On the contrary, there is waste heat from nuke plants. There is heat lost from any form of steam power.
You boil the water to make steam (under very high pressure), you run it through the turbines, and you release it. When it leaves the power plant, it's still signifigantly hotter than the surrounding environment, so obviously you haven't taken all the potential energy out of it - however you've gotten what you can from turbines.
Now add an electrolysis plant to the mix. You've lost some of your power output - the water needs to be kept contained so it doesn't cool via evaporation, which limits your ability to use turbines. However, you can now derive hydrogen from it at greater power effeciency than you could before with cold water, which is the whole point of the exercise. This is because regular electrolysis, as the OP pointed out, is grossly ineffecient.
You aren't getting power from nowhere, you're getting slightly better use of the energy you input into the electrolysis. All the system does is improve an otherwise severly ineffecient process. And as an added bonus, while you still need to transport the fuel to it's destination (which is a problem for all alternative fuels), you're no longer losing power in transmitting electricity from a power plant to a hydrogen production plant, since they're at the same site.
Actually, I saw a/. article some time ago about using a combination of high temperature + electrolysis to get hydrogen from water*. My memory may be wrong, but I think the gist was that it's easier to split water molecules when they're heated and/or under pressure (the electrical input needed is lowered). All you need to increase electrolysis effeciency is an abundant source of heat.
Now, where do we have tonnes of hot, pressurized water going to waste? Nuclear plants! The stuff in the heat exchangers is reused, but the stuff used in the turbines isn't. We could presumably use this as a hydrogen source - pipe the stuff through an extraction facility while it's still superheated, and split the water using electrolysis. You might have to construct a dedicated plant for this, one that doesn't produce commercial power, but it would be a self contained hydrogen source.
Now some people would argue that this is just trading Co2 for nuclear waste. Fine, that's still an improvement in my books, since the later is easier to contain, and can be recycled back into fuel. Plus, the final leaving sof nuclear power don't need to be contained forever - just bury them far below the water table in a subduction zone, and collapse the tunnel behind you. It'll eventually suck them back into the mantle.
But in the long run there's no requirement to get the superheated water from fission plants - if we can get fusion working, we'll have another source of power that presumably will produce lots of steam to run the turbines with.
Of course, the best solution in the meantime is a combination of different fossil fuel alternatives. Biofuels may be easier to convert our existing vehicles to, and might even be easier to make by using waste products (see the other/. story recently about using raw sewage to produce the stuff). But hey, having more than one approach is a good thing, and not hinging everything on fusion is sensible, given that the reactor technology is still many years away.
*Note: I am aware that I'm taking a/. science article from memory and assuming it was factually correct. In my defense, I did RTFA at the time and it seemed like it wasn't quackery.
True, but he didn't say they didn't. He merely said that, if windows were in fact to die, the people making/adding to linux could not subsequently make a commercial monopoly out of their product. And he's right - how on earth can you claim "monopoly" when the program isn't commercial?
"Yes, and since your topic was the fusion process..."
I think we have here the source of our misunderstanding.
The GP (the person I originally quoted) asked if fusion was safer than fission. I brought up the danger of fission reactors being used to make bombs, which is not an issue with fusion plants. You then took my phrase "likely no danger of weapon's proliferation" to refer to the entire process of fusion, rather than just the reactor tech.
There are existing weapons that use fusion. Building fusion reactors will not make these weapons any more widespread. That was my one, and only, point, about proliferation. Apologies for being unclear. I was in no way refering to the specific nuclear process, instead I meant the technology to get power from it.
Music - RIAA would love to attack P2P music services. Movies - substitue MPAA for RIAA and the same applies. Warez, you got the BSA...
But who the heck cares about porn? Of the affected materials, only the first three qualify as copyright infringement - most porn is legal (and most of what isn't legal, is illegal for reasons unrelated to copyright). You don't see lawsuits or massive industry crusades over pron-piracy.
