No I agree with your stance that products prices should reflect the damage they do, by using EPA regulations and the like. My argument is that the damage done by using gasoline is far far less that the damage done by increasing the cost of gasoline. Just drive around some of the poor states in this nation and think of what would happen if the price of gas doubled. No more money for college, no more money for books, for businesses, for food, for farming, for fertilizer, it would decimate this country and prolong the transition to Solar power/Electric vehicles. Geo-engineering solutions all cost far less, why aren't they considered. Drop a couple nukes and it cools of the earth, it's pretty easy and cheap to do. How about a 4th of July with some nukes, for the sake of the environment. Weather control will be one of the great accomplishments of humanity, it's sad how it's always thought of as 'bad'.
The transition to natural gas vehicles looks somewhat promising and if it could be accomplished with small incentives, the taxes on the profit made from producing natural gas locally (instead of importing oil from other countries) could pay for the incentives. A thorough analysis would have to be made to see if this is actually cost effective. Any policy that just makes all Americans poorer, I'm not in favor of.
I have a nice little desk lamp, it's 25 watts and I like the spectrum incandescents produce, to me it's worth the extra cost of electricity. By the government telling me that I should ignore the features I like, to save what, a whole 15 watts doesn't make any sense. My computer is by far the most power hungry thing I have in my house, but they didn't put a ban on desktops and large monitors.
Oil is a finite resource and ANY scientific analysis will show you that we will switch away from oil within 20 years or so, so why force the issue to make us poorer. To me it's either good intentions with a lack of thought, or it's just socialism in disguise.
So because the government illegally bailed out the banks, it's a good idea to create laws to change the market. If CFLs and high mpg cars were as appealing as you think, they would take over the market WITHOUT the help of the government.
First let's do some math. Say you expect to drive 100,000 miles in the next 10 yrs. At $3.50/gallon and 35 mpg, it's 10 cents a mile, or $10,000 for those 100,000 miles.
So in the USA it made sense to switch from a 15mpg car (~$20,000 in gas) to a 35mpg ($10,000 in gas) as long as the high mpg car cost less than $10,000 and it was still practical.
Switching to a 70mpg car would only save you $5,000, so really what's the point for us. It's just not economically practical. Your suggestion of forcing us to switch only wastes money that could be spent on jobs and other useful things.
Have you ever driven a 1300 cc (1.3 Liter) car or pickup truck. Besides failing crash tests they are horribly slow, and I couldn't imagine trying to pass someone on the freeway with one of those cars. You can't even produce autos when the hp and torque are so low, and we like autos in the USA. You have to downshift just to go up a hill.
How can I tow my boat with those little engines? There's A LOT of countryside in the US and pickup trucks are very useful, and they can plow snow.
As far as high mpg diesels go, if we did import them to the US the diesel price would skyrocket. That's the very reason Ford didn't bring it's 55mpg diesel here. We made a choice decades ago that Europe can use diesel and we will use gas.
The mpg requirements force companies like Lamborghini to make small efficient cars so that their average mpg is high enough. It doesn't make any sense, if you specialize in making trucks and SUVs there is no need for the government to come in and force you to create and market and sell small compact cars that you are not skilled in and do not care to produce. If the market wanted high MPG cars, they would have produced them, but the mandates just made detroit produce compact cars that are inferior to japanese compact cars, and it helped wreck the US industry.
Then what is sort of hilarious is that in the last decade there were tax incentives to buy gas guzzling SUVs, yet there were still average mpg requirements, it's just government insanity everywhere you look. Although I do support the crash test requirements, that's just common sense. Watch a couple crash tests of those little cars and I'm sure you'll think twice before buying one.
I'm sure Comcast is spending more than $500,000 just on lawyers. If this 'small' fee, at least in Comcast's eyes, is enough to justify the lawyers costs and media publicity, there's a good chance Comcast is in fact innocent. This of course suppose a logical assessments by the managers.
