Obligatory Simpson's quote (the Stonecutter's song).
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, we do
Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do, we do Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
We do, we do
Who robs gamefish of their site?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do, we do
Ah yes, the people fleeing California trope so ever so popular on the right and in the meme-hyping media. In the reality-based world however amazingly few Californians leave the state (the OC Register is a famously right-wing newspaper BTW). In the 2010-2015 period studied no state had a lower per-capita movement rate than California, with an out-migration rate of 1.55%. Since that time the rate has increased, and is currently slightly above the national average (which is 2.3%).
Of course with the largest population of any state (one in 8 Americans) even a low, or average, rate is a relatively large number of people, due to simple arithmetic. But California is a high-income state (8th, 5th if you take out low population resource extraction economy states) with a diverse high-tech economy, and even with the current out-migration its population is still growing (despite the fact that the undocumented population isn't - so that's not why), and the real dynamic is that young(ish) people are coming into California for the jobs and salaries, and retired people are leaving.
This is a very healthy dynamic for California. Let Florida be the place where people go to die, and vote against education and the environment since they don't care about the future. Enjoy that red tide Floridians.
I'm perfectly okay with that. They can change their mind any time they want 5G. I'm sure Verizon will be happy to oblige. A wealthy enclave of 14,000 people is not going to hold up the deployment of 5G anywhere, but their own little community.
Quite so. The cheetah's in fact have gone through two severe bottlenecks in the last 12,000 years and are virtually clones - you can graft skin between cheetahs willy-nilly without rejection. Also white mice used in laboratories are effectively clones, no diversity at all, and they are healthy (until the researchers get to them).
If you have the genetic technology to actually create an animal from a DNA sequence then you definitely have the technology to edit out defects. And of course a cone/copy of a healthy animal will still be a healthy animal. If it has a deleterious recessive gene, then that will be quickly discovered when a second generation is created, and the deleterious gene can be edited out. By the time we can do this, we will probably be able to spot candidate genetic defects in the sequence itself (we already have some ability to do this using known models of defects).
OTOH it would be a good idea to get a second genome from a different population if possible to retain a high level of genetic diversity. But it does not take many well chosen individuals to capture a high percentage of the total diversity of a species.
I am unable to confirm that 50% of the budget of Quebec goes to health and human services (a broader category than just "health care") for 2018 it is apparently $38.5 billion (Canadian of course) out of a budget of almost $110 billion, or about 35%. And however "damn expensive" it is, it is cheaper by far than the U.S.
The whole purpose of the expensive fragile large space plane configuration was to allow it to put huge reconnaissance satellites into polar orbit from the Space Shuttle launch facility at Vandenburg AFB, and land it back at the base, i.e. operate it as an entirely classified system from a military base.
Here is the thing about the shuttle program: it was really a military program masquerading as a civilian system, and getting the civilian budget to fund it. All of the costly, dangerous aspects of its design can be traced to military requirements inserted into the program.
The whole purpose of the expensive fragile large space plane configuration were to allow it to put huge reconnaissance satellites from the Space Shuttle launch facility at Vandenburg AFB, and land it back at the base, i.e. operate it as an entirely classified system from a military base. This capability was never used even once. No shuttle was ever launched from Vandenburg. It never went into polar orbit.
None of this was public information at the time. Though the plans for the Vandenburg AFB launch site was no secret (that part could not be kept hidden, any more than the existence of Area 51), the actual development and management program for the shuttle was a black program, with a civilian cover. It could be compared to the Hughes Glomar Explorer project - claimed to be for seabed mining, but was really a CIA operation to recover a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank.
It was a cause of wonder for many years to me (and others) about how the engineers and NASA could be so very wrong about all the things the shuttle was supposed to do: its turn around time, its launch rate, its cost, its development schedule, etc.
By the 1990s the real story came out, and the mysteries evaporated. They weren't wrong about what it was designed to do, they were simply lying ("disinforming") in public about it. The various justifications offered for it in public were cover stories, nothing more.
The public development schedule was a false one as well. The program was famously delayed by a couple of years, but not really. It hit its real (secret) project plan, but the public plan was used to help support congressional funding.
Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
You are looking at this all wrong. If they had good broadband out in the sticks you could move there and enjoy your Internet based lifestyle, work remote, and live where it is cheap and the land and skies are beautiful. And if a fair number of people such as yourself would make this relocation, blue people moving to the red prairies, they would turn purple and maybe even blue breaking the back of the right-wing in America.
