All nuclear power plants are required, from beginning of operation, to set aside money in a decommissioning fund.
fuel processing
What? All nuclear plants have to buy their fuel rods. Wouldn't the cost of fuel processing be part of the price of the fuel rods?
Or are you referring to "fuel processing" of the spent nuclear fuel after it's been used in the reactor? Nuclear plants have been paying funds to the govt for many years now to dispose of the waste. According to Wikipedia: "The Nuclear Waste Fund receives almost $750 million in fee revenues each year and has an unspent balance of $25 billion."
Also, there is the issue that "spent nuclear fuel" still contains a *LOT* of potential energy which our current reactors do not utilize. If we used that "spent nuclear fuel" in the right types of reactors, we could generate trillions of dollars of more electricity. Spent nuclear fuel should be viewed as a strategic asset, not a liability.
Full Insurance
Presumably your complaining about the Price-Anderson act? I do agree that we should probably seek some reform of the current system. Part of the problem is that we have too few nuclear plants. The more plants you have, the more participants you can have in an insurance pool. The risk of a large, very expensive nuclear accident are very small. Ideally, we spread the cost of the risk out over a large pool of insured plants, so that the cost burden on any one plant isn't too high. The problem is, we only have about 100 reactors, and didn't start construction of a new one for 30 years (there are now, I think, 3 or 4 reactor projects trying to start construction).
Technology development costs
Seriously? As if all the solar and wind technologies, geothermal, etc haven't all received (and continue to receive) lots of support from the government? Again, why is it a problem that nuclear received tech expenditure dollars, but its OK for solar, wind, etc to receive govt monies?
Anyhow, there's an argument that since we've already spent that money, shouldn't we try to get the benefit of those expenses? As one example, the government spent a lot of money over 20 years on a project called the "Integral Fast Reactor", which would be a safer reactor, which could be fueled with our current "nuclear waste", producing waste which would be highly radioactive for only about 150 years, and after about 300 years the radioactivity would decrease so much it would be below background radiation levels, as opposed to our current version of nuclear waste which is significantly radioactive for many thousands of years, and takes almost 100,000 years to decay to "below background" (although its radioactivity is pretty low for the vast majority of that time, but still significant).
Guess what happened to it? It was a very successful project that was at the 11th hour (that is, almost done, with just a little bit more R&D to complete; all the R&D which had been done had already produced useable technology, there was just one more piece of tech to finish). Then, the anti-nuke lobby pressured the Clinton administration to cancel it. Why spend all that money then cancel the project when it is a success? Ridiculous.
So, in the end, I view your list, unless I've misunderstood your items, to be weak because it's full of half-truths, and represents a double standard.
What you're saying is true. . . so long as you can actually make a profit. If you spend a million dollars developing a new free to play game, plus a bunch of premium content, and then only sell $200k of the premium product, you have a problem.
I suppose that has probably happened to at least a few of the free-to-play games through the years. . . you just usually don't hear much about the failures. But, in any case, it's likely that the customers wouldn't have payed to play those games in the first place, so it's not the business model that failed, but the product/company.
Or maybe a tie means they had the same percentage of votes. The number of votes a candidate got can be determined with perfect accuracy because of error, which is the point of the article, so what you are left with is saying that to within such a close margin it doesn't matter, they got the same *percentage* of the vote.
Even if you had an "ideal" electronic system which was not rigged in any way and couldn't be hacked. . .
Some people would still accidentally push the wrong button or otherwise make the wrong choice. But, when it comes to voter error, at a certain point, you have to say a vote cast is a vote cast and if you screwed up, too bad (that's assuming the UI isn't screwed up and is detecting your touches at the wrong candidate on the touch screen and registering them for that wrong candidate).
Seems like, if anything, a delegate system helps to (somewhat arbitrarily) decide who the winner is when you have a statistical tie like this. Unfortunately, error is a reality - some people will accidentally check or fill in the bubble, or hit the button for the wrong candidate.
Hopefully, if you're using machine counting, the counting would be error free (at least, as long as the machine wasn't hacked to "adjust" the vote a little bit towards the "right" candidates).
As we saw in Florida in 2000, people will b*&%h about a very close popular vote forever, based upon errors and whatnot, and will say that whoever won "stole the vote".
