Your name reminds me of a pertinent story. When I was younger I had a midlife crisis. I bought a, then new, Dodge Viper. It was great for a guy who had recently been divorced. Until my kids moved in with me.
Anyhow, it had nothing nor could I order it with anything. It had a number of gauges. It had NO radio - it did not even have a slot to put in a radio nor did it have speaker slots to put speakers. Instead you listened to the engine. And it was beautiful. I paid much more attention to driving in that car than I paid in any other car (and I am a bit of a car buff as is evidenced by my many car stories - I always have a car analogy) and I think the reason for this was the car was just too damned much fun to not pay attention to driving and, secondly, there were no non-function related distractions in the car other than an occasional college chick.
The bad part is that it was my only car and the payments and insurance were pretty intense for that period of my life. I ended up selling it. I kind of wish I had it back again. The kids moved in with me, Daddy has the best toys, and I bought a 9-5 wagon. That car, not the wagon, and I had some great (and scary) times together.
Anyhow, I suspect it is not just HUD that is the problem but distraction that is the problem. You are paying attention when you are doing the Axl Rose Shuffle, on purpose, in a snow storm but you are not paying nearly as much attention when you are cruising down the highway and just passed your 600th mile of driving today. You are also likely paying less attention when you are playing some sort of simulation on a computer, regardless of what the researchers ask of you, because the penalty for failing to notice something is not nearly as high as it is when you are driving. Also, I tend to pay more attention when I am driving too fast or driving off-road. I live in the middle of nowhere so I can get away with it to some extent but I still am much more attentive and even tend to change my driving position before doing so.
I just recently ordered a bespoke 640Li that has ~650 HP and it is not loud, at all. Well, no. It is not built yet. I test drove a similar model (I was quite pleased that they let me take it for a full weekend) that was barely different and it had a beautiful exhaust note and was hardly loud by any stretch. Even when I gave it lots of dead dinosaur guts it was not loud. I did, mostly, obey the speed limits. It is not my vehicle to trash.
The star rating system. You mean like/.'s moderation system? Yeah. That is effective. An obscene proportion of my posts get modded up. I know I did not say that many witty, insightful, informational, or otherwise beneficial posts.
Why the hell would anyone want to win a left testicle? I am not sure we should take advice from you. Your testicle has value only to you and, perhaps, your SO. I mean, really, it is not even a pair of testicles. This is not a bet I would take because I do not want to be the winner. How am I to explain it to the mailman when he delivers a bloody package containing your testicle?
I thought that claim went to Buffet... I was shocked, shocked I say, to learn that the royalties on Margaritaville paid him that much but it goes to show...
One of my favorite yearly activities is coming up. I sometimes do it on Memorial Day but I missed it this year and so I will do it on the 4th of July weekend. I go down to Rangely and go to the public boat landing. I sit there, eat, and usually quietly observe. It is so much fun to watch the idiots try to back their boat trailers into the water... I have seen them jackknife and ruin the boat and cause extensive damage to their vehicles. I love watching this. I go, literally, every year to see it.
Are you certain you want the guy with a midlife crisis, and not someone with experience, driving around with a trailer as often as would likely happen in your scenario? I do... I will enjoy the videos and real-life experiences. I will have a great time watching someone try to parallel park or get through traffic. It will amuse me to no end. However, I am an asshole. Are you certain you really want to see this mayhem? I do, so I support your idea.
I have used their service in the past but I never bought their program. I did some debugging and definitions work with a security company as a lark and have free access to their software. Anyhow, it took a minute to find a code online which I entered (use the ID too) and it offered me a free key after that. It was pretty painless. I will give their monitoring service a try on this laptop and see how it works out. I often do not use real-time AV anyhow.
I do not think anyone is suggesting it as the sole source. What is with people and the assumption that it is an all-or-nothing game? What is the issue with mitigating additional, greater, problems with partial solutions either combined or awaiting further technical developments to make improvements? What is with hoping for a change in the future instead of taking action now to reduce the speed of the coming environmental problems?
