If it works, and the bugs are worked out, or you know how to work around them, why does it matter that it's "not supported"?
Because there is no guarantee it feature set, development tools or even compilers will be available on newer platforms. You code in VB in 2005, customer upgrades to Vista. You've got a problem. If the chipset is new as well, will you even be able to get a compiler for it? Will COM even work on Vista?
Realistically, is any of this going to be a problem in 2007/8? Probably not. Is it going to be a problem in 2015. You bet your ass!
OTOH, conscription ensures (well, supposedly) that your armed forces represent a cross section of society, and thus reduces the danger of praetorianism.
Or more likely increases it, as you now have a large segment of the population who have "accepted" that being forced at gunpoint to do the will of those is command is OK. Society learns to become regimented. People believe rights are "earned" by military service rather than inherant, and so can be just as easily taken away by the military from an "unworthy" weak populace.
Conscription is slavery. People run this backwards and forwards and make up all kinds of rhetoric, but at the end of the day compelling anyone, by force or law, to work against their will is slavery.
Citizenship is not earned by military service. No one should have to "do" anything to gain human rights. If you want to, you can, by choice, take up employment as a civil servant, working as a professional soldier. If so, that's your job. But it doesn't grant you any additional basic rights or status in society other than kudos and thanks for a job well done, if even that.
I purchased my Alienware this last November, and I'm not sorry in the slightest. 3.8GHz P4-hyperthreaded/2GB RAM (room for 4gb)/240 GB HD/DVD+-RW/Combo Drive/5.1 Dolby/17"/internal 802.11abg/12-in-1 card reader/video in AND out/256 MB Video, it just cannot be beat.
Plus bringing a recently purchased P4 machine to a LAN party is a good way to scream "CLUELESS!" to your fellow gamers.
Why? I've got a pentium 4 at home and it runs the first person shooters just fine if you turn the settings down. In fact, if you turn the settings down enough, your games will be faster and less laggy than those running with all the highest settings on the groovy kids customised $3000 machines.
Bringing a $600 P4 machine to a LAN party to play starcraft is a good way to scream "You guys got Shafted" to your fellow gamers. The younger ones looking to purchase might even thank you for it.
To be fair, a powerful gaming machine is essentially a powerful machine full stop.
When looking about for a good value dual core workstation, which was going to have to do some significant number cruching, I found that the only really powerful machines available were the gaming rigs. Skimp on the graphics card and the the sound system, and a gaming machine becomes a very affordable workstation.
More appropriately, it was taken from them under the premise that repayment would be in the form said grandchildren reaching adulthood without being killed by the legions of rapid terrorists lying in wait in the darkness, silently and profanely cursing the american way of life.
Well. What's wrong with a faraday cage. If gravity doesn't affect you, then you have nothing to fear. The cage will protect you from lightning strikes and will only weigh down the evil, gravity prone, electro-terrorist scum.
Filters must work on some actual physical principle, not magic; they must discriminate based on particle size or some chemical property possessed by the specific pollutants being filtered.
Coal filters do not pick and choose on a molecular level. They don't work on chemical principles. They're basically just an (not so) advanced sieve that traps larger particles. The solid thorium oxide particles, which are airbore as an aerosol, not as a gas, are largely trapped by the filters. The CO2 escapes as a gas. It's not magic. you can try this at home with muddy water and a piece of tissue.
Assuming there is even a significant amount of aerosol in the vincinity of your lungs by the time the dust from the plant has dispersed. You're probably at more risk from your car engines fumes than you are from the coal plants dust in terms of the radioactivity levels. Or even from burning an insense candle, or maybe just a regular candle.
Re: the leukemia sufferers around the Irish sea, your last argument was that radioactive material could not possibly be the cause of cancer around coal plants, and leukemia is a cancer.
Large amounts of irradiated waste chemicals and sometimes even material are dumped from the Sellafield recycling plant on a very regular basis. There is a correllation between lukemia rates and distance from the Irish sea in many areas. In any case, my original argument was that the (miniscule) amount of radioactive material from coal was unlikely to be the cause of any cancers caused by coal dust.
...assuming your hydrogen engine was a Carnot heat engine, which it's not.
Yes, it's not. The hydrogen fuel cell is not a Carnot heat engine and is not constrained by the Carnot efficiency limit. Thus, hydrogen is a more efficient fuel than gasoline can ever be.