I'm going to go with "the writer of this software want's to piss people off". It's the explanation that makes the most sense.
Unless, of course, that's what they want us to think....
H-bombs aren't in any way related to fusion power technology, save only that both use fusion reactions. A thermonuclear weapon and a fusion reactor have about as much in common as a chemical explosive and an internal combustion engine. If a fusion reactor were as easy to construct as a nuke, we'd have them already.
With a nuclear reactor there is a danger of weapons proliferation. Iran is a good example of that - reactors that can be used for power generation can also be used both as a valid excuse for obtaining nuclear materials and as a breeder reactor for making them weapons-grade.
With a fusion reactor, there likely is no danger; the only way that a reactor could help make a bomb is in neutron production to breed plutonium from uranium, and even that isn't likely, given that a conventional breeder reactor will be easier to build. Also, a country with a fusion power plant doesn't have any excuse other than bombmaking for owning the fissile materials in the first place.
"If the two types of bear can mate and produce fertile offspring, then they are really the same species."
Nah, different species can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Look up "ring species" for examples where A can breed with B, and B can breed with C but C cannot breed with A.
Mostly this reflects the fact that the term "species" is a fairly arbitrary distinction that goes back before our understanding of evolution.
I would tend to assume that a conventional fission based breeder reactor would be cheaper and easier to build if you want plutonium. Just getting fusion to work won't make it cheap or widespread right away after all, and by the time we have it, making breeder reactors should be old hat for countries like Iran. Also, a fusion plant will presumably be more complex that a fission one, and therefor harder for scientists and engineers working in third wourld countries to repurpose.
As for tritium, it has a halflife of only 12 years, and doesn't stay in the body for long periods, or become concentrated in specific organs like strontium-90 or radioactive iodine. It is radioactive, but if the reactor used a lithium breeding layer in it's shielding, then the tritium wouldn't need to leave the core. And when compared with the fuels used in just about every other means of power generation... well ask yourself if you'd rather have a ten-thousand liter oil spill or a ten liter tritium spill. After all, it's not like we need a whole hell of a lot to keep a reactor going, and assuming we breed the stuff on site, then we don't have to transport it.
The waste doesn't have to be especially long lived no matter what method of recycling you use. It's only when you don't recycle the waste that you run into problems.
However, consider what we're comparing to. The waste product of a fusion reaction (using deuterium and tritium fuel) is helium-4, which is safe and useful. The only radioactivity is through neutron activation, which isn't precisely "waste", and isn't even close to a fission plant.
Long term is relative. From a human perspective, if we have to store non-recyclable waste for 50 years before it's safe to handle or dispose of, that's a long term problem. It may not be a long time when compared with unspent uranium rods, but it's still "long term". That isn't to say it's horribly bad, but it does need to be considered in to total cost of operating a nuclear plant.
When comparing to a fission based reactor, perhaps my use of the word "minimal" was a tad skewed.
Remember that the object of comparison here has the same issue with neutron irradiation (ie, even ignoring waste products, a fission reactor core will become irradiated over time, as will the coolant in the heat exchangers). In addition to the neutron problem, which applies to both fission/fusion, you've also got to consider direct radioactive contamination from the fuel/waste. At least with a fusion reactor we can eliminate (or reduce) the risk of elements like strontium-90, since we get the option of choosing what radioactives we want left over at the end of the plant's life when we build it.
But I cede the point that, objectively, the degree of radioactivity in the core of a decomisioned plant would not be "minimal" by human standards.
"Also, if we do get large scale fusion, is it really going to be cleaner and safer than modern fission plants?"
No meltdown risk...
No long-lived waste products...
No dangerous fuels...
Likely no immediate danger of weapon proliferation...
And you have to ask if it's safer?
