mikevp
Joined 14 years ago
Karma
83
Submissions
45
Member since
Sep 7
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
That's what I want -- I want all political anything, left right and center, expunged from my FaceBook.
There's a browser plugin "Social Fixer" that can do this really well by all accounts, but alas, almost all my facebooking is on my phone, which it doesn't support.
Comment · 6 years ago
One analysis I read ages ago showed that an electric car (even of that time) was enough more efficient than a gasoline or Diesel car that even if the electricity to charge the batteries came entirely from coal, it was a net CO2 win.
Comment · 6 years ago
"People need to place more effort on maintaining factual reputation. If someone spews bullshit once, they are on probation. If they do it twice, I don't listen to them anymore."
Bingo. Michael Moore has been on my personal _index expurgatorius_ for decades.
Much of what this film says is outdated enough to constitute deliberate mendacity, and deliberate mendacity is Moore's stock and trade.
Of course, Moore's latest documendacity doesn't mention nuclear as a carbon-free energy source.
I've long said that the moment an energy source -- ANY energy source -- threatens to be able to produce enough reliable 24x7 power to keep technological civilization from collapsing, All The Usual Suspects will find some reason to oppose it. The goal is the collapse of technological civilization and the depopulation of the planet. (These types assume that they will not be personally snapped because they are Oh So Special.)
I hadn't thought wind and solar were likely to meet the challenge of producing sufficient 24x7 energy to power our technological civilization, but Moore & co. seem to think there's a risk that it might.
Comment · 6 years ago
Heh... Recalling a demonstration by an EE prof way back when. He had the bank of capacitors charging up on his desk, and was writing on the blackboard the equations of how much energy was stored. Hand raised in the back of the room. "Uh, Dr. Miagawa, I think you slipped a decimal point there." Prof looks over his work again, says "Oh, dear" unplugs the charger and backs away. He tapes two meter sticks together with a screwdriver on the end to discharge his little electrobomb. WHAMO, screwdriver vaporizes.
I'm pretty much convinced this was not a mistake, it was a "Be really CAREFUL with this stuff!" object lesson.
Comment · 6 years ago
Agreed. Stories like this keep popping up, because this is something the whole world desperately needs. EEStor was one of the previous claimants to the title, but they flew by night.
After so many disappointments, I'm down to "Let me know when I can buy one at Fry's, until then, I am not holding my breath."
Comment · 6 years ago
Talk about what if something magically dissolves the concrete casks betrays that the person bringing that up has no idea what they're talking about. The wastes are not in any liquid or soluble form inside the casks. They're solid chunks of glass, like tektites, meteoric glass that's known to have sat in sea water unchanged for over a billion years.
Those interested in what is already there at Yucca Mountain should go to Google Earth. Search for "Sedan Crater." Scan south.
Guess what those 1000-ish craters are.
Comment · 6 years ago
But always keep in mind Gene Spafford's observation: Debugging is twice as hard as programming. So, if you write a program as cleverly as you can, you are by definition not smart enough to debug it.
Comment · 6 years ago
Talking about reactor waste with an image of 55 gallon steel drums with the radiation trefoil on them... Sheer ignorant incompetence.
"Near-infinite" power source from decay of Carbon 14. In some low power applications this would be close enough to eternal as makes no difference, but calling it a "near-infinite" source of power in general is pretty wildly exaggerated.
Comment · 6 years ago
Every now and then over the years, I've considered designing The Perfect On-line Discussion Group software.
Every time, I've gotten a half hour or so into the process and realized I'm re-inventing trn 4.0.
Comment · 6 years ago
The anti-nuclear self-proclaimed environmentalists simply do not seem to understand the concept of "Base Load." They believe, or pretend to believe, that industrial civilization can be powered by "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy, and doesn't need 24x7 365 days a year energy.
I call this arithmetic denialism.
If you don't want to be an arithmetic denier, show me the energy source that can provide 24x7 energy all 356 days a year in sufficient quantity to power industrial/technological civilization. I see a startling lack of any energy source that passes muster with the anti-nuke sort of "environmentalist."
Call that what you like...
Comment · 6 years ago
That's why all my passwords (including my Ring password) look like this:
c3Ve*w^ZHKmq1SQK&gGVQCezROLgZy
Individually generated, unique for every site I log into.
Comment · 7 years ago
But before Prop 13, people on fixed incomes were getting taxed out of their paid-off homes they'd lived in for decades.
Comment · 7 years ago
cf. XKCD -- "Bury it in the desert. Wear gloves."
Comment · 7 years ago
Miracle battery breakthrough du jour.
I've been watching this soap opera for years. These announcements keep coming, but nothing I can pop down to Fry's and pick some up.
Let me know when they're on the shelf at Fry's or Best Buy, or I can order them from Amazon.
I met him briefly at one of the West Coast Computer Faires, in the early days of AutoDesk, or maybe pre-AutoDesk.
His name was familiar to me from the infamous "Pervading Animal Game" on the Univac mainframes. "Introducing a new way of distributing software, Pervasive Release. If someone asks you for your program, you can tell them that in all likelihood, they already have it." There were a number of other, more serious programs in the Univac 1108 ecosystem that had his name on them.
It would be unfair to call this a virus, as it went to great lengths to insure that it couldn't do any harm, other than the few kilobytes it took up in a "program file". (Think "directory" in modern terms.)