...the Hohlraum approach is unlikely to be used in a power-plant, as it doesn't give the biggest energy gains, so this is basically a significant step towards projects such as HiPER. If NIF achieves success in ignition as is widely expected the money should be around for projects like HiPER.
The HiPER direct drive/fast ignition is definitely a more promising scheme for using laser drivers. But even the best available laser technologies for drivers have poor power-line-to-beam efficiency.
The NIF hohlraum indirect drive approach has the marked advantage that it does not require lasers to produce those hot x-rays that drive the implosion. Far more efficient ion beams can do this work instead, which will likely more than compensate for any advantages in the beam-to-target-yield ratio from HiPER.
BTW - the principle purpose of NIF is doing weapons research. This is why it got $5 billion in US DOE funding. It does have relevance to research for peaceful power production, but the facility was optimized for the weapons role, not for peaceful research.
With Google "Don't be evil" is a shibboleth that sets an aspirational goal which, as so often happens in the real world, may only be honored in the breech.
With Microsoft "being evil" is, and has always been, at the core of their whole business model.
" the weather man can't predict the weather for the comming week. but for some reason you think they can predict the weather 100 years into the future accurately?"
I bet you're a lousy programmer...
Based on the quality of the AP's "reasoning" I would have to agree with your estimate of his programming skill, even if one accepts his initial premise insulting to weather forecasters.
But even his initial premise is simply ignorant bashing of what are really fairly good estimates of future weather. I routinely use one-week-out estimates of weather from N.O.A.A. or the NWS to plan vacations and outdoor activity and have found them really quite useful. Clearly uncertainty about specific conditions at specific times (this what people mean by "weather") increases with time, but even at 1 week the description of overall weather for the day is pretty good.
This depends on part on the stability of the local weather patterns in the areas you deal with of course.
I suggest you actually read the fair tax site. The fair tax provides a prebate check for taxes paid up to the poverty line, so the poor pay NO TAXES for spending on basic necessities....
Ah! It is good the legally defined poor (... up to the poverty line...) are spared annihilatory taxation on their subsistence income (but then, they have little wealth to contribute to the public coffers anyway). This then merely dumps even more of the cost of running the government on the Middle Class, who have seen their proportionate burden of taxation greatly increase while their income stagnated over the last generation.
There is always another "fair tax" or "flat tax" stalking horse around the corner designed to further cut the taxes of the wealthy, rich, and super-rich even farther below their already historic lows. As with Intuit, those who already have, never have seem to have enough. It's a shell game and the Middle Class always ends up with the empty shell.
You know, if Intuit were really smart they wouldn't fight this...but rather got to the IRS and ask, "how can we be contracted to help you."
They'd probably make more....
Ah! A proposal to bring back tax farming! (Or actually a suggestion that it would fit into Intuit's corporate strategy to bring it back.)
This privatization of the tax system (And we all know that "privatization" is always a Good Thing! Right?) is one of the things that brought on the French Revolution and sent tax farmers to the guillotines. Can we just move directly to that latter stage? Intuit's executive suite sounds ready for a visit from the Committee of Public Safety right now!
...However, you don't get to pretend that the Russian program is inherently safer just because they've been lucky enough to survive their accidents.
I actually agree with most of your remarks, and yes, given the similar nature of the programs and similarity of inherent risks, it is not surprising that their manned launch safety records are not greatly different. By picking and choosing what to count as a "serious" accident or methods of counting (does a fatal launch make the system more unreliable because more people are on board?) either one can be made to look worse.
Nonetheless, the notion of a flight on which fatalities occur is by itself a clear and unbiased measure of safety (though not a complete or exclusive measure). Remember, the original challenge was to name a program with a significantly better safety track record. While it is possible the string of 94 launches with no fatalilities is pure dumb luck, rather than evidence for a system that overcame its initial problems, what is the likelihood that this is so?
Consider this hypothesis: what is the confidence that Soyuz has a 95% of better reliability (as measured by fatal accidents) now, given a sample of 94 successive successes? Answer: 99.1%.
What is the confidence that the Shuttle has 95% reliability now given 2 failures in 123 launches? Answer: 94.4%. What is the confidence that it now has 95% reliability given its current record of 16 successive successes? Answer: 55.1%. What if we take all post Challenger launches with 1 failure? Answer 96.7%.
The fact is the current Soyuz launch record without fatalities is quite definitely and literally significantly better.
