While ITER, being a prototype, can be expected to have increased costs, there has to be a break even point.
$10 billion euros for a 500MW plant that can't sustain fusion.
Just to point out the price disadvantage, a 1 gigawatt nuclear plant can be expected to cost between $1-2 billion, discounting broken regulatory expenses. And that's for a fully functional plant, to include steam turbines, not cheap devices themselves.
So you're looking at spending ten times as much for half the watts, even if it was sustainable.
ITER will produce enough power to sustain itself. But that power output will not be used to sustain containment. Why? because it adds unnecessary costs to the experiment.
It is like trying to figure out a more efficient jet engine. Would you build a plane around it or test it in a wind tunnel?
At some point they're going to stick the jet engine into a plane. Besides, there are safety factors involved with planes that cause you to conduct at least some tests on the ground.
ITER is still huge, and has no provisions to generate power to sustain itelf. If I was designing it and truly thought it would produce enough power to feed itself I'd have put provisions in to at least retrofit the steam turbines needed to turn the power into electricity.
Why? Well, first you monkey around and get it sustainable. Then, during the wear testing phase even a limited amount of power from a turbine set would quickly pay for itself in reduced power costs. Finally, it'd also be a more complete test of concept, as you'd actually be generating electricity from it.
I view the ITR as the first fission pile from my other post. It's not even built yet. It took six more years before a plant was built that produced electricity, and another 9 before a commercial one was built.
They may not need heavy containment to keep nuclear waste from escaping, but they sure as heck do need heavy containment to keep it going. We're talking a huge install of magnets, these devices, and other equipment before you even start about putting steam turbines in.
By the way, this made me think of some old sci-fi and 'diesel fusion'. In this case, it sounds like they've invented a sparkplug, so I'd guess 'gasoline fusion' would be closer.
Pulsed fusion might be the way to go, probably allows much more in the way of refreshing the hydrogen payload and removing the helium.
36 kilowatts @240 volts = 150 amps. 164 if you use 220 as a figure.
The new 'standard' for homes today is 200 amps.
It's doable in that sense. Obviously you're going to need a hellacious capacitor bank to charge up for the shots, as the 36Kw is for a steady drain, figuring on a 1 microsecond shot once every 10 seconds.
It just goes to show how something can use the power of 360 power plants, yet average less power than a house can handle, if you spread it out...
But I think that it kinda points out where we're at. Fusion is VERY HARD. It gets somewhat easier if you 'spike' the mix with tritium, and larger reactions, while taking more power to initiate, generally release more power as well.
My point is that I figure that we're going to figure out how to make it workable sooner or later. It's just that version 1 will have a practical plant pushing the size limits. Imagine a plant the size of your average military base. Large enough they build a rail system to shuttle workers from one end to another. Heck, picture a Black Mesa.
And back then they had a huge pressure to compete with and show up the commies*, and nuclear power was going to be the new great thing.
There was also orders of magnitude less red tape.
I don't see things going very quickly even if they can promise no waste if the fusion reactor costs 10X as much as a fission plant, even if it produces 10X the power.
Build time on a nuclear reactor today is pretty much a minimum of 3 years. A fusion plant's going to be a lot more complicated.
That just means the installation must be really efficient to compete with existing energy providers... or existing energy providers must become as expensive as this new energy producer. I suspect that in 20 years they will be close to meeting in the middle.
From my understanding of the problems, that'd require a HUGE plant. Right now they're talking about building the largest fusion test reactor yet. One telling thing about the design: It's as large as a modern gigawatt nuke/coal plant, yet has absolutely no provisions for making power from the reactions.
Now, I admit that my figures are estimates, based roughly on the idea that contaiment can be roughly approximated as surface area, while fusion mass is volume based. Thus, square vs. cube.
Take the test plant*, it's as large as a gigawatt reactor. Since they aren't putting any means to generate electricity in, they're obviously not planning on it producing enough power to even offset the cost of the generating equipment. IE not enough power for it's containment costs.
Now, lets pretend that we had many issues solved and could merely double the size of it**. 4 times the containment energy cost, 8 times the power produced. If we have a self-sustaining plant, where enough power is generated for it to continue operating with no external power, the doubling would give us 4X the original capacity available to sell.