There is nobody, at least nobody with the power to do anything, who is advocating a single power distributor. Not one single person... They may be concentrating on one area as a potential solution or as a solution for lessening the immediacy or total effect of environmental catastrophe. That does not mean that they are advocating neglecting other solutions or even recommending that their solution is the only, best, and final solution. Trust me, when all the world's problems are solved you will still be able to find something to complain about. In the meantime, quit complaining and get out of the way so that we can work on mitigating the looming disaster you are hell bent on decrying. Got it? Good... Now get out of the way and stop clouding the conversation with your intellectually dishonest tripe. Some of us are trying to learn and others are trying to solve.
Tidal power has some issues with portability. Much of the United States is not close to the coast and power is lost as over the distances it would need to be transported. (Inverse square law and all that.) Anyhow, this does not detract (in my humble opinion) from your idea. Those same states have a fairly constant wind option and solar options.
Also, one needn't look for a perfect solution that suits everywhere but, rather, a blend of solutions that reduce carbon fuel dependence. Unfortunately some folks seemingly see this as an all-or-nothing scenario and think that if one solution is not effective then no solutions are effective. They also seem to think that if it does not work everywhere and would only reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels that it is not enough and therefor must be skipped as a partial reduction is not a good enough place to start. The various comments, here on this site, that reply how the solutions offered will not fix everything are a good example of this mentality. No, nobody said it would fix everything, it was just a suggestion as to where we might start to alleviate some of the problems.
Finally, it is my understanding that a number of environmental groups are not happy with tidal power as it could, theoretically, disrupt currents, change the wetland ecosystems, and kill fish. I am not sure that any of those are true and I suspect that the folks who complain about this are not going to be satisfied no matter what is done and, if we did solve the issues - all of them that they had, they would simply find another reason to complain. This, of course, does not mean that all of their complaints are unreasonable.
During that period, the U.S. government also built an experimental molten salt reactor using U-233 fuel, the fissile material created by bombarding thorium with neutrons. The reactor, built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, operated critical for roughly 15000 hours from 1965 to 1969.
I may be missing something. I am not an expert and freely admit this. I could also be wrong. Tech from 50 years ago obviously should be improved on before it is put into use, so there may be other compelling reasons to not start with LSTRs ASAP, though I am unaware of any major issues preventing us from doing so. China is betting quite heavily on thorium reactors and seem to be having no issue with them at this time - though none are complete that I am aware of. It seems unlikely that they would be in the production-scale building phase had they not already demonstrated the effectiveness at a smaller scale. Again, I could be mistaken and could be reading something into this that simply is not there. Or, alternatively, you simply are unaware of them and I respect your willingness to include the verbiage, "...I'm aware of..."
Just because you agree with them does not stop them from being regulatory hurdles. The phrase, "regulatory hurdles," carries no inherent bias unless you add one to it. There are regulatory hurdles for automobile manufacturing and they are a good thing. There are regulatory hurdles that must be overcome in order to serve food to the public and this is a good thing. There are regulatory hurdles to creating a nuclear power plant and this is a good thing.
There may be TOO MANY or TOO STRINGENT regulatory hurdles, a subject up for debate, but there are regulatory hurdles (that must be overcome) for most anything in today's world and that, really, is a good thing. Giving your bias to a phrase is not constructive or honest. Your inability to understand words and their meanings does not make your definition the default. You should be ashamed of yourself but I suspect you (and maybe a minority of nitwits) will attempt to argue this. You are free to do so. There are no regulatory hurdles you must overcome in order to delude yourself further.
I am not an expert but I have been forcing myself to read and learn more about LSTRs (Liquid Salt Thorium Reactors) which are really quite harmless and have very low radioactivity (read a very long half-life). Of course people do not really understand radiation, I have a passing layman's knowledge though much higher than the 'average' person would have but I defer to experts and learn a lot, so they think that this can not be done with a reasonable safety risk. The reality is that older systems are much more hazardous but we could, seemingly, make them pretty damned safe now with a couple of different choices.
Given my little knowledge and my observations it seems that LSTRs are the way to go. Thorium was being used in the 50s but they dropped the ball when they decided to go with Uranium instead and little research has been done since then but they had it working way back then as I understand. Educating people and showing that that the risks, even with the old systems, are actually fewer than they are with the other options. Coupled with the fact that nuclear reactors are not going to be releasing a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere there is little justification for not using them other than fear based on ignorance. As for the ignorance, it is not always a bad thing - people just do not know and can not be expected to educate themselves well enough to make sound judgments. Judgments should be made by the NRC and we should rely on them as they are the experts. Obviously they should be subject to criticism and the likes and should take into consideration alternative views...
