Jaime comes off as reserved enough that I can't legitimately judge his intelligence. Given the breadth of skills he's shown, I'd say he's far from average.
Tory and Kari I'll agree are only above average. Yes, I said above; remember how low the average is. Adam comes off as more intelligent, but seems to have ADHD, which is actually pretty common as a combination. Having a short attention span makes others think a person is less intelligent than they actually are, mostly because of the perceived immaturity.
So I'd say calling them, collectively "smart" isn't sad or inaccurate. I wouldn't call them genius, but I don't expect a science entertainment show to be hosted by a genius.
And regardless, Mythbusters is celebrated by/. not because it's hosted by smart people, it's celebrated because so much else on TV is incredibly stupid, lowest common denominator crap. It's the same reason Futurama gets as much love as it does; how many other animated shows slip in quantum mechanics jokes and just expect the audience to get it?
By that logic, there are no engineers. Anywhere. Ever. Every engineer is an applied scientist.
I think you need to reexamine the way you use those terms. Using the word "scientist" instead of the word "engineer" to describe someone who does engineering, simply because what they're doing is applied science, doesn't leave a single person on the planet who can legitimately be called an engineer. Well, except for a few cases where a job title includes the work "engineer" to make it sound more complex than it actually is, but I don't count those.
I count someone a scientist if they work in a scientific field and spend most of their time on projects that they intend to publish the results of. I call them an engineer if they spend most of their time designing, building and tinkering with technology. Obviously there are people who are somewhere in between those two, but the Mythbusters are engineers first.
See, I think the way some people react to the idea ("no, they're scientists, not engineers") suggest that they think engineering is somehow more vulgar than science.
I'd call them engineers first and foremost, and call it label of respect. They're also non-academic scientists, since the "scientist" label simply means "someone who does scientific research" but engineering is clearly their focus.
It's actually composite plating. Duct tape over electrical tape, with explosive reactive armour on the outside. The ER plates are made of C4 and disassembled microwave ovens.
I'd be more inclined to call them engineers. Yes, they do experiments, as that's kinda the point of the show, but if you examine their skill sets and techniques, it's pretty obvious what we'd call them if they applied those skills to another field. They make blueprints, run computer simulations, build small scale prototypes, build large scale tests, etc. In particular the "keep at it til something breaks/blows up" approach is engineer thinking.
So, they're Hollywood SFX guys putting engineering skills to work testing popular science. The fact they're sneaking lessons about control groups and repeatable results into what is ostensibly an entertainment show is an added bonus. The purists who shout "it's not REAL science" are just setting up a "no true Scotsman" argument, since while "science" has a clear meaning "REAL science" does not.
Just wanted to add to what you said: look at the parallels to Prohibition in the twenties and early thirties.
Alcohol was made illegal and what happened? Gang warfare. Smuggling. Higher addiction rates, instead of lower ones like you might expect, only now the addicts are going broke because of the increased prices. Criminality of all stripes caused by desperate, broke addicts. Illegal products contaminated by poisons (methanol, mostly). Law enforcement resources diverted when they were sorely needed elsewhere. Officials bribed and corrupted. Assassination and murder for hire, the inevitable result of unscrupulous people flush with cash operating outside the law. This was not a good time to be alive.
Every negative consequence of Prohibition is mirrored in the modern War on Drugs. And what happened when Prohibition was repealed? The problems slowly went away. There wasn't an explosion of alcoholism; the addicts were there all along and nobody suddenly decided to join their number now that it was legal to do so. The criminal empires built on moonshine and smuggling collapsed. Things got better once we stopped trying to force people to live up to the ideals of sobriety, as if it were ever possible to coerce someone to be a better person.
Uh, not rude? I'm pretty sure calling your opponent a fuckwit qualifies as rude. To say nothing of the rest of the comment.
Being rude doesn't matter from a standpoint of factual correctness, but a person can have the facts of their side and still come off looking like a raving lunatic when they write an entire paragraph where every third word is "cock".
Yeah, and the dumb thing is, it's not like we haven't seen this happen before.
"Arcades are dying! Games are moving into the home!" "PC games are dying! Games are moving to the consoles!" "Consoles are dying! Games are moving to the smartphones!"
This can also be applied to statements that "Game Company X is dying!" "Game genre Y is dying!", etc. The game's industry does love its' doomsayers.
