Superconductors are much more efficient at transferring large amounts of power with very little cost (ie. cooling). They would suck at powering your house (200A or so cable there), but are great at transferring power from a substation to the city core where you need 100,000A or more at 5kV or so and it is just not practical to transfer 100A at 5MV!
There are loses from cooling and other loses (100,000A produces a somewhat significant electromagnetic field, which causes current to be induced elsewhere, which causes power loss in superconductors, which costs $$$ - Actual loss depends on the structure immediately around the wire).
Also remember that copper wire costs are through the roof in recent years which makes the superconductor cheaper. Base copper price is near $3.5/lb - it was at $0.80/lb 5 years ago.
Just to add some information, the reference to how much waste a 1000MW nuclear plant produces is wrong. With reprocessing, most of the 33t of "waste" is reusable.
So assuming just 90% is reused, that results in about 3.3t of actual waste. 3.3t at that densities is less than 0.5 cubic meter. That's one barrel of waste for 1000MW or 1GW power plant per year. And without reprocessing there is enough Uranium and Thorium for few hundred years. With reprocessing, there is enough for a thousand years or more. But then I'm sure we'll be able to come up with Shingle Solar Panels on every roof and fusion so no problem.
PS. For the radiation worried crowd - the Chernobyl disaster actually *saved* the environment around that town. The no-go zone is now one of the best animal and bird sanctuaries in Ukraine and surrounding regions. Endangered birds are now gaining in numbers even having their nests *inside* (well, on the building, not where the core is:) the sarcophagus of the reactor! With this surprisingly great news, maybe the only way to save the Amazon is to dump nuclear waste all over it - sad but true.
Insightful? This is damn racist bullshit. For an example of a country where this also occurs, see Canada. One province is mostly French speaking and the rest of the country is English speaking. Should be split the country? Ship the French speakers back to France?? According to you, yes. Fortunately, most people have have the understanding that people speak different languages. What was done, CANNOT be undone. Period.
The only normal solution for Estonia is to adopt *two* official languages. After all, their recent history had both at different points in time. Yes, government services should be offered in *both* in light of this fact. You can't ignore 26% of the population! If you try to marginalize them, you are *no better* than the "evil Soviets". You are even worse, because you can't even learn from their mistakes. (And even from an economic point of view, it makes sense to learn Russian as Estonian is not exactly known outside of Estonia).
Of course you could have another solution. Just have a nice civil war and ethnic cleansing like some other bigoted countries.
Wrong. it is/14 not/21./14 is 4/16 or ~65k*4 => 256k IPs.
~$ host stanford.edu stanford.edu has address 171.67.22.34 stanford.edu has address 171.67.20.36 stanford.edu has address 171.67.20.37 stanford.edu has address 171.67.22.26 stanford.edu has address 171.67.22.33 stanford.edu mail is handled by 20 mx2.stanford.edu. stanford.edu mail is handled by 20 mx3.stanford.edu. stanford.edu mail is handled by 40 mx4.stanford.edu. stanford.edu mail is handled by 20 mx1.stanford.edu.
~$ whois 171.67.20.36
OrgName: Stanford University Network OrgID: SUN-5 Address: Pine Hall, Room 115 City: Stanford StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94305-4122 Country: US
def: Using MVC (Model-View-Client), a website is a remote application accessed typically over HTTP/HTTPS protocols with the remote Model, local View (in an application called a "web browser"). The Controller may reside either remote or local or both.
This defines every single website, from HTML-dump sites to user generated websites like YouTube or Ebay. It is up to you to define MVC, application, and other terminology, just like a "normal" dictionary.
If you want recursion, then just pick a mathematician. *Every* single idea in current mathematics is derived from the basic axioms. And you can prove everything by these basic axioms. The Theorems and Lemmas are the recursive help tool that is used so we do not have to go to the basics all the time.
What Law has that Mathematics lacks is interpretation and intension. Maths have neither because everything is derived from the axioms. In Law, even the axioms (ie. the constitution or similar) are not exact.
If you want a laymen understandable description of subjects like String Theory (wikipedia is much more laymen in that regard than any journal I even seen!), then go to a public library and pick up a book. These tend to be for laymen if they don't contain too many equations (ie. no a University library book for most part). It takes a book to explain these subjects.
But if you want to know about the Lie superalgebra, well, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_superalgebra you better know your background. How would you expect a high school graduate that saw some article about Lie Superalgebra, go to wikipedia and know what it is talking about? They don't even know what a field is! They think it is their lawn.