Deregulating space travel is the only way we're ever going to make a dent there, for the time being and with the current political climate.
Please, just shut up. Yes, a few are going to die going up, but they know the risks.
There is nothing stopping a private consortium from funding out of private capital the development of it's own space flight system, then selling its launch services to the government or space tourists. In fact there a number of companies trying to do this right now, for small satellites mostly (and non-orbital thrill rides).
What is preventing LockMart or Boeing from coughing up the $5 to $10 billion required for a full-scale manned launch system? Nothing... except they want the government to contract in advance to use them exclusively for launch services in the future, or else they want the government to fund the "private deregulated" project. They do not want to invest and compete, they want a "pre-bailout", a no risk proposition from the beginning.
Private enterprise can be efficient if there is competition - multiple providers - and preferably also a marketplace of multiple customers. When there is one provider for an essential service needed by only one customer none of the supposed disciplines of the marketplace function and there is no pragmatic (that is, practical as opposed to ideological) reason for the government not to own its own launch system and many for it to do so.
NASA doesnt have a great safety track record any longer.
Well that's a load of shit. Can you name a space agency which regularly launches manned missions and has a significantly better safety track record?
Didn't think so.
...
Well, now that you mention it, yeah! I can! It is the Russian Federal Space Agency. They currently have a running string of 94 manned launches with zero fatalities (the equivalent number for the U.S. is 16).
Or, if you prefer, we could rate the overall safety of the two nation's current manned launch systems, the U.S. Space Shuttle and the Russian Soyuz vehicle family. It is 2 fatal missions out of 129 for the Shuttle (on flights 25 and 113) and 2 fatal missions out of 104 for the Soyuz (on flights 1 and 10). Fatal accidents occurring throughout a program's history is symptomatic of a fundamentally unsafe system. Fatal accidents exclusively concentrated near the beginning shows a system that got through the near side of the "bathtub curve" and is now operating with high reliability. Soyuz is on track for exceeding the Shuttle launch history, and thus the overall fatal launch rate, before the U.S. can launch a replacement.
The argument for letting children profit is easy; some people work so their children and granchildren can benefit, and not themselves. How true that argument is, and how far in the future that profit should extend, are open to debate, but it's not a completely stupid argument.
And there are various mechanisms by which someone who worked for the benefit of their children, not themselves, can leave most of the wealth they accrue during their lives to those descendants. The money can be invested and continue providing for those descendants forever (this is called a "foundation") without any limit.
What has this go to with the abuse of the provision in the U.S. Constitution that seeks: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" ?
Copyright is, in U.S. law, a benefit extended to an actual creator for a limited time (i.e. their lifetime or less, originally 14 years) in order to encourage their creative activities for the benefit of the public.
What we can say - given the actual example of Bangladesh - is that a long term (50 years and counting) drop in fertility to (in the next decade) below replacement levels can be accomplished in even the poorest societies on Earth, even if the implementation of specific policies that promote this drop is imperfect or incomplete. The first world lifestyle (i.e. great wealth) is not required.
Guess what the only thing we've discovered that limits population growth without actually killing people is?
Give up?
It's a first world lifestyle.
It is not the only thing. Educating women is a proven independent source of growth reduction, as is giving women an independent source of income at the prevailing local economic level (e.g. through the grameen bank micro-loan system). The fertility rate in Bangladesh has dropped dramatically in 50 years, from 6.81 to 2.36 (near mere replacement rate) and the drop shows no sign of slowing. It is still one of the poorest countries in the entire world.
Improving the social and economic conditions of women to being similar to men in the same society is a sufficient means of fixing this problem. This may be a major part of the reason why the industrial revolution itself initiated an almost uninterrupted decline in fertility (and still dropping): it led to the equality of women.
The project will decimate 2000 acres of desert habitat for 200 megawatts output.
It isn't clear to me that it does decimate 2000 acres of desert habitat. What they are doing is putting a clear roof over the desert, so that sunlight still reaches the ecological communities in the area, and efficiently conducting away the trapped heat (it is the product they are after, after all) so that the temperatures could be kept at normal. Clearly a means of distributing rain under the roof is needed (flip up panels when raining perhaps), if this solved then aside from a one-time installation of (probably) widely spaced support pillars what would the adverse ecological impact necessarily be? The roof would need to be opaque to far infrared light, but could be transparent to everything else (materials technology willing).
What would cause the decimation? (I am assuming you are using "decimation" in its modern sense, equivalent to annihilation, not the original sense of reduction by one-tenth.)