Meanwhile, while arcades actually did die, sort of, neither PC games nor home consoles seem to have. A few trends get set, and followed, because the industry's direction is set by clueless managers who follow the market leader religiously. The prophecies are occasionally self fulfilling, particularly when it comes to moving on to the next console generation, which often has the feel of a mass migration.
Here's the useful rule to apply: If someone says "X mode of gaming is dying", ask them what they think will replace it. If they answer something that isn't up to the task, they're surely wrong. At best, in lieu of "dying" the mode of gaming in question will undergo a dry spell, or be reduced in importance.
Besides, a neutron star is essentially one giant molecule anyways, since in degenerate matter protons, neutrons and electrons are pretty much in direct contact, without any "atomic" or "molecular" structure.
Respectfully, this isn't correct. The core of a neutron star is indeed degenerate matter, but it's exclusively neutron degenerate matter, with a complete lack of protons or electrons. Every particle is a neutron, with no space at all in between them. Calling it a giant molecule is not accurate in any interpretation I can think of. I have heard of neutron star cores described as one giant atomic nucleus, which is slightly more accurate (in that it's made of subatomic particles in direct contact with each other), though actual nuclei are held together by nuclear force instead of gravity.
Now, the outer layers of a neutron star are made of electron degenerate matter with a thin surface of highly compressed regular matter. That fact may have been where you got the "protons, neutrons and electrons" part of your post - there are no protons or electrons in the interior, but they are present in the outer layers. Which, while interesting, doesn't really matter in regards to TFA, as they observed evidence of a superfluid core, and the core is nothing but neutrons.
A better option is this: If a cop instructs or incites illegal action, that officer is potentially an accomplice/co-conspirator and the department they work for is liable. Note "instructs/incites" would only count when the officer was A) acting in his or her professional capacity, since otherwise they're just another civilian breaking the law on their own time and B) actually started something instead of going along with other criminal elements as part of their cover. This would mean that the victims of riots instigated by undercover cops would be able to sue the department.
So Officer Bob working for the EXPD posing undercover as an anarchist throws the first stone during a protest, which then sparks a riot. Under these changed rules, the shopkeeper whose window was smashed or the insurance company of the car that was set on fire has a surefire lawsuit against the EXPD, who of course wise up and tell all of Officer Bob's coworkers to never, ever pull this kind of crap again. Ol' Bob himself is, of course, given his pink slip, and might face charges if the local prosecutor has the stones.
Plus, added bonus, the actual victims of the riot get compensation - and by "actual victims" I mean the folks who caught in the crossfire, whose homes, neighbourhoods or places of business were turned into a warzone by overzealous cops and the violent assholes who enjoy rioting.
Thermodynamically the Earth is anything but a closed system. We lose heat into space. We gain heat from the sun, from atomic decay, from tidal forces, etc (the sun is the most significant of the lot, obviously). The planet is not a closed system, and it's a damn good thing for us that this is the case.
I think what you meant to say was that it doesn't matter where exactly the waste heat from a power plant goes, as heat tends to equalize over time. But "closed system" is right out.
Someone else already posted the fact that 2% of the Sahara works out to tens of thousands of square kilometres, which pretty much destroys that argument. That doesn't even get into overnight power storage, or the hazards and challenges of centralizing the entire global power grid.
But lets say you're being glib, and what you actually meant was that a solar power grid distributed across the entire planet, or maybe just distributed across the equatorial regions that get the most sun, could provide all our energy needs. I'll argue that point as it's much less stupid than paving over a square region of the Sahara 300 km across and covering it in panels.
First up, you need to look at the total cost of building an entire global solar grid. Solar panels aren't cheap, and while they're getting cheaper, there's also the cost measured in energy and resources, i.e. how much power does it take for a factory to make a single panel, and what resources are needed in quantity. These are non-trivial problems.
But okay, let's take it for granted that it's possible. Hell, one thing that would make it much easier is ditching solar panels entirely and using solar heat engines, which give a more even output and scale up better. On a large enough scale, they might even be cheaper.
Let's even go so far as to ditch the "solar only" approach and instead go for "passive power only", i.e. expand our approach to include hydro, geo and wind. Gee, you know what... That actually is what I argued for in my initial post. I didn't use some flippant pipe dream about paving over ninety thousand square klicks of dessert and plunking down solar panels, I actually looked at a more realistic and nuanced approach.
But, there's still a problem, one I didn't cover in my post directly. Global power demands aren't static. They're increasing. And the rate of increase is only going to get worse as there are two to three billion people living in nations that are now starting to demand first world living standards. We're not going to be able to do this with just solar, or even just solar/wind/hydro/geo. We'll need something that can be built on demand to make up the deficit. Hence, nuclear. And eventually fusion.