Now, look in regular encyclopedia about a Lie Superalgebra and you'll find nothing. So I guess it boils down to that smart people must not write articles about subjects they enjoy because laymen can't comprehend nor have the background to comprehend the material.
SStop with your 5 year plan thinking. Dust settles quick. And if you artificially slow down global warming by not dealing with the cause (CO2), well, you just end up with even *more* global warming after the dust settles. You see, water is one thing that washes CO2 out of the atmospere. And with artificial cooling, less water in atmosphere, less storms, more CO2 builds up. Dust settles, and you have more CO2 than before. So you need to repeat with more nukes or you are screwed. Cycle repeats until you *are* screwed.
Also, putting a nuke in a volcano would do about,.... *nothing*. Volcanoes erupt NOT because of nukes, but because of pressure builtup. Pressure caused by trillions and trillions and quadrillions of tons of rock. A nuke does *nothing*. Even if you nuked Yellowstone (a supervolcano), it would do nothing. At worst, it would cause massive amounts of acid rain but most likely, absolutely *nothing* would happen.
And no, I would not give you 100 nukes because you don't seem to know how they work and they are completely ineffective. Other examples of completely uselessness of nukes is blowing up an asteroid. Good luck! They couldn't even blow a big iceberg!!!!! (really). Nukes are *only* good at creating atmospheric or water super heater gases that burn things and people. They are *completely* *useless* otherwise.
As an example, it is easier to blow up a mountain with conventional charges than with nukes. Yes, was tried by Russians. Didn't work so well from contamination point of view and from effectiveness point of view.
Similarly, the tropical diseases you mention are not truly tropical. They are transmitted by insects (mostly mosquitoes) that thrive in water. The reason that they are largely found in the tropics now is that the tropics are largely poor and dominated by bad governments. In Europe and North America public works of sanitation, drainage and insect extermination have largely eliminated these diseases, and they could in the tropics, if they were used.
Had a good laugh! Or should I cry instead? Why are people so *stupid*, *ignorant* and *arrogant* to think that draining swamps and exterminating insects is a good thing??
There is a reason why people are starting to reflood marshes and don't use DDT. We learned a lesson. You apparently you have not. You don't even know that climate is responsible for the *tropical diseases*. You see, parasites and bacteria like it warm too.
Seriously, you either have a city where it is nice to live or you live in tundra or middle of some deserts. Plants and us like the same spaces. Furthermore, "best food producing land" is fertilized land. There are no more things about "fertile soil" or whatever. That's pre-1950s BS. Soil doesn't vary with 10km in most cases. It varies on 100kms distances.
Regardless, the best food-producing area (ultra-high intensive farming practices) are greenhouses. And most intensive of these are hydroponic installations. These produce more per acre of land than any "best land" (by pre-1950 standards). But these are most expensive (per acre) farming practices as well.
If you want proof, see food production over the last few decades. If we are paving over the "best land", why did it go up? Yeap, fertilizer. At current production levels, any land not fertilized properly (ammonia and similar) will become useless wasteland within a decade.
And if you do not want to "screw up" the food supply, well, don't multiply so much. Number of people is screwing up with the food supply and major cause of global warming (people want to increase their standard of living - can you blame them?). Yet all we hear from politicians is "breed more". The shit will hit the fan sooner or later. Each environment has a carrying capacity and we are way on the borrowed side with our extensive use of fertilizers and insecticides and other so called "control" agents. If the current massive dieoffs of bees are not stopped, well, we might see that affect the food supply much more than some highway over the "best food producing land".
Please don't talk about the food supply if you don't know what you are taking about. Modern farming practices, the ones that enable 6 billion people to feed, are not the same ones as pre-1950s. Silicon Valley is *insignificant*. All cities combined are *insignificant* (ie. land size). Urban sprawl is much more significant than paving 100 Silicon Valleys.
Actually, shows tend to get canceled because they outlived their own good. People don't want to watch crap. I prefer to watch grass grow! For example, X-files. Great show until they tried to replaced Duchovny with the evil terminator guy (never new his name!). Then the show tanked for obvious reasons. The final episode (something about the revelation when Duchovny was on trial), was some of the worst crap I could think of. The entire premise of the show like X-files was the suspense and the little guy fighting the unwinable battles (overall plot) and just weird cases. Show should have ended when Duchovny left.
The spinoff from the X-Files, The Lone Gunmen (the three geeks we see in X-files), well, the pilot was nice and just freaking too real [1], but then it was just ridicules. Whoever made that show didn't think of a story past the pilot. The plot become worse until the characters finally got killed off by preventing the escape of some nerve gas or something...
