"Don't forget that some trains are hybrid - they can use power lines or a third rail when available to avoid having to burn on-board diesel."
Which means that they can run without electricity, but they won't run without diesel fuel.
If this were a discussion about diesel-electric cars then you might have a point but this is about battery electric vehicles. When those trains run from batteries on board then you can make your point. Until then battery electric vehicles remain a novelty.
Your examples of diesel/electric systems only prove my point. Those vehicles run on diesel fuel, the electric drive is merely the means to transfer the power from the ICE to the drive shaft.
There are no batteries in the drive train, all the energy to move the vehicle come from the fuel.
That may be true but I suspect the motor uses plenty of rare earth metals. While the GPP may have where those metals end up in the car wrong they do end up in the car somewhere.
An electric motor can certainly be made without rare earth metals but it will be heavier and less efficient. Given the weight and performance gap electric cars already have compared to internal combustion competitors they cannot afford to not use rare earth metals.
I'm sure someone is thinking that electric cars can outperform most any ICE powered car. Well, let me know when electric tractor/trailers are on the market. Diesel engines rule the road, rail, and sea. Until we get batteries that can compete with fuel oil and diesel fuel on weight, volume, and cost we will continue to see electric vehicles as novelties and penis size compensators.
Test engineer 1, "WTF? This electric car sure seems to need a lot of lubricating oil. Where does it go anyway? I don't see it leaking."
Test engineer 2, "I don't get it either. Are you feeling light headed too? I think we need to open a window on the car testing bay, get some fresh air in here."
I keep hearing about how we can use "agricultural waste" to make bio-fuel but that is a lie, there is no agricultural waste. What is this "waste" exactly? What do you think happens to it now?
This "waste" is usually described as cornstalks and other chaff made from the growing of (obviously) corn and other food crops. I grew up on a dairy farm and we'd use those corn stalks as bedding for the cattle, so they'd have a warm and dry place to rest. After those cornstalks are soaked with cattle manure it is collected and spread on the fields. Those corn stalks return vital nutrients to the soil, control erosion, and hold that manure (and other fertilizers) in place for the next crop.
I suspect a lot of people that live in high rise apartments, that never saw a cow that wasn't served on a plate, think that these corn stalks are hauled off to put in landfills. If we convert cornstalks to fuel then we are going to see another dust bowl in the Midwest.
I suspect that some vegan would like to point out how we should not be eating meat or drinking milk anyway, we don't need to bed cattle with cornstalks or feed that cattle corn. Okay then, if we harvest all that corn to eat, and haul off the stalks for fuel, then what is holding the soil in place? What is going to keep that topsoil from just blowing away and get carried out to sea by rivers? Answer, the corn stalks that should not be taken out of the field.
I read an interesting paper on how we could mine basalt, grind it up, and spread on farm land to return nutrients to the field and fix carbon out of the air into the soil. That's something I can support. Use nuclear power to produce that basalt fertilizer rather than the fossil fueled lime kilns we use now, we'd go from carbon positive to carbon negative. We'd also be building up topsoil rather than hauling it away to make fuel. This fuel, by the way, could also be produced from nuclear power in a carbon neutral or perhaps even carbon negative way.
I'm not even a agronomist or anything like that. I'm just an Iowa farm boy that grew up to write code. Even I see this as an environmental disaster. Do these bio-fuel people even talk to farmers? Did they not do some sort of environmental impact study on removing vital erosion control material, like corn stalks, from fields? Perhaps they did do their homework and I'm missing something important. If so then I'd like someone to point out what I'm missing.
I fail to see how this is a bad thing. With a public sector funded competition with private sector entities, and perhaps even other public sector entities, as competitors I suspect we'd get the most gain for the least dollars.
Should I really care why Apple chose to fight against a government that wishes to act outside of its authority?
Imagine this was a manufacturer of a safe, they say the safe cannot be opened without destroying the contents. The government tells them to open the safe, or else. The company comes back with drawings, material lists, and so forth to back up their claim that the safe cannot be opened. A court orders them to open the safe. What do you expect them to say now? "Oh, we were lying earlier. We TOTALLY have a back door on the safe. All you had to do was ask nicely."
The government is asking a company to prove their product is not as secure as they claim. I recall that the government is not even providing them with compensation for their efforts. Of course they are going to fight this.
You know you are so right that I'm going to give you a lollipop for your insightful answer. Now, run along child, us adults would like to continue talking.
Perhaps because the developer believe that they can do better than Microsoft. This is something that might not be all that high of a bar to hurdle generally speaking.
I was also thinking something along these lines. I remember reading a child's fantasy story as an assignment for a Spanish class. The story went something like there was a rather imaginative and nosy kid that was listening in on his rather mean neighbors. They were making up a story on how if someone were to slide down the roof on a rug during a full moon the person could fly. The mean neighbors were obviously full of it, they just wanted to see the kid slide himself off the roof and fall to his death. Well, the kid slides down the roof in a full moon and... flies. Is that something we want to teach a robot?
If we have robots read stories to learn social norms then be prepared for them to learn that breaking a mirror gives seven years of bad luck, stepping on a crack breaks your mother's back, every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings, and so on. Perhaps this is harmless as we can also teach the robots the difference between fantasy and reality.
Perhaps much of this is harmless fun but think of how some cultures teach their children. Things like on how women should be dressed in public or be stoned, that homosexuals are bad and need to hang from the neck until dead, you know like perhaps half of the world population lives.
