And it's covered in tiny little scratches even though it's only ever lived in my key-less, coin-less pocket...
Have you tried toothpaste? Put a little on it and rub with your finger (not a toothbrush, the bristles itself will scratch it.) Then get a holder for it.
My 11 year old son and 12 year old nephew still talk about that commercial. (They don't buy Budweiser, admittedly...)
It's probably a poor ad in what it's trying to do, however, in that it doesn't really identify the brand that clearly. It's the "magic fridge" ad, not the "Bud fridge" ad.
I consider Mac OS X a handy platform for working on FOSS applications, and with Darwine, et al the Intel ones should be able to run just about any program out there, so I can use it for entertainment too.
I'd say that thousands upon thousands (maybe millions?) of acres strip mined is a huge environmental cost even before you count the dollar cost of doing that.
Agreed, I was only objecting to particular claims regarding coal plants and nuclear byproducts. From other posts of mine it should be obvious when it comes to energy production, I'd be making plenty of wind.:-)
But that's just a design "feature" - nuclear plants on naval vessels handle power transients quite nicely, thank you.
But is there any efficiency gained in doing so -- the fuel and/or container lasting longer as a result -- or is it just necessary because you don't want the Karl Vinson doing 30 knots in port?
that 0.5% is still considerably greater than just about any other man-made source of radiation in the world.
But it's so dispersed it doesn't really matter, according to one of my earlier links. No doubt there's far more radiation in the ocean than in all the power plants in the world, but we don't put on NBC suits to go for a swim.
Why wouldn't nuclear plants be able to have an on-demand control system?
Technically, no reason; certainly you can remove the fuel rods of a standard reactor. It was more the issue of whether there was any point in doing so, i.e. if the inefficiencies from stopping and starting would be countered by reduced fuel use, and whether it could be done fast enough to respond to fluctuations in more variable methods of power production such as wind.
At any rate, neither coal or nuclear would operate at peak efficency at a throttled rate... Nor does an internal combustion operate at peak efficiency unless it's at WOT.
But hybrids work this way, turning on and off the ICE as needed to recharge the battery.
Yup. I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that Wikipedia labels it wrongly.
You take the 24 tons of nuclear waste produced by a nuclear plant
"In the half century of the nuclear age, the U.S. has accumulated some 30,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods from power reactors" - Sci Am, 1996
Assuming Sci Am is right, I question your 24 tons number; I don't think we've decomissioned > 1,000 nuclear plants, and that's just counting fuel rods.
Which is more dangerous at that point?
Apparently the nuke waste, since fly ash is used in concrete construction.
I'll tell you what, we get some new nuclear plants up, multiples of the same type so we can get some economy of scale going
We already get 15% of our grid power from nukes. Why do you need more plants for this comparison? Tell you what, how about we remove Price-Anderson protection from nuke plants and require them to pay for their own waste storage (and insurance of same), and then do a comparison?
Given that wind power is growing at 25-35% per year, however, it looks like we'll get a good impression of how practical it is in the not-too-distant future anyway.
Perhaps one of the new cheap solar techs we hear mentioned now and again will become practical, also. Since sunshine and AC load correlate pretty highly, powering one's AC from such a system takes care of the intermittent power production issue.
I was talking in a sense of 'we magically pull all the uranium out of the coal/ash without significant effort or cost'.
Typical uranium concentration in coal is 1-4 ppm, so, let's say, 2.5 tons of uranium per million tons of coal. That's 400,000:1, which overwhelms even the 16,000:1 ratio you mention. Moreover, less than 1% of the uranium in coal is U-235; it's unclear whether your numbers are for pure U-235 or for the 4% concentration they mention later. So even magic wouldn't make it pay off.
Moreover, as for radioactive material, with the coal plant, that's it. There's no need for the whole decommisioning process with lots of radioactive material, because the plant itself and the fly ash isn't particularly radioactive. Same source: "One extreme calculation that assumed high proportions of fly-ash-rich concrete in a residence suggested a dose enhancement, compared to normal concrete, of 3 percent of the natural environmental radiation."
