The project supposedly has a 10 thousand year life span
Originally it was a lot longer period of time, however once they realized there was no way they could guaranty storage would be safe that long politicans lowered the length to 10,000 years. Also when the process of finding storage place other places were being considered as well, Texas and Washinton amoung them. However because Nevada didn't have a strong congressional delegate and both Texas and Washington did, they were dropped with only Yucca left.
The solution to nuclear waste storage is to haul this waste into space. Such a journey can be planned such that it is perpetual - it never ends! With enormous distances from earth, there is no way this waste can affect us over here. What about that?
Yea, pollute the solar system instead of just our bed.
"We must stop fossil fuels now, or it will destroy our planet", virtually all of them are dead set against the cheapest and easiest way to replace fossil fuels - Nuclear Power.
Nuclear power is only "cheap" because the government gives them massive subsidies. If the Nuclear Power industry had to operate in a freemarket, ie buy their own insurance and pay for their own waste disposal without government assistance, the industry would not exist. The US has a number of laws and such to shield nuclear power thus "making it profitable". Get rip of all of them and it would no longer be profitable.
you will see that amoung organized enviornmentalist, opposition to nuclear power is universal.
Amoung environmentalists, not all oppose nuclear power, there are some who push for more nuclear power plants as a "clean" source of energy. I consider myself an environmentalist and at one tyme I opposed nuclear power, but now I sit on the fence. I'm not anti-nuclear power but I'm not pro it yet either. What concerns me now environmentally is the mining of the fuel and storage. However from what I've been reading reprosessing spent fuel extends fuel as well as makes it less harmful. If true then I may support nuclear power. However there's one thing that could derail any support, the US subsidies to the Nuclear Power industry. In order for me to support it it would have to operate in a true freemarket, they'd have to buy and pay for their insurance instead of laws shielding them, and they'd have to pay for the disposal of the remaining waste.
There are many places in the crust of the earth that are in the middle of tectonic plates and are extremely stable for many millions of years and will likely be so for a long time to come. Yucca was chosen for that reason.
Dispite what you may think Yucca Mt is a seismically active region and has has earthquakes in the area. A government building there was damages in the '70s because of an earhquake. There was another Quake reported near Yucca Mountain in 2002. Besides this all overlooks the fact that Yucca Mountain is situated on the Shoshone's ancestral lands that was promised them by the Ruby Valley Treaty.
Every time they try to build one, NIMBY comes into play, they get some hippy crazies into the mix, and it goes down the tubes. They can't even replace aging reactors with newer, safer reactors without running into this.
NIMBYism isn't just an environmental issue, take a look at the Opposition from NIMBYs for building a wind farm in Cape Cod. Even though the wind gennies will be miles from land some people complain they will spoil their veiw.
On the other hand, Yucca Mountain is hundreds of miles away from anything else in Nevada. That doesn't make the folks in Las Vegas or even Reno a whole lot happier about having a nuclear waste storage site located in the same state as them.
Things have changed since Ford was president. Nevada's populaton went from 621,975 to more than 2,000,000. Clark County alone has 1.8 million people, and Pahrump, down the road from Yucca Mountain, has a 9 percent annual growth rate. By the time the repository would be operational, optimistically projected at 2017, Nevada's population will be seven times greater than it was in 1975.
Wrong. We don't reprocess fuel because it has been banned since the 1970's, an executive order signed by Jimmy Carter. Good old Jimmy Carter, he will be remembered because he felt so bad for everything that ever happened. Felt so bad.
Wrong. Jimmy Carter may of signed an Executive Order but those presidents who followed him could have revoked those orders. If Jimmy Carter's EO are too onorous President Bush could counter sign them right now, he did this to EOs Clinton signed before leaving office.
are the people that use the fuel in the first place even the same people that have to pay for the storage, or is it a taxpayer thing?)
