Slashdot Mirror

People come to the world "unprogrammed" and take

There is mounting eveidence that newborns do not have a tabla rasa

They only burn less because they usually have a higher utilisation. And they only always have higher utilisation during rush hours.

e.g.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002197.html

Conventional mass transit isn't the answer. Packetised mass transit is...

"I never understood comments like this about how things man does are not natural or "endorsed" by God. Why would God give us the intellect and capabilities to harvest eggs and many other things?"

It's because it becomes a moral question. God gave us the intellect to build nuclear weapons as well. God gave man the capacity to viciousness that can lead to the murder of millions. The point is that mankind is supposed to act morally.
The question is simply: is harvesting embryos morally correct by God's law.
Somehow I don't think there is a passage in the bible that states the correct answer bluntly (although I'm sure there are whackos out there who would consider the murder of innoncents to be descriptive). However because an embryo is a "potential child", killing the embryo is killing the potentiality with human hands - rather than by an unavoidable "natural" act. So the same argument applied against abortion is applied here.
Now you imply that no one complains about the excess eggs in a fertility clinic. A quick search on google shows things like a bill in Kentucky that makes it illegal to fertilize more than one egg for IVF. Or the findings that there are 400,00 0 frozen embryos in storage, partially because the parents have moral qualms about getting rid of fertilized eggs they don't need. It seems like no one thought about it too much before the stem cell issue came up, but I would expect to see legislation passed in some states which will make IVF more difficult.
I'm playing devil's advocate here - as these aren't my personal opinions.

In other news...

Sun Energy Output At Over 1,000 Year Peak
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002242.html

Hmm...

And then there's the possibility that a significant proportion of the Israeli labour force have a genetic mutation that makes them think faster, a sort of neurological overclocking. Or so some scientists at the University of Utah have claimed.

Says no:

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.

"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable." Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and wood biomass as well as for producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. Their report is published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).

A prominent USDA/DOE study shows for every unit of fossil fuel used to make biodiesel, 3.2 units of energy are gained in energy output. That's a 320% increase and includes soybean planting, harvesting, fuel production and transportation.

Exactly what technology do car manufacturers license today? OEMs are notorious for refusing to license anything. Unless this technology is offered license free, it wont be available.

Sorry, what? My friend just bought a car with GPS, A/V, Bluetooth audio integration, and a bunch of other snazzy shit. All came from the factory, and NONE of it is branded by the car maker--it's all 3rd-party stuff. Added about $4K to the sticker price, too, so it's not a small deal. Right now it's mostly high-end makes with this kind of gear, but it's growing.

Even better--GOOGLE IT--"hybrid engine licensing" gives, in just the first page of results, several examples of major manufacturers licensing critical powertrain components. Here's a couple, dealing the the Ford-Toyota and GM-DaimlerChrysler deals:

http://motormouth.com.au/myresources/alternatefuel sarticle.aspx?article=200403_fordhybrid
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6705895/

Looks like you don't know WTF you're talking about, smart guy. And think, the right answer was just a Google search away!

OPEC only wants to up production so they don't piss everyone off and then people look elsewhere for oil. OPEC is not the only producer.

Did you even read my OP? OPEC CAN'T INCREASE PRODUCTION! Not much more, anyway, with serious consequences. They're trying like hell right now, and it's proving very difficult to increase the flow of oil. There's a lot of reasons for this: production capacity isn't flexible enough (not enough refineries/tankers/etc. to deal with more oil), as well as possible damage to oil-producing formations if they try to pump more than they already are. I seem to remember the Russians severely limiting the useful lives of oil deposits in the 70s by force-pumping them with water--it upped immediate production substantially, but took years off the lives of the oil fields. Kind of like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

OEMs are building hybrids barely and half-heartidly. Mostly through coops and shared technology. They are not competiting in the electric market as of today.

First, "shared technology" kind of kicks the shit out of your first point, doesn't it? Yeah, that's right, you just contradicted yourself.

And I don't know about "half-heartedly". At the NY Auto Show this year, virtually every major mid-level manufacturer, American, Asian, and Euro, had at least some kind of hybrid vehicle in production and were loudly marketing those strains. There were even a couple of pure electrics, with the same buzz. Sounds pretty hearted, to me.

But how about some numbers? If you look at production quantities of hybrids AND electrics over the past three years, every single quarter has been showing substantial increases. Most observers agree on continuing strong future increases in market share, though different predictions exist about how strong and how fast. Here's a great survey of some of the models (sources linked, too!):

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002783.html

You want more data, just fucking Google it: "hybrid vehicle production growth". Getting the hang of this "data" thing, yet? Works wonders in arguments!

(God, I needed that! What a fucking day!)

Except of course that the clone would be as old as you were.

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/000964.html
http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SU/dolly599.htm l

So basically you're using a small piston engine and an air tank instead of the capacitor bank and larger motor you'd need otherwise. That might be a sound strategy, but with those new fast-charging lithium ions you may be able to do away with the capacitors.

I can't help but think air hybrids would make more sense, since you can dump the electrical components entirely. But then of course you'd have emissions, especially if you used a 2-stroke.

Here's an obligatory energy density link.

