Answer: When war was declared on Japan following the attack on pearl harbor (we never declared war on germany, although the axis pact obligated germany to declare war on the US as a result of our declaration against Hapan, IIRC).
Actually, that is not correct. Japan declared war on Dec 7, 1941 on the U.S. by attacking Pearl Harbor, and the United States Congress responded by declaring war against the Imperial Government of Japan on Dec. 8, 1941. On December 11, 1941, the governments of Germany and Italy, pursuant to the Tri-Axis Pact, declared war on the United States, and the United States Congress responded by declaring war on both Germany and Italy on Dec 11, 1941. (yes, the text on that particular page only contains the declaration against Germany, but see the Avalon Project, which includes some text of the proceedings in Congress, and in particular the votes and motions leading to the passage of all three declarations of war.)
Point 1- No hydrogen powered jet engine exists in the thrust range nessecary to lift a modern widebody(or narrow body) jet.
Point 2-Currently, the GE-90, which powers many/most of the 777 aircraft retails at ~$9M each. That= ~$18M per plane, for engines alone.
Well, I note again that the guests on the show said that it would cost no more than a few hundred thousand per plane, not me. Their claim (not mine) was that switching from JPx to H2 for fuel would NOT require replacement of the engines, but a retrofit to operate with different type of fuel, with little to no loss of thrust, a retrofit that they claim has already been done and demonstrated as feasible. Since the basic physics of a jet engine is not substantitively changed by using H2 rather than JPx, I have no reason to disbelieve them; you need a slightly increased fuel flow rate, some new insulation, and different internal sensors. Additional refits to the aircraft would require new fuel tanks, fuel distribution systems, and fuel ditching equipment. But fundamentally, there is no roadblock to doing any of these things, as they are all well understood engineering issues with well understood solutions. Furthermore, since you need to replace all of these systems in the airliners at regular intervals, a refit wouldn't even require taking the aircraft out of service except as already scheduled. The claim was that it is not an engineering or even economic/financial issue in the long run, but a chicken and egg problem: no one will make the transition until there is infrastructure in place, and no one will invest in infrastructure until there are companies investing in using the technology. And there is no reason for me to disbelieve the guests' claims.
First, you would have a hard time refitting an existing aircraft to be hydrogen fueled. I'd rate it as impossible.
Well, this was discussed as well on the NPR show. The cost of refitting is a few hundred thousand dollars per plane... in other words, peanuts compared to the cost of the plane in the first place, and a small added cost over the lifetime of the airframe if the cost could be stretched out. One of the reasons it would be relatively inexpensive is that you take the entire plane apart every few months for inspections anyway, and things like fuel tanks get replaced every few years during overhauls. Or so they said.
You'd also have to change the current petrol-based fuel distribution system.
Yup, you would... but there are already widespread distribution mechanisms for refrigerated, compressed gasses; that is, this is a well understood, solved problem, not a show stopper.
One of the reasons why the Chalenger disaster was so bad was because the entire hydrogen tank, filled with liquid hydrogen, evaporated very fscking fast,
The reason the challenger disaster was so bad was that the shuttle carries its oxidizer with it, not just that the hydrogen evaporated quickly. Combustion requires both fuel, oxidizer, and heat; violent explosions require a very large supply of readily available oxidizer. That just isn't available in the type of system being discussed here since the oxidizer has to come out of the air.
If you can keep it from forming a fuel-air-explosive.
Since the planes wouldn't be carrying oxidizers, this borders on the ridiculously unlikely. FAE's work because a small amount of liquid fuel is atomized and dispersed over a large volume BEFORE the combustion is begun. That wouldn't happen here, as the fuel would begin burning as it disperses.
I consider that more of a way for scientists to get more funding for hydrogen experiments than anything else.
The guests on the show were not pie in the sky academics (like me:-), but engineers at commercial establishments that are actively attempting to implement these technologies in the near future. This isn't basic scientific research stuff, it is well understood, applied engineering research at this point.
I'm all for cost benefit analysis, and the way you do that is to consider what past investment has returned in terms of economic activity. And if you DON'T count the WWW, particle physics since WWII in the US alone has DIRECTLY returned at a rate of approximately 12/1 ($12 of economic activity for every dollar invested) in many disparate fields (magnetics, electronics, medicine, etc.), while the INDIRECT results have seen offshoots in other fields that have led to returns of thousands to 1 (XRay diffraction and NMR, major advances in computation including data mining applications, parallel computation advances and high speed networking advances, high strength magnet research, civil engineering advances, large scale cryogenics, etc. etc. etc.)
Of course the next major expensive project might fail to return anything, but we have no reason to expect that it will from a historical perspective, and we have many reasons to expect that it will end up returning fabulously on the investment made. That's what basic experimental science allows: advances in technology and understanding that have huge and lasting impact, both directly and indirectly, on the future.
And for scientists outside of particle physics, it isn't about finding the "Higgs Boson", just like for particle physicists the Human Genome project is not about getting a detailed map of the human genes; I mean, frankly, who cares if you have a map and I have a Higgs? How is either discovery going to affect our lives? Directly, they don't. It only gets to the level of my interest when the information can be applied to improving the quality of life for people. A map won't give you that, but the offshoot technologies will ENABLE such future applied research.
Similarly for particle physics: for people in other disciplines, it's about using the computer software developed at CERN to access data via a web browser, or using the magnet technology developed at Fermilab to build those spiffy maglev trains, or using the advances in free electron lasers developed at DESY to study protein reactions in real time. Science on the cutting edge ALWAYS requires major advances in the state of the art in experimental apparatus and the supporting technologies that can be directly and indirectly applied to other areas of "real life". So you never know WHERE those advances will be useful, but you damn well know that they WILL be useful. I realize you may be a disgruntled former physicist, but take the blinders off; there may be a BETTER way to advance the experimental particle physics enterprise, but it isn't by declaring the field dead because you can't see how continued research will affect the future. If that is your attitude, we might as well close down all science, entertainment, and other industries, and all go back to the fields and grow our own food because there isn't ANY valuable enterprise....
Nanotech: $400e6 dollars/year x 12 years = $4.8 billion dollars
$5e9 dollar over 12 years = $5 billion dollars
I'm not suggesting that this changes your argument, but when you are making an argument based on comparing "dollar investments", you need to compare the right dollar amounts. I'm actually opposed to building such a machine in the US, but for other reasons.
each has 1 billion particles in storage, tied to one another and sequentially numbered
Ahh, but you can't do that! The "wierdness" of QM (it isn't really that wierd, just different than what you are used to) includes the "indistinguishability" of identical particles: you can't attach a number to particles that you aren't observing. If you know where a particle is, you have already collapsed the wavefunction and disentangled it. If you don't know where it is in a collection of identical particles (so that you don't collapse the wavefunction before you apply your "information transmission algorithm"), then you don't know which label you gave it originally. When the wave function is "collapsed" at the remote station (which has the same identification problem you do, by the way, so they can't actually do this, but let's ignore that for now...), and one of the particles "collapses" at your station, you, even if you could figure out that the "collapse" has occurred, have no idea which bit of information you are looking at! All you would know is that one bit was transmitted, but that doesn't give you any information whatever. Of course, there are many other issues with you algorithm that make it worthless for information transmission, and I only focused on one of the problems. Quantum mechanics is VERY DIFFERENT from classical mechanics, and most analogies from the macroscopic world are absolutely incompatible with the way reality actually seems to work.
