own merits quite well and that most of the people advocating against it have no idea what they are talking about.
It's perfectly feasible to decrease your energy use by 50% or more without seriously affecting your standard of living.
I'm sorry but that's incorrect -- at least in my case. I live in a modest one bedroom apartment. In the last 12 months I used 6,398 KwH of electric (heating, a/c and appliances) and 159.4 therms of natural gas (hot water and cooking). All the lights in my apartment are florescent, save two that I rarely use. I don't leave appliances running when I don't need them and only use the a/c on humid days (otherwise I have a mildew problem). I wash all my clothes with cold water. I hang them outside if the weather allows. Where can I achieve 50% energy savings? Hell, in the spring/fall (with no A/C) I only use about 150kWh/mo -- and most of that is for my fridge. The only area that would result in any savings (and it's beyond my control because I don't own the property) would be more insulation in the apartment -- but that wouldn't be a 50% savings.
Moving onto my car -- I can't afford a hybrid. I drive a subcompact car that gets ~30mpg. I make a point to carpool to work whenever possible (gas prices being the driving factor here) and I try to schedule stuff so it's all on my way to/from work so I don't need to log extra miles. Where can I achieve a 50% savings here? I'd love> to slash my gasoline bill in half.
All that said, I don't have a problem with advocating efficiency. I do have a problem with the people (and I'm not saying you are one of them) that pretend it's the solution the problem. Part of the solution in my eyes would be a crash program to replace all CO2-based power plants with nuclear. It's a technology that we have. It's ready today. It scales. Why aren't we using it? This would be the single easiest thing we could do to reduce our carbon footprint.
Unsustainable, maybe (you need fossil fuels to mine and ship the uranium), but not unsafe.
You might need fossil fuels to mine and ship it today but think about the future. If your source of electric is greenhouse gas free (i.e: nuclear or solar) then energy storage schemes like hydrogen, fuel cells or new battery technology start to look a lot more attractive. Trains can run on electric, large ships can use nuclear power and cars/trucks can use one of the above mentioned storage schemes. The only wild card I see is aviation.... can you power a 747 or A380 type aircraft off hydrogen?
BTW, neither nuclear, nor solar nor wind power are *carbon neutral*.
Explain to me how fissioning an atom results in a net increase in CO2.
You think technology will save us and prevent us from changing our lifestyle?
Nope, (at least if we hear you), because consuming better will give us the impression that we can consume more!
I think this idea that people will willingly accept a reduction their standard of living is pretty naive. We can either hope that science and technology provides an answer or we can accept the fact that the nations of the world will fall upon each other in a new World War over resources. Call me a hopeless optimist but I'm rooting for a technological solution.
Your chinese and indian argument is (sorry!) totally stupid.
There is no space for 4,5,6,7 or 10 billions people on Earth living like we do, so we'd better show developing countries the right way if we don't want to force Mother Nature to tell us how we should behave in a sustainable way.
Why is that argument stupid? Explain to me why you think the current population of Earth couldn't have an American standard of living if that lifestyle was supported by a carbon neutral energy source (be it nuclear, solar, wind or what not)? The big issue for me seems to be the energy source for mobile applications (cars, ships, planes, etc). Assuming that the back-end energy source is nuclear or solar (i.e: carbon neutral) then it seems to me that storage schemes like hydrogen, fuel cells or batteries become more realistic for mobile applications.
Nuclear power won't save us if we keep on abusing meat/hummer/chillers.
You'll get no argument from me on the hummer argument (you know how many of us hippies driving hybrids it takes to make up for that ONE asshole?) but meat and chillers? Do you really see our consumption of meat or use of A/C as a huge problem?
There is no reason to think that we as a race can't come up with a technological solution to our problems that doesn't involve a reduction in our standard of living. Removing carbon based fuels as an energy source would go a long way.
I don't like nuclear power either (it's unsafe, unsustainable and expensive), but in today's world, it's not like we have lot of choices...
Really? Cuz I think anybody that knows about the subject could dispute all three of those statements. It's unsafe? Want to talk about how many people die in coal mining accidents? Hell, that still happens in the Western world. Thousands die in the developing world. Want to talk about global climate change caused by CO2? Nuclear accidents get more press because of the fear of anything "nuclear" but if you look at the complete life cycle of fossil fuels they aren't any better. In fact they are probably much worse.
