In the truly long term, neither are these. We can huddle around the fire (Sol) until it goes out or we can learn how to build fires ourselves. This really is a case of: if we don't use the energy, something will evolve to use it (or, in the case that nothing can, it will be re-radiated in lower and lower density until the Universe cools off). Living things use energy and evolve ways to consume it more effectively (if not necessarily more efficiently) than their competitors. If you want to argue for true sustainability, we ought to look at least as far ahead as getting conscious entities off this planet permanently, if not until the whole shebang is over.
In the grand scheme of things, is it more important to slowly use up the resources of the Earth and Sun, then fade out of existence altogether (does it matter which form of life does this, really?) or to use them as the building block to expand into the rest of the Universe (at which point you can leave Earth as your nature preserve)? The consumption of potential energy is the building block of life--the bottom line. You don't consume energy, you don't live.
Now, how long do you think we can mutually sustain a list of pet species you'd like to have around? 1000 years? 10,000? Until the Sun warms the Earth so much that nothing "living" as we know it can exist here? Maybe just leave it to them, to make sure that humans aren't the ones who evolve to consume all these resources. It sure doesn't sound like a sustainable solution if your solution is to live off (only) this one local fusion reactor until it runs out and humans/other life forms go extinct altogether.
TL;DR: If you want to "save the planet", invest in science, figure out how to mine the rest of the Universe, and get us off this rock. Otherwise, physics has exactly 1 conclusion for our scenario, and it doesn't end with you posting on Slashdot.
AC may have mocked this, but it is correct. Several instances were discovered at Oklo, in Gabon, Africa. I'm not really sure what this has to do with practical energy generation, however.
So, you'd rather that, instead of producing 5750 tons of waste per year for nuclear (let's assume that you haven't figured out what an LFTR is, and can't think about reprocessing here) per year, you'd rather use up our atmospheric oxygen to turn the coal into carbon dioxide at a far greater rate.
Complete combustion of 1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons) of carbon dioxide.
That means we're looking at dealing with 1 billion * 2.86 short tons = 2.86 billion short tons = 5,720,000,000,000 (or 5.72 trillion) pounds of CO2 per year. My calculator suggests that's around 497,000x the mass of the potential nuclear waste, not to mention more radioactive waste actually in the atmosphere. Do you really want to discuss which of these methods is contributing more radiation to the atmosphere and whose house all these byproducts are polluting? I'm pretty sure they don't usually entomb the resultant CO2 in concrete, even if half of (less than half, actually) fly ash winds up that way.
At these prices the value of the energy produced by the thorium is an average cubic meter of the Earth’s crust in a LFTR is worth (11000 to 17000)/(220) = 50 to 77 cubic meters of anthracite coal.
At this point, NIMBY is just mindless obstructionism. There is no scientific ground left to stand on, unless you happen to have an actual, implementable solution for long-term base power, and no, solar isn't cutting it. For that, you have toxic build and recycling processes, short life, low efficiency, the sort of thing that's okay on a small scale but hasn't shown real base-load promise due to the cost of storing energy en-masse for use during off-peak hours instead of throttling a nuclear reaction pulling energy from a very dense storage medium.
LFTR isn't just some pie-in-the-sky. It's a tried and tested reactor design, and we learned from our initial failures (metal embrittlement, evolution of uranium and plutionium), and we came out the other side with a new process for decommissioning. This is how science and engineering work, folks.
Minor quibble. FLOSS *is* copyright protected. The authors simply choose to allow everyone to copy freely. That's why we have licenses that specifically say this. But in no way does that change the existence of copyright, which comes into being at the birth of any sort of "document". It does not need to be registered or even stated anywhere. Under US law, the instant you create an original work, it's copyrighted, owned by you.
A simple google for "open source itunes sync" suggests that this is not merely uninformed, but flat out incorrect. Personally, I use SharePod. GtkPod also works, as does CopyTransManager, etc.. Now, the kicker is that *some* of those need internal components from iTunes--not a good solution--or a jailbroken iPhone with a replaced iPod.app--again a terrible solution. CopyTransManager appears to work without any hackery, but it's only free-as-in-beer, not FLOSS, and it's Windows only. For Linux? Well.. gtkpod support is falling behind.
This is what you get for using their walled garden (and I speak as someone whose SO owns at least 4 iDevices/Apple computers, ignoring the ones I've forgotten about due to getting dusty in a drawer). Me, I'm happy without an iDevice and I like VLC. Why? I like cheap brick dumbphones, despite having owned fancy smartphones with both iOS and Android in the past. You can't have your privacy *and* their walled garden at this point in time.