It might even stimulate the rural economy, leading to higher incomes and less dependence on the blue states for Federal tax transfers.
You should be supporting efforts to bring broadband to rural America. I sure as heck do.
While this is true, you also have to develop and demonstrate the plastic catching boom system.
This boom is not being tested in the ideal location for maximum plastic removal, it is being tested where there is already a lot of plastic that needs to be removed. I don't see why this should be seen as a failure or a problem. If it works well, more can be deployed in other areas.
Becausepaperstrawsdonotexist? Of course if disabled people need to use a plastic straw instead of any of the alternatives, they can carry some with themselves though it would be a good idea for restaurants to keep a supply on hand for their disabled customers.
This is very likely the only time the AC expresses any interest in the problems of the disabled, when it is an excuse to say "fucking liberals". If someone were to suggest that laws require restaurants to keep a supply of plastic straws for the disabled the AC would probably post to denounce those "fucking liberals" imposing snowflake requirements on "the market".
They aren't growing wheat. They are growing vegetables, fodder to produce milk, and fruits - all stuff that kind of makes sense to produce locally as they don't store well. Not grains.
No, but much of pre-industrial Arabia and North Africa was grassland. What is now the Sahara Desert was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
No it wasn't. The Roman breadbasket was the Mediterranean Maghreb which is about as fertile now as it was then. In 2003 Tunisia alone produced 2.3 million tonnes of grain.The total amount of grain needed to feed the million people of Rome was 300,000 tonnes.
The expansion of the Sahara is almost entirely to the west and south, not the north where the Maghreb its.
The worst travesty by far are the alfalfa growers in California, that only exist because of water rights written into law 140 years ago. The crop is worth less than the cost of delivering the water used to grow it, it consumes 22% of all of California's water (as much as all the cities in California combined) and 2/3 of the alfalfa is simply exported to Asia. Yes the California tax payer is paying to have 14% of the state's water exported to Asia at a financial loss so that a small number of industrial farm operators can pocket some money.
But no wheat. Check it out. What they are growing are stuff like vegetables, fodder to produce milk, and fruit crops, all stuff that actually makes sense to produce locally since they don't ship that well, or are specialty items, not tonnage crops like grain.
Thanks for being at least one person who is not just opining in complete ignorance like all of other 126 posts here (at this moment).
This is subject (towing icebergs for water) has been studied to death, anyone can Google dozens of studies done over the last few decades. There is nothing novel about the idea at all. This is the second such scheme posted on/. this year!
Slashdot should stop posting stories about "plans" to do this, and just post a story about someone who is at least about to actually do it! But then there would be no story to run.
msmash posted a story about this same boat and its voyagethree days ago. Come on guys get your act together! Quit posting the same stuff over and over.
Also note that the world speed record for a radio-controlled sailing vessel (which was also 2 meters long) is 157.65 km in 23 hours 42 min in the milder waters of the Mediterranean. At that world record speed in a small RC boat this challenge would have taken 32 days.
So 79 days in a boat not controlled by a human, and not limited to a 24 hour period, in the open waters of the Atlantic is not so shabby. The speed made good over that whole journey is 40% of that 24 hour record.
This is a 2 meter vessel, not a large racing hull built to be fast (and nothing but fast). Using the page you link to, the most useful comparison would be the single-handed records, and the one from 1987 which was about 11.5 days was in a 26 meter hull! And this is the smallest vessel on the list. You are probably not going to get a 2 meter vessel to tear along at an average speed of 7.5 m/sec which would be needed for that 11.5 day crossing.
In particular this the total content on the UAMPS website about the supposed NuScale project for which they are the alleged customer:
The Carbon Free Power Project is in the first phase of investigating the feasibility of a small modular reactor project using NuScale technology. The CFPP could consist of up to twelve 50 MW reactors located at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls. The feasibility analysis includes engineering and regulatory activities to complete a site selection analysis to allow the project participants the necessary information to make a decision whether to proceed with the Construction and Operating License Application.
Other than some promotional material copied from the NuScale website (and links to same) to provide the background to this blurb, there is nothing else on the site. Their last annual report simply said that decisions would be made in 2018 about this proposal, we are most of the way through 2018 and no decisions have been made. Previously they had said that decisions would be made in 2017 about this proposal. Nothing about this blurb has been updated since it was first written about four years ago.
