For building a dirty bomb? Any terrorist who tried to get nuclear materials for a dirty bomb from a nuclear power plant would have to be insane. They could get suitable materials from hospitals and from chemical supply companies using just a fraction of the effort.
It depends on how dirty you want your bomb to be. You can get enough materials from hospitals and chemical supply companies to scare people (perhaps even "terrorize" them), but if you want to really do wide-spread damage, I think you're going to need larger quantities. I'm no expert on this, so I could easily be wrong. It's not comforting that such material is already missing (or at least unaccounted for) from many Russian nuclear plants.
What are you worried about, that the US government might start reprocessing its nuclear waste and build some nukes from it?
Not really. If they want to make nukes, they'll make nukes. I think a concern is with other countries that don't make nukes and can't easily make nukes without the IAEA catching on. If nuclear reprocessing becomes commonplace, then I think it'd be easier to put one over on the IAEA. Again, I'm no expert, so I could be completely wrong. Mainly, I'm playing devil's advocate here, because I do think that we should be reprocessing our nuclear waste.
If you meant a very small minority then you should have said so. Try reading your original post again, and see how it comes across. The point it sounded like you're trying to make was this was the norm. Let's start with the first word in your response to my statement: "No". That suggests that the idea of no net CO2 was not the reason "ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists". Take a moment and re-read those two sentences: what I wrote, and your first response. Sure, you said a "group of environmentalists", but by starting that sentence with "no", you make it sound like that group is representative of the whole. If you had begun your sentence with, "Yes, but" instead, it would have conveyed the message that you're now implying that you meant to convey.
Except that some enviro-nuts are actually motivated to destroy oil companies. They're watermellon militants and they don't give a crap about the environmental issue.
Possibly, where "some" equals a tiny, tiny minority. Using the phrase "enviro-nuts" also seems to give something away that you might not want to reveal.
Your first point is exactly the response I was going to make, but luckily I found that you had already made it. The only thing I have to add to that point is a link.
As for your second point, in a perfect world I would agree. Unfortunately, reprocessing that spent fuel also makes it more usable for nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, etc. I'm not against reprocessing, but honesty requires one to acknowledge the downsides to reprocessing as well.
Your last point almost went without saying. Almost, except for the fact that it hadn't seemed to occur to him.
I hate to be one of those that correct spelling, so I'm not going to correct yours, but please for the sake of our sanity, use the latest Firefox with spell checking! You're killing me here. Oh, and, speaking of which, understand the difference between "your" and "you're". You make that particular mistake a lot. Perhaps you can just stick to using "your" when you mean "that thing belonging to you" and "you are" when you mean "you are". You might think that it doesn't hurt the readability of your posts, but it does. It sometimes requires multiple parsings to tease out what you're saying. Using proper spelling and grammar would make that easier. It also hurts your credibility. Until you mentioned that you have a herb garden, I would have guessed that you hadn't yet reached 9th grade. I'm not saying that in order to demean you (and I hope you don't take offense), but I think you need to realize how it comes across.
We all make mistakes, but the patterns inherent in yours suggest that you don't know better. It will help you communicate your point more effectively if you are able to improve your writing skills. This is seriously intended as friendly advice, and I hope you take it as such.
And perhaps I should've RTFA. I was just speaking on general principles with the fertilizer. My "(probably)" qualifier was intended to indicate that fertilizers aren't absolutely necessary, and with this new technology I suppose they won't even be the norm. As you point out, there might be other costs that offset this advantage, but it sounds like it's better than regular ethanol plants, which in turn are better than burning fossil fuels.
It's one thing to think the environmentalists are wrong, but to attribute ulterior, nefarious motives to their actions is borderline insane. Please re-read what you posted, and if you still think it's rational, see a professional.
The same thing goes to people who think that Bush is *trying* to destroy America (or the rest of the World), to people who think ExxonMobil is *trying* to destroy the environment, etc. They may be *doing* these things, but those are side-effects and are not their primary motivation.
Might there be a very small percentage of environmentalists who want "revenge" on big oil companies? I suppose anything is possible, but if this percentage is higher than 1%, I'll buy you a gas-guzzling SUV.
In theory, the CO2 that is released from burning the ethanol is reabsorbed by the plants used to make the ethanol, so there's no net CO2. This is why ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists. In practice, there are other CO2 costs involved, such as (probably) fertilizer, transportation costs, conversion costs, etc. (By "costs" here, I'm referring to CO2 output and nothing else. Of course, there are other costs involved as well.)
Still, it's probably much better than burning fossil-fuels with respect to CO2 output.
When you say "mine is OK", are you saying that you upgraded Vista and that you can uninstall programs you installed prior to upgrading, or are you talking about something else? Your post is surprisingly short of information for a "defense" post.