Still, even if the first doubling made it self-sufficient, and the second one to produce usefull amounts of power, we're talking about a plant with 16 times the footprint of a gigawatt nuclear plant, half it's power goes to maintaining the reaction systems, and we haven't even gotten to the area need for the steam systems. Call it 20 times the footprint of a gigawatt plant.
We have a huge way to go on efficiency before it'll be practical. This may help, but I still see fusion plants as a long way away.
*last I'd heard, they're fighting over which country to build it in. **I'm talking about the reaction area size itself. Due to inefficiencies, the rest of the equipment will likely more than double in size.
60 megaamps at 6 megavolts, as mentioned in the article adds up to 360 gigawatts.
The only time measures I saw associated in the article is 1 microsecond(.000001) to 100 nanoseconds(.0000001).
36 kilowatts sustained operation, assuming I didn't mess my math up. That's taking the microsecond figure. 3.6kilowatts for the nanoseconds. The first is within reach of a standard household circuit, the second could be powered, easily, with a dryer circuit.
Still, from what I'm seeing this doesn't address containment at all, merely detonation.
Even if we had a breakthrough and suddenly we had all the equations and knowledge to build practical fusion reactors, fusion power would still be at least a decade away.
5 years to design it into a power plant, find and obtain a site, necessary permits, etc... Then 5 years to actually build the thing.
I'll believe that it's twenty years away when we have a working plant sustaining a fusion reaction for testing purposes. IE operating the thing for days/weeks, not seconds/minutes.
We had the first nuclear pile in 1942. The first nuclear reactor to produce electricity came online in 1951. It wasn't until 1957 when the first commercial fission plant came online. 15 years from the first pile until a commercial plant. All signs point towards fusion being bigger and more difficult, so I figure one will take even longer to build than a fission plant.
I think that I'll stand by my idea that even if/when we crack fusion enough to be able to build a fusion power plant it'll have to be so big to be worth it, that they won't be able to get the funding to do so.
Basically, Containment costs go up by the square, while energy release goes up by the cube. To make it worth it, we might be looking at a 100 gigawatt reactor*, of which half goes towards sustaining the reaction.
Here in the states we have registered mail. Postal mail takes 2 or 3 days at most and with registered mail the recipient must show ID and sign. As far as I know that is how all legal and official documentation is sent (at least it is what attorneys always seem to recommend). It also has an air of respect that western union lacks since the U.S. Postal service is a quasi government entity.
The reason registered mail is normally used is that it's substantially cheaper, and you can get original documents to people.
What I was talking about is a very niche service where it's same day; at most next day. It's very expensive. Wiring money is also sometimes used. Most people don't use it because it's expensive, and most expensive purchases can be done with a check or credit card. At the worst wait three days. But, for certain circumstances, it works.
I'd have to say that it, on the whole, has driven the PC industry more than it's hindered it.
A car, discounting accident or outright neglect*, can be expected to last in excess of ten years today. Sure, you'll have probably replaced a few parts by then, but it will be pretty much the same car.
While you can get the same longevity from computers, a four year old machine is considered ancient and no longer capable of keeping up. Yes, there are still many decade old machines out there, but I'd guess them to be a fraction of a percent.
Without the development cycle experienced by the microchip industry we'd be looking at machine replacements idecade instead of every three to four years. This would lead to far less volume being sold, and which would increase the cost per unit while reducing the amount of funds available for research.
Now, with the slower development cycle and deployment times measured in the decades I would expect to see more attention focused on optimization and reliability.
*IE never doing periodic maintenance such as oil changes...
Actually, most countries still do, at least in the sense that they have a message courier service. IE when a phone call won't work, you can pay to have a western union guy deliver what's essentially a fax today.
Guaranteed delivery (via signature) makes it useful for official documentation.
Entrance exams are flawed, it measures dedication more than anything.
And dedication isn't required to pass college? I should know - I didn't get my associates until i was 29, after leaving two colleges. I have no dedication.
As far as companies moving to the US...they do have cheaper options closer by. Eastern Europe is a lot cheaper than Germany, and has a high umemployment rate that woudl jump on jobs...and very lax governmental evironmental laws. Even Japan has locales that are cheaper than the US closer to home. Makes control easier....India is not too far away from Japan, so if we outsource there, makes sense it would be cheap for Japan to do the same.
