and drop them like a hot potato if they do one thing "wrong".
No, of course not. But that's not what I'm suggesting.
The original point here was that getting money from the government doesn't mean you have to act in any way. That's true - but the government shouldn't be allowed to give money to organizations which act in a certain way. Obviously this is only one action, and it's not that big a deal. I mean, one action can be justified a dozen different ways anyway.
But there's obviously a point at which the government does have to say "we can't support an organization like this." So the idea here is that if you do receive money from the government, if you want future support, you do have to follow some of the same restrictions the government does, to some degree. Where that dividing line is is of course open for discussion. You clearly can't do it from one action. But what if Marquette had said "we're expelling all students who criticize the University"? At that point, it is something which you could easily make a claim that they can't receive future federal funding.
I can't see how you could claim that if Marquette had adopted a policy like that, they would still be eligible for federal funds. At that point, you've created a federally-sponsored activity that cannot be questioned or commented about from within without reprisal.
Name one organization that doesn't restrict speech. You can't, because they all do.
That seems to be a rather blanket statement to make. The thing is that you can say "yah, this code of ethics is fine", and I agree with that, but they're beginning to stretch it near to a point where it wouldn't be fine. Saying that "speech that is offensive and detrimental a working environment" is probably fine. Lawyers can probably argue that such speech has no connection to the federal mandate, and is purely within the context of the private nature of the organization. But saying "any speech critical of this organization, private or otherwise" directly prohibits criticism of a government-sponsored activity.
Companies and organizations which receive federal funding - if they want to continue to receive federal funding - do have to comply with more stringent requirements than a purely private institution. The mere existence of Title IX stems exactly from that. In a bizarre opposite to this,
Nevertheless, based on the Santa Rosa ruling, the government threatened to strip private universities of federal funding if they didn't enforce speech restrictions to ensure that their students are not exposed to a "hostile environment.
The government later stated that that statement did not require universities to impose speech codes which violate the First Amendment - so this was threatening to strip federal funding on the basis of supporting a violation of 14th Amendment concerns. It's not a stretch to realize this could apply to First Amendment concerns as well.
On a completely separate note, however, there are several states in which all universities - private or otherwise - must abide by First Amendment restrictions - California (the Leonard Law) in particular.
But it's legal for any private company to restrict speech, even if it receives some sources of government money.
Yes, yes, of course it is! But it may not be legal for the government to give them any more money. The "is this legal?" bits are the bills which give money, not the actions of the company.
If you restrict the tax money to the university because you don't like their policy on one aspect of speech, you are tacitly approving all the policies of every university to which you continue to give money.
Well, yes. That's what giving money to organizations means. The government does have an obligation to determine whether or not the actions of those bodies which it gives money to are acting in the public good.
If Marquette's dental clinics didn't offer help to, say, Catholics - and Congress knew this when passing the law - how would this not be the government interfering with freedom of religion?
If the government doesn't require you to restrict speech in order to receive the money, it's not a government restriction of speech.
Why? If the government gives money to an organization known to restrict speech in lieu of doing it themselves, how is that any different than them passing a law to do it? Since they singled out the organization, the public in fact has no choice in the matter - they're forced to accept that organization. You might say "well, then their choice is to vote out the congressmen" but if the organization that's being funded by the government suppresses speech against those against it, now you've got a serious problem.
The previous argument I mentioned is a stretch, yes, but it is a decent analogy. If you want it more clear cut, again, imagine if the government gives money to Corrupt, Inc. to handle the registration of, say, a public auditorium in Central Park, Some City USA. Except Corrupt, Inc. never lets anyone sign up who's politically against the current government.
In other words, cut Marquette off over this, and somebody else could come along and sue you because some tiny State college in Oklahoma did the same thing and you didn't cut them off.
I don't think the above argument would apply unless Congress actually knows about the suppression of speech. I mean, obviously you can't require the government to know everything about an organization. So there's clearly going to be some leeway there. But in the same sense, I can't see how your interpretation, taken strictly, isn't just absolving the government from any Constitutional protections so long as the actions are filtered through external entities.
They're not being punished. They aren't entitled to the money in the first place. In this argument, Congress can't pass a law giving money to Marquette because to do so would be to pass a law sponsoring the prohibition of free speech.
The reason I'm mentioning the previous grant is just to establish that Marquette has, in the past, received money from the federal government, and that they would therefore be likely to do it again in the future. Unlike, say, for instance, Grove City College.
