Well the US denies it , but controlling media distribution through government sanctioned monopolies is pretty fucking far from a capitalist free market. What Adam Smith argued was that governments should take a "hands off" approach to markets, only using a minimal amount of regulation as necessary to enable a semi-free market to exist in the first place.
I dunno what definition of capitalism you have been given, but draconian copyright laws, government sponsored monopolies and harsh penalties for copying music is about as capitalist as a 5 year plan for production imposed by a central authority.
20 songs an hour 480 songs per day 175.200 songs per year 17.520.000 songs per century.
That is assuming you don't sleep, that you never listen to the same song twice, and that you never do anything but listen to songs. For music it has been game over for a long time... Movies probably have a decade or so left, but then they are fucked too.
The major problem I see with US nuclear power is the assumption that it is a solved problem and almost zero has been spent on R&D for decades. The "new generation" of reactors from Westinghouse and others is little more than 1960's white elephants painted green.
This may be true when it comes to reactor engineering, but when it comes to the fuel cycle pyroreprocessing has been researched actively at ANL and INL even after the muppets shut down the IFR (much of the work on pyroprocessing was allowed to proceed after the IFR shutdown, except for actinide recovery tho this research was latter resumed under the Gen IV initiative as part of the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative program ).
To those not too familiar with it, pyroprocessing is an alternative to aqueous reprocessing of nuclear waste with a few advantages. In particular, since pyroprocessing is based on electrochemical reactions in molten salts rather than organic extraction agents in nitric acid, it doesn't use any water and thus doesn't produce liquid waste. Thus in contrast to the British and French reprocessing plants a pyroprocessing plant wouldn't have to discharge any radioactive water into the sea, instead the salt and fission products is immobilized into a zeolite, forming a ceramic that can be disposed in geological repositories.
Furthermore, pyroprocessing can recover more than 99% of the long lived actinide wastes (performance reported 2007 ), and if you destroy those in fast breeders you are left with waste that decays to uranium levels of radioactivity within a few hundred years, meaning a repository like yucca mountain could easily be more or less guaranteed to contain it long enough.
Finally, if you did use breeders in conjunction with pyroprocessing then simply the amount of uranium left in the nuclear waste from previous reactors would be sufficient for hundreds of years of current energy consumption, thus eliminating the need for uranium mining, enrichment and a second waste repository.
There has been some political opposition to advanced nuclear technologies, but with Oil set to breach $200 a barrel by the end of the year, and with both presidential candidates open for developing new nuclear technology, it appears likely that this research will continue for some time.
Actually they weren't. The explosion destroyed the reactor lid and parts of the reactor building but didn't cause much damage to the plant's control room. It was mainly radioactive particles emitted during the subsequent meltdown that killed people.
The leaked document includes a provision to force internet service providers to provide information about suspected copyright infringers without a warrant, making it easier for the record industry to sue music file sharers and for officials to shut down non-commercial BitTorrent websites such as The Pirate Bay.[6]
Oh no, it's not unconstitutional, we just make private companies do it... FUCK THIS. If this thing goes through it is literary time to take to the streets.
The chemical diagnostic data is damn important because it may determine things like corrosion rates and the amount of impurities circulating in the water, potentials for clogs etc... As with all other software, occasionally errors occur, and the appropriate way to respond when it does is to shutdown and blow some whistles as to ensure that the reactor is brought into a safe state before something else goes wrong. This is one of those cases where "Better safe than sorry" is a really rather good motto.
Funny, a friend of mine had a similar experience with XP SP2 the other day. After it fell over he tried to reinstall it. Turns out windows didn't include the drivers for his network card, sound card, video card etc... and since this is a a rather old box he couldn't find the CDs with all the drivers on them. Kinda sucks when you can't get on the net to search for them. Anyway, I gave him an Ubuntu CD and it booted fine , got him on the internet without installing a thing, and allowed him to download the drivers he needed to his ipod (the guy is addicted to his windows games ). After 48 hours since the first attempt at installing windows he had his system back up an running, with a little help from ubuntu.
Of course he probably has a couple of pets on the thing now seeing that it took him quite a while to even get it into a state where it would accept updates and we all have external IPs.
