It's telling that the company keeps on hiring lawyers when a single educated engineer would be able to tell them that their case is impossible, because it is fighting against laws of physics.
You're severely underestimating effort needed to acquire/built enriching and separating equipment. North Korea had to invest a huge amount to get this done, and all they could do was a very basic uranium device.
And if you try that with plutonium, you'll end up with a whole lot of useless materiel. Plutonium has a ridiculous amount of different allotropes making keeping it pure and usable after cooling it a huge technical challenge.
I'm not 100% certain about uranium, but I'm absolutely certain that you in fact cannot "melt together" a plutonium bomb without some very cutting edge know-how and technology. One of the hard parts about handling weapons grade plutonium is keeping it actual plutonium and not becoming plutonium mixed with something else while cooling it through various allotrope phases.
Or perhaps they were looking for ways to prevent the global pandemic that has a pretty good potential of wiping out over half of humans on the planet? You know, like those who experimented on dozens of diseases that killed most people before they reached the age where they could procreate, eventually driving infectious disease mortality so far down, that most people don't understand the risks hiding in them?
Corporations. Look up the whole LightSquared debacle, where corp buys billions worth of licenses for use which they aren't approved of, and get shot down. This kind of silliness often happens when potential payoff is very high.
In case of nuclear power plants, if you handle them right, they are among the most profitable, if not the most profitable industries in the world. I know that in my country (Finland) the most profitable project ever was one of our nuclear power plants, followed closely by other. Then there's a huge chasm until the third contender.
We have two nuclear power plants with two reactors each at the moment.
Speaking as a non-US resident, I must say that "left-wing claims" are nowhere near as hilarious, insane or scandalous and been so for as far as they actually paid attention to that crap in the news here on the other side of Atlantic.
Well, problem is that such discoveries are rarely the "low hanging fruit" they used to be. Nowadays those have been already picked. This has been seen with CPUs for example. The reason for multi-cores is not that they are faster then single core of equivalent processing power. It's that frequency cannot go any high in silicone so we can't get single core to similar processing power. Single core is far easier to program for, and does most of the typical CPU tasks far better then multi core provided it has similar performance. But when you hit the wall with frequency, you have to go multi core. That wall hasn't been "solved" in several years now, and not for the lack of trying by IBM, Intel and friends.
Sure, we may discover something revolutionary in next ten years. But chances are, we won't because such discoveries are already done, and we're stuck with evolutionary discoveries at best. Which means that SSDs will likely go the way of CPUs and instead of increasing chip capacity will simply start to stack more chips on drives. Not like they can't afford it, most of the modern SSDs are already small enough to fit into ultra thin form factor laptops.
Yes, you're talking about erosion. That is what happens when instead of using proper agricultural methods you just knock the forest down, put up a field and start growing plants in exhaustive (soil wise) manner. It's something that modern agriculture is specifically against, not for, which is why erosion is far worse in Sahara.
Without knowing the exact case, I would suggest that what happened was not "switch to modern agriculture", but pretty classic "see the quick buck, make the quick buck, get out". It's pretty common in PIIGS/southern European countries as its ingrained in the culture and can be seen in parts in current EU crisis, where "get rich now, things will sort themselves out somehow later"-approach has bitten everyone in the ass and not just local farmers. Blaming modern agriculture, which does not cause these problems when applied properly, is a pure case of scapegoating to avoid having to look at the real flaws. Flaws that tend to have deep cultural roots that people really don't want to have to look at.
Sure, but you will be that one exception in the field of those who will be doing exactly what I described above, so yes, I will "bang that drum". Or more accurately, call the things what they are, rather then as what they are in someone's pipe dream.
Organic farming is essentially usage of less efficient, old farming methods coupled with lack of use of oil-based fertilisers. These, among other flaws, force farmers to use more water for irrigating the same field, mostly due to inefficiencies when compared to more efficient modern agriculture.
Modern agriculture when done right does neither. On the other hand, when done wrong, the first is a real problem. Second, not so much as its treatable. You can see this in practice in difference between 1st and 3rd world in terms of farming problems. The inefficient, "organic" methods largely applied in Africa are in fact causing severe desertification and erosion, and is one of the biggest causes of hunger in Sahara region.
On the other hand we have 1st world, where worst problem is overuse of fertiliser causing short-term reversible pollution of waterways and soil, which in turn is usually caused by ignoring the regulations. Unlike the problems in 3rd world, which are largely irreversible and permanent (or at least very long term), ours are usually fixed by simply letting the land be unused for a few years. Waterways being polluted is a rather minor problem, as even the 1st world's most agriculturally taxed basin, Baltic Sea remains perfectly viable source of water and fish. Rivers clear themselves by dumping themselves into larger basins such as aforementioned Baltic Sea, and modern agriculture is regulated so that it cannot cause significant pollution of rivers (barring accidents, which happen to other industries as well).