I love science fiction and fantasy because it can teach lessons on how the best intentions can turn bad. Perhaps a robot with an imperfect comprehension on fact and fiction can learn a very different lesson, like how to convince children to jump off a roof.
I see that in the USA we consume about 4000 billion kilowatt hours per year. Average that out to get a rate of energy production and it comes out to roughly 470 gigawatts. Let's assume a windmill has a operational lifespan of forty years. Forty years times 12 months and we get 480 months. Since we are using approximate numbers here I'll just round that out to one gigawatt of capacity we'd have to build every month.
Let's assume we get another nice round number of one megawatt of electrical output capacity per windmill. That means to keep the lights on with the current electric demand we'd need to build 1000 windmills per month in the USA. We have 30 days in a month, 24 hours per day, gives us 720 hours. That means we'd have to build at least one windmill per hour in the USA and do that day and night from now until the lights go out.
Is that rate of windmill production something we can do in the USA? I can hear it now, "Yes we can!"
I'll leave as an exercise for the reader on how much aluminum we'd have to mine to build all those windmills. Sure, we can recycle the old windmills but there are going to be losses in the process, account for that as you wish. Now each windmill is going to need a concrete pedestal on which to sit. We'd need to mine limestone and sand for that, again you may account for recycling as you wish. There would need to also be steel, copper, fuel for the trucks, rare earths for the magnets, etc. Add all of that into the manufacturing requirements as you wish.
What do you get? I'll wait.
In the mean time I think I'll compute the steel, concrete, aluminum, and so forth required to build the one nuclear reactor per month (again I'm assuming a 40 year operational life span) we'd need to build to keep the lights on. Let me know when you've completed your calculations and we'll compare notes. Then we shall see who has the greatest environmental impact, nuclear or wind.
The US federal government has been acting like a barely trained 800 pound orangutan with a moderately educated owner at the leash. When the government sees an obstacle you get the orangutan owner saying "Right turn, Clyde." (Is that too obscure of a reference?)
The government has had success with having their trained ape beating results out of the public and the public has responded. We created something that their trained ape can't just beat out of people. Had the government not been so willing to break into our records then we would not have developed such encryption so quickly and used so widely.
Basically the government made this bed and now they have to sleep in it. Forgive me if I have little sympathy for their problem.
In all of this planet's history we've seen more significant changes in the climate and at rates much greater and slower than what we've seen. The flora and fauna has adapted before and will adapt again.
The interesting thing about how climate, flora, and fauna interact is that a change in any one produces a change in the others. Climates do change, fauna and flora adapt, and a new climate is produced.
At one time I would have been upset about the potential extinction of a species but no more. I remember hearing over and over again on how many species die off due to climate change. All of that got erased in my mind when I heard how many new species developed in that time. It is quite possible that we are seeing the greatest biological diversity that has ever existed on Earth.
Species die off, that's life. In fact it is required for species to die off for new, more robust, species to take its place in the ecology.
I've also discovered on how the concept of a species is very fluid and not well defined. For the longest time I thought a species was defined as a population in that a pair of mates could produce offspring capable of reproducing with another mate from that population. Then I find out that not only are grizzly bears and polar bears closely related enough to produce viable offspring it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish between the two species in certain parts of the world. Grizzly and polar bears have a range that overlap. When it comes time to breed the bears don't care much about what color the fur is of their mate. The cubs will adopt the feeding habits of the mother. Brown bears are easy to find and kill in the snow, and white bears stick out in the forest. The color of the coat is largely based on the climate the bears are found, not the genetics of the population as a whole.
What do bears have to do with birds? If these birds die off because the climate is too warm for them then I expect that same species to develop habits and genetics to adapt. In a matter of years this problem will solve itself and the birds will live on.
This is only seen as a problem because some biologists are grabbing on the keywords of the day to get publicity and, no doubt, funding.
In short, move along, there's nothing to see here.
To those that think I'm heartless, bought out by the oil lobby, and/or whatever else that might be used to turn me into a sub-human I say this... bite me. This is basic biology at work. Had this happened in another time, in another place, this would not be headlines. It'd be turned into a graduate paper at best and filed in a university library where no one would ever read it again.
I don't know the specifics on how this works in this case but I know enough about electronics that I can speculate.
One means to have a write once memory is with the use of "fuses", the fuse is a small etched wire that with enough current will open like a fuse. This would be done with a write at a voltage much higher than that normally used for a read. I would further suspect that to prevent someone from changing the written value the write function itself would have a fuse, blow that fuse and the chip is incapable of taking on a new value.
So, each chip off the line would have an identical mask. The chip would be tested for function, the crypto key written, tested that the key was written correctly, then the write fuse blown, tested again, and if it passes on all steps it would be shipped for use in a device.
Speculating further the pins to write the crypto key might only be exposed before it is packaged. Probes would be placed on the chip before it is packaged to write a crypto key. The chip verified, and if it passes it would be packaged and used in a device.
What those crypto key values might be depends on the crypto system used. It might just be a sequential number, like a serial number. It might be randomly generated, to prevent attack by somehow obtaining the serial number. It might be created by some crypto algorithm, such as being a large prime number or something.
I do not know of any technology that allows for on the fly changes to the mask used to burn the chips. Trying to retrieve the written value would require destructive evaluation of the chip. This process would seem to be quite expensive and unreliable. As the chip would be destroyed an identical chip would have to be made to recover the data that this chip was used to encrypt.
