I've hears this argument before and I just don't buy it. First it contradicts socio-historic data from the last hundred years. The United States is more religious than that rest of the western world, yet it has one of the highest crime rates. Most western countries (Canada, UK, _Germany_ for crying out loud) have lower violent crime rates, and lower church attendance. Japan, which is essentially secular has an even lower crime rate (not strictly neo-european but hey). Where is the inherited religious morality?
If anything religion breeds violence. Look at the middle east and especially the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Look at the States' foreign policy under a born again christian. This is moral? There's a lot of nationalism involved too, but at some level it becomes impossible to disentangle the two.
My own experience (strong agnostic with atheist leanings, ex-anglican) has taught me that a strong moral compass is an innate aspect of the human psyche. The most moral christians I know (my mother and the people at the volunteer kitchen I worked at) are the ones who don't beleive in divine intervention, or hell. They are down to earth ethical people with a lot of common sense and _that_ is what makes them behave morally. Not fear of god, nor belief that it'll all work out if you do what the bible says.
My own ethics system is not inherited, nor is it cultural, it is _logical_. I think in terms of basic common sense stuff like "if I act this way, will it hurt anyone" not this frightening "what would jesus do" bullshit that Bush seems to like. If anything, being logical frees you from the contradictions espoused by scripture, you can then see the grey areas for what they are.
Religion does not have a patent on morality. Get over it.
FYI it's "tritium". And don't get your science facts from Spiderman 2; tritium is a bybroduct of heavy-water (D2O) nuclear reactors. We can _make_ it if we need to (and already do in small quantities - actually this stuff can be classified as a nuclear waste product).
Besides which we don't actually need tritium for a fusion plant per se. We can use lithium (more abundant, but still rare enough) or abandon higher order fusion altogether and just use deuterium (which is really common). In a few decades/centuries/whenever after we get fusion power, we could even use elemental hydrogen fusion reactors, essentially giving us unlimited fuel (hydrogen is the most simple and abundant element in the entire universe). As a bonus, with D/T or D/D reactors there is still some radioactivity (reactor neutron activation, since the reactions spit out free neutrons). A H/H/H/H reactor would produce helium and no radioactive waste at all (mind you it'll take a long time to get a pure hydrogen reactor, but the first step is to get a basic fusion reactor that works).
Grandpa: (with stake and mallet) We have to kill the boy! Lisa: How did you know that Barts a vampire? Grandpa: He's a vampire?! (drops stake/mallet) AHHHHH (runs away)
(later)
Lisa: You must drive this stake through his heart. Homer: DIE YOU INHUMAN MONSTER!!!! (pounds stake into Burns) Lisa: Uh, dad that's his crotch.
Whereas their law firm's strategy is even simpler: take the money and run.
I can see it now; suit-and-tie lawyers making a mad dash from Utah to Texas and then Mexico, with Darl and a fleet of cops cars in hot pursuit. Their ties flapping in the dusty wind, case files and "source code", that is on closer examination shredded newspaper, fluttering as it's thrown out the window. Banjo music plays as the lawyer's Mercedes pickup truck rattles down offroad trails, the lawyers finally escaping in a mad stunt that involves getting the stylish rustbucket airborne.
Sort of the dukes of hazard meets law and order, with that special surreal Utah flavour that Darl seems to be snorting.
A nuclear accident, aside from being _worse_ than a bomb test from a radiation hazard point of view, would not leave a crater or a mushroom cloud. Generally nuke plants melt when they go FUBAR; an explosion requires inertial confinement of a supercritical fissionable mass, while a meltdown only requires that the fuel rods heat up past the melting point of the reactor vessel. In plain english, you have to _work_ to get an explosion. Even the fuckup at Chernobyl requires major human stupidity. Small explosions can happen in an out of control meltdown (this is ironically called "China Syndrom"), however the major danger is still from fallout and not the blast.
As for MAD, trust me that nuclear disarmament is a better choice than nuclear detterance. I would rather see the US, Israel, NK, China, Britain and anyone else who's got the bomb give it the fuck up. Arming everyone and expecting them to play nice is putting too much faith in common sense. Human nature being what it is, I'd rather we _not_ have the means to exterminate our species.
Er, well Agrajag _WAS_ voiced by Adams. Unless your Ouiji Board has onboard audio of course (or unless you're into time travel, but that gets you into even weirder past/present tense issues: Agrajag willan ont haven be voiced by Adams?).