Not to mention the 5th Amendment problems with forced key turnover.
I doubt that there is a 5th amendment issue here. Consider that there is no 5th amendment issue with taking fingerprints, court ordered blood tests in criminal cases, and required breathalyzer tests in suspected drunk driving cases, among other things. The 5th amendment protection, "nor shall [he] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", has generally been very narrowly construed by courts, if I remember correctly, to be just that - they can't force you onto the stand in a criminal case against you; even then, once you have chosen to take the stand, you CAN in fact be forced to give testimony that is not in your favor. (IANAL and all that, but I do remember some of the things that I learned in civics classes:-)
One eventual goals (and one of the reasons that the USDOD is paying big bucks for this kind of research) is to send these types of systems into "dangerous" areas where you wouldn't want to risk the safety of a specialist, or can't afford to send a specialist (major natural disasters, military campaigns, space explorations, remote research stations, etc.). It is unlikely that you will see many more gall bladder removals done in the middle of France with this technology. But you ARE likely to see, for example, soldiers patched up very close to the battle field, or researchers having cancer surgery done in the depths of the Antarctic winter when it is just too dangerous to try and either fly the patient out or the doctor in.
Well, I haven't read the article so I may be mentioning something that was mentioned in it, but those things you suggest doing first (operating on animals and proving dexterity through some other experiment) HAVE already been done... that's why it was not unreasonable to do this on a real live patient with a condition that was not difficult to treat (i.e. a condition that any surgeon could perform, and which was not a technically demanding operation). I mean, you wouldn't want this being done on a patient that needed microsurgery or a heart transplant as your first trial.
...once it passes the event horizon it has no identity other than its mass and charge, as far as an observer outside can tell.
A static black hole (meaning one whose metric, which describes the structure of spacetime, is not evolving in time) is completely specified in terms of its mass, charges (electric, color, weak, etc.), and angular momentum, and these quantities are in a sense distritued "evenly" over the surface of the hole, as far as an outside observer can tell. I don't know if there are any other types of black hole solutions known that are non-static, and if there are, they may or may not have more "properties" that need to be described than the static holes need.
Hawkings Radiation is the only energy known to extract itself from black holes
This is not correct as a general statement about black holes. Hawking radiation is the only method of extracting energy from a stationary, static black hole (the Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstrom black holes), meaning one that is not evolving in time. Hawking radiation is, however, a quantum energy extraction process, not a classical process. Angular momentum (and hence energy) can be extracted from a rotating black hole (the Kerr and Kerr-Newman black holes) by means of the "Penrose process" by objects passing through the "ergosphere" a region of space outside the hole with certain wierd and wonderful properties. Unlike the Hawking process, this is a purely classical energy extraction process, the only one known.
The idea is that you carry with you an object that you don't really care about, fly in the direction of hole rotation into the ergospere, throw the object you are carrying into the hole, and you will come out with more energy than when you went in. You net gain energy, so the hole has to net lose energy.
This is off topic, but as a scientist I can't stand for this type of misinformation, so I feel that I must comment....
the fact is, no one knows what to do with nuclear waste.
Actually, scientists and engineers know of many ways to deal with nuclear waste; it is a political issue driven by individuals like yourself that don't know what they are talking about that prevents the technical solutions from being implemented. I mention only one elimination method: breeder reactors can be fed low and high level nuclear waste, and that waste is transmuted from high level/long term waste to high level/short term waste (meaning hours or days of radioactivity, as opposed to tens of thousands of years). Such a solution is technically feasible and has been demonstrated at large scale.
best suggestion anyone's got about that is just encasing the entire building in concrete.
No, the best solution that politics has allowed is encasing the building in concrete. There is little to no technical difficulty in pursuing a host of other solutions; again, uninformed anti-nuclear activists are teh biggest stumbling block to safe and effective methods of dealing with the remains of a reactor.
And although you didn't address this issue, let me point out that operating nuclear plants release no greenhouse gasses (no methane, no carbon dioxide, etc), no toxic heavy metals (cadmium, mercury, and lead, for example), no long-lived hydrocarbon carcinogens, certainly no soot, have a very small footprint (as compared to wind, water, and solar power), and much lower cost, when controlled for regulatory cost, environmental impact, and litigation. In fact, all operating nuclear plants in the world have released less nuclear contamination into the air and water than is released yearly by many individual coal and oil fired, "clean" power plants in operation today. You worry about a few hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste, while I worry about a few hundred MILLION tons of carbon combustion products released by conventional power plants, not to mention the millions of tons of soot and ash that are generated and must be disposed of.
Nuclear power does have its downsides, but on the whole, there is NO cleaner, more environmentally friendly, low impact method of generating electrical power available today than nuclear fission reactors. And that includes wind and solar power.
The Hawking... temperature... would be... orders of magnitude lower than... 2.4 K...
Since it would absorb more than it emits only if it's colder than the bath it is immersed in. Anywho, the Hawking Temperature of a 2 solar mass black hole is around 3 x 10^-8 Kelvin (from John Baez; do a google search for "hawking temperature solar mass")
Sigh... I can't believe I'm even responding to this troll...
I love how people with a slight physics back ground love making statements about black holes.
Well, if by slight you mean that I've only spent ten years studying physics and the past 6 researching for a Ph.D. in the field, then I've only have a "slight" physics background. I'd be willing to wager that I have forgotten far more about this subject than you have ever learned.
The sad thruth is that most of these people are merely making *guesses* about the bahavior outside the event horizon.
Well, in a word, no. You clearly don't know what you are talking about. By saying "black hole" physicists have a very very clear definition of what we are talking about, and very very clear calculations of what will and won't occur in certain regions of spacetime. If the behavior predicted for observed objects is NOT correct, then those objects are by definition not black holes. They are something else that we don't understand and can't yet make predictions for, but they are not the "black holes" of general relativity. So, I am not "guessing" as you so idiotically put it. I've done the calculations, I know what they say, I've read the experimental literature, I know that what I have calculated is in agreement with those experiments, so I have strong reason to believe that GR is currently the most correct description of the universe that we have. So when I say that such and such is what is going on inside a black hole, I mean that I've calculated it, and have confidence that I know what I am talking about, because every other prediction made by the theory has been shown to be right. Could the predictions be wrong? Certainly, but then the theory is wrong, and the object is not, strictly speaking, a black hole. And nothing that YOU say will be correct in that case either... so I'd prefer to believe my own calculations to your proclamations.
*Anything* can happen inside the event horizon. Our physical laws don't applly there.
You are quite far from being correct. Anything CAN'T happen inside the event horizon... the physical laws of the universe govern the behavior of matter and energy everywhere in the universe, including inside the event horizon of a black hole. There is no such thing as "our" physical laws... there are THE physical laws of the universe, and GR is currently believed to describe some of those laws, because its predictions match observations everywhere they have been made.
To the extent that the mathematical structure of General Relativity describes the laws of physics (and, in every observation to date, that has been the case), then yes, we can explain what is happening inside the horizon... but we know that we CAN'T describe what is happening at the "singularity", because the mathematics tells us that it can't tell us anything, AT THAT ONE POINT. And the theory predicts its own breakdown at that point, but it does not predict that there is any real issue at or even anywhere near the event horizon.
