Humans seem to want to be perceived as being special on both an individual and a collective level
I don't see how Humans would cease to be special on a individual or collective level when we discover life outside of our own solar system.
There is life out there somewhere. We'll never find it because of the distances involved, but I am convinced it's there. I think we beat huge odds to get here, but there are still huge numbers of other civilizations that beat similar odds.
I'd like to think that sooner or later we will find it.
That is NEVER going to happen. Seriously. There are too many groups within linux kernel development to ever get everyone to agree on that kind of thing. The FSF has a long habit of taking copyright from submitters, but that isn't the kind of thing you can add on later.
I didn't say it was going to happen or even that it was possible. I merely said that it raised a couple of interesting points. What happens if the GPL V2 is thrown out? Where are projects like the Linux Kernel then?
Uh huh. Methinks there are some details your haven't mentioned. Just how did your grandmother pay for this fantastically expensive operation? How likely is Cheapass HMO, Inc to send patients to a top surgeon? How about one of the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance?
Seeing as how it was in the 70s and before I was even born I would not care to venture a guess as to how it was handled money wise. I was responding to the GPs comment of you have to be in the top 10% to have access to the best medical care in the United States. Clearly that isn't the case.
And cheapass HMOs only hold people down because they allow themselves to be brow-beaten. I know what my rights are and I won't be intimidated by an insurance company. Furthermore, in the absolute worst case scenario, you still get access to the best health care that money can buy and it drives you into bankruptcy. A friend of mine was driven into Chapter 7 by an emergency Appendectomy. She was unemployed and had no insurance. She still received the best medical care that anybody could ask for.
I'm not advocating Chapter 7 as a solution to the costs of medical care but the image of large numbers of people being turned away for treatment is a myth. And the GPs comment about "a Swiss or German would be horrified" was just plain insulting.
It's pretty cynical to assume that they did that because they thought you switched to VoIP.
I'm not defending them by any means but in my experience most issues like yours are caused by lazy people in the business office or just plain bureaucracy. The biggest issue when dealing with a Baby Bell is dealing with the bureaucracy. Find the right person to talk to and you'll be fine. Find the person that's been there for 35 years, is two months away from retirement and hates her job and your screwed.
Incidentally if they wanted to screw with your VoIP service I don't think dropping it to 1.5mbits would do it. How much bandwidth do you think VoIP needs? If I wanted to screw with VoIP I'd start randomly dropping packets.
We're not talking about where everybody knows your name. We're talking about The Boulevard Dive in your local college town that has constant people underage trying to get it. If they can say "look everyone we swiped in was over 21" then they're covered if the town tries to take their liquor license on such accusations.
And the student has a right to be leery of letting their address get stored in the database of such of a bar. Have you ever seen some of the people that work at those places? Perhaps we should be asking ourselves why the drinking age is 21 in the first place instead of why a bar owner needs to compile a massive address database to "protect" himself.
Pre-pay cell phones? The market has already corrected for classes of people who want privacy or have shitty credit.
Yeah if I want privacy all I have to do is pay $0.25/minute instead of $0.088/minute ($39.99 for 450 minutes) with unlimited mobile to mobile and nights/weekends.
Pre-paid phones are a friggen rip off in the United States. And how does privacy relate to credit? Why do they need my drivers license?
There is a big difference between "has the best" and "is the best". True, the US has the best hospitals, surgeons etc. But only the wealthiest 10% of the population has access to them. For everyone else, all you get is care that would horrify the typical Swiss or German.
Bullshit! I won't argue the merits of who has the better Healthcare system for "John Q. Public" but American car would "horrify" the typical Swiss or German? That's flamebaiting at best or trolling at worst. My old boss was a first generation German immigrant and she wasn't "horrified" by American healthcare.
And only the wealthiest has access to the best? Perhaps it would interest you know that my Grandmother had one of the first artificial heart valves ever made back in the 70s. Her surgery was performed by Denton Cooley one of the foremost Heart surgeons ever and the guy that helped pioneer heart transplants and artificial valves. My Grandmother was as lower middle class as anybody and she had access to him.
We have a lot of problems with our medical system (the cost of insurance comes to mind) but quality isn't one of them. I'm sorry if it "horrifies" you.
Stallman is fighting back. Even if you think he's over the top, a free software fundamentalist who has gone too far in his preaching, you should still listen to him. He's talking a lot of sense, on behalf of you.
I do think he's over the top (GNU/Linux? C'mon....) but reading this transcript has given me more respect for him. His opinions on 'Tivoisation' are quite interesting and probably my opinion and where I stand on the issue.
Ciarán O'Riordan's thoughts about the Linux developers needing to track everybody down and get ready for a license change are also well thought out. Even if they don't go to V3 they still need to be able to change licenses in the event that V2 is ever held to be unenforceable. It'll be a mess but it sounds like it's worth doing anyway.
There are two sides to every story. Bars want to swipe your card so they don't get fined for serving to underage kids. By having that data, they have a leg to stand on if/when the kid gets busted.
I know real bartenders that can tell more about a person (age, if they are going to be a problem, who their friends are, what sports teams they like, blah, blah, blah) just by looking at them when they walk in the door. When you work in that business for a decade or two you start to get a feel for things. None of these bartenders rely on ID scanners.
Of course, legislation is totally not the answer. If you don't want to swipe your license at a bar, go to another one.