For reference, on the latest Ubuntu I have my 3D acceleration ( on both screens ) and wireless on the laptop out of the box. My main gripe is the flash plugin for firefox crashing every now and then, but I'm guessing that is really adobe's fault.
Is the amount of data continuously using a 5mbps line for 30 days would generate (ok ok, I used 1000 rather than 1024 as the base because I'm lazy, sue me ). So I guess it is ok if they meter access as long as it doesn't cost more per megabyte than the equivalent cost of a 5mbps line operating constantly for 30 days. Somehow I expect their rates to be just a tiny bit higher.
There is only one cryptography scheme with proven secrecy, and that is the one time pad. Even if you assume no errors occur in its implementation, no physicist can guarantee there will never be discovered a way to eavesdrop on transmissions that use Quantum Cryptography. In contrast with the one time pad a Mathematician can more or less prove, at least to the extent you can prove anything at all, that eavesdropping is only possible if the implementation is flawed.
In practice none of this is relevant since the hassles associated with correctly implementing either QC or a OTP are sufficiently large that for most applications they are both inferior to public key cryptography and symmetric ciphers. There are some exceptions, but the only way you could possibly justify describing quantum cryptography as "the most secure way to transmit data" would be by ignoring so many aspects of information security that it will have no relevance to practical applications.
Equally bullshit. His polywell design wouldn't need any fusion if his claims were correct since it violates the second law of thermodynamics and could hence be used to build a perpetum mobile machine. In particular Bussard claimed that the monoenergetic velocity distribution in the plasma was periodically restored without input of energy. While his device was not a closed system, it can be shown that for such a phenomena to occur the device needs to lose an amount of energy related to the entropy reduction of the plasma ( a mono energetic energy distribution is the lowest entropy distribution possible ). This holds for ALL systems, not just closed ones. As an example, rather chaotic water is able to freeze into a very ordered ice cube by giving up some heat to the surroundings. What this means in practice is that maintaining a non-maxwellian ion distribution in a plasma requires energy. This holds for ANY plasma no matter how it is contained, and the amount of energy needed is given by how rapidly the entropy would increase without an energy input. As it turns out the cross section for fusion is rather small, even at the resonance energy Bussard was claiming to utilize, and it turns out that maintaining the non-maxwellian velocity distribution would require more energy than you could ever get from teh fusion reaction. A couple of notes:
a)This is true for ANY fusion scheme using the p-B reaction in a mono energetic velocity distribution. Even in a head on collision the chance for scattering is so much higher than the chance of fusion that restoring the monoenergetic distribution will require more energy.
b)This does NOT assume that the plasma is quasi-neutral, isotropic or anything like that. The conclusion follows directly from the ratio between the fusion cross section, the scattering cross section and the laws of thermodynamics.
c)It doesn't apply to thermal plasmas since they are at maximum entropy for their temperature. This is why it doesn't apply to Tokamaks, hydrogen bombs, or the Sun.
Bussard and his followers used to respond to this criticism by claiming whoever had come up with it had ignored some of the features of his design, or that they didn't properly understand it or some other similar claim. In reality it doesn't depend on his design. If the second law of thermodynamics is correct, and if the cross section for fusion is much smaller than the cross section for simple scattering ( and it is , even at resonance energies ) then maintaining a non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require more energy than p-B fusion produces.
As always when these discussions come up you hear a bunch of "but what if it works, the benefits would be enormous". The problem with this type of logic is of course that it can be applied to ANY claim which promises great returns, no matter how patently absurd it is. Alchemy, perpetual motion, alternative medicine, intelligent design... etc... If you just promise big enough implications for your "science" and make the explanation sound complicated enough that people don't understand it, you will always have some suckers going "Even if there is just a 0.1% chance it works, the benefits will be a quazillion dollars." This is how these crackpots get their supporters, and as usual they will yell they are being suppressed and compare themselves to Galileo, Einstein or Boltzmann when anybody from the "dogmatic scientific establishment" (i.e anybody who actually has a clue about the subject ) points out it is bullshit.
Oh, and slash dot will give them front page publicity.
I think the main problem I have with the global warming discussion -- like almost any other so-called "controversial" topic -- is that it rapidly becomes an argument among extremists.
