One thing I've wondered about is how these systems work when it is cloudy. Does the LASER operate at wavelengths that aren't affected much, is it simply powerful enough to create its own path through, or can you simply not use it when it is cloudy ? I guess I'm not sure what altitude the rockets in question get to, it may be possible to shoot them down before / after they go above the cloud cover...
Or... actively seek them out and install Ubuntu. These days it is actually possible to get a laptop with all hardware supported by open source drivers ( well except the BIOS I guess ) and depending on where you live, without the Microsoft tax.
The main issue with battery technology is not amount of charge held ( there are already electric cars that can get a similar range as petrol ones ), but the batteries that have a good enough performance are very expensive and wear out after a number of years. It also takes quite a while to recharge. If super capacitors can obtain a longer lifetime then the economics may look more attractive and they also have the advantage that the recharge time is more or less limited by the rate at which you can deliver energy, rather than the performance of the storage system.
I'm a self proclaimed British Media Expert, and I can hereby announce that a credible source has revealed to me that 85% of artists think privacy and free speech is more important than profit.
Sorry, but based on previous events "media lawyer" is not something which smells particularly credible.
That makes the assumption that you can't do both. Why wouldn't you be able to do both?
Because eventually the cost will hit the point where it exceeds what it would cost you in productivity/performance to just use a less power hungry computer.
So as a society, we will at some point have to face the realization that we cannot provide the highest quality healthcare to every member of our society, no matter how hard we try.
Strawman, nobody here is seriously believing that you can offer all healthcare free of charge and nobody paying for it. When people speak about universal healthcare they are speaking of a system where everybody is required to make a contribution in the form of taxes, and people are treated based on their medical need. Yes, this effectively means that the healthy are working for the benefit of the sick. I'm sure the idea of forcing people to help take care of those less fortunate is an alien idea to many Americans, but over here in Sweden we consider it common sense.
He never claimed it was, you made that strawman. What the GP DID claim was that if you are in a position where you are unable to comprehend the actual science ( as most people probably are ) then it is more rational to trust a vast majority of climate scientists, peer reviewed articles in scientific journals, and our national institutions, than Joe Blogger making a random claim without backing it up at all.
With regards to how large the consensus about global warming is... well, all science will have disputed points, always, even gravity ( yes , we are not completely certain how gravity works ) but this doesn't mean that you can't have an overwhelmingly large consensus that a certain phenomena is real, and while you will likely find that climate scientists may disagree about the effects of global warming, it will be about things along the lines of "will it take 20 years or 100 years to get X degrees of warming?" or "will sea levels rise 1m or 10m within the next 100 years?" what very few scientists question is that human emissions of CO2 have an impact upon the climate, and that these effects are in many cases going to cause quite severe damage. Sea level rise alone is enough to justify a sentence along the lines of "There is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that anthropogenic CO2 emissions will cause severe damage to ecosystems and human populations across the globe.".
My main point is that, yes, there are disputed features of global warming, but these are about finer points. That human CO2 emissions will cause widespread damage across the globe is doubted by a VERY tiny minority of climate scientists.
Neutron-absorbers in the fuel had *nothing* to do with this.
The Xenon is what prevents you from starting the reactor once the grid problem has been fixed. Thus while the reactors had nothing to do with the cause of the shutdown, they can't simply be restarted the moment the problem is gone, you have to wait for several hours or even a day. The time period depends a bit on the precise reactor type, and some can be safely restarted without waiting for Xenon to decay. I don't know about the specific reactors in question, so I can't tell if this was an issue or not.
If I'm not mistaken the British are not trying to make ISPs combat p2p traffic, they are trying to make them clamp down on copyright infringement. The fact that the two are different is of course why the law is absurd. There will be no way for the ISPs to confirm that copyright infringement has taken place without essentially logging all of their traffic (and even then it doesn't help if the transfer is encrypted ). Thus the law would effectively force the ISPs to cut the connection of people based on mere allegations from third parties, which would in turn make them potentially liable if wrongly accused people were to go to court. Essentially the law would put ISPs in a "damned if you do , damned if you don't" situation, and this has nothing to do with the protocol, it is a consequence of a law which effectively forces the ISPs to break the law in order to follow it.
