We in rich countries don't give laptops to every one of our kids
I dunno which "rich country" you live in, I'll presume USA.
Where I live, we do infact do this. Infact most kids have in their daily life access to multiple computers and will own like 5 of them before they become adult.
Pretty typical is for example:
0-3 years: no or insignificant computer-use
3-6 years: Varying. Some have educative computers at home (or use special learning-software on their parents computer)
6-12 years: Everyone has access to modern computers at school, depending on the school the access may not be unlimited. Perhaps half the children this age have their own computer (or one shared with siblings), in addition to this many use their parents computer to larger or smaller degree. Most have their own mobile phone.
13-16 years: Everyone has access to modern computers at school. Most (85% or so) have their own computer at home (or one shared with siblings) Everyone has their own mobile phone. (well, not everyone, but literally 99% or so.)
16-18 years: Everyone has access to modern computers at school. At many schools 100% of the pupils have their own laptop which is used extensively in school and for homework. In addition to this many have their own stationary machine at home and/or can use their parents machine.
Summary: Here (in Norway) the average kid has access to a *lot* more than a single $100 laptop troughout his childhood and schoolyears.
The fundamental purpose of Copyright law is to allow a creator to control how their works are disseminated.
No it ain't. The fundamental purpose is, and I quote from the US constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
*THAT* is the fundamental purpose. It *achieves* this purpose (or attempts to) by rewarding creators with limited exclusive rigths. Primarily the rigths to copy and to publically perform their work. Nowhere is dissemination protected, unless it involves aditional copying. So, for example, the doctrine of "first sale" ensures that you can legally re-sell a copyrigthed work that you are in legal posession of, regardless of what the original author thinks about the resale.
I don't quite get your question. What exactly do you mean by "necessary" ? Having a space-elevator (or indeed a space-program at all) is not "necessary" for suitable definitions of that word.
Regardless of how strong/ligth cables you have, there's always going to be an advantage to having a yet-stronger yet-ligther cable. The advantages are diminishing offcourse, going from rope to steel-wire has a larger benefit than from steel-wire to carbon-nanotube-rope. But both are there.
Your assertion that "99% of the way doesn't cut it" is also nonsensical. Actually, in theory *any* material with tensile strength can be used for a space-elevator. It's just that without a high strength/weigth ratio the needed tapering would be ridicolous. If you made one of normal steel for example, the "cable" would, at geosynch orbit be several miles thick. Which makes it unworkable in the real world.
With a cable with half the strength of a single CNT, you could get to geosynch orbit without tapering at all. If the cable was only 99% strong enough to do that, the consequence would be you'd need sligth tapering. Big deal. You make it out as if there's some hard limit. There ain't. There are just soft limits. (i.e. weaker means more tapering, so at *some* point you're in "impractical" territory, but it's not a case of black and white like you seem to believe)
But in practice, your guesstimate comes pretty close to what you'll need to pay to get an actual adult reliable person for a job, even one that requires little formal training or expertise. If not $20, then certainly $15.
It's partly a cultural thing. I see that kind of thinking much more from Americans I know than from other people. (and I honestly don't mean to knock the US, these are some of the best friends I have!)
Even your president seems prone to this disease; If you ain't with us, you're with the terrorists.
Which is patent nonsense. 99% of the people in Europe, for example, that are critical of the latest invasion are definitely *not* with the terrorists, and infact are a lot more critical of radical islam than they are of Bush foreign policy.
But thing is, there's more than 2 possible positions, it's possible to dislike Bush *and* Osama at the same time. The world doesn't work like, either Osama is rigth, or else Bush is.
Partly, I think, it's an artifact of your election-system that in practice ensures a two-party system. This encourages binary thinking. It's a bit different in say Norway where it's perfectly normal to have 7-8 parties in parliament at any one time, and actually the *norm* that no single party has a majority by itself. (it's basically proportional representation here instead of winner-takes-all)
It's a hard task, I honestly don't think we're anywhere close to there yet.
Actually, it's *3* hard tasks.
First, the device needs to accurately recognize what you say (both the actual words, and the actual meaning) this is something which we don't have any software capable of doing well today, and doing it when the language is only subvocalised would be an order of magnitude more difficult.
Then, the device need to translate the statement into a foreign language, preserving meaning (not just statically replacing words which frequently completely misses the point). This is *also* something we don't know how to do really well today. We can do it so that the result is "understandable" for simple texts, but that's about it.
Third, the device needs to output spoken text in the foreign language. This is *also* something we don't know how to do terribly well, though I suppose the sub-task of these 3 that we've got the best grip on. Stephen Hawking has a device which performs only this function, and anyone who's heard him talk knows the state of the art on the field. (which is: easily understandable, nowhere *near* the fidelity of even someone with only a basic knowledge of a language)
It depends on your requirements really, and your reasons for wanting out of the US in the first place. Different people will have different priorities.
For some, I think Norway is a good choice.
It has a good standard of living.
It has good education.
Wages are high, but more equal than in the US. (meaning the very richest earn less, while the poorer/average people earn a lot more.
