Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates's New Version of the Einstein Letter
dcblogs writes "In 1939, Albert Einstein sent 'F.D. Roosevelt, President of the United States,' a letter with a warning about Germany's interest in a new type of energy with potential for use as a powerful bomb. The letter also outlined the competitive threat posed by Germany and steps for improving US research efforts. Last week, Bill Gates, along with GE's CEO and others, met with President Obama to deliver their own message: that of the top 30 companies in the world working on alternative energy, only four are in the US. Similar to Einstein's point and recommendations, Gates and his allies are asking the US to view the alternative energy push as a competitive threat posed by other nations, particularly China, which may be doing a better job in bringing its engineering talent and money to bear on this problem."
Einstein wrote of specific people and experiments. Gates does not.
Einstein warned of a horrible weapon. Gates is warning us that the most environmentally ravaged countries might be developing alternative energy (may god have mercy on our souls, lol).
Einstein acted alone and was not heavily invested in nuclear energy. Gates and his friends are heavily invested in alternative energy sources.
I'm no biographer of either but from what I know Einstein seemed to be motivated by things like the discovery of knowledge and genuine concern for mankind. Gates has (at least historically) seemed to be motivated by profit and money first above everything else with ideals similar to Einstein distantly following that primary motivator. Maybe he's changed but Einstein has always held a more altruistic image in my mind. That tends to happen to people long gone who made staggering advancements. Who knows, maybe revisionist history will see Gates alongside Einstein? But as it stands now, my personal opinion is that the two are not even close.
Bottom line: Einstein was a scientist who made great discoveries. Gates was a businessman who made great sales.
I'm not sold on Gates' motives. He sounds more like a lobbyist than a sage omen of caution like Einstein was.
My work here is dung.
What is this, a planned economy? Why is Bill Gates is begging for communist government help?
Obviously, the free market will just solve this problem on its own, in the process continuing to make America the greatest nation in the world.
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Doesn't the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act include 80 billion over 10 years for alternative energy research rather than the 16 billion the article suggests?
sig loading.......
So outsourcing is working and now Gates wants to bring it back to the US?
Wasn't he one of the ones who pushed for outsourcing?
*Joking for those who can not tell*
... the solution is to increase the number of H1B visas.
Wind energy this, Solar energy that. It's all fantasy dreamed up by hippies. It may or may not be able to meet a high percentage of our energy needs at some point in the future.
Nuclear power is here now. We know it works. We know it's safe, if done right. Sure, it's expensive, but if we'd invested a few trillion in nuclear power over the last 30 years ago we'd have ended up saving a shitload on foreign wars, cost to the environment from oil spills and pollution, etc...
At the rate we're going now, nothing will have changed 20 years from now. Instead, we need to start building nuclear plants and investing in research on portable power like fuel cells so we can use that nuclear power outside of the main power grid.
The world's uber capitalist talks about how the government should do this and that
Well if the f*cking free market was so teh awesome, we'd already be the world leader, now wouldn't me ? We're the goddamn free market capital of the world, next to Somalia, that is.
Dishonest F*cker.
Absolute statements are never true
When Bill Gate's company and General Electric start paying US taxes I will take them seriously. Until then they can go fuck themselves.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
I don't understand this, the people who wrote this 'letter' to the president are rich, look at the names. So they can start a company to create new energy production facilities etc. but they decide to write to the administration as if it is as urgent as a nuclear weapon about to be created and unleashed by a warmonger. Einstein obviously was concerned about a new weapon that Germany could develop and use to completely dominate the globe, Gates and Co. looks like are hoping for the government to get into yet another money laundering scheme.
If these guys think their ideas are worth a try and may work they should invest their money, they'll be rich beyond their wild dreams (hard to do, considering who they are, but still).
BP is getting billions of dollars from government contracts of all kinds, looks like this new initiative is about the same thing.
Build factories and make your energy generating equipment and see if you can compete with it and deliver something people will buy, why are you trying to involve the administration into this? The only thing that comes to mind is yet another money laundering scheme, a Halliburton/BP level scheme.
You can't handle the truth.
Assuming top companies are measured by how big they/their profits are... Someone remind me why this metric is so important. Surely the smaller companies are contributing too? (obviously for massive prototypes costing billions, you do need a lot of money, of course) I agree with the first post that this sounds like lobbyist talk.
And no I didn't RTFA.
