Very good, but I feel the need to point out that Germany is also has some of the largest subsidies for solar power going, to the point that installs are going in areas that are unrealistic. Comparatively speaking, it'd be better for many areas such as Italy, Greece, the middleast, Texas, and Nevada before installing large amounts in Germany.
The USA also did this for hybrid cars. As more cars are sold, the subsidies drop. They're completely gone now for the Honda Civic and Toyota Prius if I remember right.
Any good distillation plant will have heat exchangers to reduce the raw energy demand, still, economics and older plant designs can reduce energy efficiency.
It costs money to make this stuff efficient, a bigger heat exchange system costs more money.
with energy costs being what they are, it has to be cost effective to do this.
Non petrochemical energy costs are still pretty low, and it can cost millions to update a plant.
My dispute with this line of reasoning is that we use an insignificant amount of oil for electricity generation purposes. So your three war argument is off-topic.
The significant hydrocarbon sources for our electricity is coal and natural gas.
Of which, receive some of the most marginal amounts of subsidy in the industry
As for being used on cars and such - solar doesn't have enough density to realistically power a car via an on-car array.
True, I just figure that creating a solar furnace that meets 70% of your daily needs, plus some sort of alternative heat source would help ensure the best performance at lowest cost.
By having a backup, you don't have the cost of the thermal storage, plus the capability to operate even in less than ideal circumstances. Like a week of heavy cloud cover, for example.
Actually, the biggest portion of glass manufacturing is, of course, heat. You wouldn't want to use 10% efficient cells to produce electricity that goes directly to an electric resistance element to make that heat.
Instead, you'd want to build a solar furnace - using mirrors and lenses and such you can get 90% efficiency, and using panels even cheaper than this.
The trick would be the substantial start-up time in the mornings. Due to the heat levels involved, you'd be wasting a lot of energy each day heating the equipment up again.
So either you have to find a solution for this, or use natural gas or whatever during the night to keep production up. This isn't bad as long as you still get more energy out of the resultant panels, etc...
there's plenty of motivation to eat that delta in profit, especially for a public company as in this case.
And said profit can be used to expand the company- increase production, research increasing efficiency and decreasing costs, not to mention paying back the investors.
Making mad money can also encourage others to get into the industry.
After all, the market for $2/watt panels is likely 4X that of $4/watt panels. And orders of magnitude more if they can manage to make $1/watt panels - installed, since that's the price point for commercial power parity.
Though if you start digging into baseband power too much, the cost for commercial power will rise. Of course, peak power demands for most of the country happen during the day, so having a supplemental power source during the day helps.
earmarked for commercial ventures only, no retail/residential sales. Pity. Hope that changes.
Is there a possibility of a distributorship? IE you don't buy small amounts of cells from the manufacturer, but solarhome.org or whoever buys a bunch of panels and puts together a kit using them?
Or maybe the construction means there's extra concerns regarding the installation of the panels, meaning you want extensive engineering, like what's uneconomical for home installs, but quite manageable for commercial ones.
I'm slightly different, in that if I were to reform the USA, I'd simply take away quite a bit of the power of the federal government. Leave it somewhere between where it is now and about where the EU is now.
For example - I'd give the senate back to the state legislators. That ensures that senators are beholden to the state they come from. I believe that this would tend to act to preserve state powers, limiting federal ones.
I'd also create a 'house of repeals'. Their job is to balance the budget(by slashing, if necessary), get rid of bad legislation, outdated legislation, etc...
I'd like to see some people elected who can solve the real problems without the impractical ideology.
I have to agree with what you say. Even I consider my party leaders to be nuts.
Of course, I consider myself a libertarian mostly on four points:
Government budgets should be balanced - on the federal level by cutting spending, not increasing taxes Guns should be legal(but regulated for safety - IE carrying is legal, brandishing/discharge in an unsafe manner is not; self defense encouraged) Drugs & Prostitution should be legal(but regulated for safety, must be 18 to use, drugs are cut with safe substances, of a specified potency, Sex workers need to meet the same rules as the porn industry) Beyond that - civil unions, get the.gov out of the marriage business.
I'm also pro-choice and pro-death penalty when we KNOW he's the sicko who did it. I believe that it's possible to be environmentally friendly without breaking the economy. I want China's wages to go up even faster, bringing the day when 'made in the USA' is the more economic choice for more than national pride sooner. I don't think that bio-fuels are ready for the prime time yet, but I'd encourage hybrids where it makes the most sense - like city taxies.