A fair share of gamers doesn't either. Unless you are overly concerned about playing the latest game on highest graphics settings you can usually get away with a fairly modest system, and not all games are memory-hogging monsters that require beefed up hardware. After all, why would game publishers set their system requirements out of reach of 90% of the PC owners? Blizzard has quite a tradition of making their games playable on modest hardware ( albeit with lower graphics settings ) to mention an example. This is going to continue since quite a lot of the processing power needed for modern games is in the graphics, and in many games it is often easy to make the most high-end eye-candy optional.
Actually there's plenty to see. If they are actively disabling 3rd party software against which they compete, then they are making themselves very guilty of anti-trust violations. My guess is the EC will not be very happy about this.
Or perhaps University IT departments know better than to install an update on 200 computers before testing it to check that it works on their hardware ?
They are opening themselves up to lawsuits involving Data protection, Copyright infringement, Libel... Then imagine when they break the functionality of a site ( yes "when" not "if" ) that will be a hefty lawsuit right there. Then there is the issue of them incriminating themselves by demonstrating that they can alter the data they serve users, legal responsibility with regards to the ads accuracy etc... Somebody somewhere got greedy and decided to look for money inside the can of worms. This ought to be "fun".
For a typical household Laptop --> Router configuration the following is probably the best way to do it:
Laptop with OpenSSH Client --> Horribly insecure wireless protocol --> Router with OpenSSH Server and wired connection.
Set the router to reject/drop wireless connections to everything but the SSH port, same with the laptop, and you're pretty much done for the vast majority of applications. Yes, the encryption slows down your connection, but unless you encrypt the data AT SOME POINT then there is just no way to get a secure wireless transmission due to the very nature of wireless. Granted you could get better speed with a hardware accelerated encryption, but it has the disadvantage of being considerably harder to patch should a vulnerability in the implementation be discovered.
Now just to spell it out: No, you can't avoid doing the key exchange over a trusted channel, regardless of protocol, OpenSSH can't change this, and no other protocol can. Yes, you need to trust whoever supplies the hardware. Yes, you need to secure the physical access to the router / computer or trust whoever manage it to do so. Yes, OpenSSH isn't invulnerable, it may or may not have flaws, but good luck finding a more secure solution that is freely available.
I dare guess that in the vast majority of situations you are more likely to screw things up and make yourself vulnerable if you try some more "innovative" solution than if you just use SSH. Wireless is not a secure medium, SSH is designed to secure communication over insecure channels, it's what it does. It's open , widely scrutinized, and relies on peer reviewed algorithms. Long story short, if SSH isn't good enough for you then you should probably be using a wired connection.
The only major disadvantage I can think of is that SSH may be a bit tricky to set up for the typical user. The solution then is to create a nice cuddly fronted which guides the user through the process. I.e: "Hi, to secure your connection please choose a passphrase. Good passphrases are... blah blah blah" "Please use the suplied CAT5E cable to connect your Laptop to your router." "Congratulations, your router is now ready to accept secure wireless connections from your laptop."
The catch to this scheme is that you do at some point need to make a secure physical connection between the router and the laptop. This could be avoided by pre-loading every router with a key based on its serial number or something, but this is obviously less secure ( thou perhaps insignificantly so ).
Fuel cells is not what will drive demand for hydrogen. Instead CO2 neutral ways to produce ammonia, which is used to create fertilizer and a huge variety of compounds used to produce pharmaceuticals will be driving alternative means of generating hydrogen. As prices of natural gas rise producing fertilizer and drugs will get increasingly more expensive, and that will hit the poor of the world very hard unless alternative hydrogen sources are found. It is a particularly interesting application of wind power and solar since their intermittent nature is much less of a problem than it would be for electricity generation. The main question is if it can be economically competitive with thermochemical hydrogen production from nuclear reactors. Of course, there is no reason ( except cost ) why you can't use both, and chances are we will have to if we are to meet demand.