If the reactor were to suffer a total catastrophic failure, it would be moderately bad. Not Chernobyl bad, and not Windscale bad either - it's smaller for one thing, and less likely to endanger human lives. The human cost would be low, the environmental cost would be non-trivial and difficult to estimate, and the economic cost would be high. I'd put the scale of a worst case disaster on par with Deepwater Horizon, albeit different enough that it's apples to oranges.
But the key phrase there is "catastrophic failure". Not "leak". The difference between a leak and a catastrophe is like the difference between a house fire and the Chicago fire. There have been nuclear leaks at sea before, given the number of nuclear vessels in service, and particularly given the former Soviet Union's track record. They weren't even close to the disaster you're imagining.
The biggest advantage I can see, which I posted just before you did, is containment. A surface nuclear power plant gets the same benefit as a submerged one in terms of cooling and remoteness, but in the event of a catastrophic failure, the underwater one will not send tons of fallout into the stratosphere. You'd still get some contamination making it into the air via the hydrological cycle (think Tritium contaminated rainfall), but not on the same order of magnitude as if the same disaster had occurred on the surface.
Yeah, that always struck me as the fallacy of the nukes vs. passive power collection debate. Pursuing both options and using them in different applications and climates, as their strengths and weaknesses dictate, seems to be the most logical approach by far.
My take would be to build wind turbines, geothermal plants, hydroelectric dams and solar collectors (especially solar heat engines as opposed to photoelectric cells) in locations where the respective climate and geography dictates, and supplement those with rooftop photoelectric solar and other distributed systems wherever local homeowners want to use them.
This will leave a power deficit, as those means of power generation don't provide enough energy to meet our needs, so you solve that deficit with nuclear power for the time being, and fusion power when it becomes available, which realistically might not be for many decades. Add in non fossil fuel options for vehicles (biofuel, battery or hydrogen) and we might actually break our dependency on coal and oil entirely.
On the one hand, you're introducing corrosive seawater to the mix. And you're putting it in a cramped, high pressure environment, though if it's heavily automated that won't cause as many problems as if it had a large full time crew aboard.
On the positive side, you've now got a handy, high heat capacity, thermally conductive environment to work with, which nuke plants benefit from. And you're making it such that any contamination from a disaster will be limited to irradiated seawater instead of airborne fallout, which is a good trade off as far as limiting both human and environmental damage goes. Not that contaminating the water is a good thing, but airborne fallout is much, much worse.
Plus, when you want to decommission one of these things, you can tow it to wherever it's going, instead of dismantling it on-site and taking it away in pieces.
For those who don't RTFAs, this one has something interesting, not mentioned in the summary. The analyst thought the worm might have started as something else and been re-purposed for sabotage. There might be two separate coder groups, one who made the original program and one who made it into a weapon. The latter group was apparently less skilled, though still would have needed a considerable breadth of knowledge.
Makes me wonder if the perpetrator might not be one of Iran's less advanced neighbours, instead of the US or Israel. After all, there are plenty of Middle Eastern nations who are worried about Iranian power and expansion. And there's two obvious suspects that would be blamed when it came to light.
Of course, it could also be that either American or Israeli coders were rushed, understaffed, over-compartmentalized or otherwise had the quality of their work reduced.
Yeah, I wasn't coming down on either side of the argument there - I wasn't condoning or condemning the BSA's actions in that hypothetical case, just stating that that's their standard MO.
Slashdot has always been that way. You (or we I guess) just got older. And blogs got more common too, so blogger opinion pieces went from being on a few sites to being absolutely everywhere.
It isn't that the site has changed, it's that your memories of slashdot a decade ago are rose-tinted.
Yeah, that's true for situations where the only copies of the software being run are pirated. And you're right that many a pirate mislabels himself a customer without understanding that, as they're doing squat to support the company that makes the software they pirate, said company has no incentive to play nice.
But the situation with the BSA threatening to sue isn't usually that black and white. Far more often you have a situation where a company is running legitimate copies of BSA software on their machines, but also running "extra" copies. So you have ITExampleCorp that has 500 legit copies of XP running on 1500 machines, or something to that effect.
Suing ExampleCorp in that instance is, in fact, suing your customer. Of course, what the BSA prefers to do is to instead demand that ExampleCorp buy licences from them to cover the other thousand boxes, using the threat of a lawsuit to make them comply.