And before all you pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-tidal, pro-{insert alternative energy system here} get on my case
Ya gotta have a better argument than that.
On-demand plants like coal-fired ones can help smooth out the peaks and valleys. (I'll admit ignorance on whether any current nuke plants can operate in an on-demand mode and would have any benefit -- such as the fuel lasting longer -- in doing so.) And there are plenty of systems for storing and releasing power, batteries are by no means the only ones. Moreover, lots of industries are perfectly capable of adjusting their output as grid power waxes and wanes, and thus the price falls and rises. Large numbers of windmills in the sparsely populated Midwest could produce a good portion of our power needs, and are nearing cost-effectiveness, even without subsidies like Price-Anderson and the money spent on Yucca Mountain.
While coal burning indeed doesn't produce radiactivity like nuclear power does, there's actually so much radioactive material in it such as uranium that we'd get more power from refining it for the radioactives and sticking it in a reactor than burning it.
No we wouldn't, otherwise we'd be refining it from fly ash. As the ORNL article says, 99.5% of the fly ash produced by burning coal is retained by precipitators, not sent into the air, and thus could be processed and the radioactive material extracted after burning the coal. (Heck, it would be more concentrated that way.) Instead, Canada and Australia are the big uranium producers.
I think a large part of the author's complaint is that in the end, nobody *enjoys* playing, they just fall into a compulsion to do so.
Until a little over a week ago, I was playing a lot of Neopets, trying to get to a particular amount of "cash" to earn a particular reward. I told myself I was going to stop at that point. I can't say that I particularly enjoyed playing, it just became a compulsion to get to that objective.
Then someone used a cookie grabber to get control of my account, and looted 90% of my in-game wealth. I was angry with the hacker, angry with the Neopets guys for not restoring my lost items (since it's just numbers on the computer, etc.) But you know what? I stopped trying to earn neopoints, and don't miss it at all. It was a compulsion, not entertainment, and nobody on the planet particularly cares whether or not I have the Adam Avatar.
So, do you really enjoy playing WoW, or are you just obsessively playing to reach that next level? Is it as fun as, say, Warcraft 2 against a decent opponent?
Coffee tables are for setting coffee, books, and maybe a board game on.
Seems like this is exactly what they're doing; putting a virtual board game on the coffee table. I'd agree that a full-size table would be better for most gaming (perhaps with little hand-held tablets each for secret data), but that's a minor detail. With LCD and plasma panels, you mount a nice large one under a protective sheet of glass or Lexan, and a quick game of Wiz-War takes no time to set up. You could even use head-tracking to give each person a flying perspective over a 3-D environment during their turn.
Sounds like flac is the best lossless archive standard, then (or simultaneously) to mp3 for compact portability. iTunes won't rip to flac, nor will cdparanoia from what I can see? What will, and will get the tags as well as iTunes et al? Do any support flac/mp3 creation in one pass? I need a Mac or Windows app, although others may care about Linux solutions.
Strangely enough, my Toyota Previa minivan fits 4'x8' sheets inside it with the doors closed if you remove the middle seats and fold the rear seats to the side. It's almost an enclosed pickup.
For me, the best philosophy for life is still the Christian moral: Love God and not the material world, and secondly, love your fellow human beings, and do not judge.
Does that mean you don't believe in having a criminal justice system?
To live our lives in defense of the truth, we must be able and willing to judge the morality of acts. But the judgment of individuals must always be left to God. He alone knows the hearts and minds of us all. He alone knows how to judge how culpable we are for any of our actions. (Bizarre. Me quoting http://www.afterabortion.info/sermon1.html...)
So we can still judge acts of gluttony and wastefulness -- buying an H2 for commuting, for example, or because it gives you a bizarre feeling of power over drivers of "lesser" automobiles. Also remember that large SUVs can trigger an arms race, as other drivers, not wishing to feel intimidated, themselves buy taller, larger vehicles.