I'm not usually a fan of legislative solutions but in this scenario I think it's more or less appropriate. New Hampshire's law is actually more or less in line with libertarianism. The state has a legitimate interest in regulating drivers -- i.e: everybody has to have a drivers licence. The state also has a legitimate interest in seeing that functionality creep doesn't take over and make them mandatory in other areas.
Personally, I'd love it if New York had such a law. Forget clubs, why exactly does Verizon Wireless need to retain a copy of my licence to give me cell phone service? And don't say "take my business elsewhere" because they all do it. So the choice is to go without telecommunications or hand it over.
I'm a fan of telling them I don't have a drivers license but here's my passport.... at least that doesn't have my address on it and they can't scan it (yet). What, you won't take it? Well gosh, it's a Federal id.
It costs too much (in terms of both dollars and energy) to produce, compress, and transport.
That's probably true today when the energy that you use to produce it comes from fossil fuels. Why not just burn them directly to power your car/ship/airplane? But if the energy used to produce hydrogen comes from low cost nuclear fission/renewable/nuclear fusion/insert_favorite_future_energy_source_here then it becomes much more economical. How else do you purpose to provide a portable (carbon neutral) source of energy? You can't run an airplane on fuel cells or batteries.
Additionally, the most efficient method of producing hydrogen is using methane (natural gas), which releases C02 in the process. It'd be more economical to simply run cars straight off the methane.
Not when the long term costs of the added carbon in the atmosphere are taken into account. I love how everybody shoots down nuclear because of the "unknown cost of dealing with the waste". What nobody realizes is that the coal/natural gas/oil fired power plant doesn't have to pay any cost for the carbon they are releasing into the environment.
The big difference is that those greenhouse gases are already in circulation while burning fossil fuels takes carbon that has been locked up for millions of years and adds it back into the carbon cycle.
Decaying vegitation, burning trees, growing trees, none of these things actually change the amount of carbon in the environment, they just move around the carbon that's already there.
Which would be a decent point if I was making a hydro to coal comparison. But I was making a hydro to nuclear comparison. The last time I checked, nuclear doesn't release any carbon into the environment. And while your point about hydro being neutral CO2 is valid, forests do sequester carbon (slowly) over many years. Plants and animals die, some of them rot (carbon release), some of them get sequestered into sediment layers/peat bogs/etc (carbon removal). And what about the other environmental impacts of hydro schemes? What about the fact that most good sites in the West are already in use?
Don't get me wrong. My town has a municipal power company that receives more then 85% of our electric from public works Hydro projects. I release just ~15% of the CO2 that most people do every time I flip on a light. My electric costs about $0.05/kWh on average. I heat my friggen apartment with it due to the expensive cost of natural gas and the fact that my landlord is too cheap to upgrade my gas furnace which gets about 40% energy efficiency. I'm a big fan of hydro. I just don't see how it can be expanded on a large scale (in the West) and you can't deny the negative environmental effects.
Planes: We can have them carry fewer passengers and we can make them out of lighter materials. As a last resort we can just fly slower - which would really save fuel. The problem is it would make it more expensive to fly - like it was 50 - 60 years ago.
Well that might not be a bad thing. One wonders if the current cost of air travel is at all realistic with the way the airlines are losing money left and right.
Ships: There are some plans for using giant kites to replace sails and reduce fuel consumption. Also, we used wind power long before we knew how to make the internal combustion engine. It might not be as convenient or as fast, but we would have them just the same.
Yeah and I overlooked the fact in my post that nuclear power is a proven technology in the marine environment. Obviously weight and size precludes using it for airplanes though. Hence why I wondered if hydrogen is a solution or not. Does it have enough energy density to weight ratio (what will the storage tanks weigh vs. jet fuel tanks?) to work in aerospace?
There might be some increased risk by having giant tanks of liquid hydrogen installed on a plane or a ship but, as someone pointed out before (too lazy to find it), when a hydrogen tank ruptures, the dangerous gas goes away. It doesn't sit in a pool and continue burning like gasoline does.
Given the choice between riding a ruptured hydrogen tank and a ruptured JP-8 tank I'll take hydrogen any day of the week. Even if it does ignite the gas is going to escape a lot faster then JP-8 which will just sit in a pool on the ground and burn for hours and hours. Even if you accept that the Hindenburg disaster was caused by hydrogen (still debated -- many people think it was the fabric they used) look at how fast the fire burned itself out. Would a similar amount of JP-8 have flashed over and burned out in a few minutes? Doubtful.
Unless you really want to use fission for vehicle propulsion.
I mentioned this. The hydrogen economy may or may not provide the answer to mobile traffic. Obtaining hydrogen from sea water using fission as the power source. The other stumbling blocks (storage problems of hydrogen) are outside my area of expertise.
In any case, bio-diesel or hydrogen can power cars. Ships can be powered by nuclear propulsion. Airplanes pose a problem, as I don't know if hydrogen/bio-diesel/etc would scale well (energy density and weight are critical in aerospace).
Just getting rid of the carbon emissions from electrical production would be a huge start wouldn't it?
Scaling up the uranium mines is the main problem in the scenario I am talking about. I would also question the ability to get nuclear approvals, even in a crisis, in 5 years. Coal, at least here, is already being expanded.