Just so we're clear, fission power is reasonably safe already (provided the reactors are well designed and maintained, and provided that the waste is reproccessed). All of the dangers of a fission plant are outlined above, and they're not that bad when compared with the alternatives. Fusion has none of those dangers; the nuclear reaction ceases if the reactor vessel loses confinement, the major waste product is helium-4 (which is commercially useful and chemically inert), reactor irradiation is minimal, and can be limited further by careful choice of building materials, the fuels are safe to handle, and there's no way to make a bomb out of the reactor technology that we know of yet.
That's not to say there are absolutly no problems. Even with careful material selection, the reactor vessel will become slighly radioactive over it's lifetime. But safer and cleaner than fission? Yes, and by an order of magnitude at that.
Well, the OP was talking about Murdoch, not his own views. Seems to me that a broadcast morgul (who isn't affected by the anti-gaming zealots) would side with the Dems if he feels the Repubs are leaning a little too hard on his business. Enemy of my enemy and all that.
Someone once said that the only difference between the two main political parties in the US is that the first are a bunch of throwbacks who want it to be 1955 all over again - and the second are a bunch of throwbacks who want it to be 1965 all over again. For people like Murdoch, it's a question of who will least likely get in his way once in office.
Then, to clarify, I'd say "the terrorist threat is minimal if..." and go on to list the neccesary qualifiers.
The threat is minimal if the terrorists only have access to conventional or improvised weapons. Nukes are hard to obtain, harder to build, and typically large enough to limit their usefulness without a launcher/bomber. Biological weapons are difficult to make and distribute. Radiological bombs (despite all the hype and hysteria) are considerably less dangerous than a moderate nuclear accident, and chemical weapons that are easy to make are also bulky and not all that much worse than explosives from a casualty standpoint - this incidentally is a large part of why chemical weapons were not a larger factor in WW1.
All these things are unlikely threats that can be made even more unlikely with careful, legal use of existing intelligence and police assets (which would have been enough to stop the 9/11 attacks, had they been properly used). Use of foreign policy and military force also applies if the terrorists are operating out of another country. Though the war in Iraq was counterproductive against terrorism, the war in Afghanistan was worth it.
Any of those threats pale in comparison to the dangers posed by non-terrorist equivalents of equally low probability. The odds of a terrorist group successfully nuking anything are very very low. What are the odds of a major natural disaster? Since 9/11 we've had two of those - a major tsunami and a hurricane, both of which were unpredicted and killed large numbers of people. What are the odds that it'll happen again? Better than the odds that somebody will nuke manhatten.
The terrorist threat is minimal if they do not have the ideological support they need to get new recruits. Bad foreign policy decisions in the middle east for the last fifty years are what sparked this terrorist ideology in the first place; it stands to reason that stopping these bad policies (for example, it's a bad idea to topple every tinpot dictator on general principal) will lessen the number of potential terrorists the US needs to deal with.
You'll note that nowhere does domestic spying or the erosion of people's rights enter into it. Slowly sacrificing the principals of a free democacy does nothing useful, except allow those in control of the country to consolidate power.
Even assuming you're completely correct, the potential terrorist threats you list require solutions like sensible foreign policy and judicious use of police, intelligence gathering and military force. The NSA monitoring seems more like it's meant to monitor the domestic population without judicial oversight, and in violation of the constitution - and that's just too much of a sacrifice of freedom in exchange for some nebulous protection against "terrorism".
There are many other unknown risks that we can theoretically forsee, but can't predict accurately. A major asteroid strike, a flu epidemic, or even something as banal as an economic crash could lie 10 years in the future - does that mean that we should all run for the hills and dig deep shelters in the name of protection?
Any concievable source of energy will lead to "thermal pollution". That's just thermodynamics in action; waste heat is absolutly inevitable.
Really, stop and think about it for a second. You build black photoelectic panels for solar power. You put them where they can get sunlight. They heat up. Presto! Thermal pollution. After all, that's more sunlight converted into heat than previously (since chances are the black panels absorb more light than the lighter coloured grass, sand or rocks beneath them). Plus, any electrical power you use will eventually manifest somewhere as heat, regardless of what source of power you're using.