Depending on the algorithm is it possible the data retrieved could appear as valid but incorrect. What that means is that the person may have encrypted the King James Bible but what came out from the decryption with the wrong key was Moby Dick. With the original chip destroyed from attempting to read the crypto key its not like you can go back and try to read it again.
It is also possible that I have no idea of what I'm talking about.
If licenses are being withheld it's because of technical and economic deficiencies, not malice.
That's what you might think, and that is certainly the federal government's view. The people that have been working on liquid fueled reactors think differently. There are companies willing to invest in liquid fuel reactors but the federal government is so backward that they don't even have a clue on how to license them. Instead of learning this new technology, or finding people that know this technology and inviting them to join the licensing board, they just pretend t does not exist.
While calling it malicious to not license molten salt reactors may be harsh or not completely accurate there does appear to be a very strong bias against the technology.
As opposed to renewable alternatives. The elephant in the room is the waste these plants produce, which nobody wants to take responsibility for and we have no reliable way of dealing with. Beyond that, the environmental damage done during the mining and refining of the fuel is often overlooked, as is the immediate local impact of having such a large plant in one location due to thermal pollution.
We have a way to deal with the waste, it's called a waste annihilating molten salt reactor. That "waste" is fuel if only allowed to reprocess it. While people will claim the ban on reprocessing spent fuel has been lifted there still does not yet exist a regulatory mechanism to license these facilities. The link you provided might not say that explicitly but it sure is implied.
Also, all kinds of new reactor technologies were listed but all of them relied on solid fuel. Solid fuel is expensive to produce and requires an infrastructure that does not exist, at least not in enough capacity to matter. Liquid fuel is much cheaper to produce and it is quite likely we already have the facilities to produce it.
Alternatives like wind and solar are too dilute, too unreliable, and therefore too expensive to replace coal. We can make nuclear really cheap, but we need the Department of Energy to at least recognize the technology exists.
When it comes to environmental damage due to mining that you mention, where do you think that all the material comes from to build windmills and solar panels? It comes from mining. If you don't want people to mine then we're going to be shivering in the dark real soon. Also, the thermal pollution is also not something that wind and solar can claim to be free of. You do realize that making the aluminum for the rotors and wires for a windmill requires a lot of heat, no? Same for melting the glass for solar panels. Molten salt reactors are typically air cooled, there is no thermal pollution, at least no more than what would come off of solar panels baking in the sun.
Neither is deregulation.
I don't want nuclear energy to be deregulated, I want it regulated like coal. It should not take ten years to license a nuclear power plant. The government should be able to do this in a matter of months or weeks. This lengthy licensing process is what drives up costs.
I saw no mention of molten salt reactors in the very lengthy article you linked to. That alone tells me how backward the DoE is right now. MSRs are not a new technology, it's been shown to work fifty years ago. The DoE just needs to allow one to be built.
The DoE's idea of "encouraging" nuclear power development is to take designs that have been shown to be less than profitable, offer them to private companies to develop, and then starts to wonder why no one wants to build one. The DoE needs to do more listening than lecturing.
Another thing I saw in that article you linked is how the Obama administration has been hostile to nuclear power. It should not be surprising that no one wants to build a nuclear power plant if the government won't allow plant owners to reprocess the spent fuel or move the fuel to a safe storage site. The plant oper
Maybe some good can come from this. Let the idiots spout off solutions that won't work so that the people that have the knowledge and intelligence to see how this can fail can argue for something that will work. Sort of following the idea that "there is no such thing as bad publicity" that people follow in politics and popular culture.
If we can get people to think that firing rockets carrying radioactive materials is something that might be considered acceptable then perhaps we could do something that might work where only something with a nuclear reactor is a feasible solution. I'm just tossing this out as an example, I don't know if it would work, but suppose instead of detonating a nuclear weapon on the surface we have a nuclear powered drilling machine that bores into the asteroid. The hole it creates would act as a rocket bell and the burning and evaporating material from the nuclear reactor heat acts as the propellant. This could throw the asteroid out of orbit far enough that it misses Earth.
Also, this brain dead "science" shown in movies and TV is going to get people killed. Cars don't blow up when they hit a brick wall. The rubber soles of your boots won't keep you from getting electrocuted. Car doors don't stop bullets. People could write encyclopedias on how much movies and TV get medicine wrong.
As bad as things have been in the past I do see things getting better. Outside of the super hero genre we are starting to see science being portrayed more accurately. I think that there are enough educated people out there that writers at least try to appeal to them, and people are starting to realize that real life is interesting as it is.
While we are taxing power plants for the pollution they produce do they also get credits for the good they do? Without the power plants we'd be sitting in the dark, cold and hungry. Maybe we wouldn't be cold and hungry, but we'd be breathing in all kinds of nasty chemicals from cooking over an open flame. That is those of us that don't set ourselves on fire.
The biggest risks to women and children in parts of the world without electricity is lung disease from cooking on an open flame, and burning in a house fire. We should be thankful for those coal plants, not taxing them for keeping us safer.
I'll put up with that "dirty" coal plant so that I can cook with an electric stove if you don't mind. You go gather up some sticks and dried donkey dung to cook with, you'll be "greener" that way.
