Heard the same story, only it was a ham radio. It's likely apocryphal in any case
Not so much apocryphal, just an old trick when installing new visible radio equipment.
The whole issue is more than just our culture. It's the result of how our brains evolved over the last half a billion years or so, a very deeply ingrained over-sensitive alertness, avoidance of anything associated with "bad" stimuli, promotion of false positive responses, and such; we are not very rational creatures.
The world to which our brains adapted was also much simpler. You hear some noise, then you see a predator attacking. And the individuals becoming more alert (stressed) the next time when some noise happens, left a bit more offspring... even though in vast majority of cases there was no predator.
"Electrosensitives" are tormented by almost constant exposure to a very strong stressor of theirs, as far as their experiences are concerned (starting perhaps with one little association their brains made between a random bad mood and, say, being close to a WiFi AP or overhead power lines; worse, such random bad mood, if regular, might actually have a goo but neglected reason, even something so simple as a bad diet and lack of exercise...unfortunately, eating a lot of junk food, or not straining oneself physically, feels good to our brains at those very moments, but there's no more regulation via natural scarcity of food or a need to be active to survive)
Not the only thing... and I pointed out how 1mbit/s connection handles basic Youtube just fine (why the YT tiers it doesn't really handle are mostly called High Definition?); or BBC videos and occasional streams on their website, which are also free to me. It certainly doesn't deserve "today 1meg isn't nearly enough for basic internet use" (emphasis mine) description; it's a fairly solid baseline giving access to practically everything, particularly among "the done" things (if not at the highest quality)
And it is more than an academic point / semantics to recognize that. If we want to, say, bridge the "digital / broadband divide" as quickly as feasible, it is useful to set initial speed goals which are both "good enough" and not "pie in the sky" in practice (driving up costs, jeopardizing the whole deployment operation). For example, using the spectrum freed by the NMT shutdown to deploy a 450 MHz cdma2k evdo data network (which typically can offer this 1mbit, up to 2 or so) - in addition to other "traditional" 3G ones - is probably bound to provide, much sooner, more value per cost for rural areas (limited until fairly recently to expensive, by the minute, 56k) than pushing mainly fast wired access.
today 1meg isn't nearly enough for basic internet use
1mbit/s is far from "(not) nearly enough for basic internet use" - it's good for virtually any typical single user "pre Youtube" usage, and manages fine at least three lowest YT quality tiers. That's perfectly within "basic" and even outside of it a bit.
"Basic" is, say, a free & limited to 256kbit/s cellular 3G & LTE access that I have around here (a condition of spectrum auction; makes sense considering it's a license to use public spectrum and how web access becomes very desirable when dealing with public administration or education) - everything you need to do because of living in an increasingly web-dependent society, you can do; only some largely superfluous stuff needs Patience.
And there's plenty examples of, more or less, "x is enough for anyone" also in digital technology and particularly with bandwidths. There is very clearly something like "good enough" in the real world.
Witness how many people here defend DVDs as such in a typical fairly offtopic (but upmodded) posts attached to almost any news about Bluray (which IMHO will be more firmly at the spot in question). Radio is like that, for a long time. Likewise CDs or lossy digital audio compression. Speed of cars (unavoidable analogy;p ) and their all around characteristics for 10 to 15 years. CPU power. And so on.
It's not entirely unthinkable that we're nearing this point with bandwidths, too (not with 1mbit of course, but who knows with 1gbit...). At an extreme - once you have personally enough of it to transmit a "video" stream which can saturate human retina (and other senses / input nerves) what good is more?
What does it matter in home server? (and most "average user" stuff) It will be idling virtually all the time anyway. Or, when in a modern browser ("average user" stuff), E-350 will have GPU acceleration. Similar with video, nicely offloaded in both cases. And in some rare game... the E-350 is probably at least as good in overall perf/Watt, and most likely higher performing.
Education has few more options between "rote learning and regurgitation" and "hands-on learning" (to which you are perhaps used in dev, mentioning it first and this being/. ). In any case, we don't really want the latter, unless absolutely necessary, with nuclear technology (we especially don't want "extremely common... amateur hacking")...and when it is necessary, learning some rules beforehand is advisable.
Just like with, say, high explosives - very safe when handed properly, right?