There is no plan to build even one of these reactors right now. All there is is a feasibility study of the proposal in progress, and a permit to investigate and select a site at INL, but no actual sites have been selected.
NuScale's SMR reactor has already been certified by the NRC as being meltdown proof. Their SMR has also passed phase 1 of the NRC review, and their first 12 reactors are going to be built in Idaho.
Umm... this is just a press release on the NuScale site. I went Googling to check whether these projects existed anywhere else, like on the websites of the purported buyer/owner/operator of these 12 reactors, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) the proposed site to see how real this project is. That is, has funding actually been lined up? Is there a start date for building the first unit? And so forth.
What I found is that at the beginning of this year INL reported to the state that thus far the project consists of the fact that the "DOE granted a site use permit... in February 2016 that enables UAMPS to study, license and locate a NuScale-designed SMR at INL." Further there is no indication on the UAMPS site that anything has been agreed to other than that "study" thing. No announcement about an actual site selected, funding, customers for the power, a start date, etc..
Those 12 reactors are at the moment, simply a proposal, under study, with no funding or commitment to built them.
Will one (or more) get built? Maybe. I hope they do build one and thus give everyone a chance to evaluate the real-world practicality of this idea.
With the various site permits and other approvals NuScale's plans are moving forward, but claiming at this point that any reactors are going to be built is jumping the gun. Many nuclear reactor sites get permits, without ever having a reactor completed and operated on the site.
But I sure know the problem. I was once tasked with creating software that would flag objectionable content posted on-line. And the business types were worried about people using "banned terms" altered by look-alike characters a la Leetish (oops... 1337.sh), or spurious punctuation inserted, so I built a finite automaton matcher for database of banned terms, and applied filters during matching so that remapped characters and certain inserted punctuation would not prevent matching.
Totally useless. When such software is run against pages of normal text, with the suspected "banned terms" being high-lighted red, it is really surprising how often (or how many) buried obscenities pass under our eyes, and we are not sufficiently "little old ladyish" to notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory Simpson's quote (the Stonecutter's song).
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, we do
Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do, we do
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
We do, we do
Who robs gamefish of their site?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do, we do
Ah yes, the people fleeing California trope so ever so popular on the right and in the meme-hyping media. In the reality-based world however amazingly few Californians leave the state (the OC Register is a famously right-wing newspaper BTW). In the 2010-2015 period studied no state had a lower per-capita movement rate than California, with an out-migration rate of 1.55%. Since that time the rate has increased, and is currently slightly above the national average (which is 2.3%).
Of course with the largest population of any state (one in 8 Americans) even a low, or average, rate is a relatively large number of people, due to simple arithmetic. But California is a high-income state (8th, 5th if you take out low population resource extraction economy states) with a diverse high-tech economy, and even with the current out-migration its population is still growing (despite the fact that the undocumented population isn't - so that's not why), and the real dynamic is that young(ish) people are coming into California for the jobs and salaries, and retired people are leaving.
This is a very healthy dynamic for California. Let Florida be the place where people go to die, and vote against education and the environment since they don't care about the future. Enjoy that red tide Floridians.
I'm perfectly okay with that. They can change their mind any time they want 5G. I'm sure Verizon will be happy to oblige. A wealthy enclave of 14,000 people is not going to hold up the deployment of 5G anywhere, but their own little community.
Quite so. The cheetah's in fact have gone through two severe bottlenecks in the last 12,000 years and are virtually clones - you can graft skin between cheetahs willy-nilly without rejection. Also white mice used in laboratories are effectively clones, no diversity at all, and they are healthy (until the researchers get to them).
If you have the genetic technology to actually create an animal from a DNA sequence then you definitely have the technology to edit out defects. And of course a cone/copy of a healthy animal will still be a healthy animal. If it has a deleterious recessive gene, then that will be quickly discovered when a second generation is created, and the deleterious gene can be edited out. By the time we can do this, we will probably be able to spot candidate genetic defects in the sequence itself (we already have some ability to do this using known models of defects).
OTOH it would be a good idea to get a second genome from a different population if possible to retain a high level of genetic diversity. But it does not take many well chosen individuals to capture a high percentage of the total diversity of a species.
I am unable to confirm that 50% of the budget of Quebec goes to health and human services (a broader category than just "health care") for 2018 it is apparently $38.5 billion (Canadian of course) out of a budget of almost $110 billion, or about 35%. And however "damn expensive" it is, it is cheaper by far than the U.S.
