You are absolutely correct - this is simply a commitment to provide a universal service to the public to support a modern economy and society: like K-12 education, decent roads, clean water, electricity, mail service, access to phone service and TV signals, sewage and trash disposal, police protection, fire department protection, etc., etc.
After reading TFA I think the author did a bad job in reporting, using United States hot-button political lingo to frame decisions made overseas to provide specific levels of universal service access for the Internet.
... But in New Jersey the individual only pays around 50% of the cost, so I would argue he is only entitled to half the generated electricity. The other 50% should be split off the solar panels and dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires for the benefit of other neighbors who paid the other half of the bill. That would be fair.
Actually all of the electricity is dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires. The homeowner actually only gets an offset for the electricity that is consumed from those wires, down to $0. Any excess production is free electricity for the utility, and it turns out the utility is getting a good deal on the offset cost as well - all of the solar generated electricity is valuable peak power, but offsets one-for-one electricity use of which is only partly peak power. And then there is the savings on the capacity that would have had to be added at a central power plant instead (an expensive an inefficient peaking plant at that), the cost of which otherwise would be charged to all ratepayers.
You need to look at the whole picture, not just part of it, before declaring what is "fair".
Slight problem. If I am paying to put a solar panel on your house, I am giving you reduced rates AND making the value of your house go up by a significant percentage of what I am giving you. There is very little benefit to the public as a whole. If you were talking about government subsidizing a solar power plant, that would be an entirely different scenario altogether. The public as a whole would be getting the benefit.
Bigger problem with your analysis. You are claiming that 4.5 KW of solar capacity added to a centralized power plant benefits the public, but the same 4.5 KW of capacity on top of a private residence does not? Can you explain how this is? Both capacity increments feed their power directly into the grid, and in both cases the private residence draws its power from the grid.I can't see how one is a public benefit yet the other is not on this basis.
Is the claim then that the fact that a private individual owns the solar system rather than, say, a private company deprives the public of a benefit? Don't follow that logic either.
And you do realize that a private household is kicking in most of the money to build the power system right? That the subsidy is mobilizing private capital to invest in power production, just as it would in the centralized power plant case? And that the space devoted to power production is not taking up any new land do so?
Please cite one paper that has not been effectively refuted showing non-avian dinosaurs surviving after the KT event.
As far as I can tell there aren't any. I previously cited on this thread a paper that refuted one prominent claim of a post-KT hadrosaur.
Of course one can accurately claim that the asteroid/comet did not kill all the dinosaurs since the birds survived, but it is commonly understood that they aren't included in the hypothesis of KT extinction of dinosaurs.
Now it is conceivable (perhaps even likely) that one or a few other clades of dinosaurs made it through the main KT extinction event as a disastrously depleted community (since the birds made it, and so did several clades of the reptilians, etc.), but which died out some time later. But if so, we have no convincing evidence of it yet. And, if so, the KT event still gets credit for doing the heavy lifting in sending them to extinction.
It helps to focus on the observable facts (e.g. the distribution of dinosaur fossils in geological strata) in preference to speculations of individual scientists. The fact is: no fossils of non-avian dinosaurs have yet been conclusively dated above the KT impact boundary, but fossils of a number of non-avian dinosaur genera have been found very close to the KT event (making it extremely likely that they existed at the KT impact time). A few claims of post-KT non-avian dinosaurs have been made, but have not stood up to closer investigation.
Since the distribution of dinosaur fossils close to the KT event has received by far the most scientific attention the failure to find any surviving lineages after the event is striking.
I would be fascinated to know what actual evidence (as opposed to speculation) that your unnamed, unsourced microbiologist could possibly have of a disease striking all non-avian dinosaurids, given the limitations of the fossil record. Proposed alternate scenarios (generally lacking any evidence) are all over the map and are a dime a dozen. Looking at all conceivable possibilities is good science, but one needs to keep such speculation in perspective.
Working out all of the details about events unfolded around the time of the KT impact, and the recovery period after, is a project that will likely never be finished -- there are so many possible mechanisms, scenarios, and sub-scenarios and the evidence is (and always will be) restricted.
But to assert that "the dinosaurs being destroyed by the asteroid strike is almost mythology" is a fantastic distortion of the situation -- it is not noticing the Amazon rain forest because of all the trees.
