That seems like a fairly light penalty. Now if we count each user who had their contacts stolen in this manner than would be a $15 billion dollar fine. But I think that each contact stolen should be the definitions of "theft" in this case. So if we the average address book has, say 50 contacts in it, that would be $750 billion. Seems about right for a long running bit of organized crime.
(Germany was once called the land of thinkers and poets. That was during a time where it had no copyright-like laws. While the UK, who had them already, fell into an information dark age. Lesson learned, right?)
The phrase was, in German "Das Land der Dichter und Denker".
In the middle of the 20th Century this was transmuted into "Das Land der Richter und Henker" (the land of judges and executioners).
Right you are. Space fanboys always focus on the fuel and energy, which fall into the category of "round-off error" for all space flight systems, Fuel is free, in comparison to the hardware and operations costs. And that is what makes SpaceX viable - they are cutting the one cost that dominates, the flight hardware, by reusing it.
Correct. The Republicans would maintain simultaneously that providing broadband is an "information service" and thus cannot be regulated by the FCC since its business is proving informational content, while a the same time being a common carrier, and thus free of any liability for what goes over its pipes ("tubes" to some Congressfolk) since it does not provide any informational content.
In Japan they can build an advanced cryogenic containment system for a reactor disaster for $300 million.
California needed $1100 million to patch a leaky spillway at a dam. It would take a few trillion dollars for California to contain a damaged reactor.
Where did you get the idea that the ice barrier is "advanced"? This is routine technology, widely used for more than a century. There a major construction companies that specialize in it. It was used in Boston's "Big Dig" for example. It is somewhat interesting that this technology is being used at Fukushima, but nothing surprising or innovative about it.
Yeah major repairs on the tallest dam in the U.S., while is it still full, including improvements to prevent recurrence of a similar event, can be done for pocket change. Sure.
The moon gets a lot more exciting when we get cheap titanium and aluminum down to Earth and power from solar cells from the moon's crust. Oh, and maybe in 10 years or so we'll know what to do with He3.
The spot market price for aluminum goes as low as $0.80/lb right now. Titanium costs $25/lb. Even if stacks of aluminum and titanium ingots were sitting on the Moon right now it would never be profitable to ship them back to Earth.
The market for He-3 is tiny, several millions dollars a year, used as a neutron detector. It is an order of magnitude harder to use He-3 as a fusion fuel than deuterium-tritium which has no prospect of ever being a commercially viable source of electricity due to the high capital cost, even if you believe all of Lockheed-Martin's press releases.
Your best shot of making money for anything on the Moon is collecting souvenir Moon rocks and selling them for $$ on a gram basis. Scientific researchers would buy them too.
Some humans have 20/20 vision. Some humans have 20/200 vision. Some humans have 20/10 vision. Some humans have much better vision than that.
If you do a strip mine on the front side, people will see it. Unaided. Also: contrast, and shadows. Remember, the Sun is reflecting directly, without having been attenuated by an atmosphere. That totally changes the visibility distance calculations.
The limit of the size of a lunar feature detectable by people with really good vision is about 100 km -- the size of Copernicus crater. It is an an actual feature on the Moon and it is in fact the limit of what can be seen. This is very well established. Kepler crater, at half this is invisible to the naked eye. Only people using telescopes can see it (binoculars are just two small telescopes mounted together).
The largest surface mine on Earth is the Hull–Rust–Mahoning Open Pit Iron Mine in Hibbing, Minnesota about 5 km in its largest dimension.
If it was diamonds that would be a game-changer for the space race, because the industrial uses of diamonds are highly constrained by price and availability.
No they aren't. Diamond edged tools are cheap and widely available. Often tungsten carbide (or other super-hard ceramics) is better though since they can take higher temperatures and are not subject to oxidation.
Industrial uses of diamonds have not been "highly constrained" by prices for about 60 years when synthetic diamonds replaced natural diamonds for industrial uses because making them was cheaper than mining them. Natural diamonds used industrially today are simply byproducts of gem diamond mining operations. And before you suggest that maybe they could profitably mine gem diamonds on the Moon you should be made aware that gem diamonds are cheaper to make synthetically than mining here on Earth and this has been true for 20 years now.
You haven't seen synthetic diamonds swamping the diamond market so far simply because the jeweler supply chain set up nearly a century ago by De Beers bans synthetics, unless they have been conform to the same cartel pricing as all other diamond producers. And not having a sales system of their own, the synthetic diamond makers have complied (plus it gives them huge margins, even if it limits their sales).
But De Beers got out of the cartel years ago (but it still the cartel continues to operate in an informal cooperative basis, the supply chain still exists) and last year began direct sales of synthetic diamonds undercutting the cartel it originally set up. I suspect more diamond makers are going to start direct sales in the future. The natural diamond mining industry will survive if it continues to be able to convince women that men don't love them unless they buy them natural diamonds. This marketeer invented "tradition" which did not exist before the 1930s may no survive the present century.
And then there is the little matter of their being no diamonds on the Moon. Their are suitable materials or processes to have made any.