My "whinge", was with the original posters dismissal of the danger level of plutonium. It is most certainly not "...no more toxic than anything else we expose ourselves to every day."
It's still dangerous, in the industrial hazard sense. Something coal dust is not.
What carries radiation in pure H2O? What is it's half life?
Pure H20 is also in fact an electrical insulator. So what would be wrong with floating in a pool of waste water and holding the end of a high voltage cable? You'd be fried of course, due to the dissolved substances in the water, which was not 100% pure. In fact, it was likely very impure.
Over time, pipes and components in a plant become radioactive. The coolent water will eventually become exposed to radioactivity in some tiny trace amounts. The levels here are of course, negligable, or at least as negligable as the radioactivity released by the buringing of coal.
Also, don't be too sure that the reactor coolant, and the dissolved particles within, are not at some point dumped out of the system.
Estimates are that 10,000 times as much radioactive material is released from a coal power plant than from a nuclear power plant. This is borne out in cancer statistics in the areas around coal plants, etc.
Cancer is caused by more things that radioactivity. It's far more likely that the chemical effects of inhaling coal particles are the cause of cancers in those region. The radioactivity released by burning coal is trivial. Uranium and thorium are naturally occurring elements and can be found in soils and rocks everywhere. People living around coal plants likely ingest more uranium orally than they breath in, daily.
Simple sanity check: How's a coal powerplant smokestack filter going to catch thorium oxide if it's not stopping carbon dioxide? The size of the molecules is not significantly different.
Because thorium oxide is a solid, and carbon dioxide is a gas. The filters trap solid material, which thorium oxide is.
Additionally, if it is catching those many tons of thorium and uranium, where are all the nuclear waste disposal people dealing with the spent smokestack filters that by onw are surely clogged with tons of radioactive metal compounds?
They could dump them in a field somewhere, as the field will have about the same level of radioactive compounds in its soil as the filtered material, within an order of magnitude anyway.
Don't kid yourself. Nuclear is clean and safe. Tell that to the lukemia sufferers living around the Irish Sea.
Hydrogen power, on the other hand, is idiotic. Releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is fine as long as it comes from a carbon neutral source. If you were producing methanol from plants and burning that in cars (not farfetched, seeing as several racing leagues use it), it would not matter that CO2 was released, because each molecule of CO2 would be one that was taken out of the atmosphere a few months prior to grow the plant feedstock in the first place. The lack of a carbon in H2 is not an advantage. The very real disadvantages of H2, such as difficult of containment and poor energy/volume, still stand.
What the hell!? Most of our carbon fuel is released from burned fossil fuel, and is currently NOT being refactored into plant and animal matter. In addition, hydrogen has been successfully transported and contained at least as safely and efficiently as petrol. To cap it all off hydrogen is a much more efficient fuel than carbon based products. It achieves over 90% fuel efficiency verse only around 30% efficiency for petrol.
I believe it would be quite crude of me to name names, but in the last few months several times that number of people have been killed in coal mines in North America.
You also forgot to mention that over 40,000 people die on North American roads every single day as a product of the oil industry!
By the way, if you are terrified of plutonium, you might want to read up on exactly what comes out of the stacks at a coal fired power plant. 12,000 tons of thorium and 5,000 tons of uranium worldwide in 2000 alone.
If you think that's scary, just wait till you find out how much thorium and uranium is ingested orally by ordinary people every day!! Spooky stuff.
Unlike botox, plutonium may spontaniously combust when wet. Consequently, holding plutox parties is an ill adviced idea, despite the recent relabelling of plutonium as "mostly harmless".
Nuclear power plants keep their waste in shielded rooms deep inside the plant, which are then sealed up and stored so the waste doesn't get released.
Most nuclear plants dump irradiated waste water straight out of the system. No filtering, no decontamination. Nothing.
Coal plants, however, release more radioactive waste into the atmosphere. Coal contains traces of uranium, and as it burns, we get uranium dust in the air.
Coal contains on average 3ppm of uranium. Soil contains on average 1.8-5ppm of uranium. All coal plants also now have industrial grade filters installed which catch almost all of the heavier particles leaving the chimney.
Coal pollutes through its kinematic and chemical properties, which has significant and very damaging effects to both heath and the enviornment. But to say it releases radiation in any significant way is just FUD.