With a delegate system, you essentially get a second level of determination - so, we don't have a clear winner based upon the popular vote because it's too close. Let's apportion "votes"/delegates based upon the population of each state (and as some states do, you can even split the delegates proportionally), and see who has the most delegates.
Yes, that means, in essence, that some votes end up counting more than other votes, but it doesn't seem like a completely irrational way to try to resolve the tie.
I've often wondered though. . . yeah, you can make money that way, but for every person who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars on DLC, I bet you have hundreds or thousands of players who never buy anything?
Well, anyhow, however it works out, there's enough successful free-to-play games out their raking in the dough that I guess it does work out in the company's favor in the end.
What candidates hope to get out of Iowa, mainly, seems to be being able to say they won an election, or did way better than expected (e.g. Santorum), essentially in the hopes that it will persuade primary voters in other early primary states (NH, SC, FL, etc) to jump on the bandwagon and vote for them.
Which is sad. If you're just going to vote for the candidate everyone else is voting for, why bother voting at all, especially in a primary? Primaries should be all about voting for your *favorite* candidate, not the guy you think might win if you can just push him over the top.
Ahh, but see, there's the kicker - if a lot of people wait till the last minute, then they'll end up in line and miss the beginning of the movie (I guess I should have specified, 5 minutes before the movie *actually starts*, not 5 minutes before the trailers).
I think most people will want to make sure they get a seat (if you wait, it might sell out, and then you have to wait for another showing). Even if it doesn't sell out, you might get stuck in line and miss the first 5 or 10 minutes.
Now, as to your other objection: "I'm not sure that makes any sense. Those people who might buy the "fire sale" tickets are already at the theater, and are already committed to seeing a movie at full price"
I'm thinking of like, cheap/poor kids/teens with time on their hands, who might swing by the theater just to see if they can score some cheap tickets last minute. In any case, right now, the only people at the theater are people committed to seeing it at full price. As people knew that tickets would become available cheaper right before the show starts, some people would start showing up who might not have gone to the movie theater at all, knowing they can get some cheap tix if they don't care about maybe missing the start of the movie.
That is, it might possibly draw more people into the theater in total, on the basis they can get 1/2 price tickets.
The thing I like about Open Source/Free Software, in the end, isn't so much that I have to, myself, inspect and compile every program. I trust the pre-compiled binaries because I know that if someone *does* try to sneak something in, someone else will find it, probably pretty quickly.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, I'm glad there's very technical and very paranoid people out there double checking everything so I don't have to.
An additional thought occured to me - what I said above is true for weekend-to-weekend sales, because they can easily change what movie is showing from one weekend to the next.
However, it seems to me that if any movie is not sold out by about 5 minutes before the show, movie theaters could do last minute "fire sales" - discount the remaining tickets 30-50% to try to get people who are cheap to fill up those remaining seats. However, you then run the risk of alienating your customers because some people in that theater payed less than others, so the people who payed more might feel screwed.
"Yes, but why not? For any given movie, at a given cinema, at a given time, there's an optimal price that maximizes profit".
Yes, but there's also another movie being released which might do better. Why work so hard to make a bad movie make money, if you're a cinema, when you can just kick the movie out of your theater and show something else which *will* make money? I've seen lots of movies advertised which were only in theaters for one weekend, and were gone the next.
The point is, if your movie won't sell tickets at $10, they'll find another movie which will. They won't lower the price to $5 and hope people will see it just because it's cheap.
This whole Strait of Hormuz stuff is about other middle eastern nations' oil supplies, more specifically, their shipping access to the open ocean.
I don't really think it's in the cards that the U.S. is going to be able to start buying Iranian oil any time soon, it's more about whether Iran can interfere with international trade between other nations.
I think this also presents a good argument for why we should be pursuing the development of a domestic coal-to-liquids industry. We have a lot of coal in this country. On the one hand, I hate to see us try to burn it as fast as possible, but, I'd like to see us have the ability, when we need to, to provide some significant percentage (maybe 10 or 20%, something like that) of our gasoline and diesel fuel from domestic coal reserves.
The best move, from his company's perspective, would be to fire him and go "under new management."
Did you read the response from N-Control? They are trying to put as much distance between that guy and the company as they can.