Anyway, that's not really an issue when talking about educating the population at large - surely you don't expect them to have any "hands-on learning" of note with fossil fuel mining or extraction, aerodynamic design (wind turbines), semiconductor design and manufacturing experience, construction engineering (many variants), applied geology (can't have any large construction without it; and even more attention required with water power generation), and so on, ALL OF IT...and those are just few narrow areas of our knowledge (specialisation being kinda required for our modern civilisation), plus any familiarity with them still doesn't automatically bring the ability to see grander picture (for example: from my local experience, it's very typical for people involved in and/or educating about fossil fuel extraction - in many cases, glorified labourers - to totally dismiss AGW, or pretty much any negative effects of their field*... so, throw in climatology, waste management, habitat preservation, agriculture, life-cycle management, city planning & monitoring, public health, water treatment, grid design, efforts to improve efficiencies of various technologies or tools, and so on)
A high school curriculum plus decently dedicated physics (with cooperation of geography, biology and "civil education" of sorts, incl. civil defence) teacher are probably enough. Access to engineering designs or "hands on" isn't particularly required; one doesn't need blueprints or much more than analogies to understand how aircraft work (and most people who fly them, don't know it). If somebody really wants to go deeper (not like it's really required for the need at hand) without pursuing some degree - university libraries are wide open; in practice, also lectures, at least at the physics departments I'm familiar with (where nobody verifies attendees, in typically "too big" lecture halls with plenty of free seats; schedules posted on web pages, first and second year lectures conveniently taking place in the evening, typically); the students lingering at the departments' cafeteria don't require much more encouragement to assist than beer in the nearby bar; heck, even slipping to consultations with the lecturer while you're not a student shouldn't be too hard, as long as you're still in your 20s and its a 1st (maybe also 2nd) year topic; then there's the web.
There might be, here and there, background problems with educational systems and larger anti-science sentiments of various groups, desiring to polarise the society along their ideologies. But that's something entirely different, not limited to nuclear physics; and often stems from a priori rejection of scientific discoveries, not from limited access to them.
Meanwhile...
*dismissing the negatives of their darling is something to which strong nuclear proponents are by no means immune.
The thing with Fukushima is how I suspect that, a short time ago, you would count it and its ilk (not specifically of course, not giving those plants more thought than the rest) as a shining beacon of nuclear energy...like you possibly still tend to do now with other designs, the "modern and dependable" ones (how many others are different engineering failures waiting to happen? Oh, and I think you're aware that backyard experimenters most likely wouldn't reveal them, it's not sexy). Like you propose miniature reactors sc
Well bits (or Bits) are much clearer to everybody else...
Kiruna itself is very decent also for "external" reasons (ESA spaceport, sat tracking station, university, that sort of stuff); which are still secondary to how residents have it decent. But "hook everyone up" doesn't have to mean wired - for example, at my place such rural areas (and there are quite a rural ones - say, with rather vast swaths of primordial forest or swamps) are often served by the wireless spectrum freed some time ago by NMT switch-off, used now by Qualcomm/evdo CDMA variant and dedicated to bridging the "broadband divide".
In addition, people expect to be able to emulate fifth- and sixth-generation consoles nowadays (PS1, N64, PS2, and GameCube/Wii)
5th gen, nowadays? It was quite hot in the last millenium (always fun to use this wording;) ) - those were possibly even the hottest times of 5th gen emulation, as far as popular attention and usage went. And, really, just a very short time after SNES emulation really arrived; it seems it was not strictly about processing power, more about collaboration and disseminations (via the web) of information, emulators (and roms...), new techniques becoming widespread.
Depends on the place, I guess. Both when it comes to such legal status (only in some places?), and "widely adopted" (likewise). Faxes are a thing only 3 decades tops, mostly dead / stillbirth where they didn't disseminate much before the arrival of more computerised forms; it might also explain why such places seem to have faster uptake of online authentication / digital signatures, there's greater need (NVM how it can give a more sensible legal robustness)
Habits of thinking, ways of working, often really die out only with people... (well, or at least retirement of large enough portion of them)
With fax servers at large institutions, and "internet fax" (or simply software on a computer with fax-modem, or faxes which take input from some file on a computer, and output incoming messages likewise, to an image file) available to smaller entities (NVM how easy it is to forge something in an "analogue" way on an ordinary, low-quality, standalone fax) such records seem dubiously reliable, anyway...
So why aren't we doing the very same thing with "current technology" in the Sahara? (kinda more current actually - say, just storing the collected energy in chemical propellants; also powering production line of launchers and its supply chain) Even at an order of magnitude (or two, or three, or four, or five, or six) lesser output of launched mass per km^2, it would be a bargain.
Yet the Sahara, despite being insanely more welcoming for infrastructure than the Moon, is not an industrial powerhouse of the planet but more or less a wasteland...
And that material would still need to be propelled en route and/or landed safely as a rather largish mass; scattered stream of pellets wouldn't be much good for anything except burning up in the atmosphere.
Don't keep you hopes too high, even if we would send humans - out of the twelve people we sent to the Moon, only one was a geologist, during the very last mission; sad.
Plus a sample return mission might just give the answers... (and ExoMars is supposed to cache samples; and, heck, scientific benefits from the Apollo were demonstrably roughly comparable to those from unmanned probes of the time)
That's not entirely unlike Mars 3*, Viking, or Phoenix landing sequences; and they made it (*through the landing). The only major difference being "just" in using the rover itself as the landing gear of sorts, and decoupling the landing rocket from it; to save mass and minimise loads, I guess.
