We have one reactor in Australia which is a lucas hights research reactor, for developing amoung other things, the radioactive isotopes used in medical diagnoses.
The story goes, my next door neighbor is actually a Safty analyst up there. Whenever he comes around for the odd cup of tea he enlightens me on a few facts, which i feel speak fairly generally for most of the western nations with reactors. A few of the major points are
1. The nuclear industry has grown up ALOT since the cold war era, and today there are rewards in place for safty record tracks, rather then being able to maintain the highest production levels.
2. A literally massive portion of the nuclear waste is infact harmless, various items used not even close the the reactor have to be carefully disposed off under government legistlation, even though they contain little more radiation then that absorbed by a shirt from a day on the beach.
3. The disposal methods avaliable for the classical highly radiactive waste have matured greatly without much public notice. The whole "to the moon theory" is as much of a joke as it is an insult to the industry in the 21st century, for one theres simply not enough waste produced to warrant it economically, let alone the safe risks involved in useing space dumping. Alot of people ignore the fact that alot of todays waste is going back into the earth from whence it came, and is as dangerous to people as raw amounts of uranium are if dug up intentionally. It comes out radioactive, it goes back radioactive. And in the proces generates electricity, industrial and medical materials. My neighbor is far more concerned about the pollution levels effecting peoples asthma.
4. My neighbor also conceeded at nuclear technology might not be as economical as other forms of energy production, but we both came to this conclusion. It is worth going that extra mile to ensure that we no longer produce greenhouse gases adversly affection the worlds environment and also, that in many circumstances renewable energy fails in terms of practicality and maturity.
So, for a more energy hungry world, that even having africa covered in wind farms couldnt feed, nuclear power seems to be the practical, and *arguably* economical choice for decreasing our reliance on fossile fuels and our harm to the environment. At least until *possibly* reaches maturity in the next 50 years or so.
Im agnostic, but i for one know that above all else
Science is not incompatiable with spirituality.
Sometimes science might interfear with conservative religious teachings, but when that happens its up to the individual to make up their own minds. Take in all the information they can and decide for themselves.
I fear that sometimes, all this intelligent design fiasco is simply a minority of people who fear beyond all else that if they let go of their litteral interpretation of religious teachings that their lives will become divoid of a sense of wonder, or purpose.
For some, i feel that science is a natural path of humanity, it is part of who we are, we are discoverers. For most, science helps us uncover more and more about the universe, from the very small, to the very large and even the scale of interactions between objects within it. Looking at the universe brings a sense of awe to every human being and whether they interpret this as part of gods power or simply mathamatical beauty is up to them.
I ask, anyone to look at a picutre of the Hubble Deep Field photograph, and tell me that it doesnt give them a sense of awe. Then i will ask them what it means to them... some will say it shows the correlation of how truely important yet insignificant our actions and lives are, while some will say that it is a testament to their gods power. Either way, neither statement is removing the scientific accuracy of the image.
Just like when church was scared when Galileo presented his heliocentric model of the universe, Intelligent design and creationalist believers are scared of losing the wonder and purpose in their worlds, because they have never known the scientific method, the unknown scares them. for them everything is made clear in a book, and to diviate would not only be sin, but would scare them at the deepest level. Its just upto us to convince them that the scientific method is not imcompatiable with spirituality, and that infact, discovering details about the world around us is not only enjoyable, and fullfilling, but can be seen in terms of gods power.
The universe is a big place, and that makes god powerful for some, science just tried to understand it, and make it bigger, and for many more it makes their god even more powerful.
Science and spirituality are not imcompatiable. Religious conservatives are just scared, for they are only human and are not familure with the beauty of the universe outside the pages of a book.
RIAA's and MPAA's plans are working perfectly, they realised that their previous fear tactics through sueing were not having an accountable effect, then they saw Sony shoot itself in the foot with DRM.
They asked themselves what would be the best way to stop people transfering their media online through P2P, only to come up with another of their patented brilliant ideas at crushing P2P once and for all.....
Stop producing media.
It's so simple... If they dont produce anything, or at least anything anyone wants to listen to or watch, then no one will pirate it. Deviously evil, but oh so effective..... Strangly reminds me of classic Superhero comics and cartoons, where the villians would come up with a new plan to kill the superhero every week, only to be defeated and thus retret to their leir to work on a new and more evil plan.