If I got in I'd try to simplify the tax system. I like the idea of fairtax, but believe that it needs work - and certainly wouldn't get rid of the entire IRS, as you'd still need to audit businesses.
Everything will degrade. There's just the question of whether it'll degrade in a useful amount of time from biological sources.
It takes an awful lot to biodegrade a cotton shirt, but it will happen, eventually. But by the standards of many 'biodegradable' requirements, a cotton shirt wouldn't qualify.
This is actually good, because the lifespan of a good cotton shirt can be in the years.
I'd look at Season 2, episode 5. That's the recycling episode of bullshit. I don't remember the glass part, but there's a lot of stuff in there about recycling.
Happens for my wells fargo card too. But I don't think that those are stored on the card, I think those preferences are stored at a central server - it looks up the preferences on the basis of your card number.
But yeah, being able to simply hit 'quick $100' is nice.
Of course, I need to figure out what to do with the other 97 bags I have...
Well, you put them in one bag to place in the recycling bin(whether at home or elsewhere).
The problem is that while some people have uses for lots of bags(the lady who picks up dog doo with them), some, like me, don't. I find them too small for most kitchen usage, it takes me months to fill up the bathroom can, as small as it is. For that matter, half the time I dump the bathroom bag into the kitchen bag when I'm taking it out for sanitary reasons.
It'd be more helpful if the grocery sized bags were a bit bigger - as is they're a bit small even for my bathroom basket.
Whether before or after the incinerator the glass will still be separated for recycling
And, isn't this possibly the BETTER option? I mean, it takes labor and resources to seperate trash in the beginning, resources to keep the various seperated trash seperate and transport it to the recycling/disposal facilities(more trucks), resources to recycle the glass.
It's quite possible it's cheaper to simply have a 'glass out' line in the incinerator that produces glass blocks or something to be hauled whereever somebody is making glass that the blocks are suitable for.
Of course, I also keep thinking about NYC's glass recycling scheme - requiring deposits, refunds, mandatory seperation, and 9/10ths of the resulting glass ends up being dumped back into the waste stream to go to the disposal facility because nobody's willing to buy it.
showing that the bags that are sold and used in preference to the plastic bags aren't biodegradable or recyclable (although they are reusable of course).
The ones I have are recyclable, but you probably don't want a permanent bag that's any more biodegradable than, say, a cotton shirt. After all, if you're reusing the thing, why would you want it to break down in six months if you can otherwise get twenty years out of it? Personally though, I'd prefer some plain linen, or just about anything but those green bags with all the advertising/'I'M BEING GREEN!!!' screen silking.
One of the primary reasons I like those bags is the higher weight tolerance. You can't still three 2 liters, a couple cans of soup, along with a dozen eggs and sundry other bits into a plastic bag and not expect it to break.
I think the biodegradable plastic bags sound like the better choice and much more preferable then a 20 cent tax per bag
I agree. Taxes are asinine, especially if, like in the USA, checkers and packers just start stuffing your stuff into lots of plastic bags. I KNOW those things can take twice the weight they're putting in there.
We have a program to help us be 'green'. It's a series of steps: Reduce - Just use less. Ranges from sending that form electronically instead of printing it, using two paper towels to dry your hands instead of three, use a tablespoon of cleaner if it'll work instead of three. Reuse - My grocery bags. If you can use it again, do so. Simple enough. If you just replaced your chairs and some of the old ones are still good, see if any other shops could use them. Don't need a desk anymore? Give it to another unit. Recycle - Things like lead acid batteries, metal, motor oil, etc... Are all highly recyclable, and profitable to boot. Unlike a lot of paper/plastic recycling, they're actually cheaper to use than virgin materials. So places will PAY you for them. The last is Dispose - if you just can't do anything else with it.
Thus, reusable bags, in general, score higher than recyclable disposables because, on average it's cheaper to reuse instead of recycling.
Take glass bottles. It's cheaper to wash/sanitize them than to reform them, so a bottle collection service that services the bottles(inspecting, washing, & sterilizing) before refilling them would be higher on the scale than breaking them then forming new bottles out of the glass.
Of course, then you run into the unfortunate fact that a disposable plastic bottle takes less oil to produce than a glass bottle to sterilize, much less make.
So besides, the usual mantra, you have to look deeper, and see if the specific case makes sense.