Where? The only commercial source of plutonium I have ever heard of are ionization smoke detectors (like the KV-1) sold in the Soviet Union, but apparently not made in decades. These don't show up on eBay much (I check from time to time). List a source, or you are blowing smoke.
and order deuterium oxide right from Canada.
I don't know of a regular commercial Canadian source (isotope vendors usually don't sell to the public), do you? If so, list them here. I do know of a U.S. source though, United Nuclear, as far as I know this where all fusor makers get their material (and where I got mine).
I'm pretty sure the do-it-yourself kit also includes radiation poisoning, shorter life span, and investigation by a nuclear regulatory agency since the persons involved would be glowing to the radiation detectors in pretty much any western city...especially since a simple radioactive dye will trip them.
Not with a Farnsworth Fusor. These only put out a few million neutrons a second. Assuming a high performing unit with 10 million, that is 10,000,000 * 2.5 MeV * 1.6*10^-13 J/MeV = 4*10^-6 J/s. A rad is 0.01 J/kg of tissue, so a 50 kg kid would require 0.5 J to get a one rad whole body dose. If the actual absorption from the fusor were 10% of its emission (he isn't wrapped around it), then he would have to sit next to it for 2 weeks without a break to get to 1 rad exposure. Radiation poisoning (overt toxicity) sets in around 200 rads in a short period, no acute symptoms would show up if this is spread out over weeks, much less the 8 years of sitting next to the fusor he would need. He could get up to a 2000 rad lifetime exposure sitting next to it his whole life (80 years) but would never show radiation symptions. His cancer risk would be bumped a bit though.
No, it's actually about high time somebody asked this question.
It is indeed. And the answer is clear. Medicine and medical research must not be driven by market economics.
That medicine emerged as a major profit making industry in the 20th Century was due to a transitional phase in science and health care, wherein most things could not be cured, but treatment was huge business opportunity.
Some of the most dramatic improvements in U.S., and world, health in the 20th Century was in the development of vaccines which were one of the cheapest interventions also. But what gets little attention is that this was always a government and charitable foundation activity, not a business, and not profit making.
Health care must be a service available to everyone, with government taking the lead role in supplying it. There is plenty of room for business in the delivery process, but profit must not be allowed to drive health care decisions. Period.
As I recall from something I read a long time ago the minimum size of a breeding population to avoid inbreeding problems is about 10,000. To assure this is truly self perpetuating then the population would have to be far larger, and likely selected against many inheritable diseases.
There are, and have been, populations like this on Earth. As one might imagine this turned out well in some cases and not so well in others. Part of this is social pressures on who is an acceptable breeding partner. If cousin marriage is considered accepted, even though far better mates exist, this can result in a drop of IQ, physical deformities, and all kinds of bad things for the future of the population.
There several problems with this.
First it is helpful to distinguish between the necessary size of a founding population from the how large a population needs to be over the long term, as these are not the same at all.
Successful founding populations throughout the human migrations over the globe have usually been small - a single band consisting of no more than a few hundred people, which is in itself not very diverse. The entire population of humans outside of African appears to have descended from an out-migration of no more than a few thousand breeding individuals, and perhaps as few as about 400 hundred. And no, Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed no more than 2% of the DNA to this population, so they did not add much genetic diversity. A small number of out-breeding events does not greatly increase the effective size of the ancestor population.
In fact as humans migrated around the globe there was a process of continually reducing diversity through the serial founder effect. New populations would be founded by a single band, with a population of no more than a few hundred, and usually less than that. And further expansion started from this reduced genetic base by further small founder groups.
The estimated size required for terrestrial vertebrate populations for long term survival is 500-1000 individuals, to avoid gene loss through genetic drift the population needs to be about 5000 (i.e. it preserves its genetic diversity). Humans are not bound by this though, since with genetic testing deliberate breeding selection can prevent the effect of random drift, so the aforementioned 500-1000 should be enough.
It should be observed that for most the existence of H. sapiens sapiens the entire human population on Earth was not "far larger" than 10,000. Genetic evidence (as well as knowledge of the African environment) indicate that 10,000 to a few tens of thousands over some 200,000 years was the entire H. sapiens sapiens population from which all modern humans descended.
If preserving human genetic diversity is a top priority then the space settlers would need to be mostly African since most of human genetic diversity is found in ancestral African populations. Some Eurasians would be needed to pick up the Neanderthal/Denisovan DNA and recent mutations from outside Africa (last 50,000 years) but most black Africans would be logical population.
American int eh 20th Century picked up a peculiar horror about familial inbreeding not based on actual evidence. It is not that problems to do not exist, but the effects are exaggerated to preposterous levels, and ignores the fact that cousin marriage has been common throughout history. In small bands it is impossible to avoid. Third cousin marriage in fact appears to maximize fertility, it is lower among unrelated people.
Somebody invented the word 'archology' and drew a big book of pictures back in the 1960s.
I don't think he lived near the sea. Certainly never maintained a boat on salt water. Too much acid.