Here's an idea, put the coal power plants out of business. Go make something so clean, cheap, and safe that no one would be stupid enough to build another coal plant. Easy, right? Of course not. We don't burn coal because we want to destroy the environment, we do it because it's the best we got. If you have a better idea then let me know, I'll listen.
You don't get it. These people don't want to keep operating these old nuclear reactors. They want to build new ones, safer ones, because safe reactors make a better profit.
The safer the reactor the fewer people get hurt. People that don't get hurt don't sue the owners of the reactor. The safer the reactor the fewer people it takes to operate, the fewer people on site the less it costs to operate. The older the reactor gets the more likely it is to fail, build new ones and they don't need as much money to repair. New safe reactors means more profit. No nuclear reactors means we keep running the old ones because people don't like living in the dark.
What "costs" are being passed on to the public? Like the "cost" of drinking clean water? The "cost" of refrigerated food? The "costs" of living in a first world economy?
You are an idiot. It's because of modern power plants that we have the life we live. Coal is not nearly as bad as sitting in the dark and cold, while hungry and shivering. We can do better than coal though, with nuclear power. We can have coal, nuclear, or a short and miserable life. I choose nuclear.
Only because the government has deemed it so. If the government would actually do its job and issue licenses for nuclear power plants then it might not be so expensive. I seem to recall the federal government holding up licensing a nuclear power plant for thirty years, always coming back looking for more paperwork. At this point the paperwork likely weighs more than the power plant. It's not like we haven't built power plants before, there's a hundred of them in the USA right now. The government just needs to let them get built.
and environmentally dubious.
As opposed to what? We can choose burning coal, nuclear power, or the lights going out and we freeze to death. I suppose we could burn wood for fuel but if you want to see an environmental disaster then make people choose between freezing to death and cutting down a tree.
2) Improving efficiency would reduce power requirements, which not only would reduce the size and quantity of power plants required (regardless of type) but also improves economics in other ways.
The reason the wall warts are considered inefficient is because they were made cheaper than a more efficient model. I'd think that cheap nuclear power, and cheap wall warts, would improve our economy more than anything. Efficiency is good but there is a point where it becomes absurd... and I think we've just reached it.
3) Quite frankly, given the potential for abuse, environmental damage and public health hazards posed by nuclear power, government regulation is really the ONLY solution that would have sufficient clout and impartiality to be even remotely effective.
I don't suggest that we do away with government regulation on nuclear power. I suggest that the government actually regulate, not ban, nuclear power. That's really what we have now, a ban on all new plants. We have not seen a new nuclear power plant built for forty years, and it not for a lack of trying.
I think that the states should assert their rights as sovereign entities and license nuclear power plants on their own. If the federal government is not wiling to regulate nuclear power then the states should do it.
Power plants have essentially zero incentive to do things properly, and huge financial incentive to cut corners that could result in severe and widespread problems.
I find your faith in government disturbing. More government is not the solution to every problem. In fact I believe that many of our problems are from too much government. A government that can dictate what kind of light bulbs, wall warts, and toilet bowls I can buy is just too big. If the government was really concerned about CO2 output then they'd be licensing nuclear power plants. This wall wart regulation is just a bunch of people making busy work, they think that the public is too stupid to figure out that this regulation will do next to nothing.
Reading many of the comments on this thread and I see that most people see through this as a pointless endeavor.
We could demand by government fiat that wall warts be more efficient and reduce our carbon output or we could use nuclear power and eliminate it. I suggest we use nuclear power.
If we use technology like a waste annihilating molten salt reactor we could eliminate the carbon emitted from electricity production, burn up the nuclear waste from old solid fuel reactors, and get some very valuable medical and industrial isotopes.
The only reason we haven't seen reactors like this already is because the federal government has decided that they alone have the authority to manage nuclear materials, and that the people that license these nuclear facilities are so risk adverse that they'd rather see everyone in the world suffer and die from a carbon dioxide induced environmental collapse than have someone get on the news for having bumped their head while working on something "nukular".
The federal government created this problem, I have little faith that they will fix it.
Very interesting technology but I have many questions on its utility. First of all, how does it compare to existing technologies? Put it in terms of terabytes per dollar, kilogram, cubic centimeters, or joule, and then give the same specifications for storage we have now like hard drives, SSD, Library of Congress (had to work that in here somewhere), microfilm, or even the human brain.
The data density is important but then so is the rate that the data can be stored and retrieved, and put this in terms that people understand. Compare it to IDE, PCI, or station wagons full of digital tapes. Knowing some of this would give us some idea on how useful this technology would be.
If we are going to discuss storing data for extended periods of time then I'd think that the data should be in a form that is human readable with some very basic equipment. Nanoscale etchings on glass that are written in a commonly written language that can be read with a proper microscope sounds near ideal to me. Better yet have it in multiple languages, this gives not only redundancy of the data but gives a better chance that it could be read by a future civilization.
While human readability is a must so is having a method that eases machine readability. We can assume that any civilization that can read nanoscale text can also create an OCR system to transfer the data into a computer system but we can do things to make it easier on us and whatever future entity wishes to reliably recover the data. Just making a good choice of fonts so that a "1", "l", and "I" are readily distinguishable.
Slashdot Mirror
"Don't forget that some trains are hybrid - they can use power lines or a third rail when available to avoid having to burn on-board diesel."
Which means that they can run without electricity, but they won't run without diesel fuel.