The reason this argument holds at all ("can't give money to an organization that prohibits free speech") is that you can imagine a situation where a government would sell, for instance, public land to some company to take care of it, with the government giving that company money because the government doesn't want to establish a beauracracy to take care of it. In this case, the government can, in effect, restrict speech by choosing a company which restricts speech.
In Marquette's case, the government gave the dental school money to establish clinics in the surrounding area. Suppose one of the teachers this kid insulted works at that clinic, and he insulted him. Now you've got the government paying for an organization to run a clinic in an area, and then that organization punishes someone for being critical of a person in that clinic, and hence the clinic, and hence the government. So now you've got something very close to the government sponsoring an organization to punish someone who's critical of the government.
Yah, okay, that's a roundabout argument. But with a bit of substitution of entities and situations, you could be talking about a very, very serious violation of the constitution.
Wouldn't that argument also be applicable to your Pell Grant? Medicare? Social Security?
No, as all of those have specific requirements not involving the actual person to determine eligibility. There was no law passed specifically involving me (or anyone else). There's nothing in the law that sponsors people or organizations which restrict free speech.
In Marquette's case, there were laws specifically passed giving money to Marquette. There, there is direct sponsorship.
Note that this excludes grants from DOE, NSF, NIH, etc. as those are exactly the same (though most of those grants do include restrictions on the institution as well), but Marquette has received money directly from federal funding. The dental school, in fact (search for "marquette dental site:gov").
and your boss can fire you for any reason or no reason at all
True. But he can't lie about why he's firing you - he can't, for instance, say that you slept with the secretary and came to work drunk, and that's why he fired you. That's slander/libel. In this case, the University is publicly saying that he violated the school's code of conduct, when in fact, he didn't, and several professors at Marquette agree that he didn't.
Add onto that the fact that Marquette doesn't really have the right to expel him any time they wish on a whim (who, honestly, would enroll at a University with this policy?) and they could be in a whole heap of trouble for breach of contract and slander.
Honestly, is this university really that stupid? It's not a trivial amount of money he could sue for - he could also sue for lost future wages as well as the wasted tuition money.
A private university can expell a student for many more reasons than a public one can.
First, Marquette receives, and has received, money from the federal government in terms of grants, and sponsored programs. This might put future funding in jeopardy.
Second, while they're free to expel him, they're not free to make false claims against him. The statements that he is "guilty of professional misconduct in violation of the dental school's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct" and "violated a universitywide code that subjects students to disciplinary action if they participate in stalking, hazing or harassments" are libelous/slanderous if they're not true.
Your boss is free to fire you - but he's not free to say that you slept with the secretary, came to work drunk, and stole money from the company unless you did.
Given the statements by other professors at Marquette, I think he could easily sue them. For quite a lot of money, too.
the administration has falsely accused him of "stalking, hazing or harassments"
Actually, that's a very good point. The student could definitely make a claim that the comments from the school are libelous. And yes, you can still be charged with libel if you take someone's comments out of context and present them in a different light, and I think almost any court in the US would recognize those entries in a blog as purely harmless.
And I'm saying they don't sign away their property and contract rights just because they accept money from the government,
Of course not. But they may sign away their ability to get more money from the government by doing this.
While there's nothing that prevents them from doing this, I think it's arguable that the Constitution might prevent the government from giving them more money.
chances are like you said if there is a crash again it will be by people no one has heard of or ones that were trying to get rich quick from a gaming boom but failed misserably at.
But that's kinda the point - this hurts even the big boys, because it makes investors less willing to spend money.
Or that any student who got a Pell Grant is forever forbidden to speak ill of the government?
Uhm, while your argument may be valid, this is not a valid analogy. He's not saying Marquette can't speak ill of the government. He's saying Marquette cannot be discriminatory of other free speech. The example you're giving would be the government violating the first amendment, not extending it.
I have no idea if your argument is valid in any case - certainly if the grant goes directly to the student (which it does) then there's no limitation. But if the money would go to the University which then distributes it (in the form of grants) to the students, I'm not so sure your argument holds.
any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance..."
Yah, but how broad is that statement? If you extend it to state financial assistance as well (that's not that much of a stretch, as most states have free speech clauses as well), does this school really receive no governmental funding whatsoever?
