While not a perfect conductor of heat, diamond is incredibly good at it. The rigidity of the crystalline structure is what makes it such a good heat conductor. Diamonds are used as heat sinks in some applications for this reason. The required rigid structure does limit the practicality for some applications. Carbon nanotubes are also very good conductors of heat along their lengths. So, bundles of very long carbon nanotubes could presumably make good flexible heat pipes.
length shrinks proportionally with the cross sectional area so nothing changes
All other things being equal, no it doesn't. The cross sectional area is two dimensional, whereas the length is one dimensional. This is really basic stuff. If you need an illustrative example, consider a bar with a square cross section. We will set the length of our example bar to ten times its other edges. We'll call the length of the cross-sectional square's edges n. So, the cross sectional area will be n^2 and the length will be 10n for any given n. For n=10, cross section is 100 and length is 100 so ratio is 1/1 For n=9, cross section is 81 and length is,90 so ratio is 9/10 For n=8, cross section is 64 and length is,80 so ratio is 4/5 For n=7, cross section is 49 and length is,70 so ratio is 7/10 For n=6, cross section is 36 and length is,60 so ratio is 3/5 For n=5, cross section is 25 and length is,50 so ratio is 1/2 For n=4, cross section is 16 and length is 40, so ratio is 2/5 For n=3, cross section is 9 and length is 30, so ratio is 3/10 For n=2, cross section is 4 and length is 20, so ratio is 1/5 For n=1, cross section is 1 and length is 10, so ratio is 1/10 So, by scaling down the length of the bar by a factor of 10, without altering the shape, the ratio of cross-section to length went from 1/1 to 1/10. Scaling down the length by another factor of ten would yield a ratio of 1/100 and so forth and so on.
If the superconductors can be kept out in vacuum, isolated from heat-generating parts of the ship, and shielded from sunlight, then the GGGP has a point. The superconductor could be kept cold with minimal cooling (it would still get some heat radiated from the rest of the ship, re-radiated from solar shields, etc.). The problem is that the kind of setup required may not be very practical in many of the places you'd actually want superconductors, such as in propulsion systems.
Zero tolerance means zero responsibility, and they are made by smart people to avoid these kinds of problems.
I pretty much agree with that except for the part about them being made by smart people. You don't have to be smart to apply the CYA principle, you just have to be exercising standard human moral cowardice. That's not to say that a smart person can't decide on a zero-tolerance policy, but they're very frequently put in place by committees of people who truly don't understand what the consequences will be.
I'm assuming this is just an rfid system and not something more elaborate. The question becomes what happens to students who are reported absent by malfunctioning or poorly set up equipment and incorrect information in databases?. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a problem since the student would be able to verify their presence some other way, then the problem would be conscientiously addressed and corrected. This is the real world, however. In the real world, school administrators tend to be authoritarians and extremely blunt thinkers. The prevalence of ill-thought out "zero tolerance" policies in the area of education makes this perfectly clear. Students identified as absent by this system probably won't be given a chance to prove their innocence and may stand a good chance of being punished more harshly if they try.
Ok. The Bayh-Dole Act gives small businesses and non-profits (including universities) the right to patents from government-funded research they perform. Once they own the patents, the rest of us have to pay to benefit for the research funded by our tax dollars. You shouldn't really need a specific example of this since the intent of the act is pretty clear, but there are some right in the article I linked to. It mentions, for example, the legal case In Re Petition of CellPro, Inc. It's clear from the brief summary in the article that Johns Hopkins got the patent for stem cell research conducted with government funding, then licensed the patents to Baxter. Oh, then there's another great one:
In In the Case of NORVIR[7], the NIH received a request[8] from Essential Inventions, supported by the public and members of the United States Congress, to exercise march-in rights for patents owned by Abbott Labs covering the drug ritonavir, sold under the trade name Norvir, a prescription drug used in the treatment of AIDS. Abbott had recently raised the price of Norvir 400% for U.S. customers (but not for consumers in any other country), and had refused to license ritonavir to another company for purposes for providing protease inhibitors coformulated with ritonavir. The NIH denied the petition finding no grounds to exercise its march-in rights. The NIH cited:
* The availability of Norvir to patients with AIDS
* That there was no evidence that health and safety needs were not adequately met by Abbott, and
* That the NIH should not address the issue of drug pricing, only Congress.