Nonsense, the main problem is that popular media doesn't think science is interesting enough to sell papers, and hence they "spice it up a bit" by giving attention to doomsayers and conspiracy theorists.
I would argue that the following is pretty much known:
a)We emit a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere b)If we continue to do so this it will cause significant warming of the planet c)It will likely be a lot easier to reduce emissions that to adapt to changes they could cause
What is not clear is just how large consequences our emissions will have, it is not completely clear how rapidly problems will start to arise if we do nothing, and it is not completely clear what the best ways to reduce emissions are. However, I would argue that most of the people that try to argue that we do not need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions are either basing their arguments on a gross misrepresentation of what we do know, are banking their hopes on a rather small probability of a rather solid theory being wrong, or simply don't know what they are talking about.
By all means there are uncertainties in climate science, but anybody who will seriously argue that we shouldn't try to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions has either not done his homework properly, or has nefarious motives.
Well the main difference would be that the people with respiratory problems would be right. Government failures to properly address air pollution is hurting all of us, and unlike the anti-wifi nutjobs people with respiratory problems would actually be able to back up their claims with sound well documented and close to universally accepted science. I don't think you will find many doctors who does agree that air pollution in cities significantly hurt the people living there.
When I walk through a hospital or lab I can "feel" the MRI/NMR machines, but it doesn't mean I'm feeling the earth's mag field.
Considering the fields in them are strong enough to propel a paper clip to lethal speeds over a distance of a few meters, while the earth's magnetic field can barely turn a compass needle, I dunno what this is supposed to prove. Having said that, I very much doubt it is the magnetic field you feel. MRI machines are more than merely a magnet and for all we know you might just be reacting to sound,vibrations,the ventilation system etc...
Typical molecular binding energies are on the order of electron volts. The energy barrier hydrogen isotopes must overcome to fuse is on the order of 10000 electron volts. While there are ways to reduce this barrier, simply putting the atoms in a crystal lattice seem unlikely, given that the electrostatic forces needed to overcome the barrier would tear apart the atoms of every known material.
One method of cold fusion which does work is to inject muons into the sample. Muons are like electrons, but significantly heavier. Their negative charge in combination with their large mass causes the nuclei of Deuterium molecules to move close enough to one another that quantum tunneling becomes a strong possibility and the nuclei eventually fuse. Unfortunately you lose a lot of muons either through radioactive decay ( muons are radioactive ) or because they get trapped by the positively charged helium nucleus produced. Consequentially you end up spending more energy to produce the muons than the fusion reaction produces.
Finally I like to add that achieving fusion is not very hard. The potentials required are only a few thousand volts, and desktop neutron sources based on fusion reactions have been available for decades. Heck, it is simple enough that hobbyists have built their own fusion devices. The difficulty is to get the fusion reaction to produce more energy than you need to sustain it.
Sold in tax free: Razor blades, Matches, Vodka in glass bottles, Propane propelled deodorant, etc...
Confiscated in security: Nail scissors, tweezers, liquid volumes exceeding 100ml
Allowed through security (personal experience ): candles, multiple liquid containers at 100ml each, litres of liquids that are inside a sealed plastic bag with a pwetty picture on it... etc..
This is even past the stage of security theater, it is damn obvious its primary purpose is to allow the airports to sell more stuff once you are past the security clearance.
I was under the impression that at least some CPUs can detect temperature and adjust their clock frequency accordingly, thus meaning that they simply slow down if overheating. Is this insufficient to deal with the loss of the entire heatsink or am I missing something? I would have expected that there were mechanisms which kick in to prevent damage at elevated temperatures, even if it means simply shutting down. Maybe it is a consequence of studying nuclear physics but personally I would argue that a device should at least make an attempt to detect anomalous conditions and take measures to minimize damage. I guess it could make sense if the consequences of a chip going down due to lost cooling would exceed the cost of replacing it, but to be honest you probably want to alter your design if you have a plausible probability of such a situation.
Currently availible non-specialty cells (the cells used for space etc are not used for general power) are typically between 5 and 15%.
Therefore getting to the 80-90% range would result in a 5-18X improvment.