Anyhow, it's not a simple subject and I do not see much hope for it changing in the near future. One of the great things is that you can go outside, scoop up a single shovelful of dirt, and probably have some thorium in it. Maybe if people realize this they will be more open to the LSTR (or a variation of it) and will be less afraid of it. Maybe they need to be financially motivated as there does not seem to be anyone with environmental motivations actively seeking to change this. "Bring in your shovel of dirt and we will assay it and get back to you. Maybe you can get paid to fuel your local reactor!" No, that would not work. People would try to outlaw dirt. They will think that is what a dirty bomb is and they will claim terrorists are throwing clods of dirt at victims. Think of the children, playing in the dirt...
And not riddled with SEO garbage, intrusive user tracking scripts, obnoxious ads, and other unsavory shit.
WTF? Have you BEEN to any Google-owned pages and, you know, actually looked at the things they contain? They may not contain links to OTHER tracking or unsavory shit sites but they certainly have tracking scripts and tracking cookies. They are not better simply because they are Google. In fact they are probably worse because they are, you know, Google and those same scripts and tracking cookies are on a very large number of other sites which enables them to do those same things you are complaining about as if they are not done by Google. Hell, they are engineered by Google!
Go get Opera and then get Disconnect and NoScript Suite Lite. Grab Ghostery too. You can run all three together just fine. Then poke away at Google. Notice all the blurbs? Pick a random Google page - almost any page will do, from what I have noticed, except the Search page and GMail pages. Hell, if you want a very GOOD example of the sad state of affairs - grab Ghostery and click on the fucking PRIVACY page at Google. Seriously... Google tracking... On their privacy policy page. AdBlock happily announces that it is blocking all sorts of stuff when I do a search at Google. Who knows what else it is blocking - it may be blocking scripts that are now not recognized as being blocked by the other apps.
So, no... Google is just as awful with the tracking scripts (on their PRIVACY POLICY PAGE no less), obnoxious ads (at least they are not blinking and moving ads so I give them credit for that), and other unsavory shit (such as tracking cookies and, I imagine, web beacons). What would have made you think that they were somehow not guilty of these behaviors? They are riddled with these things. I guess you could have said, "Not as riddled." You could have then tried to argue it. You did not say that though so I am using your own verbiage as my source of information and, well, I fail to see how you came to the conclusions you have reached.
I miss Mosaic's gopher search functionality. There is little left to the gopher space. I have checked. Bastards...You are all bastards for killing the gopher.
I think there should be a competition in standards with the resulting best standard being used. That is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. Competition to establish a standard is a good thing assuming the judgment body is unbiased and the end result is the best standard at the time. Standards should compete on their own merit with good proposals being enacted. Why would standardization be based on which one gives a "feel-good" result instead of being based on their merits? Am I missing something here or are you just thinking that standards should be based on the proposals from your favorite companies instead of being based on their merits?
Seriously, please do answer. I tend to get reasonably sane responses from you and this seems unlike your characteristic statements. I suspect that I am missing something and that the something probably isn't, "It is M$ so default evil. Duh!" You are usually more rational about things. So who are you and what did you do with the real 140Mandak, hmm?
1 Where will they go? to some unknown upstart? That goes counter the fact that people in general hate change.
Umm... But... Err.. Erf... Seriously? How, exactly, do you think Google got popular in the first place? I am not sure you thought your clever rebuttal through very well.
Add-ons: Disconnect and Ghostery come to mind. Disconnect is actually suing Google for anti-competitive behavior according to a blurb that popped up when it updated earlier this evening. I did not read more about it. Anyhow, those are two pretty decent choices.
Slashdot Mirror
A bell curve does not work that way.
Your name reminds me of a pertinent story. When I was younger I had a midlife crisis. I bought a, then new, Dodge Viper. It was great for a guy who had recently been divorced. Until my kids moved in with me.
