Off Topic but interesting read

[MarkTTU]

I cant help but to say Terry is right on.
If people(Middle Class!)who pay the majority of all costs in this country,would quit taking the slap in the face year after year and give the government the same **** the give us,they might listen.

Remember what (Revolution!) stands for

I'm curious, what part of what Terry has said are you agreeing with?

 

[rsdoran]

I think Terry is the greatest thing since peanut butter. My favorite brand of peanut butter is Peter Pan. Just like Peter Pan, Terry has a tendency to go to NEVER NEVER LAND.

The stock/financial aspect aside, many geeks are not good with money but know how to make it.

I can not believe you maintain a DOS environment. DOS is 8 bit and has severe memory restrictions. It is stable but severly lacking in so many areas.

 

[Peter Nachtwey]

Now who is in Never Never land

I cant help but to say Terry is right on.
If people(Middle Class!)who pay the majority of all costs in this country,would quit taking the slap in the face year after year and give the government the same **** the give us,they might listen.

Remember what (Revolution!) stands for

It would be an expensive revolution. Who would pay for it?
Who do you think pays for our welfare state? Most people are being subsidized. Get your facts right. The top 10% pay 2/3rds of the taxes. What bothers me is all those people that aren't paying anything. See the right hand columns. There are some, but not many, that make a lot but don't pay anything. That is injustice.
http://www.house.gov/jct/x-45-00.pdf
It took me only a moment to find this info. MiniRocky, you should get your facts right before talking about revolution.

Ron, what makes DOS an 8 bit operating system?

 

[ndzied1]

The South Africans are developing a Pebble Bead Reactor using German technology. They claim it is safer than traditional nuclear reactors. Of course, there are others who disagree. You can google "pebble bed reactor" and spend the rest of the week reading

Peter,

I would have thought you too tall for Sub work.

 

[LadderLogic]

Remember what (Revolution!) stands for

Hmmm... A legalized larceny?

 

[Peter Nachtwey]

Peter,

I would have thought you too tall for Sub work.

Yes, I am sure I got waivers. I was not the tallest one in my class or the biggest. At that time the navy was looking for minds not bodies. Later the navy changed the rules. I always got static from the XO for not being made in the image of Adm Rickover. Those that weren't made in Rickover's image were lessor beings. Our XO was just a younger version of Rickover. I actually got stuck a couple times and banged my head all the time. What scared me most is getting stuck in a ballast tank after inspecting them. I had to inspect them for foreign objects that may rattle and give away our location. The only thing I could be sure of is that I know I wouldn't be left in a ballast tank because my bones would rattle too.

 

[MiniRocky]

The part about big oil and prices

 

[MarkTTU]

He may well be right on that. I wouldn't go so far as to say the big oil companies are not acting together to fix the prices where they want them, in fact I'm fairly confident that to a certain degree this does happen.

I also know that in this country if they get very far out of line someone will step in and offer the same product for less money. As a perfect example here in Lubbock we have a small (by oil standards) family owned oil company named Bolton's Oil. Bolton's owns everything from the oil rights and wells to the gas stations and while they (like all other oil companies) sometimes buy or sell oil or refined gas from or to outside vendors they have pretty good control over all the steps in the process. Amazingly the gas price at their stations is very close to the other stations, sometimes its a little higher, but usually its a little lower.

Another example... A few years back a local grocery store decided to start selling gas for cost at one store as an experiment. The idea was to pull more customers into the store by also selling gas so they weren't looking to profit from the gas. They calculated "cost" as the price of the delivered gas plus cost of a single attendant plus cost of the station over several years (I was employed by them at the time and it was really cost). After about 2 days of this the Bolton's station a few hundred yards away lowered their gas price to match. After about a week Bolton's had a press conference and stated that if the grocery store chain wanted all the gas business in town that was fine with them, but they would not operate their family business at a 0% profit; the family planned to close up shop and retire at the end of the month if nothing changed. Over at the grocery store we all felt really good about ourselves until someone did the math and we realized we couldn't support the sales volume we would get if Bolton's closed up shop. In the end the grocery store decided that gas should be sold for cost + $0.05 per gallon. The grocery store has since partnered with Conoco for the gas stations and I have since moved on... and Bolton's is usually cheaper than the grocery store.

I throw these examples out just to give a basis of why I'm not convinced the oil companies have massive profit margins; massive profits for sure. I don't know what their margin looks like, but I'm not convinced its really all that high.

 

[Ken M]

Whichever way you look at it the basis for all these problems discussed here is energy consumption.

There's no doubting that we humans are consuming significantly more energy than our predecessors. Whether you see the problems that this produces as symptoms associated with weather patterns, ice-cap shrinkage, use of fossil fuels, use of nuclear power, waste management (nuclear, traditional, personal, industrial) etc, there are definitely issues there.