Conventional solar power approaches can harvest four times as much energy per square kilometer, but they completely shade the ground below the collecting surfaces which creates a far greater impact.
Well, it is a big budget (make that: BIG!!! budget) holiday blockbuster. The last time you saw one of those with a unique plot and surprising plot twists was.... when?
There are different types of movies with different entertainment qualities, and you should judge it by its own genre. Do you go to a kung-fu flick expecting an emotional story about small town life? Do you go to a sports movie expecting Shakespeare?
The Matrix is the last big budget blockbuster that I can think of with an original story, which was almost eleven years ago, and was not a holiday blockbuster (it was released in March).
A heavy water reactor is the anti-thesis of the salt-based Thorium reactors.
Antihesis? I hardly think so, it is just another thorium reactor technology - one that is more mature. I think we should look at as many viable candidate thorium reactor technologies as we can, and develop all them to the point of establishing whether they are commercially attractive or not.
There will be dozens of AHWR reactors operating, in all likelihood, before a single molten fluoride salt starts producing power on an industrial scale.
Perhaps some day, instead of releasing entire novels, authors will release single chapters, wait until enough people have paid, and then release the next chapter, and so forth, until the entire novel is complete.
I don't even start reading the first book in a series until the last book is in print. I'm certainly not interested in reading a book one chapter at a time.
Literary habits may be hard to change - you are not used to reading serialized material, and thus reject the very idea. You do realize, I hope, that serialized novels were commonplace in the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century. Science fiction magazines have kept this practice alive (as well as printing popular short fiction, which was once common and has also died out in most of the publishing industry).
The Wired Magazine article presents a false picture of the development of nuclear power and leaves out some crucial facts about thorium reactors. A key fact about thorium reactors mentioned no where in the article: you can't build a reactor, load it with thorium alone, and have it work. It will sit there producing no power forever. This because thorium is only the breeding material and is not fissile. To get the reactor to produce power the thorium has to be mixed with plutonium or U-233 bred in some uranium fueled reactor somewhere, or with highly enriched U-235. In other words - the reactor has to be loaded with bomb-usable material and there has to be a lot of it, enough for hundreds of weapons.
This is part of why the whole quasi-conspiratorial story of "why we didn't go with thorium in the first place" is utter nonsense. It was not because "we wanted bombs instead" and were prejudiced against "superior thorium", it is because only if you have an established nuclear industry cranking out materials usable in bombs by the thousands can you build these reactors in the first place. Either you must have natural/low enriched uranium reactors to produce plutonium, or you need large amounts of highly enriched uranium (prime bomb material) to load into thorium breeders.
Also unacknowledged is that the particular type of reactor being promoted, the molten fluoride salt reactor, was and is a complex technology that requires substantial additional development. Only one single reactor of this kind was ever built, and it was an 8 megawatt (thermal) materials test reactor, not a power reactor. We are looking at many years of additional development before construction can start on a prototype full scale power reactor. I agree that this technology should be further pursued, and it may turn out more successful that plutonium breeders (no successful power plants have been built, just several failures) but it is by no means guaranteed.
Hyman Rickover, by the way, was interested in light water uranium fueled reactors because they are a good technology for powering submarines, not because they produce plutonium (they are lousy plutonium producers, the yield is low and the material produced has terrible properties for bombs).
Check out the 2005 IAEA survey document (http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/IAEA-TECDOC-1450.pdf) for a good summary of the thorium technology options and prospects.
After writing a couple of million lines of code, the more code I write, the more I unwind it. Somewhere along the line, adolescent programmers got the idea that jamming all your logic into as few unreadable lines as possible is the fastest way to manliness. Way, way wrong.
Amen to that brother!
I am also much aggrieved by the corollary: junior developers coming up to me to complain about my "bad coding" - i.e. writing visibly nested loops with clear indentation of each level, and separating different logic tests into different statements, instead of mashing everything together into a few unindented lines.
Any publicly held corporation has the legal obligation to return value to it's shareholders, it's not a defense, it's the stone cold truth - hence the Revlon Rule.
On the other hand, there is a lot of latitude for an (immortal) corporation to decide on the appropriate time frame for realizing that value. The Revlon Rule is interesting because it relates to the value of a sale of the business, whose time frame is both fixed and short (and which addressed decisions that served only the interests of the current management). A business that is not up for sale can consider the implications of its business practices as they play out decades from now, and in fact would be remiss if it did not do so.
