I don't think anyone else has bothered to put together several interesting recent developments. For power you use the cadmium-salt nanotech solar cell tech, on either side, the base is this five-layer circuitry, the display would be liquid paper, possibly, or perhaps OLED, or both, and toss in the recent Apple patents-pending for an improved touch interface. Oh, yes, perhaps you could also tap into the body's natural electrical field and heat for additional power. Add a wireless visor display, subdermal voice communications as well.Numerous kinks to work out, de-glitch, etc., but do-able, very do-able. Flexible bracelet form, natch. The flexipad is born (from the Axis of Time series by John Birmingham).
Well, Duh!!! I haven't thought of Solaris in years although I recall it's a BSD derivative of some sort. That'll work since I still have the Daemon book and experience running it on mi Amiga back in the 80's.
That covers what I have done in the IT field. I won't bore you with the non-IT rest. It runs to several pages, and I rarely slept. But it was never boring, which is usually has been lately.
Actually this is one of the goals VMWare is proposing to meet with their vSphere. vCenter, ad nauseum initiatives. [full disclosure I've beta'ed VMWare software since v1]. This also presupposes full P2V, V2P cross machine conversions if required. The goal here is be anywhere, and run anywhere.
Now if I had the money, I'd toss full de-dup into the storage array mix as well, so much of the image file size essentially disappears unless there is simply no duplication anywhere. And if you are in that situation, take my advice. Quit, or just shoot yourself and get it over with.
It's been a long time since I played at that level (six mainframes, eighteen mini's, 575 desktops, and I never got an accurate count of the 100+ laptops) but at some point you have to ask yourself, when does the customization end? Standardization was the only thing that kept myself and my team of four !relatively! sane.
If you seriously need customization of that level, then you aren't doing things right. Reduce each VM to a single app (Apache, MySQL, IIS, network appliance, whatever) and use virtual switches to create a topology as required. Think of each VM as a particular Lego block, or IC: Systems Componentization as it were. And this is where de-dupe will also shine.
Which explains why a certain storage company bought VMWare, and a certain switching company has created a virtual switch. Now if you don't have the big bucks, you have a slight problem. However you can create this kind of topology if each box has more than one physical network adapter AND you get creative. Now that job I also wouldn't mind trying here. Time to resuscitate some old boxes and see what I can come up with. Been a while since I setup an enterprise class simulation:-).
It's high time that we all realize that the lines between the various (computer) engineering disciplines are now blurred. Sure, be a subject matter expert but know How the other people think and work.
Political leanings are irrelevant here. From the light curve, you can extrapolate sensor capability in a various applications such as boost-course, mid-course, even late-course ballistic missile/warhead intercept capabilities, which should, given known albedo characteristics for those phases, liklihood of detection. That's just one engineer's perspective.
Like you I generally prefer to be referred to as a consultant since it wasn't until recently that I found the proper term (synthesist). I operate across multiple problem domains, engineering disciplines, sciences, etc. By the time I left the Navy, I had trained two other individuals to approach systems analysis and engineering my way and I'm certain they did quite well. The problems are, as I see it: (1) an inability to systematically deconstruct the processes to there core (layered) components, and reengineer them as needed; (2) the inability to delegate to subject matter experts that are available; and (3) the inability to foster teamwork. Usually it's 1 that kills most projects, but 2 & 3 can lead to far larger financial loses as well as losses in prestige and personnel.
About five years into my naval career, they handed me a key to the front (control) panel to every Harris 300/301 computer and the master password for Pacific Fleet. A Harris system engineer also gave an unexpurgated system generation tape (all the compilers, tools, and documentation were uncut). I never knew where I was going on some days but it was sure fun since it was all about understanding the processes and making them tick correctly be it hardware, software, or people. And teaching, of course!
Heck I'd take a job. Fortran, WatFor, WatFiv, Assembler 360 and 370 (loved it), and I could JCL with the best. Archive 5 (removable disk pack) was practically mine for five years at our local UC. I still recall reading the JCL manual and right there on one page for JCL Job Class ranking that if you picked a particular set (J,K,L, or M) and set TIME=24.00.00 it turned off all acounting;-). 12-17 yo back then, but I still have some life left (48 now). Actually, learning from the IBM system engineers is what set me apart from other software types. Zero software defects (any kind) was engraved in my soul. Paid off when the penalty for failure would have been federal prision (Navy).
Sorry, except for testing purposes for Microsoft and others, I entirely deal with the home and SOHO markets and I have no MSDN subscription here. Frankly, it's way out of my financial reach and will remain so for the forseeable future unless I come up with the killer app of the century (not likely). The whole situation is very strange in light of Microsoft rolling out the Express line of development tools to rekindle their 'Golden Age of Visual Basic' again. With free virtualization software from both major providers, free development tools, yet requiring an MSDN subscription to test in a virtual environment for software targetted at the home market, this does not make sense. Then again, we are talking about Microsoft where what one unit is trying to do frequently is in opposition to what another unit is doing.