Show me a nuclear power plant design that's immune to terrorist attack and I might be onboard. In the US we have a nuclear plant within 30 miles of NYC!!!! Can you imagine having to evacuate NYC. I'm all for nuclear power for space travel and in remote regions where fallout won't require millions of people to leave everything behind.
And isn't a 9.0 THREE orders of magnitude bigger than a 7.0??
The $8 gas is mostly from taxes, otherwise it would be just as cheap gas as the US has, and even we have taxes on top of the gas. I don't see how the wars in Iraq or Libya increased production at all, more the opposite. You could even follow the price of gas vs the wars, and it's extremely clear it only increases the price of gas. If the US went to wars to take the gas that would be great and I might actually change my view and become pro these wars.
I followed your link to various electric cars that still haven't got anywhere close to any gasoline counterpart. Electric dragsters lose dismally to an 8,000 hp ethanol drag car. Top speed runs are even worse and still haven't eclipsed what a gas car can do in a 1/4 mile. Then when you look at production cars and it's just as bad.
Yes IF you have windows you don't have to evacuate, but considering I have to wash down my entire carpet it's not practical at all. When you say that they paid for themselves, was that WITHOUT a subsidy, and if it was, then there's no need at all for the law, they'd disappear on their own within a couple years.
Yes, I like my gas car and motorcycle very much, and if electric cars/bikes were competitive in anyway at all, I'd have to justify my purchase. Considering they are more expensive, slower, shorter range, there's no need to at all.
You're forgetting about the advantage decentralized power gives us in the current paradigm of terrorism. Without major power plants to attack we gain huge, huge advances in national security. Besides national security, I hate the mandates and laws the government is placing upon us.
To me, it's like the government demanding everyone have computers, when a computer still took up an entire building. It took TIME and RESEARCH to get to cheap iPhones. A government subsidy demanding we all have computers before they were ready wouldn't have helped, and personally, I think it would have just made it a lot longer to get to iPhones and the like. More money poured into NSF and other R&D companies would have helped, and I'm all for that approach, and the way we have the most money to throw into R&D is to use the cheapest form of energy we can right now.
That's not to say we go back to no emission laws or anything, but CO2 is not nearly as bad as acid rain, and we can deal with another 5-10yrs of CO2 quite easily.
BTW, I don't like iPhones, it was just a nice example.
To me, it's like the government demanding everyone have computers, when a computer still took up an entire building. It took TIME and RESEARCH to get to cheap iPhones. A government subsidy demanding we all have computers before they were ready wouldn't have helped, and personally, I think it would have just made it a lot longer to get to iPhones and the like. More money poured into NSF and other R&D companies would have helped, and I'm all for that approach, and the way we have the most money to throw into R&D is to use the cheapest form of energy we can right now.
That's not to say we go back to no emission laws or anything, but CO2 is not nearly as bad as acid rain, and we can deal with another 5-10yrs of CO2 quite easily.
BTW, I don't like iPhones, it was just a nice example.
Petrofuel companies only make Billions/yr (so how would they spend more than Billions/yr) and they have their own R&D facilities that do plenty of pure science that isn't subsidized, as well as plenty of research into alternative fuels that isn't subsidized completely and they have been doing that research for decades.
Hydrids cost close to double when you include the tax incentives and battery replacement costs. If not double, what 50% more, it's not less either way. If the government actually wanted to do something beneficial to customers they would force GM to release the Ovonics NiMH battery patent that they aren't using, which actually has a chance of giving us competitive hybrid vehicles.
How are you paying toward my non-hybrid car? That's my issue with hybrids, because that is when I am paying for your car.
Climate scientists say an 80% reduction in 10-20yrs will SLOW climate change, but my argument is that if we don't waste all this money on production and consumption of the current shitty hybrids/alternative energy sources, is that we will get to a sustainable future both sooner and richer. And slowing climate change, or keeping the current increase in temperature doesn't fix the problem, sea levels will still rise. Without geo-engineering the problem isn't solved and countries the world over will have to deal with global warming.