I'm not strictly disagreeing with you, but I do think you're conflating two different forms of piracy.
But seriously folks, this is an awful, awful idea. If given a choice between sinking my money into this or into the Phantom console, I'd have to think a bit before making up my mind.
Want to make a game with an olfactory element? Go for it. Make the character someone/something with an enhanced sense of smell and display whatever their nose picks up as a visual overlay, or with an in game radar map. This has been done at least twice that I'm aware of, and works just fine, conceptually. Make it a core gameplay element and you could do something original even.
It also doesn't require either the player to use their very real nose to experience anything unpleasant, and doesn't require an expensive, useless, gimmicky peripheral.
I did cover that with the second paragraph of my post. Prion bioweapons wouldn't be person-to-person contagious the way that viral or bacterial bioweapons are. Hence the comparison between prion weapons and chemical weapons, where in both cases only the people initially exposed will be affected. I should also clarify that I find the notion of actually using bioweapons to be a crime against humanity, but I have no problem hypothesizing about their use.
Also, the comparison to land mines is inept. Land mines last a long time, but only kill or maim one person per mine. Bioweapons don't last a long time, but can kill or main many people per deployment.
you can never clear an area. You could nuke the area, but the biological agents could return, carried by insects or water or birds.
No, this is demonstrably wrong.
Some, not all, pathogens are transmissible through animal vectors. If you were to weaponize bubonic plague then there could still be rodent carriers inside the exposed area after all human beings have been evacuated or died. Not every bioweapon has an animal vector available to it however, and even the ones that do, the animal must be at least partially asymptomatic in order to remain a threat, or it's going to die in short order. The "worst case" would be a disease that can jump species to something ubiquitous, like rats or mosquitoes, and can infect those species without killing them.
If you'd stated that some bioweapons remain a threat in a region after deployment, I would have accepted your argument as valid, but the way your post is written suggests that you think all bioweapons can, which is wrong.
Also, you listed "insects water and birds". Insects and birds belong on that list, and you didn't mention any other animals like rats, but water is another matter entirely. Waterborne transmission due to contamination is temporary. Water itself cannot act as a host. When a disease is waterborne, it either spends part of it's life-cycle in water, like the Guinea Worm, or it's the result of contamination via feces or dead organisms, like cholera.
Here we tested the cellular and molecular characteristics of prion propagation after aerosol exposure and after intranasal instillation. We found both inoculation routes to be largely independent of the immune system
Admittedly quoted out of context. But it does mean that no, having an immune system that works properly is not in and of itself enough to protect you from aerosol prions.
And despite what TFS says, I can see uses for this in biological warfare. A person exposed to airborne prions cannot transmit the disease to another human being, as person-to-person transmission has only been observed to occur via ingestion of tissue. So, unlike a viral or bacterial agent, there's no risk of a bioweapon attack spreading out from the initial targets to other populations. At the same time, there's the advantage over chemical weapons, in that an airborne agent needs to be at a minimum concentration in order to kill you, whereas a single prion in your system can start the needed protein chain reaction.
However, in order to make prions into useful weapons, they'd need to be lethal much faster than they are now, something that's a problem with bioweapons already. Chemical agents are more practical if only in that they kill in minutes instead of weeks. My biological understanding of prions is not good enough to make an accurate assessment as to whether they could be made faster acting, but I suspect it can't be done.
The long onset time for symptoms makes prions useless for tactical biological warfare, but they could be used as terror weapons or tools for assassination. Of course, prions can already be used for either of the above without making them airborne first, and haven't been so far as I know. Assassins would likely prefer something faster, and terrorists almost always default to low tech solutions like bombs, which can kill plenty of people reliably without needing any fancy preparation or patience.
IIRC, there's still some debate as to how much of the interior heat of the Earth is due to radioactive decay and how much is residual heat leftover from the planet's formation. Remember that the Earth/Moon system originated as two bodies of similar mass that collided a few billion years back; both would have been fully molten, surface to core, when the proverbial dust had settled. Millennia would pass before either had a solid surface.
It might be that the internal heat of the Earth is partly residual, with radioactive decay delaying cooling by adding more heat. Regardless of the proportion of residual to radioactive heat, the moon should be less molten than the Earth, if only due to the square-cube law dictating the Earth will cool more slowly. So the science in TFA is actually pretty interesting.
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Jaime comes off as reserved enough that I can't legitimately judge his intelligence. Given the breadth of skills he's shown, I'd say he's far from average.