Since solar is currently 4X, that means it will drop to.2-.8X of CURRENT power costs..
I said 4X WIND POWER costs. Not current power costs. Britain's Royal Academy of Engineering estimates the cost of wind power at roughly 3 times that of nuclear, so even if you achieve 90% efficiency that would put you at roughly twice the cost of nuclear generation ( assuming 15% efficiency for present cells ). Now, to give an idea of how hard 90% efficiency would be to reach, the Sun's average surface temperature is 5778K , meaning a solar cell at 300K could at best reach 95% efficiency without violating the laws of thermodynamics.
That is, ignoring ANY other problems you are closing in on the theoretical limits allowed by the laws of physics if you are to get such efficiencies, and you have to do this without increasing the costs of your cells. Any dust on the cells and you can forget it. Protective glass coating is a no-no since it would absorb in the UV range. Heck, simply finding a material that is reasonably transparent at all the relevant wavelengths could be tricky. Add in to this that you cannot use any expensive/toxic/rare elements, that the cells should have to last for a long time, that they should survive a wide range of temperatures and be able to handle a reasonable level of abuse, and it becomes far from certain that it is even possible to reach 80% efficiency, let alone to do so in the foreseeable future.
If I am not completely mistaken "classical" semi conductor cells can reach efficiencies of 40%, meaning that even with perfect 100% efficiency you would get at best a factor 2.5 improvement. Of course, 100% efficiency is an impossibility and thus I think we can safely assume that these cells will never reach more than 80%-90% efficiency, which would be an improvement of a factor of 2 over current technology. Now last estimate I saw was that in Europe solar cells work out to be about 4 times as expensive as wind power (which is itself rather pricey ), so even assuming the 100% efficiency, efficiency gains alone cannot make solar economical.
Add in to this that a large part of the cost of solar is the energy needed to produce the cells, which means that if you get that energy from a more expensive power source, the price of the cells will increase. I.e, if one started to replace relatively cheap generation capacity with more expensive solar cells, then the cost of energy, and hence the cost of the cells, would increase.
It would therefore appear to me that for solar to have a chance to become competitive what is needed is focus on lowering the cost of producing the cells, because the gains from improving their efficiency cannot offset their presently large price, and it appears unlikely that pushing for higher and higher efficiencies will be possible without making the cells more expensive.
Time to start using it... Even if you just sign your own certificates, thus making the whole thing completely vulnerable to man in the middle attacks, these ISPs would be guilty of rather serious violations of cybercrime laws if they started sending your clients fake SSL certificates. I.e, if you just want to prevent the ISP from doing this you don't even need a secure session, you just need one they can't interfere with without incriminating themselves.
In a system where the sender initiates information transfer ( such as in e-mail) you have the following problem:
"If you want everybody to to be able to contact you, then you will receive information you do not want."
Conversely, if you have a system where the recipient requests information ( such as for web-pages ) then you have the following problem:
"I you want everybody to be able to get information about yourself, then people you don't like could collect information about you."
There's no way around these very simple facts, the best you can do is to change what you expect from the service. As an example e-mail spam would be rapidly defeated if you limited yourself to only receive information from sources you have approved in advance, but that is to limited for most people. Because we want our friends to be able to give our e-mail addresses to their friends if they have something nice to tell us. Therefore we will get e-mails we don't want. If you want to change this you have to either change your expectations of what e-mail should do, or you have to change the behavior of people sending out spam. The easiest way to do the latter is to penalize business who do it.
As others have noted in this discussion it's also held Linux back in a few areas.
Ok, this is nonsense. There is a license incompatibility, yes, but it is because BOTH licenses make requirements the other does not fullfill, not just the GPL. In other words , the license of ZFS does not permit using it in Linux because the GPL does not fullfill the requirements of the CDDL. SIMULATENOUSLY the GPL does not permit combining Linux with ZFS because the CDDL does not fullfill the requirements of the GPL.
There are a lot of trolls here who try to interpret this as the FSF the GPL being fanatic and Sun and the CDDL being more reasonable, the reality is that the the incompatibility arises from similar terms that exist in both licenses, namely that you cannot impose any further restrictions on derived works. Since the set of restrictions in two licenses differ they are incompatible. So basically, if you are going to consider this "a problem caused by teh GPL" then it is as much "a problem caused by the CDDL" and vice versa.