And unless you have a way to use hydro, solar, or wind power to produce as much energy as either fossil fuel or nuclear, we're left with this choice:
There is a way. Use these sources to produce hydrogen. Millions of barrels worth. Then ship it about like natural gas to fuel power plants and cars.
Plutonium is no more toxic than anything else we expose ourselves to every day.
I cannot describe in words how assine this statement is. Plutonium might not be the worlds most lethal substance, but it's a danm sight more dangerous than everyday toilet bleach. Just ask Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. Well, you could have asked them if they hadn't been killed in plutonium accidents.
What difference does this make to the general public. We were all assurred that the older, control rod style, reactors would never, ever blow. And yet Chernobyl went sky high. Extreme example yes, but the older model reactor which was riddled with flaws was sold over and over as a "failsafe" and "foolproof" system. They said it was "impossible" for them to explode
Now the public has Pebble-Bed reactors being sold as a "failsafe, foolproof and risk free" reactor. Do you think Joe average is really going to look into the physics behind what makes the reactor safe? Or is he simply going to make the connection between nukes, Chernobyl and reactors and assume the thing will blow up anyway.
Scientists do not have a good record on selling nuclear safety. They would do everyone a favour if they put some disclaimers on "failsafe, foolproof and risk free", like; Unless the events X,Y,Z occur. And if X,Y,Z are unlikely enough, then Joe average might swallow it. But just telling him the same old thing you said about the failed reactors is not likely to inspire confidence.
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....plus it lets learners go straight into OO and learn good practices.
Or run, screaming in mental agony from the building as their virgin eyes behold the Java "Hello World" app.
If it works, and the bugs are worked out, or you know how to work around them, why does it matter that it's "not supported"?
Because there is no guarantee it feature set, development tools or even compilers will be available on newer platforms. You code in VB in 2005, customer upgrades to Vista. You've got a problem. If the chipset is new as well, will you even be able to get a compiler for it? Will COM even work on Vista?
Realistically, is any of this going to be a problem in 2007/8? Probably not. Is it going to be a problem in 2015. You bet your ass!
I got a ton of "BUT IT'S NOT SUPPORTED" responses, with no real explination.
That's kind of an explaination in itself.
This is the whole reason the FOIA process exists: to give transparency to the operation of the federal government.
Details of Military operations in war zones to not fall under the scope of FOIA requests.
OTOH, conscription ensures (well, supposedly) that your armed forces represent a cross section of society, and thus reduces the danger of praetorianism.
Or more likely increases it, as you now have a large segment of the population who have "accepted" that being forced at gunpoint to do the will of those is command is OK. Society learns to become regimented. People believe rights are "earned" by military service rather than inherant, and so can be just as easily taken away by the military from an "unworthy" weak populace.
Conscription is slavery. People run this backwards and forwards and make up all kinds of rhetoric, but at the end of the day compelling anyone, by force or law, to work against their will is slavery.
Citizenship is not earned by military service. No one should have to "do" anything to gain human rights. If you want to, you can, by choice, take up employment as a civil servant, working as a professional soldier. If so, that's your job. But it doesn't grant you any additional basic rights or status in society other than kudos and thanks for a job well done, if even that.
Enlist in the military they OWN you. You can, in situations, be ordered to perform what amounts to indirect suicide.
And you'd better LIKE IT!!
I purchased my Alienware this last November, and I'm not sorry in the slightest. 3.8GHz P4-hyperthreaded/2GB RAM (room for 4gb)/240 GB HD/DVD+-RW/Combo Drive/5.1 Dolby/17"/internal 802.11abg/12-in-1 card reader/video in AND out/256 MB Video, it just cannot be beat.
Except on battery life.
Plus bringing a recently purchased P4 machine to a LAN party is a good way to scream "CLUELESS!" to your fellow gamers.
Why? I've got a pentium 4 at home and it runs the first person shooters just fine if you turn the settings down. In fact, if you turn the settings down enough, your games will be faster and less laggy than those running with all the highest settings on the groovy kids customised $3000 machines.
Bringing a $600 P4 machine to a LAN party to play starcraft is a good way to scream "You guys got Shafted" to your fellow gamers. The younger ones looking to purchase might even thank you for it.
To be fair, a powerful gaming machine is essentially a powerful machine full stop.
