I don't think that even includes breeders which just use U235 as starter fuel and breed their own from either thorium (breeding fissile U233) or U238 (nuclear waste) breeding fissile plutonium U239.
Right now the rare earths used in wind turbine magnets are nearly exclusively being mined in China, and China then requires manufacture of the parts that use them on Chinese soil with Chinese workers. The turbines themselves can be assembled elsewhere, but China has the rare earths market by the balls with their near monopoly.
The US actually has a lot of rare earths, but we don't mine them because they show up wherever thorium shows up and NRC requirements make mining thorium a pain. If that thorium had a market, it would be worth it for miners, but currently it doesn't.
Personally I use this to sell it: they can run on nuclear waste and the leftovers are safe in 300 years, not thousands. I then point out how fossil fuels are spewing out radiation every day and nobody complains, but when a nuclear plant leaks a little it suddenly is a huge deal.
Personally, I'm not entirely sold on MSR as the only way to go with nuclear - really, we should re-fund the Integral Fast Reactor (the industry choice for Gen IV), which is much further along. It also is supposed to be passively safe, but isn't quite as fault-proof as MSR. It also takes more fuel to start these things. Incidentally, it also was killed mainly because of proliferation concerns, but Russia built them (the BN-800 is nearly in production and two smaller versions are running) and made them not reprocess fuel and yields about 70% efficiency (with reprocessing it'd be 99.5%) - still 30% is a lot less waste than conventional reactors.5-5%, and that waste could be centrally reprocessed in a secure facility (which the US did for years when we needed bomb materials). They also are using a plutonium-uranium mix to burn off weapons grade plutonium, so it is, in fact, reducing the proliferation risk in some ways.
Um, no. Germany should have 30% renewable energy by 2030 and plan for 80% by 2050. They actually plan to build something like 26 new coal plants to make up for shutting down nuclear in the meantime, which is an entirely ass-backward thing to do, IMO. There also are plans to try and hit 100% renewable by 2050, but I think that's unrealistic.
To be fair, coal employs a LOT of blue collar workers because it is relatively inefficient energy, so it doesn't just benefit the rich, but it does benefit the rich because of capitalism (private owners like the Kochs).
Personally, I'd like to see coal die for environmental and health reasons. It pollutes in mining, transportation, and burning, spews radiation into the air (and in a bad form because you breathe it), and doesn't truly have any serious clean prospects (sorry, but carbon capture and sequestration still leaves dirty mining and transportation and cuts efficiency by about 25% from what I've read, and 25% profit loss isn't going to happen - again, capitalism).
Actually, natural gas turbines are almost universally used as quick power for wind and solar downtime. My understanding is the fast firing ones (for on-demand power) are not very efficient, either (even though turbines in general are relatively efficient).
The FCC did some deregulation here in the 1990s, requiring telephone companies to allow competing ISPs to use their lines and CO (central offices) for a flat rate, but then they backtracked on that and decided that the phone companies could choose who they wanted in and charge whatever they wanted. I pretty much went from 100+ ISP choices to 3 overnight (including the shut down of the ISP I had at the time).
Sorry, but Obamacare uses free market capitalism even in the limited choices for people that need assistance paying for it. Communism would give you the health care. Universal health care (aka socialized medicine) requires the government to collect money for and provide insurance for everyone. You can actually choose to not have any health care under Obamacare, but you are fined for doing so.
While I'm not a fan of the ACA by any means, it really bugs me when people call it socialism or communism. The reason Mitt Romney's government in Massachusetts created it in pretty much the same way as it exists in Obamacare is because it requires multiple competing providers and that by definition is capitalism.
And it makes sense to appease the environmentalists on this one - It creates few permanent American jobs and they are shipping and refining a corrosive, dirty form of oil (and is awful at the field, as you mention). That oil isn't even going to be used in the US - it is destined for use mainly in South America. So the US bears all the risk, gets almost no return and Canada reaps the profits. If I were Obama, I'd punt on this too - no reason to piss off the environmentalist Dems for a bunch of short term jobs and almost no permanent ones.
How do I pay them? With a check to the IRS and sometimes the state (this year the state paid me $50 - woo).