Entirety of the UI doesn't need to be on a tablet. Using the example of parent poster, NLE - I see no particular reason why a tablet plus some nice big TV couldn't work rather fine (basically: more interactive parts of the UI on a tablet, previews and such on a TV, streaming via wireless and/or heavy lifting being done by an evolved set-top-box of sorts - say, some successor to X360, Apple TV, or Google TV)
Advanced in-situ manufacturing, an assumption which makes asteroid capture useful and a practical space elevator feasible, also makes them largely superfluous at best.
And one of the worst places for such infrastructure, anyway. We're already possibly not too far from the Kessler Syndrome, so I can see few problems with introducing at least two large and quite "static" targets for all the projectiles flying around (constantly produced by mining activity and previous impacts). Especially when the orbit is the ultimate asymmetric warfare battleground (take any medium rocket and launch a "satellite" of which by far the most massive part is a gravel container)
So you might as well send it to some asteroids without the immense delta-v required to capture them (close passes, as with the one from TFA, are not a particularly suitable events anyway, with high multi-km/s flyby speeds typically involved), likely over many decades if not centuries (but then, maybe "The Chinese" do think on such timescales...).
As a matter of fact, places like the middle of an ocean or Sahara desert are insanely more friendly to the (early) kinds of infrastructure required, so don't expect much of asteroid-anything as long as we mostly ignore Sahara (and such), as long it is a wasteland and not an industrial powerhouse.
And by the time all of this would be maybe-who-knows feasible, the whole surrounding tech background is likely to be quite different; changing the rules. Heck, 'we' might as well have "magical nanotech" & mind uploading first, which would simply obsolete the dreams of "big & glorious" modes of space travel known from scifi (which often shows limited imagination - to make the work of writers easier & consumption more palatable to audiences / not too dissimilar from earthly experiences) and adored by all the scifi cargo cultists who treat it almost as proven to be viable - while largely in disregard of the absolutely wild realities of existing universe.
Signed: "The European", I guess... (while technically 50+% "The Slav", it's also quite a bit of a regional mix-up, of a "how did your ancestors hooked up anyway, instead of hating and killing each other during the first half of XX century?" kind... that, and unrelated ostracism throughout youth, at the place of 50+% part, didn't help to clarify the matter)
Last I checked, modern educational systems are able to provide more than good enough basic knowledge about nuclear physics, pretty much to anybody (and there's overall no need to go hysterical about the launch protesters, they are a very small group anyway and didn't really ever stop any launch; but pressure of opponents is needed)
Problems with transparency might as well be something deep within "unquestionably pro nuclear" camp of cargo cultists...
Recall how it went when Fukushima unfolded recently: ~"So we have a bit of a situation, X happened, but X+1 (a step worse) didn't"
Day to few later: ~"So we have a bit of a situation, X+1 happened, but certainly not X+2"
Repeat few times. Wishful thinking throughout.
That's not something which builds trust, confidence. Quite the contrary.
Oh, and while at it, they can't resist completely forgetting or almost slandering other viable approaches; which will flourish, many of them make too much sense as part of the grander solution, particularly on small & "distributed" scales. Heck, you're doing it, too. Fukushima and its type was mostly counted among "nothing can go wrong here" not a long time ago. Plus, with how rough and neglected / underfunded local infrastructures can already be, hundreds of small nuclear plants is not something particularly viable. Coal plants are by no means fun, but modern ones don't really spew heavy particulates downwind, the "nasty ash" is mostly stored on-site.
Now, I'm somebody who seriously toys with the idea of moving nearby (moving to) the site of a possible future nuclear power plant in my part of the woods (which would be a first finished one, and I'm the first the despair the waste of previous attempt); living there would most likely have few nice all-around advantages. But the default "everything will be fine; nuclear is the wundersolution overall" doesn't help.
Yet you probably don't mind Bombardiers flying above you; plus it could just as well end up as ~"you(n)cares" in colloquial language (and what was this another suspiciously sounding name... "baang", "booming"?)
As usual, depends which Laplanders... from what little I've heard, Kiruna is decent. Solitary farmers anywhere (or reindeer herders?) barely influencing the stats, anyway. But considering how the Finnish part falls under "everybody must have 1mbit" (with supposedly much more in a few years being a goal, IIRC), or how the region had reasonably bearable mobile coverage 2 years ago - and at least the PL and CZ parts are grossly outdated, for example (click "Play Online - internet mobilny" at the top); and yes, this is one of the stupid carriers adopting "4G = HSPA+" marketing, but their network is good otherwise.
And no, Europe is not ""these INCREDIBLY dense population centers that extend, well.. the whole damned continent, really. The only sparsely inhabited areas of Europe are in the far north, up near the Laplanders"...where do you get that from? (heck, and after implying in parent post it's all about population concentrations)
There are population gaps even in the very heart of the continent. "Real" desolate wilderness wouldn't spoil the stats anyway, they have by definition very little people; and are not very unike crossing a sea (also probably not completely unlike borders; it's not a "single market" but "common market", many things being loosely integrated, a lot of our network layouts and routes are weird - for example, this comments of mine probably will do two hops across the Baltic for no particular reason...)