I drive a 1800 cc motorcycle, which is faster than a C4 Corvette, as fuel efficient as a Prius IRL (around 40-45 MPG), hella fun to ride, AND I can take the carpool lane:-)
More power to you man! "Green" choices come in different packages for people with different needs. I, on the other hand, can also shop for a week's worth of groceries for my family, and also take said family of four for a trip, and be able to hold conversations with any passengers, all with a single vehicle.
Given that one needs to buy a car, and you need one with sedan-type 4-person seating, what car purchase would you say is "greener" (lower pollution and minimizing fossil fuel consumption over its life)?
Not what I was saying. It gets used as "I'm Green" icon and far too often. You can survive without a car, you can survive by not using it as much and you can be green in many other ways without spending a bucket load on a car. Horses for courses really.
Despite your denial it does indeed appear to be exactly what you are saying: that no car purchase can be a green one, and the only "green" choice is to do without a car. This is a false dichotomy.
I also detect a certain circularity in your perception of a Prius purchase as a being empty public posing despite the fact that really is objectively a cost-effective outstanding ultra-low pollution petroleum-saving vehicle. You think of it is a foolish symbol, and thus when you see one you perceive it as being confirmation of your preconceived idea ('there goes another phony 'green' poser...").
...What sort of magical juice about hybrids lets them use the carpool lane that very efficient ICE-only cars don't have?
Permits to use HOV lanes were available for both hybrids (if they had 45 miles per gallon or greater fuel economy highway rating) and non-hybrid ultra-low pollution vehicles in California. These were only offered for the first 85,000 qualifying vehicles as a way to jump start the market. These were exhausted some years ago.
BTW were there any very efficient ICE-only cars that rated 45 miles per gallon or greater at the time? I think the notion that there is an arbitrary bias of substantial effect is false.
You are absolutely correct that large scale deployment of plug-in vehicles will require a massive upgrade of electricity production and the electric power grid.
However, the electric grid must be given a massive upgrade anyway to bring large amounts of non-polluting electricity on-line. The national grid has fallen into decrepitude due to a few decades of coasting on previous investments (like so much of the national infrastructure). A national electric system upgrade is coming down the pike no matter what.
Well they are more of a fad/statement then anything else. You don't buy a Prius to be "green", you buy one to say "Look at me, I care about the environment". Now that may come off a bit trollish, but that certainly is the reality of the situation.
Bullfeathers.
Given that one needs to buy a car, and you need one with sedan-type 4-person seating, what car purchase would you say is "greener" (lower pollution and minimizing fossil fuel consumption over its life)?
My family/commuter car (a Camry) recently died with almost 300,000 miles on it. A straight-forward calculation of cost-effectiveness including the purchase price of the car, a 200,000 mile minimum vehicle life, and gas at least $3 a gallon averaged over the car's life, showed that the Prius was the cheapest vehicle to buy. A purely utilitarian decision.
And, what car do you think I should have bought that would fill the role that was more "green", that is with lower fossil fuel consumption over its life, and with very low pollution?
(I note parenthetically the "used car fallacy" that I've seen dredged up to attack buying fuel-efficient vehicles: that automotive energy-efficiency is best maximized by buying used cars in which the energy for production is sunk. The problem with this is that viewed on a national level vehicle are consumables like food, they get used up and must be replaced with new product. Used cars exist only because some fraction of people don't use them up completely before replacing, the supply is finite and relatively small compared to the overall market. New vehicles must be bought by someone, and the more fuel efficient they are the better.)
... I note according to Wikipedia the United States has 104 power stations currently in operation.
So how many enrichment centres are currently in the United States?
One. It is an (obsolete) gaseous diffusion plant at Paducah, Kentucky owned and operated by USEC Inc. 9the United States Enrichment Corporation). There is also a small USEC pilot gas centrifuge plant Piketon, Ohio.
...I can't help but think we're close to the end of the line for rotating, magnetic media.
Not that close, yet. Using patterned media and/or thermal assisted recording data densities can rise another 100-fold to 1000-fold (they say - this takes bit density down to the nanometer range).
I've wondered whether scanning tunneling microscope (STM) technology might provide an ultimate density limit for spinning media drives.
SSD technology is coming up fast, but hard disks still have a way to go.
US policy was to keep man-in-the-loop to the lowest operational levels possible in order to prevent a 'Dead Hand' scenario.