You mean the GUI from Unix in that movie a decade or so ago, the one with Dinosaurs. Jurassic Dinosaurs. Inside what could have been a themepark. I believe it was called, Jurassic Park.
1. Using government money is bound to have strings attached.
2. China is having a peaceful awakening and the Soviet Union Fell over a decade ago, so unless Bin Laden has his own satellite network of dooms-day devices, this seems a pretty fuitless idea, if true.
3. A deep space reciever of very very minute radio sources, being used to output a focused beam to destroy LEO targets.... enough said.
4. Using this deep space telescope to target LEO objects for later destruction. So let me get this straight, the Military is replaceing all of their LEO object detection systems, with a deep space radar? I guess technology really is becoming centralised.
or should we all begin calling it EL RADAR and wait for Jodie Foster to turn up?
With toys like that becomeing avaliable, even if slightly unrefined, its only a matter of time before we have toys for children alot like the Bear from the movie A.I.
Who said artificially intelligent, nuclear powered, tonka-tough toys bend on makeing sre your children eat their breakfast and do their homework?
Out of pure interest, how many Australians like myself are active users of slashdot, it seems faily often amooung a great many American forums, like slashdot and the steam forums, i reguraly run into fellow aussies.
By the way, like, 3 people will be pissed off by this slow and painful death of kazza.
Project Manager: Alright, in light of the Churchs and concerned citizens feelings on the issue of pornography online, we have decided to do the best we can as an organization and insist that all pronographic sites be moved to a new domain, so that they can be very easily blocked thus meaning that...
Conservatist: Hold on a gawd damn minute, this is an outrage we will not allow it!
Project Manager: My apologies, is there a specific problem with the idea?
Conservatist: Absolutly! its a horrible idea!
Project Manager: Im sorry sir, i dont quite understand, using the method i described we can make it much easier for people to be protected again profanity, is that not what you have been lobbying for?
Conservatist: Absolutly! This is exactly the kind of progress we wanted, however i wont be one to see progress in either the right or wrong direction around here, which is why we must object
Project Manager: Im not quite sure you understand sir, we are trying to help keep chil...
Conservatist: Your about an inch away from going to hell young man, we dont care for your so called "logic" and "deduction", we know the truth is that by making profanity easier to protect against, its more likely to be seen.
Project Manager: im sorry sir, your being totally unreasonable, many many people have put their own time into developing this stradagry, and we believe its the best move we can make at this time. As you can see the majority of people are in favour of this ide...
Conservatist: I DONT CARE, I know im being illogical, irrational and am bassically shooting myself in the foot, but by god me and my friends are going to take this one to the top! RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE....
If this is done wrong, it could ahve horrible consequences in humans. Fear ranges incredibly from simple common sense and caution to the fight or flight senarious which activate a persons adreanal glands. Infact fear is a intergral part of our survival instinct, without it, we would surely self destruct.
Im not sure about the liminations of this discovery, but if fear was removed from a human, there would be nothing except a thin layer of logic between them and the edge of a building, a knife on a desktop, or a burning fireplace.
I cannot simply imagine living without fear, if one delves deeply enough, one realises that fear is an integral part of logic. IF touch fire THEN burn, IF burn THEN damage, DAMAGE bad. But if one has no sense of "harm" to one self, then there is a break down of logic. Its is an imperpexly complext situation, and i would be amazed to see the self destructive patter emerge in a person who has had such gene theropy.
What do you believe would happen if a person had no fear?
Would their survival and logic process break down?
Would they become self destructive without realising it?
Finally, on the issue of military use, it would seem that this development stops the production fo the protine not limits it, which would means, if used as a military application, you would have soldiers who would be unpredictable. They could possibly be self destructive, unscared of alerting enemies to their position, will not think through tactics to ensure their survival and the completeion of their obkective and finally they may not even be afraid of disobeying orders....
Your future is pretty grim, it may exist now, but it wont in a few decades.
Perth is built on a sandbank people. One that is slowly becomeing unstable.