Chevron for example invests a great deal up front in new petroleum developments to make them as clean as possible, generally far exceeding current legal requirements. Why spend more money now, when they could be returned as share-holder profits next quarter (as many businesses do)? Because it avoids costly accidents, and retrofits many years from now, and adds to good will -- which is a very valuable commodity. Deals made decades from now will depend on good corporate citizenship today (Google take note).
A lot of us buy clothing or other items that are made in China, complete with all of the horrible working conditions that the people are exposed to, but we don't feel that Nike, Wal-Mart, Fruit-of-the-Loom, or whoever else should "stand up" to the Chinese Government, so why should Google be any different? I'm not saying it's right, but it's hardly unique.
Speak for yourself. A lot of us feel that Nike, Wal-Mart, Fruit-of-the-Loom, etc. SHOULD "stand up" to the Chinese Government, and furthermore ensure adequate wages and conditions for their factory workers, and that the resources going in to the products are obtained through ethical means, and that the products produced should be safe, instead of being partners-in-crime with the Communist Party of China.
Yet you post all over the Internet. So I guess you aren't really hiding everything. When was it suddenly a good idea to put private information on the Internet. Why are you doing that? If you aren't, it doesn't matter what Google does.
Say what?
"Posting all over the Internet" (i.e. engaging in a public conversation, an ancient right and obligation in fact of a public minded citizen) is not "putting private information" on the Internet. When does exercising the rights of free speech abrogate expectations of privacy in other areas?
The problem I have with this sort of stuff is look at Tiger Woods, even President Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc...
People without skeletons in their closet are extremely rare. Nearly everybody has something to hide, if not from criminal matters, from embarrassing personal matters....
In addition we should all recognize that most anything, taken out of context and misrepresented, can be made to look bad. There is no reason why we should have to share any information about our private lives at all with people who we have not voluntarily established a personal relationship with.
Who would like prospective employers scrutinizing your hobbies, friends and acquaintances, Google searches, choice of reading materials, and personal communications without disclosing this scrutiny to you, or giving you a chance to "explain"?
It is another instance of the Matthew Effect (Matthew 25:29 - '"To all those who have, more will be given... but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away"). Stripping individuals of privacy is another step in giving new immense powers to those who already have immense powers.
Slashdot Mirror
The HiPER direct drive/fast ignition is definitely a more promising scheme for using laser drivers. But even the best available laser technologies for drivers have poor power-line-to-beam efficiency.
The NIF hohlraum indirect drive approach has the marked advantage that it does not require lasers to produce those hot x-rays that drive the implosion. Far more efficient ion beams can do this work instead, which will likely more than compensate for any advantages in the beam-to-target-yield ratio from HiPER.
BTW - the principle purpose of NIF is doing weapons research. This is why it got $5 billion in US DOE funding. It does have relevance to research for peaceful power production, but the facility was optimized for the weapons role, not for peaceful research.
With Google "Don't be evil" is a shibboleth that sets an aspirational goal which, as so often happens in the real world, may only be honored in the breech.
With Microsoft "being evil" is, and has always been, at the core of their whole business model.
" the weather man can't predict the weather for the comming week. but for some reason you think they can predict the weather 100 years into the future accurately?"
I bet you're a lousy programmer...
Based on the quality of the AP's "reasoning" I would have to agree with your estimate of his programming skill, even if one accepts his initial premise insulting to weather forecasters.
But even his initial premise is simply ignorant bashing of what are really fairly good estimates of future weather. I routinely use one-week-out estimates of weather from N.O.A.A. or the NWS to plan vacations and outdoor activity and have found them really quite useful. Clearly uncertainty about specific conditions at specific times (this what people mean by "weather") increases with time, but even at 1 week the description of overall weather for the day is pretty good.
This depends on part on the stability of the local weather patterns in the areas you deal with of course.
I suggest you actually read the fair tax site. The fair tax provides a prebate check for taxes paid up to the poverty line, so the poor pay NO TAXES for spending on basic necessities. ...
Ah! It is good the legally defined poor (... up to the poverty line ...) are spared annihilatory taxation on their subsistence income (but then, they have little wealth to contribute to the public coffers anyway). This then merely dumps even more of the cost of running the government on the Middle Class, who have seen their proportionate burden of taxation greatly increase while their income stagnated over the last generation.