No, the same people who generate nuclear waste are not responsible for storing the waste nor paying for storage. The US government, ie the taxpayers, pays for storage of the waste as one of the methods of subsidizing the nuclear power industry. If the industry were required to operate in a freemarket, ie pay for their own insurance and store the waste they produce themself then the industry would never exist.
Nope, we're already a nuclear weapons state, so non-proliferation agreements don't apply. We can't ship weapons-grade plutonium to other countries by that treaty, but anything we do domestically is ok. There *is* a Federal law that prohibits commercial reprocessing, but chances are that Congress will see reason eventually and repeal it.
Actually as part of the non-proliferation agreements or treaties those countries with nuclear weapons also agreed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons significantly, but none have. Neither the US nor any other nuclear weapons power can really expect non nuclear weapons countries to remain nuclear weapons free if they don't live up to their part of the deal. You shoudn't expect the other side to live up the their side of a deal if you don't.
Personally, if I was the EO(Evil Overlord) of the USA, I'd institute a practice of reprocessing nuclear waste as well as a building program to replace all the coal plants with modern nuclear ones. Kyoto, eat my dust. After shutting down all the coal plants, I'd work on replacing the old nuclear ones.
I'm not sure if it is true but I've heard building nuclear power plants is an energy intensive process. What I'd like to see is an ROI, Return on Investment, analysis of nuclear power. Well any and all sources of electrical generation really. And I'd want the government to stop subsidizing the nuclear power industry along with the petroleum industry, at least help alternative energy to the same degree. For each dollar nuclear gets, the wind energy sector gets the same. Or maybe the money can go to research on using alga to produce hydrogen.
In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy.
And a damned good thing, too. A democracy is three wolves and two sheep voting on what's for dinner. A republic, restrained by constitutional protections of individual rights, is quite different.
And there are several popular distros to develop and test for to make sure installation is smooth and seamless like in Windows. Windows is a single distro and extremely predictable in that regard.
There hasn't been one Windows distro for years, and now with Vista there are even more. I lost track, but isn't there 4 or 5 versions of Vista?
Once a real and effective standard is settled upon in Linux (api, distro, installation and package maintenance mechanism) I suspect Linux would be much more popular on the layman's desktop.
And a lot less popular on geeks', power users', and developers' desktop. Once this happens less people will work on or develop for linux. Linux lets it's users setup their PCs the way they want, if it no longer does then they will use something else that will.
Using no source license (i.e. the source is protected by copyright) allows you to do this! Then when you want to release the code, you pick any license you want.
However if I use some code with a BSD license, from my understanding of the license, I need do is give credit to the authors of the code I use along with any conditions they've put on it. On the other hand if I use any GPL code then I have to include all the code if I distribute the program. For instance if I started with GIMP but made improvements, like adding 16 or 24 bit colour support which it doesn't have yet, then I'd have to release all the code imcluding the modifications I made.
I would hate to get a call from someone who doesn't know what they're doing trying to set up Gentoo, but I don't know that I'd recommend Ubuntu or openSUSE because of the lack of effective package management when they're trying to get a new application running.
Have you checked out Linspire Linux? I don't know how well installation of it goes, my new PC came with it preinstalled, but Linspire maintains a warehouse of software that only requires a click to download and install. As long as you've got a broadband collection it's easier to install software in Linspire than in Windows.
My mom can install Windows XP on a computer all by herself (Step 1: Insert OS CD, keep clicking next / yes / ok. Pick your time zone. Continue clicking next / yes / ok. Be sure to remove the CD when it tells you to. Step 2: Insert MoBo CD. Keep clicking next / yes / ok. Remove CD. Step 3: Insert Video Card CD. Keep clicking next / yes / ok. Remove CD. DONE!) I don't expect *nix to be THAT easy, but it would be nice to be confident that without having a secondary PC available, a given Linux can be installed on a 1 year old or less PC in less than 10 utterances of WTF, SOAB, or MFPOS.