Taxes are progressive, for high-earners they're higher than US, for low-earners they're lower than US. When comparing, it's important to remember that "taxes" here include such details like universal healthcare, free education (all levels), pentions that one can actually live from, unemployment benefits, a full year off with 80% of your normal wages when you get a child, government-sponsored childcare, the works. For this, I consider the taxes quite acceptable. (for example, I earn on the order of $70K and pay 29% taxes)
Pollution is low. Nature is beautiful. Climate is mild on the coast. Not very warm summers, but neither very cold winthers. (unless you live way inland or way up north, which basically noone does anyway)
Worker protection laws are good. You're actually allowed a life beside work, even as a 25 year old programmer. You can actually reasonably provide for a family with a single normal job. (though most women work anyway)
Unemployment is at less than 3%, and falling. Enough said.
Our social security is dead-simple, and very good. Rules for membership fit on a single line: You're legally in Norway for a (planned or actual) period longer than a year ? Member, all benefits ! There's no fee for membership, it's financed trough your taxes.
There are drawbacks.
It's not the place for those of you who love the big metropolis. Our biggest cities, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger are only in the 100.000s, not in the millions.
Immigration can be tricky, unless you're married to a norwegian, from the EU, or have a desired qualification. Immigration also takes atleast 3-5 months for the paperwork (non-EU people, EU-people can come first, apply after), and you get only a 1-year work-and-stay permit which you need to renew yearly. After 3 years you get a permanent permit.
95% of the population speaks varying levels of english, most educated people speak it fluently. Nevertheless you'll be at an disadvantage until you learn the language. The language is in the same language-group as english and german though, so it's not very hard to learn. (80% of the words are recognizably similar for example)
Parts are rainy. The west-coast in autumn can be a shock (depending on where you're from). Normal rainfall in Bergen is like 2000mm/year. (less than half that in Oslo though)
Living-costs are high, especialy services are expensive. This is a result of the fact that your waitress, your hairdresser and your burgerflipper earns a decent living.
There's a number of reasons things don't work out like that.
First, there actually *is* friction. So it's obvious the elevator would not swing forever. Second, you claimed that each cargo sent up would tend to strengthen the swinging, until something breaks. That's also not true. That *would* be true if the cargo was sent up and released at the worst possible moment.
In the best case, two following cargoes cancel exactly. Like this:
First cargo goes up, presses top eastwards, whereafter the top swings westwards to neutral, and *would* overshoot to go an (almost) equal distance westward. Except you send up cargo 2 with such timing that it's eastward pressure cancels the westwards motion of the elevator, so that at the moment you release cargo 2, the elevator is both vertical, and at rest.
In practice, there's likely to be many cargoes on the way up at any given time, this acts a lot more like a *constant* eastwards pressure. (in the limit, infinitely many infinitely small cargoes, it *would* be a constant pressure)
You *do* need to take care that you don't put energy *into* the standing waves that will inevitably build quicker than the energy dissipates. That can be taken care of in two ways (or a combination thereof).
Put less energy in. (by timing, by size of cargo, by equal-symetrical-shipping whatever)
Or make the energy dissipate faster, by passive means (increase friction, dampeners) or active means (ion-trusters at top , or movement of the bottom-point that actively work against the waves, for example)
Yes. These things have been happening to US journalists.
For example Judith Miller was imprisoned for refusing to reveal her sources, and dozens (or hundreds) of photographers where harassed by police, or had their equipment confiscated as a result of taking photos of unclassified public structures (such as bridges, airports, large buildings etc)
They've been happening considerably more this year than it used to a few years ago, thus USA has fallen on the rankings.
It's not a "how much does government supress the free press" ranking. It's a "How much is the free press supressed" ranking. It doesn't rank governments (though those are *part* of the picture), it ranks countries in general.
Having death-threats against journalists and editors who cover certain topics leads to a worse score, regardless of who makes the threats. Because it makes it harder to be a journalist and cover those topics in that country.
Americans are used to consider only government-censorship "relevant". Something that comes from your constitution. Government-censorship *is* relevant, and important.
But a country inwhich the government censors nothing, but you get killed for writing certain things is also no paradise for the free press.
What, other than space elevators, requires space-elevator strength cabling?
It's not a question of "require" it's a question of benefit from.
Lots and lots and lots of engineering-projects would benefit from stronger, ligther cables. Any sort of tension-structure at all really. The most obvious example migth be bridges.
Yes, you can build bruidges with steel-cables. But if you had cables 10 times as strong, and 10% the weigth, you'd be able to build much longer freespan bridges, and you'd be able to save an awful lot on construction, as carrying the cables is today frequently heavier than carrying the actual part of the bridge with the cars on it.
Ask any structural engineer if stronger, ligther cables would be useful.
Sure, the cargo needs to be accelerated eastwards, which means the top of the cable will be pressed westwards. But the cable is under stress, and the stress itself will tend to rigthen it.
It's a lot like spinning a string with a rock on the end. Sure, gravity will tend to drag the rock *downwards*, but the spin and the resulting stress on the string will tend to counteract this. End-result ? The string does go diagonally downwards somewhat, how much depending on weigth of stone, length of string, and speed of spinning. But it stays stable, and it doesn't end up vertically eventually.
The energy required for accelerating the payloads eastwards is taken from the earths rotation. So sure, if you sent up a significant part of the mass of the earth, you'd actually slow down earths rotation (and make days longer), if that *was* a problem (which it ain't for the same reason that a fly on the stern doesn't cause a supertanker to capsize) you could counteract this by sending equal masses *down* and *up* the cable.
