.. And if you're a decent architect, even in the US, you should know very well how high that is.
I believe his point was that the customer would not know the "status" of the ceiling height (he explained at some length about being more than comfortable with metric units).
... Physicists will say, how could the other electron possibly know this, instantly. But a very simple explanation is that the device always shoots 1 up, 1 down. Sure you don't know if it's up or down until you measure it, but that doesn't make it spooky at all.
...
But that very simple explanation is provably incorrect. Your intuition is what is called "local realism" - that the two particles actually always have definite (though unknown) states that do not change (realism), and that the two particles are not affected by things happening at a distance (locality). John Stewart Bell developed a theorem about the statistical correlations between entangled particles, and showed that a particular property called Bell's Inequality can distinguish between the local realist interpretation and the quantum mechanical one. In other words, he showed how the two ideas predict different things. Experiments done to test this inequality consistently support the quantum interpretation.
Indeed - I am a Blu-ray movie fan and I still buy DVDs. Why? Most movies don't provide a significantly better experience in Blu-ray and paying even a modest premium makes no sense. I certainly am never going to replace my existing DVD collection - only my most favorite films a worth Blu-ray upgrades.
359 / 1,000,000 which is significantly better than 1 in a billion, and exactly 359 times better than a one in a million shot at greatness and celebrity!
You could have improved your estimate by estimating how many men (no women's teams here) are available to fill the pro ranks. There are about 4 million Americans of a given age (18 say) in this cohort, and half of them are men. So the denominator should be 2 million. Some may object that U.S. pro teams actually draw from a much larger population base (imported players), but then U.S. players have opportunities in Japanese baseball and Canadian football.
... Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom...
All we need to do is commercialize the silent supersonic flight technology that they've perfected out at Groom Lake. Oops... I should't have said that.
Looking at this rendering of the design, my first reaction is: how the hell can it see anything with that enormous chunk in the middle? Is that the secondary reflector? Or is that where the curved CCD will be housed (obviating the need for a secondary: it would be the secondary). And there's an awful lot of superstructure to hold that thing in place: won't that also obscure the field of view?
Any optics experts want to field this one?
First note that it is reported to have a three and a half meter mirror. All mirrors in this size are really multiple mirrors that use servos to keep them in common focus, so it is likely really a ring of smaller mirrors.
Second, of course the CCD camera is mounted in front of the mirrors. No high performance optical system puts extra optics in the way, and with a super-fast F/1 focal length it forms the image directly in front of the mirror, only longer focal length mirrors can extract the image to the side or behind. The large housing no doubt includes advanced (and secret) active optics to smooth out the image - the real "secret sauce".
This chart applies only to "prompt" doses. Most of the casualties from Chernobyl (4000 to 8000 fatalities and counting) were from Thyroid cancer caused by exposure of children to radioactive Iodine....
The thyroid cancers, fortunately, did not cause many deaths, since it is highly treatable by thyroid removal (you were right when you counted them as casualties, but not as fatalities). This should not be treated lightly of course - who wants to see thousands of kids getting sick with thyroid cancer, have to undergo thyroid removal surgery, then be on thyroid replacement drugs for the rest of their life?
The eventual cancer death toll from Chernobyl is expected to top 10,000 or so eventually however, spread of millions of people.
I think you mean, the American literature. AFAIK, the Russian literature never used REMs at all, and some of it is in Becqurels and Curies.
When the Soviet's opened up about Chernobyl they published readings in (IIRC) Becquerels or Becquerels/m^3, causing intense puzzlement in the Western press as to how to interpret what they were saying.
No, the use of rems for radiation exposure was not restricted to Americans - or even just the English language literature (regardless of author nationality). The unit was developed in the 1940s to supplement the roentgen (which does not distinguish different radiation effects on humans) which was adopted internationally in 1928, and remained standard world-wide until the adoption of the sievert.
But the becqurels (an SI unit) and curies (an older non-SI unit) you cite are measures of radioactive decay, not radiation exposure. Looking over contemporary 1986 Chernobyl accident reports (you can find them in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on-line) I see a Soviets expressing radiation exposure in rems, like English speakers. The sievert was not adopted as an official unit by SI until well into the 1980s (it was first proposed in 1977), so what would they have been using before, other than rems?