The cost of the fuel (and the effort that goes into obtaining it) is a minor cost in the overall scheme of nuclear power. The approvals comes down to a NIMBY problem, to which I have no easy solution. I would also note though that coal power plants, transmission lines, cell towers, airports, wind mills, etc, etc, etc all face the NIMBY problem. Everybody wants electricity but nobody wants a power plant next door. Everybody wants five bars of reception while in the basement of a steel framed building surrounded by a Faraday cage but nobody wants a cell tower next to them. Everybody wants a two minute response time for fire or EMS but nobody wants to listen to the sirens when somebody else calls them. There is no easy solution to NIMBY regardless of what solution you suggest. Hell, I'd wager that a few Homeowners Associations would frown on you covering your roof in solar panels. Heck, they frown on putting a flag in your front yard....
I could care less if we burned coal 100% for 10 years, if at the end of the 10 years, we had Fusion. Given enough energy and resources, mainly energy, we can repair or engineer around damage to the environment.
I question the wisdom of 'engineering' the environment but I'd echo your sentiment on fusion. I find it depressing that we can find the political will to spend hundreds of billions on an ill advised adventure in Iraq but we'd never stomach up the political will to spend the same amount of money on a Manhattan Project style research system to make fusion economically viable.
A solution that only certain nations are allowed to implement, under threat of military action, is no solution.
Perhaps if those nations hadn't declared an intent to wipe a sovereign nation (Israel) off the map the West wouldn't be so concerned with their attempts to obtain breeder technology. Japan uses it quite heavily and given their technology ability could probably start building bombs in less then a year. Yet, I don't hear anybody complaining about them.
The security implications of plutonium breeding make it unsuitable as a solution
Says who? If the United States doesn't do it then do you really think we can stop China or India from doing it? They aren't afraid of nuclear power. They seem to know that the fossil fuel gravy train is going to run out sooner or later. You could say the same thing about doing research with ebola, anthrax, smallpox or HIV, yet the last time I checked there were lots of civilian labs working with them.
And if you imagine fission scaling up to be the primary energy source, even with breeder reactors you still run out of uranium within decades, perhaps a century.
This would seem to disagree with that paper of yours. And even if the Earth's supply of uranium isn't enough, what about the rest of the solar system? What about fusion? If we make fusion economically viable then it would seem likely to displace fission. What would you purpose as a stop-gap until that happens? More coal power plants? Dumping carbon (and radioactivity!) into the atmosphere that will persist for hundreds of years?
Reactor safety is a huge issue (no, pebble bed reators are not as safe as fission fans tell you).
The US Navy has operated reactors for five decades without any accidents. Thousands of reactor-hours of operation. The US civil program has a similarly impressive record. Chernobyl isn't going to happen with a safe design. And what about the thousands of people that die mining coal?
Photovoltatics, renewables, and efficiency improvements exist in practical form now.
So does nuclear fission. And it scales. Name me one renewable technology that could completely replace fossil fuels for electrical production within a decade? We could completely replace them with nuclear technology if we found the political will to do so.
This is all interesting but there is one thing that I generally see ignored in the whole green house gas debate and quite frankly it confuses me. Quite often an alternative is critisized for generating CO2 and then it is compared to another source that produces water vapor which is also a green house gas. Why is CO2 bad and water vapor good?
Water vapor is part of the water cycle. You aren't changing the net balance of water in the environment if you burn hydrogen. Let's assume that the World adopts nuclear power (fission or fusion) as an energy source. Let's further assume hydrogen is used as a mobile energy source. Where did that hydrogen come from? Ocean water via electrolysis. What happens after it's burned? The water vapor enters the environment, eventually condenses into clouds and via the water cycle finds its way back into the oceans.
Contrast that to burning oil, coal or natural gas. Both of these are sequestered sources of carbon, i.e: they are not actively in the environment until being sucked out the ground and burned. Each time you burn them you are adding to the net carbon in the environment. It may take thousands of years for that carbon to be removed from the environment (peat bogs, sediment layers, etc).
My example was hydrogen but it also applies for bio-diesel or ethanol. They are carbon neutral, unless you are digging up oil/coal/natural gas to create them. They came from the environment. No carbon is added to the system. Likewise, with Hydrogen, no water is added to the system. You are just moving it around.
A new coal boiler can be brought online quickly, as the regulatory requirements - security, environmental, and supply - are much lower. Adding onto an existing plant can be done even faster.
And a new nuclear power plant can be built in four or five years. Do you really think our electrical grid is going to collapse in four or five years?
As far as investments for the future go, funding fusion research en masse 20 years ago would seem like a pretty good deal, compared to the little skirmish we have in the middle east now. I'm worried about the mess we're going to be in 10 years from now. Not 25. Not 35. 10.
That goes without saying (research and not war). I'm worried about the environment if we accept coal as a solution (even a stop-gap) and dump even more CO2 into the atmosphere.
The original push for nuclear power was mostly motivated by the defense industry.
The original push for a lot of things came from the defense industry. That doesn't mean they are bad ideas or that we dismiss them. For better or worse it seems that our greatest achievements come out of the desire to kill the other guy before he kills us. Despite nuclear weapons can you honestly say that mankind is worse off for discovering how to split/fuse the atom?