$DEITY, that book turned me into the geek I am today!
And this, again, brings us to why the left-right political spectrum is inadequate. Politics is so inherently diverse, and so hard to take in all at once, that simply labeling everything as being "liberal" or "conservative" is idiotic.
People will always see their own bias, or their opponents' bias, in others, because their political views try to shoehorn _everything_ into one of two categories./. does not lean in any particular direction, at least as far as I can tell. Its readership does, but I'm not sure whether any one point of view trumps any other, at least numerically.
Best advice I can give to politically inclined/.ers is not to feed the trolls, and don't get drawn into flamewars, no matter how much you might want to. The only people you can't reason with are the ones who are trying to start a fight, or are too closed minded to accept any other point of view.
Speaker: "And the winner is... Number 3, in a quantum finish." Farnsworth: "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"
Farnsworth: "I'm even dating a young Brazilian retired actress!" Crew: *whoohoo sounds* Farnsworth: "Some say I'm robbing the cradle, but I say she's robbing the grave!"
Farnsworth: "Fry, that monkey is my most important experiment. If you two don't stop fighting I'll have you both neutered." Fry: "Hehe, that'll show him." Farnsworth: "Oh, I always feared he might run off like this. Why, why, why didn't I break his legs??" Leela: "So he just ran away in the middle of the exam?" Farnsworth: "I'm afraid so. All he handed in was a paper smeared with feces. He tied with Fry."
But the super strong body armour won't even protect the troops from spear-wielding teddybears! We must first learn to build spear-proof armour, lest our soldiers be decimated by primitive abboreal merchandising tie-ins!
Oy, how may times will this ignorance rear it's ugly head.
Look no-one, and I do mean no one, gets stem cells from abortions. Google it for fucks sake people! Embryonic stem cells are aquired from fertility clinics _not_ abortion clinics.
The problem is that people associate "clinic" and "embryonic" with abortion; these clinics are for IVF, used to help couples concieve. THEY ARE THE POLAR OPPOSITE OF AN ABORTION CLINIC!!
The stems cells in question come from the leftover fetralized embryos that don't get implanted in the mother (there are a lot of these, due to the present ineffeciency wrt IVF). No abortion takes place, since pregnancy never occured, or at least not with these embryos.
The trouble arises from the view some pro-lifers have that "life begins at conception". If you beleive this, then fine, you have a reason to oppose stem cell research (although I disagree). But if your problem is soley with abortion, then you should educate yourself, and not simply beleive everything your told by the scientifically illiterate. Just becasue somebody shares your point of view on an issue, doesn't mean they're more informed than you are. Do your own research, and make sure you get a may people's viewpoints!
Actually, stormtrooper armour was meant to have a placebo effect. The poor sods wearing the armour would be told they were invulnerable, and thus would no notice when they got shot in the head! Hmm... that doesn't quite sound right, does it? Maybe it was to make them feel invulnerable so that they'd march into the meatgrinder without fear?
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You misunderstand; this is _normal_ in a nuke plant. The fluid in the core (usually light(H) or heavy(D) water) is heated up, then sent through a system of pipes that transfers that heat to a second set of fluid (just plain old water). The pipes in question are used to exchange heat, hence the name "heat exchangers". The heat exchanger fluid never leaves the core within the reactors lifetime (barring a leak).
The reason for this design is that the water circulating in the reactor core (the stuff used in the heat exchangers) becomes slightly radioactive over the reactor's lifetime and must be treated as nuclear waste (so you don't _want_ it in the turbines, or else the risk of contamination rises hugely). In a Helium pebble bed design, the heat exchangers use He4 instead of H2O or D20, thus no liquid nuclear waste is produced (He4 can't be neutron activater; it cannot take on a third neutron).
Re:Steam? Well...
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, in one pebble bed reactor design, a non-reactive gas is used in the heat exchangers only, steam is limited to the turbines themselves (easy to maintain that way - there is little or no corrosion among the radioactive parts). It is also possible to use recycled helium in the turbines, although IIRC it is less effecient. The advantage to a helium-only model is that He4 cannot be rendered radioactive via neutron bombardment, whereas water can (therefor there should be no liquid or gaseous waste products in a He4 design).
>Sooner or later the DFA (Deistic Fire Alliance) will come down on us...