In the cases of these companies outsourcing to the USA, I'll note that they're doing to feed our domestic market for the most part. Shipping stuff by sea is pretty cheap, but it still costs a few percentage points, then there's our import system to deal with. There are tax advantages to producing it domestically.
At least in the case of many Japanese car companies, they'll import the engine from japan and build everything else here so it counts as an american car.
In many businesses labor is the largest expense, still, saving 20% of your expenses is not small, right? Paying your foreign workers 1/5 of domestic wages, multiplied by it's 25% share.
Heck, we're starting to see outsourcing of medical care to India. They've actually built hospitals especially for foreign patients. It's a sad statement about our medical care in that in India, they manage to meet US healthcare standards, yet do it cheaply enough that care there is often cheaper than the deductibles to have it done here in the USA, and that includes the round trip flight!
As for unions...in the early days (and even today....I have to deal with unions as part of my military job!) helped protect workers from abuse by the management. Using cancer causing chemicals....pre-union: Too bad. post-union: here is your PPE.
Some unions are still doing their jobs; some have become corrupt. I'll never say that unions don't have their place; it's just that if they're not smart, they'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. On the other hand, I'd love to see them force the CEOs to cut their own pay. 100k plus or minus depending upon the company's profits, overall size, and net worth. IE no gain in pay if they create 'profits' merely by selling off assets.
But wages are usually the public reason, but in reality, low on the reasons for the move. Less restrictive government and evironmental controls plays a big part.
I work in the computer industry, so that's what I mostly track. Technical support and programming isn't that enviromentally impacting. The decrease in human costs was the driving factor for many places to send their technical support and programming to India.
You do have a point about the less restrictive government controls. I don't like the pollution reason; I dislike pollution, it's one of the few reasons I can see to impose tariffs. It's a fact of life that governments impose costs on businesses, and we're getting pretty annoying with all the government regulations and taxes, though we're no where near as bad as Western Europe. For that matter, a number of countries have found that by lowering and flattening corporate tax rates they attract new business like crazy. For an Eastern European, former soviet block state, that's a highly desired condition.
If you look, you will see foreign companies move to the US to manufacture items (for example, Mercedes, BMW, and Honda). The tax breaks and benefits outweighed staying at home for them.
Europe, on average, has extremely tight corporate controls and heavy taxes. Moving here is their equivalent to moving to Mexico. In the case of Japan, everything is so expensive there, and the limited labor and resource pool makes building factories here make sense. Shipping stuff across the ocean a couple times costs money.
I'm a SSgt style E5, and yeah, I'm in a cheap area right now. Minot, ND. But I started my savings(actually getting out of debt) in Colorado Springs as an E3. And if you thought it was bad in '95 as an E5, try moving off base as an E3 in '98, just before the reforms hit. BAH was less than half of any apartments I could find. Moving to Germany for a couple years allowed me to get the nest egg started.
In japan they have a tendency to put local items on it, like benito flakes, wasabi, tofu, etc...
Yeah, maybe, and I prefer the Chicago style too:)
I like them both. But then, I also like my pizzas pretty plain. I have this tendency when I buy frozen pizzas to buy pepperoni then eat all the pepperoni before sticking the pizza in the oven.
But yeah, take the differences in the food imported to China and their native representations, then have a divergence over 50-100 years in cooking styles.
"Humer"?. I really need to get a textbox spellchecker, and actually use it... Humor. Still, it's informative? Besides Franklin and Webster's attempts to change/clean up our spelling, and the inevitable drift in the early days, we're still capable of understanding each other with no problems. It probably helped that most of Webster's attempted changes fell through. Still, even with the spelling changes the phonetics are close enough.
I've seen English(US). It normally doesn't matter. If I program something up and don't bother to localize it to the point of having 'american' and 'english' versions, I'm going to put just plain 'English' in the list. If I have to make a distinction(a spell checker, for example), then I'd put English(US) and English(UK) because I'm splitting them up on the basis of geographical differences.
In some cases, you don't even need that. During the French elections, some old people unable to complete the different steps were helped by officials, in the polling booth. The vote secrecy is already badly screwed when you arrive at situations like that.
To a certain extent that has always been a problem. Creating an anonymous voting system that can handle every disability from blindness, deafness, dsylexia, just plain unable to read, down to outright stupidity* without help from somebody else is very difficult.