A "new refrigerator" is, supposedly, more efficient than the last one. The emergence of IT made entire armies of secretaries, messengers, archive managers, human computers etc obsolete, changing society profoundly. The comparison to an iterative development of an existing technology strikes me as moot.
A very interesting expanded comparison between IT and refrigerators can be made. The introduction of refrigerators also changed society profoundly (though perhaps not quite as profoundly as IT). The ability to ship food long distances and store it for long periods of time throughout the supply chain, right down into the kitchen, the invention of new food products (Birdeye's flash frozen vegetables, etc.) had major economic and social implications. But this was in the first half of the 20th century, long before the life experience of/. readers.
And since 1972 there has also been a genuine revolution in refrigerator technology. Prices of refrigerators have plummeted, and efficiency has sky-rocketed. This chart only takes us to 1997, but it shows a near-tripling in energy efficiency over 25 years, and the progress has not stopped since then. A new 18 cubic foot refrigerator uses 350 kWh per year, which is an average energy consumption of only 40 watts. Most PCs use more power than this, even taking into account the long periods of idling.
I suggest that computer processor energy consumption needs to follow a curve like that of refrigerators as a share of the national energy consumption - reverse its still climbing share of national energy consumption, and begin a long decline.
There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.
...
It is useful to note how we happen to know about one of the great earthquakes that occurred during this period - the last great Cascadia quake on Jan. 27, 1700. We know about this one because of the "orphan tsunami" that hit Japan that day. It was a tsunami of historic proportions that appeared without warning due to a distant great earthquake. The evidence conclusively points to a Cascadia subduction zone quake up to Magnitude 9. Without the Japanese observation of the tsunami we might not know about this quake (though dating tree rings killed by the quake would have eventually uncovered it).
Who negotiated that, Madoff?. Tito paid only 20 megabucks, and that included the stay on the ISS, not only the transport up and down. Taking a little volume discount into the equation, everything over 15 M$ is plain ripoff.
...
On the other hand there is the hotel room pricing model. Some people stay in a room real cheap (online auction sites, special promotions etc.), at a price below what the hotel could sustain as its across the board rate. Why? The room would have been unfilled, and they carry overhead to take care of the room anyway - it adds to their balance sheet to fill it even at deep discount rates.
Tito was piggy-backing on a planned ISS mission. He was quite literally just paying for an unused seat. The subsidy to Tito (the U.S. was in effect, paying part of the price for Tito's flight) made NASA hopping mad.
For what its worth, every nuclear power plant in the US has a "temporary" containment facility for spent nuclear fuel. Every single one of them has been at capacity for at least a decade or two. All of them are full... and I don't understand what we've been doing with the spent fuel if we have no where to put it. We need to solve the waste problem NOW, with the waste we already have... before we solve the energy issue.
Oddly, it turns out we do have places to put the spent fuel. It is in heavy (~10 ton) concrete casks on the grounds of the nuclear power plants that generated it - where it is perfectly stable and safe. Most plants have no trouble hosting enough casks to accommodate all of the fuel they will produce during their operating life, and the casks can be relocated to remote above-ground storage reservations somewhere eventually (perhaps a literal "reservation" - the Chiricahua Apache have expressed in this).
Simply keeping these casks above ground in a guarded storage location is a perfectly reasonable permanent solution, and without doubt the cheapest. All the stuff about geological repositories was a misguided idea that the fuel could be made to effectively "disappear" from sight and controversy. It isn't discussed but we have, by default, already implemented what is probably the best solution.
... Even Chernobyl only killed 50 people! If you want to account for cancer diseases and such, bring that up to 500 or even 1000 if you want, but it's an unrealistically high estimate....
Actually there have been 5000 cases of thryroid cancer in children diagnosed (though this is treatable). The World Health Organizations's Expert Group investigating Chernobyl expects cancer deaths in exposed groups to be 4000 or so.
Fast breeder reactors can burn that waste leaving material with a half life of mere decades.
If only a working one could actually be built!