I wonder if this Paul Cristoforo has pioneered a new PR strategy for startups though. . . hire him, or someone like him, to stir up a big pot of controversy, publicly fire him saying you had NO IDEA he was going to abuse his position, and release press releases talking about how great your products are for disabled people/kids/other sympathetic group, etc. Get the public to view your company as another victim of his abuse and try to get them to feel bad for you and good about your products, while transferring their rage to the "rogue employee/consultant".
If the tower of Babel story equates to a Babylonian tower, it would seem that suggests that the book of Genesis, which presents itself as having been written thousands of years before Babylon, actually dates to the era of Babylon (or perhaps parts of Genesis actually are older, but someone 'inserted' the Tower of Babel story much later)?
I should note, I'm not against *at-market* feed-in-tariffs, because that doesn't make everyone else's electricity more expensive, but if you start mandating *above-market* tariffs, then it does start to add to the cost of electricity.
It seems to me that the problem with those "above market" feed-in-tariffs that Germany mandates is that it makes electricity more expensive for everyone else. Lots of people don't own homes, and must live in apartments/flats. Such feed-in-tariffs effectively re-distribute wealth from wealthier homeowners to less-wealthy people who don't own a house.
Yeah, I saw that in your original post. Perhaps they'll expand into your area soon, like next year or something. It may also be that they don't service your particular area because of some sort of local law difference.
Remember my mention about feed-in-tariffs, it might be something like that, where a difference in local law makes their business model far too risky in your area. If I were you, I'd ask them if there is any local obstacle to them servicing you like that, and if they answer back with a reasonable problem, you might be able to start a local movement to change the law in your area, if need be.
The problem you described sounds like an opportunity for someone to create a company which will pay to install a solar panel on a homeowners' roof, but the panels remain the property of the company, while the homeowner pays an electric bill to the solar panel company.
Sort of a "solar utility company". Now, you say, you'd like to get away from "the electric company" - isn't that the point of solar panels? Well, if the choice is between the local utility monopoly, or a solar utility company, and if the solar utility company can sell you power at a cheaper cost than the local monopoly (a *big* IF, I realize, but at $1/watt, it might be possible).
For this idea to work the solar "utilitly" would need the ability to get a feed-in-tariff on selling power back to the local grid - that way, the solar panels could continue to make money even if the home is vacant because of foreclosure.
First off, we really need to draw a line in the sand here: A modern phone is just a very small, battery powered computer. EVERYTHING that's ever been done on other computers before it was done by Apple on the iPhone should count as prior art unless the courts are completely retarded.. Apple tries to get around this by specifying in the patent a "mobile device", but that's a false distinguisher. Since mobile devices are computers, anything done on a computer should count as prior art.
Therefore:
Windows has been multi-tasking and allowing task switching since the 80's. Unix since the 70's (or late 60's?). Every computer system has had a menu button on the keyboard or a menu icon on screen to allow you to task switch.
Specifying a specific type of app to task switch is completely moronic. Your OS supports task switching or it doesn't. What's next, the "Task switching from a Word Processor app" patent? The "Task switching from a web browser app" patent? Task switching from a game, or calculator, or spreadsheet, or database, or email client?
I wonder how many payroll systems out there were hard coded to the assumption that taxes only change on a year-to-year basis, not a month-to-month basis, so you can only load a tax table for a whole year, not a tax table for the next two months?
It may be that a software update will be necessary to change the code to add the ability to load a tax table for just one month, or a range of months, or an arbitrary range (e.g. 21st Jan to 15th April). I think if I were writing tax software, after what has happened the last couple months, I'd go for the last approach, since it seems like a law changing the taxes could go into effect at any time and last for any arbitrary duration of days.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, let's go through your list, shall we?
All nuclear power plants are required, from beginning of operation, to set aside money in a decommissioning fund.
What? All nuclear plants have to buy their fuel rods. Wouldn't the cost of fuel processing be part of the price of the fuel rods?
Or are you referring to "fuel processing" of the spent nuclear fuel after it's been used in the reactor? Nuclear plants have been paying funds to the govt for many years now to dispose of the waste. According to Wikipedia: "The Nuclear Waste Fund receives almost $750 million in fee revenues each year and has an unspent balance of $25 billion."