Tory and Kari I'll agree are only above average. Yes, I said above; remember how low the average is. Adam comes off as more intelligent, but seems to have ADHD, which is actually pretty common as a combination. Having a short attention span makes others think a person is less intelligent than they actually are, mostly because of the perceived immaturity.
So I'd say calling them, collectively "smart" isn't sad or inaccurate. I wouldn't call them genius, but I don't expect a science entertainment show to be hosted by a genius.
And regardless, Mythbusters is celebrated by /. not because it's hosted by smart people, it's celebrated because so much else on TV is incredibly stupid, lowest common denominator crap. It's the same reason Futurama gets as much love as it does; how many other animated shows slip in quantum mechanics jokes and just expect the audience to get it?
By that logic, there are no engineers. Anywhere. Ever. Every engineer is an applied scientist.
I think you need to reexamine the way you use those terms. Using the word "scientist" instead of the word "engineer" to describe someone who does engineering, simply because what they're doing is applied science, doesn't leave a single person on the planet who can legitimately be called an engineer. Well, except for a few cases where a job title includes the work "engineer" to make it sound more complex than it actually is, but I don't count those.
I count someone a scientist if they work in a scientific field and spend most of their time on projects that they intend to publish the results of. I call them an engineer if they spend most of their time designing, building and tinkering with technology. Obviously there are people who are somewhere in between those two, but the Mythbusters are engineers first.
See, I think the way some people react to the idea ("no, they're scientists, not engineers") suggest that they think engineering is somehow more vulgar than science.
I'd call them engineers first and foremost, and call it label of respect. They're also non-academic scientists, since the "scientist" label simply means "someone who does scientific research" but engineering is clearly their focus.
It's actually composite plating. Duct tape over electrical tape, with explosive reactive armour on the outside. The ER plates are made of C4 and disassembled microwave ovens.
I'd be more inclined to call them engineers. Yes, they do experiments, as that's kinda the point of the show, but if you examine their skill sets and techniques, it's pretty obvious what we'd call them if they applied those skills to another field. They make blueprints, run computer simulations, build small scale prototypes, build large scale tests, etc. In particular the "keep at it til something breaks/blows up" approach is engineer thinking.
So, they're Hollywood SFX guys putting engineering skills to work testing popular science. The fact they're sneaking lessons about control groups and repeatable results into what is ostensibly an entertainment show is an added bonus. The purists who shout "it's not REAL science" are just setting up a "no true Scotsman" argument, since while "science" has a clear meaning "REAL science" does not.
Just wanted to add to what you said: look at the parallels to Prohibition in the twenties and early thirties.
Alcohol was made illegal and what happened? Gang warfare. Smuggling. Higher addiction rates, instead of lower ones like you might expect, only now the addicts are going broke because of the increased prices. Criminality of all stripes caused by desperate, broke addicts. Illegal products contaminated by poisons (methanol, mostly). Law enforcement resources diverted when they were sorely needed elsewhere. Officials bribed and corrupted. Assassination and murder for hire, the inevitable result of unscrupulous people flush with cash operating outside the law. This was not a good time to be alive.
Every negative consequence of Prohibition is mirrored in the modern War on Drugs. And what happened when Prohibition was repealed? The problems slowly went away. There wasn't an explosion of alcoholism; the addicts were there all along and nobody suddenly decided to join their number now that it was legal to do so. The criminal empires built on moonshine and smuggling collapsed. Things got better once we stopped trying to force people to live up to the ideals of sobriety, as if it were ever possible to coerce someone to be a better person.
Eh, Rad-X is nice for the Glow, but nine times out of ten it's easier just to carry Rad-Away for the rare times it's needed.
Uh, not rude? I'm pretty sure calling your opponent a fuckwit qualifies as rude. To say nothing of the rest of the comment.
Being rude doesn't matter from a standpoint of factual correctness, but a person can have the facts of their side and still come off looking like a raving lunatic when they write an entire paragraph where every third word is "cock".
Yeah, and the dumb thing is, it's not like we haven't seen this happen before.
"Arcades are dying! Games are moving into the home!"
"PC games are dying! Games are moving to the consoles!"
"Consoles are dying! Games are moving to the smartphones!"
This can also be applied to statements that "Game Company X is dying!" "Game genre Y is dying!", etc. The game's industry does love its' doomsayers.