Two nearest cities comparable to the behemoths that you mention are at least 5 hours away, probably 6 (I don't really ever check by car). In other countries, two different ones (both cities sucking into a fairly small area up to 1/3 of the population of their whole country or major subregion, leaving the rest with very modest population densities; bordering some extensive forests on my side)
Your population distribution is nowhere like sub-Saharan Africa, you're not anywhere near that rural.
(and again, first wave of our telecom infrastructure is more a case of 60s/70s; before that, countries tried to figure out how to stop people from starving and from whole families sharing one room, while experiencing population boom)
Before "people just don't get it" you should realize the density of "big three" Nordic countries is much lower than the US... (land area not being the same kind of factor, what matters in the end is how many people pay for each proportional part of infrastructure). Sweden has 2/3 the population density of the US, Finland 1/2, Norway 2/5.
You should realize how different they are from the rest of Europe (not the least because of separation by a sea...); and developing their infrastructure very much independently, the populations very much paying for it - as one of the most prosperous places in the region, they contribute much more to the European structural funds than they receive
Yes, one look at populationmaps (vs. NY map you provide nearby) is also revealing.
If anything, those two maps might as well suggest lower concentrations, lower emphasis on top-density urbanism (though that is also how the lowest administrative divisions of the maps seem to be different; anyway, the four countries at the table here have fairly similar rates of urbanization). Also not particularly centred and contiguous at large (but remember, with a mere ~half the overall population density), Yours likewise concentrate near water, plus they display much more of the desirable "beads on a string" layout.
Generally, people everywhere concentrate in population centres. Most importantly, those who do are a proportionally dominating group in connectivity stats - if the stats are poor, that's who they mostly reflect; not the few secluded ones.
Surely you don't think Europe lacks rural areas, with farms and cows? (not so much "affluent suburbs"* though...). Also, nearby you say you live in suburbia* of a 7k city and... could walk out your front door right now, walk for maybe 20 minutes, and punch(?!) a cow.
I live in an apartment block virtually in the centre of a 20k city, and would need to walk for maybe 15 minutes before I could do that (not like there's any good reason?)... but here's the thing, I would be already out of the city and on a dirt road after 5 minutes.
All in all, you probably focus on the wrong administrative level; what makes the real difference probably isn't visible on a county (or whatever the local "city+ or ++" terms are) level, isn't about huge / structural differences due to geography. Heck, the US does seem to have a very decent backbone... (and that's where the billions were supposed to go, right?) But something seems to break down at a local level.
Some would point out less-checked greed; well, maybe. Perhaps the major difference (*and one which I hinted at) is the suburban sprawl (and you choose such travesty), at the scales and issues of local interchanges; a layout actually sort of more contiguous and centred (radiating relatively uniformly around it). That's not particularly conductive to many kinds of public infrastructure, "corridors" often work much better, lower the costs, if you don't want to go with full-blown city blocks. Heck, they seem to be typical even in rural areas in my (larger) region - where it's hard to not stumble on houses densely packed, nearly connected, along the road (not the nearest one with cows that I mentioned, just suitable Gmaps shots from other (nearby) minor villages; overall, possibly at least as close as in your "city suburbia"?...but mostly along one filament of course, usually at most with very few short branches along the way; not a grid needed to be covered throughout), sometimes even enough for municipal lights
Humans waste immensely larger sums of money when, say, throwing them at preachers claiming to have the answers - also to the very same dilemma, the origins of the universe -...but who actually sell BS.
What's one little $8.5B+ science project striving to actually provide reliable data, when compared to even yearly waste at the typically most prominent and expensive buildings accompanying human settlements?
there seems to be no reason at all to replace Hubble with an identical instrument
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Access time to the Hubble is very desired, and in very short supply.
(well, obviously not identical one)
Hubble is not strictly a one-of-a-kind deal already, there is presumably some family resemblance to Keyhole spysats. I can see a case for a more or less constant, low-intensity production of Hubble-likes - one to be launched every few years, incorporating latest imaging instruments, on an inexpensive expendable launcher; making scientists happy.
Potentially making also the population at large happy, if only about how the tech and production resources & infrastructure demanded by military are also put to some loftier goals. But I'm not sure the humanity has matured enough for that one.
Or how the story of Babel implies that man is His equal (his concern was that Man would be his equal once, not if, they completed the tower to heaven)
Well it did take the goddamn commies and their "space firsts" to get the ball rolling, right? (even if ~"I didn't see any god up there" is merely allegedly by Gagarin, apocryphal)
Slashdot Mirror
Heard the same story, only it was a ham radio. It's likely apocryphal in any case
Not so much apocryphal, just an old trick when installing new visible radio equipment.