I mean, wouldn't grants to the professors be considered financial assistance from the government? They definitely get those.
NEC's stuff was the TurboGrafx-16/TurboDuo/TurboExpress. I hesitated to include the TG-16 because it was released earlier, with a fair bit of support, and did pretty well initially. It also really doesn't fall into the "get rich quick" category because they actually did release good games, and put effort into the TG-16. But the TurboDuo and TurboExpress kinda were - they were primarily efforts to try to leverage the existing software base of the TG-16, so they fall into the "let's put out a product with no support, and magically make money!" category.
Tapwave? Where was the advertisments? where were they located in stores? N-Gage? No one liked it from day 1, it sold something like 150,000 units, no one wanted it, Nokia finnaly got around to realizing this. Gizmondo? samething as the tapwave.
3DO, NEC's stuff, Neo Geo, and the Philips CD-i were all very poorly advertised and poorly received at the time. Most people didn't know anything about them, and you'd be hard pressed to actually find a Neo Geo at a store shortly after they were released.
Same deal nowadays.
It should also be noted that Nintendo, around the same time, also put out a product that was greatly hyped, yet collapsed like a lead brick: Virtual Boy.
Honestly, the parallels to the current situation in gaming are rather frightening. The past few years have seen a ridiculous amount of complete bellyflops by companies. If you want systems that people have heard about, there's the "Phantom" console, and also the "Indrema" console that were planned, but never even made it out of development. Again, you've got people dumping money into essentially poorly planned get-rich-quick schemes, and that's what makes markets crash.
Actually, Stirling engines are "heat differential" engines.
A sterling engine probably has something to do with silver, got me. Common mistake, though. Google automatically corrects it for you, though I think it'd be nice to Rev. Stirling (and his brother) to actually get his name right.
They would be every bit as happy to sell you solar, tidal, or nuclear wattage when those become common.
But they'd have to pay for those new plants. They don't want to do that. The reason no new nuclear plants have been built isn't just because of regulation (though that's a convenient excuse for them to give) - it's because they aren't that profitable.
Eck. Peaked already? I thought the projections had it peaking several decades ahead. Hrm. Well, that would suck.
In either case, natural gas may not be the answer.
No, of course not. But hydrogen is, and this uses the only non-petroleum infrastructure we have to wean ourselves off of petroleum and onto hydrogen. Once hydrogen vehicles start becoming common, you can start generating hydrogen at plants using solar/nuclear/hydroelectric/whatever power to split water (too bad you can't safely use nuclear power directly to split water. they generate hydrogen really well, but unfortunately that hydrogen tends to go boom since it's near a really exothermic reaction), ramp up a hydrogen distribution system, and then wean people off of natural gas, as well.
Granted, that means that all of these home generation plants are extremely temporary, which might piss people off ("Why did I buy this plant when the natural gas prices spiked so high?") but, hey.
Well, you already caught my response to that by noting that the wasted heat would be used, so it's probably a total gain overall. Recovering heating costs in the winter is fairly large, so that could make up the whole deal.
Remember, they're only talking about a factor of 2 total savings in cost for heating+fuel+electricity. That's not a big gain, and for people who have hybrid cars, it's probably just breakeven.
That being said, I doubt they took into consideration the fact that your refueling point is now your destination, so you don't need to waste fuel refueling. Minor, minor advantage, but still an advantage.
The main advantage I see here is that it's an excellent stopgap until large scale hydrogen distribution is around. Natural gas distribution is already well established, so you're essentially leveraging an existing infrastructure to "take over" for petroleum until a hydrogen distribution infrastructure can be built.
Build these, sell them to people, start selling hydrogen vehicles as well, then start building solar electrolysis plants near water sources, and start ramping up a hydrogen distribution system. It could work.
And yes, solar electrolysis of hydrogen is incredibly inefficient, but you can probably help it become cost effective with tax breaks due to the fact that it's an entirely local production.
So again, what data is there to back the claim that this is "much more efficient" than an ICE and that you get "more bang for your buck"?
Well, when you're talking about total efficiencies, yah, it's probably comparable. But that's not quite the end of it.
First, that 40% for an ICE is a maximum, and varies over the speed of a vehicle. That's not the same for an electric vehicle. So net, over a trip, you're going to get a solid boost. Yes - this argument falls apart when you talk about a hybrid vehicle. Sure.