Maybe the police, even though they might have immunity, realize that they might lose it if they abuse it too much - the occasional problem might be fine, but screw over too many upstanding, successful citizens and next thing you know you have a liability responsability bill passing through the state congress. Complete with a couple weapy families to get the sympathy vote.
The occasional illegal drug user, hooker, or john - they don't have much in the way of defenses. Nobody's real sympathetic for the rapists, molesters, and beaters.
On the other hand, there's a case right now where SWAT busted into a mayor's house, killing both their dogs, that were running AWAY from SWAT. They were labradors! Somebody mailed his wife a bunch of pot - which seems odd, as no other drugs were in the house except for the still sealed package, everybody in the house tests negative for drugs*, etc...
It seems somebody mailed the drugs to deliberately cause trouble - much like the asshat who faked 911 calls.
Oddly enough, even in the USA, for upstanding people it's often cheaper to apologize(even if you admit no specific wrongdoing) and pay for damages.
In one case there was a drug raid on the wrong house, that of a grandmother. Fortuantly, the mistake was quickly realized. The sheriff showed up, personally apologized to the grannie - including a bit of a fix, along the lines of 'I'm sorry, we had what we thought was a valid tip, we'll review procedures'. Posted a deputy to guard the door for the few hours until morning when the department hired carpenter came to fix the door.
- Result: No Lawsuit. Cost: 1 hour sheriffs time. ~6 hours deputy time. 1 Door, carpenter install. Estimated cost: $750. Of that, probably only $300 or so was out of a discretionary fund to hire the carpenter.
What lawsuit can you have that DOESN'T cost you $750, in lawyer's fees alone, even if you're going to pull an immunity clause? Meanwhile the grannie is happy with the police - despite having her door broken in the middle of the night. The police are out there *protecting* people. Yes, they're not perfect, but they made good on their mistake.
That's the model police and other government agencies should be going for. I'd support an innocence fund as well - if a convicted person is later proven innocent, the fund can pay out for the imprisonment. Yes, mistakes occur. But it's normally cheaper in the long run to pay out on valid claims without involving the courts. Take prison - how many lawsuits would be successful if the state automatically paid $20k per year of imprisonment to people falsely convicted? $20k really isn't that much, but after 10 years, $200k would pay for an education, living expenses, basically a transition back to outside life. You could even cap it at $250-500k(depending on average state income, living cost levels). Instead of having to beg the governer for a job after spending 40 years behind bars, ending up with an almost minimum wage job as a janitor in the state building. For the guy who spends 40 years behind bars before it's found out that, no, he didn't rape that girl, well, he doesn't even qualify for much social security, not having held a real job enough to gather the necessary SS credits, work experience, etc... So maybe capping isn't the greatest idea.
Of course, I'm also all for throwing cops, prosecuters, and judges who misrepresented the facts in order to gain a conviction of an innocent man. If the facts were presented as best known to them - well, shit happens sometimes. All we can do is our best.
Of course, I also support having a fund for this sort of stuff - lawyers fees, damages, and such come out of the fund. If any is left at the end of the fiscal year, it's paid as bonuses to the officers. They don't screw up, they get bonuses. They screw up too much, they don't.
Yes companies can and actually do claim ownership of creations done by employees on their own time. They tend to argue that the ideas were garnered from exposure to their work environment or that the employee though about his creation while at work.
Well, they do try... They don't always win. Oddly enough, a hourly employee has a much better chance at this than a salaried employee, much less a military member. The guy would have had a much better leg to stand on if he sold the rights to the company before he ever installed it on a government machine. The moment he did that, it became the USAF's.
And yes, paying careful attention to the contract is important.
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I figured that - but you'd need to build the plant in a fashion to cool down and restart if you're expecting to use solar power to keep it running.
Thus my proposal for natural gas at night.
Germany (my country) is doing that BTW:
Very good, but I feel the need to point out that Germany is also has some of the largest subsidies for solar power going, to the point that installs are going in areas that are unrealistic. Comparatively speaking, it'd be better for many areas such as Italy, Greece, the middleast, Texas, and Nevada before installing large amounts in Germany.
The USA also did this for hybrid cars. As more cars are sold, the subsidies drop. They're completely gone now for the Honda Civic and Toyota Prius if I remember right.
Any good distillation plant will have heat exchangers to reduce the raw energy demand, still, economics and older plant designs can reduce energy efficiency.
