"A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body."
In short: if it's launched from Country X, Country X has responsibility for it, whether it was launched by the Country X government or just by some wacky idealists who live there. In practice, this means that spacecraft are no more outside of national laws than seagoing ships are.
I use Mac OS for most things, Linux for scientific computing, and PCs for games and when I have to.
Linux is dead, as a mass-market desktop OS. But Linux has always been dead in that sense. And yet somehow it keeps on going, keeps evolving and improving, always keeping pace with its competitors. I used Redhat back in the early '90s -- that wasn't an OS, that was a torture chamber. Today, while I prefer my Mac to my Ubuntu box, Ubuntu is usually a pleasure to use.
So what if there aren't 200 million desktop machines running Linux? It has enough users to support an active development group, has had for 20 years, and its existence doesn't depend on the whims of some vice president of software development somewhere. It may be dead, but it's also probably immortal.
This is incredible. Toyota's experience with the Prius puts them light-years ahead of everyone but Nissan on the road to EV technology -- and I'm including GM here, their Volt is not much more than a Prius with a power cord, and they haven't built 2 million of 'em yet.
At this point, Ford, Subaru, and Volkswagen etc. should be handing blank checks to Tesla Motors and saying "please save our sorry asses". To lose this opportunity to a competitor who's already ahead is the sort of thing that used to cause shareholder revolts back in the day.
"Gun types are not made because they are inefficient"
"getting the material for those is so difficult that few are made."
You're disagreeing with the previous poster by agreeing with him. "Inefficient" means "too much uranium for not enough boom". As I read it, the previous poster is saying it's difficult to get enough material for a gun-type bomb -- same difference.
Also, gun-type bombs can only use uranium, not plutonium, so if you're fond of breeder reactors, it may indeed be much easier to get Pu for an implosion-type weapon than 235U for a gun type.
Look at the engineering requirements. We need a chemical that: 1) is detectable at incredibly low concentrations 2) is water-soluble 2) is non-toxic and relatively long-lived in typical environmental conditions 3) can easily be configured in millions of different ways, so we can use a different "key" for each user or each batch of stuff to be tagged.
Given PCR and DNA synthesis technology, short strands of DNA seem perfect for the job.
Gasoline engines for automotive use have an energy efficiency (fuel energy to mechanical energy) of 20%. Coal power plants have an efficiency (fuel to electricity) of about 35%, but when you factor in losses from electrical transmission and electric motors, the overall efficiency of a "coal powered" electric vehicle is around 25-30%.
So the EV is a bit more energy efficient. BUT, burning coal produces about 30% more CO2 per unit heat energy than gasoline. This roughly compensates for the efficiency difference, so that, as I said, overall CO2 output from a coal-powered electric vehicle is about the same as a gasoline vehicle of similar horsepower.
If you want to talk nitrous oxide emissions, sulfur dioxide, or whatnot, there might be a case to be made. And depending on how you fudge the numbers you might be able to make coal come out ahead by a little bit.
But EVs will not solve our CO2 emissions problem unless we *massively* convert to renewables, something we have made negligible progress on so far.
"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it,"
"I agree the guy is a bad scientist for making such a claim,"
Note the use of the words "personally" and "I would say". He is not making a scientific claim: he's giving his personal opinion, which scientists are always welcome to do, and which the reporter probably encouraged. So long as he indicates it's an opinion, which he did, he doesn't have to have unshakable scientific fact to support it any more than I need gas chromatograph data to claim "Personally, I would say that pad thai is the best food on the planet."
the 230 that GM claims is one of those crazy "pollution" conversion things, where if you drive it 40 miles each day, and charge it each day, so you are always using just electricity, then the pollution created generating the electricity to power the car is somehow equivalent to getting 230MPG burning gasoline.
Says you. Can you cite a source for this, or is this just your guess as to what's going on? I don't have time to do the math right now, but I'll bet you 10 moderator points that the CO2 released at the power plant to power an electric vehicle (assuming a national-average mixture of electricity sources) is roughly equal to the CO2 emitted from the tailpipe of a similar-sized conventional gasoline engine.