No, no, and no. Please go study the physics, especially the applied side, and get back to me. Slashdot is ill equipped for this discussion especially when I need to whiteboard equations. Lots of equations. Heat is only one factor in this design. As for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that's an assertion that falls out of the mathematics of QT/QM and seems to be valid in that domain (specifically using photons/electronic-magnetic phenomena as your instrumentality for measurement/observation) but I know the history of physics and what may be true at one time for one domain is not necessarily true for all domains, and almost always isn't. Lastly, where are you going to find an isolated system in this universe? And again, simply because theory says this can't be the case does not necessarily mean that it is the case in the real world. Set up the experiment using scientific design: assert your H(0) and prove it incorrect. In the case of H(1) being a negative, you can not do it. So toss in scientific experimental design to your mix of course work.
I hate to be rude, but you really need some more education and some hands on experience here.
True enough. I was teaching at the university and consulting on the side when I was fourteen yet didn't graduate from High School until I was 17. How's that for logic. $40 per hour on those consulting gigs, back in '75, was nothing to sneeze at.
At the time the funding was cut, it was just engineering. We had several working models which did produce fusion neutrons which is where the theoretical science ends and the applied science, engineering begins. You show me it's possible, I design it, build it, and make the damn thing work.
Sorry, even your example disproves your assertion. The materials science and technology that go into an F-1, and prior racing cars, are exactly what gave us automobiles with higher safety ratings and higher fuel efficiency in lighter-weight construction. I do agree that solar isn't efficient enough per dollar of investment, but without research into increasing efficiency per unit of area as well as efficiency per usit of cost, you won't have any progress. There are already several promising leads as a result of recent research including the development of multi-frequency solar cells (conventional cells only respond to one frequency which is most definitely not efficient). It looks promising and looks cost efficient once it is scaled for production. That's assuming other factors (litigation, regulation, etc. ad nauseum as posted above) do not become factors.
Give me an efficient cell and then I can go look into the materials science, process engineering, and related fields to come up with efficiencies of scale and manufacturing. I've been doing that most of my life, both in IT and other engineering fields, it isn't that hard. Just skull sweat, a willingness to experiment, and time (although not that much of the latter). I'm not even unique in that regard. Give me more than one design and I can then run econometric analyses on life-cycle and production costs to evaluate which is the better choice. All the same, just numbers.
What nuclear engineer or physicist told you that? How do they know? It is a fundamental principle of science that you can not prove a negative. Sorry, can't be done. And speaking as a nuclear engineer who keeps his eye on both fission and fusion research, there are at least two approaches that do work on a small scale and have yielded fusion nuetrons. The problems they were having were scaling up either the voltage (electron beam) and/or beam density (electron beam and nuetral particle beam).
That was before James Earl Carter, III, then President of the United States, and former US Navy Nuclear Reactor Officer, came along, slashed the fusion research budget well beyond the bone which not only resulted in stagnant research programs but the laying off of many of the fusion researchers at that time. The budget was never really restored fully. Also toss in such idiotic practices as classifying Soviet research that they wanted to share with the US and you have a real comedy of errors (or tragedy actually). There's a lot more but I'll stop there. We could have had it in the '90's given just what I know of what Sandia was doing at the time, let alone the other projects which were also showing remarkable progress right up until the money was yanked.
Actually it is even more complex than that as you have to look at cash-flow (recurring ROI), total ROI, life-cycle costs without consideration of environmental externalities (as they are seldom considered),..., ad nauseum. We pretty much discussed it to death a few days ago. Even if ITER succeeds, I have little expectation that it will be utilized at least in the US, agreement or no agreement. The regulatory, litigatious environment, PUC behavior, and investor expections of immediate returns on investment all conspire against it.
As for the environmentalists keeping the engineers honest, well speaking as both an engineer and former member of several environmental organizations including Greenpeace, you have to have three components: a brain, some modicum of scientific training, and the willingness to use both. Sadly they fail in that regard which is why I left them. Emotional appeals do not impress either the universe or myself.
Agreed. Complacency is a continuing issue with all technological solutions and has been since the first flint or obsidian tools. I don't settle for good enough, even when I worked for the guv'ment, but it does seem to be the human condition. Sadly.