Another badly ended show is Star Trek. They dragged the glory of TNG with Deep Space 9. OK. But Voyager just got stupider after 1 or 2 seasons. The Borg became Janeway's bitches. WTF? That's not even close to what happened in TNG! And TNG was not very convincing in their "defeat" of the Borg either.
I think a show that ended at about the right time was Lexx. Perfect ending. Open ended and at the right time. Farscape ended at the right time as well. A good ending to a show is *very* important if they ever want to revive it in the future. X-Files revival probably would not fly. Farscape, probably would (another ending at about the right time).
For non-scifi crowed, Seinfeld or Everybody Loves Raymond ended at the right time. They could have kept the show going, but it was the right time to end it.
To end, Stargate, well, I think they should have stopped that show a number of years ago. It is going down and they will fade with a whimper like X-files if they keep going...
Remember people, canceling a show is not an attempt to kill it. It may be an attempt to save it for the future.
It is weird because the pilot was about a plane being flown into the World Trade Center tower. It barely missed but you could see that it actually touched the antenna on top of the towers when sparks fly from the tail of the "plane".
To add to the weirdness, the Discovery Channel had an episode about WTC and how it was built to not collapse if a plane would strike it. I think it aired a day or two before Sept. 11. They also discussed other planes hitting various buildings including the bomber that hit the Empire State Building in fog sometime around 1945 or so (no, no ammo on board)
Then maybe Verizon should not subsidize their DSL service? Verizon DSL should provide access to the Internet. Period. Nothing more, nothing less.
If Verizon DSL is a money loser, WTF are they doing supplying it?? It doesn't make sense. Companies are there to make money. They make money with DSL subscriptions. Yes, including Verizon. Verizon just wants the cake and eat it too!
Anyway, the future is digital phone service with analog maybe as a backup for things like 911. Digital is more efficient and better quality (ie. voice quality more consistent and better but jitter is a problem in current implementation - the latter can be fixed in digital, the former cannot be fixed cheaply in analog!).
Vonage is NOT a leech. Verizon just want to pull a fast one on their customers. They would prefer that *every* single service you get over their copper is from them. So if Verizon expands to book selling, would that mean that one cannot get a book from B&N or Amazon? According to you, B&N and Amazon are leeching Verizon's hypothetical book selling business...
The future doesn't wait for you or Verizon. It just happens. Catch up or be left behind.
A "web application" isn't if it does not require remote for processing and storing. It is just a local application run in a browser.
Remove applications or web application are software where the view and maybe part of the controller is run in the browser, locally on one's computer. The model is generally run remotely on the server. For example, gmail has a nice view run locally in the browser. Google's servers store and process and retrieve your email. gmail CANNOT be run locally. You cannot send or receive email if you are not online.
Some so called web application can be run locally if they do not require remote processing during the course of their execution. These are just JavaScript or similar applications (eg. XUL). These are still local.
Desktop is NOT dead. It will not be dead as long as the Workstation is not replaced by a Thin Client. Sun was stating that back in the 90s. Didn't happen. Now Red Hat seems to be singing a similar tune. I think the outcome is already decided.
Had mod points but I think I should reply instead. I have no idea *how* you got modded "Insightful" for this.
Software only -------------
How can you even say "GPL as way of enforcing sharing while copyright exists"? Huh? How can you enforce GPL without copyright?? It is NOT possible.
Give me your GPL software's source. Then abolish copyright so I can treat your GPL software just like BSD. Now, force me to share my changes without copyright. Oh, and good luck with that!
Non-software stuff ------------------
If you read any books and such, copyright is very important to authors. Without it, they do not make money. They cannot protect their work. Same thing for photographers, artists, musicians, et al.
Sure, patent system is broken, but copyright is *very* useful for everything. Including software. Including free software. It allows authors to transfer rights to their distributors and users. Without copyright, the only framework left is contracts and these are very cumbersome in comparison!
And saying "copyright is wrong" doesn't make it so. I may as well say "blue sky is just wrong" and I would be just as right.
No it is not. When I'm in *public* I expect privacy just as much as I expect privacy at home. I expect that my *private* conversation is not recorded and analyzed as if I was some psychopath or worse. It is only a matter of time when someone talking about "The PM is a fscking moron" to be viewed as terrorism, spy, etc.. It is just a natural progression.
Next thing you know, the gov't will put a chip in everyone's brains to monitor their brain pattern to make sure there are no "terror thoughts". And if they are, terminate and/or put in jail *before* you can act out your thoughts.
Welcome to the UK's future - 1984 and the Thought Police (so far, the lip reading policy due to technical difficulties).
