... regulating work conditions. If you don't LIKE how the government runs the coal mines of the great british empire, your only choice is to leave for th ecountry and haul manure on a farm. If the coal industry self-regulates, you're free to go work at another coal mine if you don't like the labor conditions there. This is the case against government interference in the great industrial age.
So you are arguing (in a backhanded fashion) there is no case against government interference, yes?
The history of gross labor abuses by the coal industry from the laissez faire 1800s to the present day is notorious. Pauper's wages, company "stores", death trap mines, goons and gun thugs (not even counting the "respectable" Pinkerton enforcers). Ever see "Harlan County USA"?
You're also completely ignoring the issue with batteries - a hybrid's batteries have to be replaced about every five years, I believe. If you pay for that yourself (IOW it's not covered under warranty or something), it'll be several thousand dollars that a non-hybrid car wouldn't have to pay.
You believe incorrectly. A Prius's battery is warranteed for 100,000 miles, which means that the manufacturer considers the possibility that it will be required is very small. Actual lifetimes are appearing to be over 200,000 miles - 15 years or so for the average American. The cost of replacement at dealer prices is $4000 (lower prices are available), but is unlikely to ever be needed.
Unlike in this study, a vehicle doesn't just vanish into thin air after five years. The average age of a vehicle on the road in the US today is over 9.5 years and rising...
A quicker way to evaluate the report's claim is that they show the price difference between the Matrix and Prius dropping from $5700 to $1700 after just 63,000 miles of driving. If the car were driven just 50% more, 95,000 miles, then it is positive by $300 (accepting every other aspect of their methodology).
A Prius can last something like 240,000 miles before it wears out (this is around the battery life people are actually seeing, as well as a typical age before mechanical wear becomes severe). So over the lifetime of the car you would see $10,000 or so in savings (equal to 35% of the purchase price of the car).
I actually ran the numbers when I bought a Prius last year and with my usage patterns (I commute 25,000 miles a year, and run every car until it wears out - ~250,000 miles) and found that the Prius was in fact the cheapest option for a comfortable 4 passenger vehicle with a bit of trunk space with the current $3 a gallon gas (California). If gas prices rise over the next 10 years (the economy may some day recover...) then it gets even better.
I roll my eyes quite a bit when posters claim Prius owners only drive them to advertise their ecofriendliness when I did it only to save money.
The usual right wing response to this observation (or to being presented with that related entity know as "facts") is to simply deny its existence. The more open-minded and thoughtful right wingers acknowledge that reality does not conform to their ideology, but regard it as a defect in reality.
This result has a much greater range of interest than one might suppose. The Rubik's Cube is a physical example of a problem in group theory (a group appropriately now known as the Rubik's Cube Group : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik's_cube_group), and completely solving this group (and thus all simpler sub-cases) is a matter of some significant interest in pure and computational mathematics.
The Rubik's Cube Group also has a physical analog in the subatomics physics of quarks. See: Golomb, S.W., "Rubik's Cube and a Model of Quark Confinement", American Journal of Physics, Vol. 49, No. 11, pp. 1030-1031, November, 1981. Analogs can provide powerful tools for visualizing other physical systems.
This is just part of a larger, decades-long trend of driving the price of labour to zero all across the economy. A working wage in western countries no longer even assures you a place in the middle classes. I shudder to think where we'll be after ten more years of such "innovation".
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
The most important reason why nothing like the Space Clipper was ever built is not due to the launch energy required. It is the cost of building and maintaining an incredibly complex vehicle. Even if the energy used to launch the Space Shuttle were free its launch cost would be virtually unchanged. It costs NASA 450 million dollars per launch, the cost of actual LH2/O2 fuel (not just energy) is on the order of 40 cents per kilogram (for example) so the total fuel cost is on the order of one million dollars (!).
The ticket price for the 30 passengers of the Space Clipper would be $30,000 or so if energy was the only cost, still quite steep compared to air travel, but nothing like the $15 million of the Space Shuttle launch bill.
Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
Or... we could use Earth as our spaceship:)
Even though you end with a "smiley" this is really a serious point.
The technologies required to survive in space would generally work equally well on Earth, and given the natural optimality of Earth conditions for human life, anything likely to happen to Earth much before stellar expansion should be fairly easily compensated for by controlled environments, if not direct biosphere control (it is intrinsically easy to "terraform" Earth).