Now stop and think of how many of those panels we'd need to reach the power output of a fusion plant.
If you go so far down the list of sources of pollution that you consider thermal pollution an issue, then there is no possible solution you'll be happy with, and that includes population control and conservation.
By that logic, the "christian" guilds that have popped up should suffer the same fate.
I mean, if your going to argue that a gay guild is forcing a message on people simply by existing, then a religious guild is doing likewise. If it's unfair for the guild to allow/exclude membership based on RL factors, like being gay, then it's likewise unfair to restrict membership based on religion.
And if you take the opposite approach, which is to say that people can form guilds based on whatever criteria they like (excluding guilds that violate the game rules, like professional gold farming guilds and greifing guilds), then the gay guild is in the clear, as is the religious one.
I'd opt for the latter approach. As long as the people in the guild aren't making life difficult for the people outside of the guild, there should be no problem.
As for compromising investigations, the system we have for preventing that in criminal trials should suffice. What are you afraid of? That actually taking a "terrorist" to court might put the PATRIOT act under the scrutiny of constitutional law?
The explanation I always heard was that the differece was the event that formed the earth's moon.
It's theorized that another plaentary body collided with earth early in our solar system's history. This collision resulted in the ejection of a debris field, which would eventually form the moon, and the blasting away of most of the atmosphere. Additionally, it's possible that the presense of a moon either further reduced the atmosphere, or prevented it from reaching it's previous density (ie, gasses in the upper atmosphere would be pulled away by tidal forces).
Under this theory, venus is normal for a rocky planet of it's size, and earth has an unusually thin atmosphere.
To point out the bleedingly obvious, Venus's surface pressure is several orders of magnitude greater than ours. Even if there were no greenhouse effect there, it would still be much, much hotter (remember, there is a direct relationship between pressure and temperature).
There is no way for Earth to reach venusian atmospheric density, and no way that Venus ever had something remotely resembling terrestrial temperature/pressure. It isn't just a matter of what proportion of the air is Co2, it's a matter of how much air there is in an absolute sense as well.
Actually, the story about the study is profoundly unscientific; either it's been misreported or it was dishonest to begin with. Basic stuff like leaping from "more permissive attitude towards drugs/alcohol" to "more likely to use/drink". If that kind of FUD was actually in the study's conclusions, then it isn't worthy of being called science.
If you read the link about their methodology, it becomes clear that the study is crap. According to Reuters:
"Regardless of whether they grew up in a violent environment, the researchers found, young men who had played the violent game were less cooperative and more competitive in completing an assigned task with another person, compared to those who played the Simpsons game. They were also more likely to have permissive attitudes toward alcohol and marijuana use."
How exactly does one get from "have a more permissive attitude" to "more likely to use drugs/drink"? Fucks sake, I've got a completely permissive attitude to other people's bad habits, but that doesn't mean I'd like to share them. If you spun this study the other way, it'd be saying "gamers more permissive, less likely to force their views on other people".
Either the study itself is politically funded crap, or the spin being put on it is.
Are you seriously likening EB to walmart in terms of their retail muscle?
Walmart is huge, widespread, and carries more than one type of product. EB is small, not terribly widespread, and carries a single type product. If EB threatened not to carry a game based on content, they'd be the one's losing customers. If walmart does the same, it's the game developer who loses customers instead.
As for the rest of your list, some of those shops carry very few games, or aren't found in many places. The fact that they exist does not refute the parent poster's arguement that walmart has a near-monopoly, anymore than the existance of mac computers negates the arguement that microsoft has a near-monopoly on the retail computer OS market.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, there is waste heat from nuke plants. There is heat lost from any form of steam power.
You boil the water to make steam (under very high pressure), you run it through the turbines, and you release it. When it leaves the power plant, it's still signifigantly hotter than the surrounding environment, so obviously you haven't taken all the potential energy out of it - however you've gotten what you can from turbines.
