I didn't know that. May be true, but has nothing to do with DU's radioactivity (or near lack thereof) that was the intended point. DU dust in the environment, no matter how it gets there, is very bad because of heavy metal toxicity--same deal as with lead or mercury, only worse.
Well, of course we know that fusion generates energy. Basic physics shows that. That doesn't mean that the means of harnessing it usefully is even remotely within our capability (other than by making use of the large, spherical fusion reactor nature has thoughfully provided us:).
There are issues of economy of scale involved in most power generation, where power produced rises faster than power and resources needed. It is entirely plausible to me that the break-even point for controlled fusion demands a scale entirely beyond our capabilities at present. From where I sit, I see people that have been saying "we need more money, more time--just a bit longer" for years. I'm far from an expert on fusion technology, but it's starting to look like fusion is mostly vaporware.
Now, none of this is to say the idea should be discarded entirely; but I think it may be unreasonable to expect to see it any time in the forseeable future, and that maybe it's given more time and resources than it really merits.
On a final note, that idea for using bombs as a power source is very interesting--I hadn't heard it before. I wonder if the idea fizzled because of technical problems with containment, or because of potential political fallout (no pun intended) of using bombs?
Except that it's not true. It is much more practical to simply reduce the amount of energy we consume, drive less, fly less, etc. Use more energy-efficient devices.
Except that this is practical only if you start by ignoring human nature. Energy use will always scale based on the economy of production. Efficiency is its own economic motivation and takes care of itself, but if you make things more efficient people will simply use them more now that it costs less to do so.
I'm not even going to get into the anti-nuclear FUD about "risks".
The problems with fusion are a bit more than merely "technical", seeing as we don't really know if there's a viable means of producing energy from it at all. Technical problems usually mean "we know this is possible, let's figure out how to make it useful". With fusion, we're still at the point of "is this ever gonna work at all?"
Until someone gets more energy out of a fusion device than they put into it, it's merely speculative.
It unfortunately turns out that electricity power generation contributes a relatively small fraction of the total CO2 output. Hence, increasing the output from other sources (like Nuclear) won't really make much of a dent.
That is currently true, but vastly increased electricity production using clean nuclear plants could allow electricity to substitute for other places that are responsible for carbon emission, such as electric cars replacing internal combustion engines.
Energy is energy, in the end, and once it's availible as electricity you can do almost anything with it without generating further pollution.
There is no quick fix. A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
Automobiles can be handled by using electric vehicles, with power generated by nuke plants. I'm not sure what you mean by "suburban lifestyles" as a contributor to anything other than cultural pollution. And one-time-use items aren't inherently bad, the problem is one-time-use items that are discarded without recycling the resources used in them--a problem that, unlike the other things you mentioned, is relatively amenable to reasonable legislative solutions such as economic incentives.
First, keep in mind that the longer it stays radioactive, by definition the less radioactive (and thus less dangerous) it is. Depleted Uranium, for instance, despite being technically radioactive, is actually used as radiation shielding!
The obvious solution to dealing with waste is to seperate it into stuff that can processed back into viable fuel (and used as such), stuff that's so mildly radioactive that it could be ground into powder and scattered into the ocean and you'd never notice the difference in the background radiation level, and stuff that's not viable as fuel but still radioactive enough that it needs to be stored--which I imagine you'll find is not very much waste.
2) Economics of building nuke plants
Yeah, and how much of the economic uncertainty comes from artificial barriers created by scientific illiterates who oppose nuclear power? Other than fossil fuels, nuclear is the only type of generator that is proven to be long-term viable and scalable to any capacity. If the economics are "uncertain" for nukes, they can only be worse for anything else.
3) Centralized distribution system
...as opposed to the way things are now? There's an economy of scale benefit to most forms of power generation. This is nothing new or unique to nuclear. Furthermore, any alternative sources that could be decentralized could likely still be deployed and connected to the power grid as they become availible. History demonstrates that demand for energy generally only goes up.
4) Undermines the drive for efficiency
Uh, no. Efficiency is, within reason, its own driving force. Despite what some people would like, we're never going to use less energy. There's only so much efficiency gain possible, for one thing. Besides, efficiency gains don't reduce consumption any more than getting a bigger house reduces clutter. Efficiency just lets us get more value from the energy we do use.
5) Difficulty in denying other countries the technology
Oh yeah, because that's working really well as is.
CO2 waste compared to RadioActive waste isnt even in the same league
This is true. Radioactive waste is, overall, less harmful to the environment, easier to capture and contain, and has the added benefit of actually being potentially useful if reprocessed into viable nuclear fuel.
It's not about looking good, it's about clarity. Good "style" in writing intended to be informative is anything that makes the information easier to read and digest, especially for people with little to no prior knowledge.