I don't know how a fuel cell's efficiency varies with temperature, though, and I know Li-Ions have strong temperature dependence on efficiency, so it might still even out.
At least they recover some energy for domestic hot water with their system, so it's not a total waste.
Domestic hot water and electricity. Now you get the advantage of avoiding all of the transmission losses.
I do have a feeling that they probably did properly work out the total costs. They're only claiming a 50% total efficiency.
Plus, as a side benefit, natural gas is a local resource, which means that effectively, the gas costs less because they're feeding money back to their own economy, as opposed to petroleum.
In fact, your best bet for shielding, if you're going for the "let's maximize the interaction potential of the material" (also known as the "cross-section" in physics) would be to use something like lead.
Lead is used because of its density, not its effectiveness. Other than hydrogen, basically all elements cause charged particles to lose ~ 2 MeV/cm per g/cm^3 of material present. For hydrogen it's ~ 4. Gamma ray interactions are similar as well.
Of course, the problem with hydrogen is the fact that it'd take a lot of space to compete with lead, even though it'd take a factor of two less mass to do it (important in a spacecraft!). And you can't exactly stably contain hydrogen easily. But water is probably a very good candidate for radiation shielding, simply because it contains ~10% hydrogen by mass, and hey, you need water around anyway.
Fragmentation of accelerated heavy nuclei, or proton-proton collisions. You can't easily accelerate neutrons, but you can create or free them at high energies.
That doesn't sound quite right. Why would free neutrons (half life 15 minutes) be an issue coming from the sun?
Sun's only about 8 light-minutes away, so even a moderate-energy neutron - say, 1 GeV - is going to reach us well before it decays. (*) A higher-energy neutron - say, tens of GeV - with a time dilation of about a factor of 10 - won't have decayed appreciably at all before it reaches us.
This is of course akin to atmospheric muons - with a lifetime of 2.2 microseconds, they shouldn't reach the surface of the earth at all. But atmospheric muons typically have an energy of ~1 GeV, and with a rest mass of ~150 MeV, this is a gamma of ~10, and so they have plenty of time before they decay.
Besides, fusion does not occur to any appreciable degree in the corona
Shock acceleration produces neutrons during a solar flare, through several mechanisms, including spallation and fragmentation of nuclei.
Also gamma rays from the sun are not an issue, the moon is brighter than the sun in gamma rays.
The article under discussion proposes a thin disk of non-luminous (as opposed to "Dark") matter on the same plane as the galaxy, in roughly the same distribution as the luminous matter.
It's not a thin disk. Read it again. It's an infinitesimally thin disk, and it's not made of dust. Basically, it's an arbitrary amount of matter, added discontinuously in the plane of the disk. To quote:
"Let us take the limit of a goes to 0, i.e. the flat cylinder limit. If the stress-energy tensor had no singularities but consisted solely of rotating dust, this limit would be zero, since the volume of the cylinder goes to zero as we shrink it. It is, however, not the case in the metric [12]."
The authors then go on to show that the metric contains a residual even as you shrink the cylinder to zero volume. In other words, the original model contained a disk of matter of infinite density.
The model that the original article used simply won't work. It's unphysical. And its unphysicality is the exact reason why it produced an asymptotically flat solution.
the claimed discontinuity is an artifact of the chosen coordinate system, not the metric.
No, it's not. Which is even mentioned in the refutation. If you integrate the disk's Killing vector, it has both mass and angular momentum. It's difficult to claim that as a coordinate system problem. What's more, that integrated mass *stays constant* as you decrease the volume that you integrate over. So if you integrate an infinitesimally small cylinder, you still have mass. That's not a coordinate system problem. That's excess matter.
The best damning evidence in the refutation is that their solution doesn't even satisfy their own equations of motion.
It's easy to see, too. They have the matter density of the disk proportional to e^-k*abs(z). That's got a kink at z=0 - it's just an exponential that goes to 1 on one side, and back down to 0 on the other, but the derivative goes from df/dz = -1 (for z greater than 0) discontinuously to df/dz = +1 (for z less than 0). If you differentiate that twice with respect to z, you get a delta function due to the kink, *not* zero as they claimed. It *doesn't work*.
In fact, the first part of the refutation is actually someone showing (very generally) that you can't have an asymptotically flat solution in general relativity for a distributed source. In other words, this idea is done, dead, completely unfixable.