Meanwhile, while arcades actually did die, sort of, neither PC games nor home consoles seem to have. A few trends get set, and followed, because the industry's direction is set by clueless managers who follow the market leader religiously. The prophecies are occasionally self fulfilling, particularly when it comes to moving on to the next console generation, which often has the feel of a mass migration.
Here's the useful rule to apply: If someone says "X mode of gaming is dying", ask them what they think will replace it. If they answer something that isn't up to the task, they're surely wrong. At best, in lieu of "dying" the mode of gaming in question will undergo a dry spell, or be reduced in importance.
Besides, a neutron star is essentially one giant molecule anyways, since in degenerate matter protons, neutrons and electrons are pretty much in direct contact, without any "atomic" or "molecular" structure.
Respectfully, this isn't correct. The core of a neutron star is indeed degenerate matter, but it's exclusively neutron degenerate matter, with a complete lack of protons or electrons. Every particle is a neutron, with no space at all in between them. Calling it a giant molecule is not accurate in any interpretation I can think of. I have heard of neutron star cores described as one giant atomic nucleus, which is slightly more accurate (in that it's made of subatomic particles in direct contact with each other), though actual nuclei are held together by nuclear force instead of gravity.
Now, the outer layers of a neutron star are made of electron degenerate matter with a thin surface of highly compressed regular matter. That fact may have been where you got the "protons, neutrons and electrons" part of your post - there are no protons or electrons in the interior, but they are present in the outer layers. Which, while interesting, doesn't really matter in regards to TFA, as they observed evidence of a superfluid core, and the core is nothing but neutrons.
Nah, that just exposes all new loopholes.
A better option is this: If a cop instructs or incites illegal action, that officer is potentially an accomplice/co-conspirator and the department they work for is liable. Note "instructs/incites" would only count when the officer was A) acting in his or her professional capacity, since otherwise they're just another civilian breaking the law on their own time and B) actually started something instead of going along with other criminal elements as part of their cover. This would mean that the victims of riots instigated by undercover cops would be able to sue the department.
So Officer Bob working for the EXPD posing undercover as an anarchist throws the first stone during a protest, which then sparks a riot. Under these changed rules, the shopkeeper whose window was smashed or the insurance company of the car that was set on fire has a surefire lawsuit against the EXPD, who of course wise up and tell all of Officer Bob's coworkers to never, ever pull this kind of crap again. Ol' Bob himself is, of course, given his pink slip, and might face charges if the local prosecutor has the stones.
Plus, added bonus, the actual victims of the riot get compensation - and by "actual victims" I mean the folks who caught in the crossfire, whose homes, neighbourhoods or places of business were turned into a warzone by overzealous cops and the violent assholes who enjoy rioting.
Uh, no.
Thermodynamically the Earth is anything but a closed system. We lose heat into space. We gain heat from the sun, from atomic decay, from tidal forces, etc (the sun is the most significant of the lot, obviously). The planet is not a closed system, and it's a damn good thing for us that this is the case.
I think what you meant to say was that it doesn't matter where exactly the waste heat from a power plant goes, as heat tends to equalize over time. But "closed system" is right out.
Someone else already posted the fact that 2% of the Sahara works out to tens of thousands of square kilometres, which pretty much destroys that argument. That doesn't even get into overnight power storage, or the hazards and challenges of centralizing the entire global power grid.
But lets say you're being glib, and what you actually meant was that a solar power grid distributed across the entire planet, or maybe just distributed across the equatorial regions that get the most sun, could provide all our energy needs. I'll argue that point as it's much less stupid than paving over a square region of the Sahara 300 km across and covering it in panels.
First up, you need to look at the total cost of building an entire global solar grid. Solar panels aren't cheap, and while they're getting cheaper, there's also the cost measured in energy and resources, i.e. how much power does it take for a factory to make a single panel, and what resources are needed in quantity. These are non-trivial problems.
But okay, let's take it for granted that it's possible. Hell, one thing that would make it much easier is ditching solar panels entirely and using solar heat engines, which give a more even output and scale up better. On a large enough scale, they might even be cheaper.
Let's even go so far as to ditch the "solar only" approach and instead go for "passive power only", i.e. expand our approach to include hydro, geo and wind. Gee, you know what... That actually is what I argued for in my initial post. I didn't use some flippant pipe dream about paving over ninety thousand square klicks of dessert and plunking down solar panels, I actually looked at a more realistic and nuanced approach.