So, since Apple is going to implement all or most of the Greenpeace recommendations, doesn't that imply they are correct to judge that Apple currently does not implement these recommendations? Doesn't it also mean that it is not FUD?
Either Apple has implemented environmentally friendlier policies like Lenovo and others, or they have not. And they have not.
Steve's excuse is rather sad - it is akin to one saying "I don't have my homework done *now*, but I'll have it done soon! That F I got is a bunch of FUD!!!"
This sort of thing was not acceptable even in Soviet Russia. When government included "free" wires radios in apartments where the internet KGB could listen, people would not put up with that BS. But sadly, people will probably do NOTHING in the UK to counter this *literally* 1984 (the book) ideas.
In Soviet Russia, radios listened to people and people got pissed off. In UK, they would just roll over and do nothing. Sad but true from recent examples.
Mercury density according to Google is 5.427g/ml (or cm^3 for the metric impaired). So, 200g = <37ml of Hg. That's just over 2 tablespoons of mercury from 40,000 bulbs. Not much if you ask me.
If this leaches into water it is still nothing. You probably get more from the "silver" fillings over lifetime than from this source. Now, there are other sources of mercury including tuna (from coal power plants contaminating oceans then into tuna and stuff).
And methylmercury is much more nasty than elemental Hg. Elemental (or metalic form) can be excreted from the body. The organic type just binds with your vital organs until you die (from Hg or unrelated reasons!).
U does not require enrichment per say. You can just use the CANDU reactors without enriched Uranium. Very safe - lose containment and reaction stops. CANDU also burns Pt so not very useful to get nukes.
Beside that, the only complain I have is your "guess" (I hope it was) that with breeders there is a 100 year supply of Uranium!! Without enrichment there is a 100 year supply of known Uranium. And there was no exploration of Uranium for many decades. Only recently did Uranium get profitable for exploration.
Anyway, the known supplies of Uranium with maximum use of reprocessing and breeders would get *thousands* not hundreds of years of supply for fission reactors. That's at today's energy consumption. Now, if we were to move to 100% nuclear for cars, heating, etc. (ie. Hydrogen economy, where power plants are used to create Hydrogen fuel), then yes, probably a hundred or two hundred years of known reserves of Uranium exists. Not a big deal - by that time fusion reactors will roll in. Much more power!! And much safer!
Solar will not work on our planet for much unless we have superconducting, global power grid so power from Sahara can be moved to N. Am. and vice-versa without loss. Solar is also perfect for space since Sun shines there ALL the time (eg. areas near moon poles), but one needs nuclear after Jupiter orbit...
Aside from nuclear and solar, there is geothermal. Dig holes 10km or 20km deep almost anywhere and you have all the power you want. And no problems.
In fusion reactor you can take some of the energy from the plasma directly to generate power (hint: induction). Regardless, still most of it would be from heating of the Li blanket with the neutron flux. One can't really get the neutrons into an electric field directly:)
I don't care what the Conservatives are proposing - they are just trying to split the environmental vote and so they can't state that CO2 is "harmless" gas and Global Warming does not exist. I don't think Harper is intelligent enough to comprehend what Global Warming actually is.
Regardless, the CO2 capture, as in Canada, was proposed under Liberals way back when Chretien was still in. The idea is to scrub CO2 from power plants and other large emitters like smelters (*before* being released into atmosphere!!), transport it in pipelines and then inject it in the ground. Where? Back down the gas wells and other areas with favourable geology. CO2 would be trapped there essentially forever.
The Slashdot article has *nothing* to do with the current CO2 capture program in Canada. And yes, Canada is the leader in the CO2 capture and sequestration as I described it above. The article talks about scrubing the *atmosphere* of CO2 - IMHO not very realistic.
Free is a relative term. $50 is free. $2500 software packages that run on it are not. Even Vista at $200 or whatever is still more expensive than hardware.
Software and services is where the money is. Hardware might as well be free. That is what Gates was saying.
Slashdot Mirror
Superconductors are much more efficient at transferring large amounts of power with very little cost (ie. cooling). They would suck at powering your house (200A or so cable there), but are great at transferring power from a substation to the city core where you need 100,000A or more at 5kV or so and it is just not practical to transfer 100A at 5MV!
There are loses from cooling and other loses (100,000A produces a somewhat significant electromagnetic field, which causes current to be induced elsewhere, which causes power loss in superconductors, which costs $$$ - Actual loss depends on the structure immediately around the wire).
Also remember that copper wire costs are through the roof in recent years which makes the superconductor cheaper. Base copper price is near $3.5/lb - it was at $0.80/lb 5 years ago.