Given how much Microsoft is breaking their backwards compatibility at the moment using Linux + wine may not necessarily be much more difficult than getting a Vista box running comfortably. It depends a lot on what your needs are.
And you just now demonstrated that some education on the matter could be useful, in particular:
a)We have direct satellite measurements of incoming / outgoing radiation , and it coincides nicely with CO2's absortion spectrum.
b)We have detailed records of how much CO2 we emit, which in combination with C-14 data from the Bomb-peak ( nuclear testing during the 60ies produced a lot of C-14 which has been latter absorbed into the oceans ) confirm that we are to blame ( Fossil carbon contains virtually no C-14 since it decays radioactively , hence the C12/C14 ratio provides the information we need ).
c)We have direct measurements of solar irradiation and temperatures have been increasing AT AN ACCELERATING RATE even while solar output was going down.
d)The oceans are getting more acidic due to CO2 being dissolved into them, they are net absorbers of CO2 and the C-14 following the bomb peak confirms they act as a CO2 sinks, not sources.
e)We have detailed records of the amount of fossil fuels we have consumed, so we know how much we put into the atmosphere.
f)Geological data in combination with analysis of C12/C14 and the records of our CO2 emissions confirm that Volcanic activity is very small compared to our emissions.
So well, besides the fact that all physics and chemistry suggests our CO2 emissions should cause warming , and besides the fact that temperature increases do correlate to greenhouse gas emissions, we have direct measurements of the radiation going in and the radiation going out. The CO2 absorption spectrum is readily visible. Now, care to explain in what sense we don't know what is causing the warming ? I.e, what possible other explanation could there be taking into consideration that solar variation, shifts in the earth's orbit, oceans releasing CO2 and volcanic activity have all been ruled out ?
I don't know how you got modded insightful, but presumably people who believe "An inconvenient truth" summarizes all of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change actually do believe that all climate scientists are going on is correlations in two graphs. In reality we have direct measurements of the most relevant parameters, ranging from CO2's absorption spectrum and C-14 concentrations to minor shifts in the earth's orbit. At the end of the day no plausible alternative theory has been suggested that holds up to scrutiny, yet you still hear people blaming the sun even thou the rate of temperature rise keeps accelerating despite of decreasing incoming solar radiation. Please note the second derivative... it's not just that temperatures are rising , thermal inertia could explain that, they are doing so at an accelerating rate, which rules out changes in solar flux as a cause since they have been going down even during periods where warming accelerated.
There are a couple of differences between license plates and this.
a)The license plates are clearly visible, while the printer code is intended to be unnoticeable by the user. I.e, most users don't even know they are being tracked.
b)When you drive your car you are using public infrastructure, such as the roads. In many countries there is no obligation to have license plates on a car you only use in a private space.
c) The license plate identifies one particular car, not [necessarily] the factory that made it. The printer code identifies the printer, not the paper it is on.
I'm sure there is more, but clearly the parent post is just another example that car analogies suck.
At which point one of you guys ought to push it to the European Court of human rights. It has struck down bad laws in England (and other countries ) before and it can do so again. Violating the spirit of human rights is one thing, ignoring an actual judgment by the European court of human rights is quite another.
The thing people don't realize with particle physics is that we are constantly bombarded by VASTLY higher energy particles than any of our accelerators can ever manage to produce. If there was even a minor possibility that particle collisions ( and yes, that includes bosons ) could destroy the planet then we would already be doomed from the vast quantity of cosmic rays that are hitting the earth's surface all the time. Basically whenever you hear about scientists trying to do some high energy particle physics collision, or similar high energy physics experiment, it is almost certain that the same type of reaction has occurred somewhere in the earth's atmosphere several times before. Since we are still here it is unlikely such research should be dangerous.