One of the great things about science, as opposed to your incorrect statement that "anything can happen", is that you, or the poster down the street, or your mailman, or an African Bushman, can sit down, learn the theory, compare it to the experiment, and make predictions for other events. General Relativity is just a specific example of a theory for which that can be done: it is relatively easy to understand, highly predictive, and immensely observationally successful scientific theory. Your donut suggestion is none of the above. So I ask, who should people listen to: someone telling them something that they can go out and calculate themselves, or a condescending, rude individual who suggests that they can make solar mass objects out of powdered donuts, in violation of every observation about the behavior of the universe ever done by man? I know where my bet lies, and it certainly isn't with the donut man....
Yes, theoretically a black hole will lose energy (evaporate) by "Hawking radiation" in a time proportional to some power of its mass (I forget which power, but it doesn't matter that much). What happens is that, in effect, black holes act as perfect black body radiators with the surface temperature determined by its mass. However, the bigger the hole, the smaller the effective temperature
Now, here comes the NO part of my response). For stellar sized black holes, the temperature of the black hole is LOWER than the ambient temperature of even the cosmic microwave background radiation not to mention the possible higher temperature of the stellar neighborhood around the black hole. So if you are considering the quantum effects (i.e. the Hawking radiation) tearing down the black hole, you also have to consider the radiation impinging on the surface from the CMBR. Since the CMBR will be "hotter" than any stellar black hole for a long long long long long long long long time (many orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe), it will be nearly forever before any stellar black hole even starts to lose mass to evaporation.
By then, the universe will be so old, there (likely) won't be any free energy left to power any type of other process (i.e. the entropy of the universe will be approaching its maximal value, and no "useful work" will be extractable from it). It will (assuming protons decay....) be a very very cold, very very very old, very very very very boring place with some photons, neutrinos, electrons and positrons floating about, and not much else around.
But all of us will be long gone and forgotten way before that happens, so don't let it trouble your sleep:-)
To an observer outside the event horizon of the black hole, the object never appears to actually cross the horizon, just to approach it more and more slowly as time goes on. In other words, the clock of an infalling observer will appear to run slower than the clock of an observer that does not approach the horizon. More generally, to a distant observer a clock in a strong gravity field will run slower than a clock he carries around with him.
Meanwhile, for the poor observer entering the black hole, as he approaches the horizon, the clock HE carries appears to continue ticking away at its usual rate, while his view of the universe slowly gets distorted, so that it looks like he is travelling down a tunnel towards the hole's surface. In a finite amount of time, he crosses the event horizon, and the "tunnel vision" he has of the rest of the universe shrinks to zero size. He doesn't notice his clock slowing down, and he eventually will hit the "bottom" of the hole.
Interesting fact: if he tries to fight the hole to prolong the time before he hits the bottom, he'll actually hit the bottom sooner than if he didn't fight.... of course, when you've already been ripped apart by the tidal forces, you wouldn't notice, but let's consider just and "ideal observer":-)
This "strange" (some would incorrectly say "paradoxical") behavior of the same set of events appearing differently to two observers is one of the hallmarks of the "Theory of Relativity"... but results like this where two people disagree qualitatively on the outcome can only occur when the two can never again communicate with each other. Otherwise, they will only disagree quantitatively on the outcome of an "experiment".
Even if we couldn't observe the emitted X-rays, wouldn't the observation that the galaxy isn't flying apart from the centrifugal force caused by its apparent rotation show that we are indeed held in place by a large gravitational force?
The fact that the galaxy is not flying apart is proof that there is a large gravitational force holding it together, but it is NOT proof that there is a large, massive object at the center holding it together. In fact, by the study of galactic rotation curves (plots of the velocity of the luminous objects in the galaxy against their distance from the center of the galaxy) we know that the majority of the stuff holding galaxies together is NOT clustered at the center; it is more diffuse and spread across the entire galactic sphere. (This is the so called "dark matter" because it doesn't interact with light.) The existence of a large black hole at the center of the galaxy is not, therefore, a foregone conclusion. Strong evidence in favor of such a black hole is very interesting, if not entirely unexpected.
Isn't it a fact that black holes grow at a steady rate?
No, it isn't. Outside of a black hole, it looks gravitationally just like a star. And just like stars do not grow at a steady rate, black holes need not grow at a steady rate. In both cases, rates of growth depend on the local environment surrounding the object; once they have "eaten" everything in their neighborhood, they will not grow anymore.
The FSC is a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, or if you will, the charge on the electron. alpha = e^2/(4 pi hbar c) in Gaussian units (I think... in any case, in the "correct" units:-) As such, alpha (along with the proton and electron masses) determines everything about chemical reactions (binding energies, reaction rates, etc), about the spectroscopic properties of elements (the absorption and emission spectra), about the behavior of semiconductors, the behavior of particle accelerators, etc. It is one of the most important fundamental "constants" in particle physics. And there has been recent data which suggests pursuasively that alpha is in fact NOT constant in time, but has changed since the very early universe.
If a the only reasonable way a person can feed their family is by stealing, they are totally morally justified by doing so.
Unless by so doing, you condemn others to suffering. And how far does this argument go? Am I justified in stealing my neighbor's house because my family doesn't have a place to live? And let's be blunt here: Brazil isn't "saving lives" by making "stealing" this patent. These people are, unfortunately, already condemned to an early death. These drugs may help push it off a few years, but this isn't a cure. Are you still justified in stealing food from your neighbor if you are going to be dead in a few hours from the time bomb strapped to your waist? (okay, ridiculous example, but I hope you get my point). I don't think the moral and ethical issues are as clear cut as you make them out to be.
Asolutely silly. There will always be profit in creating drugs.
It is absolutely silly to make such a blanket statement. There are dozens of drugs that have been discovered but are not made because likely to be unprofitable. There are a number of known birth control drugs that are more effective than those currently marketed, but are not sold because they will not be profitable. The odds of a MALE birth control pill being sold are very small, as the profits are likely not there. The costs of R&D on new antibiotics are astronomical and little R&D is being done because the likelihood of recouping that cost is so low. To expect that any given drug will automatically be profitable and therefore will be made is as silly as claiming that all drugs will be unprofitable without patent protection.
No one has the right to put a price on YOUR right to live.
Again, you are incorrect. This happens all the time, and I don't hear anyone complaining about it. We could build a car that no one is ever killed in, but it would be so expensive it would bankrupt the companies making it and the people buying it. We don't expect houses to be made out of fire-proof materials because the cost would be astronomical, but that would save lives as well. Society has realized that protecting all lives at all times is not only impossible, but also not in the general interests of the public at large. And, in my opinion, that is the only rational path to take. But doing so implicitly puts a dollar (or yen or ruble....) value on the lives lost as a result of NOT spending the money. The real question to ask is when and where do be set the bar, not if one is set. If saving a single life costs $10 more per car, is that worth it? what about $100? $1000? $10000? When does it become unrealistic to ask people to spend that money? The answers to the real questions are much harder to arrive at than the blanket statement that "you can't put a value on a human life", but in the end they are much more important.
The way i see things, Brazil has a RIGHT to HIV drugs since many if not all of them came from their forests....