People up. People down. Water up. Urine down. Food up. Feces down.
Or, you could, simply set up solar-powered ion-truster on the top to impart the needed momentum to the beanstalk and counteract the westwards-bending effect. It ain't gonna be nessecary, but even if it was, it'd be a rather trivial problem.
Imagine you buy 100 products, with prices from 1.00 to 1.99. The mathemathically correct price for all these transactions would be the sum of the series, or 149.50 (do it on your pocket-calculator if you don't trust me) This is also what you'd pay in norway if you bougth all these products in one transaction. (rather than as discrete purchases)
Now, with norwegian rounding-rules, you will pay 1.00 for 25 products, 1.50 for 50 products, and 2.00 for 25 products, in total 150.00 which is, as I claimed, 50 cents more than "correct".
The reason is simple, you make it much too complicated. There's 2 values where the distance up and down is equal..25 and.75 to make it mathemathically fair, you'd have to chose to round these in different directions, when you chose (as norway has done) to round both up, you get a statistical bias.
The simplest "fair" method (and the most coin-reducing one) would probably be to say that.25 and.75 always go to the nearest krone, so that.25 goes down and.75 goes up. This would also decrease the percentage of transactions where the 0.50 coin is needed by a percent:-)
It's just silly. Pennies are just a nuisance and have enormous negative value. The time and effort needed to deal with them much outweigh any "advantages".
In Norway, for example, the smallest coin is the 50 øre, with a value of about 10 pennies, and frankly, we could even do nicely without and stick with the krone. (1 krone is 100 øre, so the 50-øre could just aswell be thougth of as the 1/2 krone)
There are still prices given more accurately than that, but it's rounded to nearest 50 øre when paying cash. This hardly makes a difference. On the average you'll be "lucky" and "unlucky" equally often, so it makes no real difference to the prices. Except prices ending in.75 and.25 are always rounded *up*.
End effect, 2% of all your transactions you end up losing 25 øre. Which means that *if* you pay in cash 5 times daily 365 days a year, you end up losing 9.12 krone pro year. Ok, so it costs you a single buck a year. I think it's safe to say we can live with that. Besides, one could easily eliminate even *this* "unfairness" by saying that 0.25 gets rounded down and 0.75 gets rounded up. That way, statistically, you'd end up paying the same.
I think the logic is twofold. (ain't saying I nessecarily agree with it)
One, if the partners are of equal age and maturity, it's simply nonsense to punish one based on some arbitrary limit. If there's any blame, then this blame is shared equally between them. This is true even if the kids are very young. So, at one hand, it's nonsense to punish to 13-year olds who fool around with eachothers, what are you gonna do ? Convict both of abusing the other ? At the same time you may not want to allow just *anyone* to sleep with *anyone* as would be the practical consequence if difference in maturity and/or age where irrelevant.
Secondly, it's separately forbidden for example, for a teacher to have sex with a pupil, or for a doctor with a patient or similar. (even if the patient/pupil are of legal age) The reason is that it's assumed that the power which these have over the younger one will, in practice, often allow them to manipulate the younger one to agree to stuff that he/she normally wouldn't.
To some degree this latter effect is in force with very unequal maturity-levels. The 40 year old will tend to have much more authority than the 15 year old. He/She will tend to have much more money than they younger. He/She will tend to be able to offer stuff or experiences that the younger one otherwise couldn't reasonably get. Which, I guess, transforms it into a sort of prostitution. Buying sex from anyone under 18 is a crime. The assumption probably is that in very many cases where a 15 year old agree to have sex with a 40 year old, in reality it's a type of "buying sex".
Sure, these arguments have holes. It's hard to find a set of rules that everyone will agree to though. I don't think the compromise is all that bad.
First, conversion to hydrogen, and then back to electric power is a lossy process. Atleast half of your energy would get wasted as heat in the process. Thus the power-price would need to be less than *half* in the nigth from what it is daytime for this to even make sense, even then you'd need to finance the storage, the electrolysys and the hydrogen fuel-cell (or other generator). Very very doubtful.
Secondly, many powerstations do not, infact, "idle at inefficient speeds" at nigth. That is true for some plants -- once you've paid for the construction of a nuclear powerplant for example, it may just as well run at 100% 24/7. (because the fuel-expenditure is a tiny fraction of the capital-expenditure). But for example hydropower from magazines run efficiently at any rate, and furthermore their total production is limited by rainfall, so they really can shut down at nigth, and produce double at day.
Third, each conversion costs energy. It's rather silly to do the following:
Coal.
Heat.
Electricity.
Hydrogen.
Electricity.
It'd be hugely more efficient to produce the hydrogen directly from coal, if that was the point. The extra roundtrip back to chemical storage and then back into electricity will cost you a large fraction of the energy.
There's *much* better ways of storing power, if that's all you want to acomplish. Probably the simplest is to run a hydropower-plant in reverse at nigth. So that at day it produces energy from energy in high-lieing reservoirs, and at nigth it stores energy from plants that can't efficiently idle by pumping water up to the reservoir.
For that matter, the flywheel you mention is probably going to beat hydrogen for this purpose too. Certainly the losses would be a lot smaller.
Economically, installing solar-cells currently doesn't make sense. That may change in the future, but currently it is definitely so. Otherwise people would be doing it left and rigth.