I'm not at all opposed to dealing with it so long as we know what we are dealing with. I've already laid out elsewhere here several approaches, critical paths actually, to drastically reducing our carbon budget at least in the First World (developed nations). And it should be noted that even nations in the developing world, e.g. China and India to give just a couple, are investing in non-petroleum product based power production. As it currently stands, answer A is correct but not due to a lack of solutions. We are simply not investing wisely. Near-term political and finaancial returns rule in our system as it currently stands and I don't see that changing until Fresno and Sacramento, CA. become beach-front property or New York City is under a glacier.
If I should be still alive, which is doubtful as I'm terminal but I've made it past my expiration date by two years so far, I'm going to be in column B without the four arms required. One nice thing about spending much of my early teenage years assosociateing with anthropologists and archeologists (Mom has a Ph.D in Angropology) is that you can practically drop me anywhere on the planet, bare-ass naked, and I'll be able to cope. Don't get me wrong, I'll miss the heck out of my tech, especially my collection of computers, but you can't eat a computer.
As I believe I pointed out, there a potential uses for this so-called waste. What may be waste at one particular snapshot of the technological arc may be highly valuable at a (near) future date. This is also historical fact as has been demonstrated time and time again. Materials that were thought to be useless turned out to be highly desirable in future manufacturing processes. Coal tar would be my prime exhibit with mine tailings from various metal mining sites that were high in elements such as titanium, molybdenum, etc. Heck, at one time, urananium-oxide (yellowcake to be specific) was thought only to be useful as a dye for over a thousand years, at least. Oops.
As for the terrorist threat {yawn}. It is way overhyped by people that don't have a clue about what they are tallking about. First off, dealing with high-level waste requires the resources, specifically the equpment, currently only available to governments. This stuff is not only extremely radioactive, but toxic as well. True, give a budget of ten million or so and I could come up with a facility to deal with it but our intelligence services would pick up on that in short order. Secondly, the stuff will be guarded and almost certainly more well guarded than is the case with our current on-site storage scheme which was always meant to be a temporary solution. While in the service I served on a counter-terrorism team and prior to entering the service I studied terrorist tactics. Terrorists can achieve their goals far more easily than stealing vitrified, high-level waste, having to evade NEST and the counter-terrorist military op of the millenium, and ensuing fall-out (pun intended). Good thing I wear a white-hat since I could easily come up with ops far more impressive, effective (political, media), and secure.
In any case, the point is not that we use nuclear (fission or fusion) unto the end of days. We merely use it as a stepping stone to achieve renewable energy independence. Sending fifty to a hundred billon a year to overseas energy suppliers is downright idiotic when a similar investment of one years cost could easily eliminate that cost entirely using not a single bit of new technology except in the case of genetic engineering of plants for ethanol production, but that's dirt cheap in comparison to cthe capital startup costs of some of the other required tech.
When you get down to it, the world of economics is just like the world of engineering. Both exist in a system of constraints and the job involves dealing with those constraints to maximum the return on investment. When I realized that it became no surprise that I am comfortable in both worlds.
The reason it is written off is that even if all the potential tidal power from the coastlines of the United States were captured, it would supply less than 1%, yes one percent, of our electrical needs and that's assuming that the process is 100% efficient which nothing can be under the second law of thermodynamics. You also face very high captial startup costs and as another poster pointed out in this thread, investors in utilities avoid that like the plague. OTEC is a far better approach in comparison, for the same capital investment you get higher amounts of electrical production and the pollutant effect in this case is more fish. I think we can deal with that kind of side effect.
Actually I don't need to look at the numbers, I know the numbers. The chip industry is getting better about this although it has a long way to go especially in the manufacturing of photovoltiac cells. Before the shift away from using PCE as part of the manufacturing (cleaning) process), the sheer amount of hazardous chemical waste was mind-boggling even to someone used to dealing with materials in metric tons and kilotons. It's still far from ideal and with the introduction of nanotechnological processes into the photovoltiac mix, process engineering will on become more complex as will dealing with the wastes.
As for fission power, her comment is so out of date it isn't even funny. The uranium (and should we use an alternative process, thorium) is already mined and stockpiled. The last time I looked at the data, it's a couple of hundred years worth at current usage rates for uranium and potentially thosands of years for thorium. The photovoltiac cells, and alternative converters of solar energy, do not exist. So on the one hand we have an existing, usable supply, and on the other hand (economist, remember?) we have something that still needs to be manufactured, and actually in this case, we need to create the manufacturing plants as well.
Which way would you go were you a rational actor? Duh!
The problem there was he was relying on the TTAPS ('Nuclear Winter') model which was fundametally flawed in that it was one-dimensional. Later, more refined models started incorporating three spatial dimensions, the temporal dimension, and known weather patterns. These refinements demonstrated, if the model is accurate, that there is a far higher threshhold for nuclear winter, and the effects that Sagan cited from the oil field fire pollutants, than previously thought. The model is still just that, a model, that may reflect the universe at large. The oil field fires gave us some lower boundary data to verify against but without upper boundary data (someone tossing a lot of nukes around) who can say what the threshhold is actually. Frankly I'd rather not find out. I know what they can actually do.