My point was that people would starve if we stray from using cheap gas/coal, not if we don't. Solar will get to be cheaper than coal within 5-10 years on the current research path, there's no need for government intervention, although NSF funding is always appreciated.
I suppose I could ignore the warnings on the CFL, and if I have to wash down my carpets, that much worse than vacuuming. Also CFL lifetimes on the packaging is only if you leave them on all the time, if you turn them on and off their lifetime is reduced by an order of magnitude and the cost benefit just isn't there, that's why these companies like GE are using the strong arm of the government to force you to buy and subsidize their inferior product.
BTW, I don't have kids or pets and I saw the nice subsidies so I bought and use a bunch of CFLs that I wouldn't have otherwise.
Electric cars are nowhere near gas cars in any aspect, if they were we wouldn't be arguing, because you'd be able to point to them, and I'd be able to buy one.
I know what I'm talking about, I'm just realistic.
If it was possible to do that just by increasing volume right now there would be hundreds are companies doing it. Since it's not possible yet, they demand subsidies that only strip money away from other areas of the economy. That was my ENTIRE point.
If you wanna live like a poor Chinese citizen be my guest, my family moved to the US for a reason, and the cheap oil and gas that made this country rich can't be ignored. But you are correct, we shouldn't be telling what China to do until the PER CAPITA CO2 production is higher than ours.
Just look at Europe, even with a insanely high tax on gasoline, the technology for electric cars just isn't there yet. I applaud the Europeans, they have let me buy much bigger/faster/nicer cars that would have been available if they had no tax (since gas prices would go up for everyone if Europeans used more).
What's the quickest way to a 100% CO2 free power structure -- massive investment in R&D until we have cheap solar and some storage tech (batteries/ultra capacitors/ethanol/fuel cell).
How would we have the most amount of money to spend on R&D, well that's simple. Use the cheap coal and gas we have right now, to make sure we have plenty of money to spend on R&D. I'm all for NSF funding and other private R&D, which the major oil companies spend a lot on.
What the longest way to 100% CO2 free power... well that's simple too. Waste as much money as possible on current expensive tech. Divert money from the R&D facilities around the world to production, which the so called 'green' movement wants.
The 'green' movement is made up of young kids that know no better and generally have good intentions. Who lead them? Socialists and corrupt government lobbyists from both sides, be it CO2 free mandates, corn ethanol subsidies, incandescent bans, or the ridiculous mpg requirements that wrecked the US auto industry.
What's the biggest thing the government could do right now to make electric cars more feasible. Just ban the Ovonic battery patent that GM holds for NiMH batteries. Never have I heard anyone talk about this, yet it's really the only thing that would make a big difference, RIGHT NOW.
If it made economic sense to do any of these things you mention we would be doing them right now.
So by spending twice as much money on my car, I don't suffer? By raising electricity prices by using alternative energy we don't lose jobs, businesses, and a bigger chunk of my paycheck to electricity?
By forcing me to drive a smaller, slower car, that's forcing me to suffer, I like fast, loud, big sexy cars.
We don't need to reduce greenhouse emissions, we need to fix global warming. Even if we cut all greenhouse emissions by 100% right now it's not enough, there have been 100 years of emissions that need to be dealt with.
Then do a cost benefit analysis, and it's clear fixing the problem (geo-engineering) is much cheaper. Give it another 5-10 years and solar prices will become cheaper than coal, then market forces take over and we will switch automatically.
Forcing us not to use cheap coal and gas now just makes poor people starve the world over and prolongs the time until we actually have cheap solar. Mass production of current solar technologies that use toxic materials doesn't make any sense and just impedes research.
If a CFL breaks you have to evacuate and vent the entire room, scrub down carpets if you have pets or little kids, and personally I don't like the spectrum. I also live in Maine so basically 100% of the waste heat is used to heat my house most of the year, so for me, there is no efficiency I gain from using CFLs, I just have to use more FUEL oil to heat my house, not environmentally friendly at all.