Define unsustainable? Because the general opinion seems to be that using breeder technology we will have fuel sources for tens of thousands of years.
Expensive? Compared to what? Coal? Gas? How much will climate change wind up costing us?
reduce our consumption drastically
Why should I have to reduce my standard of living when we have technology (nuclear) that won't cause climate change? Everybody talks about reducing consumption but that isn't going to fly. You realize that two or three billion Chinese and Indians are doing their best to get up to a Western standard of living? If humanity doesn't embrace nuclear, what other option is there? More CO2? What kind of world do you want your children to grow up in?
and removing nuclear power from our energy panel is as stupid as arguing about nuclear wastes in a 1000 years when everything that we do today (like planning 26 new coal powerplants in Germany to replace nuclear powerplants!) lead us into *big* troubles in no more than 50 years...
How does someone being ten years old or someone being disabled and on social security
It's interesting that you point out the social security aspect. There's nothing here for RIAA to gain other then bad press (not that they care). Social security is Mom's only source of income and it can't legally be seized to pay a judgment. What are they going to do? Get a judgment against the 10 year old?
In California at least, the threshold for drink driving convictions for minors is about the same as the nominal uncertainty on many testing devices: 0.01% BAC. If I recall correctly, this can be achieved with less than 1 mL of ethanol
The net effect of that is to make it illegal for somebody under 21 to drive to church and take part in communion. Gotta love it...
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It is interesting that these are all uploading examples. It's not bandwidth per se that't the problem, but uploading. Clearly Comcast would rather leave content distribution to the big boys (itself), and has built their asymmetrical network to fulfill that (questionable) vision.
Is the backend of their network really asymmetrical though? The cable segments obviously are, but the backend? I would assume that they have an equal amount of incoming/outgoing bandwidth at the edge.
What's more interesting is that all of these examples are cable providers. Has anybody had a DSL provider pull this? The telcos aren't in the business of content distribution so I'd tend to think they'd care less about somebody uploading last weeks episode of 24.
If you're the only person on that segment using a cable modem, you get it all
Umm, not exactly. The downstream channel in DOCSIS is about 42mbits as I recall. But even if you are the only customer you can't use all of that. Your cable modem itself is typically capped at a set speed. My area Roadrunner capped them at 5mbits. I've heard they go up to 10mbits in areas with FiOS. In any case you'll never exceed this cap even if your segment is totally unused.
As others join in, it gets divided up evenly among all, so your bandwidth goes down as others join in
This can happen if they put too many customers on one segment. Your ping times will also tend to go through the roof.
I have a business account with Verizon DSL, never been more satisfied.
I have a residential Verizon DSL account and I've never had an issue. Back in August I downloaded a 46 gigabyte torrent. Took about 7 days during which I was running about 80kb/s down. I've been seeding it ever since at full speed for a total of about 600 gigs. And I haven't heard one word from them.
Because even small bandwidth caps (like 5GB a month) are impossible to sustain if more than a small percentage of users decide to push their connection to the limit every single month without fail.
You seem pretty sure of that. My city has 21,089 households. Let's assume that they all have broadband and that they all use 5GB a mo. 5GB / 30 = 0.1667GB a day = 2,071 bytes per second (easily attainable on a friggen dial-up). 2KB/sec * 21,000 = 42,000KB/sec = a little over half of an OC-12. Do you really think that kind of connectivity is out of bounds for a company like Verizon, Time Warner or AT&T? That's nothing to them. And that's just an easy example using my own small town.
Higher and higher limits are just going to make it harder and harder to provide the same level of service to everyone
Again, that would be the free market at work. Build out your network to provide the service that your customers want or lose them to your competitor. What's the problem here?
Just imagine a national ISP with a 90GB/month cap and as little as 1000 leeches using up every drop of it, every single month. I don't know how much 90TB of traffic costs an ISP, but it's probably more than the $40K they'd collect from the leeches.
Well, when you start talking about "national" ISPs you are usually talking about the telcos. Seeing as how the telcos own the infrastructure I would doubt that it costs them $40,000 to move 90TB of traffic. In fact that works out to less then half a day on a OC-48. How many OC-48s do you suppose that Verizon or AT&T own?