The only kind of threat to long term human existence on Earth until its physical destruction is form a malicious process - one that is carefully tuned to evade all protective measures and bears an effective process to destroy humanity.
It could be a deliberately designed weapon, or an evolutionarily developed artifact - perhaps an analog to biological evolution in some advanced technological system.
That's the problem isn't it, not everyone does it that way or we wouldn't be having this discussion to begin with. Most academic literature still refers to LASER as an acronym. Laymen using laser is what put it in the dictionary. I expect you'll all be crying when the computer well and truly gets renamed as the "harddrive" simply because everyone does it that way.
Which begs the question, will a slashdot reader's head explode when he reads this very sentence because of the context of the first 3 words?
The phrase "begs the question" was coined to describe a logical fallacy, in this case a type of circular argument in which the premise assumes the conclusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question). You are using the phrase in an increasingly common, but irrelevant manner.
I am not at all sure that you should be taken as an authority on the correct usage of English terminology.
So if there was a new Manhattan project today, they couldn't hire the best people for the job, they'd have to fill a certain number of positions with unqualified people, because of affirmative action towards locals. And then you wonder why China will mop the floor with us.
Sorry, but no. You are referring of course to the scientific staff of the laboratories like Los Alamos and the Chicago Met Lab - all of whom served as government employees. The H1-B program and its restrictions only apply to private companies.
In the absence of sensible regulation there are many abuses of the "free market" that effectively destroy it and turn it into a rigged game to benefit the already rich and powerful. Monopolies. Cartels. Price fixing. Trading on one's own account ahead of a customer.
These special access high-speed connections to the stock market exchange are market fixing tools, pure and simple. They allow the trading firms to skim the market for their own profit, thus defrauding every market participant in the world who lacks these powerful and privileged tools.
Requiring all buys to be held for a "long" time (a minute?, an hour?) would kill a lot of these shenanigans. Also requiring the link to go through a regulated buffer that introduces a random delay of a second or so would also take the wind out of their sales (pun intended). Or maybe we just impose a fee on each transaction so that they aren't free. Sub-millisecond trading loses a lot of luster if you automatically incur a charge equal to 0.1% (or something) of the stock's value.
I don't have a citation handy, but as I understand the situation, the rich uranium deposits are very low, resulting in the mining of lower grade deposits, Thus the cost of extracting uranium is going up, on a semi permanent basis.
That said, Uranium is a fairly small cost of a reactor...
You are correct on both points above (but not some of the others I cut out). Uranium costs are going up permanently. But they will only rise to the point where it is economical to extract from seawater, which contains more than 1000 times the supply of the current published reserve estimates which are based on a $130/kg ceiling cost.
The estimated cost of seawater extraction, based on technologies that have already been given small scale field trials, is about $300/kg. Uranium costs won't rise above this given the multi-thousand year supply that results. But uranium has already been sold on the spot market at $300/kg (in 2007), and at this price it only adds about 1 cent per kWHr.
It is the high capital cost that keeps nuclear plants off the utility company's purchase list, and creating incentives for long term investment in carbon reducing technologies will required to make them compete with new gas-fired power plants.
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To be honest I don't buy the "nuclear is expensive" thing. It's expensive the way you're doing it. Learn from the French...
Yes, I recommend ACTUALLY examining nuclear power costs in France and comparing them to other options. In France the projected capital cost of a new reactor (the EPR) is $3860/kW, MORE than the $3382/kW projected cost for the Gen III+, or the $2970/kW EPRI in the (presumably) "nuclear hostile" USA. See: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html . It is impossible to compare ACTUAL CURRENT costs from equivalent recent projects in France vs the U.S. since there aren't any in either place.
But the capital cost of the ACTUAL competition with new nuclear power plants, which are gas-fired power plants not solar power plants, is only $635-1747/kW. This is the real reason nuclear power plants seem so difficult to get built. They are INHERENTLY much more expensive to build than the competition, and for a variety of reasons (the drive for short-term financial performance among them) utilities are reluctant to take a big hit up front, which will take them much longer to turn a profit. The historical rate of default (look up the WHOOPS project) cited in the article is an additional financial factor.