Wow, that didn't take long!
Under Breaking News on BBC: "Barack Obama calls for clean energy push"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10313921.stm
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Paris Hilton said in her music video mocking the 2008 presidential election that we should support all kinds of energy development along with conservation. During the election the parties had polarized into Republican conventional position and Obama alternative/conservation position. Fortunately, Obama moved closer to Paris's more pragmatic stance since then.
Its a fantasy to think that we can run out Hummers off of windmills next year.
These guys are just a bunch of politicians trying to get in front of the trend. If they knew what goes on in their own businesses they would be warning the President (for all the good it would do) that of the top 30 companies in the world, most or all have discovered significant intrusions from China and other places, should reasonably assume there are more yet to be discovered, and that the US government should get off it's fat, dumb, sleepy, behind before it is hit with a hack attack that will make Pearl Harbor look like kids playing with cap pistols.
Amazing. Just five years to go from:
China, they just can make cheap copies of western technology
to
China, they are starting to compete with western products
to
China is ahead on R&D
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
As a US citizen I had to stop reading when Gates said
In the same way that the U.S. has led in health care
Instead of fighting for a bunch of ungrateful people in the middle east, maybe we should move to nuclear.
The top 5 nations in uranium reserves include Australia, US and Canada.
Gee perhaps the country with the largest army in the world(usa) ought to be protecting the country
with the largest supply of uranium in the world(australia).
If we build it in you backyard, are you still for the building of a nuclear plant?
'cuz that's the reason nuclear is still the exception in the US. The same is not true elsewhere.
The message that Bill Gates, venture capitalist John Doerr, Jeff Immelt CEO of GE, Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox, and others who met with President Barack Obama, is that ...
Yeah, that is an objective group on this subject matter.
You've got to be joking. To see a rise in sea levels, you have to melt land-based ice, of which the only significant volume is on Antarctica. Even the IPCC admits that to see appreciable rise would take over 10,000 years. This is a cruel joke, with us as the punchline.
It's another way to strip people of power sources that enable modern standards of living in the here and now.
Since facts are in short order, let's consider some speculations. The US of A may or may not have started a war for oil. (I'm actually pro-George W, but let's play the devil's advocate).
The next World War will likely be about natural resources. (Tell me with a straight face it won't be.) Those of us in industrialized countries (like the US) consume A LOT of resources. India and China are getting into the game, and hey, that's cool. They all deserve a piece of the pie. The problem is that pie is getting smaller. The US is behind in a lot of things. Internet being one of them. If energy runs scarce, there will be a panic. Allow me to applaud Mr. Gates and say "Hell yeah. We got the money. Let's get ahead of the game."
Why does the government have to get involved if it is a good investment?
Seems more like a win-win. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world rich enough to really put some serious money into alternative energy. And without serious money, alternative energy isn't going anywhere (the current state of the tech is just too inefficient and impractical to every really put a dent in conventional energy). So, without a serious investment from the U.S. (for altruistic reasons or otherwise), the future for the technology seems a lot bleaker. Gates is just couching it in terms that are an easier political sell (i.e., scare tactics).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm not a physicist or expert on energy, but I think there must be a way to live with the things we want without having such a harsh bi-product.
Something that would be nice, is a power-source that feeds off its own emissions in order to ELIMINATE (not reduce) pollution in the environment. Meaning a power source that takes the pollution we've already caused, and uses it to produce energy somehow. Input pollution, output pollution, pipe output stream back to input stream.
Or what if they could create a biological energy source that fed off organic substances the way our bodies do? That would be nice.
I'm pro-alternative energy sources, I don't care if someone gets rich from it. We need to change what we're doing.
Industrial civilization has a big problem ahead. It's been 50 years since the last new energy source was invented. (Atomic power and solar cells are more than 50 years old.) And we're running out.
Wind power seems promising, but the available sites are limited. There are four good onshore wind sites in California (Pacheco Pass, Altamont Pass, Mojave, and Montezuma Hills.) Each already has a big wind farm. There are plenty of good sites in the flyover states (from the Texas panhandle north to Canada) but it's hard to get power from there to someplace useful. Anyway, wind is too intermittent to be useful for more than 25-30% of power, tops.
All the good hydroelectric sites were developed by 1940 or so. And the big reservoirs behind the dams are silting up.