I'll try to explain in somewhat simplified terms how that works.
Installing a solar-cell capable of producing a single KW on a sunny day may cost $3500. ($3.50/watt is the current average price, this can change in the future offcourse)
So, if you where to install one today. Then tomorrow you'd be $3500 poorer.
Then you start earning back. If you live somewhere reasonably sunny, the cell will probably produce on the order of 1500Kwh/year. This has a value of around 100$ at an electricity-price of 7 cent.
OK, so you migth think, this means after 35 years you've made back the initial investment, and the rest from there is pure profit.
Unfortunately that's not so, for 2 reasons.
First, solar-cells don't live infinitely with zero maintenance. 20 years is more along the lines of what you'd expect, and even for that you'll need minor maintenance (which costs money). So, the solar-cells are likely to die around the time when you've made back *half* what you initially invested.
But it gets worse. There's interest. If you *didn't* spend the $3500 for buying solar-cells, you could instead have put them in an investment with interest. (or used it for paying back on loans if you have those).
In short, the $1000 that you will get in power from your solar cells over a period of 10 years isn't actually *today* worth $1000. The sums gets deprecated by interes. If the alternative interst is 5%, for example, then getting $100 in a year has (about) the same value as getting $95 today. (because if you invested the $95, in a year they'd *be* $100).
Over long time-horizons this make a *huge* difference. Getting $100 today has the same value as getting $163 in 10 years or $265 in 20 years. In reverse, the $100 you would earn in free power in year 2026 is *today* only worth $37.
End-effect: Even stuff that lasts forever with zero maintenance (and solar-cells dont!) will *never* pay for itself aslong as the payback is smaller than the interest. Getting $100/year FOREVER from a $3500 initial investment is only a good deal if interest for alternative investments is lower than 2,86% which is pretty unlikely. (the average of the Dow-Jones for the last few decades is on the order of 9%)
If your interst as a parent in what your kid is doing stops at: "I was outside with friends", or at "I was using the computer", then in both cases, you really don't have the least clue what your kid was up to.
If you *do* show an interest above-and-beyond that, then certainly, in both cases you can learn more.
"I was at the mall" is in the same category as "I was playing a game". It's more precise than simply "I was outdoors" or "I was using the computer", but it's still not terribly informative.
I just don't see whats so particularilu amorphous about computer-usage. In itself computer-usage can be from very-strongly-positive to very-strongly-negative and anything in between. That's true for "being outdoors" or "being at the mall" too.
Computer use: (in rough order of desirability)
Doing homework.
Translating letters for Amnesty International.
Learning physics.
Writing an email to my friend that moved away.
Chatting with my school-friend.
Playing an educational game.
Playing a game with inapropriate content.
Gambling on some poker-site.
Sending out spam.
Making a botnet to nuke that looser on IRC the other day.
Being "at the mall" is not much more indicative of the desirability of the activity really. The main difference is that I can think of less really positive things or educative things that one can reasonably do at a mall. But there is still a huge difference between say "looking for the new Stephen Hawking book", and "drinking in the parking-lot"
Mostly, it's a question of *what* you are doing, and perhaps to some degree with whom much more than it is a question about which tool you are using (computer, bike, screwdriver) it comes down to knowing the difference between rigth and wrong, good and bad. Often that's a question of degree. I see absolutely *nothing* special about computers in this respect.
The one difference I do see, and that I think is relevant for some parents is that computers is an area where many parents frankly have little knowledge themselves. Knowing a bit about the field your kid is interested in is a prerequisite for being able to sensibly discuss it with your kid and help the kid make the rigth choices.
It *is* a challenge I guess, when your 12-year old compiles his own linux-kernel and argues that it is morally wrong to link binary-only modules into it, while you yourself know only how to do basic file-managment in windows. Still, even then, if you challenge your kid to explain to you *why* that would be wrong, odds are you'll both end up the wiser from it.
Child molestation is categorically no different than rape; the victim is just younger. Some "child molestation" (statutory "rape" of 16 or 17 year olds, who are biologically adult) is even less of a crime, since the act would by all objective standards be considered consensual if it weren't for the legal fiction that people younger than 18 are incapable of giving consent.
And some people deliberately mis-label these kinds of relations in order to further their own agenda.
For example, Inger Marie Sunde, the then-head of the Norwegian computer-crime unit claimed, at a lecture in my university that over 400 children in the USA alone disapeared after meeting with pedophiles that they'd communicated with over the Internet.
I found the claim somewhat fishy, so I asked for a reference. Which offcourse she couldn't give there and then but promised to send me in email after the lecture.
Turns out the huge majority of these 400 where teenagers in the 15-17 years age-bracket that ran away from home with their somewhat older partners, mostly girls with boyfriends 2-5 years older.
But "sometimes 17-year old girls run away from home with their 19-year old boyfriends" don't sound quite as scary as "over 400 children in the USA alone disappear after contact with pedophiles they've met on the internet", now does it ?
Indeed, labeling these "children" and the 19-year old that is in love with a 17-year old a "pedophile" is completely nonsense. Here in Norway that's called *normal*, age of consent is 16 here. And even relations with people younger than that are free of punishment if the sex is consensual and both partners are "similar in age or development".
In practice this means, if you're 17 and have a 15-year old girlfriend, there's unlikely to be a problem. If you're 40 and have a 15-year old girlfriend it *is* a problem.