The regulatory environment for nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been stable and generally nuclear-favorable now (in that licensing is stable and well defined, and has favored standardized plants) for 30 years now (since the days of Reagan).
Actually, the data says an over abundance of regulation and irrational fear is what causes drastically increased costs on nuclear power...
Umm, no, the data does not say that to me.
First off - note that nuclear power advocates (which includes me) are quick to point out the admirable safety record of nuclear power plants, and how even a worst-case disaster like TMI had negligible practical consequences (beyond destroying an expensive reactor and incurring a complex and costly clean-up effort).
The safety of these plants and the capital cost of construction are not unrelated - it sounds like you are up for stripping out lots of costly safety measures (like the containment dome that kept TMI safely bottled up despite hydrogen gas explosions in the building). If you do this, then the plants aren't nearly as safe as they were.
Nuclear power advocates can't have it both ways. Appropriate safety standards cost money. New designs can trim this, but not at the cost of getting rid of that 'irrational' safety stuff.
Second, reactor cost data do not back you up at all. Nuclear power plants have been built all over the world, with many different regulatory environments and cost structures. In a "nuclear-power friendly" but high-cost nation like France the capital cost of a new reactor (the EPR) is $3860/kW, MORE than the $3382/kW projected cost for the Gen III+, or the $2970/kW EPRI in the (presumably) "nuclear hostile" USA. See: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html.
You have to go to Asia (China) to get nuke capital costs below $2000/kw.
But the kicker here is that the capital cost of a gas-fired power plant is only $635-1747/kW. This is the real reason nuclear power plants seem so difficult to get built. They are INHERENTLY much more expensive to build than the competition, and for a variety of reasons (the drive for short-term financial performance among them) utilities are reluctant to take a big hit up front, which will take them much longer to turn a profit.
You can buy heavy water, unlike that story claims. United Nuclear sells it.
You can buy several grams, but you need a few tons. There are safeguards in place to prevent anyone from acquiring enough for a reactor without drawing close scrutiny (actually you would be completely unable to come up with a sufficient supply even without the nice G-Men coming around).
But the "article" is idiotic. No one produces heavy water in a centrifuge for example. Nothing in it should be considered actual information.
I suspect the Prius can accelerate fast enough, but the Prius driver is too occupied with playing the "how efficiently can I drive" game.
The Prius isn't a fast car but doesn't seem terribly slow... If that level of acceleration is still not enough to merge safely, then that section of the highway is badly (and unsafely) designed. I do not see it as a problem with the car.
Indeed. The Prius can accelerate from 0-60 in 120 feet. The minimum start-line to merge point distance in highway design is 300 feet. A Prius is easily able to reach safe highway speeds on even older short on-ramps.
Yes, some people do, but they do so because they are not rolling in cash, not because they want to save the environment.
Why? Well A) no one cares THAT much about the environment and B) The difference in milage is so small that it seems silly not to get the bigger engine.
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OMG! What utter B*ll Sh*t!
I bought a 4 cylinder sedan (twice over the years in fact) when I could easily afford the V6, and the gas consumption too. Why did I do that? Because I don't worship at the altar of the Almighty God of Performance, and have better uses for my money than buying high acceleration I don't ever need. My 4-cylinders gave all the acceleration I ever wanted or needed in half a million miles of commuting over the decades.
The above poster appears to be a muscle car gear-head who is desperate to deny the existence of people with different opinions and values.
I (22) had one.
Are you seriously asking this question on Slashdot?
As someone who had a chemistry set in 1967, and pursued hobby chemistry into the 1970s, and then attempted to purchase similar ones for my kids in 1he 1990s and later, I can assure that any chemistry set that you could buy during your lifetime was a sad, pale and largely useless imitation of chemistry sets available at previous times.
To have a chemistry set approximating those available 35-40 years ago you have to spend a lot of time and money developing the lists of materials needed, buying and assembling the individual components into a set, and then you have the problem of coming up with a good manual of experiments.
In the old days the parents did not need to already be hobby chemistry experts to get their kid a set that would make him/her one.
Gotham is New York. This is a popular name for the city that dates from the Nineteenth Century (Washington Irving in 1807 to be precise).
The association with Bat Man is due to a DC writer's decision to invoke this nickname of the actual city of New York to evoke its essence in the fictional city.