The market, in its majestic wisdom, will (by definition) fix the problem when just the right number of people die!
Aarggh.
The whole purpose of the expensive fragile large space plane configuration was to allow it to put huge reconnaissance satellites into polar orbit from the Space Shuttle launch facility at Vandenburg AFB, and land it back at the base, i.e. operate it as an entirely classified system from a military base.
Here is the thing about the shuttle program: it was really a military program masquerading as a civilian system, and getting the civilian budget to fund it. All of the costly, dangerous aspects of its design can be traced to military requirements inserted into the program.
The whole purpose of the expensive fragile large space plane configuration were to allow it to put huge reconnaissance satellites from the Space Shuttle launch facility at Vandenburg AFB, and land it back at the base, i.e. operate it as an entirely classified system from a military base. This capability was never used even once. No shuttle was ever launched from Vandenburg. It never went into polar orbit.
None of this was public information at the time. Though the plans for the Vandenburg AFB launch site was no secret (that part could not be kept hidden, any more than the existence of Area 51), the actual development and management program for the shuttle was a black program, with a civilian cover. It could be compared to the Hughes Glomar Explorer project - claimed to be for seabed mining, but was really a CIA operation to recover a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank.
It was a cause of wonder for many years to me (and others) about how the engineers and NASA could be so very wrong about all the things the shuttle was supposed to do: its turn around time, its launch rate, its cost, its development schedule, etc.
By the 1990s the real story came out, and the mysteries evaporated. They weren't wrong about what it was designed to do, they were simply lying ("disinforming") in public about it. The various justifications offered for it in public were cover stories, nothing more.
The public development schedule was a false one as well. The program was famously delayed by a couple of years, but not really. It hit its real (secret) project plan, but the public plan was used to help support congressional funding.
I expect we will see the Google Lincoln Memorial and the Apple Washington Monument.
Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
You are looking at this all wrong. If they had good broadband out in the sticks you could move there and enjoy your Internet based lifestyle, work remote, and live where it is cheap and the land and skies are beautiful. And if a fair number of people such as yourself would make this relocation, blue people moving to the red prairies, they would turn purple and maybe even blue breaking the back of the right-wing in America.
It might even stimulate the rural economy, leading to higher incomes and less dependence on the blue states for Federal tax transfers.
You should be supporting efforts to bring broadband to rural America. I sure as heck do.
While this is true, you also have to develop and demonstrate the plastic catching boom system.
This boom is not being tested in the ideal location for maximum plastic removal, it is being tested where there is already a lot of plastic that needs to be removed. I don't see why this should be seen as a failure or a problem. If it works well, more can be deployed in other areas.
Because paper straws do not exist? Of course if disabled people need to use a plastic straw instead of any of the alternatives, they can carry some with themselves though it would be a good idea for restaurants to keep a supply on hand for their disabled customers.
This is very likely the only time the AC expresses any interest in the problems of the disabled, when it is an excuse to say "fucking liberals". If someone were to suggest that laws require restaurants to keep a supply of plastic straws for the disabled the AC would probably post to denounce those "fucking liberals" imposing snowflake requirements on "the market".
They aren't growing wheat. They are growing vegetables, fodder to produce milk, and fruits - all stuff that kind of makes sense to produce locally as they don't store well. Not grains.
No it isn't.
Wrong tense.
No, but much of pre-industrial Arabia and North Africa was grassland. What is now the Sahara Desert was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
No it wasn't. The Roman breadbasket was the Mediterranean Maghreb which is about as fertile now as it was then. In 2003 Tunisia alone produced 2.3 million tonnes of grain.The total amount of grain needed to feed the million people of Rome was 300,000 tonnes.
The expansion of the Sahara is almost entirely to the west and south, not the north where the Maghreb its.
True.
The worst travesty by far are the alfalfa growers in California, that only exist because of water rights written into law 140 years ago. The crop is worth less than the cost of delivering the water used to grow it, it consumes 22% of all of California's water (as much as all the cities in California combined) and 2/3 of the alfalfa is simply exported to Asia. Yes the California tax payer is paying to have 14% of the state's water exported to Asia at a financial loss so that a small number of industrial farm operators can pocket some money.
