It's an experimental, theoretical power source. A good candidate for research dollars but definitely not ready even for a prototype plant. It also doesn't speak well for HDR that when an experimental plant was built large earthquakes immidiately started after water injection began.
These are the most recent figures I could dig up. 3GW * (364*24*60*60)secs / (60*60)hours = 26000 GWh. This is larger than the IEA's figure of 500GWh for solar, though they might have made a huge increase to solar output since 2004.
But it does put it into perspective; even 26000 GWh is about half of the amount of energy they import from nuclear countries like France and Denmark, and about 1/7th of the energy they make from nuclear.
This is a country where everyone is strongly opposed to nuclear and pro-renewables, and they still get 1/3rd of their energy from nuclear, and only 1/20th of their power from renewable sources (the majority of which is hydroelectric). And because they're surrounded by nuclear countries as they use less and less nuclear at home they're having to use more and more nuclear from other countries, which seems like a political move than a practical anti-nuclear move.
It comes down to this:
- a roof has a large surface area
- sun ain't going to burn out any time soon
- solar panels can't be made into bombs
I don't understand why we are still arguing about this. Well maybe you should find out why before posting then. Do you really think solar is a viable option but we're not considering it just because we don't want to make our roofs look ugly? There's a reason no-one is using solar power on a large scale.
sun ain't going to burn out any time soon Nuclear fuel isn't going to run out any time soon either.
solar panels can't be made into bombs You really think nuclear power plants are needed for governments to create bombs? Japan has the largest nuclear plant in the world, but is strongly opposed to nuclear weapons. The number of nukes has decreased massively since the Cold War, so if your logic goes more plants = more bombs = bad the data completely contradicts you.
Most types of reactors aren't useful for creating nuclear weapons; reactor grade fuel doesn't have to be enriched as much as a weapon grade fuel, because you don't want reactor fuel to be critical. Conveniently it's much harder to enrich uranium to weapons grade nuclear fuel than reactor grade fuel.
Fuck nuclear. Oh, yeah, great "all we have to worry about is this extremely toxic waste... but that's not a problem because all we have to do is store it safely! it'll never get into the water supply! we'll always have room to store it! people will never make bombs out of it. there'll never be another hiroshima/nagasaki/chernobyl" Yeah, that's pretty much how the argument goes.. Though there's no need to mention hiroshima and nagasaki because nuclear power has nothing to do with it.
Seriously, has the world gone stupid or something? Ok, MORE stupid. How on earth can you people convince yourself that nuclear waste is acceptable? What is wrong with you? You really think you've seen the light and that all the policy makers and scientists in the world just haven't heard of solar power? They'll slap their foreheads after reading your post and say "Wow ddoctor, why didn't I think of solar?!"
Waste arguments aside... why the hell are we, as a civilization, pursuing nuclear technology, given nuclear annihilation is probably the #1 most likely reason we will become extinct? Because an energy crisis would cause huge conflict, possibly including nuclear war (oh what an irony that would be). I don't think the effects of global warming would decrease political tensions either.
Most of all it's because we don't have a choice. Fossil fuels are running out and causing problems anyway. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, gerbils running on wheels, etc, won't scale (unless a huge breakthrough in efficiency is made). Hydroelectric power sources are limited, and can have huge environmental impact.
The main issue I have with the way its handled here, is that we in WA get all of the waste from, I think, 11 states, and we have the feds refusing to give us any assistance to clean up the mess we have. That being said the treat is more of a long term thyroid cancer risk than anything else, and potassium iodide does a pretty good job of keeping that at manageable levels. Some assistance would be good, but I have no problems with them storing their nuclear waste here in WA. Let the world store it too, for a fair price; we have so much stable, dry, unused, inaccessible land available. It's the moral thing to do, in my opinion.
I wouldn't worry about it too much though: We may be a geographically and politically stable, dry, empty country with expertise and large reserves of uranium, but the misinformed Australian public have still voted in a government that prefers experimental clean coal (ready in ~20 years) over nuclear power.
As the rest of the world starts to come to its senses Australia, perhaps the country most suitable for nuclear power in the entire world, is abandoning nuclear power.
Thorium is nice for India, which happens to have most of the world's thorium. For the rest of us burning spent nuclear "waste" would be a better idea.
Also thousands of years is a very conservative estimate, I've heard estimates range from tens of thousands of years to billions of years. How many "only 40 more years now" will that give the fusion team?