It costs money to make this stuff efficient, a bigger heat exchange system costs more money.
with energy costs being what they are, it has to be cost effective to do this.
Non petrochemical energy costs are still pretty low, and it can cost millions to update a plant.
My dispute with this line of reasoning is that we use an insignificant amount of oil for electricity generation purposes. So your three war argument is off-topic.
The significant hydrocarbon sources for our electricity is coal and natural gas.
Of which, receive some of the most marginal amounts of subsidy in the industry
As for being used on cars and such - solar doesn't have enough density to realistically power a car via an on-car array.
Well, yes, it's bloated due to the high subsidies. Doesn't mean that a solar company capable of making cheaper panels won't make more money.
True, I just figure that creating a solar furnace that meets 70% of your daily needs, plus some sort of alternative heat source would help ensure the best performance at lowest cost.
By having a backup, you don't have the cost of the thermal storage, plus the capability to operate even in less than ideal circumstances. Like a week of heavy cloud cover, for example.
Actually, the biggest portion of glass manufacturing is, of course, heat. You wouldn't want to use 10% efficient cells to produce electricity that goes directly to an electric resistance element to make that heat.
Instead, you'd want to build a solar furnace - using mirrors and lenses and such you can get 90% efficiency, and using panels even cheaper than this.
The trick would be the substantial start-up time in the mornings. Due to the heat levels involved, you'd be wasting a lot of energy each day heating the equipment up again.
So either you have to find a solution for this, or use natural gas or whatever during the night to keep production up. This isn't bad as long as you still get more energy out of the resultant panels, etc...
there's plenty of motivation to eat that delta in profit, especially for a public company as in this case.
And said profit can be used to expand the company- increase production, research increasing efficiency and decreasing costs, not to mention paying back the investors.
Making mad money can also encourage others to get into the industry.
After all, the market for $2/watt panels is likely 4X that of $4/watt panels. And orders of magnitude more if they can manage to make $1/watt panels - installed, since that's the price point for commercial power parity.
Though if you start digging into baseband power too much, the cost for commercial power will rise. Of course, peak power demands for most of the country happen during the day, so having a supplemental power source during the day helps.
earmarked for commercial ventures only, no retail/residential sales. Pity. Hope that changes.
Is there a possibility of a distributorship? IE you don't buy small amounts of cells from the manufacturer, but solarhome.org or whoever buys a bunch of panels and puts together a kit using them?
Or maybe the construction means there's extra concerns regarding the installation of the panels, meaning you want extensive engineering, like what's uneconomical for home installs, but quite manageable for commercial ones.
I'm slightly different, in that if I were to reform the USA, I'd simply take away quite a bit of the power of the federal government. Leave it somewhere between where it is now and about where the EU is now.
For example - I'd give the senate back to the state legislators. That ensures that senators are beholden to the state they come from. I believe that this would tend to act to preserve state powers, limiting federal ones.
I'd also create a 'house of repeals'. Their job is to balance the budget(by slashing, if necessary), get rid of bad legislation, outdated legislation, etc...
I'm guessing VB.
Congratulations, you've guessed right! It also uses an unsecured access database, among other scary things to people half involved with security.
I'd like to see some people elected who can solve the real problems without the impractical ideology.
I have to agree with what you say. Even I consider my party leaders to be nuts.
Of course, I consider myself a libertarian mostly on four points:
Government budgets should be balanced - on the federal level by cutting spending, not increasing taxes .gov out of the marriage business.
Guns should be legal(but regulated for safety - IE carrying is legal, brandishing/discharge in an unsafe manner is not; self defense encouraged)
Drugs & Prostitution should be legal(but regulated for safety, must be 18 to use, drugs are cut with safe substances, of a specified potency, Sex workers need to meet the same rules as the porn industry)
Beyond that - civil unions, get the
I'm also pro-choice and pro-death penalty when we KNOW he's the sicko who did it. I believe that it's possible to be environmentally friendly without breaking the economy. I want China's wages to go up even faster, bringing the day when 'made in the USA' is the more economic choice for more than national pride sooner. I don't think that bio-fuels are ready for the prime time yet, but I'd encourage hybrids where it makes the most sense - like city taxies.
If I got in I'd try to simplify the tax system. I like the idea of fairtax, but believe that it needs work - and certainly wouldn't get rid of the entire IRS, as you'd still need to audit businesses.