I disagree with that statement. The Pantheon has been used, altered, gutted, and refitted several times. I'm sure that during that period refurbishment has been performed.
Also, the excerpted "quotelet" was with reference to the Horyu-ji temple that has be continuously maintained. The Pantheon has stood for many centuries in a stretch in which no maintenance or upkeep was performed at all. The rotunda dome has never needed structural repair or maintenance.
Wooden buildings can commonly stand a century or so without care,
That is simply not true. Wooden buildings may survive a century without care, but they certainly cannot be left to the elements without major work over the years.
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So you disagree with me.. by immediately stating the EXACTLY the same thing that I did?
You agree that it can stand a century without care. But that century takes a toll on the structure (which I also stated), and probably would prevent it from standing another century in the same fashion.
I disagree with that statement. The Pantheon has been used, altered, gutted, and refitted several times. I'm sure that during that period refurbishment has been performed.
That said, yes, concrete will last a while. I should have been more clear and now I regret not specifically mentioning concrete when I said stonework in my original post. (I initially mentioned it, but deleted it when I felt it was covered by the more general stonework).
My original statement is correct as I stated it. I specified the pantheon dome, which is intact, in its original structural form. It has not been refitted or strengthened. Other changes to the pantheon building are not relevant.
...It would be incredibly hard to design for as there are no modern materials that have been around long enough for us to know conclusively how they would behave after even 200 years of weathering....
The Pantheon. It is almost 1900 years old and has an original unreinforced concrete dome 43.3 meters across and deep. It is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Much stronger concretes are available today.
The Horyu-ji temple in Japan is made of wood and is up to 1300 years old (exact year of completion is unknown). In this case however it has received continual upkeep (unlike the Pantheon). Wooden buildings can commonly stand a century or so without care, as long no one burns them, but looking how dilapidated very old long-abandoned wooden buildings look I doubt they can go much longer without replacement of the outer shell facings.
I don't think generics are a 'disaster'. More like 'potential disaster if you don't watch your ass'.
Thanks, that is close enough for me. Languages can only afford so many treacherous features.
And to date, I still haven't seen a better way to do it. (Your suggestion, "typing containers and letting it go at that", makes no sense; there was no way to do that without adding generics to the language, or something that works like generics.)
"Something like it" is right. Just much less ambitious and intrusive into the language. A minimally ambitious implementation.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. There's no way in hell that they'll be removing a widely-used feature from future versions of the language. As long as we're coding in Java, we're stuck with generics.
Actually there is a way it can be removed. A less ambitious subset that people actually use (container typing with directly related simplified support features is the poster child here) can be left and at most a compiler switch can be used for the more complex aspects if they are actually used.
And you know the bit about type erasure as the implementation mechanism? You know, generics disappearing in the byte code to maintain backward compatibility? Well a down-scoped release of generics will still be backwardly compatible.
Java generics seems to require at least a graduate level course in type theory to use (possibly an actual degree in the field)
So? Is this a bad thing? It's like saying "expert field" seems to require at least "expert field" graduate level course. If you are no expert, then don't use java generics. And if you can't read other's code, then maybe we should hire someone who can.
Indeed it is a bad thing. A problem that all excessively obscure and complex languages have rapidly revealed (C++, Perl) is that every difficult-to-use feature gets used (if it is usable at all) and has to be supported by every other programmer eventually since 90% of all programming is support of existing code.
The saving grace for Java generics is that beyond container typing it seems sufficiently hard to use that it rarely gets used. Some time back I scanned the source of several substantial and active open source projects without finding any examples in use beyond container typing.
I remember using java generics to build a visual keyboard for any kind of text component. I'm reading my code now, and yes, I understand it.
Beyond container typing what aspects did you actually use? Have you ever written one genuine generic algorithm? That is - an algorithm with a generic interface that takes any appropriate generic type and returns an appropriate result type while maintaining typing throughout?
Slashdot Mirror
... regulating work conditions. If you don't LIKE how the government runs the coal mines of the great british empire, your only choice is to leave for th ecountry and haul manure on a farm. If the coal industry self-regulates, you're free to go work at another coal mine if you don't like the labor conditions there. This is the case against government interference in the great industrial age.
So you are arguing (in a backhanded fashion) there is no case against government interference, yes?