But, there's still a problem, one I didn't cover in my post directly. Global power demands aren't static. They're increasing. And the rate of increase is only going to get worse as there are two to three billion people living in nations that are now starting to demand first world living standards. We're not going to be able to do this with just solar, or even just solar/wind/hydro/geo. We'll need something that can be built on demand to make up the deficit. Hence, nuclear. And eventually fusion.
Don't be absurd.
If the reactor were to suffer a total catastrophic failure, it would be moderately bad. Not Chernobyl bad, and not Windscale bad either - it's smaller for one thing, and less likely to endanger human lives. The human cost would be low, the environmental cost would be non-trivial and difficult to estimate, and the economic cost would be high. I'd put the scale of a worst case disaster on par with Deepwater Horizon, albeit different enough that it's apples to oranges.
But the key phrase there is "catastrophic failure". Not "leak". The difference between a leak and a catastrophe is like the difference between a house fire and the Chicago fire. There have been nuclear leaks at sea before, given the number of nuclear vessels in service, and particularly given the former Soviet Union's track record. They weren't even close to the disaster you're imagining.
The biggest advantage I can see, which I posted just before you did, is containment. A surface nuclear power plant gets the same benefit as a submerged one in terms of cooling and remoteness, but in the event of a catastrophic failure, the underwater one will not send tons of fallout into the stratosphere. You'd still get some contamination making it into the air via the hydrological cycle (think Tritium contaminated rainfall), but not on the same order of magnitude as if the same disaster had occurred on the surface.
Yeah, that always struck me as the fallacy of the nukes vs. passive power collection debate. Pursuing both options and using them in different applications and climates, as their strengths and weaknesses dictate, seems to be the most logical approach by far.
My take would be to build wind turbines, geothermal plants, hydroelectric dams and solar collectors (especially solar heat engines as opposed to photoelectric cells) in locations where the respective climate and geography dictates, and supplement those with rooftop photoelectric solar and other distributed systems wherever local homeowners want to use them.
This will leave a power deficit, as those means of power generation don't provide enough energy to meet our needs, so you solve that deficit with nuclear power for the time being, and fusion power when it becomes available, which realistically might not be for many decades. Add in non fossil fuel options for vehicles (biofuel, battery or hydrogen) and we might actually break our dependency on coal and oil entirely.
On the one hand, you're introducing corrosive seawater to the mix. And you're putting it in a cramped, high pressure environment, though if it's heavily automated that won't cause as many problems as if it had a large full time crew aboard.
On the positive side, you've now got a handy, high heat capacity, thermally conductive environment to work with, which nuke plants benefit from. And you're making it such that any contamination from a disaster will be limited to irradiated seawater instead of airborne fallout, which is a good trade off as far as limiting both human and environmental damage goes. Not that contaminating the water is a good thing, but airborne fallout is much, much worse.
Plus, when you want to decommission one of these things, you can tow it to wherever it's going, instead of dismantling it on-site and taking it away in pieces.
For those who don't RTFAs, this one has something interesting, not mentioned in the summary. The analyst thought the worm might have started as something else and been re-purposed for sabotage. There might be two separate coder groups, one who made the original program and one who made it into a weapon. The latter group was apparently less skilled, though still would have needed a considerable breadth of knowledge.
Makes me wonder if the perpetrator might not be one of Iran's less advanced neighbours, instead of the US or Israel. After all, there are plenty of Middle Eastern nations who are worried about Iranian power and expansion. And there's two obvious suspects that would be blamed when it came to light.
Of course, it could also be that either American or Israeli coders were rushed, understaffed, over-compartmentalized or otherwise had the quality of their work reduced.
Yeah, I wasn't coming down on either side of the argument there - I wasn't condoning or condemning the BSA's actions in that hypothetical case, just stating that that's their standard MO.
Slashdot has always been that way. You (or we I guess) just got older. And blogs got more common too, so blogger opinion pieces went from being on a few sites to being absolutely everywhere.
It isn't that the site has changed, it's that your memories of slashdot a decade ago are rose-tinted.
Yeah, that's true for situations where the only copies of the software being run are pirated. And you're right that many a pirate mislabels himself a customer without understanding that, as they're doing squat to support the company that makes the software they pirate, said company has no incentive to play nice.
But the situation with the BSA threatening to sue isn't usually that black and white. Far more often you have a situation where a company is running legitimate copies of BSA software on their machines, but also running "extra" copies. So you have ITExampleCorp that has 500 legit copies of XP running on 1500 machines, or something to that effect.