I'm not too terribly concerned about the occasional voter who needs help. I am worried about a voting system so unsecure that somebody with minimal knowledge of microsoft access can jigger the system.
*The universe keeps making better idiots, after all.
Just like how it's generally considered that two creatures are the same species if they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring; I consider a language to be the same if two average speakers can understand each other with minimal misunderstanding.
With a couple dozen word differences(like trunk vs boot, torch vs flashlight), and a few more spelling differences, it's entirely possible for a UK English speaker to communicate with a US English speaker with no need for translation.
I can watch and understand the humer in British TV, just as somebody from the UK can watch the latest offering from hollywood without issue. Not so with German(Deutsch), Japanese, French, Spanish, etc...
For that matter, both countries have wider ranges of dialect within their borders than the differences between the accepted standard for either.
Go to Japan/China and look at what they put on it there.;)
Sill, there was that $1k pizza I heard about a while back - that involved no cheese or baking. Other than the vaguest resembelance to pizza in that it was round with toppings on top.
If we must find something american, I believe that the hamburger/cheeseburger would come close. Then again, maybe not. So many of our products came from immigrants; frequently with some changes for the different conditions.
For example, chicago deep dish pizza might as well be a diffent product than italy's pizzas with the paper-thin crust. Both are good, but they are substantially different dishes.
To put it another way, this is like being able to patent the gasoline engine.
If it transforms gasoline into motive force, it's in violation of the patent. You could build a gasoline powered steam engine and it'd be infringing. The patent could have been for a 2 stroke, then a company comes along and starts mareting a rotary engine and the patent holder sues.
Tabs have been used to assist in organizing and finding specific parts of paper-based information for ages. Desktops, filing cabinets, trash cans and many other objects have made appearances in GUIs, so why not tabs?
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While ITER, being a prototype, can be expected to have increased costs, there has to be a break even point.
$10 billion euros for a 500MW plant that can't sustain fusion.
Just to point out the price disadvantage, a 1 gigawatt nuclear plant can be expected to cost between $1-2 billion, discounting broken regulatory expenses. And that's for a fully functional plant, to include steam turbines, not cheap devices themselves.
So you're looking at spending ten times as much for half the watts, even if it was sustainable.
"Up to 500 seconds"
Not even nine minutes. No wonder they're not looking into putting turbines on it. You wouldn't even be able to warm them up in that timeframe.
A 500MW plant, but not sustainable.
ITER, if it comes out this way, won't even count as the first prototype - It's not sustainable.
ITER will produce enough power to sustain itself. But that power output will not be used to sustain containment. Why? because it adds unnecessary costs to the experiment.
It is like trying to figure out a more efficient jet engine. Would you build a plane around it or test it in a wind tunnel?
At some point they're going to stick the jet engine into a plane. Besides, there are safety factors involved with planes that cause you to conduct at least some tests on the ground.
ITER is still huge, and has no provisions to generate power to sustain itelf. If I was designing it and truly thought it would produce enough power to feed itself I'd have put provisions in to at least retrofit the steam turbines needed to turn the power into electricity.
Why? Well, first you monkey around and get it sustainable. Then, during the wear testing phase even a limited amount of power from a turbine set would quickly pay for itself in reduced power costs. Finally, it'd also be a more complete test of concept, as you'd actually be generating electricity from it.
I view the ITR as the first fission pile from my other post. It's not even built yet. It took six more years before a plant was built that produced electricity, and another 9 before a commercial one was built.
They may not need heavy containment to keep nuclear waste from escaping, but they sure as heck do need heavy containment to keep it going. We're talking a huge install of magnets, these devices, and other equipment before you even start about putting steam turbines in.
By the way, this made me think of some old sci-fi and 'diesel fusion'. In this case, it sounds like they've invented a sparkplug, so I'd guess 'gasoline fusion' would be closer.
Pulsed fusion might be the way to go, probably allows much more in the way of refreshing the hydrogen payload and removing the helium.
36 kilowatts @240 volts = 150 amps. 164 if you use 220 as a figure.
The new 'standard' for homes today is 200 amps.
It's doable in that sense. Obviously you're going to need a hellacious capacitor bank to charge up for the shots, as the 36Kw is for a steady drain, figuring on a 1 microsecond shot once every 10 seconds.