And their demi-lawyers, led by the law firm Anubis Hades & Cthulu, are lobbying for the DMFA, or Divine Millenium Fire Act. This would make circumventing the divine proscription of fire use illegal and punishable by thunderbolt.
Under the DMFA all sticks, stones, steel flints and electrodes would have to come equipped with DRM (Divine Rights Magic), which would prevent unauthorized usage. Privately, attourney Cthulu admitted that enforcement of stick regulation could prove difficult, given the widespread existance of unregulated wood, and that the DFA was looking into a massive deforestation campaign to curb the problem with piracy.
Well, according to SCO, Linux doesn't exist. And the headline for this story is "Ballmer on Linux". So I gotta wonder if he's about to have one of those Wile E Coyote moments where he's standing on nothing and gravity decides to assert itself?;-)
Yes, I am new here. Why do you ask?
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Funny, my girlfriend said the exact same thing!
(to me that is, not Ballmer. Actually she wasn't my girlfreind, she just lived across the street and never closed her curtains).:-)
It is worth noting that TFA says that the signal in question in in the hydrogen absorbtion band. I remember reading old sci-fi stories that speculated that these frequencies would be a good candidate for interstellar communications, since interstellar hydrogen absorbs EM radiation in this frequency, sweeping it clear of noise. Obviously SETI feels the same way, or else they wouln't consider this signal to be "of interest".
If they have found an interstellar signal in this frequency, and it isn't artificial, will we have to revise our understanding of astrophysics? My understanding is that this can't be regular white noise. Maybe it's from our solar system (a naturally occuring local signal rather than interstellar). Or maybe it's something new.
Slashdot Mirror
I've hears this argument before and I just don't buy it. First it contradicts socio-historic data from the last hundred years. The United States is more religious than that rest of the western world, yet it has one of the highest crime rates. Most western countries (Canada, UK, _Germany_ for crying out loud) have lower violent crime rates, and lower church attendance. Japan, which is essentially secular has an even lower crime rate (not strictly neo-european but hey). Where is the inherited religious morality?
If anything religion breeds violence. Look at the middle east and especially the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Look at the States' foreign policy under a born again christian. This is moral? There's a lot of nationalism involved too, but at some level it becomes impossible to disentangle the two.
My own experience (strong agnostic with atheist leanings, ex-anglican) has taught me that a strong moral compass is an innate aspect of the human psyche. The most moral christians I know (my mother and the people at the volunteer kitchen I worked at) are the ones who don't beleive in divine intervention, or hell. They are down to earth ethical people with a lot of common sense and _that_ is what makes them behave morally. Not fear of god, nor belief that it'll all work out if you do what the bible says.
My own ethics system is not inherited, nor is it cultural, it is _logical_. I think in terms of basic common sense stuff like "if I act this way, will it hurt anyone" not this frightening "what would jesus do" bullshit that Bush seems to like. If anything, being logical frees you from the contradictions espoused by scripture, you can then see the grey areas for what they are.
Religion does not have a patent on morality. Get over it.
Nah, for that we'd need large quantities of unobtainoium. And a donkey.
-(Although I must admit to using wind power for 100% of my electical needs).
So, how hard do you have to whistle to get first post?
FYI it's "tritium". And don't get your science facts from Spiderman 2; tritium is a bybroduct of heavy-water (D2O) nuclear reactors. We can _make_ it if we need to (and already do in small quantities - actually this stuff can be classified as a nuclear waste product).
Besides which we don't actually need tritium for a fusion plant per se. We can use lithium (more abundant, but still rare enough) or abandon higher order fusion altogether and just use deuterium (which is really common). In a few decades/centuries/whenever after we get fusion power, we could even use elemental hydrogen fusion reactors, essentially giving us unlimited fuel (hydrogen is the most simple and abundant element in the entire universe). As a bonus, with D/T or D/D reactors there is still some radioactivity (reactor neutron activation, since the reactions spit out free neutrons). A H/H/H/H reactor would produce helium and no radioactive waste at all (mind you it'll take a long time to get a pure hydrogen reactor, but the first step is to get a basic fusion reactor that works).
Grandpa: (with stake and mallet) We have to kill the boy!
Lisa: How did you know that Barts a vampire?
Grandpa: He's a vampire?! (drops stake/mallet) AHHHHH (runs away)
(later)
Lisa: You must drive this stake through his heart.