The history of gross labor abuses by the coal industry from the laissez faire 1800s to the present day is notorious. Pauper's wages, company "stores", death trap mines, goons and gun thugs (not even counting the "respectable" Pinkerton enforcers). Ever see "Harlan County USA"?
You're also completely ignoring the issue with batteries - a hybrid's batteries have to be replaced about every five years, I believe. If you pay for that yourself (IOW it's not covered under warranty or something), it'll be several thousand dollars that a non-hybrid car wouldn't have to pay.
You believe incorrectly. A Prius's battery is warranteed for 100,000 miles, which means that the manufacturer considers the possibility that it will be required is very small. Actual lifetimes are appearing to be over 200,000 miles - 15 years or so for the average American. The cost of replacement at dealer prices is $4000 (lower prices are available), but is unlikely to ever be needed.
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Unlike in this study, a vehicle doesn't just vanish into thin air after five years. The average age of a vehicle on the road in the US today is over 9.5 years and rising...
A quicker way to evaluate the report's claim is that they show the price difference between the Matrix and Prius dropping from $5700 to $1700 after just 63,000 miles of driving. If the car were driven just 50% more, 95,000 miles, then it is positive by $300 (accepting every other aspect of their methodology).
A Prius can last something like 240,000 miles before it wears out (this is around the battery life people are actually seeing, as well as a typical age before mechanical wear becomes severe). So over the lifetime of the car you would see $10,000 or so in savings (equal to 35% of the purchase price of the car).
I actually ran the numbers when I bought a Prius last year and with my usage patterns (I commute 25,000 miles a year, and run every car until it wears out - ~250,000 miles) and found that the Prius was in fact the cheapest option for a comfortable 4 passenger vehicle with a bit of trunk space with the current $3 a gallon gas (California). If gas prices rise over the next 10 years (the economy may some day recover ...) then it gets even better.
I roll my eyes quite a bit when posters claim Prius owners only drive them to advertise their ecofriendliness when I did it only to save money.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
The usual right wing response to this observation (or to being presented with that related entity know as "facts") is to simply deny its existence. The more open-minded and thoughtful right wingers acknowledge that reality does not conform to their ideology, but regard it as a defect in reality.
This result has a much greater range of interest than one might suppose. The Rubik's Cube is a physical example of a problem in group theory (a group appropriately now known as the Rubik's Cube Group : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik's_cube_group), and completely solving this group (and thus all simpler sub-cases) is a matter of some significant interest in pure and computational mathematics.
The Rubik's Cube Group also has a physical analog in the subatomics physics of quarks. See: Golomb, S.W., "Rubik's Cube and a Model of Quark Confinement", American Journal of Physics, Vol. 49, No. 11, pp. 1030-1031, November, 1981. Analogs can provide powerful tools for visualizing other physical systems.
This is just part of a larger, decades-long trend of driving the price of labour to zero all across the economy. A working wage in western countries no longer even assures you a place in the middle classes. I shudder to think where we'll be after ten more years of such "innovation".
MOD THIS GUY UP!
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
The most important reason why nothing like the Space Clipper was ever built is not due to the launch energy required. It is the cost of building and maintaining an incredibly complex vehicle. Even if the energy used to launch the Space Shuttle were free its launch cost would be virtually unchanged. It costs NASA 450 million dollars per launch, the cost of actual LH2/O2 fuel (not just energy) is on the order of 40 cents per kilogram (for example) so the total fuel cost is on the order of one million dollars (!).
The ticket price for the 30 passengers of the Space Clipper would be $30,000 or so if energy was the only cost, still quite steep compared to air travel, but nothing like the $15 million of the Space Shuttle launch bill.
Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
Or... we could use Earth as our spaceship :)
Even though you end with a "smiley" this is really a serious point.
The technologies required to survive in space would generally work equally well on Earth, and given the natural optimality of Earth conditions for human life, anything likely to happen to Earth much before stellar expansion should be fairly easily compensated for by controlled environments, if not direct biosphere control (it is intrinsically easy to "terraform" Earth).
The only kind of threat to long term human existence on Earth until its physical destruction is form a malicious process - one that is carefully tuned to evade all protective measures and bears an effective process to destroy humanity.
It could be a deliberately designed weapon, or an evolutionarily developed artifact - perhaps an analog to biological evolution in some advanced technological system.