It just goes to show how something can use the power of 360 power plants, yet average less power than a house can handle, if you spread it out...
Very interesting post.
But I think that it kinda points out where we're at. Fusion is VERY HARD. It gets somewhat easier if you 'spike' the mix with tritium, and larger reactions, while taking more power to initiate, generally release more power as well.
My point is that I figure that we're going to figure out how to make it workable sooner or later. It's just that version 1 will have a practical plant pushing the size limits. Imagine a plant the size of your average military base. Large enough they build a rail system to shuttle workers from one end to another. Heck, picture a Black Mesa.
And back then they had a huge pressure to compete with and show up the commies*, and nuclear power was going to be the new great thing.
There was also orders of magnitude less red tape.
I don't see things going very quickly even if they can promise no waste if the fusion reactor costs 10X as much as a fission plant, even if it produces 10X the power.
Build time on a nuclear reactor today is pretty much a minimum of 3 years. A fusion plant's going to be a lot more complicated.
That just means the installation must be really efficient to compete with existing energy providers... or existing energy providers must become as expensive as this new energy producer. I suspect that in 20 years they will be close to meeting in the middle.
From my understanding of the problems, that'd require a HUGE plant. Right now they're talking about building the largest fusion test reactor yet. One telling thing about the design: It's as large as a modern gigawatt nuke/coal plant, yet has absolutely no provisions for making power from the reactions.
Now, I admit that my figures are estimates, based roughly on the idea that contaiment can be roughly approximated as surface area, while fusion mass is volume based. Thus, square vs. cube.
Take the test plant*, it's as large as a gigawatt reactor. Since they aren't putting any means to generate electricity in, they're obviously not planning on it producing enough power to even offset the cost of the generating equipment. IE not enough power for it's containment costs.
Now, lets pretend that we had many issues solved and could merely double the size of it**. 4 times the containment energy cost, 8 times the power produced. If we have a self-sustaining plant, where enough power is generated for it to continue operating with no external power, the doubling would give us 4X the original capacity available to sell.
Still, even if the first doubling made it self-sufficient, and the second one to produce usefull amounts of power, we're talking about a plant with 16 times the footprint of a gigawatt nuclear plant, half it's power goes to maintaining the reaction systems, and we haven't even gotten to the area need for the steam systems. Call it 20 times the footprint of a gigawatt plant.
We have a huge way to go on efficiency before it'll be practical. This may help, but I still see fusion plants as a long way away.
*last I'd heard, they're fighting over which country to build it in.
**I'm talking about the reaction area size itself. Due to inefficiencies, the rest of the equipment will likely more than double in size.
60 megaamps at 6 megavolts, as mentioned in the article adds up to 360 gigawatts.
The only time measures I saw associated in the article is 1 microsecond(.000001) to 100 nanoseconds(.0000001).
36 kilowatts sustained operation, assuming I didn't mess my math up. That's taking the microsecond figure. 3.6kilowatts for the nanoseconds. The first is within reach of a standard household circuit, the second could be powered, easily, with a dryer circuit.
Still, from what I'm seeing this doesn't address containment at all, merely detonation.
Even if we had a breakthrough and suddenly we had all the equations and knowledge to build practical fusion reactors, fusion power would still be at least a decade away.
5 years to design it into a power plant, find and obtain a site, necessary permits, etc... Then 5 years to actually build the thing.
I'll believe that it's twenty years away when we have a working plant sustaining a fusion reaction for testing purposes. IE operating the thing for days/weeks, not seconds/minutes.
We had the first nuclear pile in 1942. The first nuclear reactor to produce electricity came online in 1951. It wasn't until 1957 when the first commercial fission plant came online. 15 years from the first pile until a commercial plant. All signs point towards fusion being bigger and more difficult, so I figure one will take even longer to build than a fission plant.
Naw, that'd be 1.21 jigawatts.
Wasn't it 20 years off 20 years ago?
I think that I'll stand by my idea that even if/when we crack fusion enough to be able to build a fusion power plant it'll have to be so big to be worth it, that they won't be able to get the funding to do so.
Basically, Containment costs go up by the square, while energy release goes up by the cube. To make it worth it, we might be looking at a 100 gigawatt reactor*, of which half goes towards sustaining the reaction.