You and everyone else's pet feature. MPD is a real Unix Philosophy tool. It does one thing, does it well, and doesn't try to be Emacs. (Couldn't resist that last bit...)
First, I agree completely with your post. I'd just like to expand with a thought.
Perhaps it would be saner to allow each type of fauna/flora to develop their own legal system--one which is automatically going to be more appropriate for their own concerns--once they are capable of coming up with the concept on their own? In all social orders, you see these sorts of systems. Nowhere in there is the requirement for humans to understand them--these things are managed internally, and in a fashion that each flora/fauna see as appropriate. For humans to be offended is ridiculous.
As for the development of laws in human society regarding other flora/fauna, I see little point in regulating their behavior outside of measures to handle any specific and immediate threat to our well-being. In the rest of the animal kingdom (humans being animals too), this is usually handled by beating the snot out of the offender. As humans, we can make laws ensuring that problems are handled in a humane fashion. But why should we try to make a law about chimpanzees screwing out in the bush?
Corporate personhood is just a legal shorthand for talking about the collective rights of the individuals that make up the corporation.
It isn't the collective rights of the people who work for the corporation, it is the collective rights of the people who control the corporation.
Which is it? Make up your mind. Is it the people who make up the corporation (employees, shareholders, board members, investors in other forms, etc.) or is it some ever-shifting subset of it that you imagine in your head to redraw the boundaries of the argument? Grow up. I'm done feeding this troll.
Did you forget how to form a coherent logical argument rather than an unjustified attack? I see no justification in your post for WHY you said what you said just now. Grow up.
If they're exercising the collective rights of the people who work for that corporation, why can they lobby for some law X in the name of arbitrary employee Y without employee Y's consent, uncoerced by threat of being fired/shipped off/etc.? It very nearly parallel slave-owners using their slaves as an extra 3/5 of a vote.
Not quite. Perhaps they had influence, but, from the mouth of the horse itself: "Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory."
I've got real problems with that one. If it's so damn important to put something above the Constitution, make an amendment. Otherwise, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Otherwise, you've just defeated the point of having rule-by-law.
When three of the latest mass murders that happened in the US was due to people with mental illness. It is not statistically likely but it could become highly deadly given the failings previously.
This is a combination of several logical fallacies. Let's examine the given argument: Because attacks happened, and because the perpetrators were mentally ill, if we let a mentally ill person into the country, then there might be an attack.
First, correlation does not indicate causation. Simply because a person is mentally ill does not mean that an attack was perpetrated because of them being mentally ill. You would need further proof that this is the case, and it wasn't due to political or ideological motivation.
The cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy can be expressed as follows:
A occurs in correlation with B.
Therefore, A causes B.
Secondly, this is a fallacy of the single cause.
It can be logically reduced to: X occurred after Y. Therefore, Y caused X (although A,B,C...etc also caused X.)
Often after a tragedy it is asked, "What was the cause of this?" Such language implies that there is one cause, when instead there were probably a large number of contributing factors. However, having produced a list of several contributing factors, it may be worthwhile to look for the strongest of the factors, or a single cause underlying several of them. A need for simplification may be perceived in order to make the explanation of the tragedy operational, so that responsible authorities can be seen to have taken action.
This is also straight up cherry-picking. If it's not statistically likely that a mentally ill person will commit a terrorist act, then why would you base your argument around it?
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position. It is a kind of fallacy of selective attention, the most common example of which is the confirmation bias.
That barely skims the surface of the problems with that argument.
The right set of laws? What happened to that one, oh, I forget its name... The Con-something or other, the one that's supposed to be the supreme law of the land, bar none? A law that violates the Constitution is not a law.
I'd like to see what gave you the idea that the law was applied fairly to all, without respect to the amount of money they can pay for a legal team. Oh wait, the law isn't applied like that.
Really, which other shill modded this down, or are you using sockpuppet accounts? The US government has a long history of repeatedly violating its own laws when bureaucrats or internal agency representatives feel justified in doing it. The government IS the people it is made up of. They utilize their brains to make decisions. When the pressure is too much, they burn their own to save their asses. This is not the rule of law, this is the rule of "don't get caught".
A shitty reality? You're suggesting that the US government is strictly ruled by law, and THAT's its problem? I think you must have missed all the NSA leaks as of late.