Nuclear power works, but all designs other than classic pressurized-water and boiling reactors have been flops. Gas-cooled reactors, pelletized-bed reactors, and thorium reactors require more complex components on the radioactive side of the system, and for each of those types, the prototypes have had serious problems.
Solar cells are useful, at least in the daytime. But they're expensive to make and take up a lot of land. You only get about 50 watts per square meter over 24 hours, or about 1KWh per day.
Solar power satellites are a fantasy. We have no way of putting that much mass in orbit at a profit.
Tidal power is a niche technology. There are about ten good sites in the world.
Natural gas and coal are good for most of the next century, but they're not unlimited. Coal reserves in the US turn out to have been overestimated - the 200 year availability figure assumed that any coal in the ground could be strip-mined, even if there was a city or farmland on top of it. (Big issue in Illinois - the same land that's being used for farming has coal underneath.)
Ethanol from corn is a tax-funded boondoggle. Ethanol from cellulose, maybe, if the biotech people come through with bacteria able to convert cellulose into something more useful at low cost.
The problems with oil are well known.
Energy efficiency improvement is useful, but once you get past the first 25% or so, it gets hard. The more efficient equipment may in the end a lose.
And that's where we are, not much better off than 50 years ago, but closer to the end of nonrenewable resources.
We are wed to Oil. Other countries may not be as integrated into Oil's infrastructure and may have better opportunities with alternatives, but that is yet to be seen. There is enough oil in this planet to easily get us to the next century. Not to say that staying with Oil is the wise course, it just entails fewer unknowns. As they say "the devil you know." The point, there is no alternative that offers the same "empire building" opportunity. It takes that size of opportunity to motivate people to sustain the level of risk that changes infrastructure. Oil companies understand this, which explains why they have not substantially shifted their investments. Governments understand this, which explains why they have not substantially shifted their economic policies. People understand this, that is why they bought increasingly larger and less fuel efficient vehicles between "oil crises." Logical? Americans are also getting heavier and less healthy as a result of their unnecessary weight gain. Is that logical? The good news is that Nature has a way of dealing with these things, so that we do not have to worry about them. Each of us, however, may wish to consider the personal impact.
Cover the moon in solar cells. Beam back the energy. There ya go. :)
Of course, in the requisition process, form 27B/6 would get misfiled so that a senator's son could get a contract, and we'd wind up with the moon covered in windmills.
I've been reading slashdot since the 90's, and this is the first time that I've -EVER- seen someone use sources from Paris Hilton as a position of supporting an argument.
Well played my friend... well played.
> Gates has (at least historically) seemed to be motivated by profit and money first above everything else with ideals similar to Einstein distantly following that primary motivator.
Sure, yeah; well except for that whole thing about giving (in essence) his entire estate to be spent for the betterment of humankind.
Oh, and Warren Buffett's billions have also been added into the pot. As Warren put it (paraphrasing here) I'm real good at earning the money and I trust Bill to put together the organization to spend it.
Whatever Gates says is PURE GOLD! Follow his advice! Do it NOW! He are a GENIUS!
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
Jobs will write a letter warning about the dangers of Flash.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
just like some other megalomaniacs we know of. no money in softwar gangstering anymore. there's still the 'put giant ice cubes in the ocean' 'business plan' on fuddles desk....
einstein (maybe just us) would probably like to see some of those felonious stock markup FraUDsters put on display in glass cages with their alter-ego contemporaries, the glowbull warmongerers. then, they could get the attention they crave, without so many of us having to die every day.
the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their platform now. they do pull A LOT of major strings.
never a better time for all of us to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.
consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If my peo
why no mention of hydrogen in their business plan?(did a document search for the word)
seems to me that they just cut and pasted this together as a pr move
Chances are we'd still intervene in foreign wars for humanitarian and business reasons, for as long as we have the economic and military prominence allowing us to do so.
Considering the issues with fresh water in the present (water wars in the South East and out West), Global Warming and what that will do to fresh water supplies, and our increasing population, I see us invading Canada over water in the near future.
But Canada is not completely defenseless. They do grow pot and the invading armies would light up, give up, and have a beer with their Canadian toke buddies.
So, as an American, I strongly suggest that you learn the Canadian national anthem (O Cananda) because the Canadians are invincible.