Although the actual city may take a long time to go under or for any foundations to crack, the problem is already causing Perths water tables to rise and causeing so far a small amount of catchment water to run into the sea.
Luckily, the city of wollongong (where i live) is built on top of old coal wash and useless material from the many mines we have. That has no chance of causing any problems, and the huge floods we had in 1998 were not related:P
Personally, if i was doing biology in highschool, and the powers that be attempted to pull the wool over my eyes, and try and limit my knowlege by teaching me garbage, i would be fairly unhappy.
Which also bags the question of what the science teachers think?
. Surely science classes canot operate without science teachers, i myself would leave in disgust, realising that the occupation i chose as my path is being mocked, and twisted for some egotistical and fundamentalist enjoyment.
History tells us that societys can work without the internet.
However the truth of the matter is that our society could well possibly go into shock from the loss of the internet. The pace at which information flows using the internet is something which can never be achieved by we mear mortals. Just ask any accountant. Think, ATM's, EFTPOS, Sharemarkets, Email, scientific data. All these things and more make use of the internet on a massive scale, and if were to dissapear well...
The teenager at the local corner store wouldnt be able to process your eftpos transaction, and when you try to get money from the atm inside the store, you wouldnt be able to. Now imagine this happening to roughly 600 million people.
Societies work on communication. The roads of the roman empire told us that, but they could not even suffice for the eventual size of the empire, and from a lack of communication, cultures grew apart, eventually splitting. Today the internet serves as the bussiness, infrmation and maybe cultural portal of the modern world.
Today, communication is severly under valued and taken for granted. If the internet were to stop tomorrow all fucking hell would break loose. Now to mention the loss of various services on the web.
Which is why the internet is made using redundancies, it cannot be shut down so long as a portion of it survives (which was DARPA's original project). But sure it can be damaged, simply nocking out data centres, backbones and DNS serves will hurt it massivly, but the insane amount of connections and people who are willing to pick up the slack just means any damage will be absorbed.
So i can see one of two things happening if you were to stop the internet as you say, and none of them is as positive as yours:
1. After the initial shock, we would return to a cira 1970's situation, maybe less. or 2. The shock will be so great to the advanced industrialised nations that our economies will no long be able to function. Which is very very bad.
The problem is that in recent decades those in science have been able to advance our knowlege at a pace that scares the general population. And because they are scared and fail to understand, they find comfort in the explainations religion offers.
The only way to stop this process is having intelligent people, make the right choices in terms of funding in education for science. More money for science sounds trivial compared to the argument at hand, but it is the key to the next generations ability to improve on the lasts, not simply become complacant.
And no, anti-scientists are not the majority, but they scream the loudest.
Here is a step by step guide to the death of science
People are stupid Science is the probing of the unknown it results in technological change Science evolves at a pace the general population cannot follow People are scared of the unknown and change Science becomes unknown to people People become scared of science People attempt to destroy what scares them People attack science People use religion as a weapon Science fights back with facts Facts have no effect on religion, people become more scared Science conceeds some ground Religion takes hold in education Science dies, not to screams and crying, but to cheers of joy A second Dark Age begins.....
I am all for the actions being undertaken, esspecially in the face of an outbreak but let us not forget that in a capitalist economy the incentive for the development of new technologies by companies comes in their ability to recieve profit.
It is a catch 22, we can break patent laws surrounding drugs that may help people, but in turn we will sacrafice the insentive for companies to reseach and develop new drugs to better combat disease.
Well first of all, im not a mac fan boy, infact i am admitedly a windows zealot. But in reference to what i said, i was mearly conceeding that the ipod got it right, and althoug i used the term ipod, it was primarily as an example of al devices of the sort, from the Zentouch to any other mp3 player.
Slashdot Mirror
We have one reactor in Australia which is a lucas hights research reactor, for developing amoung other things, the radioactive isotopes used in medical diagnoses.
The story goes, my next door neighbor is actually a Safty analyst up there. Whenever he comes around for the odd cup of tea he enlightens me on a few facts, which i feel speak fairly generally for most of the western nations with reactors. A few of the major points are
1. The nuclear industry has grown up ALOT since the cold war era, and today there are rewards in place for safty record tracks, rather then being able to maintain the highest production levels.