It failed because basing an economic system on extrapolation of a populist catch-phrase is retarded. This is the problem with political ideologies. They take note of one issue, make a naive suggestion for how one can magically solve it by changing the system, and then the same solution is applied to every damn problem which has fuck all to do with it. That's how privatization becomes the answer to everything for capitalists. It's how re-nationalization becomes the answer to everything for the communist, it is how "small government" becomes the answer to all problems for the libertarian, and it is how reducing our consumption becomes the answer to everything for the environmentalists.
The real world is more complicated than that so pushing your economic system to force it into line with some naive ideology is doomed to fail.
Lovely. Let us all see what those running costs are for an actual existing plant and name it please. None of the nuclear advocates on this site have known enough about their topic to actually know the "simple facts", but perhaps this time they'll be a little more than handwaving and distractions.
Your question is impossible to answer because variable costs are measured over a plants lifetime and thus they are strictly speaking not defined for any plant that is still operating. Many costs ( repairs, refueling , service, etc.. ) occur at discrete moments, and their magnitude changes as a plant ages, and thus the life-cycle variable costs are not completely determined until the plant is decomissioned. As a consequence every quotation of such costs for plants that are still operating ( or about to be built ) is a best estimate based on the experience at hand.
If we were to answer your question by taking the costs incurred by a plant up until today and average it over the time it has been in service the estimate would likely be too low because more repairs are necessary towards the end of its life. Similarly if we were to take the variable costs associated with a plant that has already been decommissioned then the estimate would be too high because technology has improved over the years. Your question is similar to the problem of estimating how long it will take to download a file. You can't answer it with certainty until after the file has been downloaded, because you don't know what will happen to your download speed before it is done. What you CAN do is to make a reasonable estimate based on previous based on previous experience and the knowledge at hand. This is the estimates that are quoted in most reports ( among others the one I gave above ).
Now, I don't expect you to accept this answer, because I've seen you argue this point before only to reject every reply you get when you don't like it, but simply put there is no way to know the life-cycle variable costs of ANY power source until after it has been decommissioned, and that is not something that applies merely to nuclear, it applies to Solar, Wave, Coal etc... Call it hand waving if you really want to, I still think you are just trying to use a bullshit argument to reject widely published figures that you personally dislike. To the best of our knowledge, the life-cycle costs of Nuclear power plants are lower than those of competing energy sources. Now if you don't trust organizations like the RAE or IEA then that is one thing, but don't try to pretend that nobody has told you about this, because it isn't the first time it is spelled out for you.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I've wondered about is how these systems work when it is cloudy. Does the LASER operate at wavelengths that aren't affected much, is it simply powerful enough to create its own path through, or can you simply not use it when it is cloudy ? I guess I'm not sure what altitude the rockets in question get to, it may be possible to shoot them down before / after they go above the cloud cover...
Or... actively seek them out and install Ubuntu. These days it is actually possible to get a laptop with all hardware supported by open source drivers ( well except the BIOS I guess ) and depending on where you live, without the Microsoft tax.
The main issue with battery technology is not amount of charge held ( there are already electric cars that can get a similar range as petrol ones ), but the batteries that have a good enough performance are very expensive and wear out after a number of years. It also takes quite a while to recharge. If super capacitors can obtain a longer lifetime then the economics may look more attractive and they also have the advantage that the recharge time is more or less limited by the rate at which you can deliver energy, rather than the performance of the storage system.
Just who is "UK media lawyers Wiggin" ?
I'm a self proclaimed British Media Expert, and I can hereby announce that a credible source has revealed to me that 85% of artists think privacy and free speech is more important than profit.
Sorry, but based on previous events "media lawyer" is not something which smells particularly credible.
Because eventually the cost will hit the point where it exceeds what it would cost you in productivity/performance to just use a less power hungry computer.
Strawman, nobody here is seriously believing that you can offer all healthcare free of charge and nobody paying for it. When people speak about universal healthcare they are speaking of a system where everybody is required to make a contribution in the form of taxes, and people are treated based on their medical need. Yes, this effectively means that the healthy are working for the benefit of the sick. I'm sure the idea of forcing people to help take care of those less fortunate is an alien idea to many Americans, but over here in Sweden we consider it common sense.