Just to add some information, the reference to how much waste a 1000MW nuclear plant produces is wrong. With reprocessing, most of the 33t of "waste" is reusable.
e ssing
:) the sarcophagus of the reactor! With this surprisingly great news, maybe the only way to save the Amazon is to dump nuclear waste all over it - sad but true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Reproc
So assuming just 90% is reused, that results in about 3.3t of actual waste. 3.3t at that densities is less than 0.5 cubic meter. That's one barrel of waste for 1000MW or 1GW power plant per year. And without reprocessing there is enough Uranium and Thorium for few hundred years. With reprocessing, there is enough for a thousand years or more. But then I'm sure we'll be able to come up with Shingle Solar Panels on every roof and fusion so no problem.
PS. For the radiation worried crowd - the Chernobyl disaster actually *saved* the environment around that town. The no-go zone is now one of the best animal and bird sanctuaries in Ukraine and surrounding regions. Endangered birds are now gaining in numbers even having their nests *inside* (well, on the building, not where the core is
Insightful? This is damn racist bullshit. For an example of a country where this also occurs, see Canada. One province is mostly French speaking and the rest of the country is English speaking. Should be split the country? Ship the French speakers back to France?? According to you, yes. Fortunately, most people have have the understanding that people speak different languages. What was done, CANNOT be undone. Period.
The only normal solution for Estonia is to adopt *two* official languages. After all, their recent history had both at different points in time. Yes, government services should be offered in *both* in light of this fact. You can't ignore 26% of the population! If you try to marginalize them, you are *no better* than the "evil Soviets". You are even worse, because you can't even learn from their mistakes. (And even from an economic point of view, it makes sense to learn Russian as Estonian is not exactly known outside of Estonia).
Of course you could have another solution. Just have a nice civil war and ethnic cleansing like some other bigoted countries.
Wrong. it is /14 not /21. /14 is 4 /16 or ~65k*4 => 256k IPs.
~$ host stanford.edu
stanford.edu has address 171.67.22.34
stanford.edu has address 171.67.20.36
stanford.edu has address 171.67.20.37
stanford.edu has address 171.67.22.26
stanford.edu has address 171.67.22.33
stanford.edu mail is handled by 20 mx2.stanford.edu.
stanford.edu mail is handled by 20 mx3.stanford.edu.
stanford.edu mail is handled by 40 mx4.stanford.edu.
stanford.edu mail is handled by 20 mx1.stanford.edu.
~$ whois 171.67.20.36
OrgName: Stanford University Network
OrgID: SUN-5
Address: Pine Hall, Room 115
City: Stanford
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94305-4122
Country: US
NetRange: 171.64.0.0 - 171.67.255.255
CIDR: 171.64.0.0/14
NetName: NETBLK-SUNET
NetHandle: NET-171-64-0-0-1
Parent: NET-171-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: ARGUS.STANFORD.EDU
NameServer: AVALLONE.STANFORD.EDU
NameServer: ATALANTE.STANFORD.EDU
Comment:
RegDate: 1994-08-22
Updated: 2000-08-17
RTechHandle: JK535-ARIN
RTechName: Kohn, Jay
RTechPhone: +1-650-723-7515
RTechEmail: security@stanford.edu
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-05-16 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
def: Using MVC (Model-View-Client), a website is a remote application accessed typically over HTTP/HTTPS protocols with the remote Model, local View (in an application called a "web browser"). The Controller may reside either remote or local or both.
This defines every single website, from HTML-dump sites to user generated websites like YouTube or Ebay. It is up to you to define MVC, application, and other terminology, just like a "normal" dictionary.
If you want recursion, then just pick a mathematician. *Every* single idea in current mathematics is derived from the basic axioms. And you can prove everything by these basic axioms. The Theorems and Lemmas are the recursive help tool that is used so we do not have to go to the basics all the time.
What Law has that Mathematics lacks is interpretation and intension. Maths have neither because everything is derived from the axioms. In Law, even the axioms (ie. the constitution or similar) are not exact.
If you want a laymen understandable description of subjects like String Theory (wikipedia is much more laymen in that regard than any journal I even seen!), then go to a public library and pick up a book. These tend to be for laymen if they don't contain too many equations (ie. no a University library book for most part). It takes a book to explain these subjects.
Things like Linear Algebra is very understandable,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Algebra
so is Vector spaces,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space
But if you want to know about the Lie superalgebra, well,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_superalgebra
you better know your background. How would you expect a high school graduate that saw some article about Lie Superalgebra, go to wikipedia and know what it is talking about? They don't even know what a field is! They think it is their lawn.