Sure, any age-limit is subjective. That's unavoidable. I think however that 16 makes more sense than 18. And I also think that the exception for relationships where it's essentially two equally-old or equally-mature persons make sense.
It's complete lunacy to imprison the guy who is half a year older than his girlfriend and happens to have sex with her while they're on separate sides of some imaginary border.
a.) Being on the computer is not a particularly homogenous activity. Going to the mall, coffee shop, or downtown to Main street at 3am is.
I'm not so sure about that. In practice kids spend a lot of time simply being outdoors with their friends. I sure as hell never reported (nor was I expected to) each and every geographical location and building that I entered while playing with friends for hours.
Perhaps I went biking. Or fishing. Or playing football. Or stealing in a shop. Or drinking alkohol. Or riding. Or climbing to the top of buildings under construction. Or swimming. Or building a raft. Or any of a gazillion different kinds of things.
To have an idea what I was up to required parents that took an interest. That talked to me. That did stuff together with me sometimes. But also that trusted me.
That's no different on a computer. Unless you, as a parent, take an interest, you won't know what your kid is up to.
Not all power in the US is used by households. (and the 4% figure was for households). Most heavy industries *don't* spend 4% of their power-budget running electrical gizmos in standby-mode.
Antisuckbackdevice is a rather logical word for a diode, no ?
It's hard to avoid this sometimes, even for us humans.
You should've seen the reaction of my Canadian friends when I was momentarily unable to recall that you guys refer to certain devices as "vacuum-cleaner", and instead translated my native word for same device.
"Dustsucker"
Blank stare. Incomprehension. Sudden spark of insigth. Laugther. Rather a lot of the latter.
The name makes perfect sense, and it's what its called in atleast Norwegian, Swedish and German. Nevertheless, in english I suppose it just sounds silly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd buy a hosting-plan capable of dealing with it, and put up sufficient advertising to more than pay for the needed bandwith and servers.
Thereafter, let the floodgates open. The more people visit, the more money I make. Simple really.
I dunno which "rich country" you live in, I'll presume USA.
Where I live, we do infact do this. Infact most kids have in their daily life access to multiple computers and will own like 5 of them before they become adult.
Pretty typical is for example:
Summary: Here (in Norway) the average kid has access to a *lot* more than a single $100 laptop troughout his childhood and schoolyears.
Newsflash: Netflix buys DVDs too.
No it ain't. The fundamental purpose is, and I quote from the US constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
*THAT* is the fundamental purpose. It *achieves* this purpose (or attempts to) by rewarding creators with limited exclusive rigths. Primarily the rigths to copy and to publically perform their work. Nowhere is dissemination protected, unless it involves aditional copying. So, for example, the doctrine of "first sale" ensures that you can legally re-sell a copyrigthed work that you are in legal posession of, regardless of what the original author thinks about the resale.
Regardless of how strong/ligth cables you have, there's always going to be an advantage to having a yet-stronger yet-ligther cable. The advantages are diminishing offcourse, going from rope to steel-wire has a larger benefit than from steel-wire to carbon-nanotube-rope. But both are there.
Your assertion that "99% of the way doesn't cut it" is also nonsensical. Actually, in theory *any* material with tensile strength can be used for a space-elevator. It's just that without a high strength/weigth ratio the needed tapering would be ridicolous. If you made one of normal steel for example, the "cable" would, at geosynch orbit be several miles thick. Which makes it unworkable in the real world.
With a cable with half the strength of a single CNT, you could get to geosynch orbit without tapering at all. If the cable was only 99% strong enough to do that, the consequence would be you'd need sligth tapering. Big deal. You make it out as if there's some hard limit. There ain't. There are just soft limits. (i.e. weaker means more tapering, so at *some* point you're in "impractical" territory, but it's not a case of black and white like you seem to believe)
But in practice, your guesstimate comes pretty close to what you'll need to pay to get an actual adult reliable person for a job, even one that requires little formal training or expertise. If not $20, then certainly $15.
Even your president seems prone to this disease; If you ain't with us, you're with the terrorists.
Which is patent nonsense. 99% of the people in Europe, for example, that are critical of the latest invasion are definitely *not* with the terrorists, and infact are a lot more critical of radical islam than they are of Bush foreign policy.
But thing is, there's more than 2 possible positions, it's possible to dislike Bush *and* Osama at the same time. The world doesn't work like, either Osama is rigth, or else Bush is.
Partly, I think, it's an artifact of your election-system that in practice ensures a two-party system. This encourages binary thinking. It's a bit different in say Norway where it's perfectly normal to have 7-8 parties in parliament at any one time, and actually the *norm* that no single party has a majority by itself. (it's basically proportional representation here instead of winner-takes-all)
Actually, it's *3* hard tasks.
First, the device needs to accurately recognize what you say (both the actual words, and the actual meaning) this is something which we don't have any software capable of doing well today, and doing it when the language is only subvocalised would be an order of magnitude more difficult.
Then, the device need to translate the statement into a foreign language, preserving meaning (not just statically replacing words which frequently completely misses the point). This is *also* something we don't know how to do really well today. We can do it so that the result is "understandable" for simple texts, but that's about it.