Of course bashing the GPL on slashdot is a lot more fun, but the boring reality is that both Sun and Linus have picked a license of their choice, and they turned out to be incompatible. It is either the fault of both parties or neither. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the US denies it , but controlling media distribution through government sanctioned monopolies is pretty fucking far from a capitalist free market. What Adam Smith argued was that governments should take a "hands off" approach to markets, only using a minimal amount of regulation as necessary to enable a semi-free market to exist in the first place.
I dunno what definition of capitalism you have been given, but draconian copyright laws, government sponsored monopolies and harsh penalties for copying music is about as capitalist as a 5 year plan for production imposed by a central authority.
Lets say a song is about 5 minutes long
20 songs an hour
480 songs per day
175.200 songs per year
17.520.000 songs per century.
That is assuming you don't sleep, that you never listen to the same song twice, and that you never do anything but listen to songs. For music it has been game over for a long time... Movies probably have a decade or so left, but then they are fucked too.
Uhm, some reactors are cooled with liquid sodium, and trust me, you CAN put too much water into those ...
This may be true when it comes to reactor engineering, but when it comes to the fuel cycle pyroreprocessing has been researched actively at ANL and INL even after the muppets shut down the IFR (much of the work on pyroprocessing was allowed to proceed after the IFR shutdown, except for actinide recovery tho this research was latter resumed under the Gen IV initiative as part of the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative program ).
To those not too familiar with it, pyroprocessing is an alternative to aqueous reprocessing of nuclear waste with a few advantages. In particular, since pyroprocessing is based on electrochemical reactions in molten salts rather than organic extraction agents in nitric acid, it doesn't use any water and thus doesn't produce liquid waste. Thus in contrast to the British and French reprocessing plants a pyroprocessing plant wouldn't have to discharge any radioactive water into the sea, instead the salt and fission products is immobilized into a zeolite, forming a ceramic that can be disposed in geological repositories.
Furthermore, pyroprocessing can recover more than 99% of the long lived actinide wastes (performance reported 2007 ), and if you destroy those in fast breeders you are left with waste that decays to uranium levels of radioactivity within a few hundred years, meaning a repository like yucca mountain could easily be more or less guaranteed to contain it long enough.
Finally, if you did use breeders in conjunction with pyroprocessing then simply the amount of uranium left in the nuclear waste from previous reactors would be sufficient for hundreds of years of current energy consumption, thus eliminating the need for uranium mining, enrichment and a second waste repository.
There has been some political opposition to advanced nuclear technologies, but with Oil set to breach $200 a barrel by the end of the year, and with both presidential candidates open for developing new nuclear technology, it appears likely that this research will continue for some time.
Actually they weren't. The explosion destroyed the reactor lid and parts of the reactor building but didn't cause much damage to the plant's control room. It was mainly radioactive particles emitted during the subsequent meltdown that killed people.
Oh no, it's not unconstitutional, we just make private companies do it... FUCK THIS. If this thing goes through it is literary time to take to the streets.
The chemical diagnostic data is damn important because it may determine things like corrosion rates and the amount of impurities circulating in the water, potentials for clogs etc... As with all other software, occasionally errors occur, and the appropriate way to respond when it does is to shutdown and blow some whistles as to ensure that the reactor is brought into a safe state before something else goes wrong. This is one of those cases where "Better safe than sorry" is a really rather good motto.
Funny, a friend of mine had a similar experience with XP SP2 the other day. After it fell over he tried to reinstall it. Turns out windows didn't include the drivers for his network card, sound card, video card etc... and since this is a a rather old box he couldn't find the CDs with all the drivers on them. Kinda sucks when you can't get on the net to search for them. Anyway, I gave him an Ubuntu CD and it booted fine , got him on the internet without installing a thing, and allowed him to download the drivers he needed to his ipod (the guy is addicted to his windows games ). After 48 hours since the first attempt at installing windows he had his system back up an running, with a little help from ubuntu.