Also, there is the issue that "spent nuclear fuel" still contains a *LOT* of potential energy which our current reactors do not utilize. If we used that "spent nuclear fuel" in the right types of reactors, we could generate trillions of dollars of more electricity. Spent nuclear fuel should be viewed as a strategic asset, not a liability.
Presumably your complaining about the Price-Anderson act? I do agree that we should probably seek some reform of the current system. Part of the problem is that we have too few nuclear plants. The more plants you have, the more participants you can have in an insurance pool. The risk of a large, very expensive nuclear accident are very small. Ideally, we spread the cost of the risk out over a large pool of insured plants, so that the cost burden on any one plant isn't too high. The problem is, we only have about 100 reactors, and didn't start construction of a new one for 30 years (there are now, I think, 3 or 4 reactor projects trying to start construction).
Seriously? As if all the solar and wind technologies, geothermal, etc haven't all received (and continue to receive) lots of support from the government? Again, why is it a problem that nuclear received tech expenditure dollars, but its OK for solar, wind, etc to receive govt monies?
Anyhow, there's an argument that since we've already spent that money, shouldn't we try to get the benefit of those expenses? As one example, the government spent a lot of money over 20 years on a project called the "Integral Fast Reactor", which would be a safer reactor, which could be fueled with our current "nuclear waste", producing waste which would be highly radioactive for only about 150 years, and after about 300 years the radioactivity would decrease so much it would be below background radiation levels, as opposed to our current version of nuclear waste which is significantly radioactive for many thousands of years, and takes almost 100,000 years to decay to "below background" (although its radioactivity is pretty low for the vast majority of that time, but still significant).
Guess what happened to it? It was a very successful project that was at the 11th hour (that is, almost done, with just a little bit more R&D to complete; all the R&D which had been done had already produced useable technology, there was just one more piece of tech to finish). Then, the anti-nuke lobby pressured the Clinton administration to cancel it. Why spend all that money then cancel the project when it is a success? Ridiculous.
So, in the end, I view your list, unless I've misunderstood your items, to be weak because it's full of half-truths, and represents a double standard.
Wait, so an advocate of concentrated solar thermal power plants is calling nuclear *too expensive**. . .?
Heh. . . . heh. . . ha. . . ha. hahhahahaahahBwahahahaha!
Seriously: Costs of Electricity, by source
Notice that Solar Thermal comes out almost 3 TIMES more expensive than advanced nuclear in the U.S. DOE estimates.
Why is it that nuclear is "too expensive", but renewables get a blank check?
Maybe I've missed some case, but it seems to me that there's a simple test for what is a basic human right:
It's something that other people/the government can only take away from you, not give to you.
What you're saying is true. . . so long as you can actually make a profit. If you spend a million dollars developing a new free to play game, plus a bunch of premium content, and then only sell $200k of the premium product, you have a problem.
I suppose that has probably happened to at least a few of the free-to-play games through the years. . . you just usually don't hear much about the failures. But, in any case, it's likely that the customers wouldn't have payed to play those games in the first place, so it's not the business model that failed, but the product/company.
Or maybe a tie means they had the same percentage of votes. The number of votes a candidate got can be determined with perfect accuracy because of error, which is the point of the article, so what you are left with is saying that to within such a close margin it doesn't matter, they got the same *percentage* of the vote.
Even if you had an "ideal" electronic system which was not rigged in any way and couldn't be hacked. . .
Some people would still accidentally push the wrong button or otherwise make the wrong choice. But, when it comes to voter error, at a certain point, you have to say a vote cast is a vote cast and if you screwed up, too bad (that's assuming the UI isn't screwed up and is detecting your touches at the wrong candidate on the touch screen and registering them for that wrong candidate).
Seems like, if anything, a delegate system helps to (somewhat arbitrarily) decide who the winner is when you have a statistical tie like this. Unfortunately, error is a reality - some people will accidentally check or fill in the bubble, or hit the button for the wrong candidate.
Hopefully, if you're using machine counting, the counting would be error free (at least, as long as the machine wasn't hacked to "adjust" the vote a little bit towards the "right" candidates).
As we saw in Florida in 2000, people will b*&%h about a very close popular vote forever, based upon errors and whatnot, and will say that whoever won "stole the vote".