Anyhow, it had nothing nor could I order it with anything. It had a number of gauges. It had NO radio - it did not even have a slot to put in a radio nor did it have speaker slots to put speakers. Instead you listened to the engine. And it was beautiful. I paid much more attention to driving in that car than I paid in any other car (and I am a bit of a car buff as is evidenced by my many car stories - I always have a car analogy) and I think the reason for this was the car was just too damned much fun to not pay attention to driving and, secondly, there were no non-function related distractions in the car other than an occasional college chick.
The bad part is that it was my only car and the payments and insurance were pretty intense for that period of my life. I ended up selling it. I kind of wish I had it back again. The kids moved in with me, Daddy has the best toys, and I bought a 9-5 wagon. That car, not the wagon, and I had some great (and scary) times together.
Anyhow, I suspect it is not just HUD that is the problem but distraction that is the problem. You are paying attention when you are doing the Axl Rose Shuffle, on purpose, in a snow storm but you are not paying nearly as much attention when you are cruising down the highway and just passed your 600th mile of driving today. You are also likely paying less attention when you are playing some sort of simulation on a computer, regardless of what the researchers ask of you, because the penalty for failing to notice something is not nearly as high as it is when you are driving. Also, I tend to pay more attention when I am driving too fast or driving off-road. I live in the middle of nowhere so I can get away with it to some extent but I still am much more attentive and even tend to change my driving position before doing so.
I just recently ordered a bespoke 640Li that has ~650 HP and it is not loud, at all. Well, no. It is not built yet. I test drove a similar model (I was quite pleased that they let me take it for a full weekend) that was barely different and it had a beautiful exhaust note and was hardly loud by any stretch. Even when I gave it lots of dead dinosaur guts it was not loud. I did, mostly, obey the speed limits. It is not my vehicle to trash.
Using instruments doesn't.
They do if you did not reset your altimeter.
The star rating system. You mean like /.'s moderation system? Yeah. That is effective. An obscene proportion of my posts get modded up. I know I did not say that many witty, insightful, informational, or otherwise beneficial posts.
Just a guess but maybe you should not have stopped at the end of that sentence?
Why the hell would anyone want to win a left testicle? I am not sure we should take advice from you. Your testicle has value only to you and, perhaps, your SO. I mean, really, it is not even a pair of testicles. This is not a bet I would take because I do not want to be the winner. How am I to explain it to the mailman when he delivers a bloody package containing your testicle?
Nah, the idiot brother with his mother's last name. The uncool one.
I thought that claim went to Buffet... I was shocked, shocked I say, to learn that the royalties on Margaritaville paid him that much but it goes to show...
One of my favorite yearly activities is coming up. I sometimes do it on Memorial Day but I missed it this year and so I will do it on the 4th of July weekend. I go down to Rangely and go to the public boat landing. I sit there, eat, and usually quietly observe. It is so much fun to watch the idiots try to back their boat trailers into the water... I have seen them jackknife and ruin the boat and cause extensive damage to their vehicles. I love watching this. I go, literally, every year to see it.
Are you certain you want the guy with a midlife crisis, and not someone with experience, driving around with a trailer as often as would likely happen in your scenario? I do... I will enjoy the videos and real-life experiences. I will have a great time watching someone try to parallel park or get through traffic. It will amuse me to no end. However, I am an asshole. Are you certain you really want to see this mayhem? I do, so I support your idea.
I have used their service in the past but I never bought their program. I did some debugging and definitions work with a security company as a lark and have free access to their software. Anyhow, it took a minute to find a code online which I entered (use the ID too) and it offered me a free key after that. It was pretty painless. I will give their monitoring service a try on this laptop and see how it works out. I often do not use real-time AV anyhow.
I do not think anyone is suggesting it as the sole source. What is with people and the assumption that it is an all-or-nothing game? What is the issue with mitigating additional, greater, problems with partial solutions either combined or awaiting further technical developments to make improvements? What is with hoping for a change in the future instead of taking action now to reduce the speed of the coming environmental problems?
There is nobody, at least nobody with the power to do anything, who is advocating a single power distributor. Not one single person... They may be concentrating on one area as a potential solution or as a solution for lessening the immediacy or total effect of environmental catastrophe. That does not mean that they are advocating neglecting other solutions or even recommending that their solution is the only, best, and final solution. Trust me, when all the world's problems are solved you will still be able to find something to complain about. In the meantime, quit complaining and get out of the way so that we can work on mitigating the looming disaster you are hell bent on decrying. Got it? Good... Now get out of the way and stop clouding the conversation with your intellectually dishonest tripe. Some of us are trying to learn and others are trying to solve.