It also helps that their economy is in much better shape than ours - even with their evil government run health care.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter
The Einstein–Szilárd letter was a letter sent to United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, that was signed by Albert Einstein but largely written by Leó Szilárd in consultation with fellow Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. The letter advised Roosevelt that Nazi Germany might be researching the use of nuclear fission to create atomic bombs and suggested that the U.S. should begin its own research because of the potentially vast destructive power of such bombs.
But hey, let's not let reality get in the way of some good old fashing slashdot Gates bashing.
[rant]
Oh, and that kindly old Doc Teller; yeah, he was the guy behind StarWars at LLNL. He sold the idea to Reagan.
Teller Ede was a great scientist and he was one hell of a Cold Warrior. I'm not ragging on him for it. Hell I worked at LLNL for many years. Ede was right. He often oversold his ideas to the dim-bulbs like Reagan and I can't say that I respected him for that, but he was right about the Russians.
And for full disclosure, half of my family comes from Russia and half comes from Hungary. So yeah, I'm part crazy Hungarian physics wackjob too.
The idea that I grew up in a country that was planning to nuke (what was left of) both sides of my family (behind the Curtain) and then went to work for Teller is -- well, it tell's you about the world that we used to live in.
But I can understand MAD. Teller lost a lot of his family to the Nazis and the Russians. That kind of shapes your thinking about these kinds of things.
[/rant]
I don't understand this, the people who wrote this 'letter' to the president are rich, look at the names. So they can start a company to create new energy production facilities etc. but they decide to write to the administration as if it is as urgent as a nuclear weapon about to be created and unleashed by a warmonger.
Because they want Government to finance the R&D (socialize the risks and costs of R&D) and then let the private sector reap the rewards - just like what was done with the banks.
America: risks, losses and costs are socialized: profits privatized. It's only for folks who are connected. For you and me, the peons, we get the bill but not the profits. Not even the jobs because you know this shit will be made over-seas.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Yeah, there's the obvious business slant to this. Yes, a bunch of business people are pandering to get greedy bucks. But they are also in a panic for reasons that they don't want the public to understand.
I have yet to see someone get a clue, so here it goes.
Energy is the driving force of modern industrial society. What Gates is warning about is "if we don't get our country's ass in gear, we will loose any pretension of being a first-world nation and will have our asses handed to us on a platter as we continue to suck the teet of fossil fuel, while some other country makes a huge breakthrough in energy that allows them to leapfrog us without buying our petrodollars, leading us to a currency devaluation which in turn destabilizes the country"
If you honestly believe that the dollar is propped up by the pixie dust of the Fed then you don't have a clue as to how things function. It's a fiat currency deep in debt and we make the world buy petro products in dollars so that we can "sell" that debt, making it someone else's problem. Any energy source that shifts away from petrodollars is a direct threat to the United States (ever hear of the Carter Doctrine? ever wonder why it came about? hint: oil.) We have sold so many dollars overseas over the last few decades that it would scare you shitless for a week if you thought about what would happen if everyone - and I mean everyone in the world - bailed on the US dollar all at once. It would be a mongolian clusterfuck of epic proportions and leave us in a depression that would make the 1930's look like paradise.
asking the US to view the alternative energy push as a competitive threat posed by other nations, particularly China, which may be doing a better job in bringing its engineering talent and money to bear on this problem
Undoubtedly, if the Chinese wanted to beat our pants off in clean energy, they could. But they will never never. If it's one thing we have learned about developing nations, and China, is that they'll exploit all natural resources without regard to health or environmental concerns. China, and other nations, are like the US or UK a hundred years ago. Granted, the current technical revolution is coinciding with China's own industrial revolution, and they are advancing at an insane pace (seen pictures of Beijing from the late 80's?), but like us, who really haven't moved too far in advancing alternative energies, neither will they. Even when it becomes essential to sustaining society, there will still be areas of China 50 years from now that will still be using the dirtiest, simplest method of making energy... burning something.
The Admin and the Engineer
No he doesn't: it's MY money. Money HE ripped from me with his MONOPOLY rent seeking. If Gates is going to get kudos for spending the billions he'll never be able to spend in his lifetime, then ***I*** want kudos for buying four windows licenses which gave him the money to do so.
This is a good approach to help oil the gears of a slow machine. However, alternative energy is only a really viable pursuit if it is carbon emission free. I don't see the use of biofuels as a really good solution because they still produce greenhouse gasses. If we are really serious about being a leader in alternative energy, then we must go about it all of the way, not simply reducing carbon emissions but eliminating them.