Everything will degrade. There's just the question of whether it'll degrade in a useful amount of time from biological sources.
It takes an awful lot to biodegrade a cotton shirt, but it will happen, eventually. But by the standards of many 'biodegradable' requirements, a cotton shirt wouldn't qualify.
This is actually good, because the lifespan of a good cotton shirt can be in the years.
I'd look at Season 2, episode 5. That's the recycling episode of bullshit. I don't remember the glass part, but there's a lot of stuff in there about recycling.
I've heard of optical based plastics - too much solar exposure and it breaks down.
How does the plastic determine it's buried vs being in a store/closet?
Now, gotten wet would make sense.
I know several sky marshals, and I can tell you that unless they are flying into DC they are in plain clothes.
Then that's changed since the last time I heard about it - there was a big stink about all marshals being required to be in suit&tie.
Yes, but given the dress code marshals are required to adhere to, you simply make them your first target, get their gun, then jack the plane.
Not to mention the rather lousy number of flights with a marshal on them in the first place.
Note: I approve of none of this, merely a bit sarcastic about the stupidity of various administrations.
Do the same thing as a responsible doctor would if it's their relative brought into the emergency room.
I'd excuse myself as being biased and let the vice handle it.
Then commit unholy terrors on the perpetrators.
Not all plastic comes from oil. Most forms of biodegradable plastics actually comes from organic substances, normally plant.
That's what makes them biodegradable.
Happens for my wells fargo card too. But I don't think that those are stored on the card, I think those preferences are stored at a central server - it looks up the preferences on the basis of your card number.
But yeah, being able to simply hit 'quick $100' is nice.
Of course, I need to figure out what to do with the other 97 bags I have...
Well, you put them in one bag to place in the recycling bin(whether at home or elsewhere).
The problem is that while some people have uses for lots of bags(the lady who picks up dog doo with them), some, like me, don't. I find them too small for most kitchen usage, it takes me months to fill up the bathroom can, as small as it is. For that matter, half the time I dump the bathroom bag into the kitchen bag when I'm taking it out for sanitary reasons.
It'd be more helpful if the grocery sized bags were a bit bigger - as is they're a bit small even for my bathroom basket.
Whether before or after the incinerator the glass will still be separated for recycling
And, isn't this possibly the BETTER option? I mean, it takes labor and resources to seperate trash in the beginning, resources to keep the various seperated trash seperate and transport it to the recycling/disposal facilities(more trucks), resources to recycle the glass.
It's quite possible it's cheaper to simply have a 'glass out' line in the incinerator that produces glass blocks or something to be hauled whereever somebody is making glass that the blocks are suitable for.
Of course, I also keep thinking about NYC's glass recycling scheme - requiring deposits, refunds, mandatory seperation, and 9/10ths of the resulting glass ends up being dumped back into the waste stream to go to the disposal facility because nobody's willing to buy it.
showing that the bags that are sold and used in preference to the plastic bags aren't biodegradable or recyclable (although they are reusable of course).
The ones I have are recyclable, but you probably don't want a permanent bag that's any more biodegradable than, say, a cotton shirt. After all, if you're reusing the thing, why would you want it to break down in six months if you can otherwise get twenty years out of it? Personally though, I'd prefer some plain linen, or just about anything but those green bags with all the advertising/'I'M BEING GREEN!!!' screen silking.
One of the primary reasons I like those bags is the higher weight tolerance. You can't still three 2 liters, a couple cans of soup, along with a dozen eggs and sundry other bits into a plastic bag and not expect it to break.
I think the biodegradable plastic bags sound like the better choice and much more preferable then a 20 cent tax per bag
I agree. Taxes are asinine, especially if, like in the USA, checkers and packers just start stuffing your stuff into lots of plastic bags. I KNOW those things can take twice the weight they're putting in there.
We have a program to help us be 'green'. It's a series of steps:
Reduce - Just use less. Ranges from sending that form electronically instead of printing it, using two paper towels to dry your hands instead of three, use a tablespoon of cleaner if it'll work instead of three.
Reuse - My grocery bags. If you can use it again, do so. Simple enough. If you just replaced your chairs and some of the old ones are still good, see if any other shops could use them. Don't need a desk anymore? Give it to another unit.
Recycle - Things like lead acid batteries, metal, motor oil, etc... Are all highly recyclable, and profitable to boot. Unlike a lot of paper/plastic recycling, they're actually cheaper to use than virgin materials. So places will PAY you for them.