From what I understand, obtaining the fuel for nuclear reactors involves a lot of mining and purifying of uranium ore. Ten years ago this process was causing a lot of low grade radioactive waste to be washing down river into people's drinking water. Since this was occuring mostly in undeveloped countries full of brown skinned people, it didn't register much in the mainstream media. Can this process be done cleanly and harmlessly?
Replace "uranium mining" with "coal mining" and everything you said is still accurate. The difference being that you obviously mine a lot less uranium for the same energy return. If we were willing to use breeder reactors we could also use U-238 instead of U-235. This would also decrease the amount of uranium mined. And the ecological effects of any kind of mining can be mitigated using modern techniques and technology. Bottom line: It's not a deal breaker.
If we were spending as much money on research of alternative energy sources and efficiency technologies as we spend on violence to secure oil sources (or even as much as the energy companies spend on lobbying and public relations to keep the current power structure), we could expect much more.
I'm not disagreeing with you. Heck, even if you are opposed to nuclear power, I'm sure you'd rather see that money spent on researching fusion or safe nuclear waste disposal then in fighting wars over oil.
Buildings in the US are kept a few degrees warmer in the winter than they are in the summer! How absurdly wasteful! A culture shift would produce huge changes.
I'd rather see a technological solution to the problem. Not because I'm advocating a wasteful lifestyle in which you wear sweaters indoors during the summer and shorts during the winter. But because I'd rather see technology solve the problem then people accept a reduction in the standard of living. Solve the energy problem and everybody can be as wasteful as Americans -- with no impact on the environment.
Because the problem of radioactive waste is still unsolved. The radioactive waste will be dangerous for literally thousands of year, we have no means to store it safely for even a fraction of that time. We actually don't even have means to convey the message that there is highly dangerous radioactive waste to people living in 2000 years.
Chemical waste is dangerous forever (no half life on a lot of that stuff) but nobody is shutting down the plastics or fertilizer industries. Reprocessing can take a large part of the existing stockpile of nuclear "waste" and convert it into useful fuel. What about burial in subduction zones? What about launching it into space? What about reprocessing? We know that coal dumps radioactive waste directly into the atmosphere. We know that burning hydrocarbons is messing up things. The only reason nobody is putting any effort into solving the perceived problems of nuclear technology is because the fossil fuel providers don't want anything messing up their gravy train -- and the tree huggers are afraid of anything with the word "nuclear" in it.
And we don't have a way to communicate with people 2,000 years from now? Even if I accept that nuclear waste is that much of a problem, do you know how many day-to-day records survived from the Romans? And I'm not talking about major historical events. I'm talking routine stuff -- deeds, marriages, legal records, etc, etc. If we can find such routine stuff from them (with no computers, no modern filing systems, no modern archival systems) then do you really think it's that hard to fathom that modern records will survive?
Breeder reactors certainly overcome this limitation, but as I understand it are a much newer technology. I'm not saying they won't work, just that I'm not sure how well they will work in the long term.
They aren't a new technology. Using them to create nuclear fuel to generate electricity would be a new use but breeder reactors have been around since the Manhattan Project. Where do you think the plutonium for nuclear weapons comes from?
Bear in mind, nuclear won't fly planes or probably drive trucks. To store that energy will require a whole technology that doesn't really work yet. One ordinary car engine with the pedal to the metal consumes enough power to light up a small village. People don't really understand that yet - the big issue is not future energy (although its an issue) - it is portable energy in the future. I don't know what the answer to this is; hopefully its biodiesel. Honestly, I don't think its nuclear, but I'd love to be wrong.
I don't see it as nuclear either (though I'd love a Mr. Fusion!). I'm not too sure about bio diesel either. Will it scale? How much land is required? I place more hope in hydrogen production using nuclear power as the energy source. My only question is whether or not hydrogen scales well enough to power airplanes or ships. Trains can be run off the grid -- but nobody seems to talk about ships or airplanes. Can you picture a world without container ships? Without air travel?
At the present use rate, there are 50 years left of low cost known uranium reserves [24]. Given that the cost of fuel is a minor cost factor for fission power, more expensive, lower grade, sources of uranium could be used in the future. For example: extraction from seawater [25] or granite. Another alternative would be to use thorium as fission fuel. Thorium is three times more abundant in the Earth crust than uranium[26], and much more of the thorium can be used (or, more precisely, converted into Uranium-233 and then used).
Current light water reactors burn the nuclear fuel poorly, leading to energy waste. Nuclear reprocessing [27] or burning the fuel better using different reactor designs would reduce the amount of waste material generated and allow better use the available resources.
As opposed to current light water reactors which use Uranium-235 (0.7% of all natural uranium), fast breeder reactors convert the more abundant Uranium-238 (99.3% of all natural uranium) into plutonium for fuel. It has been estimated that there is anywhere from 10,000 to five billion years worth of Uranium-238 for use in these power plants [28].
So I suppose 10,000 years isn't "unlimited" but if humanity can't solve the fusion problem in 10,000 years then I don't have much hope for us.
Barring serious economic recession (always a possibility), nuclear isn't really an option anymore. It takes awhile to get the plants online, and there would have to be a very large number of them built in a very short period of time. As an engineer, that'd be great news.
And it doesn't take awhile to build new coal power plants? Tell me, what's the better investment for the future?