Total amount of arable land globally is decreasing, and has been decreasing for a long time. This is cause by erosion, desertification, and improper farming practices. We have largely managed to regulate such occurrences in the West to zero, but 3rd world is really having problems with this.
Actually, under a best case scenario (zero accidents, recycled fuel), nuclear power is a very obvious saviour. You could replace pretty much all major plants with nuclear and CO2 emissions as well as a number of other emissions that come from older coal-burning plants would crash to zero. We would also have enough fuel to last us at least a millennium with recycling when factoring in usage growth.
The issue is getting to this scenario. We still have ancient plants that we have to run because research is considered unsafe (which is a massive paradox in itself), and because recycling fuel involves enriching it, which has proliferation problems.
As has been shown, the water shortage in Australia has been at least in large part because of climate change enhancing the effect of el nino and la nina.
Of course, you could argue that "we're pulling water out of rivers and reservoirs faster then it can be replenished" is at fault anyway. Of course, when much of this happened because the water was not replenished as it usually was, the ROOT CAUSE is still climate change. Because if not for it, we would be able to go about pulling water out of these river as reservoirs as usual, without risk of them running out.
Water shortage is slowly manifesting in some dry places in Western world as climate change keeps rumbling on. It's far worse in 3rd world, where lack of water infrastructure is combined with inefficient farming methods.
The issue will likely become more and more evident in the next few decades, as climate change causes some of the dry areas that are used for agriculture to become even dryer (as happened with Australia some time ago).
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When we talk about companies not allowing free speech because company is not legally bound by same rules as government, it matters.
But here, when the pendulum swings the other way, certain pundits think that it doesn't. I wonder why?
I can second this one, I had syncmaster 957MB CRT monitor and it got REALLY blurry after 2 years. No amount of adjustment would help the problem.
Shame, the monitor was very good for the time I bought it otherwise.
It's telling that the company keeps on hiring lawyers when a single educated engineer would be able to tell them that their case is impossible, because it is fighting against laws of physics.
Add "Work" as one of your middle names. Problem solved.
I'd hate to be John Smith then. Because that one John Smith account must be valuable as fuck, since there can be only one!
You're severely underestimating effort needed to acquire/built enriching and separating equipment. North Korea had to invest a huge amount to get this done, and all they could do was a very basic uranium device.
And if you try that with plutonium, you'll end up with a whole lot of useless materiel. Plutonium has a ridiculous amount of different allotropes making keeping it pure and usable after cooling it a huge technical challenge.
I'm not 100% certain about uranium, but I'm absolutely certain that you in fact cannot "melt together" a plutonium bomb without some very cutting edge know-how and technology. One of the hard parts about handling weapons grade plutonium is keeping it actual plutonium and not becoming plutonium mixed with something else while cooling it through various allotrope phases.
That is false. One of the hardest aspects of making the bomb is producing enough fissile material in sufficient concentration.
Or perhaps they were looking for ways to prevent the global pandemic that has a pretty good potential of wiping out over half of humans on the planet? You know, like those who experimented on dozens of diseases that killed most people before they reached the age where they could procreate, eventually driving infectious disease mortality so far down, that most people don't understand the risks hiding in them?
Just a suggestion.
Lethality. 50% lethality + uncontrolled spread = societal collapse.
If you really hate the current world order, this may be your best bet to change it.
Corporations. Look up the whole LightSquared debacle, where corp buys billions worth of licenses for use which they aren't approved of, and get shot down. This kind of silliness often happens when potential payoff is very high.
In case of nuclear power plants, if you handle them right, they are among the most profitable, if not the most profitable industries in the world. I know that in my country (Finland) the most profitable project ever was one of our nuclear power plants, followed closely by other. Then there's a huge chasm until the third contender.
We have two nuclear power plants with two reactors each at the moment.
Feasibility of such interfaces and algorithms in relation to using human brain to control a robot. Not robots themselves.
There is some legwork already done on this in prosthetics, but other then that, it should be fairly virginal territory.
It's an investigation of feasibility. Not an actual development project. 7.000.000 USD is quite a lot for something like that.
Many other countries are smaller then individual states.
Speaking as a non-US resident, I must say that "left-wing claims" are nowhere near as hilarious, insane or scandalous and been so for as far as they actually paid attention to that crap in the news here on the other side of Atlantic.