And this was the policy in the Soviet Union also. As the TFA eventually discloses, Perimeter actually simply passes launch authority to a pre-designated human command authority in a secure location. This is NOT a "Doomsday Machine"!
If one reads the article one soon discovers that it is misrepresenting itself. The Perimeter system is not an automatic response system - it transfers launch authority to an actual authorized person in a secure location who makes the launch decision. In no way is this an automatic "Doomsday Machine".
Is this a shocking revelation? Well, the U.S. has its own "pre-positioned national command authority" who does exactly the same thing! See Bruce Blair's book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War.
I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital... our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
This reasonable cost analysis illustrates the TRUE fundamental reason why nuclear power construction has been dead since the 1970s: the high capital cost. Coal power currently costs around 4 cents per kilowatt hour. Under current regulatory conditions coal power plants are always cheaper to build which means not only do they produce electricity more cheaply, but the risk to the utility is lower since the payoff on the investment is faster. And utilities are generally under a legal requirement that their investment decisions pass the muster of regulators who represent the rate-payer -- if the decisions are not found to be reasonable from the rate-payers view point the utility CANNOT recover the investment! In effect this regulatory regime prohibits the construction of nuclear power plants for practical purposes.
Reforming this situation requires at least one of the following:
Making coal power more expensive (by bearing the cost of carbon pollution, for which they currently bear no cost);
Creating clean energy mandates that include nuclear power so that regulations require bringing more costly clean energy on-line.
Currently item 2 has been the only technique put into practice, and only spottily.
BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.
There is a perpetual shortage of good viewing time on high resolution instruments, so the more we can add at reasonable cost the better. Space observatories are extremely expensive, so any close runner-up on Earth will be an excellent deal.
This looks like an excellent site for one or more automated observatories - think of it as a cheap Hubble on Earth. Servicing will be available when needed (repairs and upgrades) for negligible cost (compared to the cost of shuttle launch ), and building the observatory to Antarctic specs is far cheaper than space specs.
Are you insane? Removing support for older versions?
Windows 2000 (released on Feb 17, 2000) is supported until 13 July 2010.
Windows XP (released in Aug 2001 is supported until April 8, 2014
True story. In 1997 I bought a PC running Windows 95. Due to the defective design of said operating system, it had to be reinstalled every 10 months or so. An annoyance, but not a serious problem... as long as I could get the necessary security patches and browser updates to keep the system current to the Internet environment. Some critical OS functions also did not ship with Win95 (VPN for example) and had to be downloaded and installed separately. But these patches and upgrades were available only via a live download/installation process from a Microsoft server. Given its vast resources there is no reason they couldn't at least keep that server up indefinitely even though they weren't adding new patches or upgrades.
On December 31, 2001 Microsoft terminated support for Windows 95 and shut down that server. As it happened, on Christmas Day the OS had done its "Day 300 crash" and I needed to reinstall, but didn't get around to it until January 2 or so. And all I could do was reinstall from the original disks, now outdated to the point of uselessness. So I had to abandon a computer only 4 years old.
Some of the sins microsoft commit though according to the site are just rubbish.
They list inspecting your hard disk for pirated copies of their software as a sin. Is it really a sin for microsoft to try and find out if you are stealing from them?
Next thing you know they will be complaining about me putting a lock on my front door to stop someone emptying my house while I am at work.
This is a very poor analogy. A better one using the same approach is that Microsoft is claiming the right to break the locks that are on your house, and coming in to "look around" whenever they want to see if you they think you have stolen something of theirs.
Actually, the science has never been presented for peer review....
Unless of course you count every single journal article published on the subject and the numerous scientific panel reviews around the world, culminating in the largest such peer review in scientific history -- the IPPCC. Other than that, no peer review at all.
... The debate has been politicized and therefore forever tainted. The science has been lost and those involved pushed to their respective sides so much so that the truth is getting lost. We're all citing our science celebs in some kind of battle royale of evidence. The scientific debate will hopefully go on, as it should. Let's hope the political debate is stifled until some meaningful consensus can be reached.
To paraphrase: those who benefit from the status quo have politicized the debate by slinging unfounded FUD ( fear uncertainty and doubt). Since there has been politicization we should do nothing at all to upset the status quo, until the politicization ceases. By the way, don't pay any attention to the bucket of FUD I'm carrying...