*1-2 gigawatts is a pretty big reactor today.
Here in the states we have registered mail. Postal mail takes 2 or 3 days at most and with registered mail the recipient must show ID and sign. As far as I know that is how all legal and official documentation is sent (at least it is what attorneys always seem to recommend). It also has an air of respect that western union lacks since the U.S. Postal service is a quasi government entity.
The reason registered mail is normally used is that it's substantially cheaper, and you can get original documents to people.
What I was talking about is a very niche service where it's same day; at most next day. It's very expensive. Wiring money is also sometimes used. Most people don't use it because it's expensive, and most expensive purchases can be done with a check or credit card. At the worst wait three days. But, for certain circumstances, it works.
I'd have to say that it, on the whole, has driven the PC industry more than it's hindered it.
A car, discounting accident or outright neglect*, can be expected to last in excess of ten years today. Sure, you'll have probably replaced a few parts by then, but it will be pretty much the same car.
While you can get the same longevity from computers, a four year old machine is considered ancient and no longer capable of keeping up. Yes, there are still many decade old machines out there, but I'd guess them to be a fraction of a percent.
Without the development cycle experienced by the microchip industry we'd be looking at machine replacements idecade instead of every three to four years. This would lead to far less volume being sold, and which would increase the cost per unit while reducing the amount of funds available for research.
Now, with the slower development cycle and deployment times measured in the decades I would expect to see more attention focused on optimization and reliability.
*IE never doing periodic maintenance such as oil changes...
Actually, most countries still do, at least in the sense that they have a message courier service. IE when a phone call won't work, you can pay to have a western union guy deliver what's essentially a fax today.
Guaranteed delivery (via signature) makes it useful for official documentation.
Entrance exams are flawed, it measures dedication more than anything.
And dedication isn't required to pass college? I should know - I didn't get my associates until i was 29, after leaving two colleges. I have no dedication.
As far as companies moving to the US...they do have cheaper options closer by. Eastern Europe is a lot cheaper than Germany, and has a high umemployment rate that woudl jump on jobs...and very lax governmental evironmental laws. Even Japan has locales that are cheaper than the US closer to home. Makes control easier....India is not too far away from Japan, so if we outsource there, makes sense it would be cheap for Japan to do the same.
In the cases of these companies outsourcing to the USA, I'll note that they're doing to feed our domestic market for the most part. Shipping stuff by sea is pretty cheap, but it still costs a few percentage points, then there's our import system to deal with. There are tax advantages to producing it domestically.
At least in the case of many Japanese car companies, they'll import the engine from japan and build everything else here so it counts as an american car.
In many businesses labor is the largest expense, still, saving 20% of your expenses is not small, right? Paying your foreign workers 1/5 of domestic wages, multiplied by it's 25% share.
Heck, we're starting to see outsourcing of medical care to India. They've actually built hospitals especially for foreign patients. It's a sad statement about our medical care in that in India, they manage to meet US healthcare standards, yet do it cheaply enough that care there is often cheaper than the deductibles to have it done here in the USA, and that includes the round trip flight!
As for unions...in the early days (and even today....I have to deal with unions as part of my military job!) helped protect workers from abuse by the management. Using cancer causing chemicals....pre-union: Too bad. post-union: here is your PPE.
Some unions are still doing their jobs; some have become corrupt. I'll never say that unions don't have their place; it's just that if they're not smart, they'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. On the other hand, I'd love to see them force the CEOs to cut their own pay. 100k plus or minus depending upon the company's profits, overall size, and net worth. IE no gain in pay if they create 'profits' merely by selling off assets.
But wages are usually the public reason, but in reality, low on the reasons for the move. Less restrictive government and evironmental controls plays a big part.
I work in the computer industry, so that's what I mostly track. Technical support and programming isn't that enviromentally impacting. The decrease in human costs was the driving factor for many places to send their technical support and programming to India.
You do have a point about the less restrictive government controls. I don't like the pollution reason; I dislike pollution, it's one of the few reasons I can see to impose tariffs. It's a fact of life that governments impose costs on businesses, and we're getting pretty annoying with all the government regulations and taxes, though we're no where near as bad as Western Europe. For that matter, a number of countries have found that by lowering and flattening corporate tax rates they attract new business like crazy. For an Eastern European, former soviet block state, that's a highly desired condition.