Part of the problem, though, is that many of us would love to have a subcompact for our commute, and a larger vehicle only for long trips or trips to the hardware store, but in the absence of modular vehicles, that requires multiple vehicles -- and that's more expensive and probably just as polluting as using a single, larger vehicle for all our driving.
Unfortunately, despite all best efforts to dissuade the novices, folks still tend to run as root or admin on their systems.
That's true on Windows, because it's a PITA otherwise. There are plenty of apps that won't run except as admin, or unless you've somehow fixed some set of permissions that is not identified when you try (and fail) to run the app.
I try to run not as admin on Windows. I installed an app called, I believe, FileTweak recently. Now every time I try to get a file's properties, I get a half-dozen alerts about not having the proper permissions before the properties pane. Woo hoo!
Macs are much more usable without being admin, which is one reason I'm about to get an iMac.
Personally I'm going to protest by buying a bunch of used CD's and publically ripping them today in starbucks with a sign taped to my laptop lid saying "I'm violating Copyrights right now!"
Why would you say that? An accurate sign would be "I'm exercising my fair use rights, and the RIAA can go suck eggs."
Slashdot Mirror
And it's covered in tiny little scratches even though it's only ever lived in my key-less, coin-less pocket...
Have you tried toothpaste? Put a little on it and rub with your finger (not a toothbrush, the bristles itself will scratch it.) Then get a holder for it.
There's a picture floating around of a guy who tried that. I can't remember the URL, goat-something-or-other I think.
I dunno, how exactly would you make 65,000 pieces of paper disappear without anyone noticing?
Perhaps we should vote on stone tablets or bricks to make that especially hard?
My 11 year old son and 12 year old nephew still talk about that commercial. (They don't buy Budweiser, admittedly...)
It's probably a poor ad in what it's trying to do, however, in that it doesn't really identify the brand that clearly. It's the "magic fridge" ad, not the "Bud fridge" ad.
I consider Mac OS X a handy platform for working on FOSS applications, and with Darwine, et al the Intel ones should be able to run just about any program out there, so I can use it for entertainment too.
So are you for the Iranians having nuclear power?
I'd say that thousands upon thousands (maybe millions?) of acres strip mined is a huge environmental cost even before you count the dollar cost of doing that.
:-)
Agreed, I was only objecting to particular claims regarding coal plants and nuclear byproducts. From other posts of mine it should be obvious when it comes to energy production, I'd be making plenty of wind.
But that's just a design "feature" - nuclear plants on naval vessels handle power transients quite nicely, thank you.
But is there any efficiency gained in doing so -- the fuel and/or container lasting longer as a result -- or is it just necessary because you don't want the Karl Vinson doing 30 knots in port?
that 0.5% is still considerably greater than just about any other man-made source of radiation in the world.
But it's so dispersed it doesn't really matter, according to one of my earlier links. No doubt there's far more radiation in the ocean than in all the power plants in the world, but we don't put on NBC suits to go for a swim.
Why wouldn't nuclear plants be able to have an on-demand control system?
Technically, no reason; certainly you can remove the fuel rods of a standard reactor. It was more the issue of whether there was any point in doing so, i.e. if the inefficiencies from stopping and starting would be countered by reduced fuel use, and whether it could be done fast enough to respond to fluctuations in more variable methods of power production such as wind.
At any rate, neither coal or nuclear would operate at peak efficency at a throttled rate... Nor does an internal combustion operate at peak efficiency unless it's at WOT.
But hybrids work this way, turning on and off the ICE as needed to recharge the battery.
Ah, it's not waste, it's POLLUTION.
Yup. I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that Wikipedia labels it wrongly.
You take the 24 tons of nuclear waste produced by a nuclear plant
"In the half century of the nuclear age, the U.S. has accumulated some 30,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods from power reactors" - Sci Am, 1996
Assuming Sci Am is right, I question your 24 tons number; I don't think we've decomissioned > 1,000 nuclear plants, and that's just counting fuel rods.