So the real question: How do I file them? With an accountant. Why? Because I own rental property and even if you can do business taxes without an accountant, you're still better off hiring one. Why? Because you can expense it to your business (i.e. write it off), and write off your personal taxes as well, as long as you follow the IRS requirement that you are only going to an accountant because of your business. The best part is I spend 1 hour doing taxes each year, and the last year I did them myself I spent over 30 hours just looking up depreciating asset schedules (with rental property, all expenses are paid over a period of time, so a 5 year depreciating asset needs to be deducted at 1/5 the cost over 5 years - I had to find some items in the massive IRS tomes for these at my local library) and about 55 hours total (investment income was about 75% of the remaining time - played the Wall Street Lotto a bit too much that year).
Bottom line: if you own a business, hire an accountant.
Which makes me wonder why Glu bought them at all. It seemed their first action was to kill the (gaming) website (or at least it shut down right around the time of the acquisition) and then dilute the brand and finally to shut it down completely. If it wasn't to kill competition, it sounds like a colossal waste of money.
In the stuff I'm working on, lower resolution images are used for motion and then a high resolution image sent when the camera is still, but I work in a lower latency area meant for mobile devices. Some of my coworkers work on stuff like this.
I wouldn't say the Soviets saw SDI as a joke, as it basically scrapped the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Reagan also killed off SALT II saying the Soviets had violated it (while still proceeding with SALT III, which later became START I if I recall correctly). All in all, it pretty much jump started the Cold War and the USSR didn't have the resources to continue that war, thus it started to fall apart.
Heh, my first programmer job interview was the opposite - long scraggly hair and (at least reasonably trimmed around that time) beard and a fitted, tailored suit. The suit and neat(er) beard were because I was playing cello professionally at weddings prior to graduating (and I tucked my hair under a hat, just like in the song Signs).
Incidentally, I get knocked for communication too, usually for some incident in the systems engineering part of my job. Usually my manager contacts me and says "why is system A down?" and I say "It was up this morning" and then she says "Bob says A is down, we can't get any work done! System A can't be down." Five minutes later "OK, I fixed it, server crash" and my boss says "You need to communicate when System A is down better." I want to reply "I didn't know system A was down until you fucking called me" but I reply more humanely. When it comes to review time, I get docked on it anyway:P
I would say it a different way - the corporations own the media and through corporate PACs that utterly destroy any individual contributions, also control the government.
I for one welcome our (not so new) corporate overlords.
I personally have little tolerance for stupidity, probably why I got into tech in the first place. I may have a better initial reaction to a pretty girl, but if she is a stereotypical dumb blonde, I quickly start talking down to her and say things like "in layman speak" - translation "I've seen smarter squirrels, so I'm going to really dumb this down for you, you petulant (because they often are) fool."
Fortunately, most blondes I knew in school were smart and completely against stereotype. I didn't have any girls in my college math courses (calc II-VI, and seriously, zero), but in pre-calc and calc my high school (accelerated math) study partner was Megan, a gorgeous, athletic blonde (she was all state in track) with a pretty nice rack to boot. Yeah, objectification there, but when I think of someone that had everything (brains and looks), I think of her. Unfortunately, she dated and mated with a dumb jock I intensely disliked and spurted out some kids right after high school graduation, so I doubt she went to college or got a job using her brains, which is unfortunate. That dumb jock did go to college (my college, which is how I know) on a football scholarship and failed out (rumors are with a 0.0 GPA, though that is possibly just rumors my friends started). I never saw or heard from either of them after that year, not that I've made any effort to look them up.
By the time women take the SAT, they've been culturally pushed away from math and science; for instance, I see this with my brother's girl, who HATES math with a passion just like her mom, and she is 8. If you're culturally indoctrinated by 8, there isn't much hope. OTOH, there is hope for one of my nieces, who is one of the top ranked girls in her state for math (in fact, I think she was the top ranked girl, but was behind a couple of boys overall) and has a geneticist mom. Unfortunately, I know far too many of the former mom/daughter pairs and too few of the latter.
It runs on OSX and Linux, neither of which have native DirectX support because Microsoft keeps their graphics technology under tight wraps. All implementations of it not shipped by Microsoft need to be reverse engineered from the API. OpenGL is licensed to hardware manufacturers (which is how development is paid for) and accessing the API is free for software developers.
Yeah, probably minimal, since it is bytecode level (what HLSL and GLSL compile into)
The bad - this is DX 9.0c, which is analogous to OpenGL 2.0 (with extensions - note that ATI drivers didn't support extensions at the time, so more like 2.2+ for them) and in console terms, XBox 360/PS3 tech. OTOH, OpenGL went through a major paradigm shift with OpenGL 3 and 4 that make it work more like HLSL, so I expect shader conversion is much easier. When I ported a DX10 shader to OpenGL 3 it was much easier (but much harder was porting the entire OpenGL 2 project to 3).