Slashdot Mirror
No, of course not. But that's not what I'm suggesting.
The original point here was that getting money from the government doesn't mean you have to act in any way. That's true - but the government shouldn't be allowed to give money to organizations which act in a certain way. Obviously this is only one action, and it's not that big a deal. I mean, one action can be justified a dozen different ways anyway.
But there's obviously a point at which the government does have to say "we can't support an organization like this." So the idea here is that if you do receive money from the government, if you want future support, you do have to follow some of the same restrictions the government does, to some degree. Where that dividing line is is of course open for discussion. You clearly can't do it from one action. But what if Marquette had said "we're expelling all students who criticize the University"? At that point, it is something which you could easily make a claim that they can't receive future federal funding.
I can't see how you could claim that if Marquette had adopted a policy like that, they would still be eligible for federal funds. At that point, you've created a federally-sponsored activity that cannot be questioned or commented about from within without reprisal.
Name one organization that doesn't restrict speech. You can't, because they all do.
That seems to be a rather blanket statement to make. The thing is that you can say "yah, this code of ethics is fine", and I agree with that, but they're beginning to stretch it near to a point where it wouldn't be fine. Saying that "speech that is offensive and detrimental a working environment" is probably fine. Lawyers can probably argue that such speech has no connection to the federal mandate, and is purely within the context of the private nature of the organization. But saying "any speech critical of this organization, private or otherwise" directly prohibits criticism of a government-sponsored activity.
Companies and organizations which receive federal funding - if they want to continue to receive federal funding - do have to comply with more stringent requirements than a purely private institution. The mere existence of Title IX stems exactly from that. In a bizarre opposite to this,
The government later stated that that statement did not require universities to impose speech codes which violate the First Amendment - so this was threatening to strip federal funding on the basis of supporting a violation of 14th Amendment concerns. It's not a stretch to realize this could apply to First Amendment concerns as well.
On a completely separate note, however, there are several states in which all universities - private or otherwise - must abide by First Amendment restrictions - California (the Leonard Law) in particular.
But it's legal for any private company to restrict speech, even if it receives some sources of government money.
Yes, yes, of course it is! But it may not be legal for the government to give them any more money. The "is this legal?" bits are the bills which give money, not the actions of the company.
If you restrict the tax money to the university because you don't like their policy on one aspect of speech, you are tacitly approving all the policies of every university to which you continue to give money.
Well, yes. That's what giving money to organizations means. The government does have an obligation to determine whether or not the actions of those bodies which it gives money to are acting in the public good.
If Marquette's dental clinics didn't offer help to, say, Catholics - and Congress knew this when passing the law - how would this not be the government interfering with freedom of religion?
If the government doesn't require you to restrict speech in order to receive the money, it's not a government restriction of speech.
Why? If the government gives money to an organization known to restrict speech in lieu of doing it themselves, how is that any different than them passing a law to do it? Since they singled out the organization, the public in fact has no choice in the matter - they're forced to accept that organization. You might say "well, then their choice is to vote out the congressmen" but if the organization that's being funded by the government suppresses speech against those against it, now you've got a serious problem.
The previous argument I mentioned is a stretch, yes, but it is a decent analogy. If you want it more clear cut, again, imagine if the government gives money to Corrupt, Inc. to handle the registration of, say, a public auditorium in Central Park, Some City USA. Except Corrupt, Inc. never lets anyone sign up who's politically against the current government.
In other words, cut Marquette off over this, and somebody else could come along and sue you because some tiny State college in Oklahoma did the same thing and you didn't cut them off.
I don't think the above argument would apply unless Congress actually knows about the suppression of speech. I mean, obviously you can't require the government to know everything about an organization. So there's clearly going to be some leeway there. But in the same sense, I can't see how your interpretation, taken strictly, isn't just absolving the government from any Constitutional protections so long as the actions are filtered through external entities.
They're not being punished. They aren't entitled to the money in the first place. In this argument, Congress can't pass a law giving money to Marquette because to do so would be to pass a law sponsoring the prohibition of free speech.
The reason I'm mentioning the previous grant is just to establish that Marquette has, in the past, received money from the federal government, and that they would therefore be likely to do it again in the future. Unlike, say, for instance, Grove City College.
The reason this argument holds at all ("can't give money to an organization that prohibits free speech") is that you can imagine a situation where a government would sell, for instance, public land to some company to take care of it, with the government giving that company money because the government doesn't want to establish a beauracracy to take care of it. In this case, the government can, in effect, restrict speech by choosing a company which restricts speech.