Now add an electrolysis plant to the mix. You've lost some of your power output - the water needs to be kept contained so it doesn't cool via evaporation, which limits your ability to use turbines. However, you can now derive hydrogen from it at greater power effeciency than you could before with cold water, which is the whole point of the exercise. This is because regular electrolysis, as the OP pointed out, is grossly ineffecient.
You aren't getting power from nowhere, you're getting slightly better use of the energy you input into the electrolysis. All the system does is improve an otherwise severly ineffecient process. And as an added bonus, while you still need to transport the fuel to it's destination (which is a problem for all alternative fuels), you're no longer losing power in transmitting electricity from a power plant to a hydrogen production plant, since they're at the same site.
Actually, I saw a /. article some time ago about using a combination of high temperature + electrolysis to get hydrogen from water*. My memory may be wrong, but I think the gist was that it's easier to split water molecules when they're heated and/or under pressure (the electrical input needed is lowered). All you need to increase electrolysis effeciency is an abundant source of heat.
/. story recently about using raw sewage to produce the stuff). But hey, having more than one approach is a good thing, and not hinging everything on fusion is sensible, given that the reactor technology is still many years away.
/. science article from memory and assuming it was factually correct. In my defense, I did RTFA at the time and it seemed like it wasn't quackery.
Now, where do we have tonnes of hot, pressurized water going to waste? Nuclear plants! The stuff in the heat exchangers is reused, but the stuff used in the turbines isn't. We could presumably use this as a hydrogen source - pipe the stuff through an extraction facility while it's still superheated, and split the water using electrolysis. You might have to construct a dedicated plant for this, one that doesn't produce commercial power, but it would be a self contained hydrogen source.
Now some people would argue that this is just trading Co2 for nuclear waste. Fine, that's still an improvement in my books, since the later is easier to contain, and can be recycled back into fuel. Plus, the final leaving sof nuclear power don't need to be contained forever - just bury them far below the water table in a subduction zone, and collapse the tunnel behind you. It'll eventually suck them back into the mantle.
But in the long run there's no requirement to get the superheated water from fission plants - if we can get fusion working, we'll have another source of power that presumably will produce lots of steam to run the turbines with.
Of course, the best solution in the meantime is a combination of different fossil fuel alternatives. Biofuels may be easier to convert our existing vehicles to, and might even be easier to make by using waste products (see the other
*Note: I am aware that I'm taking a
That's what you get for staring at the hydrogen-1 reactor all day. Does terrible things to your eyesight :-P
True, but he didn't say they didn't. He merely said that, if windows were in fact to die, the people making/adding to linux could not subsequently make a commercial monopoly out of their product. And he's right - how on earth can you claim "monopoly" when the program isn't commercial?
"Yes, and since your topic was the fusion process..."
I think we have here the source of our misunderstanding.
The GP (the person I originally quoted) asked if fusion was safer than fission. I brought up the danger of fission reactors being used to make bombs, which is not an issue with fusion plants. You then took my phrase "likely no danger of weapon's proliferation" to refer to the entire process of fusion, rather than just the reactor tech.
There are existing weapons that use fusion. Building fusion reactors will not make these weapons any more widespread. That was my one, and only, point, about proliferation. Apologies for being unclear. I was in no way refering to the specific nuclear process, instead I meant the technology to get power from it.
What's more, why porn?
Music - RIAA would love to attack P2P music services. Movies - substitue MPAA for RIAA and the same applies. Warez, you got the BSA...
But who the heck cares about porn? Of the affected materials, only the first three qualify as copyright infringement - most porn is legal (and most of what isn't legal, is illegal for reasons unrelated to copyright). You don't see lawsuits or massive industry crusades over pron-piracy.
I'm going to go with "the writer of this software want's to piss people off". It's the explanation that makes the most sense.
Unless, of course, that's what they want us to think....
