Uranium and thorium are everywhere. If they are mining for anything then they have a source of uranium and thorium in the mining tails. Barring that they can extract uranium from seawater. https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
I love how people say that "we" can do without coal and nuclear if only we put up enough windmills, solar panels, and connect them all with enough wires. That might work in a large nation and/or in a politically stable part of the world. What of the people that don't have a lot of sun and wind, and don't particularly get along with their neighbors? I believe Finland applies here. The nation is largely sub-arctic, so not a lot of sun. Sharing a border with Russia would shackling their first world economy to a second world economy by electrical wires, or the idea of a "smart grid" fails from the start. Dealing with Russia for natural gas is bad enough, at least that can be tanked up for times when they decide to turn off the tap and demand a higher price. If the plug is pulled on the electric grid like that then it means things get dark and cold real quick.
You may be correct in claiming that the USA does not have this capability but Canada has had the capability from the early 1980s, or perhaps late 1970s. I think that if we ask real nice that they'll send some of their nuclear engineers over here and teach us how to do it.
There's over two dozen operating CANDU reactors in the world, another dozen more derived from the design. Around the world there are something like 50 total (CANDU and CANDU derived included) pressurized heavy water reactors operating in the world right now. They are all capable of using spent fuel from light water reactors as fuel with little, or perhaps no, reprocessing.
They were designed to use natural uranium as fuel, so just keeping them running means no enrichment of mined uranium. If we were to use the plutonium and enriched uranium from the nuclear weapon stockpile then we could mix that with lower grade spent fuel and burn that too.
Just keep reprocessing the fuel, adding in some natural uranium each time, and the loop on this is pretty much closed. The stuff left over that can't be put back in the reactor are useful isotopes for medicine and industry.
Two things prove you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
First, if it took more energy to produce the uranium than what they got out of it then no one would do it. Well, people burn ethanol so perhaps that's not completely true. What they wouldn't do is use nuclear power to produce nearly 20% of the electricity in the USA. The only way to "prove" nuclear power is a net negative is to use a lot of assumptions that cannot be proven, like the future costs of decommissioning a site. This often also includes that a site must be returned to a "greenfield" state, which no other energy source must abide by. In other words, nuclear power is a "negative" energy source because we deemed it so.
Second, uranium 238 exists in nature at better than 99% purity so extracting it is quite simple really. What makes it difficult is again the costs we impose on it. But that's not the part that makes you look stupid, it's that U-238 is not nuclear fuel. It can be bred into fuel, which also avoids the expensive process of extracting the U-235 which is fuel.
There are nuclear reactor designs that use U-238 as breeder stock for fuel. When left in it's naturally "contaminated" state of about 0.7% U-235 it can be burned in heavy water reactors, a popular design is called CANDU. No reactor will (or likely even can) use U-238 for fuel without adding some plutonium, or other isotopes of uranium, to bombard it with enough neutrons to make fuel out of it.
Oh, and uranium is about as common as tin or tungsten. No wonder we see tens of thousands of tons of these elements produced every year.
Nuclear plants spend half their time generating dirt-cheap nighttime power.
You seem to imply that is a bad thing. I thought we wanted dirt cheap power.
Solar power will always be expensive because it is unreliable. Sure, we know that the sun will come up at a given time so it's "reliable" in that way. What it can't do is provide power we can rely on being there when we want it.
I think I see what you are saying, a utility wants a return on it's investment so it's going to want to sell it's electricity at the highest price. That does not mean they want to sell electricity that costs them the most. They can demand (or at least try to demand) a higher price for solar because of it being inherently unreliable. People don't want to pay for unreliable power, especially if it costs more than reliable power.
For solar power to make any sense it has to be cheaper than reliable energy like nuclear and natural gas. People will be willing to pay for unreliable power if it means getting it cheaper. Making expensive and unreliable power can just mean no one is going to buy it. Certainly if there is electricity to sell then people will buy it at some price, but that means producing it at a cost lower then what people are willing to pay so they make a profit on their investment.
Solar power is cheap right now because the government deems it so. Nuclear power is expensive because the government deems it so. If the government just got their collective heads out of their collective asses then we'd have nuclear energy so cheap that solar panels would never be considered for utility power.
Wind is only "controlled" in that it has means to turn it down when there is too much. There is no way to turn it up if there is not enough.
That's like calling a bobsled a "controlled" means of transportation. It only works when you have a downhill slope, and even then you can only turn slightly, slow down, or accelerate at the rate gravity allows. To get to the top of the hill you need a snowmachine, or get off and push it back up the hill, or wait until a new valley appears below your feet.