In Marquette's case, the government gave the dental school money to establish clinics in the surrounding area. Suppose one of the teachers this kid insulted works at that clinic, and he insulted him. Now you've got the government paying for an organization to run a clinic in an area, and then that organization punishes someone for being critical of a person in that clinic, and hence the clinic, and hence the government. So now you've got something very close to the government sponsoring an organization to punish someone who's critical of the government.
Yah, okay, that's a roundabout argument. But with a bit of substitution of entities and situations, you could be talking about a very, very serious violation of the constitution.
Wouldn't that argument also be applicable to your Pell Grant? Medicare? Social Security?
No, as all of those have specific requirements not involving the actual person to determine eligibility. There was no law passed specifically involving me (or anyone else). There's nothing in the law that sponsors people or organizations which restrict free speech.
In Marquette's case, there were laws specifically passed giving money to Marquette. There, there is direct sponsorship.
Note that this excludes grants from DOE, NSF, NIH, etc. as those are exactly the same (though most of those grants do include restrictions on the institution as well), but Marquette has received money directly from federal funding. The dental school, in fact (search for "marquette dental site:gov").
and your boss can fire you for any reason or no reason at all
True. But he can't lie about why he's firing you - he can't, for instance, say that you slept with the secretary and came to work drunk, and that's why he fired you. That's slander/libel. In this case, the University is publicly saying that he violated the school's code of conduct, when in fact, he didn't, and several professors at Marquette agree that he didn't.
Add onto that the fact that Marquette doesn't really have the right to expel him any time they wish on a whim (who, honestly, would enroll at a University with this policy?) and they could be in a whole heap of trouble for breach of contract and slander.
Honestly, is this university really that stupid? It's not a trivial amount of money he could sue for - he could also sue for lost future wages as well as the wasted tuition money.
A private university can expell a student for many more reasons than a public one can.
First, Marquette receives, and has received, money from the federal government in terms of grants, and sponsored programs. This might put future funding in jeopardy.
Second, while they're free to expel him, they're not free to make false claims against him. The statements that he is "guilty of professional misconduct in violation of the dental school's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct" and "violated a universitywide code that subjects students to disciplinary action if they participate in stalking, hazing or harassments" are libelous/slanderous if they're not true.
Your boss is free to fire you - but he's not free to say that you slept with the secretary, came to work drunk, and stole money from the company unless you did.
Given the statements by other professors at Marquette, I think he could easily sue them. For quite a lot of money, too.
the administration has falsely accused him of "stalking, hazing or harassments"
Actually, that's a very good point. The student could definitely make a claim that the comments from the school are libelous. And yes, you can still be charged with libel if you take someone's comments out of context and present them in a different light, and I think almost any court in the US would recognize those entries in a blog as purely harmless.
They also received $285,000 from the federal government in 2004 for their dental outreach program.
I think the people who think that any university is a purely private institution nowadays are a bit crazy.
And I'm saying they don't sign away their property and contract rights just because they accept money from the government,
Of course not. But they may sign away their ability to get more money from the government by doing this.
While there's nothing that prevents them from doing this, I think it's arguable that the Constitution might prevent the government from giving them more money.
No, Nintendo lost money on the Virtual Boy.
chances are like you said if there is a crash again it will be by people no one has heard of or ones that were trying to get rich quick from a gaming boom but failed misserably at.
But that's kinda the point - this hurts even the big boys, because it makes investors less willing to spend money.
Or that any student who got a Pell Grant is forever forbidden to speak ill of the government?
Uhm, while your argument may be valid, this is not a valid analogy. He's not saying Marquette can't speak ill of the government. He's saying Marquette cannot be discriminatory of other free speech. The example you're giving would be the government violating the first amendment, not extending it.
I have no idea if your argument is valid in any case - certainly if the grant goes directly to the student (which it does) then there's no limitation. But if the money would go to the University which then distributes it (in the form of grants) to the students, I'm not so sure your argument holds.
any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance..."
Yah, but how broad is that statement? If you extend it to state financial assistance as well (that's not that much of a stretch, as most states have free speech clauses as well), does this school really receive no governmental funding whatsoever?
I mean, wouldn't grants to the professors be considered financial assistance from the government? They definitely get those.