And your qualifications are...?
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/...
They are not right now. They are still protesting. People like them seem to believe that technology stands still.
Tidal power has some issues with portability. Much of the United States is not close to the coast and power is lost as over the distances it would need to be transported. (Inverse square law and all that.) Anyhow, this does not detract (in my humble opinion) from your idea. Those same states have a fairly constant wind option and solar options.
Also, one needn't look for a perfect solution that suits everywhere but, rather, a blend of solutions that reduce carbon fuel dependence. Unfortunately some folks seemingly see this as an all-or-nothing scenario and think that if one solution is not effective then no solutions are effective. They also seem to think that if it does not work everywhere and would only reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels that it is not enough and therefor must be skipped as a partial reduction is not a good enough place to start. The various comments, here on this site, that reply how the solutions offered will not fix everything are a good example of this mentality. No, nobody said it would fix everything, it was just a suggestion as to where we might start to alleviate some of the problems.
Finally, it is my understanding that a number of environmental groups are not happy with tidal power as it could, theoretically, disrupt currents, change the wetland ecosystems, and kill fish. I am not sure that any of those are true and I suspect that the folks who complain about this are not going to be satisfied no matter what is done and, if we did solve the issues - all of them that they had, they would simply find another reason to complain. This, of course, does not mean that all of their complaints are unreasonable.
Ah ... in case you never googled: all thorium reactors I'm aware of failed.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
During that period, the U.S. government also built an experimental molten salt reactor using U-233 fuel, the fissile material created by bombarding thorium with neutrons. The reactor, built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, operated critical for roughly 15000 hours from 1965 to 1969.
I may be missing something. I am not an expert and freely admit this. I could also be wrong. Tech from 50 years ago obviously should be improved on before it is put into use, so there may be other compelling reasons to not start with LSTRs ASAP, though I am unaware of any major issues preventing us from doing so. China is betting quite heavily on thorium reactors and seem to be having no issue with them at this time - though none are complete that I am aware of. It seems unlikely that they would be in the production-scale building phase had they not already demonstrated the effectiveness at a smaller scale. Again, I could be mistaken and could be reading something into this that simply is not there. Or, alternatively, you simply are unaware of them and I respect your willingness to include the verbiage, "...I'm aware of..."
Just because you agree with them does not stop them from being regulatory hurdles. The phrase, "regulatory hurdles," carries no inherent bias unless you add one to it. There are regulatory hurdles for automobile manufacturing and they are a good thing. There are regulatory hurdles that must be overcome in order to serve food to the public and this is a good thing. There are regulatory hurdles to creating a nuclear power plant and this is a good thing.
There may be TOO MANY or TOO STRINGENT regulatory hurdles, a subject up for debate, but there are regulatory hurdles (that must be overcome) for most anything in today's world and that, really, is a good thing. Giving your bias to a phrase is not constructive or honest. Your inability to understand words and their meanings does not make your definition the default. You should be ashamed of yourself but I suspect you (and maybe a minority of nitwits) will attempt to argue this. You are free to do so. There are no regulatory hurdles you must overcome in order to delude yourself further.
I am not an expert but I have been forcing myself to read and learn more about LSTRs (Liquid Salt Thorium Reactors) which are really quite harmless and have very low radioactivity (read a very long half-life). Of course people do not really understand radiation, I have a passing layman's knowledge though much higher than the 'average' person would have but I defer to experts and learn a lot, so they think that this can not be done with a reasonable safety risk. The reality is that older systems are much more hazardous but we could, seemingly, make them pretty damned safe now with a couple of different choices.
Given my little knowledge and my observations it seems that LSTRs are the way to go. Thorium was being used in the 50s but they dropped the ball when they decided to go with Uranium instead and little research has been done since then but they had it working way back then as I understand. Educating people and showing that that the risks, even with the old systems, are actually fewer than they are with the other options. Coupled with the fact that nuclear reactors are not going to be releasing a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere there is little justification for not using them other than fear based on ignorance. As for the ignorance, it is not always a bad thing - people just do not know and can not be expected to educate themselves well enough to make sound judgments. Judgments should be made by the NRC and we should rely on them as they are the experts. Obviously they should be subject to criticism and the likes and should take into consideration alternative views...