Also and more importantly, I believe that the leaders of that party need to have a candidate who will allow the many crimes of the last 7 years to go unpunished, so they need a person they already own. (that's also why McCain and Huckabee don't have many 'big' endorsements or money, btw).
McCain? If anything he is likely to let them go unpunished. He pretended that having to wear a flak jacket and be escorted by tanks and helicopters to grocery shopping is A-OK. Didn't he cave on torture ("allowing a 'just following orders' defense"), on habeas corpus, and on illegal detentions? Sad to see a good man fall. You should watch BBC's Why Democracy Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary on allegations of torture in US terrorist interrogation prisons. It repeatedly showed McCain arguing against the use of torture, and holding the military to account during hearings (it's not a pro-McCain documentary though, McCain was only mentioned a few times). They used it to make the point that if McCain, who was a Vietnam POW, doesn't think torture works he probably knows best.
That's a nice idea, but unfortunately contradicted by reality. We are the subjects of a plutocracy, our government is wholly owned by corporations, and the constitution gets little more than lip service these days. [Citation needed]
The numbers flash on the screen for 210ms, and are then replaced by white blocks. The chimps and humans then have to click on each of the numbers in order.
210ms isn't enough time to read the numbers, so it's really all about having a photographic memory. Chimps can memorize the numbers in a smaller amount of time than we can because they can take a better "snapshot" of what they're seeing more quickly.
What I don't understand is why the researchers talk about intelligence. It seems like if you were less intelligent it would be better to be able to quickly memorize what you've just seen so you have more time to think about it. Maybe they need a photographic memory because they need more time to think about what they're seeing, because they're less intelligent?
(Note: I'm not saying this because I don't like the idea of chimps being more intelligent humans, I just don't agree with the interpretation. Interesting experiment though.)
Based on CIA intel gathered from mailing list posts we believe the HQ is located in a place only referred to as "The Basement". The actual location of The Basement is sketchy, but we believe it's somewhere in the oil-rich fields of south-east Iran.
These are the three problems with dinosaur cloning:
Find a dinosaur DNA, enough of it to complete the dinosaur's genome
Make sure the dinosaur DNA isn't fragmented, which it almost certainly will be after so long. Or piece it all back together somehow.
You can't take a cell from a modern animal, stick dinosaur DNA inside it and turn it into a dino-cell. Even with a full dinosaur genome you can't clone a dinosaur without a dinosaur cell. It's the chicken and egg problem on a microscopic scale.
Even if we could clone them we've still got other problems to deal with:
The hard-line Christians question the ethics of cloning and the existence of dinosaurs, so how well would dinosaur cloning research go down?
Not letting them escape. Here in Australia we're having enough problems dealing with cane toads, can you imagine having to deal with velociraptors?
Trying to tell them that everything they ever knew and loved is gone. They wouldn't know about the Soviet collapse or the World Wars, or that these days most large animals grow their children inside of them, how would they deal with that shock? Is it ethical? These dinosaurs have never even seen anything with hair before, how would they cope?
Freenode is also a good place to get help with various problems, and you do get a sense of community in most channels.
Back on topic; I already knew about this, and don't see what the big deal is. I often run into chat logs while googling, sometimes they have useful info. Does anyone really consider a public IRC channel to be a private place?
A lot of the things I've said on/. since 2005 I would probably cringe if I reread it, but if you don't want it to be public don't say it in public.
All the replies questioning my post haven't read the article, which lays it out unambiguously.. How can you debate something which is stated crystal clear in the article?! It probably would have been quicker to read the article than write that reply.
RTFA: They are deploying their Perl on Rails app so that they can have more dynamic content, which they couldn't have before because they're limited to static files and perl scripts. It's basically a hack that allows them to keep their Perl & flat file setup, while allowing dynamic content.
What I'm wondering is why they don't just use an existing framework and scrap whatever restrictions are keeping them using Perl and flat files.
From TFA:
Like most organisations the BBC has its own technical ecosystem; the BBC's is pretty much restricted to Perl and static files. This means that the vast majority of the BBC's website is statically published - in other words HTML is created internally and FTP'ed to the web servers.
And a couple of implication, including an effective hard limit on the number of files you can save in a single directory (many older, but still commonly used, filesystems just scan through every file in a directory to find a particular filename so performance rapidly degrades with thousands, or tens of thousands, of files in one directory), the inherent complexity of keeping the links between pages up to date and valid and, the sheer number of static files that would need to be generate to deliver the sort of aggregation pages we wanted to create when we launched/programmes; let alone our plans for/music and personalisation. I really think the BBC is running without using a database, I wouldn't have believed it either but it's right there straight from the horse's mouth.