NEC's stuff was the TurboGrafx-16/TurboDuo/TurboExpress. I hesitated to include the TG-16 because it was released earlier, with a fair bit of support, and did pretty well initially. It also really doesn't fall into the "get rich quick" category because they actually did release good games, and put effort into the TG-16. But the TurboDuo and TurboExpress kinda were - they were primarily efforts to try to leverage the existing software base of the TG-16, so they fall into the "let's put out a product with no support, and magically make money!" category.
Tapwave? Where was the advertisments? where were they located in stores? N-Gage? No one liked it from day 1, it sold something like 150,000 units, no one wanted it, Nokia finnaly got around to realizing this. Gizmondo? samething as the tapwave.
3DO, NEC's stuff, Neo Geo, and the Philips CD-i were all very poorly advertised and poorly received at the time. Most people didn't know anything about them, and you'd be hard pressed to actually find a Neo Geo at a store shortly after they were released.
Same deal nowadays.
It should also be noted that Nintendo, around the same time, also put out a product that was greatly hyped, yet collapsed like a lead brick: Virtual Boy.
Honestly, the parallels to the current situation in gaming are rather frightening. The past few years have seen a ridiculous amount of complete bellyflops by companies. If you want systems that people have heard about, there's the "Phantom" console, and also the "Indrema" console that were planned, but never even made it out of development. Again, you've got people dumping money into essentially poorly planned get-rich-quick schemes, and that's what makes markets crash.
Actually, Stirling engines are "heat differential" engines.
A sterling engine probably has something to do with silver, got me. Common mistake, though. Google automatically corrects it for you, though I think it'd be nice to Rev. Stirling (and his brother) to actually get his name right.
They would be every bit as happy to sell you solar, tidal, or nuclear wattage when those become common.
But they'd have to pay for those new plants. They don't want to do that. The reason no new nuclear plants have been built isn't just because of regulation (though that's a convenient excuse for them to give) - it's because they aren't that profitable.
Yup. They're actually looking for the Big Bang Burger Bar.
Eck. Peaked already? I thought the projections had it peaking several decades ahead. Hrm. Well, that would suck.
In either case, natural gas may not be the answer.
No, of course not. But hydrogen is, and this uses the only non-petroleum infrastructure we have to wean ourselves off of petroleum and onto hydrogen. Once hydrogen vehicles start becoming common, you can start generating hydrogen at plants using solar/nuclear/hydroelectric/whatever power to split water (too bad you can't safely use nuclear power directly to split water. they generate hydrogen really well, but unfortunately that hydrogen tends to go boom since it's near a really exothermic reaction), ramp up a hydrogen distribution system, and then wean people off of natural gas, as well.
Granted, that means that all of these home generation plants are extremely temporary, which might piss people off ("Why did I buy this plant when the natural gas prices spiked so high?") but, hey.
Well, you already caught my response to that by noting that the wasted heat would be used, so it's probably a total gain overall. Recovering heating costs in the winter is fairly large, so that could make up the whole deal.
Remember, they're only talking about a factor of 2 total savings in cost for heating+fuel+electricity. That's not a big gain, and for people who have hybrid cars, it's probably just breakeven.
That being said, I doubt they took into consideration the fact that your refueling point is now your destination, so you don't need to waste fuel refueling. Minor, minor advantage, but still an advantage.
The main advantage I see here is that it's an excellent stopgap until large scale hydrogen distribution is around. Natural gas distribution is already well established, so you're essentially leveraging an existing infrastructure to "take over" for petroleum until a hydrogen distribution infrastructure can be built.
Build these, sell them to people, start selling hydrogen vehicles as well, then start building solar electrolysis plants near water sources, and start ramping up a hydrogen distribution system. It could work.
And yes, solar electrolysis of hydrogen is incredibly inefficient, but you can probably help it become cost effective with tax breaks due to the fact that it's an entirely local production.
So again, what data is there to back the claim that this is "much more efficient" than an ICE and that you get "more bang for your buck"?
Well, when you're talking about total efficiencies, yah, it's probably comparable. But that's not quite the end of it.
First, that 40% for an ICE is a maximum, and varies over the speed of a vehicle. That's not the same for an electric vehicle. So net, over a trip, you're going to get a solid boost. Yes - this argument falls apart when you talk about a hybrid vehicle. Sure.