2. A literally massive portion of the nuclear waste is infact harmless, various items used not even close the the reactor have to be carefully disposed off under government legistlation, even though they contain little more radiation then that absorbed by a shirt from a day on the beach.
3. The disposal methods avaliable for the classical highly radiactive waste have matured greatly without much public notice. The whole "to the moon theory" is as much of a joke as it is an insult to the industry in the 21st century, for one theres simply not enough waste produced to warrant it economically, let alone the safe risks involved in useing space dumping. Alot of people ignore the fact that alot of todays waste is going back into the earth from whence it came, and is as dangerous to people as raw amounts of uranium are if dug up intentionally. It comes out radioactive, it goes back radioactive. And in the proces generates electricity, industrial and medical materials. My neighbor is far more concerned about the pollution levels effecting peoples asthma.
4. My neighbor also conceeded at nuclear technology might not be as economical as other forms of energy production, but we both came to this conclusion. It is worth going that extra mile to ensure that we no longer produce greenhouse gases adversly affection the worlds environment and also, that in many circumstances renewable energy fails in terms of practicality and maturity.
So, for a more energy hungry world, that even having africa covered in wind farms couldnt feed, nuclear power seems to be the practical, and *arguably* economical choice for decreasing our reliance on fossile fuels and our harm to the environment. At least until *possibly* reaches maturity in the next 50 years or so.
If the respective camps can't decide on a standard format, then the worlds consumers will decide for them.
The last thing consumers want is a format war, but if it comes to that, we will decide who wins based on quality, price and useability of product.
Listening to loud music causes hearing loss.
Fire prooved to be 'Hot' by team of Japanese Scientists.
UK based research finds water to be 'wet'.
I'm sorry, but what the hell are you talking about.
Im agnostic, but i for one know that above all else
Science is not incompatiable with spirituality.
Sometimes science might interfear with conservative religious teachings, but when that happens its up to the individual to make up their own minds. Take in all the information they can and decide for themselves.
I fear that sometimes, all this intelligent design fiasco is simply a minority of people who fear beyond all else that if they let go of their litteral interpretation of religious teachings that their lives will become divoid of a sense of wonder, or purpose.
For some, i feel that science is a natural path of humanity, it is part of who we are, we are discoverers. For most, science helps us uncover more and more about the universe, from the very small, to the very large and even the scale of interactions between objects within it. Looking at the universe brings a sense of awe to every human being and whether they interpret this as part of gods power or simply mathamatical beauty is up to them.
I ask, anyone to look at a picutre of the Hubble Deep Field photograph, and tell me that it doesnt give them a sense of awe. Then i will ask them what it means to them... some will say it shows the correlation of how truely important yet insignificant our actions and lives are, while some will say that it is a testament to their gods power. Either way, neither statement is removing the scientific accuracy of the image.
Just like when church was scared when Galileo presented his heliocentric model of the universe, Intelligent design and creationalist believers are scared of losing the wonder and purpose in their worlds, because they have never known the scientific method, the unknown scares them. for them everything is made clear in a book, and to diviate would not only be sin, but would scare them at the deepest level. Its just upto us to convince them that the scientific method is not imcompatiable with spirituality, and that infact, discovering details about the world around us is not only enjoyable, and fullfilling, but can be seen in terms of gods power.
The universe is a big place, and that makes god powerful for some, science just tried to understand it, and make it bigger, and for many more it makes their god even more powerful.
Science and spirituality are not imcompatiable. Religious conservatives are just scared, for they are only human and are not familure with the beauty of the universe outside the pages of a book.
RIAA's and MPAA's plans are working perfectly, they realised that their previous fear tactics through sueing were not having an accountable effect, then they saw Sony shoot itself in the foot with DRM.
.... Strangly reminds me of classic Superhero comics and cartoons, where the villians would come up with a new plan to kill the superhero every week, only to be defeated and thus retret to their leir to work on a new and more evil plan.
They asked themselves what would be the best way to stop people transfering their media online through P2P, only to come up with another of their patented brilliant ideas at crushing P2P once and for all.....
Stop producing media.
It's so simple... If they dont produce anything, or at least anything anyone wants to listen to or watch, then no one will pirate it. Deviously evil, but oh so effective.