These giant companies had plenty of resources and time to put together something like itunes before napster even existed. Their continuing demand for high prices and lack of providing an alternative to piracy creates the black market.
Just consider redbox, it's $1 to rent a physical dvd. Think of the overhead costs, you have to stock those machines in stores all around the nation, and I'm sure you have to pay the store something to put it there, and you have to create physical dvds. Now think of the online market, where can I rent a movie for $1? Amazon and itunes let you steam it (for $5), but streaming is terrible, I have to wait for buffering even if I just rewind it 30 seconds. The streaming quality and features are worse than what youtube offers.
These deceptive business practices are illegal in any other market, yet they have been getting away with it for years, be it movies, or internet radio.
Actually it is illegal even if you do have a seperate dropbox, it's only legal if you pay USPS postage on top of whatever your company charges. I'm sure UPS or DHL would be able to deliver it. Internal mail is obviously completely different.
Thanks for the article, I'll be sure to read it soon, perhaps after much coffee first.
I suppose it's a little to soon to hope that anyone on slashdot would happen to know the perspective that string theory gives us, and if it agrees or not with the Everett interpretation, which in my opinion is quite a stretch; although the multiverse theory that certain interpretations of string theory suggest are almost as bizarre. Doesn't the Everett interpretation suggest you could be the Schroedinger cat, and 'you' wouldn't die, your body might in this reality, but each time you live on in another 'world'?
And you're correct, I was making too strong a case that QM could be explained away by common sense, but I still think the weirdness is overestimated in almost every article on the subject.
I can still expect a better theory that is somewhat more compatible with common sense. Perhaps it's simply a string vibrating at two frequencies, and our measurement devices can only detect a single frequency at a time. Which then would imply it is actually in a superposition of two states...- I have no idea if this is what string theory actually suggests.
**Completely incorrect**. Quantum theory says that you'll get the entangled photons polarization will correlate to each other.** It doesn't matter** what axis you measure on. If this wasn't the case, well, there wouldn't be anything special about this facet of quantium physics, that couldn't be explained with classical.
Read any paper on quantum cryptography and you'll realize you were mistaken. There is indeed something special about this, it's the classical result where it doesn't matter what axis you measure on. This phenomenon is behind the idea of using quantum encryption for serial numbers on money. Then when the counterfeiter tries to read the serial number without knowing what axis to measure on, not only does he get bogus results, but he also destroys the serial number of the dollar bill he's trying to counterfeit.
If you took 2 polarisation detectors, each measuring one of the entangled pair of photons, then cos^2(theta) describes how often the two bitstreams will correlate. However, theta is the angle between the photon detectors... It has no dependence on the original polarisation the the photons are emitted. Indeed it can be shown the emitted photons **cannot actually have** a specific polarisation.
Read any paper that does this exact experiment with the entire purpose of the experiment to show that it's not cos^2(theta) with correlated photons. Cos^2(theta) is the classical result that would occur if there wasn't entanglement.
So my analogy was obviously incorrect, but so is any other analogy. QM says nothing about the underlying details of the particle before measurement. The wave function collapses, the particle is just observed.
"it's in a superposition of two states" is like saying the "position is washed out over the entire universe", it's just the mathematical function used to predict probabilities that's in a superposition, and it's just another mathematical function that's washed out over the entire universe.
The underlying math doesn't say anything about the particle, it just lets us calculate probabilities. The position operator is in infinite dimensional Hilbert space, but that doesn't mean every position is a new dimension.
Incorrect, it's only correlated on 1 axis, (numeric or alphabetic), and if you measure on the incorrect axis there is no correlation and the correlation is destroyed. See Quantum Cryptography for a detailed method of dealing with this by using a regular electronic signal to first tell the receiver what axis to measure on.