If you think that's not useful, valuable, or necessary, well... I'm sorry for you, and suggest you might find a lucrative career in writing college textbooks.
The point wasn't about vandalism or mistakes. The point was that larger and more heavily edited articles tend to have a deteriorating quality of STYLE, as they go from the contributions of (often) a few skilled writers who built most of the original article, to a mass of correct-but-ugly "written by committee" information.
That doesn't always happen, though, and popular articles tend to occasionally get someone who'll come through and do a major edit that restructures and rewords the article--refactoring, if you will.
Besides, even the somewhat poorly written articles on Wikipedia, in my experience, tend to hold their own against the writing in a lot of textbooks, periodicals, manuals, and other information-oriented nonfiction. There's a lot of very bad writing out there.
I wonder if this will create any noticable amount of publicity for the rail station and surrounding area? Apparently people have been suggesting that Jimbo Wales visit the station as some sort of, I don't know, Wikipedia commemorative event?
It'd be kind of amusing to befuddle the non-Wikipedia-using locals. I know I fully intend to stop by if I'm ever in that part of the world.:)
Wandering off on the subject of installing Linux, I run nothing but Linux machines at home and pretty much every one is a different distribution. From personal experience, 99% of the difference between the distros is hot air and fanboyism. If you really want to try Linux, just pick a popular distro and go for it. The closest I've ever come to thinking "this distro was a bad idea, I should've picked something different" was getting tired of all the compilation in Gentoo. The only IMPORTANT difference between distros that I've seen is probably how supportive of newbies the community is.
But that's just my two cents--installing Linux was a lot of fun for me. It's nowhere near the headache it apparently used to be, but still conducive to tinkering with in your spare time in a way that never felt comfortable in Windows.
Customers which are confused by 6 choices will be even more afraid of "alternatives".
Except that one of those alternatives is "don't upgrade at all". As many people have observed, the most dangerous competitor to any Microsoft product is its own prior version.
Point is, chess AIs are strong players only because the game is so amenable to brute-force look ahead approaches. Yes, the programs are still quite sophisticated, but all that sophistication would likely perform at average competence at best without the look-ahead. For very open-ended games (like Go, as mentioned earlier) where brute-force is not an option, strong AI players simply don't exist.
Chess AI is actually probably 90% brute force with some position evaluation functions using heuristics of some sort. Processor-intensive, yes, but not really "sophisticated". This works because any given board configuration has a limited number of availible moves, and look-ahead trees can often be pruned aggressively since bad outcomes are easy to recognize.
If you want a sophisticated AI, go find a program that plays Go at a master player level.
Yeah, but in order to turn off an alarm in pseudo-sleep mode you rely on subconscious habit, since you don't have any conscious thought at the time. Thus the possibly(?) fool-proof solution: HIDE the alarm clock every night--or better yet get someone else to hide it for you--in a randomly changing location. That way you have to stumble around looking for it long enough that you'll likely wake up before you find the blasted thing.
In the next game, to add Auto-Haste to your armor, instead of Chocobo Wings you'll use Dew of the Mountain.
Or would that add Sleepproof? I'm not sure.
(The worst part is that "Dew of the Mountain" actually sounds like an equipment customizing item in FFX, like the Gambler's Spirit or Door to Tomorrow or all those sort.)
I have Gentoo running on a 75MHz machine with I think 16MB of RAM.
However, I WAS able to boot from CD and I used distcc to "cheat" on the compilation using my 3GHz primary desktop. So I don't think I win any prizes.:(
Especially the ones that weren't letting their children play these games anyhow, but enjoyed playing the games themselves. Talk about irresponsible parenting.
Given the demographics of videogame players these days, measures like this aren't so much "think of the children!" as "think of the young adults and middle aged folks!".
Given this, I have to wonder again at the possibility of lower budget games and their financial viability--okay, so you lose out on the "gimme eye candy" market demographic, and probably the "I buy the games the magazines tell me to" crowd, but with reduced development costs you don't have to sell anywhere near as many units to turn a profit.
Mostly I just think it's sad to see the videogame industry spiral into the same bland mire as much of the movie industry--avoiding risk and innovation, pumping huge budgets into a handful of games on the premise that a few will have huge sale numbers and hopefully keep the money flowing in at least as fast as it's bleeding away.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know that. May be true, but has nothing to do with DU's radioactivity (or near lack thereof) that was the intended point. DU dust in the environment, no matter how it gets there, is very bad because of heavy metal toxicity--same deal as with lead or mercury, only worse.
Well, of course we know that fusion generates energy. Basic physics shows that. That doesn't mean that the means of harnessing it usefully is even remotely within our capability (other than by making use of the large, spherical fusion reactor nature has thoughfully provided us :).