Dude, globalisation is a GOOD thing.
Get your relatives a Gameboy.
Remind me to get one for my kid for christmas.
You mean the GUI from Unix in that movie a decade or so ago, the one with Dinosaurs. Jurassic Dinosaurs. Inside what could have been a themepark. I believe it was called, Jurassic Park.
1. Using government money is bound to have strings attached.
2. China is having a peaceful awakening and the Soviet Union Fell over a decade ago, so unless Bin Laden has his own satellite network of dooms-day devices, this seems a pretty fuitless idea, if true.
3. A deep space reciever of very very minute radio sources, being used to output a focused beam to destroy LEO targets.... enough said.
4. Using this deep space telescope to target LEO objects for later destruction. So let me get this straight, the Military is replaceing all of their LEO object detection systems, with a deep space radar? I guess technology really is becoming centralised.
or should we all begin calling it EL RADAR and wait for Jodie Foster to turn up?
"the Large Millimeter Telescope..." So ahh how large exactly is a millimeter in astronomical terms?
With toys like that becomeing avaliable, even if slightly unrefined, its only a matter of time before we have toys for children alot like the Bear from the movie A.I.
Who said artificially intelligent, nuclear powered, tonka-tough toys bend on makeing sre your children eat their breakfast and do their homework?
Out of pure interest, how many Australians like myself are active users of slashdot, it seems faily often amooung a great many American forums, like slashdot and the steam forums, i reguraly run into fellow aussies.
By the way, like, 3 people will be pissed off by this slow and painful death of kazza.
Project Manager: Alright, in light of the Churchs and concerned citizens feelings on the issue of pornography online, we have decided to do the best we can as an organization and insist that all pronographic sites be moved to a new domain, so that they can be very easily blocked thus meaning that...
Conservatist: Hold on a gawd damn minute, this is an outrage we will not allow it!
Project Manager: My apologies, is there a specific problem with the idea?
Conservatist: Absolutly! its a horrible idea!
Project Manager: Im sorry sir, i dont quite understand, using the method i described we can make it much easier for people to be protected again profanity, is that not what you have been lobbying for?
Conservatist: Absolutly! This is exactly the kind of progress we wanted, however i wont be one to see progress in either the right or wrong direction around here, which is why we must object
Project Manager: Im not quite sure you understand sir, we are trying to help keep chil...
Conservatist: Your about an inch away from going to hell young man, we dont care for your so called "logic" and "deduction", we know the truth is that by making profanity easier to protect against, its more likely to be seen.
Project Manager: im sorry sir, your being totally unreasonable, many many people have put their own time into developing this stradagry, and we believe its the best move we can make at this time. As you can see the majority of people are in favour of this ide...
Conservatist: I DONT CARE, I know im being illogical, irrational and am bassically shooting myself in the foot, but by god me and my friends are going to take this one to the top! RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE RABLE....
Project Manager: (cries)
Everyones thinking it, im just saying it out loud
Sony and the RIAA rape children and kill peoples mothers
If this is done wrong, it could ahve horrible consequences in humans. Fear ranges incredibly from simple common sense and caution to the fight or flight senarious which activate a persons adreanal glands. Infact fear is a intergral part of our survival instinct, without it, we would surely self destruct.
Im not sure about the liminations of this discovery, but if fear was removed from a human, there would be nothing except a thin layer of logic between them and the edge of a building, a knife on a desktop, or a burning fireplace.
I cannot simply imagine living without fear, if one delves deeply enough, one realises that fear is an integral part of logic. IF touch fire THEN burn, IF burn THEN damage, DAMAGE bad. But if one has no sense of "harm" to one self, then there is a break down of logic. Its is an imperpexly complext situation, and i would be amazed to see the self destructive patter emerge in a person who has had such gene theropy.
What do you believe would happen if a person had no fear?
Would their survival and logic process break down?
Would they become self destructive without realising it?
Finally, on the issue of military use, it would seem that this development stops the production fo the protine not limits it, which would means, if used as a military application, you would have soldiers who would be unpredictable. They could possibly be self destructive, unscared of alerting enemies to their position, will not think through tactics to ensure their survival and the completeion of their obkective and finally they may not even be afraid of disobeying orders....
