You seem to be unfamiliar with anti-matter annihilations.
There's also the mass defect between nucleons and free protons and neutrons, which was the origin of the discovery of the strong nuclear force to begin with.
Palladium is actually a nuclear catalyst of sorts. Embedding material in a palladium matrix can be used to accelerate beta-decay. But no one's been able to propose a mechanism for any of the cold fusion proposals, whereas the beta-decay acceleration was predicted from theory first before it was absorbed.
If it is a scam, then why doesn't he ask for money?
What am I, psychic? There are plenty of possible reasons. Maybe he's trying to con a large company instead of cashing in on on thousands of small-time suckers. Since most of his dealings have been behind closed doors, we have no idea what he's been asking for. Or maybe he's waiting until he gets enough publicity. Or maybe he figures enough fame will create opportunities for making money all on it's own, regardless of whether his machine works.
You could ask the converse question - if he isn't looking to make money, why is he being so secretive about it? Why not just publish a paper and let everyone profit? Every day he delays means thousands of lives lost which might otherwise have been saved.
Who knows. I don't need to divine the complete workings of his mind to determine that he's almost certainly a quack, and probably fully aware that his device doesn't actually produce energy. I may be wrong about the latter, but I doubt it. Either way, the rational response to his claims is skepticism. Until he provides us with something tangible, there's no reason to take him seriously.
The key to any good scam is convince people it's not a scam. The first question you want people asking is "well if it was a scam he'd do this and he hasn't!"
I mean let's put this in perspective: why did Steorn spend so much money on an ad in the Economist?
It could be a scam. Of course in both cases they could just genuinely believe its real, but "not quite ready" and want to talk about it.
The Polywell is a great concept but Bussard kept awful lab notes and that makes me wary. The scientific process is done the way it is for a good reason.
The above was typed only half tongue-in-cheek. I feel the same way about James Randi as I feel about Jesus Christ and Ron Paul - sure, I can respect the man himself, but his posse seems to include a lot of delusional, arrogant lunatics.
Except with the principle benefit that they've been proven right, consistently?
Indeed. Clearly this is an expenditure the first world country with the lowest sovereign debt of all developed nations cannot possibly afford, in a world where major growth industries are being increasingly dominated by IT companies.
Also cheaper to maintain. It's marginal but it changes the maintenance cost structure from continuous upkeep (power, line degradation etc.) to largely being the expense of replacing direct physical damage (trees, back hoes).
The list of small towns which are being FTTH'd is pretty impressive though. There are places on there with populations as low as 800.
That said, the NBN outback and deep rural strategy isn't focused on exchanges and ADSL technology - it's focussed on wireless for rural and satellite for really remote places. They've a pretty good track record so far with sensible deployment decisions, and a point-to-point wireless technology in uncrowded spectrum would probably work out.
The problem with your suggestion (acid free photo paper) is that it's "write and forget". The fundamental point about data storage is that it doesn't matter how redundant it is, it won't last if it's not routinely verified. Having a good procedure to routinely verify your data and keep it redundant is a far better then planning to lock something away forever and forget about it.
For photos it should be whatever the raw format was if it's compressed. If you're shooting raw then you should at the very least be using a lossless format like TIFF but I'd store the RAW file too (since strictly speaking it stores far more accurate data then any other format you could convert too).
You'd have better luck if you figured out a solvent which wouldn't degrade the disks themselves. Relatively speaking very little oxygen dissolves in most liquids, so some type of oil which choked out the water content as well, but didn't attack the polycarbonate would work great.
You say that because you're probably not intimately familiar with just *how* well established General Relativity is.
It's a theory which has survived decades of absurdly rigorous testing. Being cautious in how you present it is absolutely the correct approach - and far more responsible then how say, the debacle over cold fusion was handled.
These are not trivial measurements to make, nor is there any obvious explanatory theory that they confirm. They also aren't a gross excess - well bounded, but a very small difference which is on the same timescale as the delays in the processing speeds of the individual components of the apparatus. It's only us sci-fi nerds who fully expect (want) FTL to be possible and Relativity broken somehow.
Were this the case then original Michelson-Mauley experiment, and it's repetitions, would not be accurate.
If light does not travel at c, then the orientation of an interferometer (and we can build very accurate interferometers) relative to the Earth's passage through space would show a slight difference depending on if it was parallel or perpendicular to the direction of travel. This would've identified the issue far earlier since it's a much easier experiment then measuring neutrino speeds.
i.e. Light parallel to Earth's travel would move at v(light) + v(earth-solar orbital velocity), and perpendicular it would be v(light) - thus giving different interference patterns based on rotation of the apparatus.