Nice sig, BTW.:-) Ta (but you forgot the (PBUH) after the smiley face, you insensitive clod)
Sounds to me like the BBC are using flat files and no database! They're talking about having tens of thousands of files in a directory, and having an archive of data on all shows the BBC is showing, but no mention of using anything other than flat files!
I seriously doubt they have very much Perl code around; there's not much dynamic content on BBC. I really can't imagine what their circumstances would have to be for it to be a sane option to rewrite Ruby on Rails in Perl
Why not make a meaningful comparison, like $ subsidy per watt?
Both nuclear and solar need subsidies at present because coal is dirt cheap. Nuclear has also almost certainly received more investment and subsidies than solar.
The big difference though is that nuclear actually makes up a large part of the world's power production, and is actually a realistic way to meet the world's growing power demands. Barring a miracle world-changing invention solar just can't.
If you want your tax dollars (in subsidies) to fight climate change then you'll get much better bang for your buck with nuclear.
Well I can see it was also modded insightful and redundant, which makes me think that those modding it funny think that it's funny as a joke about how the research was bought. I don't see how it can be a joke without thinking the research was bought.
I think you mean, 40 fewer cars = 1 more bus driver Everyone take the bus! Now there's a realistic solution to the energy problem.
Maybe, I don't know the ratio, but going with PV/windpower just to make more jobs than nuclear isn't good to me. I love how anti-nuclear guys say "nuclear power is expensive", but then say "wind power will create hundreds of thousands of jobs". "Nuclear power is expensive, but paying joggers to run on a treadmill which powers a turbine will create millions of jobs!"
No but I don't think he was joking.. I think he's making a comment about how the research was bought, not a joke about how... Well I just don't see any way that it can be taken as a joke.
What?! I haven't seen anything about these users running a beta boot loader hacked to prevent it expiring, it only seems to be related to Boot Camp.
Why is the OS an issue? Well on non-Apple PCs booting into other OSes is taken for granted, and isn't expected to affect OS updates. Apparently on Macs booting into other OSes is an amazing new innovation called "Boot Camp", and an update to an OS causes the ability to dual boot to break, and requires you to reformat your entire hard disk.
Can you imagine if a Windows update made your computer unable to boot if you had it set up to dual-boot into Linux? Why do people rush to the defense of Apple when they completely fuck up and make a mockery of their cheesy "it just works" phrase?
Well Microsoft does have.NET Compact Framework, which may not allow really easy portability from.NET apps, but still fairly easy, and it does include everything such as SQL Servers, GUIs, etc.
The PRNG is reseeded for each new process. This means that the vulnerability where you break the PRNG is only good for the process you exploited. Once the process is closed or restarted you're no longer in.
As the GP said this is a fuss over nothing. It's one of those vulnerabilities where you have to think real hard to imagine a way it could be used maliciously. (Though I agree that MS should make proprietary crypto algorithms open to public scrutiny.)
Quite frankly, up until this point, everything about stem cells was about ethics. That is what makes this story so humongous.
The annoying thing is that they're still trying to act like this is about ethics, like this is some kind of victory. We're seeing obnoxious comments from "pro-life" groups about how "Finally the scientists are seeing the light and having some common sense", as if they couldn't take the guilt any more.
But (taken from the article above):
Prof Wilmut [the guy who cloned Dolly the sheep] said: "We've not made this decision because it's ethically better.
"To me it's always been ethically acceptable to think that if you could use cells from a human embryo to develop a treatment for a disease like motor neurone disease, for which there is no treatment at present, then that is an acceptable thing to do." I'm almost disappointed that this new technique has been developed. This means that now politicians can safely oppose stem-cell research, and people won't have to think about what they believe and why any more. It removes a question about ethics which I think needed to be tackled.
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It's an experimental, theoretical power source. A good candidate for research dollars but definitely not ready even for a prototype plant. It also doesn't speak well for HDR that when an experimental plant was built large earthquakes immidiately started after water injection began.
These are the most recent figures I could dig up. 3GW * (364*24*60*60)secs / (60*60)hours = 26000 GWh. This is larger than the IEA's figure of 500GWh for solar, though they might have made a huge increase to solar output since 2004.
But it does put it into perspective; even 26000 GWh is about half of the amount of energy they import from nuclear countries like France and Denmark, and about 1/7th of the energy they make from nuclear.
