I'm convinced that China would destroy us quickly if we tried.
Either you are not in any way familiar with our relative military strengths, or you are trying to make a very absurd joke.
Not only do we have almost immeasurable technical superiority, enormously more capable and well trained troops and an order of magnitude more depth of strategic intelligence on their military than they have on ours, but our forces all actually want to fight for our country. China's only hope is either to continue milking us until we ruin ourselves financially (which is much further off than you might imagine), or to support a radical third party who would do something stupid and get themselves slaughtered to weaken us (like, say, Iran or North Korea).
Then again, are you sure that all the intermediary servers your mail goes through are using SSL?
Of course they are! In fact, I did a geo-location on one of the computers I'm connected to through TOR and it looks like it's a pretty secure one in the Chinese government! If you can't trust them, who can you trust? See, TOR is a great idea for safe web access!
Holy cow, you UK guys get paid for everything! I can't imagine ever getting paid overtime just because I finished my days work early. Heck, you can get in trouble for that kind of thing in the US.
I seem to recall that in the infancy of traditional computation, a similar level of sophistication was seen as the standard barrier to entry. Give quantum computing a few decades and any 12 year old kid will be able to whip up some quantum php and call themselves a quantum hacker.
Sarah said she was locked up in the madhouse and we were all a delusion. When they came to lock her up, she said "Oh not this again. Now I'm in five deep."
Exactly, like the elephants that control the New York Stock Exchange. Everyone knows that we use ultra low frequency for covert communications. It only makes sense that there's a sophisticated interaction between elephant stomping passing through the core of the earth and the computers controlling the stocks. I mean, the science is all there, there's no logical fallacy.
Or like a giant bearded old white dude in the sky who planted all the dinosaur bones to test the unbelievers. That's a totally consistent theory, too. It's gotta be just as valid a hypothesis, right?
Or maybe, just maybe, there should be a limit where people listen to these stupid ideas and say "that's retarded, and so are you." I mean, seriously, brain power amplifying quantum mechanical effects? Like the randomness of quantum is some magical radio signal from our souls in another dimension? Next you'll tell me that the sun is the real consciousness, controlling us all through neutrinos. I mean, there's no fallacy there either, right?
My number 5 was really in response to his unnumbered fifth point, that the federal government is unintentionally sabotaging "renewable" energy. I was arguing that they are, in fact, the only reason we have any renewables in the US at all. I absolutely agree with you that these incentives are an integral part of this transition. We should be investing as heavily in that as we should invest in something as pivotal for the continuation of the human race as, say, space travel, and far more than we invest in something as wastefully pointless as, say, foreign wars over nothing.
That it's a potentially less-efficient mode of generating power. It's like an RTS, if you invest in the wrong tech trees early on, you'll lose, even though it doesn't actually kill you directly. It may be cheaper/just as safe to do something else entirely. This makes technologies pursued simply due to buzzwords like "renewable" inherently dangerous. Plus, renewable is a misleading term, since you still have maintenance costs. Just because those costs aren't defined under the heading "fuel" doesn't mean they don't exist, or that they're necessarily lower than maintenance costs for other systems. That's the danger of a solar power tower.
1 - Shipping and mining of feedstock - I presume you mean fuel... I really don't see how this is a problem at all, it creates a lot of industry and drives new technologies. It's a good thing all around. There's no way a sane person can see this as a drawback.
2 - Long term cost with storage of waste - You've clearly never heard of breeder reactors, or the negative radioactive waste drawbacks of things like coal. Combine the already-lower radioactive waste of nuclear with breeders, and you've got an extremely planet and people-friendly power source.
3 - Proliferation - Ya, we're clearly stopping openly-hostile, fundamentalist Iran from building nuclear power plants. That's totally happening. If you call Stuxnet on this, you're crazier than Ahmadinejad.
4 - Worldwide fuel limits - I also went to college. In fact, I went to college for power engineering, and that number is utter nonsense. It's more like 3,000 years with current consumption, assuming we don't use breeders. With new technologies like Indian thorium breeders we have more like 250,000 years, assuming we only use uranium and thorium, and assuming we're still stuck on this rock. That gives us only 20 years more to hold out until we solve the fusion break-even problem.
5 - Solar and wind production in the US - At the APPA conference in Nashville this spring, one of the foremost investors in "renewable" energy in the country outright stated that they would have put absolutely nothing into solar/wind/geothermal if they didn't receive federal grants for it. It'd've simply've been a waste of time and money. Federal support is the only reason we have anything like this project.
6 - If you're not an idiot, you should stop trying so hard to look like one.
Applications you've made because of a school project will not count.
That's stupid. As an EE, a buddy of mine and I made a spiffy wireless sensor system which we presented at a conference. We did the project all on our own without any direction from any professors and received a $5000 grant from an independent organization interested in publishing our work. And we did it all for 6 credits worth of independent undergraduate research classes, too. Just because you get college credit for a project doesn't mean it isn't a real project.
Don't confuse cults with religions either - atheist bigotry aside, they're two very different things.
Isn't it a staple of freshman English courses at university to ask what this difference is, to discover it's only in the cultural perception, or connotation, and there is no fundamental distinction? Or did we just do that because I didn't go to school in Texas?
I seem to be having trouble conveying this very simple idea (not something major or important at all). Let's start with the concept that money only has utility in the context of a society, for the exchange of goods or services. Other materials can have utility to an individual separated from society, which money cannot. These types of utility are different. Do you see that now?