Well I was obviously being a wiseass but they still wouldn't have counted even locally -- at least in my state. There's no point to counting votes for President for somebody without electors. In fact, on my state ballot it doesn't say "John F. Kerry/John Edwards", it says "Electors for John F. Kerry for President and John Edwards for Vice President".
Some states go further and require that all write-in candidates declare their candidacy and file with the Board of Elections. It could be a race for Governor or dogcatcher. Otherwise you might as well vote for Donald Duck.
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Humans seem to want to be perceived as being special on both an individual and a collective level
I don't see how Humans would cease to be special on a individual or collective level when we discover life outside of our own solar system.
There is life out there somewhere. We'll never find it because of the distances involved, but I am convinced it's there. I think we beat huge odds to get here, but there are still huge numbers of other civilizations that beat similar odds.
I'd like to think that sooner or later we will find it.
That is NEVER going to happen. Seriously. There are too many groups within linux kernel development to ever get everyone to agree on that kind of thing. The FSF has a long habit of taking copyright from submitters, but that isn't the kind of thing you can add on later.
I didn't say it was going to happen or even that it was possible. I merely said that it raised a couple of interesting points. What happens if the GPL V2 is thrown out? Where are projects like the Linux Kernel then?
Uh huh. Methinks there are some details your haven't mentioned. Just how did your grandmother pay for this fantastically expensive operation? How likely is Cheapass HMO, Inc to send patients to a top surgeon? How about one of the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance?
Seeing as how it was in the 70s and before I was even born I would not care to venture a guess as to how it was handled money wise. I was responding to the GPs comment of you have to be in the top 10% to have access to the best medical care in the United States. Clearly that isn't the case.
And cheapass HMOs only hold people down because they allow themselves to be brow-beaten. I know what my rights are and I won't be intimidated by an insurance company. Furthermore, in the absolute worst case scenario, you still get access to the best health care that money can buy and it drives you into bankruptcy. A friend of mine was driven into Chapter 7 by an emergency Appendectomy. She was unemployed and had no insurance. She still received the best medical care that anybody could ask for.
I'm not advocating Chapter 7 as a solution to the costs of medical care but the image of large numbers of people being turned away for treatment is a myth. And the GPs comment about "a Swiss or German would be horrified" was just plain insulting.
It's pretty cynical to assume that they did that because they thought you switched to VoIP.
I'm not defending them by any means but in my experience most issues like yours are caused by lazy people in the business office or just plain bureaucracy. The biggest issue when dealing with a Baby Bell is dealing with the bureaucracy. Find the right person to talk to and you'll be fine. Find the person that's been there for 35 years, is two months away from retirement and hates her job and your screwed.
Incidentally if they wanted to screw with your VoIP service I don't think dropping it to 1.5mbits would do it. How much bandwidth do you think VoIP needs? If I wanted to screw with VoIP I'd start randomly dropping packets.
We're not talking about where everybody knows your name. We're talking about The Boulevard Dive in your local college town that has constant people underage trying to get it. If they can say "look everyone we swiped in was over 21" then they're covered if the town tries to take their liquor license on such accusations.
And the student has a right to be leery of letting their address get stored in the database of such of a bar. Have you ever seen some of the people that work at those places? Perhaps we should be asking ourselves why the drinking age is 21 in the first place instead of why a bar owner needs to compile a massive address database to "protect" himself.
Oh and you can't fake the barcode/mag stripe?
Pre-pay cell phones? The market has already corrected for classes of people who want privacy or have shitty credit.
Yeah if I want privacy all I have to do is pay $0.25/minute instead of $0.088/minute ($39.99 for 450 minutes) with unlimited mobile to mobile and nights/weekends.
Pre-paid phones are a friggen rip off in the United States. And how does privacy relate to credit? Why do they need my drivers license?
There is a big difference between "has the best" and "is the best". True, the US has the best hospitals, surgeons etc. But only the wealthiest 10% of the population has access to them. For everyone else, all you get is care that would horrify the typical Swiss or German.
Bullshit! I won't argue the merits of who has the better Healthcare system for "John Q. Public" but American car would "horrify" the typical Swiss or German? That's flamebaiting at best or trolling at worst. My old boss was a first generation German immigrant and she wasn't "horrified" by American healthcare.
And only the wealthiest has access to the best? Perhaps it would interest you know that my Grandmother had one of the first artificial heart valves ever made back in the 70s. Her surgery was performed by Denton Cooley one of the foremost Heart surgeons ever and the guy that helped pioneer heart transplants and artificial valves. My Grandmother was as lower middle class as anybody and she had access to him.
We have a lot of problems with our medical system (the cost of insurance comes to mind) but quality isn't one of them. I'm sorry if it "horrifies" you.
Stallman is fighting back. Even if you think he's over the top, a free software fundamentalist who has gone too far in his preaching, you should still listen to him. He's talking a lot of sense, on behalf of you.
I do think he's over the top (GNU/Linux? C'mon....) but reading this transcript has given me more respect for him. His opinions on 'Tivoisation' are quite interesting and probably my opinion and where I stand on the issue.
Ciarán O'Riordan's thoughts about the Linux developers needing to track everybody down and get ready for a license change are also well thought out. Even if they don't go to V3 they still need to be able to change licenses in the event that V2 is ever held to be unenforceable. It'll be a mess but it sounds like it's worth doing anyway.