Of course he probably has a couple of pets on the thing now seeing that it took him quite a while to even get it into a state where it would accept updates and we all have external IPs.
For reference, on the latest Ubuntu I have my 3D acceleration ( on both screens ) and wireless on the laptop out of the box. My main gripe is the flash plugin for firefox crashing every now and then, but I'm guessing that is really adobe's fault.
Is the amount of data continuously using a 5mbps line for 30 days would generate (ok ok, I used 1000 rather than 1024 as the base because I'm lazy, sue me ). So I guess it is ok if they meter access as long as it doesn't cost more per megabyte than the equivalent cost of a 5mbps line operating constantly for 30 days. Somehow I expect their rates to be just a tiny bit higher.
There is only one cryptography scheme with proven secrecy, and that is the one time pad. Even if you assume no errors occur in its implementation, no physicist can guarantee there will never be discovered a way to eavesdrop on transmissions that use Quantum Cryptography. In contrast with the one time pad a Mathematician can more or less prove, at least to the extent you can prove anything at all, that eavesdropping is only possible if the implementation is flawed.
In practice none of this is relevant since the hassles associated with correctly implementing either QC or a OTP are sufficiently large that for most applications they are both inferior to public key cryptography and symmetric ciphers. There are some exceptions, but the only way you could possibly justify describing quantum cryptography as "the most secure way to transmit data" would be by ignoring so many aspects of information security that it will have no relevance to practical applications.
Equally bullshit. His polywell design wouldn't need any fusion if his claims were correct since it violates the second law of thermodynamics and could hence be used to build a perpetum mobile machine. In particular Bussard claimed that the monoenergetic velocity distribution in the plasma was periodically restored without input of energy. While his device was not a closed system, it can be shown that for such a phenomena to occur the device needs to lose an amount of energy related to the entropy reduction of the plasma ( a mono energetic energy distribution is the lowest entropy distribution possible ). This holds for ALL systems, not just closed ones. As an example, rather chaotic water is able to freeze into a very ordered ice cube by giving up some heat to the surroundings. What this means in practice is that maintaining a non-maxwellian ion distribution in a plasma requires energy. This holds for ANY plasma no matter how it is contained, and the amount of energy needed is given by how rapidly the entropy would increase without an energy input. As it turns out the cross section for fusion is rather small, even at the resonance energy Bussard was claiming to utilize, and it turns out that maintaining the non-maxwellian velocity distribution would require more energy than you could ever get from teh fusion reaction. A couple of notes:
a)This is true for ANY fusion scheme using the p-B reaction in a mono energetic velocity distribution. Even in a head on collision the chance for scattering is so much higher than the chance of fusion that restoring the monoenergetic distribution will require more energy.
b)This does NOT assume that the plasma is quasi-neutral, isotropic or anything like that. The conclusion follows directly from the ratio between the fusion cross section, the scattering cross section and the laws of thermodynamics.
c)It doesn't apply to thermal plasmas since they are at maximum entropy for their temperature. This is why it doesn't apply to Tokamaks, hydrogen bombs, or the Sun.
Bussard and his followers used to respond to this criticism by claiming whoever had come up with it had ignored some of the features of his design, or that they didn't properly understand it or some other similar claim. In reality it doesn't depend on his design. If the second law of thermodynamics is correct, and if the cross section for fusion is much smaller than the cross section for simple scattering ( and it is , even at resonance energies ) then maintaining a non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require more energy than p-B fusion produces.
As always when these discussions come up you hear a bunch of "but what if it works, the benefits would be enormous". The problem with this type of logic is of course that it can be applied to ANY claim which promises great returns, no matter how patently absurd it is. Alchemy, perpetual motion, alternative medicine, intelligent design... etc... If you just promise big enough implications for your "science" and make the explanation sound complicated enough that people don't understand it, you will always have some suckers going "Even if there is just a 0.1% chance it works, the benefits will be a quazillion dollars." This is how these crackpots get their supporters, and as usual they will yell they are being suppressed and compare themselves to Galileo, Einstein or Boltzmann when anybody from the "dogmatic scientific establishment" (i.e anybody who actually has a clue about the subject ) points out it is bullshit.