There is always another "fair tax" or "flat tax" stalking horse around the corner designed to further cut the taxes of the wealthy, rich, and super-rich even farther below their already historic lows. As with Intuit, those who already have, never have seem to have enough. It's a shell game and the Middle Class always ends up with the empty shell.
You know, if Intuit were really smart they wouldn't fight this...but rather got to the IRS and ask, "how can we be contracted to help you."
They'd probably make more. ...
Ah! A proposal to bring back tax farming! (Or actually a suggestion that it would fit into Intuit's corporate strategy to bring it back.)
This privatization of the tax system (And we all know that "privatization" is always a Good Thing! Right?) is one of the things that brought on the French Revolution and sent tax farmers to the guillotines. Can we just move directly to that latter stage? Intuit's executive suite sounds ready for a visit from the Committee of Public Safety right now!
Now the Japanese can look forward to slime molds doing their urban renewal instead of Godzilla or Mothra!
...However, you don't get to pretend that the Russian program is inherently safer just because they've been lucky enough to survive their accidents.
I actually agree with most of your remarks, and yes, given the similar nature of the programs and similarity of inherent risks, it is not surprising that their manned launch safety records are not greatly different. By picking and choosing what to count as a "serious" accident or methods of counting (does a fatal launch make the system more unreliable because more people are on board?) either one can be made to look worse.
Nonetheless, the notion of a flight on which fatalities occur is by itself a clear and unbiased measure of safety (though not a complete or exclusive measure). Remember, the original challenge was to name a program with a significantly better safety track record. While it is possible the string of 94 launches with no fatalilities is pure dumb luck, rather than evidence for a system that overcame its initial problems, what is the likelihood that this is so?
Consider this hypothesis: what is the confidence that Soyuz has a 95% of better reliability (as measured by fatal accidents) now, given a sample of 94 successive successes? Answer: 99.1%.
What is the confidence that the Shuttle has 95% reliability now given 2 failures in 123 launches? Answer: 94.4%. What is the confidence that it now has 95% reliability given its current record of 16 successive successes? Answer: 55.1%. What if we take all post Challenger launches with 1 failure? Answer 96.7%.
The fact is the current Soyuz launch record without fatalities is quite definitely and literally significantly better.
Shut up.
Deregulating space travel is the only way we're ever going to make a dent there, for the time being and with the current political climate.
Please, just shut up. Yes, a few are going to die going up, but they know the risks.
There is nothing stopping a private consortium from funding out of private capital the development of it's own space flight system, then selling its launch services to the government or space tourists. In fact there a number of companies trying to do this right now, for small satellites mostly (and non-orbital thrill rides).
What is preventing LockMart or Boeing from coughing up the $5 to $10 billion required for a full-scale manned launch system? Nothing... except they want the government to contract in advance to use them exclusively for launch services in the future, or else they want the government to fund the "private deregulated" project. They do not want to invest and compete, they want a "pre-bailout", a no risk proposition from the beginning.
Private enterprise can be efficient if there is competition - multiple providers - and preferably also a marketplace of multiple customers. When there is one provider for an essential service needed by only one customer none of the supposed disciplines of the marketplace function and there is no pragmatic (that is, practical as opposed to ideological) reason for the government not to own its own launch system and many for it to do so.
NASA doesnt have a great safety track record any longer.
Well that's a load of shit. Can you name a space agency which regularly launches manned missions and has a significantly better safety track record?
Didn't think so.
Well, now that you mention it, yeah! I can! It is the Russian Federal Space Agency. They currently have a running string of 94 manned launches with zero fatalities (the equivalent number for the U.S. is 16).
Or, if you prefer, we could rate the overall safety of the two nation's current manned launch systems, the U.S. Space Shuttle and the Russian Soyuz vehicle family. It is 2 fatal missions out of 129 for the Shuttle (on flights 25 and 113) and 2 fatal missions out of 104 for the Soyuz (on flights 1 and 10). Fatal accidents occurring throughout a program's history is symptomatic of a fundamentally unsafe system. Fatal accidents exclusively concentrated near the beginning shows a system that got through the near side of the "bathtub curve" and is now operating with high reliability. Soyuz is on track for exceeding the Shuttle launch history, and thus the overall fatal launch rate, before the U.S. can launch a replacement.
...
The argument for letting children profit is easy; some people work so their children and granchildren can benefit, and not themselves. How true that argument is, and how far in the future that profit should extend, are open to debate, but it's not a completely stupid argument.