While if relativity applies the appropriate Lorentz transformations would be necessary, the net effect would still be a perceived difference in the speed of light along each vector.
It's not just that, it's that the churches are often complicit in perpetuating myths about HIV transmission. The Catholic church in particular has done a lot of damage in Africa by encouraging the myth that condoms have no effect on HIV transmission.
Whereupon you've hit the problem with the idea: a person with HIV is infectious for an immensely long time before they'll detect it in themselves. They are potentially infectious even before any test will reveal them to be HIV positive.
The one thing that wasn't made clear was what the impact will be to those who are already infected. It sounds as if this could potentially be useful to existing infections as well but I haven't seen any statements to that effect as of yet.
Since most present treatments for HIV involve strengthening the immune system in the first place, I imagine that for anyone except a terminal patient it's likely to be effective. After all you don't have a finite amount of immune system cells - you're constantly making more, with the basic problem being that the HIV virus then cripples it faster then it can be renewed (at least by my somewhat uninformed understanding).
It seems like this would move HIV potentially into being curable in a somewhat similar fashion to tuberculosis - it would take a while but you'd end up clearing it.
The notion is similar to what Lord Monckton proposed, which was rounding up all the HIV+ people and putting them in internment camps. Which would work, except be (1) morally repungent [means never justifies the ends because the means is never 100% effective] and (2) assumes you'd actually be able to find 100% of HIV positive people.
Fun fact: that was largely because at first it spread amongst gay men quicker then heterosexuals, and the prevailing attitude was "great, this will finally get rid of the gays!"
Thus governments assumed they didn't need any sort of public education campaigns about it.
Then at some point, once someone realized straight people also have promiscuous sex (and there are tons more of them so it didn't seem like an epidemic till much later) did we decide to do anything about it.
Well the real issue is the private money won't flow until public money shows that it is possible and profitable. See: every major scientific innovation since WW2.
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You seem to be unfamiliar with anti-matter annihilations.
There's also the mass defect between nucleons and free protons and neutrons, which was the origin of the discovery of the strong nuclear force to begin with.
Care to link that since you are apparently familiar with the reference?
Palladium is actually a nuclear catalyst of sorts. Embedding material in a palladium matrix can be used to accelerate beta-decay. But no one's been able to propose a mechanism for any of the cold fusion proposals, whereas the beta-decay acceleration was predicted from theory first before it was absorbed.
If it is a scam, then why doesn't he ask for money?
What am I, psychic? There are plenty of possible reasons. Maybe he's trying to con a large company instead of cashing in on on thousands of small-time suckers. Since most of his dealings have been behind closed doors, we have no idea what he's been asking for. Or maybe he's waiting until he gets enough publicity. Or maybe he figures enough fame will create opportunities for making money all on it's own, regardless of whether his machine works.
You could ask the converse question - if he isn't looking to make money, why is he being so secretive about it? Why not just publish a paper and let everyone profit? Every day he delays means thousands of lives lost which might otherwise have been saved.
Who knows. I don't need to divine the complete workings of his mind to determine that he's almost certainly a quack, and probably fully aware that his device doesn't actually produce energy. I may be wrong about the latter, but I doubt it. Either way, the rational response to his claims is skepticism. Until he provides us with something tangible, there's no reason to take him seriously.
The key to any good scam is convince people it's not a scam. The first question you want people asking is "well if it was a scam he'd do this and he hasn't!"
I mean let's put this in perspective: why did Steorn spend so much money on an ad in the Economist?
It could be a scam. Of course in both cases they could just genuinely believe its real, but "not quite ready" and want to talk about it.
The Polywell is a great concept but Bussard kept awful lab notes and that makes me wary. The scientific process is done the way it is for a good reason.
The above was typed only half tongue-in-cheek. I feel the same way about James Randi as I feel about Jesus Christ and Ron Paul - sure, I can respect the man himself, but his posse seems to include a lot of delusional, arrogant lunatics.
Except with the principle benefit that they've been proven right, consistently?
The Unison file synchronizer is written in OCaml.
How the christ can it possibly be legal to sue people who use technology that infringes a patent which was sold to them by someone else?
Isn't the whole enterprise of patents supposed to cover the manufacture and commercial sale of inventions, not their use?
Indeed. Clearly this is an expenditure the first world country with the lowest sovereign debt of all developed nations cannot possibly afford, in a world where major growth industries are being increasingly dominated by IT companies.
Also cheaper to maintain. It's marginal but it changes the maintenance cost structure from continuous upkeep (power, line degradation etc.) to largely being the expense of replacing direct physical damage (trees, back hoes).