There are two sides to every story. Bars want to swipe your card so they don't get fined for serving to underage kids. By having that data, they have a leg to stand on if/when the kid gets busted.
I know real bartenders that can tell more about a person (age, if they are going to be a problem, who their friends are, what sports teams they like, blah, blah, blah) just by looking at them when they walk in the door. When you work in that business for a decade or two you start to get a feel for things. None of these bartenders rely on ID scanners.
Of course, legislation is totally not the answer. If you don't want to swipe your license at a bar, go to another one.
I'm not usually a fan of legislative solutions but in this scenario I think it's more or less appropriate. New Hampshire's law is actually more or less in line with libertarianism. The state has a legitimate interest in regulating drivers -- i.e: everybody has to have a drivers licence. The state also has a legitimate interest in seeing that functionality creep doesn't take over and make them mandatory in other areas.
Personally, I'd love it if New York had such a law. Forget clubs, why exactly does Verizon Wireless need to retain a copy of my licence to give me cell phone service? And don't say "take my business elsewhere" because they all do it. So the choice is to go without telecommunications or hand it over.
I'm a fan of telling them I don't have a drivers license but here's my passport.... at least that doesn't have my address on it and they can't scan it (yet). What, you won't take it? Well gosh, it's a Federal id.
It costs too much (in terms of both dollars and energy) to produce, compress, and transport.
That's probably true today when the energy that you use to produce it comes from fossil fuels. Why not just burn them directly to power your car/ship/airplane? But if the energy used to produce hydrogen comes from low cost nuclear fission/renewable/nuclear fusion/insert_favorite_future_energy_source_here then it becomes much more economical. How else do you purpose to provide a portable (carbon neutral) source of energy? You can't run an airplane on fuel cells or batteries.
Additionally, the most efficient method of producing hydrogen is using methane (natural gas), which releases C02 in the process. It'd be more economical to simply run cars straight off the methane.
Not when the long term costs of the added carbon in the atmosphere are taken into account. I love how everybody shoots down nuclear because of the "unknown cost of dealing with the waste". What nobody realizes is that the coal/natural gas/oil fired power plant doesn't have to pay any cost for the carbon they are releasing into the environment.
The big difference is that those greenhouse gases are already in circulation while burning fossil fuels takes carbon that has been locked up for millions of years and adds it back into the carbon cycle.
Decaying vegitation, burning trees, growing trees, none of these things actually change the amount of carbon in the environment, they just move around the carbon that's already there.
Which would be a decent point if I was making a hydro to coal comparison. But I was making a hydro to nuclear comparison. The last time I checked, nuclear doesn't release any carbon into the environment. And while your point about hydro being neutral CO2 is valid, forests do sequester carbon (slowly) over many years. Plants and animals die, some of them rot (carbon release), some of them get sequestered into sediment layers/peat bogs/etc (carbon removal). And what about the other environmental impacts of hydro schemes? What about the fact that most good sites in the West are already in use?
Don't get me wrong. My town has a municipal power company that receives more then 85% of our electric from public works Hydro projects. I release just ~15% of the CO2 that most people do every time I flip on a light. My electric costs about $0.05/kWh on average. I heat my friggen apartment with it due to the expensive cost of natural gas and the fact that my landlord is too cheap to upgrade my gas furnace which gets about 40% energy efficiency. I'm a big fan of hydro. I just don't see how it can be expanded on a large scale (in the West) and you can't deny the negative environmental effects.
Planes: We can have them carry fewer passengers and we can make them out of lighter materials. As a last resort we can just fly slower - which would really save fuel. The problem is it would make it more expensive to fly - like it was 50 - 60 years ago.
Well that might not be a bad thing. One wonders if the current cost of air travel is at all realistic with the way the airlines are losing money left and right.
Ships: There are some plans for using giant kites to replace sails and reduce fuel consumption. Also, we used wind power long before we knew how to make the internal combustion engine. It might not be as convenient or as fast, but we would have them just the same.
Yeah and I overlooked the fact in my post that nuclear power is a proven technology in the marine environment. Obviously weight and size precludes using it for airplanes though. Hence why I wondered if hydrogen is a solution or not. Does it have enough energy density to weight ratio (what will the storage tanks weigh vs. jet fuel tanks?) to work in aerospace?
There might be some increased risk by having giant tanks of liquid hydrogen installed on a plane or a ship but, as someone pointed out before (too lazy to find it), when a hydrogen tank ruptures, the dangerous gas goes away. It doesn't sit in a pool and continue burning like gasoline does.
Given the choice between riding a ruptured hydrogen tank and a ruptured JP-8 tank I'll take hydrogen any day of the week. Even if it does ignite the gas is going to escape a lot faster then JP-8 which will just sit in a pool on the ground and burn for hours and hours. Even if you accept that the Hindenburg disaster was caused by hydrogen (still debated -- many people think it was the fabric they used) look at how fast the fire burned itself out. Would a similar amount of JP-8 have flashed over and burned out in a few minutes? Doubtful.
Unless you really want to use fission for vehicle propulsion.
I mentioned this. The hydrogen economy may or may not provide the answer to mobile traffic. Obtaining hydrogen from sea water using fission as the power source. The other stumbling blocks (storage problems of hydrogen) are outside my area of expertise.
In any case, bio-diesel or hydrogen can power cars. Ships can be powered by nuclear propulsion. Airplanes pose a problem, as I don't know if hydrogen/bio-diesel/etc would scale well (energy density and weight are critical in aerospace).