If this were a discussion about diesel-electric cars then you might have a point but this is about battery electric vehicles. When those trains run from batteries on board then you can make your point. Until then battery electric vehicles remain a novelty.
Your examples of diesel/electric systems only prove my point. Those vehicles run on diesel fuel, the electric drive is merely the means to transfer the power from the ICE to the drive shaft.
There are no batteries in the drive train, all the energy to move the vehicle come from the fuel.
That may be true but I suspect the motor uses plenty of rare earth metals. While the GPP may have where those metals end up in the car wrong they do end up in the car somewhere.
An electric motor can certainly be made without rare earth metals but it will be heavier and less efficient. Given the weight and performance gap electric cars already have compared to internal combustion competitors they cannot afford to not use rare earth metals.
I'm sure someone is thinking that electric cars can outperform most any ICE powered car. Well, let me know when electric tractor/trailers are on the market. Diesel engines rule the road, rail, and sea. Until we get batteries that can compete with fuel oil and diesel fuel on weight, volume, and cost we will continue to see electric vehicles as novelties and penis size compensators.
Test engineer 1, "WTF? This electric car sure seems to need a lot of lubricating oil. Where does it go anyway? I don't see it leaking."
Test engineer 2, "I don't get it either. Are you feeling light headed too? I think we need to open a window on the car testing bay, get some fresh air in here."
I keep hearing about how we can use "agricultural waste" to make bio-fuel but that is a lie, there is no agricultural waste. What is this "waste" exactly? What do you think happens to it now?
This "waste" is usually described as cornstalks and other chaff made from the growing of (obviously) corn and other food crops. I grew up on a dairy farm and we'd use those corn stalks as bedding for the cattle, so they'd have a warm and dry place to rest. After those cornstalks are soaked with cattle manure it is collected and spread on the fields. Those corn stalks return vital nutrients to the soil, control erosion, and hold that manure (and other fertilizers) in place for the next crop.
I suspect a lot of people that live in high rise apartments, that never saw a cow that wasn't served on a plate, think that these corn stalks are hauled off to put in landfills. If we convert cornstalks to fuel then we are going to see another dust bowl in the Midwest.
I suspect that some vegan would like to point out how we should not be eating meat or drinking milk anyway, we don't need to bed cattle with cornstalks or feed that cattle corn. Okay then, if we harvest all that corn to eat, and haul off the stalks for fuel, then what is holding the soil in place? What is going to keep that topsoil from just blowing away and get carried out to sea by rivers? Answer, the corn stalks that should not be taken out of the field.
I read an interesting paper on how we could mine basalt, grind it up, and spread on farm land to return nutrients to the field and fix carbon out of the air into the soil. That's something I can support. Use nuclear power to produce that basalt fertilizer rather than the fossil fueled lime kilns we use now, we'd go from carbon positive to carbon negative. We'd also be building up topsoil rather than hauling it away to make fuel. This fuel, by the way, could also be produced from nuclear power in a carbon neutral or perhaps even carbon negative way.
I'm not even a agronomist or anything like that. I'm just an Iowa farm boy that grew up to write code. Even I see this as an environmental disaster. Do these bio-fuel people even talk to farmers? Did they not do some sort of environmental impact study on removing vital erosion control material, like corn stalks, from fields? Perhaps they did do their homework and I'm missing something important. If so then I'd like someone to point out what I'm missing.
I fail to see how this is a bad thing. With a public sector funded competition with private sector entities, and perhaps even other public sector entities, as competitors I suspect we'd get the most gain for the least dollars.
Interesting, but also missing the point.
Should I really care why Apple chose to fight against a government that wishes to act outside of its authority?
Imagine this was a manufacturer of a safe, they say the safe cannot be opened without destroying the contents. The government tells them to open the safe, or else. The company comes back with drawings, material lists, and so forth to back up their claim that the safe cannot be opened. A court orders them to open the safe. What do you expect them to say now? "Oh, we were lying earlier. We TOTALLY have a back door on the safe. All you had to do was ask nicely."
The government is asking a company to prove their product is not as secure as they claim. I recall that the government is not even providing them with compensation for their efforts. Of course they are going to fight this.
You know you are so right that I'm going to give you a lollipop for your insightful answer. Now, run along child, us adults would like to continue talking.
Perhaps because the developer believe that they can do better than Microsoft. This is something that might not be all that high of a bar to hurdle generally speaking.
I was also thinking something along these lines. I remember reading a child's fantasy story as an assignment for a Spanish class. The story went something like there was a rather imaginative and nosy kid that was listening in on his rather mean neighbors. They were making up a story on how if someone were to slide down the roof on a rug during a full moon the person could fly. The mean neighbors were obviously full of it, they just wanted to see the kid slide himself off the roof and fall to his death. Well, the kid slides down the roof in a full moon and... flies. Is that something we want to teach a robot?
If we have robots read stories to learn social norms then be prepared for them to learn that breaking a mirror gives seven years of bad luck, stepping on a crack breaks your mother's back, every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings, and so on. Perhaps this is harmless as we can also teach the robots the difference between fantasy and reality.
Perhaps much of this is harmless fun but think of how some cultures teach their children. Things like on how women should be dressed in public or be stoned, that homosexuals are bad and need to hang from the neck until dead, you know like perhaps half of the world population lives.
I love science fiction and fantasy because it can teach lessons on how the best intentions can turn bad. Perhaps a robot with an imperfect comprehension on fact and fiction can learn a very different lesson, like how to convince children to jump off a roof.