The US government itself has little to do with nuclear energy. Congress gave that job to the NRC, and the NRC is both a salesman and regulator, so it has a serious conflict of interest. Basically, they are Westinghouse's (aka Toshiba Energy) bitch.
In any case, I'm standing on a giant fission reactor and you probably are too (unless you're in flight) - that technology seems to work on a much smaller scale.
I've found the majority of people just ape what their party tells them, even if it is completely wrong, whether it be liberalism, socialism, communism (of which we only refer to the dictatorship form, not like in, say, the natural communism in some Amish or Mennonite communes), or whatever. For instance, socialism does not mean a nanny state, and in fact, works quite well with Capitalism as shown by employee owned businesses and co-ops. Applying socialist concepts to government is called bureaucracy, but it does not a socialism make, as Yoda would say.
Anyhow, I almost always want to bop people over the head when they talk about liberalism, socialism, or even conservative-ism because they are nearly always wrong. In fact, you can be liberal and conservative at the same time, since conservative essentially means keeping things as they were or bringing things back to the way they were (so, for instance, you could be conservative and bring back pensions where pensions were killed off - this extra spending will likely label you a liberal, but since you are bringing back tradition, you are conservative).
My company just flat out says if you bring your own device and want to use it on the corporate network, you need to install remote management software that pushes security updates and such and gives them complete access to the device. On the other hand, they don't care much where you go on the work devices, and part of my job often requires going to internet sites. I don't think I'd ever have Eclipse java dev working with Maven plugin without the internet, for instance. About the worst they do is block some sites (mostly torrent, webcomic and game sites).
My wife has thousands of friends, I only have hundreds... I guess I know who the attractive one is now.
Funny thing is, the real reason I limit my friends is because I can't keep up with Facebook as it is, and my wife spends about 4 hours a day on it. If I included just first cousins and their kids alone I'd have over 200 due to the very prolific Catholics on my dad's side (my aunt knocked out 13 and her kids are trying to catch up).
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I don't think that even includes breeders which just use U235 as starter fuel and breed their own from either thorium (breeding fissile U233) or U238 (nuclear waste) breeding fissile plutonium U239.
Right now the rare earths used in wind turbine magnets are nearly exclusively being mined in China, and China then requires manufacture of the parts that use them on Chinese soil with Chinese workers. The turbines themselves can be assembled elsewhere, but China has the rare earths market by the balls with their near monopoly.
The US actually has a lot of rare earths, but we don't mine them because they show up wherever thorium shows up and NRC requirements make mining thorium a pain. If that thorium had a market, it would be worth it for miners, but currently it doesn't.
Personally I use this to sell it: they can run on nuclear waste and the leftovers are safe in 300 years, not thousands. I then point out how fossil fuels are spewing out radiation every day and nobody complains, but when a nuclear plant leaks a little it suddenly is a huge deal.
Personally, I'm not entirely sold on MSR as the only way to go with nuclear - really, we should re-fund the Integral Fast Reactor (the industry choice for Gen IV), which is much further along. It also is supposed to be passively safe, but isn't quite as fault-proof as MSR. It also takes more fuel to start these things. Incidentally, it also was killed mainly because of proliferation concerns, but Russia built them (the BN-800 is nearly in production and two smaller versions are running) and made them not reprocess fuel and yields about 70% efficiency (with reprocessing it'd be 99.5%) - still 30% is a lot less waste than conventional reactors .5-5%, and that waste could be centrally reprocessed in a secure facility (which the US did for years when we needed bomb materials). They also are using a plutonium-uranium mix to burn off weapons grade plutonium, so it is, in fact, reducing the proliferation risk in some ways.
Um, no. Germany should have 30% renewable energy by 2030 and plan for 80% by 2050. They actually plan to build something like 26 new coal plants to make up for shutting down nuclear in the meantime, which is an entirely ass-backward thing to do, IMO. There also are plans to try and hit 100% renewable by 2050, but I think that's unrealistic.
source
To be fair, coal employs a LOT of blue collar workers because it is relatively inefficient energy, so it doesn't just benefit the rich, but it does benefit the rich because of capitalism (private owners like the Kochs).