If you look, you will see foreign companies move to the US to manufacture items (for example, Mercedes, BMW, and Honda). The tax breaks and benefits outweighed staying at home for them.
Europe, on average, has extremely tight corporate controls and heavy taxes. Moving here is their equivalent to moving to Mexico. In the case of Japan, everything is so expensive there, and the limited labor and resource pool makes building factories here make sense. Shipping stuff across the ocean a couple times costs money.
I'm a SSgt style E5, and yeah, I'm in a cheap area right now. Minot, ND. But I started my savings(actually getting out of debt) in Colorado Springs as an E3. And if you thought it was bad in '95 as an E5, try moving off base as an E3 in '98, just before the reforms hit. BAH was less than half of any apartments I could find. Moving to Germany for a couple years allowed me to get the nest egg started.
googling "Webster spelling reform" will pull up a few references.
Like some essays by him.
Some of the reforms worked, some didn't.
I figured that china would be like Japan...
:)
In japan they have a tendency to put local items on it, like benito flakes, wasabi, tofu, etc...
Yeah, maybe, and I prefer the Chicago style too
I like them both. But then, I also like my pizzas pretty plain. I have this tendency when I buy frozen pizzas to buy pepperoni then eat all the pepperoni before sticking the pizza in the oven.
But yeah, take the differences in the food imported to China and their native representations, then have a divergence over 50-100 years in cooking styles.
"Humer"?. I really need to get a textbox spellchecker, and actually use it... Humor. Still, it's informative? Besides Franklin and Webster's attempts to change/clean up our spelling, and the inevitable drift in the early days, we're still capable of understanding each other with no problems. It probably helped that most of Webster's attempted changes fell through. Still, even with the spelling changes the phonetics are close enough.
I've seen English(US). It normally doesn't matter. If I program something up and don't bother to localize it to the point of having 'american' and 'english' versions, I'm going to put just plain 'English' in the list. If I have to make a distinction(a spell checker, for example), then I'd put English(US) and English(UK) because I'm splitting them up on the basis of geographical differences.
In some cases, you don't even need that. During the French elections, some old people unable to complete the different steps were helped by officials, in the polling booth. The vote secrecy is already badly screwed when you arrive at situations like that.
To a certain extent that has always been a problem. Creating an anonymous voting system that can handle every disability from blindness, deafness, dsylexia, just plain unable to read, down to outright stupidity* without help from somebody else is very difficult.
I'm not too terribly concerned about the occasional voter who needs help. I am worried about a voting system so unsecure that somebody with minimal knowledge of microsoft access can jigger the system.
*The universe keeps making better idiots, after all.
Just like how it's generally considered that two creatures are the same species if they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring; I consider a language to be the same if two average speakers can understand each other with minimal misunderstanding.
With a couple dozen word differences(like trunk vs boot, torch vs flashlight), and a few more spelling differences, it's entirely possible for a UK English speaker to communicate with a US English speaker with no need for translation.
I can watch and understand the humer in British TV, just as somebody from the UK can watch the latest offering from hollywood without issue. Not so with German(Deutsch), Japanese, French, Spanish, etc...
For that matter, both countries have wider ranges of dialect within their borders than the differences between the accepted standard for either.
Similarly with pizza - how different can it be?
;)
Go to Japan/China and look at what they put on it there.
Sill, there was that $1k pizza I heard about a while back - that involved no cheese or baking. Other than the vaguest resembelance to pizza in that it was round with toppings on top.
If we must find something american, I believe that the hamburger/cheeseburger would come close. Then again, maybe not. So many of our products came from immigrants; frequently with some changes for the different conditions.
For example, chicago deep dish pizza might as well be a diffent product than italy's pizzas with the paper-thin crust. Both are good, but they are substantially different dishes.
To put it another way, this is like being able to patent the gasoline engine.
If it transforms gasoline into motive force, it's in violation of the patent. You could build a gasoline powered steam engine and it'd be infringing. The patent could have been for a 2 stroke, then a company comes along and starts mareting a rotary engine and the patent holder sues.
Tabs have been used to assist in organizing and finding specific parts of paper-based information for ages. Desktops, filing cabinets, trash cans and many other objects have made appearances in GUIs, so why not tabs?