OK, from a pure cost point of view, cars have been cited as more efficient than trains but only if a number of conditions are fulfilled. Not buses, but many of the same factors will apply

For a start the car needs to be full to get to that point, it also needs to be a fairly new and efficient model - and old clunker or a hummer are just not going to cut the mustard there. I'm also not sure that the article cited above has considered the multi-purpose nature of many trains (carrying mail, cargo and passengers for instance)

You should also take into account infrastructure costs for roads, parking, the maintenance of individual cars and so on, parking cops, towing, speed cameras, enforcement, medical cost for injuries sustained (cars are sttistically very dangerous), blah blah blah.

In short, I don't think a discussion on slashdot will ever conclusively prove x has a lower TCO than y, but the suggestion of ditching public transport altogether in favour of private cars disturbs me, somehow.

Everything I've read on slashdot will have you belive these hybrids are clean and green. And they are on the surface... But what your NOT told about is when it comes to disposing of those batteries and replacing them. It's bad enough seeing standard lead acid car batteries being illigally dumped, but can you imagine if everyone started driving hybrids?

Look folks, even if you could centrally recycle and administer these batteries, your still having to deal with the chemical pollution they cause themselves in regards to manufacturing and servicing. At this point, why not use bio-fuels such as diesel and E85? We all know that the Sun UV rays will break up these gassious compounds in the upper atmosphere and simple CO2 will reused by mother nature is some form and fassion. At the worst, will just get quicker growing plant life...as alreadying being recording.

Just to be fair though, I see studies reporting both positive and negitive impacts of high CO2 levels on plant life. So I guess the jury is still out on this one.

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001938.html

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2002/decembe r11/jasperplots-124.html

Maximum_possible_efficiency = (input_temp - output_temp) / (input_temp)

Anybody talking about numbers better than that is claiming perpetual motion. If you could beat the Second Law, you could hook a heat pump up to a heat engine and gain energy. Doesn't anybody take thermo in engineering school any more?

In real steam plants, additional stages are added at the output which run at successively lower pressures and lower exhaust temperatures, until it ceases to be cost effective to add more stages. This is old technology. Triple expansion steam engines date back to 1900 or so, and multistage steam turbines are almost as old.

The carbon-uptake of N. American landmass may be due in large part to the adoption of zero-till farming; here is an article on it.

Not in humans, anyway. Not yet.

There is no reason to believe that genetically engineered diseases will be more universally fatal than natural ones.

Read that link:

Investigators were trying to bioengineer a less dangerous strain of a pathogen and instead inadvertently created a far more dangerous strain.

Nobody knows how to create a universally fatal disease

You're so certain it can't happen by accident?

There is little incentive to try. Engineered weapons are usually designed to kill the other guy, not your own people as well.

Think of suicide bombers, but on a far, far bigger scale.

not quite.... found this on a google search.

Well, $50 million and $200 million are not a big slice of even NASA's current budget so they will be easy to slap on today. They won't accomplish much with that money, however, aside from some initial planning and research. To really do what is proposed will add much more, at least an average of $2 billion per year more according to most estimates of what it will take to get to Mars.

Hopefully some new technologies like nuclear electric propulsion will turn out to be fit for this sort of purpose to cut the travel time to Mars down to a reasonable level so we can survive the largest problem with such a mission, radiation. Since Bush likes nuclear technology, this one might even fly.

One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.

Skylab was intended for exactly three missions, with no intention of resupply or re-use. The vehicle itself had severe problems -- one solar panel tore off at launch -- which limited its usefulness (the first mission ended up being largely wasted on rescuing the station). Mir was no picnic, either -- there was a major fire, and the collission with a resupply ship. The ISS has, so far, been comparatively problem-free.

Skylab's orbit was not that high -- roughly 270 miles -- in any case it was launched in 1973 and crashed to Earth only six years later, in 1979. The ISS's current altitude is 242 miles. I can't find any orbital data on Mir, but the space shuttle got there, too, and it didn't take more than a few years to crash back to Earth after maintenance ended.

Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.

I don't know what you mean by "real orbit", but the shuttle deployed Hubble at an altitude of 368 miles and has visited it several times since. No current manned vehicle can go much higher than this; and none can reach geosynchronous orbit. Shuttle deployment is not a good idea for commercial satellites, but it makes sense for large, multi-billion-dollar one-shot spacecraft (like Hubble) because if something goes wrong there is an option to bring it back to Earth or do on-orbit repair.

The safety record sucks.

The claimed accident rate of one-in-400 is clearly off. The demonstrated accident rate of 2-in-113 is not atypical of comparable launch vehicles, such as Soyuz. It's even more impressive given that the shuttle system is intended to be reusable, while Soyuz is launched new each time.

It's a white elephant without a mission

Its mission has been and always will be to service the ISS.

It's very tempting to look at any complicated system that has problems, and say, "Bah, this is useless, let's start over". The reality is that experience gained using the shuttle and the ISS is crucial to the continued exploitation of space.

Space flight is a risky business and will continue to be so. There is no guarantee that a new system with untested hardware will be any safer.

Whatever happened to the guys that were going to print out boards on inkjet printers?

Maybe they statred doing this. Modified Printers Used For Tissue Engineering

You're right: it's turboprop-based. It's supposed to save fuel by flying low and building up a "buoyant aerodynamic effect".
More links:
Daily Telegraph UK
FuturePundit.com
Seattle Times
Boeing Frontiers with larger image