Personally, I think the 230 mpg is just marketing handwavery.
No, the guy who said that anyone who thinks this outcome is fair is a "sociopathic asshole."
I'm not standing behind what he says, I'm just pointing out that your "obvious" conclusion isn't so obvious to some people. I pointed out your post to him too, with exactly the same goal.
corporations who skip out on taxes. Would you support cutting them off from government services? Answer truthfully now. Yes. What are you getting at?
No kids, this is an example of the tragedy of the commons looks like. The tragedy of the commons is *exactly* my problem with libertarianism. Solving commons problems is what government is (ideally) all about.
So don't be putting a decision by a government entity in same class as private fire service. The government entity is *not* his government, but the next town over. In this, they're providing a subscription-fee based service, with no special authority, jurisdiction, or legal privilege -- in effect, outside of their town of South Fulton they *are* a private fire company. Their decision here -- should they offer this guy service on credit? -- was exactly the sort of business decision a private company would make.
That's how it would work if Obion County, Tennessee ran the health care system. They refused to put out the fire
Wrong "they". The fire department belongs to the city of South Fulton, and is supported by taxpayers there. Obion County has no fire department: their elected county commission decided against establishing one back in 2008.
(Yeah, sorry for citing Mother Jones, I couldn't find a centrist site with the full details.)
In any case, I highly doubt the dude was actually waving thousands of dollars of cash in the firemens' faces. More likely he *promised* to pay. Given the dude's previous track record in paying for fire services, would you take an IOU from him?
And if he doesn't pay? They can't amend his property taxes or put a lien on the house: he doesn't live in the fire department's municipality. Their only option would be to sue him, which would help nobody but the lawyers involved.
Or I guess they could go back and restart the fire...
Remember, they're not *his* firefighters, they're from the next town over. His nonexistent local government has no fire service: I bet it would have no objection if you wanted to buy yourself a tanker truck and set up your own private fire company.
But nobody does this, because fire protection is an absolutely shitty way to make a living in the 21st century. There's no profit in it unless you run around setting fires yourself.
Unprofitable but indispensable social services: this is what government is good at.
They can't tack it onto his property taxes because he doesn't live in the same town as the firefighters. The fire company's only recourse would be to sue him, which is a lose-lose proposition for everyone but the lawyers involved.
The firefighters who show up in the truck are good with hoses and CPR, but they're not trained to run credit checks, negotiate payment plans, and set up early-termination contracts while standing in front of a burning home. There are a hundred different ways the homeowner could abuse a "save house now, pay later" system. The *only* fair ways to do it are "pay in advance" or "free with your taxes".
There's a lot of libertarians here on Slashdot. Well, this is what a libertarian utopia looks like, kids. If this strikes you as unjust and cruel, you'd probably better stop listening to Glen Beck on the teevee, and start voting for candidates who believe that government is a useful thing.
(If, on the other hand, you're happy with the outcome of this story, that's cool, you're not a hypocrite, and, we can agree to disagree.)
As for "why not put out the fire and then bill him", the $75 fee is not to put out the fire, it's to keep the fire department running when there *isn't* a fire. You can no more pay the bill after you need the service than you can wait until after you get cancer to start paying for medical insurance. The system can't work that way.
Robust: you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Robust, adj. Sturdy in construction. Unlikely to break.
A hammer is robust. A Swiss Army Knife is not. A hammer does only one thing, but it doesn't break while doing it. A Swiss Army Knife can do lots of things, but it will break if you try to use it as a hammer, and honestly, it'll probably break if you try to use it seriously as a screwdriver, scissors, or knife too.
Say what you like about iOS's feature set, but it's pretty much unbreakable.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, Article VIII puts it more directly:
"A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body."
Won't work. Read the Outer Space Treaty, specifically Article VI. (full text: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Article_VI)
In short: if it's launched from Country X, Country X has responsibility for it, whether it was launched by the Country X government or just by some wacky idealists who live there. In practice, this means that spacecraft are no more outside of national laws than seagoing ships are.