The movie industry just shat a brick.
He never claimed it was, you made that strawman. What the GP DID claim was that if you are in a position where you are unable to comprehend the actual science ( as most people probably are ) then it is more rational to trust a vast majority of climate scientists, peer reviewed articles in scientific journals, and our national institutions, than Joe Blogger making a random claim without backing it up at all.
With regards to how large the consensus about global warming is... well, all science will have disputed points, always, even gravity ( yes , we are not completely certain how gravity works ) but this doesn't mean that you can't have an overwhelmingly large consensus that a certain phenomena is real, and while you will likely find that climate scientists may disagree about the effects of global warming, it will be about things along the lines of "will it take 20 years or 100 years to get X degrees of warming?" or "will sea levels rise 1m or 10m within the next 100 years?" what very few scientists question is that human emissions of CO2 have an impact upon the climate, and that these effects are in many cases going to cause quite severe damage. Sea level rise alone is enough to justify a sentence along the lines of "There is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that anthropogenic CO2 emissions will cause severe damage to ecosystems and human populations across the globe.".
My main point is that, yes, there are disputed features of global warming, but these are about finer points. That human CO2 emissions will cause widespread damage across the globe is doubted by a VERY tiny minority of climate scientists.
The Xenon is what prevents you from starting the reactor once the grid problem has been fixed. Thus while the reactors had nothing to do with the cause of the shutdown, they can't simply be restarted the moment the problem is gone, you have to wait for several hours or even a day. The time period depends a bit on the precise reactor type, and some can be safely restarted without waiting for Xenon to decay. I don't know about the specific reactors in question, so I can't tell if this was an issue or not.
If I'm not mistaken the British are not trying to make ISPs combat p2p traffic, they are trying to make them clamp down on copyright infringement. The fact that the two are different is of course why the law is absurd. There will be no way for the ISPs to confirm that copyright infringement has taken place without essentially logging all of their traffic (and even then it doesn't help if the transfer is encrypted ). Thus the law would effectively force the ISPs to cut the connection of people based on mere allegations from third parties, which would in turn make them potentially liable if wrongly accused people were to go to court. Essentially the law would put ISPs in a "damned if you do , damned if you don't" situation, and this has nothing to do with the protocol, it is a consequence of a law which effectively forces the ISPs to break the law in order to follow it.
A fair share of gamers doesn't either. Unless you are overly concerned about playing the latest game on highest graphics settings you can usually get away with a fairly modest system, and not all games are memory-hogging monsters that require beefed up hardware. After all, why would game publishers set their system requirements out of reach of 90% of the PC owners? Blizzard has quite a tradition of making their games playable on modest hardware ( albeit with lower graphics settings ) to mention an example. This is going to continue since quite a lot of the processing power needed for modern games is in the graphics, and in many games it is often easy to make the most high-end eye-candy optional.
Actually there's plenty to see. If they are actively disabling 3rd party software against which they compete, then they are making themselves very guilty of anti-trust violations. My guess is the EC will not be very happy about this.
Or perhaps University IT departments know better than to install an update on 200 computers before testing it to check that it works on their hardware ?
They are opening themselves up to lawsuits involving Data protection, Copyright infringement, Libel ... Then imagine when they break the functionality of a site ( yes "when" not "if" ) that will be a hefty lawsuit right there. Then there is the issue of them incriminating themselves by demonstrating that they can alter the data they serve users, legal responsibility with regards to the ads accuracy etc... Somebody somewhere got greedy and decided to look for money inside the can of worms. This ought to be "fun".
For a typical household Laptop --> Router configuration the following is probably the best way to do it:
Laptop with OpenSSH Client --> Horribly insecure wireless protocol --> Router with OpenSSH Server and wired connection.