Third, the device needs to output spoken text in the foreign language. This is *also* something we don't know how to do terribly well, though I suppose the sub-task of these 3 that we've got the best grip on. Stephen Hawking has a device which performs only this function, and anyone who's heard him talk knows the state of the art on the field. (which is: easily understandable, nowhere *near* the fidelity of even someone with only a basic knowledge of a language)
Oh, and I forgot: the women/girls are hot :-)
For some, I think Norway is a good choice.
There are drawbacks.
It's not the place for those of you who love the big metropolis. Our biggest cities, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger are only in the 100.000s, not in the millions.
Immigration can be tricky, unless you're married to a norwegian, from the EU, or have a desired qualification. Immigration also takes atleast 3-5 months for the paperwork (non-EU people, EU-people can come first, apply after), and you get only a 1-year work-and-stay permit which you need to renew yearly. After 3 years you get a permanent permit.
95% of the population speaks varying levels of english, most educated people speak it fluently. Nevertheless you'll be at an disadvantage until you learn the language. The language is in the same language-group as english and german though, so it's not very hard to learn. (80% of the words are recognizably similar for example)
Parts are rainy. The west-coast in autumn can be a shock (depending on where you're from). Normal rainfall in Bergen is like 2000mm/year. (less than half that in Oslo though)
Living-costs are high, especialy services are expensive. This is a result of the fact that your waitress, your hairdresser and your burgerflipper earns a decent living.
First, there actually *is* friction. So it's obvious the elevator would not swing forever. Second, you claimed that each cargo sent up would tend to strengthen the swinging, until something breaks. That's also not true. That *would* be true if the cargo was sent up and released at the worst possible moment.
In the best case, two following cargoes cancel exactly. Like this:
First cargo goes up, presses top eastwards, whereafter the top swings westwards to neutral, and *would* overshoot to go an (almost) equal distance westward. Except you send up cargo 2 with such timing that it's eastward pressure cancels the westwards motion of the elevator, so that at the moment you release cargo 2, the elevator is both vertical, and at rest.
In practice, there's likely to be many cargoes on the way up at any given time, this acts a lot more like a *constant* eastwards pressure. (in the limit, infinitely many infinitely small cargoes, it *would* be a constant pressure)
You *do* need to take care that you don't put energy *into* the standing waves that will inevitably build quicker than the energy dissipates. That can be taken care of in two ways (or a combination thereof).
Put less energy in. (by timing, by size of cargo, by equal-symetrical-shipping whatever)
Or make the energy dissipate faster, by passive means (increase friction, dampeners) or active means (ion-trusters at top , or movement of the bottom-point that actively work against the waves, for example)
For example Judith Miller was imprisoned for refusing to reveal her sources, and dozens (or hundreds) of photographers where harassed by police, or had their equipment confiscated as a result of taking photos of unclassified public structures (such as bridges, airports, large buildings etc)
They've been happening considerably more this year than it used to a few years ago, thus USA has fallen on the rankings.
Having death-threats against journalists and editors who cover certain topics leads to a worse score, regardless of who makes the threats. Because it makes it harder to be a journalist and cover those topics in that country.
Americans are used to consider only government-censorship "relevant". Something that comes from your constitution. Government-censorship *is* relevant, and important.
But a country inwhich the government censors nothing, but you get killed for writing certain things is also no paradise for the free press.
It's not a question of "require" it's a question of benefit from.
Lots and lots and lots of engineering-projects would benefit from stronger, ligther cables. Any sort of tension-structure at all really. The most obvious example migth be bridges.
Yes, you can build bruidges with steel-cables. But if you had cables 10 times as strong, and 10% the weigth, you'd be able to build much longer freespan bridges, and you'd be able to save an awful lot on construction, as carrying the cables is today frequently heavier than carrying the actual part of the bridge with the cars on it.
Ask any structural engineer if stronger, ligther cables would be useful.
Sure, the cargo needs to be accelerated eastwards, which means the top of the cable will be pressed westwards. But the cable is under stress, and the stress itself will tend to rigthen it.
It's a lot like spinning a string with a rock on the end. Sure, gravity will tend to drag the rock *downwards*, but the spin and the resulting stress on the string will tend to counteract this. End-result ? The string does go diagonally downwards somewhat, how much depending on weigth of stone, length of string, and speed of spinning. But it stays stable, and it doesn't end up vertically eventually.
The energy required for accelerating the payloads eastwards is taken from the earths rotation. So sure, if you sent up a significant part of the mass of the earth, you'd actually slow down earths rotation (and make days longer), if that *was* a problem (which it ain't for the same reason that a fly on the stern doesn't cause a supertanker to capsize) you could counteract this by sending equal masses *down* and *up* the cable.
People up. People down. Water up. Urine down. Food up. Feces down.
Or, you could, simply set up solar-powered ion-truster on the top to impart the needed momentum to the beanstalk and counteract the westwards-bending effect. It ain't gonna be nessecary, but even if it was, it'd be a rather trivial problem.
Imagine you buy 100 products, with prices from 1.00 to 1.99. The mathemathically correct price for all these transactions would be the sum of the series, or 149.50 (do it on your pocket-calculator if you don't trust me) This is also what you'd pay in norway if you bougth all these products in one transaction. (rather than as discrete purchases)
Now, with norwegian rounding-rules, you will pay 1.00 for 25 products, 1.50 for 50 products, and 2.00 for 25 products, in total 150.00 which is, as I claimed, 50 cents more than "correct".