I haven't tried to in several years but from I've heard some Linux distros are as easy to install as Windows. I may find out soon, I got a new PC and I've been thinking of setting it as a multiboot PC, currently it runs Linspire Linux but I'd like to try Ubuntu and maybe Kubuntu as well as gentoo and one or two more distros.
I live in the US. Our Constitution specifically mentions copyright as a specifically granted limited-time monopoly with legal enforcement. Our guiding philosophy also acknowledges the presence of certain (and unexhaustively enumerated) natural rights. I take this to mean that copyright is not a natural right.
Your political jurisdiction and views may differ.
I live in the USA too, and you're right. Copyrights aren't a natural right. It is a right, along with patents, granted by the Constitution to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. However congress has gone way past the point of encouraging progress by making the duration of copyrights last longer than the creater lives. If you want to encourage progress then you want creaters to continue creating, and one of the best ways is financial so you want copyrights to last a short period to encourage more creativity. Once a person creates a blockbuster, admittedly not many people do, they don't have much reason to create more.
Linux hasn't failed to take over the world because it needs a microkernel or a different IP stack or whatever
I don't think so, Linux hasn't taken over because it is the rare PC that has Linux preinstalled. The vast majority of people don't buy a PC then install an OS. When they get home with a new PC all they want to do is set it up, plug it in, and have it work. When PCs with Linux preinstalled can be found anywhere and are easy to setup then they will gain market share.
Remember, kids: it's only judicial activism when the rulings support left-wing positions.
That's about the size of it, for right-wing positions. On the left, if a judge doesn't support their position s/he is an activist judge. And the same on the right. I say get back to the orignial meaning of the USA Constitution!!! Liberty and SMALL government.
No, copyright takes away freedom. The GPL gives some of it back.
Yes, copyright grants freedom. If I copyright something, I have the right, freedom, to prevent others from making money off of my efforts without paying me anything.
The BSD is a wonderful license if you want to effectively place something in the public domain but can't bring yourself to accept that you might not get any credit for it... but IMO it's just a half-assed half-step towards making it PD.
The BSD License isn't all just about putting software into the PD, public domain. I'm not a developer myself, however as a photographer I'd like to work on graphics, photo editing, software comparable to Photoshop and if I were to put the effort required in developing such an app I'd want to be able to make money off of selling it without having someone else take the source code and selling it as well without paying me anything. More like what I'd like to do is to keep the code closed until I have made enough money to make it worthwhile then release or copyleft the code. Though I'm not sure I think the BSD license allows this whereas the GPL most definitely does not.
On another front, I'm a bit disappointed that no one seems to be touting Linspire/Freespire as a distribution. It's one of the few that's really been targeting the consumer market.
I got a new PC with Linspire preinstalled a few months ago, and I've made mention of it a number of tymes. Once booted up it acts pretty much like Windows, so like you say, it's targetted at the consumer market. Get more OEMs to preinstall Linux and more stores to carry them is what it will take for linux to have a bigger market share.
The ONLY thing holding linux back from a desktop point of view at this point is a lack of a standardized LDAP backend for businesses thats as retardedly easy to work with as Active Directory (from an admin standpoint). _Thats it_
Not at all. What is holding Linux back from most people's desktops is that most users can't just walk into a store and buy a PC with Linux preinstalled. Most PCs have Windows preinstalled and Macs have OSX preinstalled, for most people to use Linux they have to install Linux themself, yet most people hardly ever install an OS, and I dare say that most of the tyme they do they do because the PC companies tech support said to reinstall the OS when they've had a problem and called tech support.
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The project supposedly has a 10 thousand year life span
Originally it was a lot longer period of time, however once they realized there was no way they could guaranty storage would be safe that long politicans lowered the length to 10,000 years. Also when the process of finding storage place other places were being considered as well, Texas and Washinton amoung them. However because Nevada didn't have a strong congressional delegate and both Texas and Washington did, they were dropped with only Yucca left.