Arcology. Paolo Soleri. He also started a silly project to build one of his utopian cities in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti, without considering the one thing that every city needs to exist - an economic basis. So its construction has ended, it is mostly unoccupied and parts of it are falling apart. Also - his designs were all grandiose architect dreams, not carefully thought out city patterns where actual people might want to live. It is not a good idea to have one dilettante design a city for millions.
The thing about peak population is that the peak is reached not because of resource constraints, but because of the natural human inclination to have fewer children when people are healthy and have good access to education. Since all of that has been ramping up continuously we are in no danger of hitting resource limits.
The last sentence does not follow from the first. The human population stabilizing because of increased wealth halts more intensive resource use due to population increase it does not halt more intensive resource use because everyone is using more resources. To cite one example, the U.S. uses 30 times as much energy per capita as Bangladesh. If Bangladesh rose to the same level of national wealth, and increased its energy use identically then the use of energy resources would rise 30 times as well.
Currently the U.S. uses 3.5 times as much energy per capita as the world average. If the world population were to increases 50%, to 11 billion, and energy usage rose to the same level as the U.S. total energy consumption would rise 100 times.
Every country that undergoes industrialization shifts into a negative growth pattern eventually, with only some extremely limited exceptions (e.g. the high birth rate among the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel keeps that country in growth mode).
Early in the process government policy can distort this (the high birthrates encouraged in China and Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s) but as industrial society touches more of the population this rate inevitably falls. China pushed this along in the 1970s with its "One Child" policy, now abandoned, but China will not shift back into positive growth, the normal process of falling birth rates has taken hold.
But industrialization is not the only process that brings down birth rates, and may only be an enabling factor, rather than the true driving force. Bangladesh is the poster example for this. A conservative Muslim nation, that is one of the poorest in the world, it is now below the replacement rate. It did not take industrialization or becoming wealthy to do it, it was entirely the choice of the female population there. This phenomenon was entirely unexpected, until it happened, That is what this book is alluding to - educating women brings down birthrates by itself, and may be why it correlates with industrialization and wealth in the first place.
If you look at UN population projections by region you see every region in the world is projected to peak in population during this century and begin declining. Except for one, Africa. Continuous growth is projected there. What this book is arguing is that female education will bring down the birthrate there also, like it did in Bangladesh. The difference between UN and author projections for population in 2100 is due almost entirely due to differences in population projections for Africa.
I think the authors are likely correct in this regard.
But is the world population fated to shrink away to nothing now?
We don't know of a trend that will reverse it at present. Some countries are already heavily affected by declining (and aging) populations - Japan, Italy, Russia, Serbia (perhaps the lowest birthrate in the world), for example - and none of these has found a way to halt it yet.
But the Industrial Revolution was not predicted, the Green Revolution was not predicted, the fall of birth rates with industrialization was not predicted, and the fall in the birth rate of Bangladesh without industrialization was not predicted. That some future change in world human societies might stabilize populations globally certainly cannot be ruled out. It may be simply that no society currently affected by declining population has yet undergone a sufficient and necessary transformation - providing enough support and incentive to make higher rates of child-bearing attractive.
Even more remarkable about the B-52: the program to build it started in 1947 and it first flew in 1952. It is expected to remain in service until at least 2050 at which time the design will be more than a century old and the youngest airframes would be 88 years old, with others being over 90.
We already have adequate temporary storage: The cooling ponds at the nuclear plants.
You are almost correct, but for one detail. The cooling ponds are not adequate temporary storage, but the above ground concrete casks to which the fuel is transferred after a few years of cooling are. And that is where nearly all spent fuel resides today, in passive convection air-cooled concrete casks on-site with the power plant. Unlike ponds, these require no maintenance and the fuel is stable in them for millenia (indefinitely really).
So, yeah. A solved problem with current on-site storage, just not in pools.
1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. Note I don't say long term because what we call waste will be very very valuable, it's all transmuted isotopes most of which don't occur in nature.
2. Get the NRC out of the way and have them actually trim down and simplify the regulation of power plants.
3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built.
Spending money on new designs or upgrading and standardizing current design, would be great as well. Imagine if we had a national standard design that could be quickly deployed and licensed without endless approvals needed.
For once though I feel sorry for Mr. Gates, he is going to find just how much joy dealing with the idiocy environmentalism and the off grid hippies have injected into our society.
No, no, and no. And your beliefs about "regulation" are at least 30 years out of date, to the extent that they ever resembled reality at all.
A streamlined regulatory process has been in place since the Reagan Administration. At various points over the last three decades commercial operators have taken advantage of this to get plant licenses granted, and sometimes even to begin construction, but every time cost considerations have caused them to bail out. In 2007 a whole new batch of streamlined licenses were granted for seven AP-1000 new generation reactor plants. The AP-1000 is a greatly improved, standardized LWR design that promised lower costs of construction and enhanced safety. Of these seven units, five have been cancelled due to cost overruns, partly due to the inability to get components in a timely fashion, and only two are still under construction with costs three time the original estimate. The developer of the AP-1000, Westinghouse, went bankrupt three years ago.