Just getting rid of the carbon emissions from electrical production would be a huge start wouldn't it?
Scaling up the uranium mines is the main problem in the scenario I am talking about. I would also question the ability to get nuclear approvals, even in a crisis, in 5 years. Coal, at least here, is already being expanded.
The cost of the fuel (and the effort that goes into obtaining it) is a minor cost in the overall scheme of nuclear power. The approvals comes down to a NIMBY problem, to which I have no easy solution. I would also note though that coal power plants, transmission lines, cell towers, airports, wind mills, etc, etc, etc all face the NIMBY problem. Everybody wants electricity but nobody wants a power plant next door. Everybody wants five bars of reception while in the basement of a steel framed building surrounded by a Faraday cage but nobody wants a cell tower next to them. Everybody wants a two minute response time for fire or EMS but nobody wants to listen to the sirens when somebody else calls them. There is no easy solution to NIMBY regardless of what solution you suggest. Hell, I'd wager that a few Homeowners Associations would frown on you covering your roof in solar panels. Heck, they frown on putting a flag in your front yard....
I could care less if we burned coal 100% for 10 years, if at the end of the 10 years, we had Fusion. Given enough energy and resources, mainly energy, we can repair or engineer around damage to the environment.
I question the wisdom of 'engineering' the environment but I'd echo your sentiment on fusion. I find it depressing that we can find the political will to spend hundreds of billions on an ill advised adventure in Iraq but we'd never stomach up the political will to spend the same amount of money on a Manhattan Project style research system to make fusion economically viable.
A solution that only certain nations are allowed to implement, under threat of military action, is no solution.
Perhaps if those nations hadn't declared an intent to wipe a sovereign nation (Israel) off the map the West wouldn't be so concerned with their attempts to obtain breeder technology. Japan uses it quite heavily and given their technology ability could probably start building bombs in less then a year. Yet, I don't hear anybody complaining about them.
The security implications of plutonium breeding make it unsuitable as a solution
Says who? If the United States doesn't do it then do you really think we can stop China or India from doing it? They aren't afraid of nuclear power. They seem to know that the fossil fuel gravy train is going to run out sooner or later. You could say the same thing about doing research with ebola, anthrax, smallpox or HIV, yet the last time I checked there were lots of civilian labs working with them.
And if you imagine fission scaling up to be the primary energy source, even with breeder reactors you still run out of uranium within decades, perhaps a century.
This would seem to disagree with that paper of yours. And even if the Earth's supply of uranium isn't enough, what about the rest of the solar system? What about fusion? If we make fusion economically viable then it would seem likely to displace fission. What would you purpose as a stop-gap until that happens? More coal power plants? Dumping carbon (and radioactivity!) into the atmosphere that will persist for hundreds of years?
Reactor safety is a huge issue (no, pebble bed reators are not as safe as fission fans tell you).
The US Navy has operated reactors for five decades without any accidents. Thousands of reactor-hours of operation. The US civil program has a similarly impressive record. Chernobyl isn't going to happen with a safe design. And what about the thousands of people that die mining coal?
Photovoltatics, renewables, and efficiency improvements exist in practical form now.
So does nuclear fission. And it scales. Name me one renewable technology that could completely replace fossil fuels for electrical production within a decade? We could completely replace them with nuclear technology if we found the political will to do so.
Current natural reserves of uranium will last for about another 60 years. Just like coal, gas and oil.
See this post.
This is all interesting but there is one thing that I generally see ignored in the whole green house gas debate and quite frankly it confuses me. Quite often an alternative is critisized for generating CO2 and then it is compared to another source that produces water vapor which is also a green house gas. Why is CO2 bad and water vapor good?
Water vapor is part of the water cycle. You aren't changing the net balance of water in the environment if you burn hydrogen. Let's assume that the World adopts nuclear power (fission or fusion) as an energy source. Let's further assume hydrogen is used as a mobile energy source. Where did that hydrogen come from? Ocean water via electrolysis. What happens after it's burned? The water vapor enters the environment, eventually condenses into clouds and via the water cycle finds its way back into the oceans.
Contrast that to burning oil, coal or natural gas. Both of these are sequestered sources of carbon, i.e: they are not actively in the environment until being sucked out the ground and burned. Each time you burn them you are adding to the net carbon in the environment. It may take thousands of years for that carbon to be removed from the environment (peat bogs, sediment layers, etc).
My example was hydrogen but it also applies for bio-diesel or ethanol. They are carbon neutral, unless you are digging up oil/coal/natural gas to create them. They came from the environment. No carbon is added to the system. Likewise, with Hydrogen, no water is added to the system. You are just moving it around.
A new coal boiler can be brought online quickly, as the regulatory requirements - security, environmental, and supply - are much lower. Adding onto an existing plant can be done even faster.
And a new nuclear power plant can be built in four or five years. Do you really think our electrical grid is going to collapse in four or five years?
As far as investments for the future go, funding fusion research en masse 20 years ago would seem like a pretty good deal, compared to the little skirmish we have in the middle east now. I'm worried about the mess we're going to be in 10 years from now. Not 25. Not 35. 10.
That goes without saying (research and not war). I'm worried about the environment if we accept coal as a solution (even a stop-gap) and dump even more CO2 into the atmosphere.