Suing ExampleCorp in that instance is, in fact, suing your customer. Of course, what the BSA prefers to do is to instead demand that ExampleCorp buy licences from them to cover the other thousand boxes, using the threat of a lawsuit to make them comply.
I'm not strictly disagreeing with you, but I do think you're conflating two different forms of piracy.
But seriously folks, this is an awful, awful idea. If given a choice between sinking my money into this or into the Phantom console, I'd have to think a bit before making up my mind.
Want to make a game with an olfactory element? Go for it. Make the character someone/something with an enhanced sense of smell and display whatever their nose picks up as a visual overlay, or with an in game radar map. This has been done at least twice that I'm aware of, and works just fine, conceptually. Make it a core gameplay element and you could do something original even.
It also doesn't require either the player to use their very real nose to experience anything unpleasant, and doesn't require an expensive, useless, gimmicky peripheral.
I did cover that with the second paragraph of my post. Prion bioweapons wouldn't be person-to-person contagious the way that viral or bacterial bioweapons are. Hence the comparison between prion weapons and chemical weapons, where in both cases only the people initially exposed will be affected. I should also clarify that I find the notion of actually using bioweapons to be a crime against humanity, but I have no problem hypothesizing about their use.
Also, the comparison to land mines is inept. Land mines last a long time, but only kill or maim one person per mine. Bioweapons don't last a long time, but can kill or main many people per deployment.
you can never clear an area. You could nuke the area, but the biological agents could return, carried by insects or water or birds.
No, this is demonstrably wrong.
Some, not all, pathogens are transmissible through animal vectors. If you were to weaponize bubonic plague then there could still be rodent carriers inside the exposed area after all human beings have been evacuated or died. Not every bioweapon has an animal vector available to it however, and even the ones that do, the animal must be at least partially asymptomatic in order to remain a threat, or it's going to die in short order. The "worst case" would be a disease that can jump species to something ubiquitous, like rats or mosquitoes, and can infect those species without killing them.
If you'd stated that some bioweapons remain a threat in a region after deployment, I would have accepted your argument as valid, but the way your post is written suggests that you think all bioweapons can, which is wrong.
Also, you listed "insects water and birds". Insects and birds belong on that list, and you didn't mention any other animals like rats, but water is another matter entirely. Waterborne transmission due to contamination is temporary. Water itself cannot act as a host. When a disease is waterborne, it either spends part of it's life-cycle in water, like the Guinea Worm, or it's the result of contamination via feces or dead organisms, like cholera.
From one of TFA:
Here we tested the cellular and molecular characteristics of prion propagation after aerosol exposure and after intranasal instillation. We found both inoculation routes to be largely independent of the immune system
Admittedly quoted out of context. But it does mean that no, having an immune system that works properly is not in and of itself enough to protect you from aerosol prions.
And despite what TFS says, I can see uses for this in biological warfare. A person exposed to airborne prions cannot transmit the disease to another human being, as person-to-person transmission has only been observed to occur via ingestion of tissue. So, unlike a viral or bacterial agent, there's no risk of a bioweapon attack spreading out from the initial targets to other populations. At the same time, there's the advantage over chemical weapons, in that an airborne agent needs to be at a minimum concentration in order to kill you, whereas a single prion in your system can start the needed protein chain reaction.
However, in order to make prions into useful weapons, they'd need to be lethal much faster than they are now, something that's a problem with bioweapons already. Chemical agents are more practical if only in that they kill in minutes instead of weeks. My biological understanding of prions is not good enough to make an accurate assessment as to whether they could be made faster acting, but I suspect it can't be done.
The long onset time for symptoms makes prions useless for tactical biological warfare, but they could be used as terror weapons or tools for assassination. Of course, prions can already be used for either of the above without making them airborne first, and haven't been so far as I know. Assassins would likely prefer something faster, and terrorists almost always default to low tech solutions like bombs, which can kill plenty of people reliably without needing any fancy preparation or patience.
IIRC, there's still some debate as to how much of the interior heat of the Earth is due to radioactive decay and how much is residual heat leftover from the planet's formation. Remember that the Earth/Moon system originated as two bodies of similar mass that collided a few billion years back; both would have been fully molten, surface to core, when the proverbial dust had settled. Millennia would pass before either had a solid surface.
It might be that the internal heat of the Earth is partly residual, with radioactive decay delaying cooling by adding more heat. Regardless of the proportion of residual to radioactive heat, the moon should be less molten than the Earth, if only due to the square-cube law dictating the Earth will cool more slowly. So the science in TFA is actually pretty interesting.