Which is more dangerous at that point?
Apparently the nuke waste, since fly ash is used in concrete construction.
I'll tell you what, we get some new nuclear plants up, multiples of the same type so we can get some economy of scale going
We already get 15% of our grid power from nukes. Why do you need more plants for this comparison? Tell you what, how about we remove Price-Anderson protection from nuke plants and require them to pay for their own waste storage (and insurance of same), and then do a comparison?
Given that wind power is growing at 25-35% per year, however, it looks like we'll get a good impression of how practical it is in the not-too-distant future anyway.
Perhaps one of the new cheap solar techs we hear mentioned now and again will become practical, also. Since sunshine and AC load correlate pretty highly, powering one's AC from such a system takes care of the intermittent power production issue.
I was talking in a sense of 'we magically pull all the uranium out of the coal/ash without significant effort or cost'.
Typical uranium concentration in coal is 1-4 ppm, so, let's say, 2.5 tons of uranium per million tons of coal. That's 400,000:1, which overwhelms even the 16,000:1 ratio you mention. Moreover, less than 1% of the uranium in coal is U-235; it's unclear whether your numbers are for pure U-235 or for the 4% concentration they mention later. So even magic wouldn't make it pay off.
Most coal fields exhibit a substantial degree of natural radioactivity, and when burned in a power plant it goes right up the stack
No it doesn't, 99.5% of the thorium and uranium gets caught by the fly ash precipitators. Radon gas is released, but then wikipedia gets stupid: if it's released, it's not nuclear waste. The proper claim is that, while operating as designed, coal plants will release more radioactivity than nuke plants. "[...] the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern [coal-fired] power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment."
Moreover, as for radioactive material, with the coal plant, that's it. There's no need for the whole decommisioning process with lots of radioactive material, because the plant itself and the fly ash isn't particularly radioactive. Same source: "One extreme calculation that assumed high proportions of fly-ash-rich concrete in a residence suggested a dose enhancement, compared to normal concrete, of 3 percent of the natural environmental radiation."
And before all you pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-tidal, pro-{insert alternative energy system here} get on my case
Ya gotta have a better argument than that.
On-demand plants like coal-fired ones can help smooth out the peaks and valleys. (I'll admit ignorance on whether any current nuke plants can operate in an on-demand mode and would have any benefit -- such as the fuel lasting longer -- in doing so.) And there are plenty of systems for storing and releasing power, batteries are by no means the only ones. Moreover, lots of industries are perfectly capable of adjusting their output as grid power waxes and wanes, and thus the price falls and rises. Large numbers of windmills in the sparsely populated Midwest could produce a good portion of our power needs, and are nearing cost-effectiveness, even without subsidies like Price-Anderson and the money spent on Yucca Mountain.
While coal burning indeed doesn't produce radiactivity like nuclear power does, there's actually so much radioactive material in it such as uranium that we'd get more power from refining it for the radioactives and sticking it in a reactor than burning it.
No we wouldn't, otherwise we'd be refining it from fly ash. As the ORNL article says, 99.5% of the fly ash produced by burning coal is retained by precipitators, not sent into the air, and thus could be processed and the radioactive material extracted after burning the coal. (Heck, it would be more concentrated that way.) Instead, Canada and Australia are the big uranium producers.
Unless you want to go to brown alert...
Really? Do programmers make the same wage as Walmart workers? Sheesh, maybe I should switch to being a greeter...
Besides, you spend two hours writing that program, and the afternoon reading slashdot.
I think a large part of the author's complaint is that in the end, nobody *enjoys* playing, they just fall into a compulsion to do so.
Until a little over a week ago, I was playing a lot of Neopets, trying to get to a particular amount of "cash" to earn a particular reward. I told myself I was going to stop at that point. I can't say that I particularly enjoyed playing, it just became a compulsion to get to that objective.