Anyhow, it's not a simple subject and I do not see much hope for it changing in the near future. One of the great things is that you can go outside, scoop up a single shovelful of dirt, and probably have some thorium in it. Maybe if people realize this they will be more open to the LSTR (or a variation of it) and will be less afraid of it. Maybe they need to be financially motivated as there does not seem to be anyone with environmental motivations actively seeking to change this. "Bring in your shovel of dirt and we will assay it and get back to you. Maybe you can get paid to fuel your local reactor!" No, that would not work. People would try to outlaw dirt. They will think that is what a dirty bomb is and they will claim terrorists are throwing clods of dirt at victims. Think of the children, playing in the dirt...
And not riddled with SEO garbage, intrusive user tracking scripts, obnoxious ads, and other unsavory shit.
WTF? Have you BEEN to any Google-owned pages and, you know, actually looked at the things they contain? They may not contain links to OTHER tracking or unsavory shit sites but they certainly have tracking scripts and tracking cookies. They are not better simply because they are Google. In fact they are probably worse because they are, you know, Google and those same scripts and tracking cookies are on a very large number of other sites which enables them to do those same things you are complaining about as if they are not done by Google. Hell, they are engineered by Google!
Go get Opera and then get Disconnect and NoScript Suite Lite. Grab Ghostery too. You can run all three together just fine. Then poke away at Google. Notice all the blurbs? Pick a random Google page - almost any page will do, from what I have noticed, except the Search page and GMail pages. Hell, if you want a very GOOD example of the sad state of affairs - grab Ghostery and click on the fucking PRIVACY page at Google. Seriously... Google tracking... On their privacy policy page. AdBlock happily announces that it is blocking all sorts of stuff when I do a search at Google. Who knows what else it is blocking - it may be blocking scripts that are now not recognized as being blocked by the other apps.
So, no... Google is just as awful with the tracking scripts (on their PRIVACY POLICY PAGE no less), obnoxious ads (at least they are not blinking and moving ads so I give them credit for that), and other unsavory shit (such as tracking cookies and, I imagine, web beacons). What would have made you think that they were somehow not guilty of these behaviors? They are riddled with these things. I guess you could have said, "Not as riddled." You could have then tried to argue it. You did not say that though so I am using your own verbiage as my source of information and, well, I fail to see how you came to the conclusions you have reached.
I miss Mosaic's gopher search functionality. There is little left to the gopher space. I have checked. Bastards...You are all bastards for killing the gopher.
I think there should be a competition in standards with the resulting best standard being used. That is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. Competition to establish a standard is a good thing assuming the judgment body is unbiased and the end result is the best standard at the time. Standards should compete on their own merit with good proposals being enacted. Why would standardization be based on which one gives a "feel-good" result instead of being based on their merits? Am I missing something here or are you just thinking that standards should be based on the proposals from your favorite companies instead of being based on their merits?
Seriously, please do answer. I tend to get reasonably sane responses from you and this seems unlike your characteristic statements. I suspect that I am missing something and that the something probably isn't, "It is M$ so default evil. Duh!" You are usually more rational about things. So who are you and what did you do with the real 140Mandak, hmm?
1 Where will they go? to some unknown upstart? That goes counter the fact that people in general hate change.
Umm... But... Err.. Erf... Seriously? How, exactly, do you think Google got popular in the first place? I am not sure you thought your clever rebuttal through very well.
Heh... Who knew? The Scottish national animal is the Wandering Violent Drunk - See also: Scottish kiss.
Actually, it is the Unicorn. Really. I did not know that. I should think that would be the national imaginary animal but, well, see Scottish Kiss.
There were not a lot of ads on the internet in the early 90s. Really, there was a time...
Add-ons: Disconnect and Ghostery come to mind. Disconnect is actually suing Google for anti-competitive behavior according to a blurb that popped up when it updated earlier this evening. I did not read more about it. Anyhow, those are two pretty decent choices.