Now if you want to make the argument that if everybody "leeched" that they'd need to invest money in network upgrades you might be more successful. But I don't see how that justifies the practice of advertising something as unlimited and using fine print to limit it. If they can't provide an unlimited service then they have no business advertising it as such.
Now think about how a company like Verizon is going to act when there's no Net Neutrality. How long you think it's going to take before you are so limited by their TOS that you can ONLY do email and web browsing, and only using their email and approved web sites?
They'll probably sell unlimited access to websites that are 'IN' and charge you $0.015/kb for all other sites. If their brainwashed customer base for voice is any indication ("I don't want to talk to you because you aren't IN and I'm too cheap to pay for enough minutes") they'd probably get away with it too.
We need net neutrality....
I disagree. The term "unlimited", as we've seen, can be open to interpretation
Which is why we need to kill all the lawyers.
People go over cell phone limits all the time, and those limits use a metric (time) that is very easy for everyone to grasp. With an Internet connection, we're talking about data transfer limits, which aren't plainly obvious and which most people wouldn't know how to monitor and would have no clue as to how they can effectively limit their usage
Your worrying about Grandma going over her bandwidth quota? That doesn't seem very likely. I would make the argument that anybody doing enough on the computer that they would go over a large limit (the grandparent said 90GB IIRC) is probably also smart enough to monitor and check that usage. And how hard would it be for the ISP to provide you with a website that you could visit to check your usage? The cellular providers don't seem to have a problem doing this for minutes and SMS. E-mail or SMS reminders when you approach the limit would also be trivial to setup.
Now the ISPs could plainly advertise GB/month limits, but what's going to happen then? An "arms race" of sorts where ISPs compete by ratcheting up the limit
How would that arms race a bad thing? I think that's called competition and is how the free market is supposed to work.
Actually, no. It does not matter where the power is being used. All of it turns into heat regardless.
Yes, but not all of that heat is helpful to me. The photons leaving my monitor that escape through the glass of my window and go into my neighbors house aren't doing very much for me ;)
IANAL, but last I checked, perjury was lying under oath. You don't answer a question, no lie can be possible.
And that's what I'm wondering. Because AWAIK (and IANAL) if you refuse to answer a question during a civil proceeding you can be held in contempt. Can you invoke your right against self-incrimination in a civil proceeding? That was my original question. If you can't then your choice is between contempt or perjury.
In civil cases in the US both sides are essentially required to turn over all relevant evidence to each other
What happens if that evidence may prove that I'm guilty of a crime? I.e: They want my computer to inspect for copyright infringement (civil matter), but it's loaded with kiddie porn * (criminal matter)? If I willingly turn it over to them I might as well walk down to the local police station and confess. Seems to violate the spirit of the 5th amendment, if not the actual text.
Likewise, what happens if they are deposing me and ask a question that would force me to incriminate myself? Do I still have the right to decline to answer even though it's a civil proceeding and not a criminal one? Or is my choice between perjury or self-incrimination?
* Before the PC police jump on this one, I'm not advocating kiddie porn. Just asking the question about self-incrimination and that's the easiest example to make.
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 79 -j REJECT
Doesn't TCP imply that they need your permission (i.e: completed handshake) to shove something up your anus? This seems more like a UDP flood to me. Without lube.
But it wasn't that heavily skewed against them(somalians), I think.
Well, they had rifles, RPGs and sheer numbers. We had air power, training, communications and technology.
I'm kinda surprised that he took my comment as a pissing contest. I was just making the observation that I wouldn't find a lot to be cheerful about in that movie if I was a Somali. Is there anything in "Tora, Tora, Tora" to be cheerful about if you are an American?
Except the Somalians were cheering every time a US soldier died...
18 US KIAs. 1,000 Somalian KIAs. 55 to 1 kill ratio. I wouldn't be cheering if I was them.
Sounds you didn't take time to read those articles. I'll put them once again
Sounds like your a troll that wants to dodge my questions with links.