When looking about for a good value dual core workstation, which was going to have to do some significant number cruching, I found that the only really powerful machines available were the gaming rigs. Skimp on the graphics card and the the sound system, and a gaming machine becomes a very affordable workstation.
Since when did any "IT Professional" ever consider purchasing a fucking AlienWare machine?
Well a lot of them have Macs, which is essentially the same thing 90% of the time.
More appropriately, it was taken from them under the premise that repayment would be in the form said grandchildren reaching adulthood without being killed by the legions of rapid terrorists lying in wait in the darkness, silently and profanely cursing the american way of life.
1. Present list of choices
2. User picks one
3. Present confirmation
4. Print paper copy for confirmation #2 and recount purposes.
You forgot spec 5.
5. Do Not Oppose Any OCP Officer
A blind citizen given a paper ballot has to get someone to help, raising problems of confidentiality and trust.
There's such a thing as braille. Blind people can actually read you know. They can even post on Slashdot with the right software.
Guess what's cooking kids?
Neo-Freedom!!
Now With Extra Oppression and only Half The Rights of Other Nations
Sign up Today!!!
(registration is mandatory)
Well. What's wrong with a faraday cage. If gravity doesn't affect you, then you have nothing to fear. The cage will protect you from lightning strikes and will only weigh down the evil, gravity prone, electro-terrorist scum.
Filters must work on some actual physical principle, not magic; they must discriminate based on particle size or some chemical property possessed by the specific pollutants being filtered.
...assuming your hydrogen engine was a Carnot heat engine, which it's not.
Coal filters do not pick and choose on a molecular level. They don't work on chemical principles. They're basically just an (not so) advanced sieve that traps larger particles. The solid thorium oxide particles, which are airbore as an aerosol, not as a gas, are largely trapped by the filters. The CO2 escapes as a gas. It's not magic. you can try this at home with muddy water and a piece of tissue.
Assuming there is even a significant amount of aerosol in the vincinity of your lungs by the time the dust from the plant has dispersed. You're probably at more risk from your car engines fumes than you are from the coal plants dust in terms of the radioactivity levels. Or even from burning an insense candle, or maybe just a regular candle.
Re: the leukemia sufferers around the Irish sea, your last argument was that radioactive material could not possibly be the cause of cancer around coal plants, and leukemia is a cancer.
Large amounts of irradiated waste chemicals and sometimes even material are dumped from the Sellafield recycling plant on a very regular basis. There is a correllation between lukemia rates and distance from the Irish sea in many areas. In any case, my original argument was that the (miniscule) amount of radioactive material from coal was unlikely to be the cause of any cancers caused by coal dust.
Yes, it's not. The hydrogen fuel cell is not a Carnot heat engine and is not constrained by the Carnot efficiency limit. Thus, hydrogen is a more efficient fuel than gasoline can ever be.
My "whinge", was with the original posters dismissal of the danger level of plutonium. It is most certainly not "...no more toxic than anything else we expose ourselves to every day."
It's still dangerous, in the industrial hazard sense. Something coal dust is not.
What carries radiation in pure H2O? What is it's half life?
Pure H20 is also in fact an electrical insulator. So what would be wrong with floating in a pool of waste water and holding the end of a high voltage cable? You'd be fried of course, due to the dissolved substances in the water, which was not 100% pure. In fact, it was likely very impure.
Over time, pipes and components in a plant become radioactive. The coolent water will eventually become exposed to radioactivity in some tiny trace amounts. The levels here are of course, negligable, or at least as negligable as the radioactivity released by the buringing of coal.
Also, don't be too sure that the reactor coolant, and the dissolved particles within, are not at some point dumped out of the system.
Estimates are that 10,000 times as much radioactive material is released from a coal power plant than from a nuclear power plant. This is borne out in cancer statistics in the areas around coal plants, etc.
Cancer is caused by more things that radioactivity. It's far more likely that the chemical effects of inhaling coal particles are the cause of cancers in those region. The radioactivity released by burning coal is trivial. Uranium and thorium are naturally occurring elements and can be found in soils and rocks everywhere. People living around coal plants likely ingest more uranium orally than they breath in, daily.
Simple sanity check: How's a coal powerplant smokestack filter going to catch thorium oxide if it's not stopping carbon dioxide? The size of the molecules is not significantly different.
Because thorium oxide is a solid, and carbon dioxide is a gas. The filters trap solid material, which thorium oxide is.
