Slashdot Mirror

As private industry becomes the next government, more overtly as time goes on..

It's sorta hard to argue this is more overt than having Al Gore on your board...

What the hell is this rambling post about anyway? Is it about the new spook on board at Apple, is it about his many accomplishments, or is it about environmentalism hysteria, or is it about pushing for a new tax on software? I'll go with the last one/two... Acid rain was a billion dollar solution to a million dollar problem. This sounds similar. The software I use has bugs. It comes with the territory. It's open source and when I find bugs, I fix them. So some schmuck says bugs cost everyone money so we should pay him a tax to create some market based invisible hand to solve it? Does anyone actually buy this BS argument? You know what a tax will do? Encourage people to use IE 6 for the rest of eternity because the new version is taxed and the old buggy piece of shit works 'good enough.' I swear, some days I just want to slap the taste out of these people's mouths.

but not the fact of usage.

Onpoint 09/2002: College Students and Psychoactive Medication

Never mind the old equation of college and recreational drugs, the parents' old tiptoe through pot and peyote. A new generation is arriving at university heavily armed with prescriptions for Zoloft, Dexedrine, Paxil and Prozac. Xanax, Adderall, Cylert and Ritalin. And it's not about weekend benders. It's about ADD, anxiety, OCD and depression.

Officials say that today that about 40 percent of American college students are on psychoactive drugs. Everybody knows the number is huge. But what exactly does it mean? Up next On Point: the Medicated Generation goes to college.

---

And maybe the reason for the increasing levels of usage is that they are learning this from their days in grade school?

Better Living through Chemistry? (Dr. Leonard Sax)

This year some six million children in the U.S.--one in eight-- will take Ritalin. With 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. consumes 85 percent of this drug. Have we considered the consequences?

and...

Despite their stubborn refusal to medicate their children with Ritalin, these other countries do not lag behind the United States in academic performance. On the contrary: according to the most recent studies, France, Germany, and Japan continue to maintain their traditional lead over the United States in tests of math and reading ability.
---

This article dates to 2000, but it's about the very same crisis that we've been hearing about more and more the last few years. Children are being medicated in order to get them to sit still in school (where 'unproductive' things like things like recess are being cut in favor of more cramming). Maybe a whole generation has been raised to think of 'learning' as something you need drugs to accomplish. And now we are beginning to see the consequences.

I know it's called a serial hybrid. What I'm wondering is why they aren't available now. The most logical reason I've heard in this thread is that current battery technology is not up to the task. Perhaps upcoming ultracapacitors would be the ultimate solution to this problem.

NSAS inspector general is investigating a $30 million shuttle toilet that was supposed to cost $3 million. The cost went up, the contractor explained, when NASA added a window. Source

This might sound expensive, but considering the $14G development cost of the shuttle. It isn't really much. Foale is trivializing the discussion of NASA's future direction by saying stuff like this. A guarantee the Crew Exploration Vehicle will have a toilet. What sense does it make to send astronauts on a month long trip to the moon only to have them return with Cholera?

There is a primary difference between coal/oil and nuclear. Nuclear can't be cleaned up.

So how do we clean up the billions of metric tons of coal byproducts released into the atmosphere every year.

How about we put it in your backyard for starters?

Why do I always hear this back yard argument? If you took an average size suburban house and made it water tight, all of the nuclear waste made by all of mans reactors since the beginning of the nuclear age wouldn't even fill the basement.

Tell me, what have you read of experimental nuclear reactors called PBMR's? Read this and pay close attention to the section labeled "Gas turbines heated by nuclear furnaces. When people mention nuclear energy, all they can think of is some 1950's, slow neutron reactors. Because of careless mistakes by humans, not their machines, all development of nuclear research has been severely limited. The much safer and, fool proof, technology of the PBMR's could have replaced most of the older reactors in this country if it weren't for panicky people who rely on sensational news outlets for their education. Who knows what we would be capable of now if development hadn't ground to a halt.

If we went to nuclear war, as countries both we and the chinese would be eliminated.

No, we wouldn't.

The chinese would fall in a nuclear fire, we would fall from the tremendous damage afterwards

No, we wouldn't. Although it would take a large amount of nukes to destroy China's command and control (somewhere around 340). It would take about 400 to cause a nuclear winter assuming a US/Russia war. A US/China war would probably need more to cause a nuclear winter, because the US's nukes are smaller tacticle nukes. Some scientists don't even believe the nuclear winter theory

And even MAD doesn't govern us, the political climate of the last decades is basically scared shitless of even small scale nuclear war.

Agreed, any leader caught up in such a thing wouldn't be a leader for long.

As for US and russia - if we went to war with them, bothe of us plus the rest of the world would be rendered uninhabitable (assuming large scal

Definatly. With over 10,000 nukes combined a US/Russia Nuclear war truely means MAD for the whole world. A Chinese/American Nuclear war doesn't though.

That doesn't mean anyone wants to start one. :)

Personally I plan to get a microwave dryer

http://www.worldandi.com/specialreport/1993/februa ry/Sa10458.htm

Yeah, and this is actually an old idea that was used extensively by the Soviets during their push for planetary exploration. Since the atmosphere of Venus was so hot and dense, they were able to float the balloons with extremely heavy loads. The scheme worked well during the Venusian "night," until the sun came and expanded the volume of gas in the balloon, bursting it. The idea for balloons on Mars has been "floated" before, but it looks like it just might happen this time...

Ah, but we do have ratings for books... sort of. Not banned and banned.

This is a rant. If you don't want to read it, don't.

It's been clear to me for some time that when it comes to energy policy, stupidity and fear rule the day. I believe Heinlein once wrote: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity". Can there be a more truthful statement? Consider:

We humans handily ignore the 13 TRILLION pounds of carbon emitted by our chemical-fuel economy, nearly all pumped out of the ground, causing global climatic change. Many people go so far as to argue that this would have no effect on the global ecology!

How can you argue that this much CO2 will not have an effect on our environment?

We pay little more than lip service to all of the apparent results of our decisions to persue chemical energy.

I'm not one to say that we should go back to banging rocks, and eat bark and bugs, but since we all think so highly of our children WHY AREN'T WE THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD THEY WILL LIVE IN?

I cringe every time I see a new make of unsafe, inefficient, ecologically expensive SUV and consider the irony of the owners of such vehicles being among the most likely to have an "I love America" bumper sticker when such vehicles provide only a dependence on foreign oil. Even funnier still is the idea that an SUV is a good car "for the kids"...

And yet, when you mention alternatives, such as this ultra-clean and efficient compressed-air car that cleans the air as it drives, refuels in under 2 minutes, and provides reliable transportation at an equivalent cost of around $0.35 per gallon of gas, it's "nerdy" or "unsafe" or "a hassle".

And, perish the thought that having a clean, safe, self-sufficient micronuclear power plant ! I mean, cheap, safe, non-polluting energy! Oh, "but it's DANGEROUS!" they say. Never mind the annual death toll of just under 1.2 MILLION people from those wonderful cars. If 2 dozen people died in a power plant, it'd be a "national disaster" in the papers, but 1.2 million people dying in cars barely make the obituaries column on page B-11.

How is stupidity not in power?

And one of the primary reasons why the SUV is so popular is because of all the stupid legal benefits that automakers enjoy for making large, cheap, polluting, inefficient, over-priced-but-"stylish" SUVs and light trucks.

If we just applied some sense to the situation, we'd have cars that didn't pollute, we'd have energy that didn't force us to sell the birthrights of our children, all combined with a reasonable economy we could all be proud of.

What kind of world are your grandchildren going to live in?