Who told me that wind power is uncontrolled? I was told this by the people that build, operate, and install them.
Wrong. Solar power peaks at noon, power usage peaks at sundown. Solar power is terrible for meeting peak demands., it can in fact make it worse.
To a utility they see load and supply. Supply is something that they control, at least that's how it use to be, while load they do not. To the utility solar power looks like a "negative load" in the equation that they must keep balanced. Solar power does not show on the supply side but the load side, as a negative value.
How can the utility balance this equation when the load can potentially go negative?
Laws that require utilities to buy consumers excess electricity drive up the costs for the utility, and therefore everyone else. The government is also paying these people, with subsidies, to put up the solar panels. This is a big "fuck you" to all the poor people that rent their homes and can't put up panels, or simply cannot afford the upfront cost of installing the panels.
Solar power is taking money from the poor, to give to the wealthy, raising energy prices for everyone but the lobbyists that got this feel good measure into law. It doesn't "work out fine". It won't work out fine until the people that buy the panels have to pay the full cost for them and either have to negotiate a price for selling their excess electricity back to the utility, like any other energy producer, or have to buy their own energy storage so they don't have to sell it back.
If solar power is so great then why does the government have to pay people to buy into it?
Implement a system to shut the reactor down before the storm comes ashore.
That's precisely what killed the reactors at Fukushima. The reactors have a system to automatically shutdown when a tremor of a certain magnitude hits, far smaller than what would cause damage. So the earthquake that triggered the tsunami also triggered the scarm. When the wave hit and took out the generators and power lines the power plant didn't have enough power to keep the reactor cool, or to restart the perfectly functional reactor.
For the first few minutes or hours they had some battery power and the decay heat from the core that ran a secondary cooling pump. Maybe (emphasis on maybe) they had enough power then to restart but they didn't know the extent of the damage yet. I'm not sure if procedures at the time would have allowed a restart, assuming they could have.
The assumptions they were working with at the time was that in the case of a earthquake induced scram one of the four backup power systems would keep the reactor cool enough to prevent meltdown. All backup power was lost in the tsunami though. No power means no cooling. No cooling means heat will build up to the point of a failure.
This kind of accident would not happen in a more modern design because they are made to hold up to a complete loss of power. The problem is that without new reactors to take the place of these older designs these reactors with this design problem still exist and are operating. Perhaps a change in procedure has come in to make sure this does not happen again, like not going into scram but instead to "idle" power. This means in the case of a total loss of backup power the reactor itself can run the pumps needed to cool it, like it would do normally, but not produce so much power that it can cause further damage from a sudden loss of a grid connection.
It's not just about the design, which no doubt can help a lot, but also the process. What killed Fukushima was not just the design, or the tsunami, but also the failure to provide a proper process in dealing with a situation like this. There's a lot of words said and typed over the height of the flood wall and such. I believe that if they had only thought that maybe the reactors could provide backup power for each other that maybe this would not have happened.
Judging by the size of the text on his screen I have to wonder if he had vision problems and the multiple screens were to get some lost screen real estate back. It's hard to tell but it also looks like he had multiple computers running. That was also likely to get sufficient screen real estate. I do that too, I have multiple computers side by side so I can look things up on the web on one computer while typing into another. I'm not writing a novel, just doing programming homework and writing up assignments.
I better get in line at Best Buy right now, I'm sure people will be standing in line for this release!
Seriously though this is another reminder that maybe I need a new laptop. This MacBook I'm typing on is somewhere around 10 years old and it's stuck at macOS 10.11, which will soon be two versions behind. I hit this wall before when my previous Apple laptop was stuck at 10.4 as I recall. Sure there's hacks to work around the software enforced system requirements but I think I got my money's worth out of this.
I know that there are places that sell laptops with Linux pre-installed but this is Slashdot, who doesn't wipe the drive and install their own OS of choice anyway? There's just a much wider choice of hardware if one ignores which OS comes on the laptop knowing they'll just blow it away once the computer is in their hands.
The question to ask how the Windows partition is formatted on the drive from the factory is something someone might just notice as they go to gparted and blow away the partition. It might mean much in the end but this is Slashdot and people notice things like what formatting is on a partition.
I dropped a Mt Dew on the kitchen floor before and it just splattered everywhere. I cleaned it up as best I could but I still come across sticky spots here and there weeks later.