Slight flaw there, since you obviously don't know nuclear weapons design. Fusion weapons use a fission nuclear device to initiate the fusion reaction. You also seem to assume that a fusion detonation yields reduced radiation effects, the only reason I can discern for why one would select a fusion device, as compared to a fission device. That's a heck of an assumption with nothing to back it up. There are numerous conditions that effect the results, most of them environmental.
I probably know more about postive and negative feedback loops as applied to more disciplines than any man living and that goes equally well for the perils and pitfalls of modeling systems. We do not have an accurate model of the atmospheric feedback loops in earth's ecosystem as has been demonstrated time and again with almost every set of monthly journals that I receive or journey down to the university to read. If you have garbage either being fed into your model in the form of data and/or in the form of the mathematical structure of the model and its interdependent equations, you get garbage out and that is what we see to date. No model has been able to map previous climatological trends accurately on the basis of existing known inputs. Plain, simple, recorded scientific fact. What you have instead is faith in a model that does not reflect the modeled system at hand. Faith, not scientific method. I deal in facts and reproducible results that reflect the actual behavior of the universe. These people remind me more and more of the history of economics prior to the econometric revolution (and sadly still exists today in many corridors of academe and power).
Bring me an accurate model that reflects past performance, then we can talk. I've dealt with chaotic systems before and while no cakewalk, it can be done.
Fortunately, the work on climate change is being done by people who understand these effects and who observe and refine numbers for them.
Ummm..., yeah..., right. Sorry to disillusion you but that is not the case. Clouds and there effects within climatological systems, especially all the positive and negative feedback loops, are the most badly broken area of the computer models and unfortunately the area where we need the best answers. Clouds may very well determine whether we face an ice age or a Venusian future. By way of background, I got my start back in my early teens creating models, empirically testing them against the real world, and teaching my techniques. So far the computer models I've examained and/or read journal articles about do not compare well with real world behavior. You could say models are my 'thang', statistics, systems engineering and analysis, and econometrics (& sociometrics for that matter) and just the way to bring the models into alignment with the real world and make use of them. Archeology, nuclear engineering, logistics, OSHA/HERP/HERF/HERO (some milary jargon in there), epidemiology, bsusiness process, process engineering, power generation, even sociological and psychological, those are just a few disciplines I've operated in and saved the government millions per year (and more than a few lives). [I just wish the government has given me a cut! Oh well.]
The climatological computer models and often enough aren't even generating predictions of the same order of magnitude, high or low, which is disconcerting in the least and inexcusable in any well-observed or well-understood system, which tells me that climate is neither. Even the mathematical systems of climate are poorly understood. They are non-linear, chaotic systems. While such features do occur in other models I have done over the years, that are not the central defining characteristic of the system! If I had attempted to use these models for a research project before the chairman of my department, I would have been laughed out the door. Dr. F. N. David had no tolerance for inaccurate models and that was the very first thing she taught: follow the data; do not attempt to manipulate the date to match the preconceived model. I shudder to think what would have happened in the military or later working for civil service using models with such accuracies.
Lastly, as I poionted out above, establishing and enforcing policy decisions based upon models that may, or more likely not, represent the way the (system) actually works is idiotic if not absolutely foolhardy. Multi-disciplinary systems are another of my 'thangs' and climatology overlaps fields from atmospherics to biology, botany, oceaonography, thermosdynamics, and especially vulcanology. The sad fact here is that we completely lack the systems people to even get a good hack at this problem and those that do exist, well good luck getting funding, let alone published. Polymaths are not appreciated where they abide. Especially when they ignore ideologically approved agendas.
The fields of politics and the sciences are littered with the wreckage of ideologically driven policies based upon theory, not data. Is the globe warming? Yep, nope, maybe. Is it entirely due to man? I doubt it and find that yet another example of Homo Hubris at work. You can actually flip a coin as to whether we are in a period of global cooling or global warming simply upon the basis of what year you select as your baseline for temperature measurements and where those measurements were collected, I cannot emphasize that enough.
The chief engineering discipline I was trained in was nuclear engineering and I will be the first to acknowledge the dangers. The rational dangers, especially since I worked professionally and taught for four years before serving in the US Navy was statstics and probability theory, that and computer science. Rational dangers. We have a few metric tons of high level waste, especially if we vitrify the damn stuff. Heck, it might even have future economic value when we figure out how to manipulate at the quantum nuclear level (and we will, I know that). Coal, and only to a slighly lesser degree oil petroleum, produces millions of metric tons of fly-ash, is far more hazardous in terms of radiation exposure due to radon gas and other isotopes introduced into the environment, and you still have to find a place to dump the stuff. KW-hr for KW-hr, waste for waste, coal/petroluem produces 400,000 times more waste than nuclear. That's a hard number. Give me a break. It's like Alar or DDT all over again.