First: Einstein's contribution to the letter was mainly signing it - it was really authored by Leó Szilárd with contributions from Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner.
Second: The atomic bomb is a weapon that could only be created by a government and should only be used by a government and is not be provided to others.
Energy technology can be produced by private industry, used by private industry, and will be traded on the free market to everyone. Even if a Chinese company develops the technology, we (and others) will be able to purchase it and benefit from it. On the other hand, the atomic bomb was not going to be sold to China (or Japan, for that matter, who was ruthlessly occupying China).
One could argue that the US government "should play its part" in solving the global externality of greenhouse gas emission by throwing tax dollars at researchers, but that is a different issue.
Never? How do you know? Ah, I see, you know because you want to use fossil fuels and fission.
Here's the magical energy fairy that will solve your problems: STOP WASTING FECKING ENERGY.
When a scandanavian country (cold, dark in winter near 24 hours a day) has 1/4 the use of the USA per capita, there's PLENTY of magic energy fairy to find.
Sarcasm detection... FAIL
A president with oil connections who is rich because of oil is not going to develop alternatives to oil and fossil fuels.
It has cost the US 4 or 5 years of development while the rest of the world got to work on cleaner technology. In the UK we export electric vehicles to the US.
Don't see how he needs Bill Gates et al weighing in, unless it's a means of convincing the pigs in Congress that the real money in this country is bigger than the money that's telling them not to improve our alternative energy R&D posture.
FUD from Bilderberg 2010
"It's sad that our top minds are working on the ability to text message our friends that we are meeting at Hooters for beer and wings at 6pm."
No, he's too batshit in his calculations. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/
Short version: 200km^2. 40,000sq km
What's the size of California? 411,048 sq km. Or 1% of the area of California to manage the ENTIRE WORLD'S NEEDS. Not Just USA.
As to the "more consistent supply" here's a couple of links:
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/u/3/llIbjC49Fjs
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/u/2/WO3V2uXTM6k
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Nuclear power won't meet the world's energy needs either, not in any realistic scenario.
To replace enough fossil fuel use to resolve the climate change problem, we would have to build 3 nuclear plants per week for 50 years. The expense involved would be incomprehensible.
http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all/
http://keystone.org/files/file/SPP/energy/NJFF-Exec-Summ-6_2007.pdf
Even under extremely agressive but realistic growth scenarios, nuclear could only cover about a tenth of our projected requirements.
Wind, by comparison, does surprisingly well, as does solar thermal, but they won't be able to cover it all either.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/26/full-global-warming-solution-350-450-ppm-technologies-efficiency-renewables/
In fact, not only is there no silver bullet, there are no silver b-bs either. Any realistic scenario requires significan efficiency gains -- in other words, we're going to have to consume less!
That's the bit that people really have trouble coming to grips with, at which point they tend to retreat into a fantasy world of some kind.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
How about, more efficient use of power + solar + wind + carbon + nuclear? Until we get off this blasted rock and off to mining asteroids and the moon, we are constrained by the limit of resources on this planet. If we reduce the rate of consumption through lower power means of attaining the same work, then we are winning.
Comparing Bill Gates to Albert Einstein make me completely nauseous! If A.E. were alive today, he too would be furious at the comparison!
The only reason Gates is so rich is ripping off the people of the world with Incredibly Expensive O/S's and application software that is some of the worst crap on the face of the earth! A price tag of $500.00 US Dollars for a copy of M$ Office is, or should be, nothing short of criminal!
Symantec has estimated that there may be well over ONE MILLION different Malware in existence! That number seems a little high, but shows how disgustingly BAD their so-called software really is!
If Gates thinks he has reformed, he is sadly mistaken. The world will always remember him for the arrogant, greedy, self-centered BASTARD he is, and has always been!
And you expect people to invest time in Science? Are you mad? The word is out, the rich are handicapping the smart every way they can...
Just act dumb and pound the flesh.
In 1994, Bill Gates gave an interview to Playboy. He stated then that he was going to give away his money. In it he says:
PLAYBOY: Does your net worth of multi-billions, despite the fact that it's mostly in stock and the value varies daily, boggle your mind?
GATES: It's a ridiculous number. But remember, 95 percent of it I'm just going to give away. [Smiles] Don't tell people to write me letters. I'm saving that for when I'm in my 50s. It's a lot to give away and it's going to take time.
PLAYBOY: Where will you donate it?