Not only is a pre-op transsexual a man in a dress so is a post-op transsexual. A man having his testicles removed and putting on a dress does not make him a female. People mutilating themselves like this is quite disturbing. Perhaps even more disturbing is that the surgeons doing this "gender reassignment" aren't having their licenses to practice medicine removed for gross malpractice.
What's next? Racial reassignment? We'll just let people choose what race they want to be? What about letting people choose their species? This is insanity and we can't fix this by allowing the insane to ignore reality. The reality is that If you are born a male you will stay that way, surgery and clothing will not change that.
Yep, that how it was done in the past. Time to stop doing that.
I keep hearing how wind and solar need government funded research to be "viable" in the future. We've been doing this for 40 or 50 years now. How much longer must this continue before we take of these training wheels and see if the industry can stay upright on its own? It seems nuclear was doing fine until the government got scared off from issuing licenses. People want to build nuclear power without the government paying them to do it. Let them do it.
It seems no one, or very few, people want to build wind or solar unless the government pays them to do it. If wind and solar is so great then why is it still a tiny fraction of our energy even after decades of subsidies? Maybe it isn't so great and it's time to stop throwing good money at it.
Currently, nuclear power isn't very cost effective and it's very centralized which makes it a vulnerability.
Cost effective? Nuclear power currently makes about 1/3rd of the electricity in the USA, if it's not cost effective then it seems the people running the plants didn't get that memo.
Vulnerable? Vulnerable to what? Wind? Hail? Clouds? Nuclear power reactors are in big steel and concrete structures, they are about as invulnerable as they can get. When we see naval aircraft carriers running off of wind and sun then we can talk about nuclear power being "vulnerable".
Distributed solar power is a better idea and reduces the amount of infrastructure that needs to be maintained.
Did you say "reduces" the infrastructure needed? What about all those batteries that people keep talking about to make wind and solar viable? Is that not "infrastructure"? Or a "smart grid"? That's infrastructure, and it doesn't exist. We have the infrastructure to make nuclear power work, it's called a "nuclear power plant" and they are relatively self sufficient. Just don't build them on fault lines and they should run for nearly a century at a time without problems. Put them on a floating platform, you know, like the US Navy does. When on water that solves a lot of "vulnerability" problems, kind of like how wind power works better on the water too, no pesky neighbors to complain.
Sure, go use solar power where it makes sense. The problem is that the places it makes sense is so small that it is nearly non-existent. Nuclear power on the other hand works well almost anywhere. If it being "vulnerable" bothers you then surround them with a bunch of well trained men with guns, kind of like how the Navy does it, such as on a military base.
It won't work everywhere but insisting on perfection prevents improvement.
Kind of like how people demand perfection from nuclear power plants before they get built? That kind of puts a damper on nuclear power too, don't you think? There's a lot of ways to improve nuclear power but people need to actually build them to learn. That includes being able to make some mistakes. Oh, and Chernobyl wasn't a "mistake" that was gross incompetence. I mean "mistake" like being allowed to make changes to a design when a flaw is discovered in a design without needed three years of review, and 50 signatures, to allow it to happen.
It would be nice if the government would fund research into next gen reactors which don't have an abundance of fissile material and thus are incapable of a meltdown but those don't make weapons, so they will not fund it.
NO! Get the government out of it. There's enough private research in this but no one in the government seems willing to let people actually build something. The nuclear power industry has been at a standstill precisely because the government has been "funding research" for the past 40 years. We have enough research, we need to build now. Oh, and that research does include reactors that don't produce weapon grade material, or make long lived fission products (at least none that isn't fuel), and are immune to a meltdown. Enough researching, time to build something.
"The better first step would be to add a pollution tax."
We have those, they are called "taxes". Everything we do produces "pollution" (if we include CO2 as pollution) and everything is taxed. Do you mean just raising tax rates?
" The taxes should be used to help clean up the pollution and subsidize solutions for the poor (because they cannot afford the initial investment needed)."
We have those too. Lots of subsidies for lights, insulation, fuel efficient cars, and on and on.
At some point we need to recognize the diminishing returns on doing more. We've already done a lot so far, at some point we need to stop doing more and go into a "maintenance mode" and just keep what we got with minor tweaks here and there as economic, technological, and other factors change. I think we met that point of diminishing returns a long time ago.
That is we hit a wall of diminishing returns if we keep this NIMBY attitude on nuclear power. We could go a long way yet with nuclear power. Barring that though we've pretty much hit a wall.