Homer: DIE YOU INHUMAN MONSTER!!!! (pounds stake into Burns)
Lisa: Uh, dad that's his crotch.
Whereas their law firm's strategy is even simpler: take the money and run.
I can see it now; suit-and-tie lawyers making a mad dash from Utah to Texas and then Mexico, with Darl and a fleet of cops cars in hot pursuit. Their ties flapping in the dusty wind, case files and "source code", that is on closer examination shredded newspaper, fluttering as it's thrown out the window. Banjo music plays as the lawyer's Mercedes pickup truck rattles down offroad trails, the lawyers finally escaping in a mad stunt that involves getting the stylish rustbucket airborne.
Sort of the dukes of hazard meets law and order, with that special surreal Utah flavour that Darl seems to be snorting.
A nuclear accident, aside from being _worse_ than a bomb test from a radiation hazard point of view, would not leave a crater or a mushroom cloud. Generally nuke plants melt when they go FUBAR; an explosion requires inertial confinement of a supercritical fissionable mass, while a meltdown only requires that the fuel rods heat up past the melting point of the reactor vessel. In plain english, you have to _work_ to get an explosion. Even the fuckup at Chernobyl requires major human stupidity. Small explosions can happen in an out of control meltdown (this is ironically called "China Syndrom"), however the major danger is still from fallout and not the blast.
As for MAD, trust me that nuclear disarmament is a better choice than nuclear detterance. I would rather see the US, Israel, NK, China, Britain and anyone else who's got the bomb give it the fuck up. Arming everyone and expecting them to play nice is putting too much faith in common sense. Human nature being what it is, I'd rather we _not_ have the means to exterminate our species.
Stoned Missile Silo Guy 1: Whoa dude, where'd that, uh, that big... whachamacallit go?
SMSG 2: Uh yeah that missile type thingy. I don't know.
1: Whoa, this is some serious shit man. What do you remember last.
2: Well, I got the munchies so I pressed the big red LUNCH button...
Er, well Agrajag _WAS_ voiced by Adams. Unless your Ouiji Board has onboard audio of course (or unless you're into time travel, but that gets you into even weirder past/present tense issues: Agrajag willan ont haven be voiced by Adams?).
$DEITY, that book turned me into the geek I am today!
Actually, you can't whore funny mods anymore. Funny != Karma now (which sucks, but at least it reduces Karma whoring).
Well, we haven't got to Soviet Russia yet...
;-)
Here let me: In Soviet Russia, robot flies prey on YOU!
Now somebody find a way to incorporate hot grits!
And this, again, brings us to why the left-right political spectrum is inadequate. Politics is so inherently diverse, and so hard to take in all at once, that simply labeling everything as being "liberal" or "conservative" is idiotic.
/. does not lean in any particular direction, at least as far as I can tell. Its readership does, but I'm not sure whether any one point of view trumps any other, at least numerically.
/.ers is not to feed the trolls, and don't get drawn into flamewars, no matter how much you might want to. The only people you can't reason with are the ones who are trying to start a fight, or are too closed minded to accept any other point of view.
People will always see their own bias, or their opponents' bias, in others, because their political views try to shoehorn _everything_ into one of two categories.
Best advice I can give to politically inclined
Speaker: "And the winner is ... Number 3, in a quantum finish."
Farnsworth: "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"
Farnsworth: "I'm even dating a young Brazilian retired actress!"
Crew: *whoohoo sounds*
Farnsworth: "Some say I'm robbing the cradle, but I say she's robbing the grave!"
Farnsworth: "Fry, that monkey is my most important experiment. If you two don't stop fighting I'll have you both neutered."
Fry: "Hehe, that'll show him."
Farnsworth: "Oh, I always feared he might run off like this. Why, why, why didn't I break his legs??"
Leela: "So he just ran away in the middle of the exam?"
Farnsworth: "I'm afraid so. All he handed in was a paper smeared with feces. He tied with Fry."
(stolen from gotfuturama.com)
And use the rest of Billy to make copies of itself!
But the super strong body armour won't even protect the troops from spear-wielding teddybears! We must first learn to build spear-proof armour, lest our soldiers be decimated by primitive abboreal merchandising tie-ins!
DO NOT TAUNT Happy Donkey Ball Sucker!
Oy, how may times will this ignorance rear it's ugly head.