So the standardized design, the streamlined regulation, all that was in place 12 years ago, yet only two hugely over-cost units look like they will be completed. Neither evil greenies, nor NIBYism, nor government regulation, nor lack of standardized design is responsible. What is responsible is the parlous state of the nuclear construction industry, the long dearth of orders left very little experience or infrastructure base, making the construction effort fragile, unreliable and prone to massive cost increases.
China has an AP-1000 plant that started last year, but it also was way over cost, and delayed for two years because of the problems of getting components. But thanks to the fact that it is a government run enterprise they did get it built, and others are expected to follow, though the bankruptcy of Westinghouse has meant that they need to take over the technology themselves completely.
Every nation in the world with a healthy nuclear power industry (China, South Korea, France, Russia) has that industry run as a largely government owned or run enterprise, able to absorb start up costs, and take advantage of scale in deploying many units spread across a regular schedule.
Oh, the issue about waste repositories is a red herring. What we are currently doing, storing spent fuel on site in above ground concrete casks at the power plant site is perfectly satisfactory as a method of storage. At some future time we might collect them into a single cask site to reduce security costs, but while the co-located plant in operating, needing security anyway, the supposed cost advantage does not exist. Cask storage is stable for thousands of years.
Yeah, off the grid hippies control American government and have corporate American at their mercy. Sure.
When a group of people who are profiting from fraud, and are aware of it, get together and decide to take no action so that they can continue to profit, that sounds like a criminal conspiracy.
You could just actually look the subject up, read some recent material, and know something rather than gas in ignorance. There are these cool things called "The Internet" and "Google", you should give them a try.
No one is going to "show" you something. You have to look.
Try this - find an actual recent scientific paper on the subject, read it, and if you disagree, post a link here are your specific criticisms about it.
Maybe there is a space lawyer here (yes, the exist). But in the absence of one...
I think this is adequately covered by the Laws of the Sea. Every vessel on the ocean is under the jurisdiction of some nation, their "flag state". The space vessel that brought the guy to the Moon, and which he lives in (no, you can't set up homesteading in a vacuum), was made somewhere on Earth, was licensed to fly, is likely owned by someone there, so establishing the "flag state" of the vessel should be trivial. If an extradition treaty exists then the flag state (assuming it is not the one after him) can get him and turn him over, or grant the aggrieved party the right to make the arrest themselves. Since no one can do this yet, there is not much case law or special legislation about this, but there will be when the time is ripe.
I'm not siding with those that say this was aliens... but from 56,000 kmh to 10,800,000 kmh is only a 190x increase.
Increasing any gross physical quantity by 190-fold hardly merits an "only", especially when you are talking about the maximum limit of a technical achievement by the human race.
But you are conceptualizing it incorrectly. Difficulty in achieving high velocity does not scale linearly no matter how you look at it. Since kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, something going 190 times faster requires 36100 as much energy, so it would be more accurate to say that it is a 36,100x increase.
But even that does not capture the real difficulty. If you must use staging, then each additional stage represents a constant multiplier in mass (and thus cost) but provides only a linear increment in velocity. So going to higher velocities become exponentially more difficult (and then if you get into the relativistic regime it gets even harder than that).
There's no good reason for the government to constantly exempt farmers from the normal law of supply and demand.
There is a reason, and it's a damn good one: To regulate supply and stabilize pricing.
Think about it: have you ever had to worry about food, really, really worry about it?
I entirely agree. There is no agricultural economy anywhere in the world that does not require government intervention to maintain a stable business environment. It is the nature of the beast. Industrial agriculture is vulnerable to the vagaries of nature, and have characteristics that no other economic activity possess - it is an essential primary producer, it is tied to seasonal cycles by nature with naturally fixed production cycles, it has large capital inputs that must be recouped on an annual basis, and the ability to stockpile its product (create "inventory") is limited at best.
That has been the primary purpose of the US Farm Bill: to encourage, subsidize, and regulate the food market, stabilizing pricing and providing ample food supply.
Lots of caveats about that though. Yes, that should be the primary purpose of the US Farm Bill. But in an era in which farm production is almost entirely from huge agricultural corporations it is heavily loaded with nonsensical and even counter-productive pay-offs, and actual management of supply (as in the milk situation) has been poor. The worst example is the Federally mandated for grotesque over-production that greatly exceeds all other farm products in tonnage and value in the U.S. Most of that corn goes into government-subsidized gasohol production, a strictly energy-negative activity that increases the U.S. carbon footprint. It is basically handing over taxpayer money to the likes of Archer-Danile-Midlands to produce a crop that Americans don't need, at a heavy cost to the environment. That should be stopped completely.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems like a fairly light penalty. Now if we count each user who had their contacts stolen in this manner than would be a $15 billion dollar fine. But I think that each contact stolen should be the definitions of "theft" in this case. So if we the average address book has, say 50 contacts in it, that would be $750 billion. Seems about right for a long running bit of organized crime.