Let's do some math, because math is fun.
I see that in the USA we consume about 4000 billion kilowatt hours per year. Average that out to get a rate of energy production and it comes out to roughly 470 gigawatts. Let's assume a windmill has a operational lifespan of forty years. Forty years times 12 months and we get 480 months. Since we are using approximate numbers here I'll just round that out to one gigawatt of capacity we'd have to build every month.
Let's assume we get another nice round number of one megawatt of electrical output capacity per windmill. That means to keep the lights on with the current electric demand we'd need to build 1000 windmills per month in the USA. We have 30 days in a month, 24 hours per day, gives us 720 hours. That means we'd have to build at least one windmill per hour in the USA and do that day and night from now until the lights go out.
Is that rate of windmill production something we can do in the USA? I can hear it now, "Yes we can!"
I'll leave as an exercise for the reader on how much aluminum we'd have to mine to build all those windmills. Sure, we can recycle the old windmills but there are going to be losses in the process, account for that as you wish. Now each windmill is going to need a concrete pedestal on which to sit. We'd need to mine limestone and sand for that, again you may account for recycling as you wish. There would need to also be steel, copper, fuel for the trucks, rare earths for the magnets, etc. Add all of that into the manufacturing requirements as you wish.
What do you get? I'll wait.
In the mean time I think I'll compute the steel, concrete, aluminum, and so forth required to build the one nuclear reactor per month (again I'm assuming a 40 year operational life span) we'd need to build to keep the lights on. Let me know when you've completed your calculations and we'll compare notes. Then we shall see who has the greatest environmental impact, nuclear or wind.
The US federal government has been acting like a barely trained 800 pound orangutan with a moderately educated owner at the leash. When the government sees an obstacle you get the orangutan owner saying "Right turn, Clyde." (Is that too obscure of a reference?)
The government has had success with having their trained ape beating results out of the public and the public has responded. We created something that their trained ape can't just beat out of people. Had the government not been so willing to break into our records then we would not have developed such encryption so quickly and used so widely.
Basically the government made this bed and now they have to sleep in it. Forgive me if I have little sympathy for their problem.
In all of this planet's history we've seen more significant changes in the climate and at rates much greater and slower than what we've seen. The flora and fauna has adapted before and will adapt again.
The interesting thing about how climate, flora, and fauna interact is that a change in any one produces a change in the others. Climates do change, fauna and flora adapt, and a new climate is produced.
At one time I would have been upset about the potential extinction of a species but no more. I remember hearing over and over again on how many species die off due to climate change. All of that got erased in my mind when I heard how many new species developed in that time. It is quite possible that we are seeing the greatest biological diversity that has ever existed on Earth.
Species die off, that's life. In fact it is required for species to die off for new, more robust, species to take its place in the ecology.
I've also discovered on how the concept of a species is very fluid and not well defined. For the longest time I thought a species was defined as a population in that a pair of mates could produce offspring capable of reproducing with another mate from that population. Then I find out that not only are grizzly bears and polar bears closely related enough to produce viable offspring it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish between the two species in certain parts of the world. Grizzly and polar bears have a range that overlap. When it comes time to breed the bears don't care much about what color the fur is of their mate. The cubs will adopt the feeding habits of the mother. Brown bears are easy to find and kill in the snow, and white bears stick out in the forest. The color of the coat is largely based on the climate the bears are found, not the genetics of the population as a whole.
What do bears have to do with birds? If these birds die off because the climate is too warm for them then I expect that same species to develop habits and genetics to adapt. In a matter of years this problem will solve itself and the birds will live on.
This is only seen as a problem because some biologists are grabbing on the keywords of the day to get publicity and, no doubt, funding.
In short, move along, there's nothing to see here.
To those that think I'm heartless, bought out by the oil lobby, and/or whatever else that might be used to turn me into a sub-human I say this... bite me. This is basic biology at work. Had this happened in another time, in another place, this would not be headlines. It'd be turned into a graduate paper at best and filed in a university library where no one would ever read it again.
I don't know the specifics on how this works in this case but I know enough about electronics that I can speculate.
One means to have a write once memory is with the use of "fuses", the fuse is a small etched wire that with enough current will open like a fuse. This would be done with a write at a voltage much higher than that normally used for a read. I would further suspect that to prevent someone from changing the written value the write function itself would have a fuse, blow that fuse and the chip is incapable of taking on a new value.
So, each chip off the line would have an identical mask. The chip would be tested for function, the crypto key written, tested that the key was written correctly, then the write fuse blown, tested again, and if it passes on all steps it would be shipped for use in a device.
Speculating further the pins to write the crypto key might only be exposed before it is packaged. Probes would be placed on the chip before it is packaged to write a crypto key. The chip verified, and if it passes it would be packaged and used in a device.
What those crypto key values might be depends on the crypto system used. It might just be a sequential number, like a serial number. It might be randomly generated, to prevent attack by somehow obtaining the serial number. It might be created by some crypto algorithm, such as being a large prime number or something.
I do not know of any technology that allows for on the fly changes to the mask used to burn the chips. Trying to retrieve the written value would require destructive evaluation of the chip. This process would seem to be quite expensive and unreliable. As the chip would be destroyed an identical chip would have to be made to recover the data that this chip was used to encrypt.