If wind was cheaper then we should be able to do without wind subsidies. Every time the possibility of removing those subsidies is mentioned though the tree huggers scream. Wind power as it is now cannot survive without subsidies, subsidies from a coal and nuclear powered economy.
Smart grids and batteries won't save wind power either because they both cost money, add those and wind power isn't so cheap any more.
Oh, and nuclear has a smaller carbon footprint than wind power too. If the goal is to get cheap, carbon free (as "free" of carbon as wind anyway), reliable, and safe energy then nuclear is at the top of the list.
I'll believe the politicians are serious about a carbon free economy when I see a new nuclear power plant built in every state. Until then it's just a bunch of hot air.
Isn't it also supposed to have a health readout on a chest plate and/or armband? How else are people supposed to know that the air runs out in 24 minutes but there's 28 minutes before they land and it's safe to open the hatch?
So they know where to mail the body once it's found floating in the ocean?
So they have some idea on what language the wearer speaks if they land far off target?
So they don't get shot/hanged as a spy if they land far off target? (Not that it'd save them universally but wearing a country identifier does conform to international laws on things like piracy, spies, and such.)
Because decades of seeing pictures of government funded astronauts wearing flags on their spacesuits people expect flags on spacesuits? In other words, marketing.
If some large nation has the ability to confuse US Navy ship navigation for an advantage in a war then would they not want to test it before, you know, having their own navy sunk in an all out war?
If this is the action of a "lone wolf" that wants to sell this to such a powerful nation, to get an advantage in a war, then would they not have to demonstrate it to sell it?
This was something of a tactic used by the USA to remove all doubts of their military and technological capability, they'd show off once, then do it again shortly after. By doing it twice they proved the first wasn't just getting lucky. It also showed that they could do it again at essentially anytime they wished.
There is some speculation that the US Navy shooting down a satellite shortly after the Chinese did it was just a show for the Chinese. The US Navy claimed it was a necessary shoot down of a dead satellite in a decaying orbit that threatened to land in a populated area, which due to it's size and massive load of fuel could have threatened life and property. They did it only once though. That was then likely enough to deflate the Chinese ego.
Let's also remember that the collisions were with civilian vessels. It's quite likely the US Navy ships new precisely where they were at the time. The problem is more like the civilian ships didn't know which way was up and big ships in small spaces can run into each other. This doesn't explain it all since the US Navy ships still have means to detect and identify ships in the worst conditions. Something still had to go wrong on those US Navy ships. That was probably trusting the ships would be transmitting accurate identification and location by their collision avoidance beacons.
If someone sets up a false navigation beacon that messes with the civilian ships that shifts their navigation track over by a few thousand feet, but the US Navy ships are immune, now you have ships in a narrow shipping lane and not everyone is using the same map. It could be that if this is an attempt to crash US Navy ships then this has been attempted for a long time now, it's only recently that they got lucky or skilled enough to do any real damage.
No consequences? Theft and fraud costs them money. Catching these people will cost them money since now they have to provide company resources to this case if they want their stuff back. Covering these costs will affect profits. There are consequences here. Best they can do now is minimize the losses.
I have little doubt they had security people look over the code. It may be that they weren't experienced, didn't have enough time to look over everything before it went live, or managers overrode their recommendations. They will fix it or stockholders will bail.
Screwing up isn't always a crime. The punishment is having to clean up the mess left by the screw up.
You're free because you don't have anything anybody wants to risk their life over.
Fixed that for you. I have a Model 1911 I keep close, as well as a 20 gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot. Best estimates are that 2 out of 3 houses have guns in them around here.
I like how the gun control types like to correlate gun ownership with "gun deaths", as if getting killed with a gun is the only way to be murdered and all deaths in this manner is a crime. Self defense with a firearm is a "gun death" but not a crime. I did a study on gun ownership and crime, all crime. Guns prevent crime. Do the study yourself. It won't take long if you have some skills with a statistical analysis program or even just are good with Microsoft Excel. Use the FBI numbers, as that tracks crimes, not the Brady Campaign numbers, they track even self defense shootings as a "crime".