Now, look in regular encyclopedia about a Lie Superalgebra and you'll find nothing. So I guess it boils down to that smart people must not write articles about subjects they enjoy because laymen can't comprehend nor have the background to comprehend the material.
SStop with your 5 year plan thinking. Dust settles quick. And if you artificially slow down global warming by not dealing with the cause (CO2), well, you just end up with even *more* global warming after the dust settles. You see, water is one thing that washes CO2 out of the atmospere. And with artificial cooling, less water in atmosphere, less storms, more CO2 builds up. Dust settles, and you have more CO2 than before. So you need to repeat with more nukes or you are screwed. Cycle repeats until you *are* screwed.
.... *nothing*. Volcanoes erupt NOT because of nukes, but because of pressure builtup. Pressure caused by trillions and trillions and quadrillions of tons of rock. A nuke does *nothing*. Even if you nuked Yellowstone (a supervolcano), it would do nothing. At worst, it would cause massive amounts of acid rain but most likely, absolutely *nothing* would happen.
Also, putting a nuke in a volcano would do about,
And no, I would not give you 100 nukes because you don't seem to know how they work and they are completely ineffective. Other examples of completely uselessness of nukes is blowing up an asteroid. Good luck! They couldn't even blow a big iceberg!!!!! (really). Nukes are *only* good at creating atmospheric or water super heater gases that burn things and people. They are *completely* *useless* otherwise.
As an example, it is easier to blow up a mountain with conventional charges than with nukes. Yes, was tried by Russians. Didn't work so well from contamination point of view and from effectiveness point of view.
Similarly, the tropical diseases you mention are not truly tropical. They are transmitted by insects (mostly mosquitoes) that thrive in water. The reason that they are largely found in the tropics now is that the tropics are largely poor and dominated by bad governments. In Europe and North America public works of sanitation, drainage and insect extermination have largely eliminated these diseases, and they could in the tropics, if they were used.
Had a good laugh! Or should I cry instead? Why are people so *stupid*, *ignorant* and *arrogant* to think that draining swamps and exterminating insects is a good thing??
There is a reason why people are starting to reflood marshes and don't use DDT. We learned a lesson. You apparently you have not. You don't even know that climate is responsible for the *tropical diseases*. You see, parasites and bacteria like it warm too.
BS. Thank you! Come again.
Seriously, you either have a city where it is nice to live or you live in tundra or middle of some deserts. Plants and us like the same spaces. Furthermore, "best food producing land" is fertilized land. There are no more things about "fertile soil" or whatever. That's pre-1950s BS. Soil doesn't vary with 10km in most cases. It varies on 100kms distances.
Regardless, the best food-producing area (ultra-high intensive farming practices) are greenhouses. And most intensive of these are hydroponic installations. These produce more per acre of land than any "best land" (by pre-1950 standards). But these are most expensive (per acre) farming practices as well.
If you want proof, see food production over the last few decades. If we are paving over the "best land", why did it go up? Yeap, fertilizer. At current production levels, any land not fertilized properly (ammonia and similar) will become useless wasteland within a decade.
And if you do not want to "screw up" the food supply, well, don't multiply so much. Number of people is screwing up with the food supply and major cause of global warming (people want to increase their standard of living - can you blame them?). Yet all we hear from politicians is "breed more". The shit will hit the fan sooner or later. Each environment has a carrying capacity and we are way on the borrowed side with our extensive use of fertilizers and insecticides and other so called "control" agents. If the current massive dieoffs of bees are not stopped, well, we might see that affect the food supply much more than some highway over the "best food producing land".
Please don't talk about the food supply if you don't know what you are taking about. Modern farming practices, the ones that enable 6 billion people to feed, are not the same ones as pre-1950s. Silicon Valley is *insignificant*. All cities combined are *insignificant* (ie. land size). Urban sprawl is much more significant than paving 100 Silicon Valleys.
Actually, shows tend to get canceled because they outlived their own good. People don't want to watch crap. I prefer to watch grass grow! For example, X-files. Great show until they tried to replaced Duchovny with the evil terminator guy (never new his name!). Then the show tanked for obvious reasons. The final episode (something about the revelation when Duchovny was on trial), was some of the worst crap I could think of. The entire premise of the show like X-files was the suspense and the little guy fighting the unwinable battles (overall plot) and just weird cases. Show should have ended when Duchovny left.
The spinoff from the X-Files, The Lone Gunmen (the three geeks we see in X-files), well, the pilot was nice and just freaking too real [1], but then it was just ridicules. Whoever made that show didn't think of a story past the pilot. The plot become worse until the characters finally got killed off by preventing the escape of some nerve gas or something...