How about this: money only has utility in the context of society, for the exchange of goods or services. Other materials can have utility to an individual separated from society, which money cannot. These types of utility are different. Do you see that now?
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I'm convinced that China would destroy us quickly if we tried.
Either you are not in any way familiar with our relative military strengths, or you are trying to make a very absurd joke.
Not only do we have almost immeasurable technical superiority, enormously more capable and well trained troops and an order of magnitude more depth of strategic intelligence on their military than they have on ours, but our forces all actually want to fight for our country. China's only hope is either to continue milking us until we ruin ourselves financially (which is much further off than you might imagine), or to support a radical third party who would do something stupid and get themselves slaughtered to weaken us (like, say, Iran or North Korea).
The only answer worth giving to the Chinese government: ä½æ''èZï¼
I agree, we should punish them by making the entire internet reliant on ASCII instead of an internationally compliant Unicode system!
Then again, are you sure that all the intermediary servers your mail goes through are using SSL?
Of course they are! In fact, I did a geo-location on one of the computers I'm connected to through TOR and it looks like it's a pretty secure one in the Chinese government! If you can't trust them, who can you trust? See, TOR is a great idea for safe web access!
It seemed to work fine with Russia owing the US.
Holy cow, you UK guys get paid for everything! I can't imagine ever getting paid overtime just because I finished my days work early. Heck, you can get in trouble for that kind of thing in the US.
8?
I got the feeling this was more along the lines of not talking about ship movements and stuff... The summary is a little extreme.
I seem to recall that in the infancy of traditional computation, a similar level of sophistication was seen as the standard barrier to entry. Give quantum computing a few decades and any 12 year old kid will be able to whip up some quantum php and call themselves a quantum hacker.
Sarah said she was locked up in the madhouse and we were all a delusion. When they came to lock her up, she said "Oh not this again. Now I'm in five deep."
Sometimes when you chase a ghost you find out that there's no such thing.
Exactly, like the elephants that control the New York Stock Exchange. Everyone knows that we use ultra low frequency for covert communications. It only makes sense that there's a sophisticated interaction between elephant stomping passing through the core of the earth and the computers controlling the stocks. I mean, the science is all there, there's no logical fallacy.
Or like a giant bearded old white dude in the sky who planted all the dinosaur bones to test the unbelievers. That's a totally consistent theory, too. It's gotta be just as valid a hypothesis, right?
Or maybe, just maybe, there should be a limit where people listen to these stupid ideas and say "that's retarded, and so are you." I mean, seriously, brain power amplifying quantum mechanical effects? Like the randomness of quantum is some magical radio signal from our souls in another dimension? Next you'll tell me that the sun is the real consciousness, controlling us all through neutrinos. I mean, there's no fallacy there either, right?
The only fallout of concern from Fukushima is political, not nuclear. And thanks for ignoring my actual arguments, by the way. That's classy of you.
My number 5 was really in response to his unnumbered fifth point, that the federal government is unintentionally sabotaging "renewable" energy. I was arguing that they are, in fact, the only reason we have any renewables in the US at all. I absolutely agree with you that these incentives are an integral part of this transition. We should be investing as heavily in that as we should invest in something as pivotal for the continuation of the human race as, say, space travel, and far more than we invest in something as wastefully pointless as, say, foreign wars over nothing.
That it's a potentially less-efficient mode of generating power. It's like an RTS, if you invest in the wrong tech trees early on, you'll lose, even though it doesn't actually kill you directly. It may be cheaper/just as safe to do something else entirely. This makes technologies pursued simply due to buzzwords like "renewable" inherently dangerous. Plus, renewable is a misleading term, since you still have maintenance costs. Just because those costs aren't defined under the heading "fuel" doesn't mean they don't exist, or that they're necessarily lower than maintenance costs for other systems. That's the danger of a solar power tower.
You should just be glad many universities don't have any English Comprehension courses as requirements...
What makes this kook any more kooky than the kook who wrote that trash?
Power consumption, among other things.
No wonder all these kids out of "good colleges" are such lazy ass slackers.
Applications you've made because of a school project will not count.
That's stupid. As an EE, a buddy of mine and I made a spiffy wireless sensor system which we presented at a conference. We did the project all on our own without any direction from any professors and received a $5000 grant from an independent organization interested in publishing our work. And we did it all for 6 credits worth of independent undergraduate research classes, too. Just because you get college credit for a project doesn't mean it isn't a real project.
Don't confuse cults with religions either - atheist bigotry aside, they're two very different things.
Isn't it a staple of freshman English courses at university to ask what this difference is, to discover it's only in the cultural perception, or connotation, and there is no fundamental distinction? Or did we just do that because I didn't go to school in Texas?
They should calculate pi*e. Knowing that number to such detail would be... delicious.
Ya, it's much more efficient to just have all your ram sitting around doing nothing all the time.
I seem to be having trouble conveying this very simple idea (not something major or important at all). Let's start with the concept that money only has utility in the context of a society, for the exchange of goods or services. Other materials can have utility to an individual separated from society, which money cannot. These types of utility are different. Do you see that now?
How about this: money only has utility in the context of society, for the exchange of goods or services. Other materials can have utility to an individual separated from society, which money cannot. These types of utility are different. Do you see that now?