And there are various mechanisms by which someone who worked for the benefit of their children, not themselves, can leave most of the wealth they accrue during their lives to those descendants. The money can be invested and continue providing for those descendants forever (this is called a "foundation") without any limit.
What has this go to with the abuse of the provision in the U.S. Constitution that seeks: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" ?
Copyright is, in U.S. law, a benefit extended to an actual creator for a limited time (i.e. their lifetime or less, originally 14 years) in order to encourage their creative activities for the benefit of the public.
What we can say - given the actual example of Bangladesh - is that a long term (50 years and counting) drop in fertility to (in the next decade) below replacement levels can be accomplished in even the poorest societies on Earth, even if the implementation of specific policies that promote this drop is imperfect or incomplete. The first world lifestyle (i.e. great wealth) is not required.
Guess what the only thing we've discovered that limits population growth without actually killing people is?
Give up?
It's a first world lifestyle.
It is not the only thing. Educating women is a proven independent source of growth reduction, as is giving women an independent source of income at the prevailing local economic level (e.g. through the grameen bank micro-loan system). The fertility rate in Bangladesh has dropped dramatically in 50 years, from 6.81 to 2.36 (near mere replacement rate) and the drop shows no sign of slowing. It is still one of the poorest countries in the entire world.
Improving the social and economic conditions of women to being similar to men in the same society is a sufficient means of fixing this problem. This may be a major part of the reason why the industrial revolution itself initiated an almost uninterrupted decline in fertility (and still dropping): it led to the equality of women.
The project will decimate 2000 acres of desert habitat for 200 megawatts output.
It isn't clear to me that it does decimate 2000 acres of desert habitat. What they are doing is putting a clear roof over the desert, so that sunlight still reaches the ecological communities in the area, and efficiently conducting away the trapped heat (it is the product they are after, after all) so that the temperatures could be kept at normal. Clearly a means of distributing rain under the roof is needed (flip up panels when raining perhaps), if this solved then aside from a one-time installation of (probably) widely spaced support pillars what would the adverse ecological impact necessarily be? The roof would need to be opaque to far infrared light, but could be transparent to everything else (materials technology willing).
What would cause the decimation? (I am assuming you are using "decimation" in its modern sense, equivalent to annihilation, not the original sense of reduction by one-tenth.)
Conventional solar power approaches can harvest four times as much energy per square kilometer, but they completely shade the ground below the collecting surfaces which creates a far greater impact.
Well, it is a big budget (make that: BIG!!! budget) holiday blockbuster. The last time you saw one of those with a unique plot and surprising plot twists was.... when?
There are different types of movies with different entertainment qualities, and you should judge it by its own genre. Do you go to a kung-fu flick expecting an emotional story about small town life? Do you go to a sports movie expecting Shakespeare?
The Matrix is the last big budget blockbuster that I can think of with an original story, which was almost eleven years ago, and was not a holiday blockbuster (it was released in March).
A heavy water reactor is the anti-thesis of the salt-based Thorium reactors.
Antihesis? I hardly think so, it is just another thorium reactor technology - one that is more mature. I think we should look at as many viable candidate thorium reactor technologies as we can, and develop all them to the point of establishing whether they are commercially attractive or not.
There will be dozens of AHWR reactors operating, in all likelihood, before a single molten fluoride salt starts producing power on an industrial scale.
Perhaps some day, instead of releasing entire novels, authors will release single chapters, wait until enough people have paid, and then release the next chapter, and so forth, until the entire novel is complete.
I don't even start reading the first book in a series until the last book is in print. I'm certainly not interested in reading a book one chapter at a time.
Literary habits may be hard to change - you are not used to reading serialized material, and thus reject the very idea. You do realize, I hope, that serialized novels were commonplace in the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century. Science fiction magazines have kept this practice alive (as well as printing popular short fiction, which was once common and has also died out in most of the publishing industry).
"I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King..."
He should have said: "I'd be enormously more successful than I really am, and very happy if I were Stephen King...".
This is part of why the whole quasi-conspiratorial story of "why we didn't go with thorium in the first place" is utter nonsense. It was not because "we wanted bombs instead" and were prejudiced against "superior thorium", it is because only if you have an established nuclear industry cranking out materials usable in bombs by the thousands can you build these reactors in the first place. Either you must have natural/low enriched uranium reactors to produce plutonium, or you need large amounts of highly enriched uranium (prime bomb material) to load into thorium breeders.