...unfortunately, eating a lot of junk food, or not straining oneself physically, feels good to our brains at those very moments, but there's no more regulation via natural scarcity of food or a need to be active to survive)
The whole issue is more than just our culture. It's the result of how our brains evolved over the last half a billion years or so, a very deeply ingrained over-sensitive alertness, avoidance of anything associated with "bad" stimuli, promotion of false positive responses, and such; we are not very rational creatures.
The world to which our brains adapted was also much simpler. You hear some noise, then you see a predator attacking. And the individuals becoming more alert (stressed) the next time when some noise happens, left a bit more offspring... even though in vast majority of cases there was no predator.
"Electrosensitives" are tormented by almost constant exposure to a very strong stressor of theirs, as far as their experiences are concerned (starting perhaps with one little association their brains made between a random bad mood and, say, being close to a WiFi AP or overhead power lines; worse, such random bad mood, if regular, might actually have a goo but neglected reason, even something so simple as a bad diet and lack of exercise
Not the only thing... and I pointed out how 1mbit/s connection handles basic Youtube just fine (why the YT tiers it doesn't really handle are mostly called High Definition?); or BBC videos and occasional streams on their website, which are also free to me. It certainly doesn't deserve "today 1meg isn't nearly enough for basic internet use" (emphasis mine) description; it's a fairly solid baseline giving access to practically everything, particularly among "the done" things (if not at the highest quality)
And it is more than an academic point / semantics to recognize that. If we want to, say, bridge the "digital / broadband divide" as quickly as feasible, it is useful to set initial speed goals which are both "good enough" and not "pie in the sky" in practice (driving up costs, jeopardizing the whole deployment operation). For example, using the spectrum freed by the NMT shutdown to deploy a 450 MHz cdma2k evdo data network (which typically can offer this 1mbit, up to 2 or so) - in addition to other "traditional" 3G ones - is probably bound to provide, much sooner, more value per cost for rural areas (limited until fairly recently to expensive, by the minute, 56k) than pushing mainly fast wired access.
today 1meg isn't nearly enough for basic internet use
1mbit/s is far from "(not) nearly enough for basic internet use" - it's good for virtually any typical single user "pre Youtube" usage, and manages fine at least three lowest YT quality tiers. That's perfectly within "basic" and even outside of it a bit.
;p ) and their all around characteristics for 10 to 15 years. CPU power. And so on.
"Basic" is, say, a free & limited to 256kbit/s cellular 3G & LTE access that I have around here (a condition of spectrum auction; makes sense considering it's a license to use public spectrum and how web access becomes very desirable when dealing with public administration or education) - everything you need to do because of living in an increasingly web-dependent society, you can do; only some largely superfluous stuff needs Patience.
And there's plenty examples of, more or less, "x is enough for anyone" also in digital technology and particularly with bandwidths. There is very clearly something like "good enough" in the real world.
Witness how many people here defend DVDs as such in a typical fairly offtopic (but upmodded) posts attached to almost any news about Bluray (which IMHO will be more firmly at the spot in question). Radio is like that, for a long time. Likewise CDs or lossy digital audio compression. Speed of cars (unavoidable analogy
It's not entirely unthinkable that we're nearing this point with bandwidths, too (not with 1mbit of course, but who knows with 1gbit...). At an extreme - once you have personally enough of it to transmit a "video" stream which can saturate human retina (and other senses / input nerves) what good is more?
What does it matter in home server? (and most "average user" stuff) It will be idling virtually all the time anyway. Or, when in a modern browser ("average user" stuff), E-350 will have GPU acceleration. Similar with video, nicely offloaded in both cases. And in some rare game... the E-350 is probably at least as good in overall perf/Watt, and most likely higher performing.
Education has few more options between "rote learning and regurgitation" and "hands-on learning" (to which you are perhaps used in dev, mentioning it first and this being /. ). In any case, we don't really want the latter, unless absolutely necessary, with nuclear technology (we especially don't want "extremely common ... amateur hacking") ...and when it is necessary, learning some rules beforehand is advisable.
...and those are just few narrow areas of our knowledge (specialisation being kinda required for our modern civilisation), plus any familiarity with them still doesn't automatically bring the ability to see grander picture (for example: from my local experience, it's very typical for people involved in and/or educating about fossil fuel extraction - in many cases, glorified labourers - to totally dismiss AGW, or pretty much any negative effects of their field*... so, throw in climatology, waste management, habitat preservation, agriculture, life-cycle management, city planning & monitoring, public health, water treatment, grid design, efforts to improve efficiencies of various technologies or tools, and so on)
...like you possibly still tend to do now with other designs, the "modern and dependable" ones (how many others are different engineering failures waiting to happen? Oh, and I think you're aware that backyard experimenters most likely wouldn't reveal them, it's not sexy). Like you propose miniature reactors sc
Just like with, say, high explosives - very safe when handed properly, right?