FalconThe solution to nuclear waste storage is to haul this waste into space. Such a journey can be planned such that it is perpetual - it never ends! With enormous distances from earth, there is no way this waste can affect us over here. What about that?
Yea, pollute the solar system instead of just our bed.
Falcon"We must stop fossil fuels now, or it will destroy our planet", virtually all of them are dead set against the cheapest and easiest way to replace fossil fuels - Nuclear Power.
Nuclear power is only "cheap" because the government gives them massive subsidies. If the Nuclear Power industry had to operate in a freemarket, ie buy their own insurance and pay for their own waste disposal without government assistance, the industry would not exist. The US has a number of laws and such to shield nuclear power thus "making it profitable". Get rip of all of them and it would no longer be profitable.
you will see that amoung organized enviornmentalist, opposition to nuclear power is universal.
Amoung environmentalists, not all oppose nuclear power, there are some who push for more nuclear power plants as a "clean" source of energy. I consider myself an environmentalist and at one tyme I opposed nuclear power, but now I sit on the fence. I'm not anti-nuclear power but I'm not pro it yet either. What concerns me now environmentally is the mining of the fuel and storage. However from what I've been reading reprosessing spent fuel extends fuel as well as makes it less harmful. If true then I may support nuclear power. However there's one thing that could derail any support, the US subsidies to the Nuclear Power industry. In order for me to support it it would have to operate in a true freemarket, they'd have to buy and pay for their insurance instead of laws shielding them, and they'd have to pay for the disposal of the remaining waste.
FalconThere are many places in the crust of the earth that are in the middle of tectonic plates and are extremely stable for many millions of years and will likely be so for a long time to come. Yucca was chosen for that reason.
Dispite what you may think Yucca Mt is a seismically active region and has has earthquakes in the area. A government building there was damages in the '70s because of an earhquake. There was another Quake reported near Yucca Mountain in 2002. Besides this all overlooks the fact that Yucca Mountain is situated on the Shoshone's ancestral lands that was promised them by the Ruby Valley Treaty.
Falconlaw.
Which France is known to do.
FalconEvery time they try to build one, NIMBY comes into play, they get some hippy crazies into the mix, and it goes down the tubes. They can't even replace aging reactors with newer, safer reactors without running into this.
NIMBYism isn't just an environmental issue, take a look at the Opposition from NIMBYs for building a wind farm in Cape Cod. Even though the wind gennies will be miles from land some people complain they will spoil their veiw.
FalconOn the other hand, Yucca Mountain is hundreds of miles away from anything else in Nevada. That doesn't make the folks in Las Vegas or even Reno a whole lot happier about having a nuclear waste storage site located in the same state as them.
Things have changed since Ford was president. Nevada's populaton went from 621,975 to more than 2,000,000. Clark County alone has 1.8 million people, and Pahrump, down the road from Yucca Mountain, has a 9 percent annual growth rate. By the time the repository would be operational, optimistically projected at 2017, Nevada's population will be seven times greater than it was in 1975.
FalconWrong. We don't reprocess fuel because it has been banned since the 1970's, an executive order signed by Jimmy Carter. Good old Jimmy Carter, he will be remembered because he felt so bad for everything that ever happened. Felt so bad.
Wrong. Jimmy Carter may of signed an Executive Order but those presidents who followed him could have revoked those orders. If Jimmy Carter's EO are too onorous President Bush could counter sign them right now, he did this to EOs Clinton signed before leaving office.
Falconare the people that use the fuel in the first place even the same people that have to pay for the storage, or is it a taxpayer thing?)
No, the same people who generate nuclear waste are not responsible for storing the waste nor paying for storage. The US government, ie the taxpayers, pays for storage of the waste as one of the methods of subsidizing the nuclear power industry. If the industry were required to operate in a freemarket, ie pay for their own insurance and store the waste they produce themself then the industry would never exist.