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No I agree with your stance that products prices should reflect the damage they do, by using EPA regulations and the like. My argument is that the damage done by using gasoline is far far less that the damage done by increasing the cost of gasoline. Just drive around some of the poor states in this nation and think of what would happen if the price of gas doubled. No more money for college, no more money for books, for businesses, for food, for farming, for fertilizer, it would decimate this country and prolong the transition to Solar power/Electric vehicles. Geo-engineering solutions all cost far less, why aren't they considered. Drop a couple nukes and it cools of the earth, it's pretty easy and cheap to do. How about a 4th of July with some nukes, for the sake of the environment. Weather control will be one of the great accomplishments of humanity, it's sad how it's always thought of as 'bad'.
The transition to natural gas vehicles looks somewhat promising and if it could be accomplished with small incentives, the taxes on the profit made from producing natural gas locally (instead of importing oil from other countries) could pay for the incentives. A thorough analysis would have to be made to see if this is actually cost effective. Any policy that just makes all Americans poorer, I'm not in favor of.
I have a nice little desk lamp, it's 25 watts and I like the spectrum incandescents produce, to me it's worth the extra cost of electricity. By the government telling me that I should ignore the features I like, to save what, a whole 15 watts doesn't make any sense. My computer is by far the most power hungry thing I have in my house, but they didn't put a ban on desktops and large monitors.
Oil is a finite resource and ANY scientific analysis will show you that we will switch away from oil within 20 years or so, so why force the issue to make us poorer. To me it's either good intentions with a lack of thought, or it's just socialism in disguise.
LEDs are more efficient that CFLs, so why not ban CFLs too.
So because the government illegally bailed out the banks, it's a good idea to create laws to change the market. If CFLs and high mpg cars were as appealing as you think, they would take over the market WITHOUT the help of the government.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
I meant "less than $10,000 MORE"
First let's do some math. Say you expect to drive 100,000 miles in the next 10 yrs. At $3.50 /gallon and 35 mpg, it's 10 cents a mile, or $10,000 for those 100,000 miles.
So in the USA it made sense to switch from a 15mpg car (~$20,000 in gas) to a 35mpg ($10,000 in gas) as long as the high mpg car cost less than $10,000 and it was still practical.
Switching to a 70mpg car would only save you $5,000, so really what's the point for us. It's just not economically practical. Your suggestion of forcing us to switch only wastes money that could be spent on jobs and other useful things.
Have you ever driven a 1300 cc (1.3 Liter) car or pickup truck. Besides failing crash tests they are horribly slow, and I couldn't imagine trying to pass someone on the freeway with one of those cars. You can't even produce autos when the hp and torque are so low, and we like autos in the USA. You have to downshift just to go up a hill.
How can I tow my boat with those little engines? There's A LOT of countryside in the US and pickup trucks are very useful, and they can plow snow.
As far as high mpg diesels go, if we did import them to the US the diesel price would skyrocket. That's the very reason Ford didn't bring it's 55mpg diesel here. We made a choice decades ago that Europe can use diesel and we will use gas.
The mpg requirements force companies like Lamborghini to make small efficient cars so that their average mpg is high enough. It doesn't make any sense, if you specialize in making trucks and SUVs there is no need for the government to come in and force you to create and market and sell small compact cars that you are not skilled in and do not care to produce. If the market wanted high MPG cars, they would have produced them, but the mandates just made detroit produce compact cars that are inferior to japanese compact cars, and it helped wreck the US industry.
Then what is sort of hilarious is that in the last decade there were tax incentives to buy gas guzzling SUVs, yet there were still average mpg requirements, it's just government insanity everywhere you look. Although I do support the crash test requirements, that's just common sense. Watch a couple crash tests of those little cars and I'm sure you'll think twice before buying one.
I'm sure Comcast is spending more than $500,000 just on lawyers. If this 'small' fee, at least in Comcast's eyes, is enough to justify the lawyers costs and media publicity, there's a good chance Comcast is in fact innocent. This of course suppose a logical assessments by the managers.
And my incandescent shoots most of the light/heat at the floor, so really how much more efficient is a blower on the floor.
Not really, a 9.0 is THREE orders of magnitude more than a 7.0.