Anyway, that's not really an issue when talking about educating the population at large - surely you don't expect them to have any "hands-on learning" of note with fossil fuel mining or extraction, aerodynamic design (wind turbines), semiconductor design and manufacturing experience, construction engineering (many variants), applied geology (can't have any large construction without it; and even more attention required with water power generation), and so on, ALL OF IT
A high school curriculum plus decently dedicated physics (with cooperation of geography, biology and "civil education" of sorts, incl. civil defence) teacher are probably enough. Access to engineering designs or "hands on" isn't particularly required; one doesn't need blueprints or much more than analogies to understand how aircraft work (and most people who fly them, don't know it). If somebody really wants to go deeper (not like it's really required for the need at hand) without pursuing some degree - university libraries are wide open; in practice, also lectures, at least at the physics departments I'm familiar with (where nobody verifies attendees, in typically "too big" lecture halls with plenty of free seats; schedules posted on web pages, first and second year lectures conveniently taking place in the evening, typically); the students lingering at the departments' cafeteria don't require much more encouragement to assist than beer in the nearby bar; heck, even slipping to consultations with the lecturer while you're not a student shouldn't be too hard, as long as you're still in your 20s and its a 1st (maybe also 2nd) year topic; then there's the web.
There might be, here and there, background problems with educational systems and larger anti-science sentiments of various groups, desiring to polarise the society along their ideologies. But that's something entirely different, not limited to nuclear physics; and often stems from a priori rejection of scientific discoveries, not from limited access to them.
Meanwhile...
*dismissing the negatives of their darling is something to which strong nuclear proponents are by no means immune.
The thing with Fukushima is how I suspect that, a short time ago, you would count it and its ilk (not specifically of course, not giving those plants more thought than the rest) as a shining beacon of nuclear energy
Well bits (or Bits) are much clearer to everybody else...
Kiruna itself is very decent also for "external" reasons (ESA spaceport, sat tracking station, university, that sort of stuff); which are still secondary to how residents have it decent. But "hook everyone up" doesn't have to mean wired - for example, at my place such rural areas (and there are quite a rural ones - say, with rather vast swaths of primordial forest or swamps) are often served by the wireless spectrum freed some time ago by NMT switch-off, used now by Qualcomm/evdo CDMA variant and dedicated to bridging the "broadband divide".
The cat?
In addition, people expect to be able to emulate fifth- and sixth-generation consoles nowadays (PS1, N64, PS2, and GameCube/Wii)
5th gen, nowadays? It was quite hot in the last millenium (always fun to use this wording ;) ) - those were possibly even the hottest times of 5th gen emulation, as far as popular attention and usage went. And, really, just a very short time after SNES emulation really arrived; it seems it was not strictly about processing power, more about collaboration and disseminations (via the web) of information, emulators (and roms...), new techniques becoming widespread.
Depends on the place, I guess. Both when it comes to such legal status (only in some places?), and "widely adopted" (likewise). Faxes are a thing only 3 decades tops, mostly dead / stillbirth where they didn't disseminate much before the arrival of more computerised forms; it might also explain why such places seem to have faster uptake of online authentication / digital signatures, there's greater need (NVM how it can give a more sensible legal robustness)
Habits of thinking, ways of working, often really die out only with people... (well, or at least retirement of large enough portion of them)
With fax servers at large institutions, and "internet fax" (or simply software on a computer with fax-modem, or faxes which take input from some file on a computer, and output incoming messages likewise, to an image file) available to smaller entities (NVM how easy it is to forge something in an "analogue" way on an ordinary, low-quality, standalone fax) such records seem dubiously reliable, anyway...
So why aren't we doing the very same thing with "current technology" in the Sahara? (kinda more current actually - say, just storing the collected energy in chemical propellants; also powering production line of launchers and its supply chain) Even at an order of magnitude (or two, or three, or four, or five, or six) lesser output of launched mass per km^2, it would be a bargain.
Yet the Sahara, despite being insanely more welcoming for infrastructure than the Moon, is not an industrial powerhouse of the planet but more or less a wasteland...
And that material would still need to be propelled en route and/or landed safely as a rather largish mass; scattered stream of pellets wouldn't be much good for anything except burning up in the atmosphere.
Often complaining about the travel via Concorde, are you?
Oh, wait...
Don't keep you hopes too high, even if we would send humans - out of the twelve people we sent to the Moon, only one was a geologist, during the very last mission; sad.
Plus a sample return mission might just give the answers... (and ExoMars is supposed to cache samples; and, heck, scientific benefits from the Apollo were demonstrably roughly comparable to those from unmanned probes of the time)
That's not entirely unlike Mars 3*, Viking, or Phoenix landing sequences; and they made it (*through the landing). The only major difference being "just" in using the rover itself as the landing gear of sorts, and decoupling the landing rocket from it; to save mass and minimise loads, I guess.