Please continue acting as if the American way of life wasn't negotiable
The last time I checked Americans don't have a monopoly on eating meat. You ignored my comment about China and India and went on a rant about the greenhouse gas life cycle analysis of moving my arm? You also ignored my question of "What do you want to change?" I'll ask it again: What exactly are you purposing? Thus far your posts seem to be a lot of rant and very little practical suggestion.
won't get us much farther if we don't change our point of view.
Change it to what, exactly?
So please understand today that everything we do has an impact
Have I once denied this? All I've advocated is doing everything possible to reduce that impact. Getting rid of it altogether and maintaining the advantages of modern society is impossible. Replacing our fossil fuel fired power plants with nuclear would reduce carbon emissions drastically. Instead of focusing on this goal that might actually be achievable (the French have done it, the Indians and Chinese are trying to do it) you are ranting about the greenhouse footprint of eating meat. Do you really think that's the biggest problem we have? Do you really think that's the easiest to solve?
and that producing electricity without producing a net-gain of CO2 is a mindview!
Would it make you feel better if we transported the uranium on bicycles? Oh, wait, I forgot, farming produces CO2. Again: What exactly are you advocating for or purposing?
Moving your arm produces CO2 (ever heard about Life Cycle Analysis???)
Moving my arm doesn't contribute to global warming unless I obtained that carbon atom from some sequestered source that wasn't part of the environment (i.e: oil or gas that has been buried for a long time). If you are seriously looking at it that way then biomass is a non-starter as well.
So sure, fissioning an atom do not directly imply CO2 release, but building 5m wide concrete walls & bringing uranium from Australia do.
Again, that may be the case today but I would be hopeful that if our electric can be generated without producing a net-gain of CO2 (i.e: nuclear, solar, wind, biomass) then carbon-neutral energy storage schemes like hydrogen, fuel cells or batteries will replace fossil fuels for mobile (trucks, ships, aviation) applications.
Once again, I love technology and I'd love to see it helps us going happily through this century, but IPCC is pretty sure that won't do if we don't change our way of life. And you'd better trust 2000 scientists telling you something, or you'll never trust anyone else!
So what do you want to change? What are you advocating? That we abandon personal transportation, live off rice and give up A/C? I'm sorry but I don't think that's realistic. Even if you could talk hundreds of millions of Europeans and North Americans into doing it, what happens with China and India? Are you going to force them at gunpoint to reduce carbon emissions and stop developing?
I'm not trying to be mean or trollish about this -- just a realist.
BTW, if 'exported' religeons are an issue, please start with the Vatican.
or Saudi Arabia.....
Nuclear power really has to stand on it's own merits other than the childish "Jimmy is being bad too" argument we see with distressing frequency in a lot of areas.
I would make the argument that it stands on it's own merits quite well and that most of the people advocating against it have no idea what they are talking about.
It's perfectly feasible to decrease your energy use by 50% or more without seriously affecting your standard of living.
I'm sorry but that's incorrect -- at least in my case. I live in a modest one bedroom apartment. In the last 12 months I used 6,398 KwH of electric (heating, a/c and appliances) and 159.4 therms of natural gas (hot water and cooking). All the lights in my apartment are florescent, save two that I rarely use. I don't leave appliances running when I don't need them and only use the a/c on humid days (otherwise I have a mildew problem). I wash all my clothes with cold water. I hang them outside if the weather allows. Where can I achieve 50% energy savings? Hell, in the spring/fall (with no A/C) I only use about 150kWh/mo -- and most of that is for my fridge. The only area that would result in any savings (and it's beyond my control because I don't own the property) would be more insulation in the apartment -- but that wouldn't be a 50% savings.
Moving onto my car -- I can't afford a hybrid. I drive a subcompact car that gets ~30mpg. I make a point to carpool to work whenever possible (gas prices being the driving factor here) and I try to schedule stuff so it's all on my way to/from work so I don't need to log extra miles. Where can I achieve a 50% savings here? I'd love> to slash my gasoline bill in half.
All that said, I don't have a problem with advocating efficiency. I do have a problem with the people (and I'm not saying you are one of them) that pretend it's the solution the problem. Part of the solution in my eyes would be a crash program to replace all CO2-based power plants with nuclear. It's a technology that we have. It's ready today. It scales. Why aren't we using it? This would be the single easiest thing we could do to reduce our carbon footprint.