This is a country where everyone is strongly opposed to nuclear and pro-renewables, and they still get 1/3rd of their energy from nuclear, and only 1/20th of their power from renewable sources (the majority of which is hydroelectric). And because they're surrounded by nuclear countries as they use less and less nuclear at home they're having to use more and more nuclear from other countries, which seems like a political move than a practical anti-nuclear move.
It comes down to this:
- a roof has a large surface area
- sun ain't going to burn out any time soon
- solar panels can't be made into bombs
I don't understand why we are still arguing about this. Well maybe you should find out why before posting then. Do you really think solar is a viable option but we're not considering it just because we don't want to make our roofs look ugly? There's a reason no-one is using solar power on a large scale.
sun ain't going to burn out any time soon Nuclear fuel isn't going to run out any time soon either.
solar panels can't be made into bombs You really think nuclear power plants are needed for governments to create bombs? Japan has the largest nuclear plant in the world, but is strongly opposed to nuclear weapons. The number of nukes has decreased massively since the Cold War, so if your logic goes more plants = more bombs = bad the data completely contradicts you.
Most types of reactors aren't useful for creating nuclear weapons; reactor grade fuel doesn't have to be enriched as much as a weapon grade fuel, because you don't want reactor fuel to be critical. Conveniently it's much harder to enrich uranium to weapons grade nuclear fuel than reactor grade fuel.
Fuck nuclear. Oh, yeah, great "all we have to worry about is this extremely toxic waste... but that's not a problem because all we have to do is store it safely! it'll never get into the water supply! we'll always have room to store it! people will never make bombs out of it. there'll never be another hiroshima/nagasaki/chernobyl" Yeah, that's pretty much how the argument goes.. Though there's no need to mention hiroshima and nagasaki because nuclear power has nothing to do with it.
Seriously, has the world gone stupid or something? Ok, MORE stupid. How on earth can you people convince yourself that nuclear waste is acceptable? What is wrong with you? You really think you've seen the light and that all the policy makers and scientists in the world just haven't heard of solar power? They'll slap their foreheads after reading your post and say "Wow ddoctor, why didn't I think of solar?!"
Waste arguments aside... why the hell are we, as a civilization, pursuing nuclear technology, given nuclear annihilation is probably the #1 most likely reason we will become extinct? Because an energy crisis would cause huge conflict, possibly including nuclear war (oh what an irony that would be). I don't think the effects of global warming would decrease political tensions either.
Most of all it's because we don't have a choice. Fossil fuels are running out and causing problems anyway. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, gerbils running on wheels, etc, won't scale (unless a huge breakthrough in efficiency is made). Hydroelectric power sources are limited, and can have huge environmental impact.
I wouldn't worry about it too much though: We may be a geographically and politically stable, dry, empty country with expertise and large reserves of uranium, but the misinformed Australian public have still voted in a government that prefers experimental clean coal (ready in ~20 years) over nuclear power.
As the rest of the world starts to come to its senses Australia, perhaps the country most suitable for nuclear power in the entire world, is abandoning nuclear power.
Thorium is nice for India, which happens to have most of the world's thorium. For the rest of us burning spent nuclear "waste" would be a better idea.
Also thousands of years is a very conservative estimate, I've heard estimates range from tens of thousands of years to billions of years. How many "only 40 more years now" will that give the fusion team?
The numbers flash on the screen for 210ms, and are then replaced by white blocks. The chimps and humans then have to click on each of the numbers in order.
210ms isn't enough time to read the numbers, so it's really all about having a photographic memory. Chimps can memorize the numbers in a smaller amount of time than we can because they can take a better "snapshot" of what they're seeing more quickly.
What I don't understand is why the researchers talk about intelligence. It seems like if you were less intelligent it would be better to be able to quickly memorize what you've just seen so you have more time to think about it. Maybe they need a photographic memory because they need more time to think about what they're seeing, because they're less intelligent?
(Note: I'm not saying this because I don't like the idea of chimps being more intelligent humans, I just don't agree with the interpretation. Interesting experiment though.)
Based on CIA intel gathered from mailing list posts we believe the HQ is located in a place only referred to as "The Basement". The actual location of The Basement is sketchy, but we believe it's somewhere in the oil-rich fields of south-east Iran.
- Find a dinosaur DNA, enough of it to complete the dinosaur's genome
- Make sure the dinosaur DNA isn't fragmented, which it almost certainly will be after so long. Or piece it all back together somehow.
- You can't take a cell from a modern animal, stick dinosaur DNA inside it and turn it into a dino-cell. Even with a full dinosaur genome you can't clone a dinosaur without a dinosaur cell. It's the chicken and egg problem on a microscopic scale.