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Uranium and thorium are everywhere. If they are mining for anything then they have a source of uranium and thorium in the mining tails. Barring that they can extract uranium from seawater.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
I love how people say that "we" can do without coal and nuclear if only we put up enough windmills, solar panels, and connect them all with enough wires. That might work in a large nation and/or in a politically stable part of the world. What of the people that don't have a lot of sun and wind, and don't particularly get along with their neighbors? I believe Finland applies here. The nation is largely sub-arctic, so not a lot of sun. Sharing a border with Russia would shackling their first world economy to a second world economy by electrical wires, or the idea of a "smart grid" fails from the start. Dealing with Russia for natural gas is bad enough, at least that can be tanked up for times when they decide to turn off the tap and demand a higher price. If the plug is pulled on the electric grid like that then it means things get dark and cold real quick.
How much do you gain? Quite a bit actually. It's called DUPIC, Direct Use of PWR fuel In CANDU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You may be correct in claiming that the USA does not have this capability but Canada has had the capability from the early 1980s, or perhaps late 1970s. I think that if we ask real nice that they'll send some of their nuclear engineers over here and teach us how to do it.
There's over two dozen operating CANDU reactors in the world, another dozen more derived from the design. Around the world there are something like 50 total (CANDU and CANDU derived included) pressurized heavy water reactors operating in the world right now. They are all capable of using spent fuel from light water reactors as fuel with little, or perhaps no, reprocessing.
They were designed to use natural uranium as fuel, so just keeping them running means no enrichment of mined uranium. If we were to use the plutonium and enriched uranium from the nuclear weapon stockpile then we could mix that with lower grade spent fuel and burn that too.
Just keep reprocessing the fuel, adding in some natural uranium each time, and the loop on this is pretty much closed. The stuff left over that can't be put back in the reactor are useful isotopes for medicine and industry.
Two things prove you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
First, if it took more energy to produce the uranium than what they got out of it then no one would do it. Well, people burn ethanol so perhaps that's not completely true. What they wouldn't do is use nuclear power to produce nearly 20% of the electricity in the USA. The only way to "prove" nuclear power is a net negative is to use a lot of assumptions that cannot be proven, like the future costs of decommissioning a site. This often also includes that a site must be returned to a "greenfield" state, which no other energy source must abide by. In other words, nuclear power is a "negative" energy source because we deemed it so.
Second, uranium 238 exists in nature at better than 99% purity so extracting it is quite simple really. What makes it difficult is again the costs we impose on it. But that's not the part that makes you look stupid, it's that U-238 is not nuclear fuel. It can be bred into fuel, which also avoids the expensive process of extracting the U-235 which is fuel.
There are nuclear reactor designs that use U-238 as breeder stock for fuel. When left in it's naturally "contaminated" state of about 0.7% U-235 it can be burned in heavy water reactors, a popular design is called CANDU. No reactor will (or likely even can) use U-238 for fuel without adding some plutonium, or other isotopes of uranium, to bombard it with enough neutrons to make fuel out of it.
Oh, and uranium is about as common as tin or tungsten. No wonder we see tens of thousands of tons of these elements produced every year.
Nuclear plants spend half their time generating dirt-cheap nighttime power.
You seem to imply that is a bad thing. I thought we wanted dirt cheap power.
Solar power will always be expensive because it is unreliable. Sure, we know that the sun will come up at a given time so it's "reliable" in that way. What it can't do is provide power we can rely on being there when we want it.
I think I see what you are saying, a utility wants a return on it's investment so it's going to want to sell it's electricity at the highest price. That does not mean they want to sell electricity that costs them the most. They can demand (or at least try to demand) a higher price for solar because of it being inherently unreliable. People don't want to pay for unreliable power, especially if it costs more than reliable power.
For solar power to make any sense it has to be cheaper than reliable energy like nuclear and natural gas. People will be willing to pay for unreliable power if it means getting it cheaper. Making expensive and unreliable power can just mean no one is going to buy it. Certainly if there is electricity to sell then people will buy it at some price, but that means producing it at a cost lower then what people are willing to pay so they make a profit on their investment.
Solar power is cheap right now because the government deems it so. Nuclear power is expensive because the government deems it so. If the government just got their collective heads out of their collective asses then we'd have nuclear energy so cheap that solar panels would never be considered for utility power.
I'm all for batteries that can store energy but you just described a battery that makes the sun shine at night. Where can I buy those?
It's called a nuclear power plant.
Wind is only "controlled" in that it has means to turn it down when there is too much. There is no way to turn it up if there is not enough.
That's like calling a bobsled a "controlled" means of transportation. It only works when you have a downhill slope, and even then you can only turn slightly, slow down, or accelerate at the rate gravity allows. To get to the top of the hill you need a snowmachine, or get off and push it back up the hill, or wait until a new valley appears below your feet.