Unsustainable, maybe (you need fossil fuels to mine and ship the uranium), but not unsafe.
You might need fossil fuels to mine and ship it today but think about the future. If your source of electric is greenhouse gas free (i.e: nuclear or solar) then energy storage schemes like hydrogen, fuel cells or new battery technology start to look a lot more attractive. Trains can run on electric, large ships can use nuclear power and cars/trucks can use one of the above mentioned storage schemes. The only wild card I see is aviation.... can you power a 747 or A380 type aircraft off hydrogen?
BTW, neither nuclear, nor solar nor wind power are *carbon neutral*.
Explain to me how fissioning an atom results in a net increase in CO2.
You think technology will save us and prevent us from changing our lifestyle?
Nope, (at least if we hear you), because consuming better will give us the impression that we can consume more!
I think this idea that people will willingly accept a reduction their standard of living is pretty naive. We can either hope that science and technology provides an answer or we can accept the fact that the nations of the world will fall upon each other in a new World War over resources. Call me a hopeless optimist but I'm rooting for a technological solution.
Your chinese and indian argument is (sorry!) totally stupid.
There is no space for 4,5,6,7 or 10 billions people on Earth living like we do, so we'd better show developing countries the right way if we don't want to force Mother Nature to tell us how we should behave in a sustainable way.
Why is that argument stupid? Explain to me why you think the current population of Earth couldn't have an American standard of living if that lifestyle was supported by a carbon neutral energy source (be it nuclear, solar, wind or what not)? The big issue for me seems to be the energy source for mobile applications (cars, ships, planes, etc). Assuming that the back-end energy source is nuclear or solar (i.e: carbon neutral) then it seems to me that storage schemes like hydrogen, fuel cells or batteries become more realistic for mobile applications.
Nuclear power won't save us if we keep on abusing meat/hummer/chillers.
You'll get no argument from me on the hummer argument (you know how many of us hippies driving hybrids it takes to make up for that ONE asshole?) but meat and chillers? Do you really see our consumption of meat or use of A/C as a huge problem?
There is no reason to think that we as a race can't come up with a technological solution to our problems that doesn't involve a reduction in our standard of living. Removing carbon based fuels as an energy source would go a long way.
I don't like nuclear power either (it's unsafe, unsustainable and expensive), but in today's world, it's not like we have lot of choices...
Really? Cuz I think anybody that knows about the subject could dispute all three of those statements. It's unsafe? Want to talk about how many people die in coal mining accidents? Hell, that still happens in the Western world. Thousands die in the developing world. Want to talk about global climate change caused by CO2? Nuclear accidents get more press because of the fear of anything "nuclear" but if you look at the complete life cycle of fossil fuels they aren't any better. In fact they are probably much worse.
Define unsustainable? Because the general opinion seems to be that using breeder technology we will have fuel sources for tens of thousands of years.
Expensive? Compared to what? Coal? Gas? How much will climate change wind up costing us?
reduce our consumption drastically
Why should I have to reduce my standard of living when we have technology (nuclear) that won't cause climate change? Everybody talks about reducing consumption but that isn't going to fly. You realize that two or three billion Chinese and Indians are doing their best to get up to a Western standard of living? If humanity doesn't embrace nuclear, what other option is there? More CO2? What kind of world do you want your children to grow up in?
and removing nuclear power from our energy panel is as stupid as arguing about nuclear wastes in a 1000 years when everything that we do today (like planning 26 new coal powerplants in Germany to replace nuclear powerplants!) lead us into *big* troubles in no more than 50 years...
Thank you!
Guess the guy who modded it flamebait doesn't agree with you ;)
A woman who installed Linux?
Can I get her phone number???
Please?
How does someone being ten years old or someone being disabled and on social security
It's interesting that you point out the social security aspect. There's nothing here for RIAA to gain other then bad press (not that they care). Social security is Mom's only source of income and it can't legally be seized to pay a judgment. What are they going to do? Get a judgment against the 10 year old?
In California at least, the threshold for drink driving convictions for minors is about the same as the nominal uncertainty on many testing devices: 0.01% BAC. If I recall correctly, this can be achieved with less than 1 mL of ethanol
The net effect of that is to make it illegal for somebody under 21 to drive to church and take part in communion. Gotta love it...