Well, problem is that such discoveries are rarely the "low hanging fruit" they used to be. Nowadays those have been already picked. This has been seen with CPUs for example. The reason for multi-cores is not that they are faster then single core of equivalent processing power. It's that frequency cannot go any high in silicone so we can't get single core to similar processing power. Single core is far easier to program for, and does most of the typical CPU tasks far better then multi core provided it has similar performance. But when you hit the wall with frequency, you have to go multi core. That wall hasn't been "solved" in several years now, and not for the lack of trying by IBM, Intel and friends.
Sure, we may discover something revolutionary in next ten years. But chances are, we won't because such discoveries are already done, and we're stuck with evolutionary discoveries at best. Which means that SSDs will likely go the way of CPUs and instead of increasing chip capacity will simply start to stack more chips on drives. Not like they can't afford it, most of the modern SSDs are already small enough to fit into ultra thin form factor laptops.
"Have been" a disappointment. Too little tits, too little blood, too much preaching.
Yes, you're talking about erosion. That is what happens when instead of using proper agricultural methods you just knock the forest down, put up a field and start growing plants in exhaustive (soil wise) manner. It's something that modern agriculture is specifically against, not for, which is why erosion is far worse in Sahara.
Without knowing the exact case, I would suggest that what happened was not "switch to modern agriculture", but pretty classic "see the quick buck, make the quick buck, get out". It's pretty common in PIIGS/southern European countries as its ingrained in the culture and can be seen in parts in current EU crisis, where "get rich now, things will sort themselves out somehow later"-approach has bitten everyone in the ass and not just local farmers. Blaming modern agriculture, which does not cause these problems when applied properly, is a pure case of scapegoating to avoid having to look at the real flaws. Flaws that tend to have deep cultural roots that people really don't want to have to look at.
Sure, but you will be that one exception in the field of those who will be doing exactly what I described above, so yes, I will "bang that drum". Or more accurately, call the things what they are, rather then as what they are in someone's pipe dream.
Organic farming is essentially usage of less efficient, old farming methods coupled with lack of use of oil-based fertilisers. These, among other flaws, force farmers to use more water for irrigating the same field, mostly due to inefficiencies when compared to more efficient modern agriculture.
Modern agriculture when done right does neither. On the other hand, when done wrong, the first is a real problem. Second, not so much as its treatable. You can see this in practice in difference between 1st and 3rd world in terms of farming problems. The inefficient, "organic" methods largely applied in Africa are in fact causing severe desertification and erosion, and is one of the biggest causes of hunger in Sahara region.
On the other hand we have 1st world, where worst problem is overuse of fertiliser causing short-term reversible pollution of waterways and soil, which in turn is usually caused by ignoring the regulations. Unlike the problems in 3rd world, which are largely irreversible and permanent (or at least very long term), ours are usually fixed by simply letting the land be unused for a few years. Waterways being polluted is a rather minor problem, as even the 1st world's most agriculturally taxed basin, Baltic Sea remains perfectly viable source of water and fish. Rivers clear themselves by dumping themselves into larger basins such as aforementioned Baltic Sea, and modern agriculture is regulated so that it cannot cause significant pollution of rivers (barring accidents, which happen to other industries as well).
Total amount of arable land globally is decreasing, and has been decreasing for a long time. This is cause by erosion, desertification, and improper farming practices. We have largely managed to regulate such occurrences in the West to zero, but 3rd world is really having problems with this.
Actually, under a best case scenario (zero accidents, recycled fuel), nuclear power is a very obvious saviour. You could replace pretty much all major plants with nuclear and CO2 emissions as well as a number of other emissions that come from older coal-burning plants would crash to zero. We would also have enough fuel to last us at least a millennium with recycling when factoring in usage growth.
The issue is getting to this scenario. We still have ancient plants that we have to run because research is considered unsafe (which is a massive paradox in itself), and because recycling fuel involves enriching it, which has proliferation problems.
As has been shown, the water shortage in Australia has been at least in large part because of climate change enhancing the effect of el nino and la nina.
Of course, you could argue that "we're pulling water out of rivers and reservoirs faster then it can be replenished" is at fault anyway. Of course, when much of this happened because the water was not replenished as it usually was, the ROOT CAUSE is still climate change. Because if not for it, we would be able to go about pulling water out of these river as reservoirs as usual, without risk of them running out.
Water shortage is slowly manifesting in some dry places in Western world as climate change keeps rumbling on. It's far worse in 3rd world, where lack of water infrastructure is combined with inefficient farming methods.
The issue will likely become more and more evident in the next few decades, as climate change causes some of the dry areas that are used for agriculture to become even dryer (as happened with Australia some time ago).