Another badly ended show is Star Trek. They dragged the glory of TNG with Deep Space 9. OK. But Voyager just got stupider after 1 or 2 seasons. The Borg became Janeway's bitches. WTF? That's not even close to what happened in TNG! And TNG was not very convincing in their "defeat" of the Borg either.
I think a show that ended at about the right time was Lexx. Perfect ending. Open ended and at the right time. Farscape ended at the right time as well. A good ending to a show is *very* important if they ever want to revive it in the future. X-Files revival probably would not fly. Farscape, probably would (another ending at about the right time).
For non-scifi crowed, Seinfeld or Everybody Loves Raymond ended at the right time. They could have kept the show going, but it was the right time to end it.
To end, Stargate, well, I think they should have stopped that show a number of years ago. It is going down and they will fade with a whimper like X-files if they keep going...
Remember people, canceling a show is not an attempt to kill it. It may be an attempt to save it for the future.
Aside:
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen
It is weird because the pilot was about a plane being flown into the World Trade Center tower. It barely missed but you could see that it actually touched the antenna on top of the towers when sparks fly from the tail of the "plane".
To add to the weirdness, the Discovery Channel had an episode about WTC and how it was built to not collapse if a plane would strike it. I think it aired a day or two before Sept. 11. They also discussed other planes hitting various buildings including the bomber that hit the Empire State Building in fog sometime around 1945 or so (no, no ammo on board)
Then maybe Verizon should not subsidize their DSL service? Verizon DSL should provide access to the Internet. Period. Nothing more, nothing less.
If Verizon DSL is a money loser, WTF are they doing supplying it?? It doesn't make sense. Companies are there to make money. They make money with DSL subscriptions. Yes, including Verizon. Verizon just wants the cake and eat it too!
Anyway, the future is digital phone service with analog maybe as a backup for things like 911. Digital is more efficient and better quality (ie. voice quality more consistent and better but jitter is a problem in current implementation - the latter can be fixed in digital, the former cannot be fixed cheaply in analog!).
Vonage is NOT a leech. Verizon just want to pull a fast one on their customers. They would prefer that *every* single service you get over their copper is from them. So if Verizon expands to book selling, would that mean that one cannot get a book from B&N or Amazon? According to you, B&N and Amazon are leeching Verizon's hypothetical book selling business...
The future doesn't wait for you or Verizon. It just happens. Catch up or be left behind.
A "web application" isn't if it does not require remote for processing and storing. It is just a local application run in a browser.
Remove applications or web application are software where the view and maybe part of the controller is run in the browser, locally on one's computer. The model is generally run remotely on the server. For example, gmail has a nice view run locally in the browser. Google's servers store and process and retrieve your email. gmail CANNOT be run locally. You cannot send or receive email if you are not online.
Some so called web application can be run locally if they do not require remote processing during the course of their execution. These are just JavaScript or similar applications (eg. XUL). These are still local.
Desktop is NOT dead. It will not be dead as long as the Workstation is not replaced by a Thin Client. Sun was stating that back in the 90s. Didn't happen. Now Red Hat seems to be singing a similar tune. I think the outcome is already decided.
Had mod points but I think I should reply instead. I have no idea *how* you got modded "Insightful" for this.
Software only
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How can you even say "GPL as way of enforcing sharing while copyright exists"? Huh? How can you enforce GPL without copyright?? It is NOT possible.
Give me your GPL software's source. Then abolish copyright so I can treat your GPL software just like BSD. Now, force me to share my changes without copyright. Oh, and good luck with that!
Non-software stuff
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If you read any books and such, copyright is very important to authors. Without it, they do not make money. They cannot protect their work. Same thing for photographers, artists, musicians, et al.
Sure, patent system is broken, but copyright is *very* useful for everything. Including software. Including free software. It allows authors to transfer rights to their distributors and users. Without copyright, the only framework left is contracts and these are very cumbersome in comparison!
And saying "copyright is wrong" doesn't make it so. I may as well say "blue sky is just wrong" and I would be just as right.
Linux does NOT have a EULA. There is the GPL *code* license, but that is NOT a EULA. There is NO restriction on end user of Linux.
Cars will only fly with the help of LSD.
And real bridges are built to last 100 years, not 5!
The cameras are in public places. Big difference.
No it is not. When I'm in *public* I expect privacy just as much as I expect privacy at home. I expect that my *private* conversation is not recorded and analyzed as if I was some psychopath or worse. It is only a matter of time when someone talking about "The PM is a fscking moron" to be viewed as terrorism, spy, etc.. It is just a natural progression.