Set the router to reject/drop wireless connections to everything but the SSH port, same with the laptop, and you're pretty much done for the vast majority of applications. Yes, the encryption slows down your connection, but unless you encrypt the data AT SOME POINT then there is just no way to get a secure wireless transmission due to the very nature of wireless. Granted you could get better speed with a hardware accelerated encryption, but it has the disadvantage of being considerably harder to patch should a vulnerability in the implementation be discovered.
Now just to spell it out: No, you can't avoid doing the key exchange over a trusted channel, regardless of protocol, OpenSSH can't change this, and no other protocol can. Yes, you need to trust whoever supplies the hardware. Yes, you need to secure the physical access to the router / computer or trust whoever manage it to do so. Yes, OpenSSH isn't invulnerable, it may or may not have flaws, but good luck finding a more secure solution that is freely available.
I dare guess that in the vast majority of situations you are more likely to screw things up and make yourself vulnerable if you try some more "innovative" solution than if you just use SSH. Wireless is not a secure medium, SSH is designed to secure communication over insecure channels, it's what it does. It's open , widely scrutinized, and relies on peer reviewed algorithms. Long story short, if SSH isn't good enough for you then you should probably be using a wired connection.
The only major disadvantage I can think of is that SSH may be a bit tricky to set up for the typical user. The solution then is to create a nice cuddly fronted which guides the user through the process. I.e:
"Hi, to secure your connection please choose a passphrase. Good passphrases are... blah blah blah"
"Please use the suplied CAT5E cable to connect your Laptop to your router."
"Congratulations, your router is now ready to accept secure wireless connections from your laptop."
The catch to this scheme is that you do at some point need to make a secure physical connection between the router and the laptop. This could be avoided by pre-loading every router with a key based on its serial number or something, but this is obviously less secure ( thou perhaps insignificantly so ).
Fuel cells is not what will drive demand for hydrogen. Instead CO2 neutral ways to produce ammonia, which is used to create fertilizer and a huge variety of compounds used to produce pharmaceuticals will be driving alternative means of generating hydrogen. As prices of natural gas rise producing fertilizer and drugs will get increasingly more expensive, and that will hit the poor of the world very hard unless alternative hydrogen sources are found. It is a particularly interesting application of wind power and solar since their intermittent nature is much less of a problem than it would be for electricity generation. The main question is if it can be economically competitive with thermochemical hydrogen production from nuclear reactors. Of course, there is no reason ( except cost ) why you can't use both, and chances are we will have to if we are to meet demand.
On fedora Office 2003 got a platium / gold rating in wine: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=3214
Photoshop also has a few platinum and gold ratings: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=17
Quickbooks doesn't seem to work well.
Given how much Microsoft is breaking their backwards compatibility at the moment using Linux + wine may not necessarily be much more difficult than getting a Vista box running comfortably. It depends a lot on what your needs are.
And you just now demonstrated that some education on the matter could be useful, in particular:
a)We have direct satellite measurements of incoming / outgoing radiation , and it coincides nicely with CO2's absortion spectrum.
b)We have detailed records of how much CO2 we emit, which in combination with C-14 data from the Bomb-peak ( nuclear testing during the 60ies produced a lot of C-14 which has been latter absorbed into the oceans ) confirm that we are to blame ( Fossil carbon contains virtually no C-14 since it decays radioactively , hence the C12/C14 ratio provides the information we need ).
c)We have direct measurements of solar irradiation and temperatures have been increasing AT AN ACCELERATING RATE even while solar output was going down.
d)The oceans are getting more acidic due to CO2 being dissolved into them, they are net absorbers of CO2 and the C-14 following the bomb peak confirms they act as a CO2 sinks, not sources.
e)We have detailed records of the amount of fossil fuels we have consumed, so we know how much we put into the atmosphere.
f)Geological data in combination with analysis of C12/C14 and the records of our CO2 emissions confirm that Volcanic activity is very small compared to our emissions.
So well, besides the fact that all physics and chemistry suggests our CO2 emissions should cause warming , and besides the fact that temperature increases do correlate to greenhouse gas emissions, we have direct measurements of the radiation going in and the radiation going out. The CO2 absorption spectrum is readily visible. Now, care to explain in what sense we don't know what is causing the warming ? I.e, what possible other explanation could there be taking into consideration that solar variation, shifts in the earth's orbit, oceans releasing CO2 and volcanic activity have all been ruled out ?