Who told me that wind power is uncontrolled? I was told this by the people that build, operate, and install them.
Wrong. Solar power peaks at noon, power usage peaks at sundown. Solar power is terrible for meeting peak demands., it can in fact make it worse.
To a utility they see load and supply. Supply is something that they control, at least that's how it use to be, while load they do not. To the utility solar power looks like a "negative load" in the equation that they must keep balanced. Solar power does not show on the supply side but the load side, as a negative value.
How can the utility balance this equation when the load can potentially go negative?
Laws that require utilities to buy consumers excess electricity drive up the costs for the utility, and therefore everyone else. The government is also paying these people, with subsidies, to put up the solar panels. This is a big "fuck you" to all the poor people that rent their homes and can't put up panels, or simply cannot afford the upfront cost of installing the panels.
Solar power is taking money from the poor, to give to the wealthy, raising energy prices for everyone but the lobbyists that got this feel good measure into law. It doesn't "work out fine". It won't work out fine until the people that buy the panels have to pay the full cost for them and either have to negotiate a price for selling their excess electricity back to the utility, like any other energy producer, or have to buy their own energy storage so they don't have to sell it back.
If solar power is so great then why does the government have to pay people to buy into it?
Implement a system to shut the reactor down before the storm comes ashore.
That's precisely what killed the reactors at Fukushima. The reactors have a system to automatically shutdown when a tremor of a certain magnitude hits, far smaller than what would cause damage. So the earthquake that triggered the tsunami also triggered the scarm. When the wave hit and took out the generators and power lines the power plant didn't have enough power to keep the reactor cool, or to restart the perfectly functional reactor.
For the first few minutes or hours they had some battery power and the decay heat from the core that ran a secondary cooling pump. Maybe (emphasis on maybe) they had enough power then to restart but they didn't know the extent of the damage yet. I'm not sure if procedures at the time would have allowed a restart, assuming they could have.
The assumptions they were working with at the time was that in the case of a earthquake induced scram one of the four backup power systems would keep the reactor cool enough to prevent meltdown. All backup power was lost in the tsunami though. No power means no cooling. No cooling means heat will build up to the point of a failure.
This kind of accident would not happen in a more modern design because they are made to hold up to a complete loss of power. The problem is that without new reactors to take the place of these older designs these reactors with this design problem still exist and are operating. Perhaps a change in procedure has come in to make sure this does not happen again, like not going into scram but instead to "idle" power. This means in the case of a total loss of backup power the reactor itself can run the pumps needed to cool it, like it would do normally, but not produce so much power that it can cause further damage from a sudden loss of a grid connection.
It's not just about the design, which no doubt can help a lot, but also the process. What killed Fukushima was not just the design, or the tsunami, but also the failure to provide a proper process in dealing with a situation like this. There's a lot of words said and typed over the height of the flood wall and such. I believe that if they had only thought that maybe the reactors could provide backup power for each other that maybe this would not have happened.
Judging by the size of the text on his screen I have to wonder if he had vision problems and the multiple screens were to get some lost screen real estate back. It's hard to tell but it also looks like he had multiple computers running. That was also likely to get sufficient screen real estate. I do that too, I have multiple computers side by side so I can look things up on the web on one computer while typing into another. I'm not writing a novel, just doing programming homework and writing up assignments.
What would be in the boots then? Cats? A cat, in boots, on Mars? Sure, let's do it.
I better get in line at Best Buy right now, I'm sure people will be standing in line for this release!
Seriously though this is another reminder that maybe I need a new laptop. This MacBook I'm typing on is somewhere around 10 years old and it's stuck at macOS 10.11, which will soon be two versions behind. I hit this wall before when my previous Apple laptop was stuck at 10.4 as I recall. Sure there's hacks to work around the software enforced system requirements but I think I got my money's worth out of this.
If you order a new Windows laptop
This is Slashdot, why on Earth would I do that?
To install Linux onto it?
I know that there are places that sell laptops with Linux pre-installed but this is Slashdot, who doesn't wipe the drive and install their own OS of choice anyway? There's just a much wider choice of hardware if one ignores which OS comes on the laptop knowing they'll just blow it away once the computer is in their hands.
The question to ask how the Windows partition is formatted on the drive from the factory is something someone might just notice as they go to gparted and blow away the partition. It might mean much in the end but this is Slashdot and people notice things like what formatting is on a partition.
Imagine the mess if he kept dropping the Mt Dew?