Oh, and slash dot will give them front page publicity.
Come on people, lets start using that tag where it is actually applicable. :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y
Nonsense, the main problem is that popular media doesn't think science is interesting enough to sell papers, and hence they "spice it up a bit" by giving attention to doomsayers and conspiracy theorists.
I would argue that the following is pretty much known:
a)We emit a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere
b)If we continue to do so this it will cause significant warming of the planet
c)It will likely be a lot easier to reduce emissions that to adapt to changes they could cause
What is not clear is just how large consequences our emissions will have, it is not completely clear how rapidly problems will start to arise if we do nothing, and it is not completely clear what the best ways to reduce emissions are. However, I would argue that most of the people that try to argue that we do not need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions are either basing their arguments on a gross misrepresentation of what we do know, are banking their hopes on a rather small probability of a rather solid theory being wrong, or simply don't know what they are talking about.
By all means there are uncertainties in climate science, but anybody who will seriously argue that we shouldn't try to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions has either not done his homework properly, or has nefarious motives.
Well the main difference would be that the people with respiratory problems would be right. Government failures to properly address air pollution is hurting all of us, and unlike the anti-wifi nutjobs people with respiratory problems would actually be able to back up their claims with sound well documented and close to universally accepted science. I don't think you will find many doctors who does agree that air pollution in cities significantly hurt the people living there.
Considering the fields in them are strong enough to propel a paper clip to lethal speeds over a distance of a few meters, while the earth's magnetic field can barely turn a compass needle, I dunno what this is supposed to prove. Having said that, I very much doubt it is the magnetic field you feel. MRI machines are more than merely a magnet and for all we know you might just be reacting to sound,vibrations,the ventilation system etc...
Typical molecular binding energies are on the order of electron volts. The energy barrier hydrogen isotopes must overcome to fuse is on the order of 10000 electron volts. While there are ways to reduce this barrier, simply putting the atoms in a crystal lattice seem unlikely, given that the electrostatic forces needed to overcome the barrier would tear apart the atoms of every known material.
One method of cold fusion which does work is to inject muons into the sample. Muons are like electrons, but significantly heavier. Their negative charge in combination with their large mass causes the nuclei of Deuterium molecules to move close enough to one another that quantum tunneling becomes a strong possibility and the nuclei eventually fuse. Unfortunately you lose a lot of muons either through radioactive decay ( muons are radioactive ) or because they get trapped by the positively charged helium nucleus produced. Consequentially you end up spending more energy to produce the muons than the fusion reaction produces.
Finally I like to add that achieving fusion is not very hard. The potentials required are only a few thousand volts, and desktop neutron sources based on fusion reactions have been available for decades. Heck, it is simple enough that hobbyists have built their own fusion devices. The difficulty is to get the fusion reaction to produce more energy than you need to sustain it.
Sold in tax free: Razor blades, Matches, Vodka in glass bottles, Propane propelled deodorant, etc...
Confiscated in security: Nail scissors, tweezers, liquid volumes exceeding 100ml
Allowed through security (personal experience ): candles, multiple liquid containers at 100ml each, litres of liquids that are inside a sealed plastic bag with a pwetty picture on it... etc..
This is even past the stage of security theater, it is damn obvious its primary purpose is to allow the airports to sell more stuff once you are past the security clearance.
I was under the impression that at least some CPUs can detect temperature and adjust their clock frequency accordingly, thus meaning that they simply slow down if overheating. Is this insufficient to deal with the loss of the entire heatsink or am I missing something? I would have expected that there were mechanisms which kick in to prevent damage at elevated temperatures, even if it means simply shutting down. Maybe it is a consequence of studying nuclear physics but personally I would argue that a device should at least make an attempt to detect anomalous conditions and take measures to minimize damage. I guess it could make sense if the consequences of a chip going down due to lost cooling would exceed the cost of replacing it, but to be honest you probably want to alter your design if you have a plausible probability of such a situation.