The reason is simple, you make it much too complicated. There's 2 values where the distance up and down is equal. .25 and .75 to make it mathemathically fair, you'd have to chose to round these in different directions, when you chose (as norway has done) to round both up, you get a statistical bias.
The simplest "fair" method (and the most coin-reducing one) would probably be to say that .25 and .75 always go to the nearest krone, so that .25 goes down and .75 goes up. This would also decrease the percentage of transactions where the 0.50 coin is needed by a percent :-)
In Norway, for example, the smallest coin is the 50 øre, with a value of about 10 pennies, and frankly, we could even do nicely without and stick with the krone. (1 krone is 100 øre, so the 50-øre could just aswell be thougth of as the 1/2 krone)
There are still prices given more accurately than that, but it's rounded to nearest 50 øre when paying cash. This hardly makes a difference. On the average you'll be "lucky" and "unlucky" equally often, so it makes no real difference to the prices. Except prices ending in .75 and .25 are always rounded *up*.
End effect, 2% of all your transactions you end up losing 25 øre. Which means that *if* you pay in cash 5 times daily 365 days a year, you end up losing 9.12 krone pro year. Ok, so it costs you a single buck a year. I think it's safe to say we can live with that. Besides, one could easily eliminate even *this* "unfairness" by saying that 0.25 gets rounded down and 0.75 gets rounded up. That way, statistically, you'd end up paying the same.
One, if the partners are of equal age and maturity, it's simply nonsense to punish one based on some arbitrary limit. If there's any blame, then this blame is shared equally between them. This is true even if the kids are very young. So, at one hand, it's nonsense to punish to 13-year olds who fool around with eachothers, what are you gonna do ? Convict both of abusing the other ? At the same time you may not want to allow just *anyone* to sleep with *anyone* as would be the practical consequence if difference in maturity and/or age where irrelevant.
Secondly, it's separately forbidden for example, for a teacher to have sex with a pupil, or for a doctor with a patient or similar. (even if the patient/pupil are of legal age) The reason is that it's assumed that the power which these have over the younger one will, in practice, often allow them to manipulate the younger one to agree to stuff that he/she normally wouldn't.
To some degree this latter effect is in force with very unequal maturity-levels. The 40 year old will tend to have much more authority than the 15 year old. He/She will tend to have much more money than they younger. He/She will tend to be able to offer stuff or experiences that the younger one otherwise couldn't reasonably get. Which, I guess, transforms it into a sort of prostitution. Buying sex from anyone under 18 is a crime. The assumption probably is that in very many cases where a 15 year old agree to have sex with a 40 year old, in reality it's a type of "buying sex".
Sure, these arguments have holes. It's hard to find a set of rules that everyone will agree to though. I don't think the compromise is all that bad.
First, conversion to hydrogen, and then back to electric power is a lossy process. Atleast half of your energy would get wasted as heat in the process. Thus the power-price would need to be less than *half* in the nigth from what it is daytime for this to even make sense, even then you'd need to finance the storage, the electrolysys and the hydrogen fuel-cell (or other generator). Very very doubtful.
Secondly, many powerstations do not, infact, "idle at inefficient speeds" at nigth. That is true for some plants -- once you've paid for the construction of a nuclear powerplant for example, it may just as well run at 100% 24/7. (because the fuel-expenditure is a tiny fraction of the capital-expenditure). But for example hydropower from magazines run efficiently at any rate, and furthermore their total production is limited by rainfall, so they really can shut down at nigth, and produce double at day.
Third, each conversion costs energy. It's rather silly to do the following:
It'd be hugely more efficient to produce the hydrogen directly from coal, if that was the point. The extra roundtrip back to chemical storage and then back into electricity will cost you a large fraction of the energy.
There's *much* better ways of storing power, if that's all you want to acomplish. Probably the simplest is to run a hydropower-plant in reverse at nigth. So that at day it produces energy from energy in high-lieing reservoirs, and at nigth it stores energy from plants that can't efficiently idle by pumping water up to the reservoir.
For that matter, the flywheel you mention is probably going to beat hydrogen for this purpose too. Certainly the losses would be a lot smaller.
Economically, installing solar-cells currently doesn't make sense. That may change in the future, but currently it is definitely so. Otherwise people would be doing it left and rigth.
I'll try to explain in somewhat simplified terms how that works.
Installing a solar-cell capable of producing a single KW on a sunny day may cost $3500. ($3.50/watt is the current average price, this can change in the future offcourse)
So, if you where to install one today. Then tomorrow you'd be $3500 poorer.
Then you start earning back. If you live somewhere reasonably sunny, the cell will probably produce on the order of 1500Kwh/year. This has a value of around 100$ at an electricity-price of 7 cent.
OK, so you migth think, this means after 35 years you've made back the initial investment, and the rest from there is pure profit.
Unfortunately that's not so, for 2 reasons.
First, solar-cells don't live infinitely with zero maintenance. 20 years is more along the lines of what you'd expect, and even for that you'll need minor maintenance (which costs money). So, the solar-cells are likely to die around the time when you've made back *half* what you initially invested.
But it gets worse. There's interest. If you *didn't* spend the $3500 for buying solar-cells, you could instead have put them in an investment with interest. (or used it for paying back on loans if you have those).