Slashdot Mirror
In the truly long term, neither are these. We can huddle around the fire (Sol) until it goes out or we can learn how to build fires ourselves. This really is a case of: if we don't use the energy, something will evolve to use it (or, in the case that nothing can, it will be re-radiated in lower and lower density until the Universe cools off). Living things use energy and evolve ways to consume it more effectively (if not necessarily more efficiently) than their competitors. If you want to argue for true sustainability, we ought to look at least as far ahead as getting conscious entities off this planet permanently, if not until the whole shebang is over.
In the grand scheme of things, is it more important to slowly use up the resources of the Earth and Sun, then fade out of existence altogether (does it matter which form of life does this, really?) or to use them as the building block to expand into the rest of the Universe (at which point you can leave Earth as your nature preserve)? The consumption of potential energy is the building block of life--the bottom line. You don't consume energy, you don't live.
Now, how long do you think we can mutually sustain a list of pet species you'd like to have around? 1000 years? 10,000? Until the Sun warms the Earth so much that nothing "living" as we know it can exist here? Maybe just leave it to them, to make sure that humans aren't the ones who evolve to consume all these resources. It sure doesn't sound like a sustainable solution if your solution is to live off (only) this one local fusion reactor until it runs out and humans/other life forms go extinct altogether.
TL;DR: If you want to "save the planet", invest in science, figure out how to mine the rest of the Universe, and get us off this rock. Otherwise, physics has exactly 1 conclusion for our scenario, and it doesn't end with you posting on Slashdot.
AC may have mocked this, but it is correct. Several instances were discovered at Oklo, in Gabon, Africa. I'm not really sure what this has to do with practical energy generation, however.
I forgot my citation: the amount of CO2 from burning coal. And, despite that I hinted at it, in case someone wonders why the resultant pollutants from coal are more massive...
Also, s/plutionium/plutonium/.
Complete combustion of 1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons) of carbon dioxide.
That means we're looking at dealing with 1 billion * 2.86 short tons = 2.86 billion short tons = 5,720,000,000,000 (or 5.72 trillion) pounds of CO2 per year. My calculator suggests that's around 497,000x the mass of the potential nuclear waste, not to mention more radioactive waste actually in the atmosphere. Do you really want to discuss which of these methods is contributing more radiation to the atmosphere and whose house all these byproducts are polluting? I'm pretty sure they don't usually entomb the resultant CO2 in concrete, even if half of (less than half, actually) fly ash winds up that way.
The energy density of coal pales in comparison to thorium:
At these prices the value of the energy produced by the thorium is an average cubic meter of the Earth’s crust in a LFTR is worth (11000 to 17000)/(220) = 50 to 77 cubic meters of anthracite coal.
At this point, NIMBY is just mindless obstructionism. There is no scientific ground left to stand on, unless you happen to have an actual, implementable solution for long-term base power, and no, solar isn't cutting it. For that, you have toxic build and recycling processes, short life, low efficiency, the sort of thing that's okay on a small scale but hasn't shown real base-load promise due to the cost of storing energy en-masse for use during off-peak hours instead of throttling a nuclear reaction pulling energy from a very dense storage medium.
LFTR isn't just some pie-in-the-sky. It's a tried and tested reactor design, and we learned from our initial failures (metal embrittlement, evolution of uranium and plutionium), and we came out the other side with a new process for decommissioning. This is how science and engineering work, folks.
It really is easier if you start that way as a kid, but parenting is open season.
Yep, if you're any sort of endurance athlete, you're probably familiar with loading up on carbs before an event.
Minor quibble. FLOSS *is* copyright protected. The authors simply choose to allow everyone to copy freely. That's why we have licenses that specifically say this. But in no way does that change the existence of copyright, which comes into being at the birth of any sort of "document". It does not need to be registered or even stated anywhere. Under US law, the instant you create an original work, it's copyrighted, owned by you.
A simple google for "open source itunes sync" suggests that this is not merely uninformed, but flat out incorrect. Personally, I use SharePod. GtkPod also works, as does CopyTransManager, etc.. Now, the kicker is that *some* of those need internal components from iTunes--not a good solution--or a jailbroken iPhone with a replaced iPod.app--again a terrible solution. CopyTransManager appears to work without any hackery, but it's only free-as-in-beer, not FLOSS, and it's Windows only. For Linux? Well.. gtkpod support is falling behind.
This is what you get for using their walled garden (and I speak as someone whose SO owns at least 4 iDevices/Apple computers, ignoring the ones I've forgotten about due to getting dusty in a drawer). Me, I'm happy without an iDevice and I like VLC. Why? I like cheap brick dumbphones, despite having owned fancy smartphones with both iOS and Android in the past. You can't have your privacy *and* their walled garden at this point in time.