It sure helps businesses innovate! /s
(Germany was once called the land of thinkers and poets. That was during a time where it had no copyright-like laws. While the UK, who had them already, fell into an information dark age. Lesson learned, right?)
The phrase was, in German "Das Land der Dichter und Denker".
In the middle of the 20th Century this was transmuted into "Das Land der Richter und Henker" (the land of judges and executioners).
Right you are. Space fanboys always focus on the fuel and energy, which fall into the category of "round-off error" for all space flight systems, Fuel is free, in comparison to the hardware and operations costs. And that is what makes SpaceX viable - they are cutting the one cost that dominates, the flight hardware, by reusing it.
In order to make it there to begin with it would have to be huge.
Or it could be very tiny like the StarChip proposal. But either way it is not landing on any planets.
Correct. The Republicans would maintain simultaneously that providing broadband is an "information service" and thus cannot be regulated by the FCC since its business is proving informational content, while a the same time being a common carrier, and thus free of any liability for what goes over its pipes ("tubes" to some Congressfolk) since it does not provide any informational content.
I hope you got better brothers after that. In retrospect were there any tells that they might destroy your property?
In Japan they can build an advanced cryogenic containment system for a reactor disaster for $300 million.
California needed $1100 million to patch a leaky spillway at a dam. It would take a few trillion dollars for California to contain a damaged reactor.
Where did you get the idea that the ice barrier is "advanced"? This is routine technology, widely used for more than a century. There a major construction companies that specialize in it. It was used in Boston's "Big Dig" for example. It is somewhat interesting that this technology is being used at Fukushima, but nothing surprising or innovative about it.
Yeah major repairs on the tallest dam in the U.S., while is it still full, including improvements to prevent recurrence of a similar event, can be done for pocket change. Sure.
The moon gets a lot more exciting when we get cheap titanium and aluminum down to Earth and power from solar cells from the moon's crust. Oh, and maybe in 10 years or so we'll know what to do with He3.
The spot market price for aluminum goes as low as $0.80/lb right now. Titanium costs $25/lb. Even if stacks of aluminum and titanium ingots were sitting on the Moon right now it would never be profitable to ship them back to Earth.
The market for He-3 is tiny, several millions dollars a year, used as a neutron detector. It is an order of magnitude harder to use He-3 as a fusion fuel than deuterium-tritium which has no prospect of ever being a commercially viable source of electricity due to the high capital cost, even if you believe all of Lockheed-Martin's press releases.
Your best shot of making money for anything on the Moon is collecting souvenir Moon rocks and selling them for $$ on a gram basis. Scientific researchers would buy them too.
Might be a little late for karma whoring but... bare with me here.
No. Just no. I am not getting bare with you, even if you leave whoring out of the equation.
Some humans have 20/20 vision. Some humans have 20/200 vision. Some humans have 20/10 vision. Some humans have much better vision than that.
If you do a strip mine on the front side, people will see it. Unaided. Also: contrast, and shadows. Remember, the Sun is reflecting directly, without having been attenuated by an atmosphere. That totally changes the visibility distance calculations.
The limit of the size of a lunar feature detectable by people with really good vision is about 100 km -- the size of Copernicus crater. It is an an actual feature on the Moon and it is in fact the limit of what can be seen. This is very well established. Kepler crater, at half this is invisible to the naked eye. Only people using telescopes can see it (binoculars are just two small telescopes mounted together).
The largest surface mine on Earth is the Hull–Rust–Mahoning Open Pit Iron Mine in Hibbing, Minnesota about 5 km in its largest dimension.
If it was diamonds that would be a game-changer for the space race, because the industrial uses of diamonds are highly constrained by price and availability.
No they aren't. Diamond edged tools are cheap and widely available. Often tungsten carbide (or other super-hard ceramics) is better though since they can take higher temperatures and are not subject to oxidation.
Industrial uses of diamonds have not been "highly constrained" by prices for about 60 years when synthetic diamonds replaced natural diamonds for industrial uses because making them was cheaper than mining them. Natural diamonds used industrially today are simply byproducts of gem diamond mining operations. And before you suggest that maybe they could profitably mine gem diamonds on the Moon you should be made aware that gem diamonds are cheaper to make synthetically than mining here on Earth and this has been true for 20 years now.
You haven't seen synthetic diamonds swamping the diamond market so far simply because the jeweler supply chain set up nearly a century ago by De Beers bans synthetics, unless they have been conform to the same cartel pricing as all other diamond producers. And not having a sales system of their own, the synthetic diamond makers have complied (plus it gives them huge margins, even if it limits their sales).
But De Beers got out of the cartel years ago (but it still the cartel continues to operate in an informal cooperative basis, the supply chain still exists) and last year began direct sales of synthetic diamonds undercutting the cartel it originally set up. I suspect more diamond makers are going to start direct sales in the future. The natural diamond mining industry will survive if it continues to be able to convince women that men don't love them unless they buy them natural diamonds. This marketeer invented "tradition" which did not exist before the 1930s may no survive the present century.