The original push for nuclear power was mostly motivated by the defense industry.
The original push for a lot of things came from the defense industry. That doesn't mean they are bad ideas or that we dismiss them. For better or worse it seems that our greatest achievements come out of the desire to kill the other guy before he kills us. Despite nuclear weapons can you honestly say that mankind is worse off for discovering how to split/fuse the atom?
From what I understand, obtaining the fuel for nuclear reactors involves a lot of mining and purifying of uranium ore. Ten years ago this process was causing a lot of low grade radioactive waste to be washing down river into people's drinking water. Since this was occuring mostly in undeveloped countries full of brown skinned people, it didn't register much in the mainstream media. Can this process be done cleanly and harmlessly?
Replace "uranium mining" with "coal mining" and everything you said is still accurate. The difference being that you obviously mine a lot less uranium for the same energy return. If we were willing to use breeder reactors we could also use U-238 instead of U-235. This would also decrease the amount of uranium mined. And the ecological effects of any kind of mining can be mitigated using modern techniques and technology. Bottom line: It's not a deal breaker.
If we were spending as much money on research of alternative energy sources and efficiency technologies as we spend on violence to secure oil sources (or even as much as the energy companies spend on lobbying and public relations to keep the current power structure), we could expect much more.
I'm not disagreeing with you. Heck, even if you are opposed to nuclear power, I'm sure you'd rather see that money spent on researching fusion or safe nuclear waste disposal then in fighting wars over oil.
Buildings in the US are kept a few degrees warmer in the winter than they are in the summer! How absurdly wasteful! A culture shift would produce huge changes.
I'd rather see a technological solution to the problem. Not because I'm advocating a wasteful lifestyle in which you wear sweaters indoors during the summer and shorts during the winter. But because I'd rather see technology solve the problem then people accept a reduction in the standard of living. Solve the energy problem and everybody can be as wasteful as Americans -- with no impact on the environment.
Because the problem of radioactive waste is still unsolved. The radioactive waste will be dangerous for literally thousands of year, we have no means to store it safely for even a fraction of that time. We actually don't even have means to convey the message that there is highly dangerous radioactive waste to people living in 2000 years.
Chemical waste is dangerous forever (no half life on a lot of that stuff) but nobody is shutting down the plastics or fertilizer industries. Reprocessing can take a large part of the existing stockpile of nuclear "waste" and convert it into useful fuel. What about burial in subduction zones? What about launching it into space? What about reprocessing? We know that coal dumps radioactive waste directly into the atmosphere. We know that burning hydrocarbons is messing up things. The only reason nobody is putting any effort into solving the perceived problems of nuclear technology is because the fossil fuel providers don't want anything messing up their gravy train -- and the tree huggers are afraid of anything with the word "nuclear" in it.
And we don't have a way to communicate with people 2,000 years from now? Even if I accept that nuclear waste is that much of a problem, do you know how many day-to-day records survived from the Romans? And I'm not talking about major historical events. I'm talking routine stuff -- deeds, marriages, legal records, etc, etc. If we can find such routine stuff from them (with no computers, no modern filing systems, no modern archival systems) then do you really think it's that hard to fathom that modern records will survive?
Breeder reactors certainly overcome this limitation, but as I understand it are a much newer technology. I'm not saying they won't work, just that I'm not sure how well they will work in the long term.
They aren't a new technology. Using them to create nuclear fuel to generate electricity would be a new use but breeder reactors have been around since the Manhattan Project. Where do you think the plutonium for nuclear weapons comes from?
Bear in mind, nuclear won't fly planes or probably drive trucks. To store that energy will require a whole technology that doesn't really work yet. One ordinary car engine with the pedal to the metal consumes enough power to light up a small village. People don't really understand that yet - the big issue is not future energy (although its an issue) - it is portable energy in the future. I don't know what the answer to this is; hopefully its biodiesel. Honestly, I don't think its nuclear, but I'd love to be wrong.
I don't see it as nuclear either (though I'd love a Mr. Fusion!). I'm not too sure about bio diesel either. Will it scale? How much land is required? I place more hope in hydrogen production using nuclear power as the energy source. My only question is whether or not hydrogen scales well enough to power airplanes or ships. Trains can be run off the grid -- but nobody seems to talk about ships or airplanes. Can you picture a world without container ships? Without air travel?
So who told you nuclear fuel supply is unlimited?
Future energy development - Nuclear Power.
A few quotes:
So I suppose 10,000 years isn't "unlimited" but if humanity can't solve the fusion problem in 10,000 years then I don't have much hope for us.
Barring serious economic recession (always a possibility), nuclear isn't really an option anymore. It takes awhile to get the plants online, and there would have to be a very large number of them built in a very short period of time. As an engineer, that'd be great news.
And it doesn't take awhile to build new coal power plants? Tell me, what's the better investment for the future?
Well I was obviously being a wiseass but they still wouldn't have counted even locally -- at least in my state. There's no point to counting votes for President for somebody without electors. In fact, on my state ballot it doesn't say "John F. Kerry/John Edwards", it says "Electors for John F. Kerry for President and John Edwards for Vice President".
Some states go further and require that all write-in candidates declare their candidacy and file with the Board of Elections. It could be a race for Governor or dogcatcher. Otherwise you might as well vote for Donald Duck.