With a delegate system, you essentially get a second level of determination - so, we don't have a clear winner based upon the popular vote because it's too close. Let's apportion "votes"/delegates based upon the population of each state (and as some states do, you can even split the delegates proportionally), and see who has the most delegates.
Yes, that means, in essence, that some votes end up counting more than other votes, but it doesn't seem like a completely irrational way to try to resolve the tie.
I've often wondered though. . . yeah, you can make money that way, but for every person who spends hundreds or thousands of dollars on DLC, I bet you have hundreds or thousands of players who never buy anything?
Well, anyhow, however it works out, there's enough successful free-to-play games out their raking in the dough that I guess it does work out in the company's favor in the end.
What candidates hope to get out of Iowa, mainly, seems to be being able to say they won an election, or did way better than expected (e.g. Santorum), essentially in the hopes that it will persuade primary voters in other early primary states (NH, SC, FL, etc) to jump on the bandwagon and vote for them.
Which is sad. If you're just going to vote for the candidate everyone else is voting for, why bother voting at all, especially in a primary? Primaries should be all about voting for your *favorite* candidate, not the guy you think might win if you can just push him over the top.
Ahh, but see, there's the kicker - if a lot of people wait till the last minute, then they'll end up in line and miss the beginning of the movie (I guess I should have specified, 5 minutes before the movie *actually starts*, not 5 minutes before the trailers).
I think most people will want to make sure they get a seat (if you wait, it might sell out, and then you have to wait for another showing). Even if it doesn't sell out, you might get stuck in line and miss the first 5 or 10 minutes.
Now, as to your other objection: "I'm not sure that makes any sense. Those people who might buy the "fire sale" tickets are already at the theater, and are already committed to seeing a movie at full price"
I'm thinking of like, cheap/poor kids/teens with time on their hands, who might swing by the theater just to see if they can score some cheap tickets last minute. In any case, right now, the only people at the theater are people committed to seeing it at full price. As people knew that tickets would become available cheaper right before the show starts, some people would start showing up who might not have gone to the movie theater at all, knowing they can get some cheap tix if they don't care about maybe missing the start of the movie.
That is, it might possibly draw more people into the theater in total, on the basis they can get 1/2 price tickets.
Can you really trust your pre-compiled compiler?
Reflections on Trusting Trust.
The thing I like about Open Source/Free Software, in the end, isn't so much that I have to, myself, inspect and compile every program. I trust the pre-compiled binaries because I know that if someone *does* try to sneak something in, someone else will find it, probably pretty quickly.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, I'm glad there's very technical and very paranoid people out there double checking everything so I don't have to.
An additional thought occured to me - what I said above is true for weekend-to-weekend sales, because they can easily change what movie is showing from one weekend to the next.
However, it seems to me that if any movie is not sold out by about 5 minutes before the show, movie theaters could do last minute "fire sales" - discount the remaining tickets 30-50% to try to get people who are cheap to fill up those remaining seats. However, you then run the risk of alienating your customers because some people in that theater payed less than others, so the people who payed more might feel screwed.
"Yes, but why not? For any given movie, at a given cinema, at a given time, there's an optimal price that maximizes profit".
Yes, but there's also another movie being released which might do better. Why work so hard to make a bad movie make money, if you're a cinema, when you can just kick the movie out of your theater and show something else which *will* make money? I've seen lots of movies advertised which were only in theaters for one weekend, and were gone the next.
The point is, if your movie won't sell tickets at $10, they'll find another movie which will. They won't lower the price to $5 and hope people will see it just because it's cheap.
This whole Strait of Hormuz stuff is about other middle eastern nations' oil supplies, more specifically, their shipping access to the open ocean.
I don't really think it's in the cards that the U.S. is going to be able to start buying Iranian oil any time soon, it's more about whether Iran can interfere with international trade between other nations.
I think this also presents a good argument for why we should be pursuing the development of a domestic coal-to-liquids industry. We have a lot of coal in this country. On the one hand, I hate to see us try to burn it as fast as possible, but, I'd like to see us have the ability, when we need to, to provide some significant percentage (maybe 10 or 20%, something like that) of our gasoline and diesel fuel from domestic coal reserves.
"I'm sure China would be delighted to see us throw away a few trillion dollars"
Right now, the U.S. owes China something like 1.5 Trillion dollars. Why would they be delighted to make it less likely that we'd repay them?