Depending on the algorithm is it possible the data retrieved could appear as valid but incorrect. What that means is that the person may have encrypted the King James Bible but what came out from the decryption with the wrong key was Moby Dick. With the original chip destroyed from attempting to read the crypto key its not like you can go back and try to read it again.
It is also possible that I have no idea of what I'm talking about.
If licenses are being withheld it's because of technical and economic deficiencies, not malice.
That's what you might think, and that is certainly the federal government's view. The people that have been working on liquid fueled reactors think differently. There are companies willing to invest in liquid fuel reactors but the federal government is so backward that they don't even have a clue on how to license them. Instead of learning this new technology, or finding people that know this technology and inviting them to join the licensing board, they just pretend t does not exist.
While calling it malicious to not license molten salt reactors may be harsh or not completely accurate there does appear to be a very strong bias against the technology.
As opposed to renewable alternatives. The elephant in the room is the waste these plants produce, which nobody wants to take responsibility for and we have no reliable way of dealing with. Beyond that, the environmental damage done during the mining and refining of the fuel is often overlooked, as is the immediate local impact of having such a large plant in one location due to thermal pollution.
We have a way to deal with the waste, it's called a waste annihilating molten salt reactor. That "waste" is fuel if only allowed to reprocess it. While people will claim the ban on reprocessing spent fuel has been lifted there still does not yet exist a regulatory mechanism to license these facilities. The link you provided might not say that explicitly but it sure is implied.
Also, all kinds of new reactor technologies were listed but all of them relied on solid fuel. Solid fuel is expensive to produce and requires an infrastructure that does not exist, at least not in enough capacity to matter. Liquid fuel is much cheaper to produce and it is quite likely we already have the facilities to produce it.
Alternatives like wind and solar are too dilute, too unreliable, and therefore too expensive to replace coal. We can make nuclear really cheap, but we need the Department of Energy to at least recognize the technology exists.
When it comes to environmental damage due to mining that you mention, where do you think that all the material comes from to build windmills and solar panels? It comes from mining. If you don't want people to mine then we're going to be shivering in the dark real soon. Also, the thermal pollution is also not something that wind and solar can claim to be free of. You do realize that making the aluminum for the rotors and wires for a windmill requires a lot of heat, no? Same for melting the glass for solar panels. Molten salt reactors are typically air cooled, there is no thermal pollution, at least no more than what would come off of solar panels baking in the sun.
Neither is deregulation.
I don't want nuclear energy to be deregulated, I want it regulated like coal. It should not take ten years to license a nuclear power plant. The government should be able to do this in a matter of months or weeks. This lengthy licensing process is what drives up costs.
I saw no mention of molten salt reactors in the very lengthy article you linked to. That alone tells me how backward the DoE is right now. MSRs are not a new technology, it's been shown to work fifty years ago. The DoE just needs to allow one to be built.
The DoE's idea of "encouraging" nuclear power development is to take designs that have been shown to be less than profitable, offer them to private companies to develop, and then starts to wonder why no one wants to build one. The DoE needs to do more listening than lecturing.
Another thing I saw in that article you linked is how the Obama administration has been hostile to nuclear power. It should not be surprising that no one wants to build a nuclear power plant if the government won't allow plant owners to reprocess the spent fuel or move the fuel to a safe storage site. The plant oper
Maybe some good can come from this. Let the idiots spout off solutions that won't work so that the people that have the knowledge and intelligence to see how this can fail can argue for something that will work. Sort of following the idea that "there is no such thing as bad publicity" that people follow in politics and popular culture.
If we can get people to think that firing rockets carrying radioactive materials is something that might be considered acceptable then perhaps we could do something that might work where only something with a nuclear reactor is a feasible solution. I'm just tossing this out as an example, I don't know if it would work, but suppose instead of detonating a nuclear weapon on the surface we have a nuclear powered drilling machine that bores into the asteroid. The hole it creates would act as a rocket bell and the burning and evaporating material from the nuclear reactor heat acts as the propellant. This could throw the asteroid out of orbit far enough that it misses Earth.
Also, this brain dead "science" shown in movies and TV is going to get people killed. Cars don't blow up when they hit a brick wall. The rubber soles of your boots won't keep you from getting electrocuted. Car doors don't stop bullets. People could write encyclopedias on how much movies and TV get medicine wrong.
As bad as things have been in the past I do see things getting better. Outside of the super hero genre we are starting to see science being portrayed more accurately. I think that there are enough educated people out there that writers at least try to appeal to them, and people are starting to realize that real life is interesting as it is.
Of course I could be completely wrong.
The meteor impact will cause a nuclear winter that will cancel out the global warming.
"Also, we like explosions."
Is it explosion Wednesday already?
*BOOM*
I guess it is.
What could possibly go wrong?
While we are taxing power plants for the pollution they produce do they also get credits for the good they do? Without the power plants we'd be sitting in the dark, cold and hungry. Maybe we wouldn't be cold and hungry, but we'd be breathing in all kinds of nasty chemicals from cooking over an open flame. That is those of us that don't set ourselves on fire.
The biggest risks to women and children in parts of the world without electricity is lung disease from cooking on an open flame, and burning in a house fire. We should be thankful for those coal plants, not taxing them for keeping us safer.
I'll put up with that "dirty" coal plant so that I can cook with an electric stove if you don't mind. You go gather up some sticks and dried donkey dung to cook with, you'll be "greener" that way.