Entirety of the UI doesn't need to be on a tablet. Using the example of parent poster, NLE - I see no particular reason why a tablet plus some nice big TV couldn't work rather fine (basically: more interactive parts of the UI on a tablet, previews and such on a TV, streaming via wireless and/or heavy lifting being done by an evolved set-top-box of sorts - say, some successor to X360, Apple TV, or Google TV)
Advanced in-situ manufacturing, an assumption which makes asteroid capture useful and a practical space elevator feasible, also makes them largely superfluous at best.
And one of the worst places for such infrastructure, anyway. We're already possibly not too far from the Kessler Syndrome, so I can see few problems with introducing at least two large and quite "static" targets for all the projectiles flying around (constantly produced by mining activity and previous impacts). Especially when the orbit is the ultimate asymmetric warfare battleground (take any medium rocket and launch a "satellite" of which by far the most massive part is a gravel container)
So you might as well send it to some asteroids without the immense delta-v required to capture them (close passes, as with the one from TFA, are not a particularly suitable events anyway, with high multi-km/s flyby speeds typically involved), likely over many decades if not centuries (but then, maybe "The Chinese" do think on such timescales...).
As a matter of fact, places like the middle of an ocean or Sahara desert are insanely more friendly to the (early) kinds of infrastructure required, so don't expect much of asteroid-anything as long as we mostly ignore Sahara (and such), as long it is a wasteland and not an industrial powerhouse.
And by the time all of this would be maybe-who-knows feasible, the whole surrounding tech background is likely to be quite different; changing the rules. Heck, 'we' might as well have "magical nanotech" & mind uploading first, which would simply obsolete the dreams of "big & glorious" modes of space travel known from scifi (which often shows limited imagination - to make the work of writers easier & consumption more palatable to audiences / not too dissimilar from earthly experiences) and adored by all the scifi cargo cultists who treat it almost as proven to be viable - while largely in disregard of the absolutely wild realities of existing universe.
Don't you mean "The Norseman"?
Signed: "The European", I guess... (while technically 50+% "The Slav", it's also quite a bit of a regional mix-up, of a "how did your ancestors hooked up anyway, instead of hating and killing each other during the first half of XX century?" kind... that, and unrelated ostracism throughout youth, at the place of 50+% part, didn't help to clarify the matter)
Last I checked, modern educational systems are able to provide more than good enough basic knowledge about nuclear physics, pretty much to anybody (and there's overall no need to go hysterical about the launch protesters, they are a very small group anyway and didn't really ever stop any launch; but pressure of opponents is needed)
Problems with transparency might as well be something deep within "unquestionably pro nuclear" camp of cargo cultists...
Recall how it went when Fukushima unfolded recently: ~"So we have a bit of a situation, X happened, but X+1 (a step worse) didn't"
Day to few later: ~"So we have a bit of a situation, X+1 happened, but certainly not X+2"
Repeat few times. Wishful thinking throughout.
That's not something which builds trust, confidence. Quite the contrary.
Oh, and while at it, they can't resist completely forgetting or almost slandering other viable approaches; which will flourish, many of them make too much sense as part of the grander solution, particularly on small & "distributed" scales. Heck, you're doing it, too. Fukushima and its type was mostly counted among "nothing can go wrong here" not a long time ago. Plus, with how rough and neglected / underfunded local infrastructures can already be, hundreds of small nuclear plants is not something particularly viable. Coal plants are by no means fun, but modern ones don't really spew heavy particulates downwind, the "nasty ash" is mostly stored on-site.
Now, I'm somebody who seriously toys with the idea of moving nearby (moving to) the site of a possible future nuclear power plant in my part of the woods (which would be a first finished one, and I'm the first the despair the waste of previous attempt); living there would most likely have few nice all-around advantages. But the default "everything will be fine; nuclear is the wundersolution overall" doesn't help.
Yet you probably don't mind Bombardiers flying above you; plus it could just as well end up as ~"you(n)cares" in colloquial language (and what was this another suspiciously sounding name... "baang", "booming"?)
Actually, the AC was using MBit+, not MBps...
As usual, depends which Laplanders... from what little I've heard, Kiruna is decent. Solitary farmers anywhere (or reindeer herders?) barely influencing the stats, anyway. But considering how the Finnish part falls under "everybody must have 1mbit" (with supposedly much more in a few years being a goal, IIRC), or how the region had reasonably bearable mobile coverage 2 years ago - and at least the PL and CZ parts are grossly outdated, for example (click "Play Online - internet mobilny" at the top); and yes, this is one of the stupid carriers adopting "4G = HSPA+" marketing, but their network is good otherwise.
Probably a large part of Americans grossly overestimate the scales of their country (second section of the text in lower left corner)
...where do you get that from? (heck, and after implying in parent post it's all about population concentrations)
And no, Europe is not ""these INCREDIBLY dense population centers that extend, well.. the whole damned continent, really. The only sparsely inhabited areas of Europe are in the far north, up near the Laplanders"
There are population gaps even in the very heart of the continent. "Real" desolate wilderness wouldn't spoil the stats anyway, they have by definition very little people; and are not very unike crossing a sea (also probably not completely unlike borders; it's not a "single market" but "common market", many things being loosely integrated, a lot of our network layouts and routes are weird - for example, this comments of mine probably will do two hops across the Baltic for no particular reason...)