You would be rather surprised and intrigued by what you'll read.
In a nut shell, the evidence via ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc do show a correlation between increased global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.
However, it seems that the carbon dioxide levels increase about 40 to 50 years *after* the temperature increase.
Additionally, the archeological evidence coming to light now isn't that the naming of of Greenland by the vikings wasn't a propaganda triumph, but instead a quite literal statement. Interestingly enough, *farms* are being discovered under the glaciers.
Add to that the medieval grape and wine industry on the coastland of Greenland. Vineyards. Doing something like that would be absolutely impossible given the current climate.
Sorry, vineyards in Greenland never happened. Even at the height of the Medieval Warm Period (the existence of which is not controversial and in no way undercuts current climate research) the Vikings were challenged to grown enough *hay* much less something so exotic and non-essential. A detailed discussion of the Greenland Viking's agricultural economy is given in Jared Diamond's book "Collapse".
You are probably confusing Vinland (Canda and New England) which the Vikings visited periodically and found native wild grapes with the notion that the Vikings grew grapes
Hogan? Really? A supporter of Intelligent Design, Velikovsky catastrophe cosmology, and an AIDS denier? Certainly if you want cherry-picked evidence that's where you should go. He seems to have made it his third career.
I guess it is based on bullshit data. For instance, Switzerland has a much higher life expentancy, see here. 80 years for men, 84 for women.
adjusted for the effects of premature death resulting from non-health-related fatal injuries
Why this adjustment ? Oh, to make data fit to your conclusion ? You live in a violent country, deal with it.
Close - it is bullshit analysis. What they did was fit a curve to the OECD data set for injury and per capita income, then using the U.S. per capita income and the assumption that it is a normal OECD country they calculate its "adjusted" life expectancy. They are thus crediting the U.S. with both a typical OECD injury death rate and a typical OECD relationship for GDP to life expectancy, when in fact it is much lower.
Do check out the blogspot post, but then check this out:
According to "OECD Economic Surveys: United States 2008", p. 137 (http://tinyurl.com/mt3g76):
"It has been claimed (Ohsfeld and Schneider, 2006) that adjusting for the higher death rate from accident or injury in the United States over 1980-99 than the OECD average would increase US life expectancy at birth from 18th of of 29 OECD countries to the highest. In fact, what the panel regression estimated by these authors shows is that predicted life expectancy at birth based on US GDP per capita and OECD average death rates from these causes is the highest in the OECD. The adjustment for the gap in injury death rates between the United States and OECD average alone only increases life expectancy at birth marginally, from 19th on average among 29 countries over 1980-99 to 17th. Hence, the high ranking of adjusted life expectancy mainly reflects high US GDP per capita, not the effects of unusually high death rates from accident and injury."
In other words, the figures in Table 1-5 are not U.S. life expectancies adjusted for fatal injuries, but rather a model that assumes that both the relationship of life expectancy to per capita GDP and injuries in the U.S. follow OECD trends.
That is - they are falsely giving the U.S. credit for having the same basic life expectancy as other other high GDP OECD countries, when in fact it is markedly lower.
Somebody doesn't seem to have done the math here. 2.3 kW of power, assuming ~1100 W/m^2 insolation, a 30% conversion efficiency, gives something like an array of solar panels less than 9 ft by 9ft (2.7 m^2). Does the article discuss how much the reactor plus the engine might weigh? I have a hard time believing its lighter than a solar array (unless they intend to launch it cold and bury it on site to shield people from the radiation).
The article is reporting on a test of a heat transfer and power production prototype, not a proposal for an actual reactor for moon deployment, with operational specifics. However, launching the reactor cold, and using cheap local materials for shielding, is exactly how such proposed schemes usually work.
But a key factor you are overlooking is how to provide continuous power. A solar system on the moon gets no light for 14 days at a stretch. This requires 775 kWH of power storage. Battery and flywheel technologies currently exist that store 100-200 WH/kg, so we are looking at a relatively optimistic mass of ~4000 kg added for the power storage. So it seems rather unlikely that a solar power system can beat a compact reactor in mass.
Slashdot Mirror
You are absolutely correct - this is simply a commitment to provide a universal service to the public to support a modern economy and society: like K-12 education, decent roads, clean water, electricity, mail service, access to phone service and TV signals, sewage and trash disposal, police protection, fire department protection, etc., etc.