I dropped a Mt Dew on the kitchen floor before and it just splattered everywhere. I cleaned it up as best I could but I still come across sticky spots here and there weeks later.
YAY! Someone cares enough about what I said to down mod me!
And a pre-op transexual isn't a man in a dress.
Not only is a pre-op transsexual a man in a dress so is a post-op transsexual. A man having his testicles removed and putting on a dress does not make him a female. People mutilating themselves like this is quite disturbing. Perhaps even more disturbing is that the surgeons doing this "gender reassignment" aren't having their licenses to practice medicine removed for gross malpractice.
What's next? Racial reassignment? We'll just let people choose what race they want to be? What about letting people choose their species? This is insanity and we can't fix this by allowing the insane to ignore reality. The reality is that If you are born a male you will stay that way, surgery and clothing will not change that.
Yep, that how it was done in the past. Time to stop doing that.
I keep hearing how wind and solar need government funded research to be "viable" in the future. We've been doing this for 40 or 50 years now. How much longer must this continue before we take of these training wheels and see if the industry can stay upright on its own? It seems nuclear was doing fine until the government got scared off from issuing licenses. People want to build nuclear power without the government paying them to do it. Let them do it.
It seems no one, or very few, people want to build wind or solar unless the government pays them to do it. If wind and solar is so great then why is it still a tiny fraction of our energy even after decades of subsidies? Maybe it isn't so great and it's time to stop throwing good money at it.
Currently, nuclear power isn't very cost effective and it's very centralized which makes it a vulnerability.
Cost effective? Nuclear power currently makes about 1/3rd of the electricity in the USA, if it's not cost effective then it seems the people running the plants didn't get that memo.
Vulnerable? Vulnerable to what? Wind? Hail? Clouds? Nuclear power reactors are in big steel and concrete structures, they are about as invulnerable as they can get. When we see naval aircraft carriers running off of wind and sun then we can talk about nuclear power being "vulnerable".
Distributed solar power is a better idea and reduces the amount of infrastructure that needs to be maintained.
Did you say "reduces" the infrastructure needed? What about all those batteries that people keep talking about to make wind and solar viable? Is that not "infrastructure"? Or a "smart grid"? That's infrastructure, and it doesn't exist. We have the infrastructure to make nuclear power work, it's called a "nuclear power plant" and they are relatively self sufficient. Just don't build them on fault lines and they should run for nearly a century at a time without problems. Put them on a floating platform, you know, like the US Navy does. When on water that solves a lot of "vulnerability" problems, kind of like how wind power works better on the water too, no pesky neighbors to complain.
Sure, go use solar power where it makes sense. The problem is that the places it makes sense is so small that it is nearly non-existent. Nuclear power on the other hand works well almost anywhere. If it being "vulnerable" bothers you then surround them with a bunch of well trained men with guns, kind of like how the Navy does it, such as on a military base.
It won't work everywhere but insisting on perfection prevents improvement.
Kind of like how people demand perfection from nuclear power plants before they get built? That kind of puts a damper on nuclear power too, don't you think? There's a lot of ways to improve nuclear power but people need to actually build them to learn. That includes being able to make some mistakes. Oh, and Chernobyl wasn't a "mistake" that was gross incompetence. I mean "mistake" like being allowed to make changes to a design when a flaw is discovered in a design without needed three years of review, and 50 signatures, to allow it to happen.
It would be nice if the government would fund research into next gen reactors which don't have an abundance of fissile material and thus are incapable of a meltdown but those don't make weapons, so they will not fund it.
NO! Get the government out of it. There's enough private research in this but no one in the government seems willing to let people actually build something. The nuclear power industry has been at a standstill precisely because the government has been "funding research" for the past 40 years. We have enough research, we need to build now. Oh, and that research does include reactors that don't produce weapon grade material, or make long lived fission products (at least none that isn't fuel), and are immune to a meltdown. Enough researching, time to build something.
"The better first step would be to add a pollution tax."
We have those, they are called "taxes". Everything we do produces "pollution" (if we include CO2 as pollution) and everything is taxed. Do you mean just raising tax rates?
" The taxes should be used to help clean up the pollution and subsidize solutions for the poor (because they cannot afford the initial investment needed)."
We have those too. Lots of subsidies for lights, insulation, fuel efficient cars, and on and on.
At some point we need to recognize the diminishing returns on doing more. We've already done a lot so far, at some point we need to stop doing more and go into a "maintenance mode" and just keep what we got with minor tweaks here and there as economic, technological, and other factors change. I think we met that point of diminishing returns a long time ago.