Two nearest cities comparable to the behemoths that you mention are at least 5 hours away, probably 6 (I don't really ever check by car). In other countries, two different ones (both cities sucking into a fairly small area up to 1/3 of the population of their whole country or major subregion, leaving the rest with very modest population densities; bordering some extensive forests on my side)
Your population distribution is nowhere like sub-Saharan Africa, you're not anywhere near that rural.
(and again, first wave of our telecom infrastructure is more a case of 60s/70s; before that, countries tried to figure out how to stop people from starving and from whole families sharing one room, while experiencing population boom)
Before "people just don't get it" you should realize the density of "big three" Nordic countries is much lower than the US... (land area not being the same kind of factor, what matters in the end is how many people pay for each proportional part of infrastructure). Sweden has 2/3 the population density of the US, Finland 1/2, Norway 2/5.
...but mostly along one filament of course, usually at most with very few short branches along the way; not a grid needed to be covered throughout), sometimes even enough for municipal lights
You should realize how different they are from the rest of Europe (not the least because of separation by a sea...); and developing their infrastructure very much independently, the populations very much paying for it - as one of the most prosperous places in the region, they contribute much more to the European structural funds than they receive
Yes, one look at population maps (vs. NY map you provide nearby) is also revealing.
If anything, those two maps might as well suggest lower concentrations, lower emphasis on top-density urbanism (though that is also how the lowest administrative divisions of the maps seem to be different; anyway, the four countries at the table here have fairly similar rates of urbanization). Also not particularly centred and contiguous at large (but remember, with a mere ~half the overall population density), Yours likewise concentrate near water, plus they display much more of the desirable "beads on a string" layout.
Generally, people everywhere concentrate in population centres. Most importantly, those who do are a proportionally dominating group in connectivity stats - if the stats are poor, that's who they mostly reflect; not the few secluded ones.
Surely you don't think Europe lacks rural areas, with farms and cows? (not so much "affluent suburbs"* though...). Also, nearby you say you live in suburbia* of a 7k city and... could walk out your front door right now, walk for maybe 20 minutes, and punch(?!) a cow.
I live in an apartment block virtually in the centre of a 20k city, and would need to walk for maybe 15 minutes before I could do that (not like there's any good reason?)... but here's the thing, I would be already out of the city and on a dirt road after 5 minutes.
All in all, you probably focus on the wrong administrative level; what makes the real difference probably isn't visible on a county (or whatever the local "city+ or ++" terms are) level, isn't about huge / structural differences due to geography. Heck, the US does seem to have a very decent backbone... (and that's where the billions were supposed to go, right?) But something seems to break down at a local level.
Some would point out less-checked greed; well, maybe. Perhaps the major difference (*and one which I hinted at) is the suburban sprawl (and you choose such travesty), at the scales and issues of local interchanges; a layout actually sort of more contiguous and centred (radiating relatively uniformly around it). That's not particularly conductive to many kinds of public infrastructure, "corridors" often work much better, lower the costs, if you don't want to go with full-blown city blocks. Heck, they seem to be typical even in rural areas in my (larger) region - where it's hard to not stumble on houses densely packed, nearly connected, along the road (not the nearest one with cows that I mentioned, just suitable Gmaps shots from other (nearby) minor villages; overall, possibly at least as close as in your "city suburbia"?
Humans waste immensely larger sums of money when, say, throwing them at preachers claiming to have the answers - also to the very same dilemma, the origins of the universe - ...but who actually sell BS.
What's one little $8.5B+ science project striving to actually provide reliable data, when compared to even yearly waste at the typically most prominent and expensive buildings accompanying human settlements?
there seems to be no reason at all to replace Hubble with an identical instrument
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Access time to the Hubble is very desired, and in very short supply.
(well, obviously not identical one)
Hubble is not strictly a one-of-a-kind deal already, there is presumably some family resemblance to Keyhole spysats. I can see a case for a more or less constant, low-intensity production of Hubble-likes - one to be launched every few years, incorporating latest imaging instruments, on an inexpensive expendable launcher; making scientists happy.
Potentially making also the population at large happy, if only about how the tech and production resources & infrastructure demanded by military are also put to some loftier goals. But I'm not sure the humanity has matured enough for that one.
Collecting dust in a museum (and it seems there were even two backups; at least the second, by Itek, wasn't wasted - apparently it's used in an Earth-based telescope)
Or how the story of Babel implies that man is His equal (his concern was that Man would be his equal once, not if, they completed the tower to heaven)
Well it did take the goddamn commies and their "space firsts" to get the ball rolling, right? (even if ~"I didn't see any god up there" is merely allegedly by Gagarin, apocryphal)