I use Mac OS for most things, Linux for scientific computing, and PCs for games and when I have to.
Linux is dead, as a mass-market desktop OS. But Linux has always been dead in that sense. And yet somehow it keeps on going, keeps evolving and improving, always keeping pace with its competitors. I used Redhat back in the early '90s -- that wasn't an OS, that was a torture chamber. Today, while I prefer my Mac to my Ubuntu box, Ubuntu is usually a pleasure to use.
So what if there aren't 200 million desktop machines running Linux? It has enough users to support an active development group, has had for 20 years, and its existence doesn't depend on the whims of some vice president of software development somewhere. It may be dead, but it's also probably immortal.
Yes, and GM has been working on electric cars for decades. Show me ten thousand retail units sold, and then I'll say you've got an EV worth the name.
This is incredible. Toyota's experience with the Prius puts them light-years ahead of everyone but Nissan on the road to EV technology -- and I'm including GM here, their Volt is not much more than a Prius with a power cord, and they haven't built 2 million of 'em yet.
At this point, Ford, Subaru, and Volkswagen etc. should be handing blank checks to Tesla Motors and saying "please save our sorry asses". To lose this opportunity to a competitor who's already ahead is the sort of thing that used to cause shareholder revolts back in the day.
"Gun types are not made because they are inefficient"
"getting the material for those is so difficult that few are made."
You're disagreeing with the previous poster by agreeing with him. "Inefficient" means "too much uranium for not enough boom". As I read it, the previous poster is saying it's difficult to get enough material for a gun-type bomb -- same difference.
Also, gun-type bombs can only use uranium, not plutonium, so if you're fond of breeder reactors, it may indeed be much easier to get Pu for an implosion-type weapon than 235U for a gun type.
God dammit! I came here specifically to post that joke! I HAD DIBS!
Look at the engineering requirements. We need a chemical that:
1) is detectable at incredibly low concentrations
2) is water-soluble
2) is non-toxic and relatively long-lived in typical environmental conditions
3) can easily be configured in millions of different ways, so we can use a different "key" for each user or each batch of stuff to be tagged.
Given PCR and DNA synthesis technology, short strands of DNA seem perfect for the job.
Gasoline engines for automotive use have an energy efficiency (fuel energy to mechanical energy) of 20%. Coal power plants have an efficiency (fuel to electricity) of about 35%, but when you factor in losses from electrical transmission and electric motors, the overall efficiency of a "coal powered" electric vehicle is around 25-30%.
So the EV is a bit more energy efficient. BUT, burning coal produces about 30% more CO2 per unit heat energy than gasoline. This roughly compensates for the efficiency difference, so that, as I said, overall CO2 output from a coal-powered electric vehicle is about the same as a gasoline vehicle of similar horsepower.
If you want to talk nitrous oxide emissions, sulfur dioxide, or whatnot, there might be a case to be made. And depending on how you fudge the numbers you might be able to make coal come out ahead by a little bit.
But EVs will not solve our CO2 emissions problem unless we *massively* convert to renewables, something we have made negligible progress on so far.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_intensity
"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it,"
"I agree the guy is a bad scientist for making such a claim,"
Note the use of the words "personally" and "I would say". He is not making a scientific claim: he's giving his personal opinion, which scientists are always welcome to do, and which the reporter probably encouraged. So long as he indicates it's an opinion, which he did, he doesn't have to have unshakable scientific fact to support it any more than I need gas chromatograph data to claim "Personally, I would say that pad thai is the best food on the planet."
the 230 that GM claims is one of those crazy "pollution" conversion things, where if you drive it 40 miles each day, and charge it each day, so you are always using just electricity, then the pollution created generating the electricity to power the car is somehow equivalent to getting 230MPG burning gasoline.
Says you. Can you cite a source for this, or is this just your guess as to what's going on? I don't have time to do the math right now, but I'll bet you 10 moderator points that the CO2 released at the power plant to power an electric vehicle (assuming a national-average mixture of electricity sources) is roughly equal to the CO2 emitted from the tailpipe of a similar-sized conventional gasoline engine.