And the way other people see it, the pharmaceutical companies have a RIGHT to the patent protection because most, if not all, of the WORK to find, understand, purify, and produce the drugs in a form that is both safe and effective came from the money of the companies and the work of their employees. Why do they have inherently less "right" to their discoveries and the fruits of their hard work? Before you answer that, stop and think about where else the answer may apply. What about the programmer who wants to "protect" his work under the GPL.... why should he have any protection for his work, since the likelihood is VERY high that he is just copying the results of someone else (either their theoretical work, or an actual product)? Why shouldn't that work be required to be in the public domain? And why should police officers be paid more than minimum wage? Don't I, under your reasoning, have a "right" to protection of my life and property, and wouldn't that "right" be enhanced by hiring more police at lower cost? I could go on, but I won't. I would just urge you to realize that the issues you are talking about are not so simple as you are arguing that they are....
Public good means that ALL OF US GET RICH, and there's more to riches than money.
There sure is... so I think that from now on, following Brazil's lead, the US should outlaw and confiscate all sorts of things. Like your car. It just pollutes the environment, and makes the streets crowded. We'd certainly be better off without pollution. And your computer. You can't have that anymore either because it uses so much electricity, which just causes pollution. And while we're at it, all that software your wrote under the GPL... we'll just take away the copyright protection, because the public would be better off if that software were public domain and Microsoft could use it to improve the software everyone else has chosen to use. And tuition to public colleges is now going to reflect the actual cost of educating a student, because the public good will be enhanced by not having to pay for the discrepancy for people that are just going to get rich in the future anyway. And you now have to serve a mandatory term of army service in the US. We've seen the light, and just like most other countries in the world, we think that the public good will be much enhanced by requiring all our citizens to serve in uniform. And police officers, teachers, doctors, and garbage men will now be compelled to work for free, because the public good would be much enhanced by having free protection from criminals and completely free health care and education through the end of high school. And those criminals? Well, they will now all be executed when caught, because that will be so much cheaper and easier for society than dealing with expensive trials and the dangers of recidivism.
I could go on listing things that would be in the "public good" that most people posting are likely to disagree with (I disagree with all of them, actually). I've made my point, that things which on the surface look like they are in the "public good" are not necessarily so when a full analysis has been done. And since one hasn't been done in this case, to claim that the "taking" of this patent IS in the public interest is both unsupportable and intellectually dishonest, both to the Brazilian citizens affected by AIDS and all the rest of us who may end up suffering in the future because of it. As for me, I'm going to withhold judgement on this issue until then.... but I won't be holding my breath, because I don't think we'll be seeing that analysis done anytime soon.
Sure, "stealing from the rich" isn't particularly 'fair', but "giving to the poor" sometimes makes it a necessary trade-off.
Sometimes, it does; taxation for example - you make more, you owe more. But the question I don't see people asking or answering is: does stealing the IP of the pharmaceutical companies really equate to "stealing from the rich to help the poor". I don't know that it is (and I don't know that it isn't).
Who is more likely to get hurt if the pharma profits begin to fall? Is the company going to lay off the top management, or the low paid schmoe in shipping? Does HIS suffering count less than the suffering of the AIDS patient? And what of his family? What about the large charitable donations made by these large companies? Which way will those go when profits fall? I haven't seen anyone doing a comprehensive analysis of who actually gets hurt in the end. Will new drug production really go down? It certainly won't go up, but it might stay the same. Will providing these drugs cheaply actually make any difference over no drugs? Or, like in South Africa, will the people who are getting these cheap drugs have so many other problems related to poverty that the drugs will do more harm than good? Will the loss of patent protection lead to more use of "trade secret" approaches, hence less long term dissemination of the information? Will this change the way other industries view the countries that ignore patents? Patents often describe the method of producing subparts of things (like the active ingredient), but trade secrets can be used to cover critical details of the production environment (such as the mixture of inactive ingredients necessary to stabilize the drug for storage). If THOSE details are become hidden rather than patented, the ability to make generics may evaporate. Do you want THAT outcome? There are a whole host of issues that are not being addressed frankly in this discussion, and it is kind of sad, because the really important issues are being clouded by the rhetorical debate over whether the drug companies are evil or not for charging for their products.
If you take the cynical stance (and I'm not saying that YOU in particular do, but the general you) that the drug companies are ONLY in the drug business for profit, then you have to apply the same logic and conclude that the Brazilian government is ONLY doing this for political gain; claiming that "first world == evil intent" and "third world == good intent" is somewhat more than totally moronic. Personally, I'm convinced that reality is somewhere in between, the whole picture isn't being presented objectively, and no one has actually looked at the whole equation to determine if this is a net social "win", or if the short and long term consequences will turn out to be a net "loss".
Diseases like AIDS are, I agree, not the problem exclusively of the diseased; society (through government funding of basic R&D and legal protections for developmental R&D, but not necessarily the current system) must contribute to eliminating or controlling the disease.... but the statement
AIDS... makes the bubonic plague look like a bad case of hiccups.
is patently idiotic. AIDS has no where near the impact of the bubonic plague, or malaria, or typhoid, or polio, or influenza, or tuberculosis, or any of a host of other diseases. Except for a few subsaharan countries where social structures guarantee high rates of infection (for EVERY STD by the way....), it has no where near the rates of infection, death, illness, incapacitation, and maiming of those other diseases. And unlike those earlier diseases, MOST (certainly not all, but most) of the people being infected by AIDS can avoid those infections by changing their behavior (which you acknowledge when you say: people are still so numbheaded that they go out and spread the disease anyway).
So, while AIDS is a tragedy, and we should be doing many things that we aren't doing to help fight the spread of the disease, to claim that the situation is on par with the most destructive epidemics of the past and present is pandering and clearly ridiculous.
Doesn't current theory describe the EM force as condensing out of the Electro-Weak force early in the universe's creation?
Yes, current theory states something to that effect (it says that electromagnetism is the left over "unbroken gauge symmetry" of the more fundamental "electroweak gauge symmetry", which "breaks spontaneously" as the universe cools, so that only the photon remains massless, while the Z and W bosons become very heavy). But, this discovery is saying something different. In the standard theory, after the electroweak symmetry breaks down to the electromagnetic symmetry, both the weak force and the electromagnetic force have strengths that are homogenous (the same at every point in space) and static (the same at every point in time). So, after electromagnetism emerges out of the big bang, right up to the current time, electricity has acted the same way everywhere in the universe.
These experimental results suggest that quite the opposite is true; what they say is that it looks like the strength of the electromagnetic force is NOT static. The data suggest that electromagnetism was slightly weaker in the distant past than it is today, something in conflict with current theory. And the data seem quite compelling, from a quick read of the paper. What we need now is other research groups with different equipment to go and confirm this result, not just in kind but in number.
This is quite an exciting time to be a physicist:-)
Etymology from the OED, which sort of supports your statement...
[a. F. calibre (qualibre in Cotgr. 1611) = It. calibro, Sp. calibre (OSp. also calibo, Diez) of uncertain origin; the Arab. qalib ?mould for casting metal?, or some cognate derivative of qalaba to turn, has been suggested as the source. See CALLIPER.
(Mahn conjectured as source L. quâ librâ of what weight?)