There are issues of economy of scale involved in most power generation, where power produced rises faster than power and resources needed. It is entirely plausible to me that the break-even point for controlled fusion demands a scale entirely beyond our capabilities at present. From where I sit, I see people that have been saying "we need more money, more time--just a bit longer" for years. I'm far from an expert on fusion technology, but it's starting to look like fusion is mostly vaporware.
Now, none of this is to say the idea should be discarded entirely; but I think it may be unreasonable to expect to see it any time in the forseeable future, and that maybe it's given more time and resources than it really merits.
On a final note, that idea for using bombs as a power source is very interesting--I hadn't heard it before. I wonder if the idea fizzled because of technical problems with containment, or because of potential political fallout (no pun intended) of using bombs?
Except that it's not true. It is much more practical to simply reduce the amount of energy we consume, drive less, fly less, etc. Use more energy-efficient devices.
Except that this is practical only if you start by ignoring human nature. Energy use will always scale based on the economy of production. Efficiency is its own economic motivation and takes care of itself, but if you make things more efficient people will simply use them more now that it costs less to do so.
I'm not even going to get into the anti-nuclear FUD about "risks".
The problems with fusion are a bit more than merely "technical", seeing as we don't really know if there's a viable means of producing energy from it at all. Technical problems usually mean "we know this is possible, let's figure out how to make it useful". With fusion, we're still at the point of "is this ever gonna work at all?"
Until someone gets more energy out of a fusion device than they put into it, it's merely speculative.
It unfortunately turns out that electricity power generation contributes a relatively small fraction of the total CO2 output. Hence, increasing the output from other sources (like Nuclear) won't really make much of a dent.
That is currently true, but vastly increased electricity production using clean nuclear plants could allow electricity to substitute for other places that are responsible for carbon emission, such as electric cars replacing internal combustion engines.
Energy is energy, in the end, and once it's availible as electricity you can do almost anything with it without generating further pollution.
There is no quick fix. A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
Automobiles can be handled by using electric vehicles, with power generated by nuke plants. I'm not sure what you mean by "suburban lifestyles" as a contributor to anything other than cultural pollution. And one-time-use items aren't inherently bad, the problem is one-time-use items that are discarded without recycling the resources used in them--a problem that, unlike the other things you mentioned, is relatively amenable to reasonable legislative solutions such as economic incentives.
1) Long-term storage of nuclear waste.
...as opposed to the way things are now? There's an economy of scale benefit to most forms of power generation. This is nothing new or unique to nuclear. Furthermore, any alternative sources that could be decentralized could likely still be deployed and connected to the power grid as they become availible. History demonstrates that demand for energy generally only goes up.
First, keep in mind that the longer it stays radioactive, by definition the less radioactive (and thus less dangerous) it is. Depleted Uranium, for instance, despite being technically radioactive, is actually used as radiation shielding!
The obvious solution to dealing with waste is to seperate it into stuff that can processed back into viable fuel (and used as such), stuff that's so mildly radioactive that it could be ground into powder and scattered into the ocean and you'd never notice the difference in the background radiation level, and stuff that's not viable as fuel but still radioactive enough that it needs to be stored--which I imagine you'll find is not very much waste.
2) Economics of building nuke plants
Yeah, and how much of the economic uncertainty comes from artificial barriers created by scientific illiterates who oppose nuclear power? Other than fossil fuels, nuclear is the only type of generator that is proven to be long-term viable and scalable to any capacity. If the economics are "uncertain" for nukes, they can only be worse for anything else.
3) Centralized distribution system
4) Undermines the drive for efficiency
Uh, no. Efficiency is, within reason, its own driving force. Despite what some people would like, we're never going to use less energy. There's only so much efficiency gain possible, for one thing. Besides, efficiency gains don't reduce consumption any more than getting a bigger house reduces clutter. Efficiency just lets us get more value from the energy we do use.
5) Difficulty in denying other countries the technology
Oh yeah, because that's working really well as is.
CO2 waste compared to RadioActive waste isnt even in the same league
This is true. Radioactive waste is, overall, less harmful to the environment, easier to capture and contain, and has the added benefit of actually being potentially useful if reprocessed into viable nuclear fuel.
That IS what you meant, right?
It's not about looking good, it's about clarity. Good "style" in writing intended to be informative is anything that makes the information easier to read and digest, especially for people with little to no prior knowledge.
If you think that's not useful, valuable, or necessary, well... I'm sorry for you, and suggest you might find a lucrative career in writing college textbooks.