That's the problem isn't it, not everyone does it that way or we wouldn't be having this discussion to begin with. Most academic literature still refers to LASER as an acronym. Laymen using laser is what put it in the dictionary. I expect you'll all be crying when the computer well and truly gets renamed as the "harddrive" simply because everyone does it that way. Which begs the question, will a slashdot reader's head explode when he reads this very sentence because of the context of the first 3 words?
The phrase "begs the question" was coined to describe a logical fallacy, in this case a type of circular argument in which the premise assumes the conclusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question). You are using the phrase in an increasingly common, but irrelevant manner.
I am not at all sure that you should be taken as an authority on the correct usage of English terminology.
So if there was a new Manhattan project today, they couldn't hire the best people for the job, they'd have to fill a certain number of positions with unqualified people, because of affirmative action towards locals. And then you wonder why China will mop the floor with us.
Sorry, but no. You are referring of course to the scientific staff of the laboratories like Los Alamos and the Chicago Met Lab - all of whom served as government employees. The H1-B program and its restrictions only apply to private companies.
In the absence of sensible regulation there are many abuses of the "free market" that effectively destroy it and turn it into a rigged game to benefit the already rich and powerful. Monopolies. Cartels. Price fixing. Trading on one's own account ahead of a customer.
These special access high-speed connections to the stock market exchange are market fixing tools, pure and simple. They allow the trading firms to skim the market for their own profit, thus defrauding every market participant in the world who lacks these powerful and privileged tools.
Requiring all buys to be held for a "long" time (a minute?, an hour?) would kill a lot of these shenanigans. Also requiring the link to go through a regulated buffer that introduces a random delay of a second or so would also take the wind out of their sales (pun intended). Or maybe we just impose a fee on each transaction so that they aren't free. Sub-millisecond trading loses a lot of luster if you automatically incur a charge equal to 0.1% (or something) of the stock's value.
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I don't have a citation handy, but as I understand the situation, the rich uranium deposits are very low, resulting in the mining of lower grade deposits, Thus the cost of extracting uranium is going up, on a semi permanent basis.
That said, Uranium is a fairly small cost of a reactor...
You are correct on both points above (but not some of the others I cut out). Uranium costs are going up permanently. But they will only rise to the point where it is economical to extract from seawater, which contains more than 1000 times the supply of the current published reserve estimates which are based on a $130/kg ceiling cost.
The estimated cost of seawater extraction, based on technologies that have already been given small scale field trials, is about $300/kg. Uranium costs won't rise above this given the multi-thousand year supply that results. But uranium has already been sold on the spot market at $300/kg (in 2007), and at this price it only adds about 1 cent per kWHr.
It is the high capital cost that keeps nuclear plants off the utility company's purchase list, and creating incentives for long term investment in carbon reducing technologies will required to make them compete with new gas-fired power plants.
... To be honest I don't buy the "nuclear is expensive" thing. It's expensive the way you're doing it. Learn from the French...
Yes, I recommend ACTUALLY examining nuclear power costs in France and comparing them to other options. In France the projected capital cost of a new reactor (the EPR) is $3860/kW, MORE than the $3382/kW projected cost for the Gen III+, or the $2970/kW EPRI in the (presumably) "nuclear hostile" USA. See: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html . It is impossible to compare ACTUAL CURRENT costs from equivalent recent projects in France vs the U.S. since there aren't any in either place.
But the capital cost of the ACTUAL competition with new nuclear power plants, which are gas-fired power plants not solar power plants, is only $635-1747/kW. This is the real reason nuclear power plants seem so difficult to get built. They are INHERENTLY much more expensive to build than the competition, and for a variety of reasons (the drive for short-term financial performance among them) utilities are reluctant to take a big hit up front, which will take them much longer to turn a profit. The historical rate of default (look up the WHOOPS project) cited in the article is an additional financial factor.
The regulatory environment for nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been stable and generally nuclear-favorable now (in that licensing is stable and well defined, and has favored standardized plants) for 30 years now (since the days of Reagan).
Actually, the data says an over abundance of regulation and irrational fear is what causes drastically increased costs on nuclear power...
Umm, no, the data does not say that to me.