Actually, this ties in with the decline of science and engineering candidates, and programs, in this country. I deal in the real world. I don't give a damn about ideology, belief systems, even social morés actually. The anti-nuclear wing of the environmental movement isn't rational (you should have heard one of them attempt to explain alpha radiation). I could discuss, what I can discuss publically, Cherobyl until I'm blue in the face. The plain fact of the matter is that such an accident as Chernobyl cannot occur over here, period. We do not even have an operational breeder reactor (Chernobyl was a cadmium moderated breeder) in this country, let alone any reactor without a containment dome, nor are we idiotic enough to bypass all the engineering safeguards and then conduct experiments on the reactor. [Or at least I hope the NRC isn't on that last point. I sometimes wonder.] I'll just leave it there.
Nature blessed us far beyond anything we deserved giving us a huge endowment of fossil fuels for cheap energy production and radical new materials, equally large endowments of uranium-235, -238, and if we would design towards it, especially thorium. But these are simply down payments. Fission and even fusion are simply a stop-gaps. We've had the technology now for over thirty years to build OTEC, SPS (Solar Power Sattelites), achieve break-even on fusion, improve the efficiency of plants for conversion to ethanol (plants are barely 1% efficient), and especially to engage in extremely heavy duty, Manhattan Project level, research into what makes our planet's complete ecology tick, and investments to achieve energy (and materials) independence for everyone, not just those of us in the 'rich' west. Instead what we face our challenges from the uninformed, or the ill-intentioned, to block any and all potential approaches to breaking out of this deadlock. Remember the windmill farm over the horizon from the Kennedy Compound?
As it stands right now, your children's children may curse the people living today to eternal damnation for squandering our endowment. We are well beyond the scientific research stage, it's (relatively) simple nuts-and-bolts engineering. As I've said elsewhere, not my problem. I don't have long left on this planet (alive anyway). What continues to amaze me is that when I break the numbers down for the actual spending required, even accounting for 500% inefficiencies typical of NASA and other government agencies (you can tell I was in government), it's cheap. Dirt cheap. [Total] Highway Spending Bill 'Pork' cheap. If we have to spend money on pork, lets do it here.
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I don't think anyone else has bothered to put together several interesting recent developments. For power you use the cadmium-salt nanotech solar cell tech, on either side, the base is this five-layer circuitry, the display would be liquid paper, possibly, or perhaps OLED, or both, and toss in the recent Apple patents-pending for an improved touch interface. Oh, yes, perhaps you could also tap into the body's natural electrical field and heat for additional power. Add a wireless visor display, subdermal voice communications as well.Numerous kinks to work out, de-glitch, etc., but do-able, very do-able. Flexible bracelet form, natch. The flexipad is born (from the Axis of Time series by John Birmingham).
Well, Duh!!! I haven't thought of Solaris in years although I recall it's a BSD derivative of some sort. That'll work since I still have the Daemon book and experience running it on mi Amiga back in the 80's.
Thanks!
That covers what I have done in the IT field. I won't bore you with the non-IT rest. It runs to several pages, and I rarely slept. But it was never boring, which is usually has been lately.
Actually this is one of the goals VMWare is proposing to meet with their vSphere. vCenter, ad nauseum initiatives. [full disclosure I've beta'ed VMWare software since v1]. This also presupposes full P2V, V2P cross machine conversions if required. The goal here is be anywhere, and run anywhere.
:-).
Now if I had the money, I'd toss full de-dup into the storage array mix as well, so much of the image file size essentially disappears unless there is simply no duplication anywhere. And if you are in that situation, take my advice. Quit, or just shoot yourself and get it over with.
It's been a long time since I played at that level (six mainframes, eighteen mini's, 575 desktops, and I never got an accurate count of the 100+ laptops) but at some point you have to ask yourself, when does the customization end? Standardization was the only thing that kept myself and my team of four !relatively! sane.
If you seriously need customization of that level, then you aren't doing things right. Reduce each VM to a single app (Apache, MySQL, IIS, network appliance, whatever) and use virtual switches to create a topology as required. Think of each VM as a particular Lego block, or IC: Systems Componentization as it were. And this is where de-dupe will also shine.
