And they actually committed espionage. Nobody that has actually committed whistleblowing has finished a trial when accused of espionage under this act - in Ellsberg's case, it was thrown out due to illegal evidence gathering.
That's the problem with the Espionage Act of 1917 - it defines espionage as giving any confidential information to anyone that isn't supposed to have it (and yes, in that loosely worded terminology). That means Richard Armitage, likely Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby, and someone at the White House for last week's press release of the CIA head in Afghanistan are all guilty of treason.
I really question of whether even Ellsberg would have walked if it weren't for the gross misconduct of evidence gathering (you know Nixon loved his wiretapping). He certainly was guilty of the Espionage Act of 1917. I suspect had he been convicted, a legal battle over the Constitutionality of the act would have ensued, but it was delayed by the case's dismissal. I doubt either the Espionage Act or the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (which was designed using the Espionage Act as a template) could stand a serious court challenge.
The problem is the NSA violating its charter against spying on Americans, not their spying on foreigners. That is the job of the FBI and they have a lot more judicial oversight. The NSA has gotten in trouble for overstepping into FBI jurisdiction multiple times all the way back to Watergate, and once again needs to be reigned in. The exceptions put in after 9/11 seem pretty far stretched to justify collecting bulk metadata on American calls by the NSA, and it certainly is out of their jurisdiction (they should only be able to collect information on calls where at least one end is in a foreign country).
As for spying on our foreign allies, I think it is a dick move on our part, but it certainly is in the jurisdiction of the NSA. I'm a little mixed on that one - while it is in NSA jurisdiction, it shows our paranoia is pretty damn acute.
He is guilty of giving the documents to friendly press, not everybody. The press then revealed some of the exposed documents, but not all of them, and censored some information. This is different than Manning, who revealed the documents to a bulk dump leak site.
The real problem is the espionage charge, though. This is based on the loosely worded and likely unconstitutional Espionage Act of 1917, which states that giving Confidential information to anyone that "is not supposed to have it" is illegal. The White House itself has committed treason by this standard by revealing the name of the CIA top official in Afghanistan last week.
As long as the espionage charge stands, I don't think Snowden can get a fair trial in the US. With Obama backing the espionage charge, there is no way he gets pardoned. In fact, I'd say there is a better chance he gets hung than there is he gets a pardon, despite the government promise that they won't chase execution for the espionage charge.
oh that's where _nsakey.lkm comes from (kidding - it's a joke referring to _NSAKEY
I've actually never heard of a silver solar cell; usually they use the same elements used in computer chips like silicon, cadmium telluride or gallium arsenic.
I have to back that post on the ugly house, though - my parents had solar heat, which was ridiculous because they got about 8 hours of sun during the winter if there was any at all. And at best got 1-2 hours of decent heating for their 6 giant ugly panels. This is my biggest issue with solar - it tends to be off when you need it most (if used for electrical, you need it most in the evening). That said, with decent battery technology it may be worth it.
The skin actually is very good at protecting against the radiation from alpha and beta emitters (most of what was leaked), so playing in the water may have little to no effect. Drinking it is an entirely different story. Burns to the skin happen the same as if you hang out too long under the great nuclear reactor in the sky (aka sunburns).
Funny thing is, I never hear people bitching about the uranium kicked out of coal plants or the radon in natural gas, both of which are likely inhaled and bad things to inhale. One of the biggest killers in tobacco is polonium, part of the natural decay cycle of radon (in tobacco it comes from fertilizer).
Actually, the MSR was designed by the same guy that designed pressurized water reactors (or PWRs - the guy is Alvin Weinberg). Nixon had him fired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory for promoting it over PWRs because he was getting a bunch of reactors built in his home state of California and that meant jobs for Californians. Stalling those projects to redesign would mean a crapload of Californians were out of work, and that was against Nixon's agenda.
Just saying Alvin didn't need to learn by other people's mistakes, they were his own
I don't think that even includes breeders which just use U235 as starter fuel and breed their own from either thorium (breeding fissile U233) or U238 (nuclear waste) breeding fissile plutonium U239.
Right now the rare earths used in wind turbine magnets are nearly exclusively being mined in China, and China then requires manufacture of the parts that use them on Chinese soil with Chinese workers. The turbines themselves can be assembled elsewhere, but China has the rare earths market by the balls with their near monopoly.
The US actually has a lot of rare earths, but we don't mine them because they show up wherever thorium shows up and NRC requirements make mining thorium a pain. If that thorium had a market, it would be worth it for miners, but currently it doesn't.
Personally I use this to sell it: they can run on nuclear waste and the leftovers are safe in 300 years, not thousands. I then point out how fossil fuels are spewing out radiation every day and nobody complains, but when a nuclear plant leaks a little it suddenly is a huge deal.
Personally, I'm not entirely sold on MSR as the only way to go with nuclear - really, we should re-fund the Integral Fast Reactor (the industry choice for Gen IV), which is much further along. It also is supposed to be passively safe, but isn't quite as fault-proof as MSR. It also takes more fuel to start these things. Incidentally, it also was killed mainly because of proliferation concerns, but Russia built them (the BN-800 is nearly in production and two smaller versions are running) and made them not reprocess fuel and yields about 70% efficiency (with reprocessing it'd be 99.5%) - still 30% is a lot less waste than conventional reactors
Um, no. Germany should have 30% renewable energy by 2030 and plan for 80% by 2050. They actually plan to build something like 26 new coal plants to make up for shutting down nuclear in the meantime, which is an entirely ass-backward thing to do, IMO. There also are plans to try and hit 100% renewable by 2050, but I think that's unrealistic.
To be fair, coal employs a LOT of blue collar workers because it is relatively inefficient energy, so it doesn't just benefit the rich, but it does benefit the rich because of capitalism (private owners like the Kochs).
Personally, I'd like to see coal die for environmental and health reasons. It pollutes in mining, transportation, and burning, spews radiation into the air (and in a bad form because you breathe it), and doesn't truly have any serious clean prospects (sorry, but carbon capture and sequestration still leaves dirty mining and transportation and cuts efficiency by about 25% from what I've read, and 25% profit loss isn't going to happen - again, capitalism).
Actually, natural gas turbines are almost universally used as quick power for wind and solar downtime. My understanding is the fast firing ones (for on-demand power) are not very efficient, either (even though turbines in general are relatively efficient).
The FCC did some deregulation here in the 1990s, requiring telephone companies to allow competing ISPs to use their lines and CO (central offices) for a flat rate, but then they backtracked on that and decided that the phone companies could choose who they wanted in and charge whatever they wanted. I pretty much went from 100+ ISP choices to 3 overnight (including the shut down of the ISP I had at the time).
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