The two principal nations using nuclear power - France and Japan - have both tried to build commercial fast breeder reactors: Superphenix and Monju. Superphenix was shut down after only being able to operate at full power for one 10 month stretch. Monju, project started 26 years ago, and first criticality reached 17 years ago failed to ever achieve full power operation. It is now been restarted and may start finally producing electricity in 2014 (barring more plant problems), twenty years after its first start-up. Japan is planning a second FBR now, which is planned to start-up in 2025, fourteen years from now.
Perhaps commercial fast breeder reactors are the power source of the future, but it is turning out to be an incredibly difficult technology to perfect and have even larger capital costs than current nuclear power. There seems little prospect that we will have significant numbers in the next quarter century. If nuclear power is to have any significantly expanded role before mid-century it will have to be the advanced versions of current light water reactor technology.
... Instead, between a near-ban on new construction (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Japan)...
There has never been an near-ban on construction in the U.S. This is an empty myth. No new nuclear power plants have been constructed in a long time because the capital cost is too high, which makes them an unfavorable investment for power companies relative to coal (and now natural gas). The time to recoup the investment is much longer, making a riskier (and perhaps no more profitable) investment than fossil fuel options. It is that darn free market at work. This is why public bond measures have been required in the past to get nuclear power projects moving - the public assuming the risk. The options to get nuclear power plants built come down to two groups - government action to penalize coal (ban new plants, impose carbon tax, etc.) or boost nuclear power (bond measures, mandate nuclear power production, etc.).
Natural gas is a bit of a wild card thrown into the mix. A good game plan would be actually shutting down existing coal-fueled plants and converting to natural gas (some coal plants can be converted) - and using nuclear power for new capacity (which would take a full decade to ramp-up, due the lack of manufacturing capacity). But currently new nuclear plants have to compete directly against new coal and natural gas plants.
A 1990s Toyota is "easy" to make today, but if China starts making them in bulk then Toyota wouldn't be happy.
In a world where slightly outdated chips are "good enough", and the marginal cost of making them is probably a few bucks, I'd be very worried if a really big competitor was breathing down my neck.
...
Bingo! The U.S. lost its consumer electronics industry to Japan in the 1970s because U.S. manufacturers were not concerned with low cost competition on the low end of the market. The low end is always pretty big and massive sales makes massive revenues and massive production; massive production and revenue perfect the industrial processes and leads to superior design and production technology; superior technology extinguishes competition who focuses only on the "high end". The low end will move up and cannibalize the high end market.
The basic premise on which patents are based is flawed. The patent system assumes that a given invention is invented once by a single individual or company. In reality, may inventions are invented by several people working independently around the same time. In this case, why should one person be rewarded for the invention while others are not?
Even if people don't agree with my assertions above, the implentation of patents is broken by the very low threshold or originality required to obtain a patent.
You have a fundamental, but very common, misunderstanding about the primary purpose of patents. It is widely believed that patents were created for the purpose of rewarding innovative people, although it only does so for a limited time. Actually the purpose is to benefit society by encouraging the free exchange of useful innovations, the period of exclusive rights under patent is the cost society accepts in return. Without patents innovations would still 'all be developed by several people working independently around the same time', but they would all keep them as trade secrets and prevent their disclosure at all costs. This is what patents are intended to prevent.
Most things have a rather uniform density, so the volume:weight correlation should hold...
For pure chemical foods this should hold (sucrose and other sugars, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, etc.) pretty well, but organic materials (spices, flours, etc.) do have significant variation.
In brewing, by the way, accurate measurements of many ingredients is very important. Accuracy seems to make a bigger difference when making beer and wine than most types of recipes. (But then brewing is microbiology, not cooking.)
This is called socialism and has been tried the world over many many times and NEVER works. Technology usually leads to more different forms of work.
Spoken like a true Anonymous Coward! At least you have enough education to read your talking point card.
As the OP argued in his post spending Government money on long-term research (not something considered by most corporations these days, with quarterly profits to attend to) has been proven to provide powerful benefits (like this little ARPA project that you are using to disseminate your opinion).
The problem with just trusting in American corporations and unregulated capitalism to provide jobs, and a decent standard of living, to Americans is the technology does lead to different forms of work, but technology plus low wages leads to bigger corporate profits, so the jobs go overseas.