After reading TFA I think the author did a bad job in reporting, using United States hot-button political lingo to frame decisions made overseas to provide specific levels of universal service access for the Internet.
... But in New Jersey the individual only pays around 50% of the cost, so I would argue he is only entitled to half the generated electricity. The other 50% should be split off the solar panels and dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires for the benefit of other neighbors who paid the other half of the bill. That would be fair.
Actually all of the electricity is dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires. The homeowner actually only gets an offset for the electricity that is consumed from those wires, down to $0. Any excess production is free electricity for the utility, and it turns out the utility is getting a good deal on the offset cost as well - all of the solar generated electricity is valuable peak power, but offsets one-for-one electricity use of which is only partly peak power. And then there is the savings on the capacity that would have had to be added at a central power plant instead (an expensive an inefficient peaking plant at that), the cost of which otherwise would be charged to all ratepayers.
You need to look at the whole picture, not just part of it, before declaring what is "fair".
Slight problem. If I am paying to put a solar panel on your house, I am giving you reduced rates AND making the value of your house go up by a significant percentage of what I am giving you. There is very little benefit to the public as a whole. If you were talking about government subsidizing a solar power plant, that would be an entirely different scenario altogether. The public as a whole would be getting the benefit.
Bigger problem with your analysis. You are claiming that 4.5 KW of solar capacity added to a centralized power plant benefits the public, but the same 4.5 KW of capacity on top of a private residence does not? Can you explain how this is? Both capacity increments feed their power directly into the grid, and in both cases the private residence draws its power from the grid.I can't see how one is a public benefit yet the other is not on this basis.
Is the claim then that the fact that a private individual owns the solar system rather than, say, a private company deprives the public of a benefit? Don't follow that logic either.
And you do realize that a private household is kicking in most of the money to build the power system right? That the subsidy is mobilizing private capital to invest in power production, just as it would in the centralized power plant case? And that the space devoted to power production is not taking up any new land do so?
Please cite one paper that has not been effectively refuted showing non-avian dinosaurs surviving after the KT event.
As far as I can tell there aren't any. I previously cited on this thread a paper that refuted one prominent claim of a post-KT hadrosaur.
Of course one can accurately claim that the asteroid/comet did not kill all the dinosaurs since the birds survived, but it is commonly understood that they aren't included in the hypothesis of KT extinction of dinosaurs.
Now it is conceivable (perhaps even likely) that one or a few other clades of dinosaurs made it through the main KT extinction event as a disastrously depleted community (since the birds made it, and so did several clades of the reptilians, etc.), but which died out some time later. But if so, we have no convincing evidence of it yet. And, if so, the KT event still gets credit for doing the heavy lifting in sending them to extinction.
It helps to focus on the observable facts (e.g. the distribution of dinosaur fossils in geological strata) in preference to speculations of individual scientists. The fact is: no fossils of non-avian dinosaurs have yet been conclusively dated above the KT impact boundary, but fossils of a number of non-avian dinosaur genera have been found very close to the KT event (making it extremely likely that they existed at the KT impact time). A few claims of post-KT non-avian dinosaurs have been made, but have not stood up to closer investigation.
See for example: http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2003RM/finalprogram/abstract_47695.htm
Since the distribution of dinosaur fossils close to the KT event has received by far the most scientific attention the failure to find any surviving lineages after the event is striking.
I would be fascinated to know what actual evidence (as opposed to speculation) that your unnamed, unsourced microbiologist could possibly have of a disease striking all non-avian dinosaurids, given the limitations of the fossil record. Proposed alternate scenarios (generally lacking any evidence) are all over the map and are a dime a dozen. Looking at all conceivable possibilities is good science, but one needs to keep such speculation in perspective.
Working out all of the details about events unfolded around the time of the KT impact, and the recovery period after, is a project that will likely never be finished -- there are so many possible mechanisms, scenarios, and sub-scenarios and the evidence is (and always will be) restricted.
But to assert that "the dinosaurs being destroyed by the asteroid strike is almost mythology" is a fantastic distortion of the situation -- it is not noticing the Amazon rain forest because of all the trees.
Bahhh--you and your Prius.