Are you foolish or just trolling?
H-bombs aren't in any way related to fusion power technology, save only that both use fusion reactions. A thermonuclear weapon and a fusion reactor have about as much in common as a chemical explosive and an internal combustion engine. If a fusion reactor were as easy to construct as a nuke, we'd have them already.
With a nuclear reactor there is a danger of weapons proliferation. Iran is a good example of that - reactors that can be used for power generation can also be used both as a valid excuse for obtaining nuclear materials and as a breeder reactor for making them weapons-grade.
With a fusion reactor, there likely is no danger; the only way that a reactor could help make a bomb is in neutron production to breed plutonium from uranium, and even that isn't likely, given that a conventional breeder reactor will be easier to build. Also, a country with a fusion power plant doesn't have any excuse other than bombmaking for owning the fissile materials in the first place.
"If the two types of bear can mate and produce fertile offspring, then
they are really the same species."
Nah, different species can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Look up "ring species" for examples where A can breed with B, and B can breed with C but C cannot breed with A.
Mostly this reflects the fact that the term "species" is a fairly arbitrary distinction that goes back before our understanding of evolution.
True. Does a hybrid bear shit in the woods, or on the ice flows? Inquiring minds want to know!
I would tend to assume that a conventional fission based breeder reactor would be cheaper and easier to build if you want plutonium. Just getting fusion to work won't make it cheap or widespread right away after all, and by the time we have it, making breeder reactors should be old hat for countries like Iran. Also, a fusion plant will presumably be more complex that a fission one, and therefor harder for scientists and engineers working in third wourld countries to repurpose.
As for tritium, it has a halflife of only 12 years, and doesn't stay in the body for long periods, or become concentrated in specific organs like strontium-90 or radioactive iodine. It is radioactive, but if the reactor used a lithium breeding layer in it's shielding, then the tritium wouldn't need to leave the core. And when compared with the fuels used in just about every other means of power generation... well ask yourself if you'd rather have a ten-thousand liter oil spill or a ten liter tritium spill. After all, it's not like we need a whole hell of a lot to keep a reactor going, and assuming we breed the stuff on site, then we don't have to transport it.
The waste doesn't have to be especially long lived no matter what method of recycling you use. It's only when you don't recycle the waste that you run into problems.
However, consider what we're comparing to. The waste product of a fusion reaction (using deuterium and tritium fuel) is helium-4, which is safe and useful. The only radioactivity is through neutron activation, which isn't precisely "waste", and isn't even close to a fission plant.
Long term is relative. From a human perspective, if we have to store non-recyclable waste for 50 years before it's safe to handle or dispose of, that's a long term problem. It may not be a long time when compared with unspent uranium rods, but it's still "long term". That isn't to say it's horribly bad, but it does need to be considered in to total cost of operating a nuclear plant.
When comparing to a fission based reactor, perhaps my use of the word "minimal" was a tad skewed.
Remember that the object of comparison here has the same issue with neutron irradiation (ie, even ignoring waste products, a fission reactor core will become irradiated over time, as will the coolant in the heat exchangers). In addition to the neutron problem, which applies to both fission/fusion, you've also got to consider direct radioactive contamination from the fuel/waste. At least with a fusion reactor we can eliminate (or reduce) the risk of elements like strontium-90, since we get the option of choosing what radioactives we want left over at the end of the plant's life when we build it.
But I cede the point that, objectively, the degree of radioactivity in the core of a decomisioned plant would not be "minimal" by human standards.
"Also, if we do get large scale fusion, is it really going to be cleaner and safer than modern fission plants?"
No meltdown risk...
No long-lived waste products...
No dangerous fuels...
Likely no immediate danger of weapon proliferation...
And you have to ask if it's safer?