Socialist policies (by American standards) never, ever work - except of course in every other industrialized country in the world. These policies aren't in the interest of the Murdochs and Kochs of the world, so constant demonization is required to hide the fact that alternatives to the American corporatist approach do work better for the workers.
BTW - did you realize that Americans now work longer hours than even the Japanese? Only emerging economies work longer hours than the U.S. - check the OECD stats . There are already several industrialized nations (Netherlands, Denmark for example) that work shorter hours and have higher real wages than the U.S. Too small to count? Well Sweden and France, those cesspools of socialism, work shorter hours and have real wages almost exactly the same as the U.S. and the trend is going against America.
Constantly shouting "We're number one!" while already in the number three or four slot ensures we will meet numbers 5,6,7, etc. going up as we go farther and farther down.
You can legally get a prescription for THC in the US, the trade name is Marinol and assuming that the doctor is willing to go along with it, you can get it without any trouble. Which sort of discards the view that it's about big pharma.
...
You mean the fact that the only THC preparation legally available is a patented trademarked synthetic form of THC produced only by one Big Pharma company (Abbott Laboratories), and no plant-based preparation is available, discards the view that it is about big pharma?
Clearly......so this Indica is totally legal, right?
...
This argument has actually been tried in court - when legislation carefully specified not only the species of plant being banned (Cannabis sativa) but even the botanical authority that provided the classification from a type specimen (probably included in legislation because it sounded more imposing), it was argued that C. indica was not covered since it did not conform to the specified plant ban. The great Harvard botanist Robert Schultes testified about this, but the judge (and others after) ruled that what the law actually said, and the scientific facts, were immaterial. If the police and DA said it was the same thing, it was. Cannabis prohibition has long depended on ignoring actual facts and law - the DEA's continued illegal refusal to obey its own administrative law judge rulings on reclassification for medical use (which is supported by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine) is a case in point.
This doesn't sound like it would work! It's not as easy as netting fish in an ocean. We are talking about very high velocities here. If the orbital velocity of a piece of space junk doesn't closely match the orbital velocity of the net, it probably will blast right through the net... You are going after a piece of space debris and another piece of space debris collides with the net. The second piece, which you were not going after, is going to damage the net. Remember, they are talking about very large nets, the probability of this happening is not small.
I'd like to see an analysis of this capture system (with data on, for example, the strength of the net and resistance to penetration), but at an (educated) guess I'd say that it only captures a small fraction of the material it encounters, but that small fraction is much larger than the present rate of removal from orbit (which, above a certain altitude, is essentially zero). If the net works, I would expect a large number of them would be orbited over time.
Maybe we would eventually have an international launch authority that grants low altitude launch licenses and requires a certain number of orbit clearance net deployments for each launch license (like the environmental re-mediation requirements used with various licenses today).
As to whether stuff is going to punch holes in it - as you say the probability is high since it is a large net. But by the same token - this isn't going to matter. Very large net, very small holes, BFD.
"Mazes and Monsters" came out as a book in 1981, and as a made-for-TV movie in 1982. It is interesting to observe that the satanic child sex abuse witch-hunt (seriously folks - it went into Salem Massachusetts territory) of the 1980s began with the Kern Country case in 1982. There was some "bad craziness" (as Hunter S. Thompson might have said) in the air back then.
What these guys claim to have discovered is a nuclear reaction heretofore unknown to science.
What a scientist does when discovering something like this (or if they truly think they have) is to set up a closely controlled demonstration of the phenomenon that carefully documents the physical conditions, and all of the measurable evidence associated with the reaction.
Turning nickel into copper? Amazing! Forget all the boiling water stuff, the commercial power production claims, etc. - lets just see a reproducible experiment of nickel being turned into copper on any scale. They don't even need a theoretical explanation - a good experiment opens the door to theorists galore. Theorists love unexplained experiments - that are real.
Was high temperature superconductivity ignored because there was no theory that explains it (and there still isn't an adequate one)? No!
Slashdot Mirror
(Who would know the status of a 2600mm ceiling?!)
.. And if you're a decent architect, even in the US, you should know very well how high that is.