Yes, clearly that will lead to a better country for all of us and not the immediate migration of that money to China as iWhatever purchases.
The list of small towns which are being FTTH'd is pretty impressive though. There are places on there with populations as low as 800.
That said, the NBN outback and deep rural strategy isn't focused on exchanges and ADSL technology - it's focussed on wireless for rural and satellite for really remote places. They've a pretty good track record so far with sensible deployment decisions, and a point-to-point wireless technology in uncrowded spectrum would probably work out.
The problem with your suggestion (acid free photo paper) is that it's "write and forget". The fundamental point about data storage is that it doesn't matter how redundant it is, it won't last if it's not routinely verified. Having a good procedure to routinely verify your data and keep it redundant is a far better then planning to lock something away forever and forget about it.
For photos it should be whatever the raw format was if it's compressed. If you're shooting raw then you should at the very least be using a lossless format like TIFF but I'd store the RAW file too (since strictly speaking it stores far more accurate data then any other format you could convert too).
Storage is cheap and getting cheaper.
You'd have better luck if you figured out a solvent which wouldn't degrade the disks themselves. Relatively speaking very little oxygen dissolves in most liquids, so some type of oil which choked out the water content as well, but didn't attack the polycarbonate would work great.
You say that because you're probably not intimately familiar with just *how* well established General Relativity is.
It's a theory which has survived decades of absurdly rigorous testing. Being cautious in how you present it is absolutely the correct approach - and far more responsible then how say, the debacle over cold fusion was handled.
These are not trivial measurements to make, nor is there any obvious explanatory theory that they confirm. They also aren't a gross excess - well bounded, but a very small difference which is on the same timescale as the delays in the processing speeds of the individual components of the apparatus. It's only us sci-fi nerds who fully expect (want) FTL to be possible and Relativity broken somehow.
Were this the case then original Michelson-Mauley experiment, and it's repetitions, would not be accurate.
If light does not travel at c, then the orientation of an interferometer (and we can build very accurate interferometers) relative to the Earth's passage through space would show a slight difference depending on if it was parallel or perpendicular to the direction of travel. This would've identified the issue far earlier since it's a much easier experiment then measuring neutrino speeds.
i.e. Light parallel to Earth's travel would move at v(light) + v(earth-solar orbital velocity), and perpendicular it would be v(light) - thus giving different interference patterns based on rotation of the apparatus.
While if relativity applies the appropriate Lorentz transformations would be necessary, the net effect would still be a perceived difference in the speed of light along each vector.
Worth reading: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db46.pdf
Basic conclusion: in every US state with abstinence-only sex education, teen pregnancy rates are far higher then the national average.
It's not just that, it's that the churches are often complicit in perpetuating myths about HIV transmission. The Catholic church in particular has done a lot of damage in Africa by encouraging the myth that condoms have no effect on HIV transmission.
Whereupon you've hit the problem with the idea: a person with HIV is infectious for an immensely long time before they'll detect it in themselves. They are potentially infectious even before any test will reveal them to be HIV positive.
The one thing that wasn't made clear was what the impact will be to those who are already infected. It sounds as if this could potentially be useful to existing infections as well but I haven't seen any statements to that effect as of yet.
Since most present treatments for HIV involve strengthening the immune system in the first place, I imagine that for anyone except a terminal patient it's likely to be effective. After all you don't have a finite amount of immune system cells - you're constantly making more, with the basic problem being that the HIV virus then cripples it faster then it can be renewed (at least by my somewhat uninformed understanding).
It seems like this would move HIV potentially into being curable in a somewhat similar fashion to tuberculosis - it would take a while but you'd end up clearing it.
The notion is similar to what Lord Monckton proposed, which was rounding up all the HIV+ people and putting them in internment camps. Which would work, except be (1) morally repungent [means never justifies the ends because the means is never 100% effective] and (2) assumes you'd actually be able to find 100% of HIV positive people.
Fun fact: that was largely because at first it spread amongst gay men quicker then heterosexuals, and the prevailing attitude was "great, this will finally get rid of the gays!"
Thus governments assumed they didn't need any sort of public education campaigns about it.
Then at some point, once someone realized straight people also have promiscuous sex (and there are tons more of them so it didn't seem like an epidemic till much later) did we decide to do anything about it.
It's better then that: you only need to accelerate to a suitably near orbit such that you get captured by Mars' gravity well and then just coast in.
Well the real issue is the private money won't flow until public money shows that it is possible and profitable. See: every major scientific innovation since WW2.