I don't know how a fuel cell's efficiency varies with temperature, though, and I know Li-Ions have strong temperature dependence on efficiency, so it might still even out.
At least they recover some energy for domestic hot water with their system, so it's not a total waste.
Domestic hot water and electricity. Now you get the advantage of avoiding all of the transmission losses.
I do have a feeling that they probably did properly work out the total costs. They're only claiming a 50% total efficiency.
Plus, as a side benefit, natural gas is a local resource, which means that effectively, the gas costs less because they're feeding money back to their own economy, as opposed to petroleum.
In fact, your best bet for shielding, if you're going for the "let's maximize the interaction potential of the material" (also known as the "cross-section" in physics) would be to use something like lead.
Lead is used because of its density, not its effectiveness. Other than hydrogen, basically all elements cause charged particles to lose ~ 2 MeV/cm per g/cm^3 of material present. For hydrogen it's ~ 4. Gamma ray interactions are similar as well.
Of course, the problem with hydrogen is the fact that it'd take a lot of space to compete with lead, even though it'd take a factor of two less mass to do it (important in a spacecraft!). And you can't exactly stably contain hydrogen easily. But water is probably a very good candidate for radiation shielding, simply because it contains ~10% hydrogen by mass, and hey, you need water around anyway.
Fragmentation of accelerated heavy nuclei, or proton-proton collisions. You can't easily accelerate neutrons, but you can create or free them at high energies.
That doesn't sound quite right. Why would free neutrons (half life 15 minutes) be an issue coming from the sun?
Sun's only about 8 light-minutes away, so even a moderate-energy neutron - say, 1 GeV - is going to reach us well before it decays. (*) A higher-energy neutron - say, tens of GeV - with a time dilation of about a factor of 10 - won't have decayed appreciably at all before it reaches us.
This is of course akin to atmospheric muons - with a lifetime of 2.2 microseconds, they shouldn't reach the surface of the earth at all. But atmospheric muons typically have an energy of ~1 GeV, and with a rest mass of ~150 MeV, this is a gamma of ~10, and so they have plenty of time before they decay.
Besides, fusion does not occur to any appreciable degree in the corona
Shock acceleration produces neutrons during a solar flare, through several mechanisms, including spallation and fragmentation of nuclei.
Also gamma rays from the sun are not an issue, the moon is brighter than the sun in gamma rays.
Not during a solar flare.
The article under discussion proposes a thin disk of non-luminous (as opposed to "Dark") matter on the same plane as the galaxy, in roughly the same distribution as the luminous matter.
It's not a thin disk. Read it again. It's an infinitesimally thin disk, and it's not made of dust. Basically, it's an arbitrary amount of matter, added discontinuously in the plane of the disk. To quote:
"Let us take the limit of a goes to 0, i.e. the flat cylinder limit. If the stress-energy tensor had no singularities but consisted solely of rotating dust, this limit would be zero, since the volume of the cylinder goes to zero as we shrink it. It is, however, not the case in the metric [12]."
The authors then go on to show that the metric contains a residual even as you shrink the cylinder to zero volume. In other words, the original model contained a disk of matter of infinite density.
The model that the original article used simply won't work. It's unphysical. And its unphysicality is the exact reason why it produced an asymptotically flat solution.
the claimed discontinuity is an artifact of the chosen coordinate system, not the metric.
No, it's not. Which is even mentioned in the refutation. If you integrate the disk's Killing vector, it has both mass and angular momentum. It's difficult to claim that as a coordinate system problem. What's more, that integrated mass *stays constant* as you decrease the volume that you integrate over. So if you integrate an infinitesimally small cylinder, you still have mass. That's not a coordinate system problem. That's excess matter.
The best damning evidence in the refutation is that their solution doesn't even satisfy their own equations of motion.
It's easy to see, too. They have the matter density of the disk proportional to e^-k*abs(z). That's got a kink at z=0 - it's just an exponential that goes to 1 on one side, and back down to 0 on the other, but the derivative goes from df/dz = -1 (for z greater than 0) discontinuously to df/dz = +1 (for z less than 0). If you differentiate that twice with respect to z, you get a delta function due to the kink, *not* zero as they claimed. It *doesn't work*.
In fact, the first part of the refutation is actually someone showing (very generally) that you can't have an asymptotically flat solution in general relativity for a distributed source. In other words, this idea is done, dead, completely unfixable.