Look no-one, and I do mean no one, gets stem cells from abortions. Google it for fucks sake people! Embryonic stem cells are aquired from fertility clinics _not_ abortion clinics.
The problem is that people associate "clinic" and "embryonic" with abortion; these clinics are for IVF, used to help couples concieve. THEY ARE THE POLAR OPPOSITE OF AN ABORTION CLINIC!!
The stems cells in question come from the leftover fetralized embryos that don't get implanted in the mother (there are a lot of these, due to the present ineffeciency wrt IVF). No abortion takes place, since pregnancy never occured, or at least not with these embryos.
The trouble arises from the view some pro-lifers have that "life begins at conception". If you beleive this, then fine, you have a reason to oppose stem cell research (although I disagree). But if your problem is soley with abortion, then you should educate yourself, and not simply beleive everything your told by the scientifically illiterate. Just becasue somebody shares your point of view on an issue, doesn't mean they're more informed than you are. Do your own research, and make sure you get a may people's viewpoints!
Actually, stormtrooper armour was meant to have a placebo effect. The poor sods wearing the armour would be told they were invulnerable, and thus would no notice when they got shot in the head!
Hmm... that doesn't quite sound right, does it? Maybe it was to make them feel invulnerable so that they'd march into the meatgrinder without fear?
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You misunderstand; this is _normal_ in a nuke plant. The fluid in the core (usually light(H) or heavy(D) water) is heated up, then sent through a system of pipes that transfers that heat to a second set of fluid (just plain old water). The pipes in question are used to exchange heat, hence the name "heat exchangers". The heat exchanger fluid never leaves the core within the reactors lifetime (barring a leak).
The reason for this design is that the water circulating in the reactor core (the stuff used in the heat exchangers) becomes slightly radioactive over the reactor's lifetime and must be treated as nuclear waste (so you don't _want_ it in the turbines, or else the risk of contamination rises hugely). In a Helium pebble bed design, the heat exchangers use He4 instead of H2O or D20, thus no liquid nuclear waste is produced (He4 can't be neutron activater; it cannot take on a third neutron).
Actually, in one pebble bed reactor design, a non-reactive gas is used in the heat exchangers only, steam is limited to the turbines themselves (easy to maintain that way - there is little or no corrosion among the radioactive parts). It is also possible to use recycled helium in the turbines, although IIRC it is less effecient. The advantage to a helium-only model is that He4 cannot be rendered radioactive via neutron bombardment, whereas water can (therefor there should be no liquid or gaseous waste products in a He4 design).
>Sooner or later the DFA (Deistic Fire Alliance) will come down on us...
And their demi-lawyers, led by the law firm Anubis Hades & Cthulu, are lobbying for the DMFA, or Divine Millenium Fire Act. This would make circumventing the divine proscription of fire use illegal and punishable by thunderbolt.
Under the DMFA all sticks, stones, steel flints and electrodes would have to come equipped with DRM (Divine Rights Magic), which would prevent unauthorized usage. Privately, attourney Cthulu admitted that enforcement of stick regulation could prove difficult, given the widespread existance of unregulated wood, and that the DFA was looking into a massive deforestation campaign to curb the problem with piracy.
Senator Orrin Hatch was unavaiable for comment.
Dangit, I've been working on my perpetual motion machine for ten years! Ironically, now I can't seem to stop. ;-)
Well, according to SCO, Linux doesn't exist. And the headline for this story is "Ballmer on Linux". So I gotta wonder if he's about to have one of those Wile E Coyote moments where he's standing on nothing and gravity decides to assert itself? ;-)
Funny, my girlfriend said the exact same thing!
:-)
(to me that is, not Ballmer. Actually she wasn't my girlfreind, she just lived across the street and never closed her curtains).
It is worth noting that TFA says that the signal in question in in the hydrogen absorbtion band. I remember reading old sci-fi stories that speculated that these frequencies would be a good candidate for interstellar communications, since interstellar hydrogen absorbs EM radiation in this frequency, sweeping it clear of noise. Obviously SETI feels the same way, or else they wouln't consider this signal to be "of interest".
If they have found an interstellar signal in this frequency, and it isn't artificial, will we have to revise our understanding of astrophysics? My understanding is that this can't be regular white noise. Maybe it's from our solar system (a naturally occuring local signal rather than interstellar). Or maybe it's something new.