Just so we're clear, fission power is reasonably safe already (provided the reactors are well designed and maintained, and provided that the waste is reproccessed). All of the dangers of a fission plant are outlined above, and they're not that bad when compared with the alternatives. Fusion has none of those dangers; the nuclear reaction ceases if the reactor vessel loses confinement, the major waste product is helium-4 (which is commercially useful and chemically inert), reactor irradiation is minimal, and can be limited further by careful choice of building materials, the fuels are safe to handle, and there's no way to make a bomb out of the reactor technology that we know of yet.
That's not to say there are absolutly no problems. Even with careful material selection, the reactor vessel will become slighly radioactive over it's lifetime. But safer and cleaner than fission? Yes, and by an order of magnitude at that.
Well, the OP was talking about Murdoch, not his own views. Seems to me that a broadcast morgul (who isn't affected by the anti-gaming zealots) would side with the Dems if he feels the Repubs are leaning a little too hard on his business. Enemy of my enemy and all that.
Someone once said that the only difference between the two main political parties in the US is that the first are a bunch of throwbacks who want it to be 1955 all over again - and the second are a bunch of throwbacks who want it to be 1965 all over again. For people like Murdoch, it's a question of who will least likely get in his way once in office.
Then, to clarify, I'd say "the terrorist threat is minimal if..." and go on to list the neccesary qualifiers.
The threat is minimal if the terrorists only have access to conventional or improvised weapons. Nukes are hard to obtain, harder to build, and typically large enough to limit their usefulness without a launcher/bomber. Biological weapons are difficult to make and distribute. Radiological bombs (despite all the hype and hysteria) are considerably less dangerous than a moderate nuclear accident, and chemical weapons that are easy to make are also bulky and not all that much worse than explosives from a casualty standpoint - this incidentally is a large part of why chemical weapons were not a larger factor in WW1.
All these things are unlikely threats that can be made even more unlikely with careful, legal use of existing intelligence and police assets (which would have been enough to stop the 9/11 attacks, had they been properly used). Use of foreign policy and military force also applies if the terrorists are operating out of another country. Though the war in Iraq was counterproductive against terrorism, the war in Afghanistan was worth it.
Any of those threats pale in comparison to the dangers posed by non-terrorist equivalents of equally low probability. The odds of a terrorist group successfully nuking anything are very very low. What are the odds of a major natural disaster? Since 9/11 we've had two of those - a major tsunami and a hurricane, both of which were unpredicted and killed large numbers of people. What are the odds that it'll happen again? Better than the odds that somebody will nuke manhatten.
The terrorist threat is minimal if they do not have the ideological support they need to get new recruits. Bad foreign policy decisions in the middle east for the last fifty years are what sparked this terrorist ideology in the first place; it stands to reason that stopping these bad policies (for example, it's a bad idea to topple every tinpot dictator on general principal) will lessen the number of potential terrorists the US needs to deal with.
You'll note that nowhere does domestic spying or the erosion of people's rights enter into it. Slowly sacrificing the principals of a free democacy does nothing useful, except allow those in control of the country to consolidate power.
Even assuming you're completely correct, the potential terrorist threats you list require solutions like sensible foreign policy and judicious use of police, intelligence gathering and military force. The NSA monitoring seems more like it's meant to monitor the domestic population without judicial oversight, and in violation of the constitution - and that's just too much of a sacrifice of freedom in exchange for some nebulous protection against "terrorism".
There are many other unknown risks that we can theoretically forsee, but can't predict accurately. A major asteroid strike, a flu epidemic, or even something as banal as an economic crash could lie 10 years in the future - does that mean that we should all run for the hills and dig deep shelters in the name of protection?
Any concievable source of energy will lead to "thermal pollution". That's just thermodynamics in action; waste heat is absolutly inevitable.
Really, stop and think about it for a second. You build black photoelectic panels for solar power. You put them where they can get sunlight. They heat up. Presto! Thermal pollution. After all, that's more sunlight converted into heat than previously (since chances are the black panels absorb more light than the lighter coloured grass, sand or rocks beneath them). Plus, any electrical power you use will eventually manifest somewhere as heat, regardless of what source of power you're using.
