Fantasy from the masses: "I want base load power that is completely safe, 100% reliable, and low carbon, while not providing money to middle eastern dictators!"
Reality: We don't have a huge amount of choices when it comes to reliable, clean base load power, concessions will need to be made with the understanding that you can't plan for every disaster that could go wrong.
Grow up? Fabulous argument, but I digress. You can provide facts, evidence, etc. all day long. The general public is full of fools who will side with whatever talking point is on the news that day. It is black and white. Nuclear power is safe when done properly; full stop. There is no grey area, and you do a disservice not only to the nuclear energy sector, but to science and technology as a whole by allowing morons to debate using emotion instead of fact and scientific fact.
I think a prudent measure to be taken would be to look at the cost of having the ability to gravity feed water to cool a core, so in the event a plant goes black and exhausts all available power for cooling, you still have a method to cool the core (although you'll have a bit of radiation release, an acceptable risk considering the half-lives involved).
Nuclear power generation is never going to be perfectly safe, but it will always be cleaner and safer than coal-fired power generation. Yes, accidents are going to happen. Yes, accidents will, from time to time, occur that you *cannot* plan for. Engineers could've designed the reactors to have seawater gravity feed into the reactors to cool them, and still vent the resulting radioactive steam due to the extremely short half-lifes, No one expected a 9.0 earthquaker and a 20ft sea surge from a tsunami. What next? Nuclear is supposed to plan for Godzilla?
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
That's the problem right there. You (and myself, who completely agree with your statement) are in the minority. What do you do when the people you have to convince have at most a high school diploma/bachelors degree in a non-technical (non-engineering/science/etc) field?
Even if we don't make trains as "efficient" as aircraft, I think the benefits of running trains on electricity when oil is $200/gal are going to be apparent. You don't have to be super-efficient when you can drink up as much wind power you need to propel yourself at 200mph across the midwest. Until aircraft can get batteries with the same energy as Jet-A, the efficiency comparison is meaningless.
Although, I agree. SMS is almost always more reliable than data, as SMS messages can eek through when reception is spotty, whereas data can be unusable.
Satabeasts. Very happy with them. We didn't run databases off of them, just raw files, but they worked like farking champs (I do take issue with their admin interface, but that's another story).
Data written was streamed, but there was quite a bit of random IO from collider dataset reconstruction runs on workers, or from various users at institutions running their own algorithms against the data.
Hmm, depends on your app I guess. We were streaming LHC collider data from CERN at 40Gbps to Nexsan SAN/NAS boxes with arrays in RAID6 with spinning 7200RPM drives, and didn't have too much trouble. YMMV.
Two drives for spare, with RAID6 (so you can lose two drives), so you're never at the mercy of one drive failing. More expensive for sure. But data loss/downtime is more expensive in most cases.
Yeah, if you write to them all the time. If Netflix fills it's datacenters with SSDs, writes the video files to them once, and only does reads off of them to stream to customers, I'm sure those SSDs are going to last damn near forever.
I had to chuckle the other day when I heard on NPR that China was outsourcing work to Vietnam because of compensation inflation. And down the spiral we go.
If you could get your hands on a V3 chip from Illumina (the same used by 23andme.com) you could do it, although you could always pay 23andme.com the $200 for the sequencing, download the raw data, and delete your account.
I myself paid for 23andme.com to do genetic profiles for myself, my wife, and my brother. $100/person and then $5/month/person ongoing as they add more research each month (come on, $5? Cheap! for the research data they add, although I guess some people don't see the value).
Define "cost of analysis". I paid 23andme.com $100 per person (myself, my wife, and my brother) to sequence 1 million SNPs per person using Illumina's V3 chip (plus $5/month/person for as long as we have accounts with them) and to provide current and future research data with regards to those SNPs. That is *super cheap* for the kind of data I'm getting out of it (I'd be happy to post an imgr link with an anonymized print-version of the report, although I guess it doesn't matter since I've already uploaded the raw data to my PersonalGenomes.org profile).
Why not blind the camera with a low-powered pointing laser from your home? Or a high-power cluster of infrared LEDs? That should blind it in both day and night conditions.
I was unaware of that North American plan. Do you get your own DID? Does it show as your number whenever you call? I've been thinking about using a Xoom tablet to replace my Nexus One (with bluetooth headset) and having a backup prepaid phone plan.
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Fantasy from the masses: "I want base load power that is completely safe, 100% reliable, and low carbon, while not providing money to middle eastern dictators!"
Reality: We don't have a huge amount of choices when it comes to reliable, clean base load power, concessions will need to be made with the understanding that you can't plan for every disaster that could go wrong.
Grow up? Fabulous argument, but I digress. You can provide facts, evidence, etc. all day long. The general public is full of fools who will side with whatever talking point is on the news that day. It is black and white. Nuclear power is safe when done properly; full stop. There is no grey area, and you do a disservice not only to the nuclear energy sector, but to science and technology as a whole by allowing morons to debate using emotion instead of fact and scientific fact.