Show me a nuclear power plant design that's immune to terrorist attack and I might be onboard. In the US we have a nuclear plant within 30 miles of NYC!!!! Can you imagine having to evacuate NYC. I'm all for nuclear power for space travel and in remote regions where fallout won't require millions of people to leave everything behind.
And isn't a 9.0 THREE orders of magnitude bigger than a 7.0??
The $8 gas is mostly from taxes, otherwise it would be just as cheap gas as the US has, and even we have taxes on top of the gas. I don't see how the wars in Iraq or Libya increased production at all, more the opposite. You could even follow the price of gas vs the wars, and it's extremely clear it only increases the price of gas. If the US went to wars to take the gas that would be great and I might actually change my view and become pro these wars.
I followed your link to various electric cars that still haven't got anywhere close to any gasoline counterpart. Electric dragsters lose dismally to an 8,000 hp ethanol drag car. Top speed runs are even worse and still haven't eclipsed what a gas car can do in a 1/4 mile. Then when you look at production cars and it's just as bad.
Yes IF you have windows you don't have to evacuate, but considering I have to wash down my entire carpet it's not practical at all. When you say that they paid for themselves, was that WITHOUT a subsidy, and if it was, then there's no need at all for the law, they'd disappear on their own within a couple years.
Yes, I like my gas car and motorcycle very much, and if electric cars/bikes were competitive in anyway at all, I'd have to justify my purchase. Considering they are more expensive, slower, shorter range, there's no need to at all.
You're forgetting about the advantage decentralized power gives us in the current paradigm of terrorism. Without major power plants to attack we gain huge, huge advances in national security. Besides national security, I hate the mandates and laws the government is placing upon us.
To me, it's like the government demanding everyone have computers, when a computer still took up an entire building. It took TIME and RESEARCH to get to cheap iPhones. A government subsidy demanding we all have computers before they were ready wouldn't have helped, and personally, I think it would have just made it a lot longer to get to iPhones and the like. More money poured into NSF and other R&D companies would have helped, and I'm all for that approach, and the way we have the most money to throw into R&D is to use the cheapest form of energy we can right now.
That's not to say we go back to no emission laws or anything, but CO2 is not nearly as bad as acid rain, and we can deal with another 5-10yrs of CO2 quite easily.
BTW, I don't like iPhones, it was just a nice example.
To me, it's like the government demanding everyone have computers, when a computer still took up an entire building. It took TIME and RESEARCH to get to cheap iPhones. A government subsidy demanding we all have computers before they were ready wouldn't have helped, and personally, I think it would have just made it a lot longer to get to iPhones and the like. More money poured into NSF and other R&D companies would have helped, and I'm all for that approach, and the way we have the most money to throw into R&D is to use the cheapest form of energy we can right now.
That's not to say we go back to no emission laws or anything, but CO2 is not nearly as bad as acid rain, and we can deal with another 5-10yrs of CO2 quite easily.
BTW, I don't like iPhones, it was just a nice example.
Petrofuel companies only make Billions/yr (so how would they spend more than Billions/yr) and they have their own R&D facilities that do plenty of pure science that isn't subsidized, as well as plenty of research into alternative fuels that isn't subsidized completely and they have been doing that research for decades.
Hydrids cost close to double when you include the tax incentives and battery replacement costs. If not double, what 50% more, it's not less either way. If the government actually wanted to do something beneficial to customers they would force GM to release the Ovonics NiMH battery patent that they aren't using, which actually has a chance of giving us competitive hybrid vehicles.
How are you paying toward my non-hybrid car? That's my issue with hybrids, because that is when I am paying for your car.
Climate scientists say an 80% reduction in 10-20yrs will SLOW climate change, but my argument is that if we don't waste all this money on production and consumption of the current shitty hybrids/alternative energy sources, is that we will get to a sustainable future both sooner and richer. And slowing climate change, or keeping the current increase in temperature doesn't fix the problem, sea levels will still rise. Without geo-engineering the problem isn't solved and countries the world over will have to deal with global warming.