Here's an idea, put the coal power plants out of business. Go make something so clean, cheap, and safe that no one would be stupid enough to build another coal plant. Easy, right? Of course not. We don't burn coal because we want to destroy the environment, we do it because it's the best we got. If you have a better idea then let me know, I'll listen.
You don't get it. These people don't want to keep operating these old nuclear reactors. They want to build new ones, safer ones, because safe reactors make a better profit.
The safer the reactor the fewer people get hurt. People that don't get hurt don't sue the owners of the reactor. The safer the reactor the fewer people it takes to operate, the fewer people on site the less it costs to operate. The older the reactor gets the more likely it is to fail, build new ones and they don't need as much money to repair. New safe reactors means more profit. No nuclear reactors means we keep running the old ones because people don't like living in the dark.
What "costs" are being passed on to the public? Like the "cost" of drinking clean water? The "cost" of refrigerated food? The "costs" of living in a first world economy?
You are an idiot. It's because of modern power plants that we have the life we live. Coal is not nearly as bad as sitting in the dark and cold, while hungry and shivering. We can do better than coal though, with nuclear power. We can have coal, nuclear, or a short and miserable life. I choose nuclear.
1) Nuclear power is stupidly expensive
Only because the government has deemed it so. If the government would actually do its job and issue licenses for nuclear power plants then it might not be so expensive. I seem to recall the federal government holding up licensing a nuclear power plant for thirty years, always coming back looking for more paperwork. At this point the paperwork likely weighs more than the power plant. It's not like we haven't built power plants before, there's a hundred of them in the USA right now. The government just needs to let them get built.
and environmentally dubious.
As opposed to what? We can choose burning coal, nuclear power, or the lights going out and we freeze to death. I suppose we could burn wood for fuel but if you want to see an environmental disaster then make people choose between freezing to death and cutting down a tree.
2) Improving efficiency would reduce power requirements, which not only would reduce the size and quantity of power plants required (regardless of type) but also improves economics in other ways.
The reason the wall warts are considered inefficient is because they were made cheaper than a more efficient model. I'd think that cheap nuclear power, and cheap wall warts, would improve our economy more than anything. Efficiency is good but there is a point where it becomes absurd... and I think we've just reached it.
3) Quite frankly, given the potential for abuse, environmental damage and public health hazards posed by nuclear power, government regulation is really the ONLY solution that would have sufficient clout and impartiality to be even remotely effective.
I don't suggest that we do away with government regulation on nuclear power. I suggest that the government actually regulate, not ban, nuclear power. That's really what we have now, a ban on all new plants. We have not seen a new nuclear power plant built for forty years, and it not for a lack of trying.
I think that the states should assert their rights as sovereign entities and license nuclear power plants on their own. If the federal government is not wiling to regulate nuclear power then the states should do it.
Power plants have essentially zero incentive to do things properly, and huge financial incentive to cut corners that could result in severe and widespread problems.
I find your faith in government disturbing. More government is not the solution to every problem. In fact I believe that many of our problems are from too much government. A government that can dictate what kind of light bulbs, wall warts, and toilet bowls I can buy is just too big. If the government was really concerned about CO2 output then they'd be licensing nuclear power plants. This wall wart regulation is just a bunch of people making busy work, they think that the public is too stupid to figure out that this regulation will do next to nothing.
Reading many of the comments on this thread and I see that most people see through this as a pointless endeavor.
We could demand by government fiat that wall warts be more efficient and reduce our carbon output or we could use nuclear power and eliminate it. I suggest we use nuclear power.
If we use technology like a waste annihilating molten salt reactor we could eliminate the carbon emitted from electricity production, burn up the nuclear waste from old solid fuel reactors, and get some very valuable medical and industrial isotopes.
The only reason we haven't seen reactors like this already is because the federal government has decided that they alone have the authority to manage nuclear materials, and that the people that license these nuclear facilities are so risk adverse that they'd rather see everyone in the world suffer and die from a carbon dioxide induced environmental collapse than have someone get on the news for having bumped their head while working on something "nukular".
The federal government created this problem, I have little faith that they will fix it.
Very interesting technology but I have many questions on its utility. First of all, how does it compare to existing technologies? Put it in terms of terabytes per dollar, kilogram, cubic centimeters, or joule, and then give the same specifications for storage we have now like hard drives, SSD, Library of Congress (had to work that in here somewhere), microfilm, or even the human brain.
The data density is important but then so is the rate that the data can be stored and retrieved, and put this in terms that people understand. Compare it to IDE, PCI, or station wagons full of digital tapes. Knowing some of this would give us some idea on how useful this technology would be.
If we are going to discuss storing data for extended periods of time then I'd think that the data should be in a form that is human readable with some very basic equipment. Nanoscale etchings on glass that are written in a commonly written language that can be read with a proper microscope sounds near ideal to me. Better yet have it in multiple languages, this gives not only redundancy of the data but gives a better chance that it could be read by a future civilization.
While human readability is a must so is having a method that eases machine readability. We can assume that any civilization that can read nanoscale text can also create an OCR system to transfer the data into a computer system but we can do things to make it easier on us and whatever future entity wishes to reliably recover the data. Just making a good choice of fonts so that a "1", "l", and "I" are readily distinguishable.
Again, this is cool stuff, but I crave more.
I thought that religion was the opium of the people. At least that is what I learned from Karl Marx.