Which explains why a certain storage company bought VMWare, and a certain switching company has created a virtual switch. Now if you don't have the big bucks, you have a slight problem. However you can create this kind of topology if each box has more than one physical network adapter AND you get creative. Now that job I also wouldn't mind trying here. Time to resuscitate some old boxes and see what I can come up with. Been a while since I setup an enterprise class simulation
It's high time that we all realize that the lines between the various (computer) engineering disciplines are now blurred. Sure, be a subject matter expert but know How the other people think and work.
Anyone know of a F/OSS de-dupe?!
Political leanings are irrelevant here. From the light curve, you can extrapolate sensor capability in a various applications such as boost-course, mid-course, even late-course ballistic missile/warhead intercept capabilities, which should, given known albedo characteristics for those phases, liklihood of detection. That's just one engineer's perspective.
Like you I generally prefer to be referred to as a consultant since it wasn't until recently that I found the proper term (synthesist). I operate across multiple problem domains, engineering disciplines, sciences, etc. By the time I left the Navy, I had trained two other individuals to approach systems analysis and engineering my way and I'm certain they did quite well. The problems are, as I see it: (1) an inability to systematically deconstruct the processes to there core (layered) components, and reengineer them as needed; (2) the inability to delegate to subject matter experts that are available; and (3) the inability to foster teamwork. Usually it's 1 that kills most projects, but 2 & 3 can lead to far larger financial loses as well as losses in prestige and personnel.
About five years into my naval career, they handed me a key to the front (control) panel to every Harris 300/301 computer and the master password for Pacific Fleet. A Harris system engineer also gave an unexpurgated system generation tape (all the compilers, tools, and documentation were uncut). I never knew where I was going on some days but it was sure fun since it was all about understanding the processes and making them tick correctly be it hardware, software, or people. And teaching, of course!
Heck I'd take a job. Fortran, WatFor, WatFiv, Assembler 360 and 370 (loved it), and I could JCL with the best. Archive 5 (removable disk pack) was practically mine for five years at our local UC. I still recall reading the JCL manual and right there on one page for JCL Job Class ranking that if you picked a particular set (J,K,L, or M) and set TIME=24.00.00 it turned off all acounting ;-). 12-17 yo back then, but I still have some life left (48 now). Actually, learning from the IBM system engineers is what set me apart from other software types. Zero software defects (any kind) was engraved in my soul. Paid off when the penalty for failure would have been federal prision (Navy).
Yeah, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Sorry, except for testing purposes for Microsoft and others, I entirely deal with the home and SOHO markets and I have no MSDN subscription here. Frankly, it's way out of my financial reach and will remain so for the forseeable future unless I come up with the killer app of the century (not likely). The whole situation is very strange in light of Microsoft rolling out the Express line of development tools to rekindle their 'Golden Age of Visual Basic' again. With free virtualization software from both major providers, free development tools, yet requiring an MSDN subscription to test in a virtual environment for software targetted at the home market, this does not make sense. Then again, we are talking about Microsoft where what one unit is trying to do frequently is in opposition to what another unit is doing.
I hate to be rude, but you really need some more education and some hands on experience here.
True enough. I was teaching at the university and consulting on the side when I was fourteen yet didn't graduate from High School until I was 17. How's that for logic. $40 per hour on those consulting gigs, back in '75, was nothing to sneeze at.
At the time the funding was cut, it was just engineering. We had several working models which did produce fusion neutrons which is where the theoretical science ends and the applied science, engineering begins. You show me it's possible, I design it, build it, and make the damn thing work.
Give me an efficient cell and then I can go look into the materials science, process engineering, and related fields to come up with efficiencies of scale and manufacturing. I've been doing that most of my life, both in IT and other engineering fields, it isn't that hard. Just skull sweat, a willingness to experiment, and time (although not that much of the latter). I'm not even unique in that regard. Give me more than one design and I can then run econometric analyses on life-cycle and production costs to evaluate which is the better choice. All the same, just numbers.
What nuclear engineer or physicist told you that? How do they know? It is a fundamental principle of science that you can not prove a negative. Sorry, can't be done. And speaking as a nuclear engineer who keeps his eye on both fission and fusion research, there are at least two approaches that do work on a small scale and have yielded fusion nuetrons. The problems they were having were scaling up either the voltage (electron beam) and/or beam density (electron beam and nuetral particle beam).
That was before James Earl Carter, III, then President of the United States, and former US Navy Nuclear Reactor Officer, came along, slashed the fusion research budget well beyond the bone which not only resulted in stagnant research programs but the laying off of many of the fusion researchers at that time. The budget was never really restored fully. Also toss in such idiotic practices as classifying Soviet research that they wanted to share with the US and you have a real comedy of errors (or tragedy actually). There's a lot more but I'll stop there. We could have had it in the '90's given just what I know of what Sandia was doing at the time, let alone the other projects which were also showing remarkable progress right up until the money was yanked.