First off - note that nuclear power advocates (which includes me) are quick to point out the admirable safety record of nuclear power plants, and how even a worst-case disaster like TMI had negligible practical consequences (beyond destroying an expensive reactor and incurring a complex and costly clean-up effort).
The safety of these plants and the capital cost of construction are not unrelated - it sounds like you are up for stripping out lots of costly safety measures (like the containment dome that kept TMI safely bottled up despite hydrogen gas explosions in the building). If you do this, then the plants aren't nearly as safe as they were.
Nuclear power advocates can't have it both ways. Appropriate safety standards cost money. New designs can trim this, but not at the cost of getting rid of that 'irrational' safety stuff.
Second, reactor cost data do not back you up at all. Nuclear power plants have been built all over the world, with many different regulatory environments and cost structures. In a "nuclear-power friendly" but high-cost nation like France the capital cost of a new reactor (the EPR) is $3860/kW, MORE than the $3382/kW projected cost for the Gen III+, or the $2970/kW EPRI in the (presumably) "nuclear hostile" USA. See: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html .
You have to go to Asia (China) to get nuke capital costs below $2000/kw.
But the kicker here is that the capital cost of a gas-fired power plant is only $635-1747/kW. This is the real reason nuclear power plants seem so difficult to get built. They are INHERENTLY much more expensive to build than the competition, and for a variety of reasons (the drive for short-term financial performance among them) utilities are reluctant to take a big hit up front, which will take them much longer to turn a profit.
You can buy heavy water, unlike that story claims. United Nuclear sells it.
You can buy several grams, but you need a few tons. There are safeguards in place to prevent anyone from acquiring enough for a reactor without drawing close scrutiny (actually you would be completely unable to come up with a sufficient supply even without the nice G-Men coming around).
But the "article" is idiotic. No one produces heavy water in a centrifuge for example. Nothing in it should be considered actual information.
I suspect the Prius can accelerate fast enough, but the Prius driver is too occupied with playing the "how efficiently can I drive" game.
The Prius isn't a fast car but doesn't seem terribly slow... If that level of acceleration is still not enough to merge safely, then that section of the highway is badly (and unsafely) designed. I do not see it as a problem with the car.
Indeed. The Prius can accelerate from 0-60 in 120 feet. The minimum start-line to merge point distance in highway design is 300 feet. A Prius is easily able to reach safe highway speeds on even older short on-ramps.
Nobody with a choice from a financial side.
Yes, some people do, but they do so because they are not rolling in cash, not because they want to save the environment.
Why? Well A) no one cares THAT much about the environment and B) The difference in milage is so small that it seems silly not to get the bigger engine.
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OMG! What utter B*ll Sh*t!
I bought a 4 cylinder sedan (twice over the years in fact) when I could easily afford the V6, and the gas consumption too. Why did I do that? Because I don't worship at the altar of the Almighty God of Performance, and have better uses for my money than buying high acceleration I don't ever need. My 4-cylinders gave all the acceleration I ever wanted or needed in half a million miles of commuting over the decades.
The above poster appears to be a muscle car gear-head who is desperate to deny the existence of people with different opinions and values.
I (22) had one. Are you seriously asking this question on Slashdot?
As someone who had a chemistry set in 1967, and pursued hobby chemistry into the 1970s, and then attempted to purchase similar ones for my kids in 1he 1990s and later, I can assure that any chemistry set that you could buy during your lifetime was a sad, pale and largely useless imitation of chemistry sets available at previous times.
To have a chemistry set approximating those available 35-40 years ago you have to spend a lot of time and money developing the lists of materials needed, buying and assembling the individual components into a set, and then you have the problem of coming up with a good manual of experiments.
In the old days the parents did not need to already be hobby chemistry experts to get their kid a set that would make him/her one.
Robert Bruce Thompson has put some effort to rectifying (not just lamenting) this situation. See his http://homechemlab.com/ site, and also look at the Amazon site material about the write-up on his book : Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture . which has a brief discussion of the decline in home chemistry.
New York is Metropolis.
Chicago is Gotham.
Gotham is New York. This is a popular name for the city that dates from the Nineteenth Century (Washington Irving in 1807 to be precise).
The association with Bat Man is due to a DC writer's decision to invoke this nickname of the actual city of New York to evoke its essence in the fictional city.
(unlike the Pantheon)
I disagree with that statement. The Pantheon has been used, altered, gutted, and refitted several times. I'm sure that during that period refurbishment has been performed.