GATES: To charitable things, scientific things. I don't believe in burdening any children I might have with that. They'll have enough. They'll be comfortable.
http://beginnersinvest.about.com/od/billgates/l/blbillgatesint5.htm
No where in TFA is Einstein even mentioned, let alone Gates or any of his partners referring to themselves as Einstein.
So while half of the posts here are discussing the merits of this being an "Einstein Letter", never was the claim even suggested.
It's as if the submitter threw that in for a bit of controversy, for an otherwise interesting story.
-David
Just recently watched a documentary about some Norwegians who recovered some of the Heavy Water they had sunk during WW2. The concentration of deuterium was nowhere near enough the required levels for plutonium production. Wikipedia also mentions this. They also said the Nazi leaders had deemed nuclear weapons to be irrelevant for the war, because they assumed it would either be quickly lost or won. Scientists still working in the field where not bound to secrecy and it was the failure of the Allied Intelligence that overestimated the nuclear threat.
Nuclear fission waste has to be guarded for millenia, because you can build dirty bombs from it, or unscrupulous companies will smelt it (metals) into other products. In addition, we, everyone we on the planet, get to enjoy all the threats of war that surround access and development of nuclear fission technology. And they already are poisoning vast areas because of the weapons they make from so called and only partially "depleted" uranium. In the headlines all the time, threats of war over who can have nuclear fission tech or who can't. This sucks, it's a new type of cold war that can turn hot overnight and really bork things up *bad*. All nations want it mostly, but they have to be "approved" by the first adopters, and that pisses them off so they go sneaky and develop it anyway, which makes other nations think they should too, etc.. And that is definitely part of nuclear fission technology, you simply cannot ignore that aspect of it, all the parts make the whole, but it apparently is common to do so, people tend to fixate on just cost of producing electricity, and ignore threats of war over access to the tech and long term storage of the waste and guarding it, etc.. It is extremely contentious and dangerous technology because of those reasons. I don't like that, it would be real nice if it could be used safely and safer and developed better, but it is reality so we shouldn't ignore it.
Coal waste and smoke sucks too, for all the normal reasons. That's why I am in favor of using our only practical nuclear *fusion* technology, which is solar, both PV and thermal. All the other laser magnetic plasma bubble containment whatever fusion tech is still decades/generations away (I mean when I was a kid in the 50s they were talking about it and promising it..let us check the calendar...), we shouldn't wait for that to be developed to switch to fusion power. We *have* fusion power right now, let's use it, make it better/faster/cheaper. Sure, more research in those other areas, but solar just needs economies of scale now more than anything else to get loads cheaper.
And if we had 100% tax credits for it now, you couldn't stop the deluge of new companies and jobs getting it out there working. Not ten percent or even thirty, but a full 100% credit, say extended for five or ten years up to a practical amount, like 25 to 50 grand.
I know I would *much* rather see a trillion dollars going out into direct solar deployment, rather than a trillion dollars sucked out of the economy for wall street's dream ticket, the universal carbon tax and cap and trade conjob.
It's going to be the same trillion dollars, so I'd rather it went to tens of millions of new panels and whatnot everywhere than to keep funding goldman sachs and those other billionaire thieves in the wall street thieves guild. They are just drooling over carbon cap and trade, which should say something about how practical that is(n't).
Let's spend Gates money but not let him have any control or profit. Then we can see what his real motive is.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
A committee did and then put his name on it because they felt it would be recognizable to Roosevelt enough that he would pay attemtion to it. In fact, the committee members joked about what they would put in the next letter from Einstein.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Didn't Einstein repent later after seeing what Cold War was like?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Comparing Bill Gates to Einstein.
Now I've seen everything...
maybe they are afraid that Chine will have a fusion reactor working sooner as the US.
So if Bill is smart "put you money where your mouth is" and invest into Fussion reactor development.
And if it works there are no energy issue anymore.
but no one will do this because ....
There are to many white mouses that get up every day thinking they rule the world.
In IT we're starting to do something about this. If you take 100 P4 desktops that burn 150 watts for eight hours a day and replace them with a virtual server that burns 150 watts and 100 15-watt thin clients you save 89% of the electricity, or about 13,000 watts - likely double that once air conditioning and other factors are considered - call it 25,000 watts - and the keyboard jockeys get a better experience overall. At that rate I only need to convert 100K users to replace a smallish (25MW) coal-fired plant like Healy Unit 1 [pdf]. That's a stretch goal, but I think I might have a chance of selling that with some help.