But no wheat. Check it out. What they are growing are stuff like vegetables, fodder to produce milk, and fruit crops, all stuff that actually makes sense to produce locally since they don't ship that well, or are specialty items, not tonnage crops like grain.
Thanks for being at least one person who is not just opining in complete ignorance like all of other 126 posts here (at this moment).
This is subject (towing icebergs for water) has been studied to death, anyone can Google dozens of studies done over the last few decades. There is nothing novel about the idea at all. This is the second such scheme posted on /. this year!
Slashdot should stop posting stories about "plans" to do this, and just post a story about someone who is at least about to actually do it! But then there would be no story to run.
msmash posted a story about this same boat and its voyage three days ago. Come on guys get your act together! Quit posting the same stuff over and over.
Despite the mocking comments here you are exactly right.
Major execs leave, and the stock dips (6% is a plunge?) and people are sure it must be the pot.
Also note that the world speed record for a radio-controlled sailing vessel (which was also 2 meters long) is 157.65 km in 23 hours 42 min in the milder waters of the Mediterranean. At that world record speed in a small RC boat this challenge would have taken 32 days.
So 79 days in a boat not controlled by a human, and not limited to a 24 hour period, in the open waters of the Atlantic is not so shabby. The speed made good over that whole journey is 40% of that 24 hour record.
This is a 2 meter vessel, not a large racing hull built to be fast (and nothing but fast). Using the page you link to, the most useful comparison would be the single-handed records, and the one from 1987 which was about 11.5 days was in a 26 meter hull! And this is the smallest vessel on the list. You are probably not going to get a 2 meter vessel to tear along at an average speed of 7.5 m/sec which would be needed for that 11.5 day crossing.
In particular this the total content on the UAMPS website about the supposed NuScale project for which they are the alleged customer:
The Carbon Free Power Project is in the first phase of investigating the feasibility of a small modular reactor project using NuScale technology. The CFPP could consist of up to twelve 50 MW reactors located at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls. The feasibility analysis includes engineering and regulatory activities to complete a site selection analysis to allow the project participants the necessary information to make a decision whether to proceed with the Construction and Operating License Application.
Other than some promotional material copied from the NuScale website (and links to same) to provide the background to this blurb, there is nothing else on the site. Their last annual report simply said that decisions would be made in 2018 about this proposal, we are most of the way through 2018 and no decisions have been made. Previously they had said that decisions would be made in 2017 about this proposal. Nothing about this blurb has been updated since it was first written about four years ago.
There is no plan to build even one of these reactors right now. All there is is a feasibility study of the proposal in progress, and a permit to investigate and select a site at INL, but no actual sites have been selected.
NuScale's SMR reactor has already been certified by the NRC as being meltdown proof. Their SMR has also passed phase 1 of the NRC review, and their first 12 reactors are going to be built in Idaho.
Umm... this is just a press release on the NuScale site. I went Googling to check whether these projects existed anywhere else, like on the websites of the purported buyer/owner/operator of these 12 reactors, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) the proposed site to see how real this project is. That is, has funding actually been lined up? Is there a start date for building the first unit? And so forth.
What I found is that at the beginning of this year INL reported to the state that thus far the project consists of the fact that the "DOE granted a site use permit... in February 2016 that enables UAMPS to study, license and locate a NuScale-designed SMR at INL." Further there is no indication on the UAMPS site that anything has been agreed to other than that "study" thing. No announcement about an actual site selected, funding, customers for the power, a start date, etc..
Those 12 reactors are at the moment, simply a proposal, under study, with no funding or commitment to built them.
Will one (or more) get built? Maybe. I hope they do build one and thus give everyone a chance to evaluate the real-world practicality of this idea.
With the various site permits and other approvals NuScale's plans are moving forward, but claiming at this point that any reactors are going to be built is jumping the gun. Many nuclear reactor sites get permits, without ever having a reactor completed and operated on the site.
But I sure know the problem. I was once tasked with creating software that would flag objectionable content posted on-line. And the business types were worried about people using "banned terms" altered by look-alike characters a la Leetish (oops... 1337.sh), or spurious punctuation inserted, so I built a finite automaton matcher for database of banned terms, and applied filters during matching so that remapped characters and certain inserted punctuation would not prevent matching.
Totally useless. When such software is run against pages of normal text, with the suspected "banned terms" being high-lighted red, it is really surprising how often (or how many) buried obscenities pass under our eyes, and we are not sufficiently "little old ladyish" to notice.