And then there is the little matter of their being no diamonds on the Moon. Their are suitable materials or processes to have made any.
... you can buy plutonium off the shelf ...
Where? The only commercial source of plutonium I have ever heard of are ionization smoke detectors (like the KV-1) sold in the Soviet Union, but apparently not made in decades. These don't show up on eBay much (I check from time to time). List a source, or you are blowing smoke.
and order deuterium oxide right from Canada.
I don't know of a regular commercial Canadian source (isotope vendors usually don't sell to the public), do you? If so, list them here. I do know of a U.S. source though, United Nuclear, as far as I know this where all fusor makers get their material (and where I got mine).
I'm pretty sure the do-it-yourself kit also includes radiation poisoning, shorter life span, and investigation by a nuclear regulatory agency since the persons involved would be glowing to the radiation detectors in pretty much any western city...especially since a simple radioactive dye will trip them.
Not with a Farnsworth Fusor. These only put out a few million neutrons a second. Assuming a high performing unit with 10 million, that is 10,000,000 * 2.5 MeV * 1.6*10^-13 J/MeV = 4*10^-6 J/s. A rad is 0.01 J/kg of tissue, so a 50 kg kid would require 0.5 J to get a one rad whole body dose. If the actual absorption from the fusor were 10% of its emission (he isn't wrapped around it), then he would have to sit next to it for 2 weeks without a break to get to 1 rad exposure. Radiation poisoning (overt toxicity) sets in around 200 rads in a short period, no acute symptoms would show up if this is spread out over weeks, much less the 8 years of sitting next to the fusor he would need. He could get up to a 2000 rad lifetime exposure sitting next to it his whole life (80 years) but would never show radiation symptions. His cancer risk would be bumped a bit though.
No, it's actually about high time somebody asked this question.
It is indeed. And the answer is clear. Medicine and medical research must not be driven by market economics.
That medicine emerged as a major profit making industry in the 20th Century was due to a transitional phase in science and health care, wherein most things could not be cured, but treatment was huge business opportunity.
Some of the most dramatic improvements in U.S., and world, health in the 20th Century was in the development of vaccines which were one of the cheapest interventions also. But what gets little attention is that this was always a government and charitable foundation activity, not a business, and not profit making.
Health care must be a service available to everyone, with government taking the lead role in supplying it. There is plenty of room for business in the delivery process, but profit must not be allowed to drive health care decisions. Period.
As I recall from something I read a long time ago the minimum size of a breeding population to avoid inbreeding problems is about 10,000. To assure this is truly self perpetuating then the population would have to be far larger, and likely selected against many inheritable diseases.
There are, and have been, populations like this on Earth. As one might imagine this turned out well in some cases and not so well in others. Part of this is social pressures on who is an acceptable breeding partner. If cousin marriage is considered accepted, even though far better mates exist, this can result in a drop of IQ, physical deformities, and all kinds of bad things for the future of the population.
There several problems with this.
First it is helpful to distinguish between the necessary size of a founding population from the how large a population needs to be over the long term, as these are not the same at all.
Successful founding populations throughout the human migrations over the globe have usually been small - a single band consisting of no more than a few hundred people, which is in itself not very diverse. The entire population of humans outside of African appears to have descended from an out-migration of no more than a few thousand breeding individuals, and perhaps as few as about 400 hundred. And no, Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed no more than 2% of the DNA to this population, so they did not add much genetic diversity. A small number of out-breeding events does not greatly increase the effective size of the ancestor population.
In fact as humans migrated around the globe there was a process of continually reducing diversity through the serial founder effect. New populations would be founded by a single band, with a population of no more than a few hundred, and usually less than that. And further expansion started from this reduced genetic base by further small founder groups.
The estimated size required for terrestrial vertebrate populations for long term survival is 500-1000 individuals, to avoid gene loss through genetic drift the population needs to be about 5000 (i.e. it preserves its genetic diversity). Humans are not bound by this though, since with genetic testing deliberate breeding selection can prevent the effect of random drift, so the aforementioned 500-1000 should be enough.
It should be observed that for most the existence of H. sapiens sapiens the entire human population on Earth was not "far larger" than 10,000. Genetic evidence (as well as knowledge of the African environment) indicate that 10,000 to a few tens of thousands over some 200,000 years was the entire H. sapiens sapiens population from which all modern humans descended.
If preserving human genetic diversity is a top priority then the space settlers would need to be mostly African since most of human genetic diversity is found in ancestral African populations. Some Eurasians would be needed to pick up the Neanderthal/Denisovan DNA and recent mutations from outside Africa (last 50,000 years) but most black Africans would be logical population.
American int eh 20th Century picked up a peculiar horror about familial inbreeding not based on actual evidence. It is not that problems to do not exist, but the effects are exaggerated to preposterous levels, and ignores the fact that cousin marriage has been common throughout history. In small bands it is impossible to avoid. Third cousin marriage in fact appears to maximize fertility, it is lower among unrelated people.