I believe his point was that the customer would not know the "status" of the ceiling height (he explained at some length about being more than comfortable with metric units).
... Physicists will say, how could the other electron possibly know this, instantly. But a very simple explanation is that the device always shoots 1 up, 1 down. Sure you don't know if it's up or down until you measure it, but that doesn't make it spooky at all.
...
But that very simple explanation is provably incorrect. Your intuition is what is called "local realism" - that the two particles actually always have definite (though unknown) states that do not change (realism), and that the two particles are not affected by things happening at a distance (locality). John Stewart Bell developed a theorem about the statistical correlations between entangled particles, and showed that a particular property called Bell's Inequality can distinguish between the local realist interpretation and the quantum mechanical one. In other words, he showed how the two ideas predict different things. Experiments done to test this inequality consistently support the quantum interpretation.
Indeed - I am a Blu-ray movie fan and I still buy DVDs. Why? Most movies don't provide a significantly better experience in Blu-ray and paying even a modest premium makes no sense. I certainly am never going to replace my existing DVD collection - only my most favorite films a worth Blu-ray upgrades.
...The local swimming / golf / basketball instructor at the local club does not make the same money as Phelps / Woods / Jordan.
Or, more to the point, the same money as your average local software engineer.
359 / 1,000,000 which is significantly better than 1 in a billion, and exactly 359 times better than a one in a million shot at greatness and celebrity!
You could have improved your estimate by estimating how many men (no women's teams here) are available to fill the pro ranks. There are about 4 million Americans of a given age (18 say) in this cohort, and half of them are men. So the denominator should be 2 million. Some may object that U.S. pro teams actually draw from a much larger population base (imported players), but then U.S. players have opportunities in Japanese baseball and Canadian football.
... Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom...
All we need to do is commercialize the silent supersonic flight technology that they've perfected out at Groom Lake. Oops... I should't have said that.
Looking at this rendering of the design, my first reaction is: how the hell can it see anything with that enormous chunk in the middle? Is that the secondary reflector? Or is that where the curved CCD will be housed (obviating the need for a secondary: it would be the secondary). And there's an awful lot of superstructure to hold that thing in place: won't that also obscure the field of view? Any optics experts want to field this one?
First note that it is reported to have a three and a half meter mirror. All mirrors in this size are really multiple mirrors that use servos to keep them in common focus, so it is likely really a ring of smaller mirrors.
Second, of course the CCD camera is mounted in front of the mirrors. No high performance optical system puts extra optics in the way, and with a super-fast F/1 focal length it forms the image directly in front of the mirror, only longer focal length mirrors can extract the image to the side or behind. The large housing no doubt includes advanced (and secret) active optics to smooth out the image - the real "secret sauce".
This chart applies only to "prompt" doses. Most of the casualties from Chernobyl (4000 to 8000 fatalities and counting) were from Thyroid cancer caused by exposure of children to radioactive Iodine....
The thyroid cancers, fortunately, did not cause many deaths, since it is highly treatable by thyroid removal (you were right when you counted them as casualties, but not as fatalities). This should not be treated lightly of course - who wants to see thousands of kids getting sick with thyroid cancer, have to undergo thyroid removal surgery, then be on thyroid replacement drugs for the rest of their life?
The eventual cancer death toll from Chernobyl is expected to top 10,000 or so eventually however, spread of millions of people.
I think you mean, the American literature. AFAIK, the Russian literature never used REMs at all, and some of it is in Becqurels and Curies.
When the Soviet's opened up about Chernobyl they published readings in (IIRC) Becquerels or Becquerels/m^3, causing intense puzzlement in the Western press as to how to interpret what they were saying.
No, the use of rems for radiation exposure was not restricted to Americans - or even just the English language literature (regardless of author nationality). The unit was developed in the 1940s to supplement the roentgen (which does not distinguish different radiation effects on humans) which was adopted internationally in 1928, and remained standard world-wide until the adoption of the sievert.
But the becqurels (an SI unit) and curies (an older non-SI unit) you cite are measures of radioactive decay, not radiation exposure. Looking over contemporary 1986 Chernobyl accident reports (you can find them in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on-line) I see a Soviets expressing radiation exposure in rems, like English speakers. The sievert was not adopted as an official unit by SI until well into the 1980s (it was first proposed in 1977), so what would they have been using before, other than rems?