FalconNope, we're already a nuclear weapons state, so non-proliferation agreements don't apply. We can't ship weapons-grade plutonium to other countries by that treaty, but anything we do domestically is ok. There *is* a Federal law that prohibits commercial reprocessing, but chances are that Congress will see reason eventually and repeal it.
Actually as part of the non-proliferation agreements or treaties those countries with nuclear weapons also agreed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons significantly, but none have. Neither the US nor any other nuclear weapons power can really expect non nuclear weapons countries to remain nuclear weapons free if they don't live up to their part of the deal. You shoudn't expect the other side to live up the their side of a deal if you don't.
FalconPersonally, if I was the EO(Evil Overlord) of the USA, I'd institute a practice of reprocessing nuclear waste as well as a building program to replace all the coal plants with modern nuclear ones. Kyoto, eat my dust. After shutting down all the coal plants, I'd work on replacing the old nuclear ones.
Result: Clean, safe, plentiful electricity, reduced emissions, etc...
I'm not sure if it is true but I've heard building nuclear power plants is an energy intensive process. What I'd like to see is an ROI, Return on Investment, analysis of nuclear power. Well any and all sources of electrical generation really. And I'd want the government to stop subsidizing the nuclear power industry along with the petroleum industry, at least help alternative energy to the same degree. For each dollar nuclear gets, the wind energy sector gets the same. Or maybe the money can go to research on using alga to produce hydrogen.
FalconIn the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy.
And a damned good thing, too. A democracy is three wolves and two sheep voting on what's for dinner. A republic, restrained by constitutional protections of individual rights, is quite different.
Ce depend. This is true if you look at democracy as being tyranny of the masses. I'd prefer to look at it as Alexis de Tocqueville did when he wrote Democracy in America .
FalconOr will it be the Zoroastrians/Zarathustrians?
FalconAnd there are several popular distros to develop and test for to make sure installation is smooth and seamless like in Windows. Windows is a single distro and extremely predictable in that regard.
There hasn't been one Windows distro for years, and now with Vista there are even more. I lost track, but isn't there 4 or 5 versions of Vista?
Once a real and effective standard is settled upon in Linux (api, distro, installation and package maintenance mechanism) I suspect Linux would be much more popular on the layman's desktop.
And a lot less popular on geeks', power users', and developers' desktop. Once this happens less people will work on or develop for linux. Linux lets it's users setup their PCs the way they want, if it no longer does then they will use something else that will.
FalconUsing no source license (i.e. the source is protected by copyright) allows you to do this! Then when you want to release the code, you pick any license you want.
However if I use some code with a BSD license, from my understanding of the license, I need do is give credit to the authors of the code I use along with any conditions they've put on it. On the other hand if I use any GPL code then I have to include all the code if I distribute the program. For instance if I started with GIMP but made improvements, like adding 16 or 24 bit colour support which it doesn't have yet, then I'd have to release all the code imcluding the modifications I made.
FalconI would hate to get a call from someone who doesn't know what they're doing trying to set up Gentoo, but I don't know that I'd recommend Ubuntu or openSUSE because of the lack of effective package management when they're trying to get a new application running.
Have you checked out Linspire Linux? I don't know how well installation of it goes, my new PC came with it preinstalled, but Linspire maintains a warehouse of software that only requires a click to download and install. As long as you've got a broadband collection it's easier to install software in Linspire than in Windows.
FalconMy mom can install Windows XP on a computer all by herself (Step 1: Insert OS CD, keep clicking next / yes / ok. Pick your time zone. Continue clicking next / yes / ok. Be sure to remove the CD when it tells you to. Step 2: Insert MoBo CD. Keep clicking next / yes / ok. Remove CD. Step 3: Insert Video Card CD. Keep clicking next / yes / ok. Remove CD. DONE!) I don't expect *nix to be THAT easy, but it would be nice to be confident that without having a secondary PC available, a given Linux can be installed on a 1 year old or less PC in less than 10 utterances of WTF, SOAB, or MFPOS.