My point was that people would starve if we stray from using cheap gas/coal, not if we don't. Solar will get to be cheaper than coal within 5-10 years on the current research path, there's no need for government intervention, although NSF funding is always appreciated.
I suppose I could ignore the warnings on the CFL, and if I have to wash down my carpets, that much worse than vacuuming. Also CFL lifetimes on the packaging is only if you leave them on all the time, if you turn them on and off their lifetime is reduced by an order of magnitude and the cost benefit just isn't there, that's why these companies like GE are using the strong arm of the government to force you to buy and subsidize their inferior product.
BTW, I don't have kids or pets and I saw the nice subsidies so I bought and use a bunch of CFLs that I wouldn't have otherwise.
Electric cars are nowhere near gas cars in any aspect, if they were we wouldn't be arguing, because you'd be able to point to them, and I'd be able to buy one.
I know what I'm talking about, I'm just realistic.
If it was possible to do that just by increasing volume right now there would be hundreds are companies doing it. Since it's not possible yet, they demand subsidies that only strip money away from other areas of the economy. That was my ENTIRE point.
If you wanna live like a poor Chinese citizen be my guest, my family moved to the US for a reason, and the cheap oil and gas that made this country rich can't be ignored. But you are correct, we shouldn't be telling what China to do until the PER CAPITA CO2 production is higher than ours.
Hans Rosling has a great TED talk on this, and it's very enjoyable to watch.
Just look at Europe, even with a insanely high tax on gasoline, the technology for electric cars just isn't there yet. I applaud the Europeans, they have let me buy much bigger/faster/nicer cars that would have been available if they had no tax (since gas prices would go up for everyone if Europeans used more).
What's the quickest way to a 100% CO2 free power structure -- massive investment in R&D until we have cheap solar and some storage tech (batteries/ultra capacitors/ethanol/fuel cell).
How would we have the most amount of money to spend on R&D, well that's simple. Use the cheap coal and gas we have right now, to make sure we have plenty of money to spend on R&D. I'm all for NSF funding and other private R&D, which the major oil companies spend a lot on.
What the longest way to 100% CO2 free power... well that's simple too. Waste as much money as possible on current expensive tech. Divert money from the R&D facilities around the world to production, which the so called 'green' movement wants.
The 'green' movement is made up of young kids that know no better and generally have good intentions. Who lead them? Socialists and corrupt government lobbyists from both sides, be it CO2 free mandates, corn ethanol subsidies, incandescent bans, or the ridiculous mpg requirements that wrecked the US auto industry.
What's the biggest thing the government could do right now to make electric cars more feasible. Just ban the Ovonic battery patent that GM holds for NiMH batteries. Never have I heard anyone talk about this, yet it's really the only thing that would make a big difference, RIGHT NOW.
If it made economic sense to do any of these things you mention we would be doing them right now.
So by spending twice as much money on my car, I don't suffer?
By raising electricity prices by using alternative energy we don't lose jobs, businesses, and a bigger chunk of my paycheck to electricity?
By forcing me to drive a smaller, slower car, that's forcing me to suffer, I like fast, loud, big sexy cars.
We don't need to reduce greenhouse emissions, we need to fix global warming. Even if we cut all greenhouse emissions by 100% right now it's not enough, there have been 100 years of emissions that need to be dealt with.
Then do a cost benefit analysis, and it's clear fixing the problem (geo-engineering) is much cheaper. Give it another 5-10 years and solar prices will become cheaper than coal, then market forces take over and we will switch automatically.
Forcing us not to use cheap coal and gas now just makes poor people starve the world over and prolongs the time until we actually have cheap solar. Mass production of current solar technologies that use toxic materials doesn't make any sense and just impedes research.
If a CFL breaks you have to evacuate and vent the entire room, scrub down carpets if you have pets or little kids, and personally I don't like the spectrum. I also live in Maine so basically 100% of the waste heat is used to heat my house most of the year, so for me, there is no efficiency I gain from using CFLs, I just have to use more FUEL oil to heat my house, not environmentally friendly at all.