Calibre and Calliper(s are apparently originally the same word. Several 16th c. writers assign the same origin to CALIVER, the name of a species of harquebus, as if this were derived from arquebuse de calibre, or some similar name. Littré has ?douze canons de calibre d'empereur (12 cannons of emperor's calibre) pour la batterie? of 16th c. The frequent use of caliver in the sense of calibre, in the 16th and 17th c., appears to favour this.]
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Answer: When war was declared on Japan following the attack on pearl harbor (we never declared war on germany, although the axis pact obligated germany to declare war on the US as a result of our declaration against Hapan, IIRC).
Actually, that is not correct. Japan declared war on Dec 7, 1941 on the U.S. by attacking Pearl Harbor, and the United States Congress responded by declaring war against the Imperial Government of Japan on Dec. 8, 1941. On December 11, 1941, the governments of Germany and Italy, pursuant to the Tri-Axis Pact, declared war on the United States, and the United States Congress responded by declaring war on both Germany and Italy on Dec 11, 1941. (yes, the text on that particular page only contains the declaration against Germany, but see the Avalon Project, which includes some text of the proceedings in Congress, and in particular the votes and motions leading to the passage of all three declarations of war.)
Point 1- No hydrogen powered jet engine exists in the thrust range nessecary to lift a modern widebody(or narrow body) jet.
Point 2-Currently, the GE-90, which powers many/most of the 777 aircraft retails at ~$9M each. That= ~$18M per plane, for engines alone.
Well, I note again that the guests on the show said that it would cost no more than a few hundred thousand per plane, not me. Their claim (not mine) was that switching from JPx to H2 for fuel would NOT require replacement of the engines, but a retrofit to operate with different type of fuel, with little to no loss of thrust, a retrofit that they claim has already been done and demonstrated as feasible. Since the basic physics of a jet engine is not substantitively changed by using H2 rather than JPx, I have no reason to disbelieve them; you need a slightly increased fuel flow rate, some new insulation, and different internal sensors. Additional refits to the aircraft would require new fuel tanks, fuel distribution systems, and fuel ditching equipment. But fundamentally, there is no roadblock to doing any of these things, as they are all well understood engineering issues with well understood solutions. Furthermore, since you need to replace all of these systems in the airliners at regular intervals, a refit wouldn't even require taking the aircraft out of service except as already scheduled. The claim was that it is not an engineering or even economic/financial issue in the long run, but a chicken and egg problem: no one will make the transition until there is infrastructure in place, and no one will invest in infrastructure until there are companies investing in using the technology. And there is no reason for me to disbelieve the guests' claims.
First, you would have a hard time refitting an existing aircraft to be hydrogen fueled. I'd rate it as impossible.
Well, this was discussed as well on the NPR show. The cost of refitting is a few hundred thousand dollars per plane ... in other words, peanuts compared to the cost of the plane in the first place, and a small added cost over the lifetime of the airframe if the cost could be stretched out. One of the reasons it would be relatively inexpensive is that you take the entire plane apart every few months for inspections anyway, and things like fuel tanks get replaced every few years during overhauls. Or so they said.
You'd also have to change the current petrol-based fuel distribution system.
Yup, you would... but there are already widespread distribution mechanisms for refrigerated, compressed gasses; that is, this is a well understood, solved problem, not a show stopper.
One of the reasons why the Chalenger disaster was so bad was because the entire hydrogen tank, filled with liquid hydrogen, evaporated very fscking fast,
The reason the challenger disaster was so bad was that the shuttle carries its oxidizer with it, not just that the hydrogen evaporated quickly. Combustion requires both fuel, oxidizer, and heat; violent explosions require a very large supply of readily available oxidizer. That just isn't available in the type of system being discussed here since the oxidizer has to come out of the air.
If you can keep it from forming a fuel-air-explosive.
Since the planes wouldn't be carrying oxidizers, this borders on the ridiculously unlikely. FAE's work because a small amount of liquid fuel is atomized and dispersed over a large volume BEFORE the combustion is begun. That wouldn't happen here, as the fuel would begin burning as it disperses.
I consider that more of a way for scientists to get more funding for hydrogen experiments than anything else.
The guests on the show were not pie in the sky academics (like me :-), but engineers at commercial establishments that are actively attempting to implement these technologies in the near future. This isn't basic scientific research stuff, it is well understood, applied engineering research at this point.
I'm all for cost benefit analysis, and the way you do that is to consider what past investment has returned in terms of economic activity. And if you DON'T count the WWW, particle physics since WWII in the US alone has DIRECTLY returned at a rate of approximately 12/1 ($12 of economic activity for every dollar invested) in many disparate fields (magnetics, electronics, medicine, etc.), while the INDIRECT results have seen offshoots in other fields that have led to returns of thousands to 1 (XRay diffraction and NMR, major advances in computation including data mining applications, parallel computation advances and high speed networking advances, high strength magnet research, civil engineering advances, large scale cryogenics, etc. etc. etc.)
Of course the next major expensive project might fail to return anything, but we have no reason to expect that it will from a historical perspective, and we have many reasons to expect that it will end up returning fabulously on the investment made. That's what basic experimental science allows: advances in technology and understanding that have huge and lasting impact, both directly and indirectly, on the future.
And for scientists outside of particle physics, it isn't about finding the "Higgs Boson", just like for particle physicists the Human Genome project is not about getting a detailed map of the human genes; I mean, frankly, who cares if you have a map and I have a Higgs? How is either discovery going to affect our lives? Directly, they don't. It only gets to the level of my interest when the information can be applied to improving the quality of life for people. A map won't give you that, but the offshoot technologies will ENABLE such future applied research.
Similarly for particle physics: for people in other disciplines, it's about using the computer software developed at CERN to access data via a web browser, or using the magnet technology developed at Fermilab to build those spiffy maglev trains, or using the advances in free electron lasers developed at DESY to study protein reactions in real time. Science on the cutting edge ALWAYS requires major advances in the state of the art in experimental apparatus and the supporting technologies that can be directly and indirectly applied to other areas of "real life". So you never know WHERE those advances will be useful, but you damn well know that they WILL be useful. I realize you may be a disgruntled former physicist, but take the blinders off; there may be a BETTER way to advance the experimental particle physics enterprise, but it isn't by declaring the field dead because you can't see how continued research will affect the future. If that is your attitude, we might as well close down all science, entertainment, and other industries, and all go back to the fields and grow our own food because there isn't ANY valuable enterprise....
You're comparing apples and oranges:
Nanotech: $400e6 dollars/year x 12 years = $4.8 billion dollars
$5e9 dollar over 12 years = $5 billion dollars
I'm not suggesting that this changes your argument, but when you are making an argument based on comparing "dollar investments", you need to compare the right dollar amounts. I'm actually opposed to building such a machine in the US, but for other reasons.
each has 1 billion particles in storage, tied to one another and sequentially numbered
Ahh, but you can't do that! The "wierdness" of QM (it isn't really that wierd, just different than what you are used to) includes the "indistinguishability" of identical particles: you can't attach a number to particles that you aren't observing. If you know where a particle is, you have already collapsed the wavefunction and disentangled it. If you don't know where it is in a collection of identical particles (so that you don't collapse the wavefunction before you apply your "information transmission algorithm"), then you don't know which label you gave it originally. When the wave function is "collapsed" at the remote station (which has the same identification problem you do, by the way, so they can't actually do this, but let's ignore that for now...), and one of the particles "collapses" at your station, you, even if you could figure out that the "collapse" has occurred, have no idea which bit of information you are looking at! All you would know is that one bit was transmitted, but that doesn't give you any information whatever. Of course, there are many other issues with you algorithm that make it worthless for information transmission, and I only focused on one of the problems. Quantum mechanics is VERY DIFFERENT from classical mechanics, and most analogies from the macroscopic world are absolutely incompatible with the way reality actually seems to work.