I said 4X WIND POWER costs. Not current power costs. Britain's Royal Academy of Engineering estimates the cost of wind power at roughly 3 times that of nuclear, so even if you achieve 90% efficiency that would put you at roughly twice the cost of nuclear generation ( assuming 15% efficiency for present cells ). Now, to give an idea of how hard 90% efficiency would be to reach, the Sun's average surface temperature is 5778K , meaning a solar cell at 300K could at best reach 95% efficiency without violating the laws of thermodynamics.
That is, ignoring ANY other problems you are closing in on the theoretical limits allowed by the laws of physics if you are to get such efficiencies, and you have to do this without increasing the costs of your cells. Any dust on the cells and you can forget it. Protective glass coating is a no-no since it would absorb in the UV range. Heck, simply finding a material that is reasonably transparent at all the relevant wavelengths could be tricky. Add in to this that you cannot use any expensive/toxic/rare elements, that the cells should have to last for a long time, that they should survive a wide range of temperatures and be able to handle a reasonable level of abuse, and it becomes far from certain that it is even possible to reach 80% efficiency, let alone to do so in the foreseeable future.
If I am not completely mistaken "classical" semi conductor cells can reach efficiencies of 40%, meaning that even with perfect 100% efficiency you would get at best a factor 2.5 improvement. Of course, 100% efficiency is an impossibility and thus I think we can safely assume that these cells will never reach more than 80%-90% efficiency, which would be an improvement of a factor of 2 over current technology. Now last estimate I saw was that in Europe solar cells work out to be about 4 times as expensive as wind power (which is itself rather pricey ), so even assuming the 100% efficiency, efficiency gains alone cannot make solar economical.
Add in to this that a large part of the cost of solar is the energy needed to produce the cells, which means that if you get that energy from a more expensive power source, the price of the cells will increase. I.e, if one started to replace relatively cheap generation capacity with more expensive solar cells, then the cost of energy, and hence the cost of the cells, would increase.
It would therefore appear to me that for solar to have a chance to become competitive what is needed is focus on lowering the cost of producing the cells, because the gains from improving their efficiency cannot offset their presently large price, and it appears unlikely that pushing for higher and higher efficiencies will be possible without making the cells more expensive.
Time to start using it... Even if you just sign your own certificates, thus making the whole thing completely vulnerable to man in the middle attacks, these ISPs would be guilty of rather serious violations of cybercrime laws if they started sending your clients fake SSL certificates. I.e, if you just want to prevent the ISP from doing this you don't even need a secure session, you just need one they can't interfere with without incriminating themselves.
In a system where the sender initiates information transfer ( such as in e-mail) you have the following problem:
"If you want everybody to to be able to contact you, then you will receive information you do not want."
Conversely, if you have a system where the recipient requests information ( such as for web-pages ) then you have the following problem:
"I you want everybody to be able to get information about yourself, then people you don't like could collect information about you."
There's no way around these very simple facts, the best you can do is to change what you expect from the service. As an example e-mail spam would be rapidly defeated if you limited yourself to only receive information from sources you have approved in advance, but that is to limited for most people. Because we want our friends to be able to give our e-mail addresses to their friends if they have something nice to tell us. Therefore we will get e-mails we don't want. If you want to change this you have to either change your expectations of what e-mail should do, or you have to change the behavior of people sending out spam. The easiest way to do the latter is to penalize business who do it.
Ok, this is nonsense. There is a license incompatibility, yes, but it is because BOTH licenses make requirements the other does not fullfill, not just the GPL. In other words , the license of ZFS does not permit using it in Linux because the GPL does not fullfill the requirements of the CDDL. SIMULATENOUSLY the GPL does not permit combining Linux with ZFS because the CDDL does not fullfill the requirements of the GPL.
There are a lot of trolls here who try to interpret this as the FSF the GPL being fanatic and Sun and the CDDL being more reasonable, the reality is that the the incompatibility arises from similar terms that exist in both licenses, namely that you cannot impose any further restrictions on derived works. Since the set of restrictions in two licenses differ they are incompatible. So basically, if you are going to consider this "a problem caused by teh GPL" then it is as much "a problem caused by the CDDL" and vice versa.
Of course bashing the GPL on slashdot is a lot more fun, but the boring reality is that both Sun and Linus have picked a license of their choice, and they turned out to be incompatible. It is either the fault of both parties or neither. You can't have your cake and eat it.