Also unacknowledged is that the particular type of reactor being promoted, the molten fluoride salt reactor, was and is a complex technology that requires substantial additional development. Only one single reactor of this kind was ever built, and it was an 8 megawatt (thermal) materials test reactor, not a power reactor. We are looking at many years of additional development before construction can start on a prototype full scale power reactor. I agree that this technology should be further pursued, and it may turn out more successful that plutonium breeders (no successful power plants have been built, just several failures) but it is by no means guaranteed.
Hyman Rickover, by the way, was interested in light water uranium fueled reactors because they are a good technology for powering submarines, not because they produce plutonium (they are lousy plutonium producers, the yield is low and the material produced has terrible properties for bombs).
Check out the 2005 IAEA survey document (http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/IAEA-TECDOC-1450.pdf) for a good summary of the thorium technology options and prospects.
I'd rate if funny too... if I hadn't actually worked in environments where commenting of this sort was actually required...
After writing a couple of million lines of code, the more code I write, the more I unwind it. Somewhere along the line, adolescent programmers got the idea that jamming all your logic into as few unreadable lines as possible is the fastest way to manliness. Way, way wrong.
Amen to that brother!
I am also much aggrieved by the corollary: junior developers coming up to me to complain about my "bad coding" - i.e. writing visibly nested loops with clear indentation of each level, and separating different logic tests into different statements, instead of mashing everything together into a few unindented lines.
...
Any publicly held corporation has the legal obligation to return value to it's shareholders, it's not a defense, it's the stone cold truth - hence the Revlon Rule.
On the other hand, there is a lot of latitude for an (immortal) corporation to decide on the appropriate time frame for realizing that value. The Revlon Rule is interesting because it relates to the value of a sale of the business, whose time frame is both fixed and short (and which addressed decisions that served only the interests of the current management). A business that is not up for sale can consider the implications of its business practices as they play out decades from now, and in fact would be remiss if it did not do so.
Chevron for example invests a great deal up front in new petroleum developments to make them as clean as possible, generally far exceeding current legal requirements. Why spend more money now, when they could be returned as share-holder profits next quarter (as many businesses do)? Because it avoids costly accidents, and retrofits many years from now, and adds to good will -- which is a very valuable commodity. Deals made decades from now will depend on good corporate citizenship today (Google take note).
A lot of us buy clothing or other items that are made in China, complete with all of the horrible working conditions that the people are exposed to, but we don't feel that Nike, Wal-Mart, Fruit-of-the-Loom, or whoever else should "stand up" to the Chinese Government, so why should Google be any different? I'm not saying it's right, but it's hardly unique.
Speak for yourself. A lot of us feel that Nike, Wal-Mart, Fruit-of-the-Loom, etc. SHOULD "stand up" to the Chinese Government, and furthermore ensure adequate wages and conditions for their factory workers, and that the resources going in to the products are obtained through ethical means, and that the products produced should be safe, instead of being partners-in-crime with the Communist Party of China.
Yet you post all over the Internet. So I guess you aren't really hiding everything. When was it suddenly a good idea to put private information on the Internet. Why are you doing that? If you aren't, it doesn't matter what Google does.
Say what?
"Posting all over the Internet" (i.e. engaging in a public conversation, an ancient right and obligation in fact of a public minded citizen) is not "putting private information" on the Internet. When does exercising the rights of free speech abrogate expectations of privacy in other areas?
Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft program manager, (1996): "If you want security on the 'Net', unplug your computer."
Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, (1999): "You, us folks, peasants, you already have zero privacy. Get over it."
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, (2009): "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Our corporate masters have always felt that our private lives are their property to abuse as they see fit.
The problem I have with this sort of stuff is look at Tiger Woods, even President Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc...
People without skeletons in their closet are extremely rare. Nearly everybody has something to hide, if not from criminal matters, from embarrassing personal matters....
In addition we should all recognize that most anything, taken out of context and misrepresented, can be made to look bad. There is no reason why we should have to share any information about our private lives at all with people who we have not voluntarily established a personal relationship with.
Who would like prospective employers scrutinizing your hobbies, friends and acquaintances, Google searches, choice of reading materials, and personal communications without disclosing this scrutiny to you, or giving you a chance to "explain"?
It is another instance of the Matthew Effect (Matthew 25:29 - '"To all those who have, more will be given ... but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away"). Stripping individuals of privacy is another step in giving new immense powers to those who already have immense powers.