I still think you're probably joking, but after reading so many of the other posts on this topic, it's no longer so obvious. The thing is that us "older folk" remembered phone numbers and birth dates when we were young folk, as well.
This is not without precedence. When books and writing became common place, a similar phenomenon happened. People used to routinely memorize very long stories in their entirety. If you do that today, it makes you a bit of a "freak show".
As others have mentioned, it does free us up to focus on other tasks. However, and perhaps this is because I'm part of the "over 30 crowd", I do feel like something precious is being lost.
Isn't that kind of like saying he's a vegetarian who eats meat? Presumably you're saying that he's a vegetarian who spurns dairy products. I'm assuming that someone who eats eggs probably would eat honey, too, but that's just an assumption.
It shouldn't be that way anyway, but pretending such a situation exists right now is ludicrous. Usually, the up-front payment for a published work only makes for a barely higher than livable wage anyway, and in exchange, they get royalties for their work investment if it continues to sell.
There are many examples of children of authors who continue to fight to make money off their parent's work, whether their parents were authors, musicians, or whatever. I believe that's what the GP post was alluding to. The copyrights that no one cares about are the ones not making any money for anybody (and, yes, there are plenty as you allude to) so they get no attention.
First of all, it points out that what is optimal for one medium (writing) might not be optimal for another (photography), even if in this case it might be. Secondly, if you have an old photograph of your parents, grandparents, etc., that you want to copy, you shouldn't have to worry about tracking down copyright permissions.
Isn't keeping 95% of your sales better than not having any sales? I mean, even if you're only selling $5,000 worth of merchandise annually, it might be worth renewing through this scheme so that you can keeping get (most) of that $5k. I'd suggest modifying your scheme with a flat fee of a few thousand dollars plus 5% of revenue, or something like that.
Of course, all of this assumes that the copyright is mainly intended to protect sales, and although that's probably the case for most instances, it's not the case for all instances.
I'd definitely argue that the existence of life on other planets is pretty much a foregone conclusion, although even that argument does rest on a certain belief structure. There are several unknown quantities involved, so I don't think one can argue rigorously that there must be life on other planets.
OTOH, I was definitely talking about sentient life, which takes an additional amount of belief. Just like you're certain that life must be out there because as you keep adding more planets, life is a statistical certainty, I would argue that as you keep adding more planets with life, sentient life is a statistical certainty. Maybe only an average of one per galaxy on average, but that would still mean that the universe has billions of races of sentient life. (Who will in that case, of course, never hold a meaningful conversation with each other - except possibly for those lucky few hundred thousand who happen to share a galaxy, in which case it will depend on how close they are to each other, how advanced their interstellar travel is, and/or how one defines "meaningful conversation".)
Do the macros just fail to load, or does the whole document fail to load? When I've used macros in MS Word in the past, they were typically editing short-cuts, so if someone I sent the document to couldn't open the macros, but could still load the document, the only bad thing would be the error message. Of course, I think that in a lot of cases, even in Word you'd get a warning message about macros being potentially dangerous.
So, taking that into account, the artist doesn't care much about the CDs, just he concerts.
Obviously, this depends a lot on which artist you're talking about. Some indie artists make very little from the concerts and hope that the concerts result in CD sales.
Part of the problem (IMO) with religious faith is that faith demands no evidence. I suspect that most of those of us that reject such faith without evidence would be willing to accept it with evidence. Of course, at that point, it's no longer exactly "faith". For the record, I was raised Methodist and have devoted a lot of time towards inspecting my own personal beliefs. I have no desire to convert others to atheism, up to the point that their religious beliefs start impacting public policy in an undesirable way (e.g., with regards to science and evolution).
Slashdot Mirror
Should Stephen King be branded a terrorist?
Nah, it's a different flavor. This one has peanuts in it!
(I should've resisted the urge to post this, but for some reason I find compelled to foist this unpleasant analogy onto Slashdot.)
Your first point is exactly the response I was going to make, but luckily I found that you had already made it. The only thing I have to add to that point is a link.
As for your second point, in a perfect world I would agree. Unfortunately, reprocessing that spent fuel also makes it more usable for nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, etc. I'm not against reprocessing, but honesty requires one to acknowledge the downsides to reprocessing as well.
Your last point almost went without saying. Almost, except for the fact that it hadn't seemed to occur to him.
I hate to be one of those that correct spelling, so I'm not going to correct yours, but please for the sake of our sanity, use the latest Firefox with spell checking! You're killing me here. Oh, and, speaking of which, understand the difference between "your" and "you're". You make that particular mistake a lot. Perhaps you can just stick to using "your" when you mean "that thing belonging to you" and "you are" when you mean "you are". You might think that it doesn't hurt the readability of your posts, but it does. It sometimes requires multiple parsings to tease out what you're saying. Using proper spelling and grammar would make that easier. It also hurts your credibility. Until you mentioned that you have a herb garden, I would have guessed that you hadn't yet reached 9th grade. I'm not saying that in order to demean you (and I hope you don't take offense), but I think you need to realize how it comes across.