I don't know how you got modded insightful, but presumably people who believe "An inconvenient truth" summarizes all of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change actually do believe that all climate scientists are going on is correlations in two graphs. In reality we have direct measurements of the most relevant parameters, ranging from CO2's absorption spectrum and C-14 concentrations to minor shifts in the earth's orbit. At the end of the day no plausible alternative theory has been suggested that holds up to scrutiny, yet you still hear people blaming the sun even thou the rate of temperature rise keeps accelerating despite of decreasing incoming solar radiation. Please note the second derivative... it's not just that temperatures are rising , thermal inertia could explain that, they are doing so at an accelerating rate, which rules out changes in solar flux as a cause since they have been going down even during periods where warming accelerated.
There are a couple of differences between license plates and this.
a)The license plates are clearly visible, while the printer code is intended to be unnoticeable by the user. I.e, most users don't even know they are being tracked.
b)When you drive your car you are using public infrastructure, such as the roads. In many countries there is no obligation to have license plates on a car you only use in a private space.
c) The license plate identifies one particular car, not [necessarily] the factory that made it. The printer code identifies the printer, not the paper it is on.
I'm sure there is more, but clearly the parent post is just another example that car analogies suck.
At which point one of you guys ought to push it to the European Court of human rights. It has struck down bad laws in England (and other countries ) before and it can do so again. Violating the spirit of human rights is one thing, ignoring an actual judgment by the European court of human rights is quite another.
The thing people don't realize with particle physics is that we are constantly bombarded by VASTLY higher energy particles than any of our accelerators can ever manage to produce. If there was even a minor possibility that particle collisions ( and yes, that includes bosons ) could destroy the planet then we would already be doomed from the vast quantity of cosmic rays that are hitting the earth's surface all the time. Basically whenever you hear about scientists trying to do some high energy particle physics collision, or similar high energy physics experiment, it is almost certain that the same type of reaction has occurred somewhere in the earth's atmosphere several times before. Since we are still here it is unlikely such research should be dangerous.
It failed because basing an economic system on extrapolation of a populist catch-phrase is retarded. This is the problem with political ideologies. They take note of one issue, make a naive suggestion for how one can magically solve it by changing the system, and then the same solution is applied to every damn problem which has fuck all to do with it. That's how privatization becomes the answer to everything for capitalists. It's how re-nationalization becomes the answer to everything for the communist, it is how "small government" becomes the answer to all problems for the libertarian, and it is how reducing our consumption becomes the answer to everything for the environmentalists.
The real world is more complicated than that so pushing your economic system to force it into line with some naive ideology is doomed to fail.
Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: surprise , chocolate, sprouts... You know what, I'll come in again.
How about:
Competitive solar cells
Economical Fusion power
Your question is impossible to answer because variable costs are measured over a plants lifetime and thus they are strictly speaking not defined for any plant that is still operating. Many costs ( repairs, refueling , service, etc
If we were to answer your question by taking the costs incurred by a plant up until today and average it over the time it has been in service the estimate would likely be too low because more repairs are necessary towards the end of its life. Similarly if we were to take the variable costs associated with a plant that has already been decommissioned then the estimate would be too high because technology has improved over the years. Your question is similar to the problem of estimating how long it will take to download a file. You can't answer it with certainty until after the file has been downloaded, because you don't know what will happen to your download speed before it is done. What you CAN do is to make a reasonable estimate based on previous based on previous experience and the knowledge at hand. This is the estimates that are quoted in most reports ( among others the one I gave above ).
Now, I don't expect you to accept this answer, because I've seen you argue this point before only to reject every reply you get when you don't like it, but simply put there is no way to know the life-cycle variable costs of ANY power source until after it has been decommissioned, and that is not something that applies merely to nuclear, it applies to Solar, Wave, Coal etc