Even if we could clone them we've still got other problems to deal with:Freenode is also a good place to get help with various problems, and you do get a sense of community in most channels.
/. since 2005 I would probably cringe if I reread it, but if you don't want it to be public don't say it in public.
Back on topic; I already knew about this, and don't see what the big deal is. I often run into chat logs while googling, sometimes they have useful info. Does anyone really consider a public IRC channel to be a private place?
A lot of the things I've said on
All the replies questioning my post haven't read the article, which lays it out unambiguously.. How can you debate something which is stated crystal clear in the article?! It probably would have been quicker to read the article than write that reply.
RTFA: They are deploying their Perl on Rails app so that they can have more dynamic content, which they couldn't have before because they're limited to static files and perl scripts. It's basically a hack that allows them to keep their Perl & flat file setup, while allowing dynamic content.
What I'm wondering is why they don't just use an existing framework and scrap whatever restrictions are keeping them using Perl and flat files.
Nice sig, BTW.
Sounds to me like the BBC are using flat files and no database! They're talking about having tens of thousands of files in a directory, and having an archive of data on all shows the BBC is showing, but no mention of using anything other than flat files!
I seriously doubt they have very much Perl code around; there's not much dynamic content on BBC. I really can't imagine what their circumstances would have to be for it to be a sane option to rewrite Ruby on Rails in Perl
Why not make a meaningful comparison, like $ subsidy per watt?
Both nuclear and solar need subsidies at present because coal is dirt cheap. Nuclear has also almost certainly received more investment and subsidies than solar.
The big difference though is that nuclear actually makes up a large part of the world's power production, and is actually a realistic way to meet the world's growing power demands. Barring a miracle world-changing invention solar just can't.
If you want your tax dollars (in subsidies) to fight climate change then you'll get much better bang for your buck with nuclear.
Well I can see it was also modded insightful and redundant, which makes me think that those modding it funny think that it's funny as a joke about how the research was bought. I don't see how it can be a joke without thinking the research was bought.
No but I don't think he was joking.. I think he's making a comment about how the research was bought, not a joke about how ... Well I just don't see any way that it can be taken as a joke.
courtesy of Burns' Atomic Power! "We light you up!" is our motto!
Smithers, pay the good Scientists for their efforts!
I don't get it.. Are you saying you know of links between the GSF Research Center for Health and the Environment and the nuclear power lobby?Or are you saying you get your data from a cartoon?
What?! I haven't seen anything about these users running a beta boot loader hacked to prevent it expiring, it only seems to be related to Boot Camp.
Why is the OS an issue? Well on non-Apple PCs booting into other OSes is taken for granted, and isn't expected to affect OS updates. Apparently on Macs booting into other OSes is an amazing new innovation called "Boot Camp", and an update to an OS causes the ability to dual boot to break, and requires you to reformat your entire hard disk.
Can you imagine if a Windows update made your computer unable to boot if you had it set up to dual-boot into Linux? Why do people rush to the defense of Apple when they completely fuck up and make a mockery of their cheesy "it just works" phrase?
Well Microsoft does have .NET Compact Framework, which may not allow really easy portability from .NET apps, but still fairly easy, and it does include everything such as SQL Servers, GUIs, etc.
What if Microsoft had designed the train?
What if Microsoft had designed anti-baldness cream?
What if Microsoft designed a house?
What if Microsoft designed the Katana?
Can I get some AdSense money now?
The PRNG is reseeded for each new process. This means that the vulnerability where you break the PRNG is only good for the process you exploited. Once the process is closed or restarted you're no longer in.
As the GP said this is a fuss over nothing. It's one of those vulnerabilities where you have to think real hard to imagine a way it could be used maliciously. (Though I agree that MS should make proprietary crypto algorithms open to public scrutiny.)
The annoying thing is that they're still trying to act like this is about ethics, like this is some kind of victory. We're seeing obnoxious comments from "pro-life" groups about how "Finally the scientists are seeing the light and having some common sense", as if they couldn't take the guilt any more.
But (taken from the article above): Prof Wilmut [the guy who cloned Dolly the sheep] said: "We've not made this decision because it's ethically better.
"To me it's always been ethically acceptable to think that if you could use cells from a human embryo to develop a treatment for a disease like motor neurone disease, for which there is no treatment at present, then that is an acceptable thing to do." I'm almost disappointed that this new technique has been developed. This means that now politicians can safely oppose stem-cell research, and people won't have to think about what they believe and why any more. It removes a question about ethics which I think needed to be tackled.