Not to mention the 5th Amendment problems with forced key turnover.
I doubt that there is a 5th amendment issue here. Consider that there is no 5th amendment issue with taking fingerprints, court ordered blood tests in criminal cases, and required breathalyzer tests in suspected drunk driving cases, among other things. The 5th amendment protection, "nor shall [he] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", has generally been very narrowly construed by courts, if I remember correctly, to be just that - they can't force you onto the stand in a criminal case against you; even then, once you have chosen to take the stand, you CAN in fact be forced to give testimony that is not in your favor. (IANAL and all that, but I do remember some of the things that I learned in civics classes :-)
One eventual goals (and one of the reasons that the USDOD is paying big bucks for this kind of research) is to send these types of systems into "dangerous" areas where you wouldn't want to risk the safety of a specialist, or can't afford to send a specialist (major natural disasters, military campaigns, space explorations, remote research stations, etc.). It is unlikely that you will see many more gall bladder removals done in the middle of France with this technology. But you ARE likely to see, for example, soldiers patched up very close to the battle field, or researchers having cancer surgery done in the depths of the Antarctic winter when it is just too dangerous to try and either fly the patient out or the doctor in.
Well, I haven't read the article so I may be mentioning something that was mentioned in it, but those things you suggest doing first (operating on animals and proving dexterity through some other experiment) HAVE already been done... that's why it was not unreasonable to do this on a real live patient with a condition that was not difficult to treat (i.e. a condition that any surgeon could perform, and which was not a technically demanding operation). I mean, you wouldn't want this being done on a patient that needed microsurgery or a heart transplant as your first trial.
A static black hole (meaning one whose metric, which describes the structure of spacetime, is not evolving in time) is completely specified in terms of its mass, charges (electric, color, weak, etc.), and angular momentum, and these quantities are in a sense distritued "evenly" over the surface of the hole, as far as an outside observer can tell. I don't know if there are any other types of black hole solutions known that are non-static, and if there are, they may or may not have more "properties" that need to be described than the static holes need.
Hawkings Radiation is the only energy known to extract itself from black holes
This is not correct as a general statement about black holes. Hawking radiation is the only method of extracting energy from a stationary, static black hole (the Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstrom black holes), meaning one that is not evolving in time. Hawking radiation is, however, a quantum energy extraction process, not a classical process. Angular momentum (and hence energy) can be extracted from a rotating black hole (the Kerr and Kerr-Newman black holes) by means of the "Penrose process" by objects passing through the "ergosphere" a region of space outside the hole with certain wierd and wonderful properties. Unlike the Hawking process, this is a purely classical energy extraction process, the only one known.
The idea is that you carry with you an object that you don't really care about, fly in the direction of hole rotation into the ergospere, throw the object you are carrying into the hole, and you will come out with more energy than when you went in. You net gain energy, so the hole has to net lose energy.
This is off topic, but as a scientist I can't stand for this type of misinformation, so I feel that I must comment....
the fact is, no one knows what to do with nuclear waste.
Actually, scientists and engineers know of many ways to deal with nuclear waste; it is a political issue driven by individuals like yourself that don't know what they are talking about that prevents the technical solutions from being implemented. I mention only one elimination method: breeder reactors can be fed low and high level nuclear waste, and that waste is transmuted from high level/long term waste to high level/short term waste (meaning hours or days of radioactivity, as opposed to tens of thousands of years). Such a solution is technically feasible and has been demonstrated at large scale.
best suggestion anyone's got about that is just encasing the entire building in concrete.
No, the best solution that politics has allowed is encasing the building in concrete. There is little to no technical difficulty in pursuing a host of other solutions; again, uninformed anti-nuclear activists are teh biggest stumbling block to safe and effective methods of dealing with the remains of a reactor.
And although you didn't address this issue, let me point out that operating nuclear plants release no greenhouse gasses (no methane, no carbon dioxide, etc), no toxic heavy metals (cadmium, mercury, and lead, for example), no long-lived hydrocarbon carcinogens, certainly no soot, have a very small footprint (as compared to wind, water, and solar power), and much lower cost, when controlled for regulatory cost, environmental impact, and litigation. In fact, all operating nuclear plants in the world have released less nuclear contamination into the air and water than is released yearly by many individual coal and oil fired, "clean" power plants in operation today. You worry about a few hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste, while I worry about a few hundred MILLION tons of carbon combustion products released by conventional power plants, not to mention the millions of tons of soot and ash that are generated and must be disposed of.
Nuclear power does have its downsides, but on the whole, there is NO cleaner, more environmentally friendly, low impact method of generating electrical power available today than nuclear fission reactors. And that includes wind and solar power.
I think you meant
The Hawking ... temperature ... would be ... orders of magnitude lower than ... 2.4 K ...
Since it would absorb more than it emits only if it's colder than the bath it is immersed in. Anywho, the Hawking Temperature of a 2 solar mass black hole is around 3 x 10^-8 Kelvin (from John Baez; do a google search for "hawking temperature solar mass")
Sigh... I can't believe I'm even responding to this troll ...
I love how people with a slight physics back ground love making statements about black holes.
Well, if by slight you mean that I've only spent ten years studying physics and the past 6 researching for a Ph.D. in the field, then I've only have a "slight" physics background. I'd be willing to wager that I have forgotten far more about this subject than you have ever learned.
The sad thruth is that most of these people are merely making *guesses* about the bahavior outside the event horizon.
Well, in a word, no. You clearly don't know what you are talking about. By saying "black hole" physicists have a very very clear definition of what we are talking about, and very very clear calculations of what will and won't occur in certain regions of spacetime. If the behavior predicted for observed objects is NOT correct, then those objects are by definition not black holes. They are something else that we don't understand and can't yet make predictions for, but they are not the "black holes" of general relativity. So, I am not "guessing" as you so idiotically put it. I've done the calculations, I know what they say, I've read the experimental literature, I know that what I have calculated is in agreement with those experiments, so I have strong reason to believe that GR is currently the most correct description of the universe that we have. So when I say that such and such is what is going on inside a black hole, I mean that I've calculated it, and have confidence that I know what I am talking about, because every other prediction made by the theory has been shown to be right. Could the predictions be wrong? Certainly, but then the theory is wrong, and the object is not, strictly speaking, a black hole. And nothing that YOU say will be correct in that case either... so I'd prefer to believe my own calculations to your proclamations.
*Anything* can happen inside the event horizon. Our physical laws don't applly there.
You are quite far from being correct. Anything CAN'T happen inside the event horizon... the physical laws of the universe govern the behavior of matter and energy everywhere in the universe, including inside the event horizon of a black hole. There is no such thing as "our" physical laws ... there are THE physical laws of the universe, and GR is currently believed to describe some of those laws, because its predictions match observations everywhere they have been made.