A "new refrigerator" is, supposedly, more efficient than the last one. The emergence of IT made entire armies of secretaries, messengers, archive managers, human computers etc obsolete, changing society profoundly. The comparison to an iterative development of an existing technology strikes me as moot.
A very interesting expanded comparison between IT and refrigerators can be made. The introduction of refrigerators also changed society profoundly (though perhaps not quite as profoundly as IT). The ability to ship food long distances and store it for long periods of time throughout the supply chain, right down into the kitchen, the invention of new food products (Birdeye's flash frozen vegetables, etc.) had major economic and social implications. But this was in the first half of the 20th century, long before the life experience of /. readers.
And since 1972 there has also been a genuine revolution in refrigerator technology. Prices of refrigerators have plummeted, and efficiency has sky-rocketed. This chart only takes us to 1997, but it shows a near-tripling in energy efficiency over 25 years, and the progress has not stopped since then. A new 18 cubic foot refrigerator uses 350 kWh per year, which is an average energy consumption of only 40 watts. Most PCs use more power than this, even taking into account the long periods of idling.
I suggest that computer processor energy consumption needs to follow a curve like that of refrigerators as a share of the national energy consumption - reverse its still climbing share of national energy consumption, and begin a long decline.
...
There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.
...
It is useful to note how we happen to know about one of the great earthquakes that occurred during this period - the last great Cascadia quake on Jan. 27, 1700. We know about this one because of the "orphan tsunami" that hit Japan that day. It was a tsunami of historic proportions that appeared without warning due to a distant great earthquake. The evidence conclusively points to a Cascadia subduction zone quake up to Magnitude 9. Without the Japanese observation of the tsunami we might not know about this quake (though dating tree rings killed by the quake would have eventually uncovered it).
Who negotiated that, Madoff?. Tito paid only 20 megabucks, and that included the stay on the ISS, not only the transport up and down. Taking a little volume discount into the equation, everything over 15 M$ is plain ripoff.
...
On the other hand there is the hotel room pricing model. Some people stay in a room real cheap (online auction sites, special promotions etc.), at a price below what the hotel could sustain as its across the board rate. Why? The room would have been unfilled, and they carry overhead to take care of the room anyway - it adds to their balance sheet to fill it even at deep discount rates.
Tito was piggy-backing on a planned ISS mission. He was quite literally just paying for an unused seat. The subsidy to Tito (the U.S. was in effect, paying part of the price for Tito's flight) made NASA hopping mad.
For what its worth, every nuclear power plant in the US has a "temporary" containment facility for spent nuclear fuel. Every single one of them has been at capacity for at least a decade or two. All of them are full... and I don't understand what we've been doing with the spent fuel if we have no where to put it. We need to solve the waste problem NOW, with the waste we already have... before we solve the energy issue.
Oddly, it turns out we do have places to put the spent fuel. It is in heavy (~10 ton) concrete casks on the grounds of the nuclear power plants that generated it - where it is perfectly stable and safe. Most plants have no trouble hosting enough casks to accommodate all of the fuel they will produce during their operating life, and the casks can be relocated to remote above-ground storage reservations somewhere eventually (perhaps a literal "reservation" - the Chiricahua Apache have expressed in this).
Simply keeping these casks above ground in a guarded storage location is a perfectly reasonable permanent solution, and without doubt the cheapest. All the stuff about geological repositories was a misguided idea that the fuel could be made to effectively "disappear" from sight and controversy. It isn't discussed but we have, by default, already implemented what is probably the best solution.
... Even Chernobyl only killed 50 people! If you want to account for cancer diseases and such, bring that up to 500 or even 1000 if you want, but it's an unrealistically high estimate. ...
Actually there have been 5000 cases of thryroid cancer in children diagnosed (though this is treatable). The World Health Organizations's Expert Group investigating Chernobyl expects cancer deaths in exposed groups to be 4000 or so.
Fast breeder reactors can burn that waste leaving material with a half life of mere decades.