Personally, I'd like to see coal die for environmental and health reasons. It pollutes in mining, transportation, and burning, spews radiation into the air (and in a bad form because you breathe it), and doesn't truly have any serious clean prospects (sorry, but carbon capture and sequestration still leaves dirty mining and transportation and cuts efficiency by about 25% from what I've read, and 25% profit loss isn't going to happen - again, capitalism).
Actually, natural gas turbines are almost universally used as quick power for wind and solar downtime. My understanding is the fast firing ones (for on-demand power) are not very efficient, either (even though turbines in general are relatively efficient).
The FCC did some deregulation here in the 1990s, requiring telephone companies to allow competing ISPs to use their lines and CO (central offices) for a flat rate, but then they backtracked on that and decided that the phone companies could choose who they wanted in and charge whatever they wanted. I pretty much went from 100+ ISP choices to 3 overnight (including the shut down of the ISP I had at the time).
Sorry, but Obamacare uses free market capitalism even in the limited choices for people that need assistance paying for it. Communism would give you the health care. Universal health care (aka socialized medicine) requires the government to collect money for and provide insurance for everyone. You can actually choose to not have any health care under Obamacare, but you are fined for doing so.
While I'm not a fan of the ACA by any means, it really bugs me when people call it socialism or communism. The reason Mitt Romney's government in Massachusetts created it in pretty much the same way as it exists in Obamacare is because it requires multiple competing providers and that by definition is capitalism.
And it makes sense to appease the environmentalists on this one - It creates few permanent American jobs and they are shipping and refining a corrosive, dirty form of oil (and is awful at the field, as you mention). That oil isn't even going to be used in the US - it is destined for use mainly in South America. So the US bears all the risk, gets almost no return and Canada reaps the profits. If I were Obama, I'd punt on this too - no reason to piss off the environmentalist Dems for a bunch of short term jobs and almost no permanent ones.
How do I pay them? With a check to the IRS and sometimes the state (this year the state paid me $50 - woo).
So the real question: How do I file them? With an accountant. Why? Because I own rental property and even if you can do business taxes without an accountant, you're still better off hiring one. Why? Because you can expense it to your business (i.e. write it off), and write off your personal taxes as well, as long as you follow the IRS requirement that you are only going to an accountant because of your business. The best part is I spend 1 hour doing taxes each year, and the last year I did them myself I spent over 30 hours just looking up depreciating asset schedules (with rental property, all expenses are paid over a period of time, so a 5 year depreciating asset needs to be deducted at 1/5 the cost over 5 years - I had to find some items in the massive IRS tomes for these at my local library) and about 55 hours total (investment income was about 75% of the remaining time - played the Wall Street Lotto a bit too much that year).
Bottom line: if you own a business, hire an accountant.
Which makes me wonder why Glu bought them at all. It seemed their first action was to kill the (gaming) website (or at least it shut down right around the time of the acquisition) and then dilute the brand and finally to shut it down completely. If it wasn't to kill competition, it sounds like a colossal waste of money.
In the stuff I'm working on, lower resolution images are used for motion and then a high resolution image sent when the camera is still, but I work in a lower latency area meant for mobile devices. Some of my coworkers work on stuff like this.
I wouldn't say the Soviets saw SDI as a joke, as it basically scrapped the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Reagan also killed off SALT II saying the Soviets had violated it (while still proceeding with SALT III, which later became START I if I recall correctly). All in all, it pretty much jump started the Cold War and the USSR didn't have the resources to continue that war, thus it started to fall apart.
Heh, my first programmer job interview was the opposite - long scraggly hair and (at least reasonably trimmed around that time) beard and a fitted, tailored suit. The suit and neat(er) beard were because I was playing cello professionally at weddings prior to graduating (and I tucked my hair under a hat, just like in the song Signs).
Incidentally, I get knocked for communication too, usually for some incident in the systems engineering part of my job. Usually my manager contacts me and says "why is system A down?" and I say "It was up this morning" and then she says "Bob says A is down, we can't get any work done! System A can't be down." Five minutes later "OK, I fixed it, server crash" and my boss says "You need to communicate when System A is down better." I want to reply "I didn't know system A was down until you fucking called me" but I reply more humanely. When it comes to review time, I get docked on it anyway :P
I would say it a different way - the corporations own the media and through corporate PACs that utterly destroy any individual contributions, also control the government.
I for one welcome our (not so new) corporate overlords.
Not sure if you're an idiot or not.