As for the environmentalists keeping the engineers honest, well speaking as both an engineer and former member of several environmental organizations including Greenpeace, you have to have three components: a brain, some modicum of scientific training, and the willingness to use both. Sadly they fail in that regard which is why I left them. Emotional appeals do not impress either the universe or myself.
Agreed. Complacency is a continuing issue with all technological solutions and has been since the first flint or obsidian tools. I don't settle for good enough, even when I worked for the guv'ment, but it does seem to be the human condition. Sadly.
If I should be still alive, which is doubtful as I'm terminal but I've made it past my expiration date by two years so far, I'm going to be in column B without the four arms required. One nice thing about spending much of my early teenage years assosociateing with anthropologists and archeologists (Mom has a Ph.D in Angropology) is that you can practically drop me anywhere on the planet, bare-ass naked, and I'll be able to cope. Don't get me wrong, I'll miss the heck out of my tech, especially my collection of computers, but you can't eat a computer.
As for the terrorist threat {yawn}. It is way overhyped by people that don't have a clue about what they are tallking about. First off, dealing with high-level waste requires the resources, specifically the equpment, currently only available to governments. This stuff is not only extremely radioactive, but toxic as well. True, give a budget of ten million or so and I could come up with a facility to deal with it but our intelligence services would pick up on that in short order. Secondly, the stuff will be guarded and almost certainly more well guarded than is the case with our current on-site storage scheme which was always meant to be a temporary solution. While in the service I served on a counter-terrorism team and prior to entering the service I studied terrorist tactics. Terrorists can achieve their goals far more easily than stealing vitrified, high-level waste, having to evade NEST and the counter-terrorist military op of the millenium, and ensuing fall-out (pun intended). Good thing I wear a white-hat since I could easily come up with ops far more impressive, effective (political, media), and secure.
In any case, the point is not that we use nuclear (fission or fusion) unto the end of days. We merely use it as a stepping stone to achieve renewable energy independence. Sending fifty to a hundred billon a year to overseas energy suppliers is downright idiotic when a similar investment of one years cost could easily eliminate that cost entirely using not a single bit of new technology except in the case of genetic engineering of plants for ethanol production, but that's dirt cheap in comparison to cthe capital startup costs of some of the other required tech.
When you get down to it, the world of economics is just like the world of engineering. Both exist in a system of constraints and the job involves dealing with those constraints to maximum the return on investment. When I realized that it became no surprise that I am comfortable in both worlds.
The reason it is written off is that even if all the potential tidal power from the coastlines of the United States were captured, it would supply less than 1%, yes one percent, of our electrical needs and that's assuming that the process is 100% efficient which nothing can be under the second law of thermodynamics. You also face very high captial startup costs and as another poster pointed out in this thread, investors in utilities avoid that like the plague. OTEC is a far better approach in comparison, for the same capital investment you get higher amounts of electrical production and the pollutant effect in this case is more fish. I think we can deal with that kind of side effect.
As for fission power, her comment is so out of date it isn't even funny. The uranium (and should we use an alternative process, thorium) is already mined and stockpiled. The last time I looked at the data, it's a couple of hundred years worth at current usage rates for uranium and potentially thosands of years for thorium. The photovoltiac cells, and alternative converters of solar energy, do not exist. So on the one hand we have an existing, usable supply, and on the other hand (economist, remember?) we have something that still needs to be manufactured, and actually in this case, we need to create the manufacturing plants as well.
Which way would you go were you a rational actor? Duh!
The problem there was he was relying on the TTAPS ('Nuclear Winter') model which was fundametally flawed in that it was one-dimensional. Later, more refined models started incorporating three spatial dimensions, the temporal dimension, and known weather patterns. These refinements demonstrated, if the model is accurate, that there is a far higher threshhold for nuclear winter, and the effects that Sagan cited from the oil field fire pollutants, than previously thought. The model is still just that, a model, that may reflect the universe at large. The oil field fires gave us some lower boundary data to verify against but without upper boundary data (someone tossing a lot of nukes around) who can say what the threshhold is actually. Frankly I'd rather not find out. I know what they can actually do.
Slight flaw there, since you obviously don't know nuclear weapons design. Fusion weapons use a fission nuclear device to initiate the fusion reaction. You also seem to assume that a fusion detonation yields reduced radiation effects, the only reason I can discern for why one would select a fusion device, as compared to a fission device. That's a heck of an assumption with nothing to back it up. There are numerous conditions that effect the results, most of them environmental.
Bring me an accurate model that reflects past performance, then we can talk. I've dealt with chaotic systems before and while no cakewalk, it can be done.