Additionally, if it is catching those many tons of thorium and uranium, where are all the nuclear waste disposal people dealing with the spent smokestack filters that by onw are surely clogged with tons of radioactive metal compounds?
They could dump them in a field somewhere, as the field will have about the same level of radioactive compounds in its soil as the filtered material, within an order of magnitude anyway.
Don't kid yourself. Nuclear is clean and safe.
Tell that to the lukemia sufferers living around the Irish Sea.
Hydrogen power, on the other hand, is idiotic. Releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is fine as long as it comes from a carbon neutral source. If you were producing methanol from plants and burning that in cars (not farfetched, seeing as several racing leagues use it), it would not matter that CO2 was released, because each molecule of CO2 would be one that was taken out of the atmosphere a few months prior to grow the plant feedstock in the first place. The lack of a carbon in H2 is not an advantage. The very real disadvantages of H2, such as difficult of containment and poor energy/volume, still stand.
What the hell!? Most of our carbon fuel is released from burned fossil fuel, and is currently NOT being refactored into plant and animal matter. In addition, hydrogen has been successfully transported and contained at least as safely and efficiently as petrol. To cap it all off hydrogen is a much more efficient fuel than carbon based products. It achieves over 90% fuel efficiency verse only around 30% efficiency for petrol.
what could possibly go wrong?
Nothing. Pebble Bed Reactors are completely safe! Haven't you read Wikipedia!?
I believe it would be quite crude of me to name names, but in the last few months several times that number of people have been killed in coal mines in North America.
You also forgot to mention that over 40,000 people die on North American roads every single day as a product of the oil industry!
By the way, if you are terrified of plutonium, you might want to read up on exactly what comes out of the stacks at a coal fired power plant. 12,000 tons of thorium and 5,000 tons of uranium worldwide in 2000 alone.
If you think that's scary, just wait till you find out how much thorium and uranium is ingested orally by ordinary people every day!! Spooky stuff.
Unlike botox, plutonium may spontaniously combust when wet. Consequently, holding plutox parties is an ill adviced idea, despite the recent relabelling of plutonium as "mostly harmless".
Nuclear power plants keep their waste in shielded rooms deep inside the plant, which are then sealed up and stored so the waste doesn't get released.
Most nuclear plants dump irradiated waste water straight out of the system. No filtering, no decontamination. Nothing.
Coal plants, however, release more radioactive waste into the atmosphere. Coal contains traces of uranium, and as it burns, we get uranium dust in the air.
Coal contains on average 3ppm of uranium. Soil contains on average 1.8-5ppm of uranium. All coal plants also now have industrial grade filters installed which catch almost all of the heavier particles leaving the chimney.
Coal pollutes through its kinematic and chemical properties, which has significant and very damaging effects to both heath and the enviornment. But to say it releases radiation in any significant way is just FUD.
And unless you have a way to use hydro, solar, or wind power to produce as much energy as either fossil fuel or nuclear, we're left with this choice:
There is a way. Use these sources to produce hydrogen. Millions of barrels worth. Then ship it about like natural gas to fuel power plants and cars.
Plutonium is no more toxic than anything else we expose ourselves to every day.
I cannot describe in words how assine this statement is. Plutonium might not be the worlds most lethal substance, but it's a danm sight more dangerous than everyday toilet bleach. Just ask Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. Well, you could have asked them if they hadn't been killed in plutonium accidents.
What difference does this make to the general public. We were all assurred that the older, control rod style, reactors would never, ever blow. And yet Chernobyl went sky high. Extreme example yes, but the older model reactor which was riddled with flaws was sold over and over as a "failsafe" and "foolproof" system. They said it was "impossible" for them to explode
Now the public has Pebble-Bed reactors being sold as a "failsafe, foolproof and risk free" reactor. Do you think Joe average is really going to look into the physics behind what makes the reactor safe? Or is he simply going to make the connection between nukes, Chernobyl and reactors and assume the thing will blow up anyway.
Scientists do not have a good record on selling nuclear safety. They would do everyone a favour if they put some disclaimers on "failsafe, foolproof and risk free", like; Unless the events X,Y,Z occur. And if X,Y,Z are unlikely enough, then Joe average might swallow it. But just telling him the same old thing you said about the failed reactors is not likely to inspire confidence.