I haven't tried to in several years but from I've heard some Linux distros are as easy to install as Windows. I may find out soon, I got a new PC and I've been thinking of setting it as a multiboot PC, currently it runs Linspire Linux but I'd like to try Ubuntu and maybe Kubuntu as well as gentoo and one or two more distros.
FalconI live in the US. Our Constitution specifically mentions copyright as a specifically granted limited-time monopoly with legal enforcement. Our guiding philosophy also acknowledges the presence of certain (and unexhaustively enumerated) natural rights. I take this to mean that copyright is not a natural right.
Your political jurisdiction and views may differ.
I live in the USA too, and you're right. Copyrights aren't a natural right. It is a right, along with patents, granted by the Constitution to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. However congress has gone way past the point of encouraging progress by making the duration of copyrights last longer than the creater lives. If you want to encourage progress then you want creaters to continue creating, and one of the best ways is financial so you want copyrights to last a short period to encourage more creativity. Once a person creates a blockbuster, admittedly not many people do, they don't have much reason to create more.
FalconLinux hasn't failed to take over the world because it needs a microkernel or a different IP stack or whatever
I don't think so, Linux hasn't taken over because it is the rare PC that has Linux preinstalled. The vast majority of people don't buy a PC then install an OS. When they get home with a new PC all they want to do is set it up, plug it in, and have it work. When PCs with Linux preinstalled can be found anywhere and are easy to setup then they will gain market share.
FalconRemember, kids: it's only judicial activism when the rulings support left-wing positions.
That's about the size of it, for right-wing positions. On the left, if a judge doesn't support their position s/he is an activist judge. And the same on the right. I say get back to the orignial meaning of the USA Constitution!!! Liberty and SMALL government.
FalconNo, copyright takes away freedom. The GPL gives some of it back.
Yes, copyright grants freedom. If I copyright something, I have the right, freedom, to prevent others from making money off of my efforts without paying me anything.
Falconfragmentation.
If the GPL prevented fragmentation then what are all of the different distros? Isn't having all of them causing fragmentation?
FalconThe BSD is a wonderful license if you want to effectively place something in the public domain but can't bring yourself to accept that you might not get any credit for it... but IMO it's just a half-assed half-step towards making it PD.
The BSD License isn't all just about putting software into the PD, public domain. I'm not a developer myself, however as a photographer I'd like to work on graphics, photo editing, software comparable to Photoshop and if I were to put the effort required in developing such an app I'd want to be able to make money off of selling it without having someone else take the source code and selling it as well without paying me anything. More like what I'd like to do is to keep the code closed until I have made enough money to make it worthwhile then release or copyleft the code. Though I'm not sure I think the BSD license allows this whereas the GPL most definitely does not.
FalconOn another front, I'm a bit disappointed that no one seems to be touting Linspire/Freespire as a distribution. It's one of the few that's really been targeting the consumer market.
I got a new PC with Linspire preinstalled a few months ago, and I've made mention of it a number of tymes. Once booted up it acts pretty much like Windows, so like you say, it's targetted at the consumer market. Get more OEMs to preinstall Linux and more stores to carry them is what it will take for linux to have a bigger market share.
FalconThe ONLY thing holding linux back from a desktop point of view at this point is a lack of a standardized LDAP backend for businesses thats as retardedly easy to work with as Active Directory (from an admin standpoint). _Thats it_
Not at all. What is holding Linux back from most people's desktops is that most users can't just walk into a store and buy a PC with Linux preinstalled. Most PCs have Windows preinstalled and Macs have OSX preinstalled, for most people to use Linux they have to install Linux themself, yet most people hardly ever install an OS, and I dare say that most of the tyme they do they do because the PC companies tech support said to reinstall the OS when they've had a problem and called tech support.
Falcon