Personally, I think the 230 mpg is just marketing handwavery.
I'd be worried about suing Dido: I hear she's pretty persistent. She'll go down with the ship, won't raise her hands up in surrender.
No, the guy who said that anyone who thinks this outcome is fair is a "sociopathic asshole."
I'm not standing behind what he says, I'm just pointing out that your "obvious" conclusion isn't so obvious to some people. I pointed out your post to him too, with exactly the same goal.
Please say hi to the poster above you.
Please say hi to the poster below you.
corporations who skip out on taxes. Would you support cutting them off from government services? Answer truthfully now.
Yes. What are you getting at?
No kids, this is an example of the tragedy of the commons looks like.
The tragedy of the commons is *exactly* my problem with libertarianism. Solving commons problems is what government is (ideally) all about.
So don't be putting a decision by a government entity in same class as private fire service.
The government entity is *not* his government, but the next town over. In this, they're providing a subscription-fee based service, with no special authority, jurisdiction, or legal privilege -- in effect, outside of their town of South Fulton they *are* a private fire company. Their decision here -- should they offer this guy service on credit? -- was exactly the sort of business decision a private company would make.
That's how it would work if Obion County, Tennessee ran the health care system. They refused to put out the fire
Wrong "they". The fire department belongs to the city of South Fulton, and is supported by taxpayers there. Obion County has no fire department: their elected county commission decided against establishing one back in 2008.
(Yeah, sorry for citing Mother Jones, I couldn't find a centrist site with the full details.)
In any case, I highly doubt the dude was actually waving thousands of dollars of cash in the firemens' faces. More likely he *promised* to pay. Given the dude's previous track record in paying for fire services, would you take an IOU from him?
And if he doesn't pay? They can't amend his property taxes or put a lien on the house: he doesn't live in the fire department's municipality. Their only option would be to sue him, which would help nobody but the lawyers involved.
Or I guess they could go back and restart the fire...
Remember, they're not *his* firefighters, they're from the next town over. His nonexistent local government has no fire service: I bet it would have no objection if you wanted to buy yourself a tanker truck and set up your own private fire company.
But nobody does this, because fire protection is an absolutely shitty way to make a living in the 21st century. There's no profit in it unless you run around setting fires yourself.
Unprofitable but indispensable social services: this is what government is good at.
They can't tack it onto his property taxes because he doesn't live in the same town as the firefighters. The fire company's only recourse would be to sue him, which is a lose-lose proposition for everyone but the lawyers involved.
The firefighters who show up in the truck are good with hoses and CPR, but they're not trained to run credit checks, negotiate payment plans, and set up early-termination contracts while standing in front of a burning home. There are a hundred different ways the homeowner could abuse a "save house now, pay later" system. The *only* fair ways to do it are "pay in advance" or "free with your taxes".
There's a lot of libertarians here on Slashdot. Well, this is what a libertarian utopia looks like, kids. If this strikes you as unjust and cruel, you'd probably better stop listening to Glen Beck on the teevee, and start voting for candidates who believe that government is a useful thing.
(If, on the other hand, you're happy with the outcome of this story, that's cool, you're not a hypocrite, and, we can agree to disagree.)
As for "why not put out the fire and then bill him", the $75 fee is not to put out the fire, it's to keep the fire department running when there *isn't* a fire. You can no more pay the bill after you need the service than you can wait until after you get cancer to start paying for medical insurance. The system can't work that way.
Robust: you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Robust, adj. Sturdy in construction. Unlikely to break.
A hammer is robust. A Swiss Army Knife is not. A hammer does only one thing, but it doesn't break while doing it. A Swiss Army Knife can do lots of things, but it will break if you try to use it as a hammer, and honestly, it'll probably break if you try to use it seriously as a screwdriver, scissors, or knife too.
Say what you like about iOS's feature set, but it's pretty much unbreakable.
Wrong way around. I never said cutting-edge was always robust.
Robust *is* cutting-edge.