So, we all expect a lifetstyle which requires a high-energy consumption? OK, no problem there. Let's do a simple piece of arithmetic.

Energy per head x Heads = Total Energy

We all want 'energy per head' to be effectively unlimited, yet surely it makes sense that 'total energy' should be tightly capped or reduced. So let me think .... what do we need to adjust ... hmmm....

Quick, a poll needed. How many of you have or know someone who has more than two offspring? Stop breeding, folks, that's the answer. I suspect an outside observer viewing Earth would regard us as a pest species. Worse than locusts, ****roaches, rats etc. I'm not one of your open-toed sandals, greens-can-do-no-wrong, knit-your-own-yogurt brigade. I quite like a life of increasing energy consumption by whatever means I choose to do it. But the simple consequence of that is we can't have so many of us doing it.

Simple, huh?

Ken

 

[Lancie1]

What was being done with the radioactive material before we obtained/used it?

Ron, before the uranium is refined and concentrated, it is simply lying around in rocks and mountains, but so widely scattered that it is not considered harmful.

Perhaps you are thinking that it could be de-concentrated? Mix the spent fuel back in with the original rocks and scatter it back into the uranium mines? That would approximatley double the total cost of nuclear power, making it more costly than most other sources. I can see tree-huggers rioting outside the mines where the spent fuel is being returned. They will be able to prove that it is going to harm the breeding habits of ****roaches that have started living in the mines.

As I said when you look at ALL the costs, there are no free energy lunches.

Hydrogen is dangerous because it is explosive in air, flammable, odorless, colorless, and invisible to the human eye. Hydrogen leaks and hydrogen fumes could not be detected by Bubba while having a smoke at the hydrogen filling station. We know from my previous poll that people DO have smokes while filling up. Why would anyone expect that to change with hydrogen fuel? How can a hydrogen tank be kept safe during a vehicle crash? Remember the "exploding gas tanks" of the Ford Pinto and the Chevrolet truck? Can you imagine being in a crash with a hydrogen-fueled vehicle? I know, they are going to develop solid hydrogen fuel. I am not holding my breath.

Does anyone out there think that people are getting smarter? I would argue that due to poor breeding habbits, health care for the weak, and government subsidies that allow survivial of the undesirables, that the average Joe Blow is dumber and physically weaker than 50 years ago. Until about 1935 in the US, it was "survival of the fittest, every man for himself", and each generation got stronger and smarter. Now it is the opposite and each decade sees more dumb, slovenly, immoral, drunk, drugged, unfocused people. At least my personal observations and experiences say that is the case, unfortunately for the world. Don't misunderstand, I am soft-hearted and would be the last person that would want to see dumb people die of neglect. I am merely making an observation here.

I suppose some good computer programmer could write an extrapolation program that calculates how long it will be before people become so dumb that the whole civilization collapses. It has happened before (ancient Rome comes to mind), but the survivors picked up and started over again.

 

[tom_stalcup]

The navy doesn't discharge nuclear WASTE overboard.... But at least when I was in, they did discharge overboard certain classes of irradiated water(usually sampled from the reactor for chemical testing) as long as we were greater than a certain distance from shore.

On the whole, less radiation involved than a radium watch dial.

 

[MiniRocky]

Somehow I think you have taken revolution out out of context.I dont think the dictionary says to overthrow a government.I think this is a great country,but the government has lost its way.Like the song says...Now is the time for me to rise to my fee,wipe the spit from my face and the tear
from my eye...I shall be heard.
And who pays ,it is the middle class working people.
One more question.When someday we go to hydro power autos,who is going to pay the lost tax revenue the 10%.I dont think so.

 

[Lancie1]

One more question.When someday we go to hydro power autos,who is going to pay the lost tax revenue the 10%.I dont think so.

Mini, why do you think there will be any lost tax revenue? The taxes will simply be shifted over to whatever fuel is used, whether it be hydrogen, alcohol, nuclear, coal, solar, wind, or wood.

"In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.", quote from Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789

 

[tom_stalcup]

I'm stealing this(paraphrased into my own words) straight from Mr. Robert A. Heinlein....

We don't NEED better sources of power. We need better ways to STORE power. Instead of making Nevada into one big reactor, you could just line the state with solar power plants and windmills, as long as there was a way to store the excess power and retrieve it adequately.


I'm kinda interested in some of the nano-tech developed batteries MIT is testing these days(ultracapacitors). I couldn't find any hard information for how much more efficient this type of "battery" will be for a comperable size current generation battery(if at all), but it's definitely some interesting reading.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/batteries-0208.html

 

[TimothyMoulder]

If rocket boosters were reliable then boosting the waste to the sun is a good idea but the cost of sending waste to the sun must be high too.

We could make them out of old blimp wrappers...

TM