The best move, from his company's perspective, would be to fire him and go "under new management."
Did you read the response from N-Control? They are trying to put as much distance between that guy and the company as they can.
I wonder if this Paul Cristoforo has pioneered a new PR strategy for startups though. . . hire him, or someone like him, to stir up a big pot of controversy, publicly fire him saying you had NO IDEA he was going to abuse his position, and release press releases talking about how great your products are for disabled people/kids/other sympathetic group, etc. Get the public to view your company as another victim of his abuse and try to get them to feel bad for you and good about your products, while transferring their rage to the "rogue employee/consultant".
Sort of Good Cop/Bad Cop for startups.
"They've pretty much ruined me in the past 24 hours," Christoforo said.
No, he did it all by himself. All they did was give him the publicity he so badly wanted. . .
Make sure you stir up a lot of controversy about us the more the better we needed some drama gets good blood flow going about the new product launch.
If the tower of Babel story equates to a Babylonian tower, it would seem that suggests that the book of Genesis, which presents itself as having been written thousands of years before Babylon, actually dates to the era of Babylon (or perhaps parts of Genesis actually are older, but someone 'inserted' the Tower of Babel story much later)?
I should note, I'm not against *at-market* feed-in-tariffs, because that doesn't make everyone else's electricity more expensive, but if you start mandating *above-market* tariffs, then it does start to add to the cost of electricity.
It seems to me that the problem with those "above market" feed-in-tariffs that Germany mandates is that it makes electricity more expensive for everyone else. Lots of people don't own homes, and must live in apartments/flats. Such feed-in-tariffs effectively re-distribute wealth from wealthier homeowners to less-wealthy people who don't own a house.
Yeah, I saw that in your original post. Perhaps they'll expand into your area soon, like next year or something. It may also be that they don't service your particular area because of some sort of local law difference.
Remember my mention about feed-in-tariffs, it might be something like that, where a difference in local law makes their business model far too risky in your area. If I were you, I'd ask them if there is any local obstacle to them servicing you like that, and if they answer back with a reasonable problem, you might be able to start a local movement to change the law in your area, if need be.
The problem you described sounds like an opportunity for someone to create a company which will pay to install a solar panel on a homeowners' roof, but the panels remain the property of the company, while the homeowner pays an electric bill to the solar panel company.
Sort of a "solar utility company". Now, you say, you'd like to get away from "the electric company" - isn't that the point of solar panels? Well, if the choice is between the local utility monopoly, or a solar utility company, and if the solar utility company can sell you power at a cheaper cost than the local monopoly (a *big* IF, I realize, but at $1/watt, it might be possible).
For this idea to work the solar "utilitly" would need the ability to get a feed-in-tariff on selling power back to the local grid - that way, the solar panels could continue to make money even if the home is vacant because of foreclosure.
First off, we really need to draw a line in the sand here: A modern phone is just a very small, battery powered computer. EVERYTHING that's ever been done on other computers before it was done by Apple on the iPhone should count as prior art unless the courts are completely retarded.. Apple tries to get around this by specifying in the patent a "mobile device", but that's a false distinguisher. Since mobile devices are computers, anything done on a computer should count as prior art.
Therefore:
Windows has been multi-tasking and allowing task switching since the 80's. Unix since the 70's (or late 60's?). Every computer system has had a menu button on the keyboard or a menu icon on screen to allow you to task switch.
Specifying a specific type of app to task switch is completely moronic. Your OS supports task switching or it doesn't. What's next, the "Task switching from a Word Processor app" patent? The "Task switching from a web browser app" patent? Task switching from a game, or calculator, or spreadsheet, or database, or email client?
I wonder how many payroll systems out there were hard coded to the assumption that taxes only change on a year-to-year basis, not a month-to-month basis, so you can only load a tax table for a whole year, not a tax table for the next two months?
It may be that a software update will be necessary to change the code to add the ability to load a tax table for just one month, or a range of months, or an arbitrary range (e.g. 21st Jan to 15th April). I think if I were writing tax software, after what has happened the last couple months, I'd go for the last approach, since it seems like a law changing the taxes could go into effect at any time and last for any arbitrary duration of days.