We all make mistakes, but the patterns inherent in yours suggest that you don't know better. It will help you communicate your point more effectively if you are able to improve your writing skills. This is seriously intended as friendly advice, and I hope you take it as such.
And perhaps I should've RTFA. I was just speaking on general principles with the fertilizer. My "(probably)" qualifier was intended to indicate that fertilizers aren't absolutely necessary, and with this new technology I suppose they won't even be the norm. As you point out, there might be other costs that offset this advantage, but it sounds like it's better than regular ethanol plants, which in turn are better than burning fossil fuels.
It's one thing to think the environmentalists are wrong, but to attribute ulterior, nefarious motives to their actions is borderline insane. Please re-read what you posted, and if you still think it's rational, see a professional.
The same thing goes to people who think that Bush is *trying* to destroy America (or the rest of the World), to people who think ExxonMobil is *trying* to destroy the environment, etc. They may be *doing* these things, but those are side-effects and are not their primary motivation.
Might there be a very small percentage of environmentalists who want "revenge" on big oil companies? I suppose anything is possible, but if this percentage is higher than 1%, I'll buy you a gas-guzzling SUV.
In theory, the CO2 that is released from burning the ethanol is reabsorbed by the plants used to make the ethanol, so there's no net CO2. This is why ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists. In practice, there are other CO2 costs involved, such as (probably) fertilizer, transportation costs, conversion costs, etc. (By "costs" here, I'm referring to CO2 output and nothing else. Of course, there are other costs involved as well.)
Still, it's probably much better than burning fossil-fuels with respect to CO2 output.
You just need to find the right LaTeX packages. :)
Of course, depending on how complex it is, you could use built-in features.
When you say "mine is OK", are you saying that you upgraded Vista and that you can uninstall programs you installed prior to upgrading, or are you talking about something else? Your post is surprisingly short of information for a "defense" post.
I still think you're probably joking, but after reading so many of the other posts on this topic, it's no longer so obvious. The thing is that us "older folk" remembered phone numbers and birth dates when we were young folk, as well.
This is not without precedence. When books and writing became common place, a similar phenomenon happened. People used to routinely memorize very long stories in their entirety. If you do that today, it makes you a bit of a "freak show".
As others have mentioned, it does free us up to focus on other tasks. However, and perhaps this is because I'm part of the "over 30 crowd", I do feel like something precious is being lost.
First of all, it points out that what is optimal for one medium (writing) might not be optimal for another (photography), even if in this case it might be. Secondly, if you have an old photograph of your parents, grandparents, etc., that you want to copy, you shouldn't have to worry about tracking down copyright permissions.
Isn't keeping 95% of your sales better than not having any sales? I mean, even if you're only selling $5,000 worth of merchandise annually, it might be worth renewing through this scheme so that you can keeping get (most) of that $5k. I'd suggest modifying your scheme with a flat fee of a few thousand dollars plus 5% of revenue, or something like that.
Of course, all of this assumes that the copyright is mainly intended to protect sales, and although that's probably the case for most instances, it's not the case for all instances.
I'd definitely argue that the existence of life on other planets is pretty much a foregone conclusion, although even that argument does rest on a certain belief structure. There are several unknown quantities involved, so I don't think one can argue rigorously that there must be life on other planets.
OTOH, I was definitely talking about sentient life, which takes an additional amount of belief. Just like you're certain that life must be out there because as you keep adding more planets, life is a statistical certainty, I would argue that as you keep adding more planets with life, sentient life is a statistical certainty. Maybe only an average of one per galaxy on average, but that would still mean that the universe has billions of races of sentient life. (Who will in that case, of course, never hold a meaningful conversation with each other - except possibly for those lucky few hundred thousand who happen to share a galaxy, in which case it will depend on how close they are to each other, how advanced their interstellar travel is, and/or how one defines "meaningful conversation".)
Do the macros just fail to load, or does the whole document fail to load? When I've used macros in MS Word in the past, they were typically editing short-cuts, so if someone I sent the document to couldn't open the macros, but could still load the document, the only bad thing would be the error message. Of course, I think that in a lot of cases, even in Word you'd get a warning message about macros being potentially dangerous.
Part of the problem (IMO) with religious faith is that faith demands no evidence. I suspect that most of those of us that reject such faith without evidence would be willing to accept it with evidence. Of course, at that point, it's no longer exactly "faith". For the record, I was raised Methodist and have devoted a lot of time towards inspecting my own personal beliefs. I have no desire to convert others to atheism, up to the point that their religious beliefs start impacting public policy in an undesirable way (e.g., with regards to science and evolution).