Then someone used a cookie grabber to get control of my account, and looted 90% of my in-game wealth. I was angry with the hacker, angry with the Neopets guys for not restoring my lost items (since it's just numbers on the computer, etc.) But you know what? I stopped trying to earn neopoints, and don't miss it at all. It was a compulsion, not entertainment, and nobody on the planet particularly cares whether or not I have the Adam Avatar.
So, do you really enjoy playing WoW, or are you just obsessively playing to reach that next level? Is it as fun as, say, Warcraft 2 against a decent opponent?
Coffee tables are for setting coffee, books, and maybe a board game on.
Seems like this is exactly what they're doing; putting a virtual board game on the coffee table. I'd agree that a full-size table would be better for most gaming (perhaps with little hand-held tablets each for secret data), but that's a minor detail. With LCD and plasma panels, you mount a nice large one under a protective sheet of glass or Lexan, and a quick game of Wiz-War takes no time to set up. You could even use head-tracking to give each person a flying perspective over a 3-D environment during their turn.
On the plus side, he shouldn't have to worry about his storage media being unreadable any time soon. No CD rot for him!
Well, I'm quite sure they wouldn't like us /.ers. Unshaven, not showered for weeks...
Sounds like we'd taste almost exactly like evolving humans then. Except some of us have quite a lot of well-marbled meat on us...
At the moment, it's: divorce, n: A change of wife.
Wouldn't "A wife-changing experience" have more zing?
Sounds like flac is the best lossless archive standard, then (or simultaneously) to mp3 for compact portability. iTunes won't rip to flac, nor will cdparanoia from what I can see? What will, and will get the tags as well as iTunes et al? Do any support flac/mp3 creation in one pass? I need a Mac or Windows app, although others may care about Linux solutions.
Strangely enough, my Toyota Previa minivan fits 4'x8' sheets inside it with the doors closed if you remove the middle seats and fold the rear seats to the side. It's almost an enclosed pickup.
For me, the best philosophy for life is still the Christian moral: Love God and not the material world, and secondly, love your fellow human beings, and do not judge.
...)
Does that mean you don't believe in having a criminal justice system?
To live our lives in defense of the truth, we must be able and willing to judge the morality of acts. But the judgment of individuals must always be left to God. He alone knows the hearts and minds of us all. He alone knows how to judge how culpable we are for any of our actions. (Bizarre. Me quoting http://www.afterabortion.info/sermon1.html
So we can still judge acts of gluttony and wastefulness -- buying an H2 for commuting, for example, or because it gives you a bizarre feeling of power over drivers of "lesser" automobiles. Also remember that large SUVs can trigger an arms race, as other drivers, not wishing to feel intimidated, themselves buy taller, larger vehicles.
Part of the problem, though, is that many of us would love to have a subcompact for our commute, and a larger vehicle only for long trips or trips to the hardware store, but in the absence of modular vehicles, that requires multiple vehicles -- and that's more expensive and probably just as polluting as using a single, larger vehicle for all our driving.
Unfortunately, despite all best efforts to dissuade the novices, folks still tend to run as root or admin on their systems.
That's true on Windows, because it's a PITA otherwise. There are plenty of apps that won't run except as admin, or unless you've somehow fixed some set of permissions that is not identified when you try (and fail) to run the app.
I try to run not as admin on Windows. I installed an app called, I believe, FileTweak recently. Now every time I try to get a file's properties, I get a half-dozen alerts about not having the proper permissions before the properties pane. Woo hoo!
Macs are much more usable without being admin, which is one reason I'm about to get an iMac.
If you want to wean the country from oil - the car solution is a better step in that direction.
How about a CNG Civic then?
* This offer valid only in California.
Personally I'm going to protest by buying a bunch of used CD's and publically ripping them today in starbucks with a sign taped to my laptop lid saying "I'm violating Copyrights right now!"
Why would you say that? An accurate sign would be "I'm exercising my fair use rights, and the RIAA can go suck eggs."