Somebody invented the word 'archology' and drew a big book of pictures back in the 1960s.
I don't think he lived near the sea. Certainly never maintained a boat on salt water. Too much acid.
Arcology. Paolo Soleri. He also started a silly project to build one of his utopian cities in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti, without considering the one thing that every city needs to exist - an economic basis. So its construction has ended, it is mostly unoccupied and parts of it are falling apart. Also - his designs were all grandiose architect dreams, not carefully thought out city patterns where actual people might want to live. It is not a good idea to have one dilettante design a city for millions.
The thing about peak population is that the peak is reached not because of resource constraints, but because of the natural human inclination to have fewer children when people are healthy and have good access to education. Since all of that has been ramping up continuously we are in no danger of hitting resource limits.
The last sentence does not follow from the first. The human population stabilizing because of increased wealth halts more intensive resource use due to population increase it does not halt more intensive resource use because everyone is using more resources. To cite one example, the U.S. uses 30 times as much energy per capita as Bangladesh. If Bangladesh rose to the same level of national wealth, and increased its energy use identically then the use of energy resources would rise 30 times as well.
Currently the U.S. uses 3.5 times as much energy per capita as the world average. If the world population were to increases 50%, to 11 billion, and energy usage rose to the same level as the U.S. total energy consumption would rise 100 times.
Every country that undergoes industrialization shifts into a negative growth pattern eventually, with only some extremely limited exceptions (e.g. the high birth rate among the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel keeps that country in growth mode).
Early in the process government policy can distort this (the high birthrates encouraged in China and Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s) but as industrial society touches more of the population this rate inevitably falls. China pushed this along in the 1970s with its "One Child" policy, now abandoned, but China will not shift back into positive growth, the normal process of falling birth rates has taken hold.
But industrialization is not the only process that brings down birth rates, and may only be an enabling factor, rather than the true driving force. Bangladesh is the poster example for this. A conservative Muslim nation, that is one of the poorest in the world, it is now below the replacement rate. It did not take industrialization or becoming wealthy to do it, it was entirely the choice of the female population there. This phenomenon was entirely unexpected, until it happened, That is what this book is alluding to - educating women brings down birthrates by itself, and may be why it correlates with industrialization and wealth in the first place.
If you look at UN population projections by region you see every region in the world is projected to peak in population during this century and begin declining. Except for one, Africa. Continuous growth is projected there. What this book is arguing is that female education will bring down the birthrate there also, like it did in Bangladesh. The difference between UN and author projections for population in 2100 is due almost entirely due to differences in population projections for Africa.
I think the authors are likely correct in this regard.
But is the world population fated to shrink away to nothing now?
We don't know of a trend that will reverse it at present. Some countries are already heavily affected by declining (and aging) populations - Japan, Italy, Russia, Serbia (perhaps the lowest birthrate in the world), for example - and none of these has found a way to halt it yet.
But the Industrial Revolution was not predicted, the Green Revolution was not predicted, the fall of birth rates with industrialization was not predicted, and the fall in the birth rate of Bangladesh without industrialization was not predicted. That some future change in world human societies might stabilize populations globally certainly cannot be ruled out. It may be simply that no society currently affected by declining population has yet undergone a sufficient and necessary transformation - providing enough support and incentive to make higher rates of child-bearing attractive.
Even more remarkable about the B-52: the program to build it started in 1947 and it first flew in 1952. It is expected to remain in service until at least 2050 at which time the design will be more than a century old and the youngest airframes would be 88 years old, with others being over 90.
1 To get a temporary waste repository in place.
We already have adequate temporary storage: The cooling ponds at the nuclear plants.
You are almost correct, but for one detail. The cooling ponds are not adequate temporary storage, but the above ground concrete casks to which the fuel is transferred after a few years of cooling are. And that is where nearly all spent fuel resides today, in passive convection air-cooled concrete casks on-site with the power plant. Unlike ponds, these require no maintenance and the fuel is stable in them for millenia (indefinitely really).
So, yeah. A solved problem with current on-site storage, just not in pools.
1 To get a temporary waste repository in place. Note I don't say long term because what we call waste will be very very valuable, it's all transmuted isotopes most of which don't occur in nature.
2. Get the NRC out of the way and have them actually trim down and simplify the regulation of power plants.
3. Streamline the licensing so new plants can actually get built.
Spending money on new designs or upgrading and standardizing current design, would be great as well. Imagine if we had a national standard design that could be quickly deployed and licensed without endless approvals needed.
For once though I feel sorry for Mr. Gates, he is going to find just how much joy dealing with the idiocy environmentalism and the off grid hippies have injected into our society.
No, no, and no. And your beliefs about "regulation" are at least 30 years out of date, to the extent that they ever resembled reality at all.