In short, the $1000 that you will get in power from your solar cells over a period of 10 years isn't actually *today* worth $1000. The sums gets deprecated by interes. If the alternative interst is 5%, for example, then getting $100 in a year has (about) the same value as getting $95 today. (because if you invested the $95, in a year they'd *be* $100).
Over long time-horizons this make a *huge* difference. Getting $100 today has the same value as getting $163 in 10 years or $265 in 20 years. In reverse, the $100 you would earn in free power in year 2026 is *today* only worth $37.
End-effect: Even stuff that lasts forever with zero maintenance (and solar-cells dont!) will *never* pay for itself aslong as the payback is smaller than the interest. Getting $100/year FOREVER from a $3500 initial investment is only a good deal if interest for alternative investments is lower than 2,86% which is pretty unlikely. (the average of the Dow-Jones for the last few decades is on the order of 9%)
If your interst as a parent in what your kid is doing stops at: "I was outside with friends", or at "I was using the computer", then in both cases, you really don't have the least clue what your kid was up to.
If you *do* show an interest above-and-beyond that, then certainly, in both cases you can learn more.
"I was at the mall" is in the same category as "I was playing a game". It's more precise than simply "I was outdoors" or "I was using the computer", but it's still not terribly informative.
I just don't see whats so particularilu amorphous about computer-usage. In itself computer-usage can be from very-strongly-positive to very-strongly-negative and anything in between. That's true for "being outdoors" or "being at the mall" too.
Computer use: (in rough order of desirability)
Being "at the mall" is not much more indicative of the desirability of the activity really. The main difference is that I can think of less really positive things or educative things that one can reasonably do at a mall. But there is still a huge difference between say "looking for the new Stephen Hawking book", and "drinking in the parking-lot"
Mostly, it's a question of *what* you are doing, and perhaps to some degree with whom much more than it is a question about which tool you are using (computer, bike, screwdriver) it comes down to knowing the difference between rigth and wrong, good and bad. Often that's a question of degree. I see absolutely *nothing* special about computers in this respect.
The one difference I do see, and that I think is relevant for some parents is that computers is an area where many parents frankly have little knowledge themselves. Knowing a bit about the field your kid is interested in is a prerequisite for being able to sensibly discuss it with your kid and help the kid make the rigth choices.
It *is* a challenge I guess, when your 12-year old compiles his own linux-kernel and argues that it is morally wrong to link binary-only modules into it, while you yourself know only how to do basic file-managment in windows. Still, even then, if you challenge your kid to explain to you *why* that would be wrong, odds are you'll both end up the wiser from it.
And some people deliberately mis-label these kinds of relations in order to further their own agenda.
For example, Inger Marie Sunde, the then-head of the Norwegian computer-crime unit claimed, at a lecture in my university that over 400 children in the USA alone disapeared after meeting with pedophiles that they'd communicated with over the Internet.
I found the claim somewhat fishy, so I asked for a reference. Which offcourse she couldn't give there and then but promised to send me in email after the lecture.
Turns out the huge majority of these 400 where teenagers in the 15-17 years age-bracket that ran away from home with their somewhat older partners, mostly girls with boyfriends 2-5 years older.
But "sometimes 17-year old girls run away from home with their 19-year old boyfriends" don't sound quite as scary as "over 400 children in the USA alone disappear after contact with pedophiles they've met on the internet", now does it ?
Indeed, labeling these "children" and the 19-year old that is in love with a 17-year old a "pedophile" is completely nonsense. Here in Norway that's called *normal*, age of consent is 16 here. And even relations with people younger than that are free of punishment if the sex is consensual and both partners are "similar in age or development".
In practice this means, if you're 17 and have a 15-year old girlfriend, there's unlikely to be a problem. If you're 40 and have a 15-year old girlfriend it *is* a problem.
Sure, any age-limit is subjective. That's unavoidable. I think however that 16 makes more sense than 18. And I also think that the exception for relationships where it's essentially two equally-old or equally-mature persons make sense.
It's complete lunacy to imprison the guy who is half a year older than his girlfriend and happens to have sex with her while they're on separate sides of some imaginary border.
I'm not so sure about that. In practice kids spend a lot of time simply being outdoors with their friends. I sure as hell never reported (nor was I expected to) each and every geographical location and building that I entered while playing with friends for hours.
Perhaps I went biking. Or fishing. Or playing football. Or stealing in a shop. Or drinking alkohol. Or riding. Or climbing to the top of buildings under construction. Or swimming. Or building a raft. Or any of a gazillion different kinds of things.
To have an idea what I was up to required parents that took an interest. That talked to me. That did stuff together with me sometimes. But also that trusted me.
That's no different on a computer. Unless you, as a parent, take an interest, you won't know what your kid is up to.
Other than that, you are correct.
It's hard to avoid this sometimes, even for us humans.
You should've seen the reaction of my Canadian friends when I was momentarily unable to recall that you guys refer to certain devices as "vacuum-cleaner", and instead translated my native word for same device.
"Dustsucker"
Blank stare. Incomprehension. Sudden spark of insigth. Laugther. Rather a lot of the latter.
The name makes perfect sense, and it's what its called in atleast Norwegian, Swedish and German. Nevertheless, in english I suppose it just sounds silly.