Yes down here in australia, MSN seems to hold the monopoly.
Your future is pretty grim, it may exist now, but it wont in a few decades.
:P
Perth is built on a sandbank people. One that is slowly becomeing unstable.
Although the actual city may take a long time to go under or for any foundations to crack, the problem is already causing Perths water tables to rise and causeing so far a small amount of catchment water to run into the sea.
Luckily, the city of wollongong (where i live) is built on top of old coal wash and useless material from the many mines we have. That has no chance of causing any problems, and the huge floods we had in 1998 were not related
What do the students in Kansas Schools think?
Personally, if i was doing biology in highschool, and the powers that be attempted to pull the wool over my eyes, and try and limit my knowlege by teaching me garbage, i would be fairly unhappy.
Which also bags the question of what the science teachers think?
. Surely science classes canot operate without science teachers, i myself would leave in disgust, realising that the occupation i chose as my path is being mocked, and twisted for some egotistical and fundamentalist enjoyment.
All of the seasons are free on Bittorrent arn't they?
ahaha an Aussie, good on ya mate. I spotted the .au :)
I think your jumping your guns.
History tells us that societys can work without the internet.
However the truth of the matter is that our society could well possibly go into shock from the loss of the internet. The pace at which information flows using the internet is something which can never be achieved by we mear mortals. Just ask any accountant. Think, ATM's, EFTPOS, Sharemarkets, Email, scientific data. All these things and more make use of the internet on a massive scale, and if were to dissapear well...
The teenager at the local corner store wouldnt be able to process your eftpos transaction, and when you try to get money from the atm inside the store, you wouldnt be able to. Now imagine this happening to roughly 600 million people.
Societies work on communication. The roads of the roman empire told us that, but they could not even suffice for the eventual size of the empire, and from a lack of communication, cultures grew apart, eventually splitting. Today the internet serves as the bussiness, infrmation and maybe cultural portal of the modern world.
Today, communication is severly under valued and taken for granted. If the internet were to stop tomorrow all fucking hell would break loose. Now to mention the loss of various services on the web.
Which is why the internet is made using redundancies, it cannot be shut down so long as a portion of it survives (which was DARPA's original project). But sure it can be damaged, simply nocking out data centres, backbones and DNS serves will hurt it massivly, but the insane amount of connections and people who are willing to pick up the slack just means any damage will be absorbed.
So i can see one of two things happening if you were to stop the internet as you say, and none of them is as positive as yours:
1. After the initial shock, we would return to a cira 1970's situation, maybe less.
or
2. The shock will be so great to the advanced industrialised nations that our economies will no long be able to function. Which is very very bad.
The problem is that in recent decades those in science have been able to advance our knowlege at a pace that scares the general population. And because they are scared and fail to understand, they find comfort in the explainations religion offers.
The only way to stop this process is having intelligent people, make the right choices in terms of funding in education for science. More money for science sounds trivial compared to the argument at hand, but it is the key to the next generations ability to improve on the lasts, not simply become complacant.
And no, anti-scientists are not the majority, but they scream the loudest.
Here is a step by step guide to the death of science
People are stupid
Science is the probing of the unknown it results in technological change
Science evolves at a pace the general population cannot follow
People are scared of the unknown and change
Science becomes unknown to people
People become scared of science
People attempt to destroy what scares them
People attack science
People use religion as a weapon
Science fights back with facts
Facts have no effect on religion, people become more scared
Science conceeds some ground
Religion takes hold in education
Science dies, not to screams and crying, but to cheers of joy
A second Dark Age begins.....
I am all for the actions being undertaken, esspecially in the face of an outbreak but let us not forget that in a capitalist economy the incentive for the development of new technologies by companies comes in their ability to recieve profit.
It is a catch 22, we can break patent laws surrounding drugs that may help people, but in turn we will sacrafice the insentive for companies to reseach and develop new drugs to better combat disease.
Well first of all, im not a mac fan boy, infact i am admitedly a windows zealot. But in reference to what i said, i was mearly conceeding that the ipod got it right, and althoug i used the term ipod, it was primarily as an example of al devices of the sort, from the Zentouch to any other mp3 player.