The point wasn't about vandalism or mistakes. The point was that larger and more heavily edited articles tend to have a deteriorating quality of STYLE, as they go from the contributions of (often) a few skilled writers who built most of the original article, to a mass of correct-but-ugly "written by committee" information.
That doesn't always happen, though, and popular articles tend to occasionally get someone who'll come through and do a major edit that restructures and rewords the article--refactoring, if you will.
Besides, even the somewhat poorly written articles on Wikipedia, in my experience, tend to hold their own against the writing in a lot of textbooks, periodicals, manuals, and other information-oriented nonfiction. There's a lot of very bad writing out there.
I wonder if this will create any noticable amount of publicity for the rail station and surrounding area? Apparently people have been suggesting that Jimbo Wales visit the station as some sort of, I don't know, Wikipedia commemorative event?
:)
It'd be kind of amusing to befuddle the non-Wikipedia-using locals. I know I fully intend to stop by if I'm ever in that part of the world.
Har har har. What is that, Ukranian? :)
Your joke would be more convincing if the summary didn't mention that the article concerns a rail station in Scotland.
Wandering off on the subject of installing Linux, I run nothing but Linux machines at home and pretty much every one is a different distribution. From personal experience, 99% of the difference between the distros is hot air and fanboyism. If you really want to try Linux, just pick a popular distro and go for it. The closest I've ever come to thinking "this distro was a bad idea, I should've picked something different" was getting tired of all the compilation in Gentoo. The only IMPORTANT difference between distros that I've seen is probably how supportive of newbies the community is.
But that's just my two cents--installing Linux was a lot of fun for me. It's nowhere near the headache it apparently used to be, but still conducive to tinkering with in your spare time in a way that never felt comfortable in Windows.
Well, the Internet thinks it's "lesser known" by a landslide.
less known vs. lesser known
Keeping in mind that correct grammar is itself "lesser known" on the internet, small fragments of sodium chloride are suggested for consumption.
Actually this could backfire. Having multiple choices that are difficult to choose among drives people to alternatives.
Speaking of which... HOW many Linux distributions are there, again?
... which are even more choices...
Customers which are confused by 6 choices will be even more afraid of "alternatives".
Except that one of those alternatives is "don't upgrade at all". As many people have observed, the most dangerous competitor to any Microsoft product is its own prior version.
That was, in fact, precisely my point. :)
To the best of my knowledge, no such Go AI exists.
Point is, chess AIs are strong players only because the game is so amenable to brute-force look ahead approaches. Yes, the programs are still quite sophisticated, but all that sophistication would likely perform at average competence at best without the look-ahead. For very open-ended games (like Go, as mentioned earlier) where brute-force is not an option, strong AI players simply don't exist.
Chess AI is actually probably 90% brute force with some position evaluation functions using heuristics of some sort. Processor-intensive, yes, but not really "sophisticated". This works because any given board configuration has a limited number of availible moves, and look-ahead trees can often be pruned aggressively since bad outcomes are easy to recognize.
If you want a sophisticated AI, go find a program that plays Go at a master player level.
You have NO idea how much I want one of those.
Yeah, but in order to turn off an alarm in pseudo-sleep mode you rely on subconscious habit, since you don't have any conscious thought at the time. Thus the possibly(?) fool-proof solution: HIDE the alarm clock every night--or better yet get someone else to hide it for you--in a randomly changing location. That way you have to stumble around looking for it long enough that you'll likely wake up before you find the blasted thing.
In the next game, to add Auto-Haste to your armor, instead of Chocobo Wings you'll use Dew of the Mountain.
Or would that add Sleepproof? I'm not sure.
(The worst part is that "Dew of the Mountain" actually sounds like an equipment customizing item in FFX, like the Gambler's Spirit or Door to Tomorrow or all those sort.)
I have Gentoo running on a 75MHz machine with I think 16MB of RAM.
:(
However, I WAS able to boot from CD and I used distcc to "cheat" on the compilation using my 3GHz primary desktop. So I don't think I win any prizes.
Especially the ones that weren't letting their children play these games anyhow, but enjoyed playing the games themselves. Talk about irresponsible parenting.
Given the demographics of videogame players these days, measures like this aren't so much "think of the children!" as "think of the young adults and middle aged folks!".
Given this, I have to wonder again at the possibility of lower budget games and their financial viability--okay, so you lose out on the "gimme eye candy" market demographic, and probably the "I buy the games the magazines tell me to" crowd, but with reduced development costs you don't have to sell anywhere near as many units to turn a profit.
Mostly I just think it's sad to see the videogame industry spiral into the same bland mire as much of the movie industry--avoiding risk and innovation, pumping huge budgets into a handful of games on the premise that a few will have huge sale numbers and hopefully keep the money flowing in at least as fast as it's bleeding away.