I think a prudent measure to be taken would be to look at the cost of having the ability to gravity feed water to cool a core, so in the event a plant goes black and exhausts all available power for cooling, you still have a method to cool the core (although you'll have a bit of radiation release, an acceptable risk considering the half-lives involved).
Nuclear power generation is never going to be perfectly safe, but it will always be cleaner and safer than coal-fired power generation. Yes, accidents are going to happen. Yes, accidents will, from time to time, occur that you *cannot* plan for. Engineers could've designed the reactors to have seawater gravity feed into the reactors to cool them, and still vent the resulting radioactive steam due to the extremely short half-lifes, No one expected a 9.0 earthquaker and a 20ft sea surge from a tsunami. What next? Nuclear is supposed to plan for Godzilla?
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
That's the problem right there. You (and myself, who completely agree with your statement) are in the minority. What do you do when the people you have to convince have at most a high school diploma/bachelors degree in a non-technical (non-engineering/science/etc) field?
I'll take Obama as a benevolent dictator. I'm tired of Congress fucking up the works. Lesser of two evils and all that.
Even if we don't make trains as "efficient" as aircraft, I think the benefits of running trains on electricity when oil is $200/gal are going to be apparent. You don't have to be super-efficient when you can drink up as much wind power you need to propel yourself at 200mph across the midwest. Until aircraft can get batteries with the same energy as Jet-A, the efficiency comparison is meaningless.
Push notifications:
Android Cloud to Device Messaging Framework
http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/
Although, I agree. SMS is almost always more reliable than data, as SMS messages can eek through when reception is spotty, whereas data can be unusable.
Satabeasts. Very happy with them. We didn't run databases off of them, just raw files, but they worked like farking champs (I do take issue with their admin interface, but that's another story).
Data written was streamed, but there was quite a bit of random IO from collider dataset reconstruction runs on workers, or from various users at institutions running their own algorithms against the data.
Hmm, depends on your app I guess. We were streaming LHC collider data from CERN at 40Gbps to Nexsan SAN/NAS boxes with arrays in RAID6 with spinning 7200RPM drives, and didn't have too much trouble. YMMV.
Two drives for spare, with RAID6 (so you can lose two drives), so you're never at the mercy of one drive failing. More expensive for sure. But data loss/downtime is more expensive in most cases.
Yeah, if you write to them all the time. If Netflix fills it's datacenters with SSDs, writes the video files to them once, and only does reads off of them to stream to customers, I'm sure those SSDs are going to last damn near forever.
I had to chuckle the other day when I heard on NPR that China was outsourcing work to Vietnam because of compensation inflation. And down the spiral we go.
If you could get your hands on a V3 chip from Illumina (the same used by 23andme.com) you could do it, although you could always pay 23andme.com the $200 for the sequencing, download the raw data, and delete your account.
I myself paid for 23andme.com to do genetic profiles for myself, my wife, and my brother. $100/person and then $5/month/person ongoing as they add more research each month (come on, $5? Cheap! for the research data they add, although I guess some people don't see the value).
Compared to the $100 million it cost 10 years ago? Yeah, $12K is cheap. Not to *you*, but for research its direct cheap.
Define "cost of analysis". I paid 23andme.com $100 per person (myself, my wife, and my brother) to sequence 1 million SNPs per person using Illumina's V3 chip (plus $5/month/person for as long as we have accounts with them) and to provide current and future research data with regards to those SNPs. That is *super cheap* for the kind of data I'm getting out of it (I'd be happy to post an imgr link with an anonymized print-version of the report, although I guess it doesn't matter since I've already uploaded the raw data to my PersonalGenomes.org profile).
They have a right to use the camera for traffic policing, not to violate your privacy IN YOUR OWN HOME.
Why not blind the camera with a low-powered pointing laser from your home? Or a high-power cluster of infrared LEDs? That should blind it in both day and night conditions.
http://www.google.com/search?q=blind+camera+infrared
Oh man, I better go long in pitchfork and torch futures ;)
All I can say is "Hold on tight everyone! THE UNIVERSE IS EATING ITSELF!"
I was unaware of that North American plan. Do you get your own DID? Does it show as your number whenever you call? I've been thinking about using a Xoom tablet to replace my Nexus One (with bluetooth headset) and having a backup prepaid phone plan.
Indeed they have. My Nexus One updated itself last night to Gingerbread (and it is *sweet*).
And in almost all cases, less painful ;)
http://www.amazon.com/WATTS-HOURS-LIGHT-INDUSTRIAL-INFRARED/dp/B000STDLFE
You're welcome. (Note: Heat lamps aren't covered by the bulb phaseout).