If only a working one could actually be built!
The two principal nations using nuclear power - France and Japan - have both tried to build commercial fast breeder reactors: Superphenix and Monju. Superphenix was shut down after only being able to operate at full power for one 10 month stretch. Monju, project started 26 years ago, and first criticality reached 17 years ago failed to ever achieve full power operation. It is now been restarted and may start finally producing electricity in 2014 (barring more plant problems), twenty years after its first start-up. Japan is planning a second FBR now, which is planned to start-up in 2025, fourteen years from now.
Perhaps commercial fast breeder reactors are the power source of the future, but it is turning out to be an incredibly difficult technology to perfect and have even larger capital costs than current nuclear power. There seems little prospect that we will have significant numbers in the next quarter century. If nuclear power is to have any significantly expanded role before mid-century it will have to be the advanced versions of current light water reactor technology.
... Instead, between a near-ban on new construction (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Japan)...
There has never been an near-ban on construction in the U.S. This is an empty myth. No new nuclear power plants have been constructed in a long time because the capital cost is too high, which makes them an unfavorable investment for power companies relative to coal (and now natural gas). The time to recoup the investment is much longer, making a riskier (and perhaps no more profitable) investment than fossil fuel options. It is that darn free market at work. This is why public bond measures have been required in the past to get nuclear power projects moving - the public assuming the risk. The options to get nuclear power plants built come down to two groups - government action to penalize coal (ban new plants, impose carbon tax, etc.) or boost nuclear power (bond measures, mandate nuclear power production, etc.).
Natural gas is a bit of a wild card thrown into the mix. A good game plan would be actually shutting down existing coal-fueled plants and converting to natural gas (some coal plants can be converted) - and using nuclear power for new capacity (which would take a full decade to ramp-up, due the lack of manufacturing capacity). But currently new nuclear plants have to compete directly against new coal and natural gas plants.
A 1990s Toyota is "easy" to make today, but if China starts making them in bulk then Toyota wouldn't be happy.
In a world where slightly outdated chips are "good enough", and the marginal cost of making them is probably a few bucks, I'd be very worried if a really big competitor was breathing down my neck.
...
Bingo! The U.S. lost its consumer electronics industry to Japan in the 1970s because U.S. manufacturers were not concerned with low cost competition on the low end of the market. The low end is always pretty big and massive sales makes massive revenues and massive production; massive production and revenue perfect the industrial processes and leads to superior design and production technology; superior technology extinguishes competition who focuses only on the "high end". The low end will move up and cannibalize the high end market.
The basic premise on which patents are based is flawed. The patent system assumes that a given invention is invented once by a single individual or company. In reality, may inventions are invented by several people working independently around the same time. In this case, why should one person be rewarded for the invention while others are not?
Even if people don't agree with my assertions above, the implentation of patents is broken by the very low threshold or originality required to obtain a patent.
You have a fundamental, but very common, misunderstanding about the primary purpose of patents. It is widely believed that patents were created for the purpose of rewarding innovative people, although it only does so for a limited time. Actually the purpose is to benefit society by encouraging the free exchange of useful innovations, the period of exclusive rights under patent is the cost society accepts in return. Without patents innovations would still 'all be developed by several people working independently around the same time', but they would all keep them as trade secrets and prevent their disclosure at all costs. This is what patents are intended to prevent.
Most things have a rather uniform density, so the volume:weight correlation should hold...
For pure chemical foods this should hold (sucrose and other sugars, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, etc.) pretty well, but organic materials (spices, flours, etc.) do have significant variation.
In brewing, by the way, accurate measurements of many ingredients is very important. Accuracy seems to make a bigger difference when making beer and wine than most types of recipes. (But then brewing is microbiology, not cooking.)
This is called socialism and has been tried the world over many many times and NEVER works. Technology usually leads to more different forms of work.
Spoken like a true Anonymous Coward! At least you have enough education to read your talking point card.
As the OP argued in his post spending Government money on long-term research (not something considered by most corporations these days, with quarterly profits to attend to) has been proven to provide powerful benefits (like this little ARPA project that you are using to disseminate your opinion).