Now stop and think of how many of those panels we'd need to reach the power output of a fusion plant.
If you go so far down the list of sources of pollution that you consider thermal pollution an issue, then there is no possible solution you'll be happy with, and that includes population control and conservation.
By that logic, the "christian" guilds that have popped up should suffer the same fate.
I mean, if your going to argue that a gay guild is forcing a message on people simply by existing, then a religious guild is doing likewise. If it's unfair for the guild to allow/exclude membership based on RL factors, like being gay, then it's likewise unfair to restrict membership based on religion.
And if you take the opposite approach, which is to say that people can form guilds based on whatever criteria they like (excluding guilds that violate the game rules, like professional gold farming guilds and greifing guilds), then the gay guild is in the clear, as is the religious one.
I'd opt for the latter approach. As long as the people in the guild aren't making life difficult for the people outside of the guild, there should be no problem.
Fear mongering doesn't help your case.
As for compromising investigations, the system we have for preventing that in criminal trials should suffice. What are you afraid of? That actually taking a "terrorist" to court might put the PATRIOT act under the scrutiny of constitutional law?
The explanation I always heard was that the differece was the event that formed the earth's moon.
It's theorized that another plaentary body collided with earth early in our solar system's history. This collision resulted in the ejection of a debris field, which would eventually form the moon, and the blasting away of most of the atmosphere. Additionally, it's possible that the presense of a moon either further reduced the atmosphere, or prevented it from reaching it's previous density (ie, gasses in the upper atmosphere would be pulled away by tidal forces).
Under this theory, venus is normal for a rocky planet of it's size, and earth has an unusually thin atmosphere.
To point out the bleedingly obvious, Venus's surface pressure is several orders of magnitude greater than ours. Even if there were no greenhouse effect there, it would still be much, much hotter (remember, there is a direct relationship between pressure and temperature).
There is no way for Earth to reach venusian atmospheric density, and no way that Venus ever had something remotely resembling terrestrial temperature/pressure. It isn't just a matter of what proportion of the air is Co2, it's a matter of how much air there is in an absolute sense as well.
Actually, the story about the study is profoundly unscientific; either it's been misreported or it was dishonest to begin with. Basic stuff like leaping from "more permissive attitude towards drugs/alcohol" to "more likely to use/drink". If that kind of FUD was actually in the study's conclusions, then it isn't worthy of being called science.
Don't forget D&D, rap and the automobile (oh noes! Billy and Sue can drive off to lover's lane! /moral outrage).
Actually, a better question: Is there anything remotely enjoyable that senile reactionaries haven't been opposed too?
If you read the link about their methodology, it becomes clear that the study is crap. According to Reuters:
"Regardless of whether they grew up in a violent environment, the researchers found, young men who had played the violent game were less cooperative and more competitive in completing an assigned task with another person, compared to those who played the Simpsons game. They were also more likely to have permissive attitudes toward alcohol and marijuana use."
How exactly does one get from "have a more permissive attitude" to "more likely to use drugs/drink"? Fucks sake, I've got a completely permissive attitude to other people's bad habits, but that doesn't mean I'd like to share them. If you spun this study the other way, it'd be saying "gamers more permissive, less likely to force their views on other people".
Either the study itself is politically funded crap, or the spin being put on it is.
Are you seriously likening EB to walmart in terms of their retail muscle?
Walmart is huge, widespread, and carries more than one type of product. EB is small, not terribly widespread, and carries a single type product. If EB threatened not to carry a game based on content, they'd be the one's losing customers. If walmart does the same, it's the game developer who loses customers instead.
As for the rest of your list, some of those shops carry very few games, or aren't found in many places. The fact that they exist does not refute the parent poster's arguement that walmart has a near-monopoly, anymore than the existance of mac computers negates the arguement that microsoft has a near-monopoly on the retail computer OS market.