With iPad type devices and private clouds and telepresence we might lure a lot of folks away from their desks or hopefully talk them out of commuting every day entirely, which will save a lot more. If they don't go to work at all you don't need to light and climate control that space, they don't have to burn energy to get their 200lbs of meat to and from work each day when their boss only needs the 10lbs between their ears and it doesn't matter to him where the work happens. That's an even better deal because getting the people to work costs more energy than building them a place to work, lighting and heating it, and and providing them technology to work on. The manufacturing plants that make the drywall, the cubicles, the furniture can be shut down - and the plants that build the parts that go into those plants can be scaled back. The trucks that take the Bic pens, paperclips and file folders to those offices don't have to be built, nor do a lot of the trucks that delivered gas to the stations that served those commuters and trucks and trains. All of that manufacturing is energy too.
If, with the help of y'all, I can help convince 100 million PC users that thin ARM-based iPad equivalents and thin clients and Apple TV type devices (with Android by personal preference) backed by cloud compute is preferable to a kilowatt gaming rig, we'll do even better. The advantage here is not to us actually, but to the next billion users to join us here. They just don't have the watts so they'll have to ante up with shared computing, thin clients and ARM just to get in the game. In the US I think it'll go another way - the PC will go cloud and most suburbanites will just have some sort of LCD ARM terminal in every room. In order to pull this off we need to promote domestic networking to fiber gigabit, and fiber to the premises. Gigabit fiber gives the bandwidth for the content-hungry American consumer and has a low enough latency to provide a satisfactory gaming experience even with thin clients accessing a neighborhood datacenter that, by providing centralized time-shared servers saves energy, costs and space.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Over there we're laughing at a reporter who thinks Donald Knuth got something wrong, ever in his life. The poor fool.
For living icons who had an impact on mankind Donald Knuth beats Bill Gates by four orders of magnitude, and I'm talking Big O notation here.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Wow, I gave a fast read to the Wikipedia article about Leo Szilard... this snippet caught my attention:
During 1932, Szilárd had read about the fictional "atomic bombs" described in H. G. Wells's science fiction novel The World Set Free. This inspired him to be the first scientist to examine seriously the science of the creation of nuclear weapons.
Too bad science fiction is a dying literary genre (real science fiction, not fantasy or SciFi).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Hmmm. China outstripping the US in terms of advancement? you don't say. How could a country unburdened with civil rights or workplace safety laws, unbound by global health treaties or other economic regulations, willing to consume energy at an unlimited place possible be outstripping a country paralyzed by an abundance of laws, regulation, politics and bureaucracy??
Face it were doomed. The president and congress have no desire to trim down all that crap. And yet, we keep voting their type into power. Face it, it is not the president that Bill Gates & Friends should be talking to about this problem... it's the American people that need this education.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
640KT of nuclear energy should be enough to destroy the world
Your statement may be true of other people who signed the letter as I know nothing about them (yeah, I didn't RTFA), but Bill Gates? In the past decade or so he's been far more interested in matters of philanthropy and legacy than with making even more ludicrously large piles of money.
...but a contributing factor in the killing of the Earth?
By helping to keep alive people that would otherwise die, the planet is hastened towards the day when it is absolutely overrun by a cancer of sapient monkeys, in their billions.
The planet is hanging in an uncertain balance before runaway greenhouse effect makes Earth another Venus. Pollyanna techno-optimists have allowed this calamity to happen. Techno-optimists promise answers, but there is absolutely no reason to trust their self-serving chatter.
The ONLY lasting safety is to be a near-anonymous factor in a balanced ecology, nowhere near planetary overload, and certainly without pretending to be "stewards" of the Earth!
Malthus is STILL right; everything else is temporizing.
Solar energy that. It's all fantasy dreamed up by hippies.
High efficiency cheap plastic solar cells covering an area of about 230sq km would power the whole Earth. The technology is in the research phase now, and is expected to be rapidly commercialised. 230sq km of plastic is easily achievable - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area of 700,000 sq km to 15,000,000 sq km, and that was made by accident.
Nuclear power is here now.
Yes, we already have a working nuclear fusion energy source.
I'd rather have illegal Mexicans living next door than racist trash. I've met both, and I know which ones have stronger morals and work ethics.