I drive a 1800 cc motorcycle, which is faster than a C4 Corvette, as fuel efficient as a Prius IRL (around 40-45 MPG), hella fun to ride, AND I can take the carpool lane :-)
More power to you man! "Green" choices come in different packages for people with different needs. I, on the other hand, can also shop for a week's worth of groceries for my family, and also take said family of four for a trip, and be able to hold conversations with any passengers, all with a single vehicle.
Given that one needs to buy a car, and you need one with sedan-type 4-person seating, what car purchase would you say is "greener" (lower pollution and minimizing fossil fuel consumption over its life)?
Not what I was saying. It gets used as "I'm Green" icon and far too often. You can survive without a car, you can survive by not using it as much and you can be green in many other ways without spending a bucket load on a car. Horses for courses really.
Despite your denial it does indeed appear to be exactly what you are saying: that no car purchase can be a green one, and the only "green" choice is to do without a car. This is a false dichotomy.
I also detect a certain circularity in your perception of a Prius purchase as a being empty public posing despite the fact that really is objectively a cost-effective outstanding ultra-low pollution petroleum-saving vehicle. You think of it is a foolish symbol, and thus when you see one you perceive it as being confirmation of your preconceived idea ('there goes another phony 'green' poser...").
...What sort of magical juice about hybrids lets them use the carpool lane that very efficient ICE-only cars don't have?
Permits to use HOV lanes were available for both hybrids (if they had 45 miles per gallon or greater fuel economy highway rating) and non-hybrid ultra-low pollution vehicles in California. These were only offered for the first 85,000 qualifying vehicles as a way to jump start the market. These were exhausted some years ago.
See: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/vr/decal.htm .
BTW were there any very efficient ICE-only cars that rated 45 miles per gallon or greater at the time? I think the notion that there is an arbitrary bias of substantial effect is false.
You are absolutely correct that large scale deployment of plug-in vehicles will require a massive upgrade of electricity production and the electric power grid.
However, the electric grid must be given a massive upgrade anyway to bring large amounts of non-polluting electricity on-line. The national grid has fallen into decrepitude due to a few decades of coasting on previous investments (like so much of the national infrastructure). A national electric system upgrade is coming down the pike no matter what.
Well they are more of a fad/statement then anything else. You don't buy a Prius to be "green", you buy one to say "Look at me, I care about the environment". Now that may come off a bit trollish, but that certainly is the reality of the situation.
Bullfeathers.
Given that one needs to buy a car, and you need one with sedan-type 4-person seating, what car purchase would you say is "greener" (lower pollution and minimizing fossil fuel consumption over its life)?
My family/commuter car (a Camry) recently died with almost 300,000 miles on it. A straight-forward calculation of cost-effectiveness including the purchase price of the car, a 200,000 mile minimum vehicle life, and gas at least $3 a gallon averaged over the car's life, showed that the Prius was the cheapest vehicle to buy. A purely utilitarian decision.
And, what car do you think I should have bought that would fill the role that was more "green", that is with lower fossil fuel consumption over its life, and with very low pollution?
(I note parenthetically the "used car fallacy" that I've seen dredged up to attack buying fuel-efficient vehicles: that automotive energy-efficiency is best maximized by buying used cars in which the energy for production is sunk. The problem with this is that viewed on a national level vehicle are consumables like food, they get used up and must be replaced with new product. Used cars exist only because some fraction of people don't use them up completely before replacing, the supply is finite and relatively small compared to the overall market. New vehicles must be bought by someone, and the more fuel efficient they are the better.)
... I note according to Wikipedia the United States has 104 power stations currently in operation. So how many enrichment centres are currently in the United States?
One. It is an (obsolete) gaseous diffusion plant at Paducah, Kentucky owned and operated by USEC Inc. 9the United States Enrichment Corporation). There is also a small USEC pilot gas centrifuge plant Piketon, Ohio.
...I can't help but think we're close to the end of the line for rotating, magnetic media.
Not that close, yet. Using patterned media and/or thermal assisted recording data densities can rise another 100-fold to 1000-fold (they say - this takes bit density down to the nanometer range).
I've wondered whether scanning tunneling microscope (STM) technology might provide an ultimate density limit for spinning media drives.
SSD technology is coming up fast, but hard disks still have a way to go.
US policy was to keep man-in-the-loop to the lowest operational levels possible in order to prevent a 'Dead Hand' scenario.