A streamlined regulatory process has been in place since the Reagan Administration. At various points over the last three decades commercial operators have taken advantage of this to get plant licenses granted, and sometimes even to begin construction, but every time cost considerations have caused them to bail out. In 2007 a whole new batch of streamlined licenses were granted for seven AP-1000 new generation reactor plants. The AP-1000 is a greatly improved, standardized LWR design that promised lower costs of construction and enhanced safety. Of these seven units, five have been cancelled due to cost overruns, partly due to the inability to get components in a timely fashion, and only two are still under construction with costs three time the original estimate. The developer of the AP-1000, Westinghouse, went bankrupt three years ago.
So the standardized design, the streamlined regulation, all that was in place 12 years ago, yet only two hugely over-cost units look like they will be completed. Neither evil greenies, nor NIBYism, nor government regulation, nor lack of standardized design is responsible. What is responsible is the parlous state of the nuclear construction industry, the long dearth of orders left very little experience or infrastructure base, making the construction effort fragile, unreliable and prone to massive cost increases.
China has an AP-1000 plant that started last year, but it also was way over cost, and delayed for two years because of the problems of getting components. But thanks to the fact that it is a government run enterprise they did get it built, and others are expected to follow, though the bankruptcy of Westinghouse has meant that they need to take over the technology themselves completely.
Every nation in the world with a healthy nuclear power industry (China, South Korea, France, Russia) has that industry run as a largely government owned or run enterprise, able to absorb start up costs, and take advantage of scale in deploying many units spread across a regular schedule.
Oh, the issue about waste repositories is a red herring. What we are currently doing, storing spent fuel on site in above ground concrete casks at the power plant site is perfectly satisfactory as a method of storage. At some future time we might collect them into a single cask site to reduce security costs, but while the co-located plant in operating, needing security anyway, the supposed cost advantage does not exist. Cask storage is stable for thousands of years.
Yeah, off the grid hippies control American government and have corporate American at their mercy. Sure.
When a group of people who are profiting from fraud, and are aware of it, get together and decide to take no action so that they can continue to profit, that sounds like a criminal conspiracy.
You could just actually look the subject up, read some recent material, and know something rather than gas in ignorance. There are these cool things called "The Internet" and "Google", you should give them a try.
No one is going to "show" you something. You have to look.
Try this - find an actual recent scientific paper on the subject, read it, and if you disagree, post a link here are your specific criticisms about it.
Maybe there is a space lawyer here (yes, the exist). But in the absence of one...
I think this is adequately covered by the Laws of the Sea. Every vessel on the ocean is under the jurisdiction of some nation, their "flag state". The space vessel that brought the guy to the Moon, and which he lives in (no, you can't set up homesteading in a vacuum), was made somewhere on Earth, was licensed to fly, is likely owned by someone there, so establishing the "flag state" of the vessel should be trivial. If an extradition treaty exists then the flag state (assuming it is not the one after him) can get him and turn him over, or grant the aggrieved party the right to make the arrest themselves. Since no one can do this yet, there is not much case law or special legislation about this, but there will be when the time is ripe.
I'm not siding with those that say this was aliens... but from 56,000 kmh to 10,800,000 kmh is only a 190x increase.
Increasing any gross physical quantity by 190-fold hardly merits an "only", especially when you are talking about the maximum limit of a technical achievement by the human race.
But you are conceptualizing it incorrectly. Difficulty in achieving high velocity does not scale linearly no matter how you look at it. Since kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, something going 190 times faster requires 36100 as much energy, so it would be more accurate to say that it is a 36,100x increase.
But even that does not capture the real difficulty. If you must use staging, then each additional stage represents a constant multiplier in mass (and thus cost) but provides only a linear increment in velocity. So going to higher velocities become exponentially more difficult (and then if you get into the relativistic regime it gets even harder than that).
There's no good reason for the government to constantly exempt farmers from the normal law of supply and demand.
There is a reason, and it's a damn good one: To regulate supply and stabilize pricing.
Think about it: have you ever had to worry about food, really, really worry about it?
I entirely agree. There is no agricultural economy anywhere in the world that does not require government intervention to maintain a stable business environment. It is the nature of the beast. Industrial agriculture is vulnerable to the vagaries of nature, and have characteristics that no other economic activity possess - it is an essential primary producer, it is tied to seasonal cycles by nature with naturally fixed production cycles, it has large capital inputs that must be recouped on an annual basis, and the ability to stockpile its product (create "inventory") is limited at best.
That has been the primary purpose of the US Farm Bill: to encourage, subsidize, and regulate the food market, stabilizing pricing and providing ample food supply.
Lots of caveats about that though. Yes, that should be the primary purpose of the US Farm Bill. But in an era in which farm production is almost entirely from huge agricultural corporations it is heavily loaded with nonsensical and even counter-productive pay-offs, and actual management of supply (as in the milk situation) has been poor. The worst example is the Federally mandated for grotesque over-production that greatly exceeds all other farm products in tonnage and value in the U.S. Most of that corn goes into government-subsidized gasohol production, a strictly energy-negative activity that increases the U.S. carbon footprint. It is basically handing over taxpayer money to the likes of Archer-Danile-Midlands to produce a crop that Americans don't need, at a heavy cost to the environment. That should be stopped completely.