The problem with just trusting in American corporations and unregulated capitalism to provide jobs, and a decent standard of living, to Americans is the technology does lead to different forms of work, but technology plus low wages leads to bigger corporate profits, so the jobs go overseas.
Socialist policies (by American standards) never, ever work - except of course in every other industrialized country in the world. These policies aren't in the interest of the Murdochs and Kochs of the world, so constant demonization is required to hide the fact that alternatives to the American corporatist approach do work better for the workers.
BTW - did you realize that Americans now work longer hours than even the Japanese? Only emerging economies work longer hours than the U.S. - check the OECD stats . There are already several industrialized nations (Netherlands, Denmark for example) that work shorter hours and have higher real wages than the U.S. Too small to count? Well Sweden and France, those cesspools of socialism, work shorter hours and have real wages almost exactly the same as the U.S. and the trend is going against America.
Constantly shouting "We're number one!" while already in the number three or four slot ensures we will meet numbers 5,6,7, etc. going up as we go farther and farther down.
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You can legally get a prescription for THC in the US, the trade name is Marinol and assuming that the doctor is willing to go along with it, you can get it without any trouble. Which sort of discards the view that it's about big pharma.
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You mean the fact that the only THC preparation legally available is a patented trademarked synthetic form of THC produced only by one Big Pharma company (Abbott Laboratories), and no plant-based preparation is available, discards the view that it is about big pharma?
Oh man! What have you been smoking?
Clearly... ...so this Indica is totally legal, right?
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This argument has actually been tried in court - when legislation carefully specified not only the species of plant being banned (Cannabis sativa) but even the botanical authority that provided the classification from a type specimen (probably included in legislation because it sounded more imposing), it was argued that C. indica was not covered since it did not conform to the specified plant ban. The great Harvard botanist Robert Schultes testified about this, but the judge (and others after) ruled that what the law actually said, and the scientific facts, were immaterial. If the police and DA said it was the same thing, it was. Cannabis prohibition has long depended on ignoring actual facts and law - the DEA's continued illegal refusal to obey its own administrative law judge rulings on reclassification for medical use (which is supported by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine) is a case in point.
This doesn't sound like it would work! It's not as easy as netting fish in an ocean. We are talking about very high velocities here. If the orbital velocity of a piece of space junk doesn't closely match the orbital velocity of the net, it probably will blast right through the net ... You are going after a piece of space debris and another piece of space debris collides with the net. The second piece, which you were not going after, is going to damage the net. Remember, they are talking about very large nets, the probability of this happening is not small.
I'd like to see an analysis of this capture system (with data on, for example, the strength of the net and resistance to penetration), but at an (educated) guess I'd say that it only captures a small fraction of the material it encounters, but that small fraction is much larger than the present rate of removal from orbit (which, above a certain altitude, is essentially zero). If the net works, I would expect a large number of them would be orbited over time.
Maybe we would eventually have an international launch authority that grants low altitude launch licenses and requires a certain number of orbit clearance net deployments for each launch license (like the environmental re-mediation requirements used with various licenses today).
As to whether stuff is going to punch holes in it - as you say the probability is high since it is a large net. But by the same token - this isn't going to matter. Very large net, very small holes, BFD.
"Mazes and Monsters" came out as a book in 1981, and as a made-for-TV movie in 1982. It is interesting to observe that the satanic child sex abuse witch-hunt (seriously folks - it went into Salem Massachusetts territory) of the 1980s began with the Kern Country case in 1982. There was some "bad craziness" (as Hunter S. Thompson might have said) in the air back then.
What these guys claim to have discovered is a nuclear reaction heretofore unknown to science.
What a scientist does when discovering something like this (or if they truly think they have) is to set up a closely controlled demonstration of the phenomenon that carefully documents the physical conditions, and all of the measurable evidence associated with the reaction.
Turning nickel into copper? Amazing! Forget all the boiling water stuff, the commercial power production claims, etc. - lets just see a reproducible experiment of nickel being turned into copper on any scale. They don't even need a theoretical explanation - a good experiment opens the door to theorists galore. Theorists love unexplained experiments - that are real.
Was high temperature superconductivity ignored because there was no theory that explains it (and there still isn't an adequate one)? No!