Also, the excerpted "quotelet" was with reference to the Horyu-ji temple that has be continuously maintained. The Pantheon has stood for many centuries in a stretch in which no maintenance or upkeep was performed at all. The rotunda dome has never needed structural repair or maintenance.
Wooden buildings can commonly stand a century or so without care,
That is simply not true. Wooden buildings may survive a century without care, but they certainly cannot be left to the elements without major work over the years.
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So you disagree with me .. by immediately stating the EXACTLY the same thing that I did?
You agree that it can stand a century without care. But that century takes a toll on the structure (which I also stated), and probably would prevent it from standing another century in the same fashion.
(unlike the Pantheon)
I disagree with that statement. The Pantheon has been used, altered, gutted, and refitted several times. I'm sure that during that period refurbishment has been performed.
That said, yes, concrete will last a while. I should have been more clear and now I regret not specifically mentioning concrete when I said stonework in my original post. (I initially mentioned it, but deleted it when I felt it was covered by the more general stonework).
My original statement is correct as I stated it. I specified the pantheon dome, which is intact, in its original structural form. It has not been refitted or strengthened. Other changes to the pantheon building are not relevant.
...It would be incredibly hard to design for as there are no modern materials that have been around long enough for us to know conclusively how they would behave after even 200 years of weathering....
The Pantheon. It is almost 1900 years old and has an original unreinforced concrete dome 43.3 meters across and deep. It is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Much stronger concretes are available today.
The Horyu-ji temple in Japan is made of wood and is up to 1300 years old (exact year of completion is unknown). In this case however it has received continual upkeep (unlike the Pantheon). Wooden buildings can commonly stand a century or so without care, as long no one burns them, but looking how dilapidated very old long-abandoned wooden buildings look I doubt they can go much longer without replacement of the outer shell facings.
I don't think generics are a 'disaster'. More like 'potential disaster if you don't watch your ass'.
Thanks, that is close enough for me. Languages can only afford so many treacherous features.
And to date, I still haven't seen a better way to do it. (Your suggestion, "typing containers and letting it go at that", makes no sense; there was no way to do that without adding generics to the language, or something that works like generics.)
"Something like it" is right. Just much less ambitious and intrusive into the language. A minimally ambitious implementation.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. There's no way in hell that they'll be removing a widely-used feature from future versions of the language. As long as we're coding in Java, we're stuck with generics.
Actually there is a way it can be removed. A less ambitious subset that people actually use (container typing with directly related simplified support features is the poster child here) can be left and at most a compiler switch can be used for the more complex aspects if they are actually used.
And you know the bit about type erasure as the implementation mechanism? You know, generics disappearing in the byte code to maintain backward compatibility? Well a down-scoped release of generics will still be backwardly compatible.
As a whole the generics is a useless and dangerous disaster
You keep repeating that. Citation needed.
Since this is the first time I have ever commented on this topic it seems unlikely that I "keep repeating it". And I gave two examples in my comment. But also see Ken Arnold's opinion: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/arnold/archive/2005/06/generics_consid_1.html and http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=222021 and Joshua Bloch's attempts at favorable treatment are pretty damning: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/bloch_effective_08_qa.html.
Java generics seems to require at least a graduate level course in type theory to use (possibly an actual degree in the field)
So? Is this a bad thing? It's like saying "expert field" seems to require at least "expert field" graduate level course. If you are no expert, then don't use java generics. And if you can't read other's code, then maybe we should hire someone who can.
Indeed it is a bad thing. A problem that all excessively obscure and complex languages have rapidly revealed (C++, Perl) is that every difficult-to-use feature gets used (if it is usable at all) and has to be supported by every other programmer eventually since 90% of all programming is support of existing code.
The saving grace for Java generics is that beyond container typing it seems sufficiently hard to use that it rarely gets used. Some time back I scanned the source of several substantial and active open source projects without finding any examples in use beyond container typing.
I remember using java generics to build a visual keyboard for any kind of text component. I'm reading my code now, and yes, I understand it.
Beyond container typing what aspects did you actually use? Have you ever written one genuine generic algorithm? That is - an algorithm with a generic interface that takes any appropriate generic type and returns an appropriate result type while maintaining typing throughout?