Next thing you know, the gov't will put a chip in everyone's brains to monitor their brain pattern to make sure there are no "terror thoughts". And if they are, terminate and/or put in jail *before* you can act out your thoughts.
Welcome to the UK's future - 1984 and the Thought Police (so far, the lip reading policy due to technical difficulties).
So, since Apple is going to implement all or most of the Greenpeace recommendations, doesn't that imply they are correct to judge that Apple currently does not implement these recommendations? Doesn't it also mean that it is not FUD?
Either Apple has implemented environmentally friendlier policies like Lenovo and others, or they have not. And they have not.
Steve's excuse is rather sad - it is akin to one saying "I don't have my homework done *now*, but I'll have it done soon! That F I got is a bunch of FUD!!!"
This sort of thing was not acceptable even in Soviet Russia. When government included "free" wires radios in apartments where the internet KGB could listen, people would not put up with that BS. But sadly, people will probably do NOTHING in the UK to counter this *literally* 1984 (the book) ideas.
In Soviet Russia, radios listened to people and people got pissed off. In UK, they would just roll over and do nothing. Sad but true from recent examples.
You do realize that 200,000mg of Hg => 200g of Hg
i n-fish-article.htm
Mercury density according to Google is 5.427g/ml (or cm^3 for the metric impaired). So, 200g = <37ml of Hg. That's just over 2 tablespoons of mercury from 40,000 bulbs. Not much if you ask me.
If this leaches into water it is still nothing. You probably get more from the "silver" fillings over lifetime than from this source. Now, there are other sources of mercury including tuna (from coal power plants contaminating oceans then into tuna and stuff).
http://www.grinningplanet.com/2004/08-10/mercury-
And methylmercury is much more nasty than elemental Hg. Elemental (or metalic form) can be excreted from the body. The organic type just binds with your vital organs until you die (from Hg or unrelated reasons!).
Skin cancer is harmless if you catch it in time. It is easy to catch skin cancer if you are careful.
Other cancers are not easy to spot because you can't see them.
Don't burn. Don't use SPF X if you don't need to.
U does not require enrichment per say. You can just use the CANDU reactors without enriched Uranium. Very safe - lose containment and reaction stops. CANDU also burns Pt so not very useful to get nukes.
Beside that, the only complain I have is your "guess" (I hope it was) that with breeders there is a 100 year supply of Uranium!! Without enrichment there is a 100 year supply of known Uranium. And there was no exploration of Uranium for many decades. Only recently did Uranium get profitable for exploration.
Anyway, the known supplies of Uranium with maximum use of reprocessing and breeders would get *thousands* not hundreds of years of supply for fission reactors. That's at today's energy consumption. Now, if we were to move to 100% nuclear for cars, heating, etc. (ie. Hydrogen economy, where power plants are used to create Hydrogen fuel), then yes, probably a hundred or two hundred years of known reserves of Uranium exists. Not a big deal - by that time fusion reactors will roll in. Much more power!! And much safer!
Solar will not work on our planet for much unless we have superconducting, global power grid so power from Sahara can be moved to N. Am. and vice-versa without loss. Solar is also perfect for space since Sun shines there ALL the time (eg. areas near moon poles), but one needs nuclear after Jupiter orbit...
Aside from nuclear and solar, there is geothermal. Dig holes 10km or 20km deep almost anywhere and you have all the power you want. And no problems.
In fusion reactor you can take some of the energy from the plasma directly to generate power (hint: induction). Regardless, still most of it would be from heating of the Li blanket with the neutron flux. One can't really get the neutrons into an electric field directly :)
I don't care what the Conservatives are proposing - they are just trying to split the environmental vote and so they can't state that CO2 is "harmless" gas and Global Warming does not exist. I don't think Harper is intelligent enough to comprehend what Global Warming actually is.
Regardless, the CO2 capture, as in Canada, was proposed under Liberals way back when Chretien was still in. The idea is to scrub CO2 from power plants and other large emitters like smelters (*before* being released into atmosphere!!), transport it in pipelines and then inject it in the ground. Where? Back down the gas wells and other areas with favourable geology. CO2 would be trapped there essentially forever.
The Slashdot article has *nothing* to do with the current CO2 capture program in Canada. And yes, Canada is the leader in the CO2 capture and sequestration as I described it above. The article talks about scrubing the *atmosphere* of CO2 - IMHO not very realistic.
Free is a relative term. $50 is free. $2500 software packages that run on it are not. Even Vista at $200 or whatever is still more expensive than hardware.
Software and services is where the money is. Hardware might as well be free. That is what Gates was saying.