The last is Dispose - if you just can't do anything else with it.
Thus, reusable bags, in general, score higher than recyclable disposables because, on average it's cheaper to reuse instead of recycling.
Take glass bottles. It's cheaper to wash/sanitize them than to reform them, so a bottle collection service that services the bottles(inspecting, washing, & sterilizing) before refilling them would be higher on the scale than breaking them then forming new bottles out of the glass.
Of course, then you run into the unfortunate fact that a disposable plastic bottle takes less oil to produce than a glass bottle to sterilize, much less make.
So besides, the usual mantra, you have to look deeper, and see if the specific case makes sense.
Maybe the police, even though they might have immunity, realize that they might lose it if they abuse it too much - the occasional problem might be fine, but screw over too many upstanding, successful citizens and next thing you know you have a liability responsability bill passing through the state congress. Complete with a couple weapy families to get the sympathy vote.
The occasional illegal drug user, hooker, or john - they don't have much in the way of defenses. Nobody's real sympathetic for the rapists, molesters, and beaters.
On the other hand, there's a case right now where SWAT busted into a mayor's house, killing both their dogs, that were running AWAY from SWAT. They were labradors! Somebody mailed his wife a bunch of pot - which seems odd, as no other drugs were in the house except for the still sealed package, everybody in the house tests negative for drugs*, etc...
It seems somebody mailed the drugs to deliberately cause trouble - much like the asshat who faked 911 calls.
Oddly enough, even in the USA, for upstanding people it's often cheaper to apologize(even if you admit no specific wrongdoing) and pay for damages.
In one case there was a drug raid on the wrong house, that of a grandmother. Fortuantly, the mistake was quickly realized. The sheriff showed up, personally apologized to the grannie - including a bit of a fix, along the lines of 'I'm sorry, we had what we thought was a valid tip, we'll review procedures'. Posted a deputy to guard the door for the few hours until morning when the department hired carpenter came to fix the door.
- Result: No Lawsuit. Cost: 1 hour sheriffs time. ~6 hours deputy time. 1 Door, carpenter install. Estimated cost: $750. Of that, probably only $300 or so was out of a discretionary fund to hire the carpenter.
What lawsuit can you have that DOESN'T cost you $750, in lawyer's fees alone, even if you're going to pull an immunity clause? Meanwhile the grannie is happy with the police - despite having her door broken in the middle of the night. The police are out there *protecting* people. Yes, they're not perfect, but they made good on their mistake.
That's the model police and other government agencies should be going for. I'd support an innocence fund as well - if a convicted person is later proven innocent, the fund can pay out for the imprisonment. Yes, mistakes occur. But it's normally cheaper in the long run to pay out on valid claims without involving the courts. Take prison - how many lawsuits would be successful if the state automatically paid $20k per year of imprisonment to people falsely convicted? $20k really isn't that much, but after 10 years, $200k would pay for an education, living expenses, basically a transition back to outside life. You could even cap it at $250-500k(depending on average state income, living cost levels). Instead of having to beg the governer for a job after spending 40 years behind bars, ending up with an almost minimum wage job as a janitor in the state building. For the guy who spends 40 years behind bars before it's found out that, no, he didn't rape that girl, well, he doesn't even qualify for much social security, not having held a real job enough to gather the necessary SS credits, work experience, etc... So maybe capping isn't the greatest idea.
Of course, I'm also all for throwing cops, prosecuters, and judges who misrepresented the facts in order to gain a conviction of an innocent man. If the facts were presented as best known to them - well, shit happens sometimes. All we can do is our best.
Of course, I also support having a fund for this sort of stuff - lawyers fees, damages, and such come out of the fund. If any is left at the end of the fiscal year, it's paid as bonuses to the officers. They don't screw up, they get bonuses. They screw up too much, they don't.
*telling you this isn't DC. :(
Yes companies can and actually do claim ownership of creations done by employees on their own time. They tend to argue that the ideas were garnered from exposure to their work environment or that the employee though about his creation while at work.
Well, they do try... They don't always win. Oddly enough, a hourly employee has a much better chance at this than a salaried employee, much less a military member. The guy would have had a much better leg to stand on if he sold the rights to the company before he ever installed it on a government machine. The moment he did that, it became the USAF's.
And yes, paying careful attention to the contract is important.