That is we hit a wall of diminishing returns if we keep this NIMBY attitude on nuclear power. We could go a long way yet with nuclear power. Barring that though we've pretty much hit a wall.
If wind was cheaper then we should be able to do without wind subsidies. Every time the possibility of removing those subsidies is mentioned though the tree huggers scream. Wind power as it is now cannot survive without subsidies, subsidies from a coal and nuclear powered economy.
Smart grids and batteries won't save wind power either because they both cost money, add those and wind power isn't so cheap any more.
Oh, and nuclear has a smaller carbon footprint than wind power too. If the goal is to get cheap, carbon free (as "free" of carbon as wind anyway), reliable, and safe energy then nuclear is at the top of the list.
I'll believe the politicians are serious about a carbon free economy when I see a new nuclear power plant built in every state. Until then it's just a bunch of hot air.
Isn't it also supposed to have a health readout on a chest plate and/or armband? How else are people supposed to know that the air runs out in 24 minutes but there's 28 minutes before they land and it's safe to open the hatch?
why does it need to show a flag?
So they know where to mail the body once it's found floating in the ocean?
So they have some idea on what language the wearer speaks if they land far off target?
So they don't get shot/hanged as a spy if they land far off target? (Not that it'd save them universally but wearing a country identifier does conform to international laws on things like piracy, spies, and such.)
Because decades of seeing pictures of government funded astronauts wearing flags on their spacesuits people expect flags on spacesuits? In other words, marketing.
I remember someone saying something about the chain of command. Oh, I found it...
"You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with 'til ya understand who's in ruttin' command here."
If some large nation has the ability to confuse US Navy ship navigation for an advantage in a war then would they not want to test it before, you know, having their own navy sunk in an all out war?
If this is the action of a "lone wolf" that wants to sell this to such a powerful nation, to get an advantage in a war, then would they not have to demonstrate it to sell it?
This was something of a tactic used by the USA to remove all doubts of their military and technological capability, they'd show off once, then do it again shortly after. By doing it twice they proved the first wasn't just getting lucky. It also showed that they could do it again at essentially anytime they wished.
There is some speculation that the US Navy shooting down a satellite shortly after the Chinese did it was just a show for the Chinese. The US Navy claimed it was a necessary shoot down of a dead satellite in a decaying orbit that threatened to land in a populated area, which due to it's size and massive load of fuel could have threatened life and property. They did it only once though. That was then likely enough to deflate the Chinese ego.
Let's also remember that the collisions were with civilian vessels. It's quite likely the US Navy ships new precisely where they were at the time. The problem is more like the civilian ships didn't know which way was up and big ships in small spaces can run into each other. This doesn't explain it all since the US Navy ships still have means to detect and identify ships in the worst conditions. Something still had to go wrong on those US Navy ships. That was probably trusting the ships would be transmitting accurate identification and location by their collision avoidance beacons.
If someone sets up a false navigation beacon that messes with the civilian ships that shifts their navigation track over by a few thousand feet, but the US Navy ships are immune, now you have ships in a narrow shipping lane and not everyone is using the same map. It could be that if this is an attempt to crash US Navy ships then this has been attempted for a long time now, it's only recently that they got lucky or skilled enough to do any real damage.
No consequences? Theft and fraud costs them money. Catching these people will cost them money since now they have to provide company resources to this case if they want their stuff back. Covering these costs will affect profits. There are consequences here. Best they can do now is minimize the losses.
I have little doubt they had security people look over the code. It may be that they weren't experienced, didn't have enough time to look over everything before it went live, or managers overrode their recommendations. They will fix it or stockholders will bail.
Screwing up isn't always a crime. The punishment is having to clean up the mess left by the screw up.
You're free because you don't have anything anybody wants to risk their life over.
Fixed that for you. I have a Model 1911 I keep close, as well as a 20 gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot. Best estimates are that 2 out of 3 houses have guns in them around here.
I like how the gun control types like to correlate gun ownership with "gun deaths", as if getting killed with a gun is the only way to be murdered and all deaths in this manner is a crime. Self defense with a firearm is a "gun death" but not a crime. I did a study on gun ownership and crime, all crime. Guns prevent crime. Do the study yourself. It won't take long if you have some skills with a statistical analysis program or even just are good with Microsoft Excel. Use the FBI numbers, as that tracks crimes, not the Brady Campaign numbers, they track even self defense shootings as a "crime".