And this was the policy in the Soviet Union also. As the TFA eventually discloses, Perimeter actually simply passes launch authority to a pre-designated human command authority in a secure location. This is NOT a "Doomsday Machine"!
Pavel Podvig has made this point on numerous occasions, like this one.
If one reads the article one soon discovers that it is misrepresenting itself. The Perimeter system is not an automatic response system - it transfers launch authority to an actual authorized person in a secure location who makes the launch decision. In no way is this an automatic "Doomsday Machine".
Is this a shocking revelation? Well, the U.S. has its own "pre-positioned national command authority" who does exactly the same thing! See Bruce Blair's book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War.
I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital ... our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
This reasonable cost analysis illustrates the TRUE fundamental reason why nuclear power construction has been dead since the 1970s: the high capital cost. Coal power currently costs around 4 cents per kilowatt hour. Under current regulatory conditions coal power plants are always cheaper to build which means not only do they produce electricity more cheaply, but the risk to the utility is lower since the payoff on the investment is faster. And utilities are generally under a legal requirement that their investment decisions pass the muster of regulators who represent the rate-payer -- if the decisions are not found to be reasonable from the rate-payers view point the utility CANNOT recover the investment! In effect this regulatory regime prohibits the construction of nuclear power plants for practical purposes.
Reforming this situation requires at least one of the following:
Currently item 2 has been the only technique put into practice, and only spottily.
BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.
There is a perpetual shortage of good viewing time on high resolution instruments, so the more we can add at reasonable cost the better. Space observatories are extremely expensive, so any close runner-up on Earth will be an excellent deal.
This looks like an excellent site for one or more automated observatories - think of it as a cheap Hubble on Earth. Servicing will be available when needed (repairs and upgrades) for negligible cost (compared to the cost of shuttle launch ), and building the observatory to Antarctic specs is far cheaper than space specs.
Are you insane? Removing support for older versions?
Windows 2000 (released on Feb 17, 2000) is supported until 13 July 2010.
Windows XP (released in Aug 2001 is supported until April 8, 2014
True story. In 1997 I bought a PC running Windows 95. Due to the defective design of said operating system, it had to be reinstalled every 10 months or so. An annoyance, but not a serious problem... as long as I could get the necessary security patches and browser updates to keep the system current to the Internet environment. Some critical OS functions also did not ship with Win95 (VPN for example) and had to be downloaded and installed separately. But these patches and upgrades were available only via a live download/installation process from a Microsoft server. Given its vast resources there is no reason they couldn't at least keep that server up indefinitely even though they weren't adding new patches or upgrades.
On December 31, 2001 Microsoft terminated support for Windows 95 and shut down that server. As it happened, on Christmas Day the OS had done its "Day 300 crash" and I needed to reinstall, but didn't get around to it until January 2 or so. And all I could do was reinstall from the original disks, now outdated to the point of uselessness. So I had to abandon a computer only 4 years old.
Some of the sins microsoft commit though according to the site are just rubbish.
They list inspecting your hard disk for pirated copies of their software as a sin. Is it really a sin for microsoft to try and find out if you are stealing from them?
Next thing you know they will be complaining about me putting a lock on my front door to stop someone emptying my house while I am at work.
This is a very poor analogy. A better one using the same approach is that Microsoft is claiming the right to break the locks that are on your house, and coming in to "look around" whenever they want to see if you they think you have stolen something of theirs.
Actually, the science has never been presented for peer review....
Unless of course you count every single journal article published on the subject and the numerous scientific panel reviews around the world, culminating in the largest such peer review in scientific history -- the IPPCC. Other than that, no peer review at all.
... The debate has been politicized and therefore forever tainted. The science has been lost and those involved pushed to their respective sides so much so that the truth is getting lost. We're all citing our science celebs in some kind of battle royale of evidence. The scientific debate will hopefully go on, as it should. Let's hope the political debate is stifled until some meaningful consensus can be reached.
To paraphrase: those who benefit from the status quo have politicized the debate by slinging unfounded FUD ( fear uncertainty and doubt). Since there has been politicization we should do nothing at all to upset the status quo, until the politicization ceases. By the way, don't pay any attention to the bucket of FUD I'm carrying...
I'd suggest reading a bit of:
Kicking the Sacred Cow by James P Hogan.