Ummm..., yeah..., right. Sorry to disillusion you but that is not the case. Clouds and there effects within climatological systems, especially all the positive and negative feedback loops, are the most badly broken area of the computer models and unfortunately the area where we need the best answers. Clouds may very well determine whether we face an ice age or a Venusian future. By way of background, I got my start back in my early teens creating models, empirically testing them against the real world, and teaching my techniques. So far the computer models I've examained and/or read journal articles about do not compare well with real world behavior. You could say models are my 'thang', statistics, systems engineering and analysis, and econometrics (& sociometrics for that matter) and just the way to bring the models into alignment with the real world and make use of them. Archeology, nuclear engineering, logistics, OSHA/HERP/HERF/HERO (some milary jargon in there), epidemiology, bsusiness process, process engineering, power generation, even sociological and psychological, those are just a few disciplines I've operated in and saved the government millions per year (and more than a few lives). [I just wish the government has given me a cut! Oh well.]
The climatological computer models and often enough aren't even generating predictions of the same order of magnitude, high or low, which is disconcerting in the least and inexcusable in any well-observed or well-understood system, which tells me that climate is neither. Even the mathematical systems of climate are poorly understood. They are non-linear, chaotic systems. While such features do occur in other models I have done over the years, that are not the central defining characteristic of the system! If I had attempted to use these models for a research project before the chairman of my department, I would have been laughed out the door. Dr. F. N. David had no tolerance for inaccurate models and that was the very first thing she taught: follow the data; do not attempt to manipulate the date to match the preconceived model. I shudder to think what would have happened in the military or later working for civil service using models with such accuracies.
Lastly, as I poionted out above, establishing and enforcing policy decisions based upon models that may, or more likely not, represent the way the (system) actually works is idiotic if not absolutely foolhardy. Multi-disciplinary systems are another of my 'thangs' and climatology overlaps fields from atmospherics to biology, botany, oceaonography, thermosdynamics, and especially vulcanology. The sad fact here is that we completely lack the systems people to even get a good hack at this problem and those that do exist, well good luck getting funding, let alone published. Polymaths are not appreciated where they abide. Especially when they ignore ideologically approved agendas.
The fields of politics and the sciences are littered with the wreckage of ideologically driven policies based upon theory, not data. Is the globe warming? Yep, nope, maybe. Is it entirely due to man? I doubt it and find that yet another example of Homo Hubris at work. You can actually flip a coin as to whether we are in a period of global cooling or global warming simply upon the basis of what year you select as your baseline for temperature measurements and where those measurements were collected, I cannot emphasize that enough.
Actually, this ties in with the decline of science and engineering candidates, and programs, in this country. I deal in the real world. I don't give a damn about ideology, belief systems, even social morés actually. The anti-nuclear wing of the environmental movement isn't rational (you should have heard one of them attempt to explain alpha radiation). I could discuss, what I can discuss publically, Cherobyl until I'm blue in the face. The plain fact of the matter is that such an accident as Chernobyl cannot occur over here, period. We do not even have an operational breeder reactor (Chernobyl was a cadmium moderated breeder) in this country, let alone any reactor without a containment dome, nor are we idiotic enough to bypass all the engineering safeguards and then conduct experiments on the reactor. [Or at least I hope the NRC isn't on that last point. I sometimes wonder.] I'll just leave it there.
Nature blessed us far beyond anything we deserved giving us a huge endowment of fossil fuels for cheap energy production and radical new materials, equally large endowments of uranium-235, -238, and if we would design towards it, especially thorium. But these are simply down payments. Fission and even fusion are simply a stop-gaps. We've had the technology now for over thirty years to build OTEC, SPS (Solar Power Sattelites), achieve break-even on fusion, improve the efficiency of plants for conversion to ethanol (plants are barely 1% efficient), and especially to engage in extremely heavy duty, Manhattan Project level, research into what makes our planet's complete ecology tick, and investments to achieve energy (and materials) independence for everyone, not just those of us in the 'rich' west. Instead what we face our challenges from the uninformed, or the ill-intentioned, to block any and all potential approaches to breaking out of this deadlock. Remember the windmill farm over the horizon from the Kennedy Compound?
As it stands right now, your children's children may curse the people living today to eternal damnation for squandering our endowment. We are well beyond the scientific research stage, it's (relatively) simple nuts-and-bolts engineering. As I've said elsewhere, not my problem. I don't have long left on this planet (alive anyway). What continues to amaze me is that when I break the numbers down for the actual spending required, even accounting for 500% inefficiencies typical of NASA and other government agencies (you can tell I was in government), it's cheap. Dirt cheap. [Total] Highway Spending Bill 'Pork' cheap. If we have to spend money on pork, lets do it here.