You and everyone else's pet feature. MPD is a real Unix Philosophy tool. It does one thing, does it well, and doesn't try to be Emacs. (Couldn't resist that last bit...)
+5 Insightful
First, I agree completely with your post. I'd just like to expand with a thought.
Perhaps it would be saner to allow each type of fauna/flora to develop their own legal system--one which is automatically going to be more appropriate for their own concerns--once they are capable of coming up with the concept on their own? In all social orders, you see these sorts of systems. Nowhere in there is the requirement for humans to understand them--these things are managed internally, and in a fashion that each flora/fauna see as appropriate. For humans to be offended is ridiculous.
As for the development of laws in human society regarding other flora/fauna, I see little point in regulating their behavior outside of measures to handle any specific and immediate threat to our well-being. In the rest of the animal kingdom (humans being animals too), this is usually handled by beating the snot out of the offender. As humans, we can make laws ensuring that problems are handled in a humane fashion. But why should we try to make a law about chimpanzees screwing out in the bush?
We don't care about their ability to vote as much as their ability to purchase votes.
Corporate personhood is just a legal shorthand for talking about the collective rights of the individuals that make up the corporation.
It isn't the collective rights of the people who work for the corporation, it is the collective rights of the people who control the corporation.
Which is it? Make up your mind. Is it the people who make up the corporation (employees, shareholders, board members, investors in other forms, etc.) or is it some ever-shifting subset of it that you imagine in your head to redraw the boundaries of the argument? Grow up. I'm done feeding this troll.
Did you forget how to form a coherent logical argument rather than an unjustified attack? I see no justification in your post for WHY you said what you said just now. Grow up.
That was a heck of a rebuttal. I guess it's hopeless for you.
If they're exercising the collective rights of the people who work for that corporation, why can they lobby for some law X in the name of arbitrary employee Y without employee Y's consent, uncoerced by threat of being fired/shipped off/etc.? It very nearly parallel slave-owners using their slaves as an extra 3/5 of a vote.
Not quite. Perhaps they had influence, but, from the mouth of the horse itself: "Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory."
over the constitution
I've got real problems with that one. If it's so damn important to put something above the Constitution, make an amendment. Otherwise, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Otherwise, you've just defeated the point of having rule-by-law.
When three of the latest mass murders that happened in the US was due to people with mental illness. It is not statistically likely but it could become highly deadly given the failings previously.
This is a combination of several logical fallacies. Let's examine the given argument: Because attacks happened, and because the perpetrators were mentally ill, if we let a mentally ill person into the country, then there might be an attack.
First, correlation does not indicate causation. Simply because a person is mentally ill does not mean that an attack was perpetrated because of them being mentally ill. You would need further proof that this is the case, and it wasn't due to political or ideological motivation.
The cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy can be expressed as follows:
A occurs in correlation with B.
Therefore, A causes B.
Secondly, this is a fallacy of the single cause.
It can be logically reduced to: X occurred after Y. Therefore, Y caused X (although A,B,C...etc also caused X.)
Often after a tragedy it is asked, "What was the cause of this?" Such language implies that there is one cause, when instead there were probably a large number of contributing factors. However, having produced a list of several contributing factors, it may be worthwhile to look for the strongest of the factors, or a single cause underlying several of them. A need for simplification may be perceived in order to make the explanation of the tragedy operational, so that responsible authorities can be seen to have taken action.
This is also straight up cherry-picking. If it's not statistically likely that a mentally ill person will commit a terrorist act, then why would you base your argument around it?
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position. It is a kind of fallacy of selective attention, the most common example of which is the confirmation bias.
That barely skims the surface of the problems with that argument.
The right set of laws? What happened to that one, oh, I forget its name... The Con-something or other, the one that's supposed to be the supreme law of the land, bar none? A law that violates the Constitution is not a law.
I'd like to see what gave you the idea that the law was applied fairly to all, without respect to the amount of money they can pay for a legal team. Oh wait, the law isn't applied like that.
Really, which other shill modded this down, or are you using sockpuppet accounts? The US government has a long history of repeatedly violating its own laws when bureaucrats or internal agency representatives feel justified in doing it. The government IS the people it is made up of. They utilize their brains to make decisions. When the pressure is too much, they burn their own to save their asses. This is not the rule of law, this is the rule of "don't get caught".
Man, I can't believe I replied to obvious troll. It's circletimessquare.... my bad for feeding the trolls.
A shitty reality? You're suggesting that the US government is strictly ruled by law, and THAT's its problem? I think you must have missed all the NSA leaks as of late.