You would be rather surprised and intrigued by what you'll read.
In a nut shell, the evidence via ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc do show a correlation between increased global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels. However, it seems that the carbon dioxide levels increase about 40 to 50 years *after* the temperature increase.
Additionally, the archeological evidence coming to light now isn't that the naming of of Greenland by the vikings wasn't a propaganda triumph, but instead a quite literal statement. Interestingly enough, *farms* are being discovered under the glaciers.
Add to that the medieval grape and wine industry on the coastland of Greenland. Vineyards. Doing something like that would be absolutely impossible given the current climate.
Sorry, vineyards in Greenland never happened. Even at the height of the Medieval Warm Period (the existence of which is not controversial and in no way undercuts current climate research) the Vikings were challenged to grown enough *hay* much less something so exotic and non-essential. A detailed discussion of the Greenland Viking's agricultural economy is given in Jared Diamond's book "Collapse".
You are probably confusing Vinland (Canda and New England) which the Vikings visited periodically and found native wild grapes with the notion that the Vikings grew grapes
Hogan? Really? A supporter of Intelligent Design, Velikovsky catastrophe cosmology, and an AIDS denier? Certainly if you want cherry-picked evidence that's where you should go. He seems to have made it his third career.
I guess it is based on bullshit data. For instance, Switzerland has a much higher life expentancy, see here. 80 years for men, 84 for women.
adjusted for the effects of premature death resulting from non-health-related fatal injuries
Why this adjustment ? Oh, to make data fit to your conclusion ? You live in a violent country, deal with it.
Close - it is bullshit analysis. What they did was fit a curve to the OECD data set for injury and per capita income, then using the U.S. per capita income and the assumption that it is a normal OECD country they calculate its "adjusted" life expectancy. They are thus crediting the U.S. with both a typical OECD injury death rate and a typical OECD relationship for GDP to life expectancy, when in fact it is much lower.
Do check out the blogspot post, but then check this out:
According to "OECD Economic Surveys: United States 2008", p. 137 (http://tinyurl.com/mt3g76):
"It has been claimed (Ohsfeld and Schneider, 2006) that adjusting for the higher death rate from accident or injury in the United States over 1980-99 than the OECD average would increase US life expectancy at birth from 18th of of 29 OECD countries to the highest. In fact, what the panel regression estimated by these authors shows is that predicted life expectancy at birth based on US GDP per capita and OECD average death rates from these causes is the highest in the OECD. The adjustment for the gap in injury death rates between the United States and OECD average alone only increases life expectancy at birth marginally, from 19th on average among 29 countries over 1980-99 to 17th. Hence, the high ranking of adjusted life expectancy mainly reflects high US GDP per capita, not the effects of unusually high death rates from accident and injury."
In other words, the figures in Table 1-5 are not U.S. life expectancies adjusted for fatal injuries, but rather a model that assumes that both the relationship of life expectancy to per capita GDP and injuries in the U.S. follow OECD trends.
That is - they are falsely giving the U.S. credit for having the same basic life expectancy as other other high GDP OECD countries, when in fact it is markedly lower.
Check it out for yourself, the Ohsfeld and Schneider report is at:
http://www.aei.org/docLib/9780844742403.pdf
See p. 20-21.
It reaches 0.13% of the speed of light. It will reach the nearest star in 3300 years or so.
Somebody doesn't seem to have done the math here. 2.3 kW of power, assuming ~1100 W/m^2 insolation, a 30% conversion efficiency, gives something like an array of solar panels less than 9 ft by 9ft (2.7 m^2). Does the article discuss how much the reactor plus the engine might weigh? I have a hard time believing its lighter than a solar array (unless they intend to launch it cold and bury it on site to shield people from the radiation).
The article is reporting on a test of a heat transfer and power production prototype, not a proposal for an actual reactor for moon deployment, with operational specifics. However, launching the reactor cold, and using cheap local materials for shielding, is exactly how such proposed schemes usually work.
But a key factor you are overlooking is how to provide continuous power. A solar system on the moon gets no light for 14 days at a stretch. This requires 775 kWH of power storage. Battery and flywheel technologies currently exist that store 100-200 WH/kg, so we are looking at a relatively optimistic mass of ~4000 kg added for the power storage. So it seems rather unlikely that a solar power system can beat a compact reactor in mass.