I personally have little tolerance for stupidity, probably why I got into tech in the first place. I may have a better initial reaction to a pretty girl, but if she is a stereotypical dumb blonde, I quickly start talking down to her and say things like "in layman speak" - translation "I've seen smarter squirrels, so I'm going to really dumb this down for you, you petulant (because they often are) fool."
Fortunately, most blondes I knew in school were smart and completely against stereotype. I didn't have any girls in my college math courses (calc II-VI, and seriously, zero), but in pre-calc and calc my high school (accelerated math) study partner was Megan, a gorgeous, athletic blonde (she was all state in track) with a pretty nice rack to boot. Yeah, objectification there, but when I think of someone that had everything (brains and looks), I think of her. Unfortunately, she dated and mated with a dumb jock I intensely disliked and spurted out some kids right after high school graduation, so I doubt she went to college or got a job using her brains, which is unfortunate. That dumb jock did go to college (my college, which is how I know) on a football scholarship and failed out (rumors are with a 0.0 GPA, though that is possibly just rumors my friends started). I never saw or heard from either of them after that year, not that I've made any effort to look them up.
By the time women take the SAT, they've been culturally pushed away from math and science; for instance, I see this with my brother's girl, who HATES math with a passion just like her mom, and she is 8. If you're culturally indoctrinated by 8, there isn't much hope. OTOH, there is hope for one of my nieces, who is one of the top ranked girls in her state for math (in fact, I think she was the top ranked girl, but was behind a couple of boys overall) and has a geneticist mom. Unfortunately, I know far too many of the former mom/daughter pairs and too few of the latter.
It runs on OSX and Linux, neither of which have native DirectX support because Microsoft keeps their graphics technology under tight wraps. All implementations of it not shipped by Microsoft need to be reverse engineered from the API. OpenGL is licensed to hardware manufacturers (which is how development is paid for) and accessing the API is free for software developers.
Yeah, probably minimal, since it is bytecode level (what HLSL and GLSL compile into)
The bad - this is DX 9.0c, which is analogous to OpenGL 2.0 (with extensions - note that ATI drivers didn't support extensions at the time, so more like 2.2+ for them) and in console terms, XBox 360/PS3 tech. OTOH, OpenGL went through a major paradigm shift with OpenGL 3 and 4 that make it work more like HLSL, so I expect shader conversion is much easier. When I ported a DX10 shader to OpenGL 3 it was much easier (but much harder was porting the entire OpenGL 2 project to 3).
The US government itself has little to do with nuclear energy. Congress gave that job to the NRC, and the NRC is both a salesman and regulator, so it has a serious conflict of interest. Basically, they are Westinghouse's (aka Toshiba Energy) bitch.
Ours is kind of on the small side...
In any case, I'm standing on a giant fission reactor and you probably are too (unless you're in flight) - that technology seems to work on a much smaller scale.
I've found the majority of people just ape what their party tells them, even if it is completely wrong, whether it be liberalism, socialism, communism (of which we only refer to the dictatorship form, not like in, say, the natural communism in some Amish or Mennonite communes), or whatever. For instance, socialism does not mean a nanny state, and in fact, works quite well with Capitalism as shown by employee owned businesses and co-ops. Applying socialist concepts to government is called bureaucracy, but it does not a socialism make, as Yoda would say.
Anyhow, I almost always want to bop people over the head when they talk about liberalism, socialism, or even conservative-ism because they are nearly always wrong. In fact, you can be liberal and conservative at the same time, since conservative essentially means keeping things as they were or bringing things back to the way they were (so, for instance, you could be conservative and bring back pensions where pensions were killed off - this extra spending will likely label you a liberal, but since you are bringing back tradition, you are conservative).
My company just flat out says if you bring your own device and want to use it on the corporate network, you need to install remote management software that pushes security updates and such and gives them complete access to the device. On the other hand, they don't care much where you go on the work devices, and part of my job often requires going to internet sites. I don't think I'd ever have Eclipse java dev working with Maven plugin without the internet, for instance. About the worst they do is block some sites (mostly torrent, webcomic and game sites).
My wife has thousands of friends, I only have hundreds... I guess I know who the attractive one is now.
Funny thing is, the real reason I limit my friends is because I can't keep up with Facebook as it is, and my wife spends about 4 hours a day on it. If I included just first cousins and their kids alone I'd have over 200 due to the very prolific Catholics on my dad's side (my aunt knocked out 13 and her kids are trying to catch up).