To the extent that the mathematical structure of General Relativity describes the laws of physics (and, in every observation to date, that has been the case), then yes, we can explain what is happening inside the horizon ... but we know that we CAN'T describe what is happening at the "singularity", because the mathematics tells us that it can't tell us anything, AT THAT ONE POINT. And the theory predicts its own breakdown at that point, but it does not predict that there is any real issue at or even anywhere near the event horizon.
One of the great things about science, as opposed to your incorrect statement that "anything can happen", is that you, or the poster down the street, or your mailman, or an African Bushman, can sit down, learn the theory, compare it to the experiment, and make predictions for other events. General Relativity is just a specific example of a theory for which that can be done: it is relatively easy to understand, highly predictive, and immensely observationally successful scientific theory. Your donut suggestion is none of the above. So I ask, who should people listen to: someone telling them something that they can go out and calculate themselves, or a condescending, rude individual who suggests that they can make solar mass objects out of powdered donuts, in violation of every observation about the behavior of the universe ever done by man? I know where my bet lies, and it certainly isn't with the donut man....
Yes and no
Yes, theoretically a black hole will lose energy (evaporate) by "Hawking radiation" in a time proportional to some power of its mass (I forget which power, but it doesn't matter that much). What happens is that, in effect, black holes act as perfect black body radiators with the surface temperature determined by its mass. However, the bigger the hole, the smaller the effective temperature
Now, here comes the NO part of my response). For stellar sized black holes, the temperature of the black hole is LOWER than the ambient temperature of even the cosmic microwave background radiation not to mention the possible higher temperature of the stellar neighborhood around the black hole. So if you are considering the quantum effects (i.e. the Hawking radiation) tearing down the black hole, you also have to consider the radiation impinging on the surface from the CMBR. Since the CMBR will be "hotter" than any stellar black hole for a long long long long long long long long time (many orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe), it will be nearly forever before any stellar black hole even starts to lose mass to evaporation.
By then, the universe will be so old, there (likely) won't be any free energy left to power any type of other process (i.e. the entropy of the universe will be approaching its maximal value, and no "useful work" will be extractable from it). It will (assuming protons decay....) be a very very cold, very very very old, very very very very boring place with some photons, neutrinos, electrons and positrons floating about, and not much else around.
But all of us will be long gone and forgotten way before that happens, so don't let it trouble your sleep :-)
You are correct ... and you are also wrong.
Let me explain :-)
To an observer outside the event horizon of the black hole, the object never appears to actually cross the horizon, just to approach it more and more slowly as time goes on. In other words, the clock of an infalling observer will appear to run slower than the clock of an observer that does not approach the horizon. More generally, to a distant observer a clock in a strong gravity field will run slower than a clock he carries around with him.
Meanwhile, for the poor observer entering the black hole, as he approaches the horizon, the clock HE carries appears to continue ticking away at its usual rate, while his view of the universe slowly gets distorted, so that it looks like he is travelling down a tunnel towards the hole's surface. In a finite amount of time, he crosses the event horizon, and the "tunnel vision" he has of the rest of the universe shrinks to zero size. He doesn't notice his clock slowing down, and he eventually will hit the "bottom" of the hole.
Interesting fact: if he tries to fight the hole to prolong the time before he hits the bottom, he'll actually hit the bottom sooner than if he didn't fight.... of course, when you've already been ripped apart by the tidal forces, you wouldn't notice, but let's consider just and "ideal observer" :-)
This "strange" (some would incorrectly say "paradoxical") behavior of the same set of events appearing differently to two observers is one of the hallmarks of the "Theory of Relativity" ... but results like this where two people disagree qualitatively on the outcome can only occur when the two can never again communicate with each other. Otherwise, they will only disagree quantitatively on the outcome of an "experiment".
Even if we couldn't observe the emitted X-rays, wouldn't the observation that the galaxy isn't flying apart from the centrifugal force caused by its apparent rotation show that we are indeed held in place by a large gravitational force?
The fact that the galaxy is not flying apart is proof that there is a large gravitational force holding it together, but it is NOT proof that there is a large, massive object at the center holding it together. In fact, by the study of galactic rotation curves (plots of the velocity of the luminous objects in the galaxy against their distance from the center of the galaxy) we know that the majority of the stuff holding galaxies together is NOT clustered at the center; it is more diffuse and spread across the entire galactic sphere. (This is the so called "dark matter" because it doesn't interact with light.) The existence of a large black hole at the center of the galaxy is not, therefore, a foregone conclusion. Strong evidence in favor of such a black hole is very interesting, if not entirely unexpected.
Isn't it a fact that black holes grow at a steady rate?
No, it isn't. Outside of a black hole, it looks gravitationally just like a star. And just like stars do not grow at a steady rate, black holes need not grow at a steady rate. In both cases, rates of growth depend on the local environment surrounding the object; once they have "eaten" everything in their neighborhood, they will not grow anymore.
The FSC is a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, or if you will, the charge on the electron. alpha = e^2/(4 pi hbar c) in Gaussian units (I think... in any case, in the "correct" units :-) As such, alpha (along with the proton and electron masses) determines everything about chemical reactions (binding energies, reaction rates, etc), about the spectroscopic properties of elements (the absorption and emission spectra), about the behavior of semiconductors, the behavior of particle accelerators, etc. It is one of the most important fundamental "constants" in particle physics. And there has been recent data which suggests pursuasively that alpha is in fact NOT constant in time, but has changed since the very early universe.
If a the only reasonable way a person can feed their family is by stealing, they are totally morally justified by doing so.
Unless by so doing, you condemn others to suffering. And how far does this argument go? Am I justified in stealing my neighbor's house because my family doesn't have a place to live? And let's be blunt here: Brazil isn't "saving lives" by making "stealing" this patent. These people are, unfortunately, already condemned to an early death. These drugs may help push it off a few years, but this isn't a cure. Are you still justified in stealing food from your neighbor if you are going to be dead in a few hours from the time bomb strapped to your waist? (okay, ridiculous example, but I hope you get my point). I don't think the moral and ethical issues are as clear cut as you make them out to be.
Asolutely silly. There will always be profit in creating drugs.
It is absolutely silly to make such a blanket statement. There are dozens of drugs that have been discovered but are not made because likely to be unprofitable. There are a number of known birth control drugs that are more effective than those currently marketed, but are not sold because they will not be profitable. The odds of a MALE birth control pill being sold are very small, as the profits are likely not there. The costs of R&D on new antibiotics are astronomical and little R&D is being done because the likelihood of recouping that cost is so low. To expect that any given drug will automatically be profitable and therefore will be made is as silly as claiming that all drugs will be unprofitable without patent protection.
No one has the right to put a price on YOUR right to live.
Again, you are incorrect. This happens all the time, and I don't hear anyone complaining about it. We could build a car that no one is ever killed in, but it would be so expensive it would bankrupt the companies making it and the people buying it. We don't expect houses to be made out of fire-proof materials because the cost would be astronomical, but that would save lives as well. Society has realized that protecting all lives at all times is not only impossible, but also not in the general interests of the public at large. And, in my opinion, that is the only rational path to take. But doing so implicitly puts a dollar (or yen or ruble....) value on the lives lost as a result of NOT spending the money. The real question to ask is when and where do be set the bar, not if one is set. If saving a single life costs $10 more per car, is that worth it? what about $100? $1000? $10000? When does it become unrealistic to ask people to spend that money? The answers to the real questions are much harder to arrive at than the blanket statement that "you can't put a value on a human life", but in the end they are much more important.