These giant companies had plenty of resources and time to put together something like itunes before napster even existed. Their continuing demand for high prices and lack of providing an alternative to piracy creates the black market.
Just consider redbox, it's $1 to rent a physical dvd. Think of the overhead costs, you have to stock those machines in stores all around the nation, and I'm sure you have to pay the store something to put it there, and you have to create physical dvds. Now think of the online market, where can I rent a movie for $1? Amazon and itunes let you steam it (for $5), but streaming is terrible, I have to wait for buffering even if I just rewind it 30 seconds. The streaming quality and features are worse than what youtube offers.
These deceptive business practices are illegal in any other market, yet they have been getting away with it for years, be it movies, or internet radio.
Satellite TV supposedly offers high quality 1080p. Netflix HD still looks worse than youtube 1080p.
Actually it is illegal even if you do have a seperate dropbox, it's only legal if you pay USPS postage on top of whatever your company charges. I'm sure UPS or DHL would be able to deliver it.
Internal mail is obviously completely different.
I'd much rather have the USPS close up shop, or at least make it legal for first class mail competitors to exist.
Thanks for the article, I'll be sure to read it soon, perhaps after much coffee first.
I suppose it's a little to soon to hope that anyone on slashdot would happen to know the perspective that string theory gives us, and if it agrees or not with the Everett interpretation, which in my opinion is quite a stretch; although the multiverse theory that certain interpretations of string theory suggest are almost as bizarre. Doesn't the Everett interpretation suggest you could be the Schroedinger cat, and 'you' wouldn't die, your body might in this reality, but each time you live on in another 'world'?
And you're correct, I was making too strong a case that QM could be explained away by common sense, but I still think the weirdness is overestimated in almost every article on the subject.
I can still expect a better theory that is somewhat more compatible with common sense. Perhaps it's simply a string vibrating at two frequencies, and our measurement devices can only detect a single frequency at a time. Which then would imply it is actually in a superposition of two states...- I have no idea if this is what string theory actually suggests.
**Completely incorrect**. Quantum theory says that you'll get the entangled photons polarization will correlate to each other .** It doesn't matter** what axis you measure on. If this wasn't the case, well, there wouldn't be anything special about this facet of quantium physics, that couldn't be explained with classical.
Read any paper on quantum cryptography and you'll realize you were mistaken. There is indeed something special about this, it's the classical result where it doesn't matter what axis you measure on. This phenomenon is behind the idea of using quantum encryption for serial numbers on money. Then when the counterfeiter tries to read the serial number without knowing what axis to measure on, not only does he get bogus results, but he also destroys the serial number of the dollar bill he's trying to counterfeit.
If you took 2 polarisation detectors, each measuring one of the entangled pair of photons, then cos^2(theta) describes how often the two bitstreams will correlate. However, theta is the angle between the photon detectors... It has no dependence on the original polarisation the the photons are emitted. Indeed it can be shown the emitted photons **cannot actually have** a specific polarisation.
Read any paper that does this exact experiment with the entire purpose of the experiment to show that it's not cos^2(theta) with correlated photons. Cos^2(theta) is the classical result that would occur if there wasn't entanglement.
So my analogy was obviously incorrect, but so is any other analogy. QM says nothing about the underlying details of the particle before measurement. The wave function collapses, the particle is just observed.
"it's in a superposition of two states" is like saying the "position is washed out over the entire universe", it's just the mathematical function used to predict probabilities that's in a superposition, and it's just another mathematical function that's washed out over the entire universe.
The underlying math doesn't say anything about the particle, it just lets us calculate probabilities. The position operator is in infinite dimensional Hilbert space, but that doesn't mean every position is a new dimension.
Incorrect, it's only correlated on 1 axis, (numeric or alphabetic), and if you measure on the incorrect axis there is no correlation and the correlation is destroyed. See Quantum Cryptography for a detailed method of dealing with this by using a regular electronic signal to first tell the receiver what axis to measure on.