The way i see things, Brazil has a RIGHT to HIV drugs since many if not all of them came from their forests....
And the way other people see it, the pharmaceutical companies have a RIGHT to the patent protection because most, if not all, of the WORK to find, understand, purify, and produce the drugs in a form that is both safe and effective came from the money of the companies and the work of their employees. Why do they have inherently less "right" to their discoveries and the fruits of their hard work? Before you answer that, stop and think about where else the answer may apply. What about the programmer who wants to "protect" his work under the GPL.... why should he have any protection for his work, since the likelihood is VERY high that he is just copying the results of someone else (either their theoretical work, or an actual product)? Why shouldn't that work be required to be in the public domain? And why should police officers be paid more than minimum wage? Don't I, under your reasoning, have a "right" to protection of my life and property, and wouldn't that "right" be enhanced by hiring more police at lower cost? I could go on, but I won't. I would just urge you to realize that the issues you are talking about are not so simple as you are arguing that they are....
Public good means that ALL OF US GET RICH, and there's more to riches than money.
There sure is... so I think that from now on, following Brazil's lead, the US should outlaw and confiscate all sorts of things. Like your car. It just pollutes the environment, and makes the streets crowded. We'd certainly be better off without pollution. And your computer. You can't have that anymore either because it uses so much electricity, which just causes pollution. And while we're at it, all that software your wrote under the GPL... we'll just take away the copyright protection, because the public would be better off if that software were public domain and Microsoft could use it to improve the software everyone else has chosen to use. And tuition to public colleges is now going to reflect the actual cost of educating a student, because the public good will be enhanced by not having to pay for the discrepancy for people that are just going to get rich in the future anyway. And you now have to serve a mandatory term of army service in the US. We've seen the light, and just like most other countries in the world, we think that the public good will be much enhanced by requiring all our citizens to serve in uniform. And police officers, teachers, doctors, and garbage men will now be compelled to work for free, because the public good would be much enhanced by having free protection from criminals and completely free health care and education through the end of high school. And those criminals? Well, they will now all be executed when caught, because that will be so much cheaper and easier for society than dealing with expensive trials and the dangers of recidivism.
I could go on listing things that would be in the "public good" that most people posting are likely to disagree with (I disagree with all of them, actually). I've made my point, that things which on the surface look like they are in the "public good" are not necessarily so when a full analysis has been done. And since one hasn't been done in this case, to claim that the "taking" of this patent IS in the public interest is both unsupportable and intellectually dishonest, both to the Brazilian citizens affected by AIDS and all the rest of us who may end up suffering in the future because of it. As for me, I'm going to withhold judgement on this issue until then.... but I won't be holding my breath, because I don't think we'll be seeing that analysis done anytime soon.
Sure, "stealing from the rich" isn't particularly 'fair', but "giving to the poor" sometimes makes it a necessary trade-off.
Sometimes, it does; taxation for example - you make more, you owe more. But the question I don't see people asking or answering is: does stealing the IP of the pharmaceutical companies really equate to "stealing from the rich to help the poor". I don't know that it is (and I don't know that it isn't).
Who is more likely to get hurt if the pharma profits begin to fall? Is the company going to lay off the top management, or the low paid schmoe in shipping? Does HIS suffering count less than the suffering of the AIDS patient? And what of his family? What about the large charitable donations made by these large companies? Which way will those go when profits fall? I haven't seen anyone doing a comprehensive analysis of who actually gets hurt in the end. Will new drug production really go down? It certainly won't go up, but it might stay the same. Will providing these drugs cheaply actually make any difference over no drugs? Or, like in South Africa, will the people who are getting these cheap drugs have so many other problems related to poverty that the drugs will do more harm than good? Will the loss of patent protection lead to more use of "trade secret" approaches, hence less long term dissemination of the information? Will this change the way other industries view the countries that ignore patents? Patents often describe the method of producing subparts of things (like the active ingredient), but trade secrets can be used to cover critical details of the production environment (such as the mixture of inactive ingredients necessary to stabilize the drug for storage). If THOSE details are become hidden rather than patented, the ability to make generics may evaporate. Do you want THAT outcome? There are a whole host of issues that are not being addressed frankly in this discussion, and it is kind of sad, because the really important issues are being clouded by the rhetorical debate over whether the drug companies are evil or not for charging for their products.
If you take the cynical stance (and I'm not saying that YOU in particular do, but the general you) that the drug companies are ONLY in the drug business for profit, then you have to apply the same logic and conclude that the Brazilian government is ONLY doing this for political gain; claiming that "first world == evil intent" and "third world == good intent" is somewhat more than totally moronic. Personally, I'm convinced that reality is somewhere in between, the whole picture isn't being presented objectively, and no one has actually looked at the whole equation to determine if this is a net social "win", or if the short and long term consequences will turn out to be a net "loss".
Diseases like AIDS are, I agree, not the problem exclusively of the diseased; society (through government funding of basic R&D and legal protections for developmental R&D, but not necessarily the current system) must contribute to eliminating or controlling the disease.... but the statement
AIDS ... makes the bubonic plague look like a bad case of hiccups.
is patently idiotic. AIDS has no where near the impact of the bubonic plague, or malaria, or typhoid, or polio, or influenza, or tuberculosis, or any of a host of other diseases. Except for a few subsaharan countries where social structures guarantee high rates of infection (for EVERY STD by the way....), it has no where near the rates of infection, death, illness, incapacitation, and maiming of those other diseases. And unlike those earlier diseases, MOST (certainly not all, but most) of the people being infected by AIDS can avoid those infections by changing their behavior (which you acknowledge when you say: people are still so numbheaded that they go out and spread the disease anyway).
So, while AIDS is a tragedy, and we should be doing many things that we aren't doing to help fight the spread of the disease, to claim that the situation is on par with the most destructive epidemics of the past and present is pandering and clearly ridiculous.
Doesn't current theory describe the EM force as condensing out of the Electro-Weak force early in the universe's creation?
Yes, current theory states something to that effect (it says that electromagnetism is the left over "unbroken gauge symmetry" of the more fundamental "electroweak gauge symmetry", which "breaks spontaneously" as the universe cools, so that only the photon remains massless, while the Z and W bosons become very heavy). But, this discovery is saying something different. In the standard theory, after the electroweak symmetry breaks down to the electromagnetic symmetry, both the weak force and the electromagnetic force have strengths that are homogenous (the same at every point in space) and static (the same at every point in time). So, after electromagnetism emerges out of the big bang, right up to the current time, electricity has acted the same way everywhere in the universe.
These experimental results suggest that quite the opposite is true; what they say is that it looks like the strength of the electromagnetic force is NOT static. The data suggest that electromagnetism was slightly weaker in the distant past than it is today, something in conflict with current theory. And the data seem quite compelling, from a quick read of the paper. What we need now is other research groups with different equipment to go and confirm this result, not just in kind but in number.
This is quite an exciting time to be a physicist :-)
Etymology from the OED, which sort of supports your statement...