Really wonderful. That and the other examples there show that not only can government funded research be patented, but there's no mandatory licensing or price control on the patents. So, not only are there sweetheart deals, but there can be sweetheart deals where companies making a drug that some people require to _live_ can undersupply the drug, but no-one else is legally allowed to take up the slack. Really great.
Yes, only in raw cash terms. However, since the sentence that inspired my original reply was "with a proper size bankroll, and correct play, you can profit" and the poster was talking in raw cash terms, raw cash is the context of the discussion. You can't just pull a context switch and invalidate what I was saying retroactively. If I said: "with a proper size bankroll, and correct [skiing], you can profit [monetarily from helicopter skiing on glaciers]", the fact that it's entertaining isn't going to change the fact that you don't profit monetarily from it. Same for all kinds of entertaining activities you can insert instead of poker.
At this point I think you must just be intentionally misunderstanding what I'm saying to doggedly make your point. I'm not disagreeing with you, I was disagreeing with the GGGGP who basically said that wind will hit the edges of a field of grass and stop, as if it were a purely 2 dimensional phenomenon. The reality is that wind is still going to hit the top of that field of grass, just like it's going to hit the top of a forest of trees.
Except of course for patents that are granted to various organizations whose research is funded all or in part by tax dollars, and all the research that isn't freely released to the public, etc. etc.
By "hypothetical average" I mean the mean average player. The mean average profit in a poker game is 0 unless there's a house taking a cut, in which case it's negative. There's more leeway for the median player to possibly be making money, but that requires some truly remarkable losers to provide the profit for everyone else. It depends quite a lot on how you determine the median also. You can simply take all the people who have ever played poker and find the one in the middle, or you can rank them in one of a number of different ways based on the number of hands of poker they've each played and other information, then pick the one in the middle. Pretty much any way you can do it, you can be assured that the median average poker player is going to be losing money.
"Blades of grass are occluded by other blades of grass in the field so only the edges of the field get full contact with the wind.
Note that the poster referred to "only the edges of the field". That was the part I was disagreeing with. A house and multi-story apartment building with the same footprint have the same size roof. Plant grass on top of either and, when the wind blows, the grass on the apartment building will get about the same amount of wind as the house, all other things being equal.
That's an interesting point. The problem I see with it though is that virtually all games are played for entertainment value and the actual entertainment value is pretty much an intangible. If you want to say that poker isn't a zero sum game because of the intangible entertainment value, then the term "zero sum game" has just lost all meaning, because all games may have an intangible entertainment value, making it impossible to determine if they are zero sum or not. So, although your argument is interesting, it isn't convincing.
That is a fact. Therefore you are wrong.
The problem there is that you were using fuzzy logic while I was working on the strict definition. You can state anything you like and call it a fact.
Some exceptional players, who also have the right lucky breaks at the right times, can make a career out of gambling. Just like some exceptional athletes, who also have the right lucky breaks at the right times, can make a career out of sports. The vast majority of people cannot.
The mathematical mean poker player breaks exactly even. As for the MEDIAN poker player. They're almost certain to be net losers, not net winners. You said "Low stakes live games are LOADED with them". If the games are loaded with a particular type of player, then that means a representative of that type of player is going to be the median, not a representative of the money-making players. It probably depends a bit on how you determine the median point. The "ATM" poker players you mention are probably not going to play as many hands of poker over their lifetimes as the professionals, unless they're hopeless addicts (of course, there are plenty of hopeless addicts), but they seem to be replaced by plenty of fresh ATMS. Poker is going to be like any predator/prey relationship with an order of magnitude more prey than predators.
The part about poker, and other similar gambling systems being zero sum games isn't my opinion, it's just a fact. It is _literally_ a game where the average amount of money won is zero, except when there's a house to take a cut, in which case it's worse than a zero sum game. I don't see how that part of what I said could be viewed as an opinion. Every success by one player in poker is precisely balanced with one or more players failure.
Some people can make money with poker, the math guarantees it (except when there's a house taking a cut, of course), but telling a general audience that they can make money with poker is false. General audience means average case. The mean average poker player will break even (once again, unless there's a house taking a cut, in which case they will lose money). As for the median average poker player, the expected distribution almost guarantees that they'll also be losing money (it might depend on how you're determining the mean: based on number of hands played, simple number of players, etc. but they're virtually guaranteed to be net losers). So the majority of poker players lose money to the few who profit from it. It's not untrue that someone can make money from it. That's obvious. It's the _typical_ experience you seemed to be misrepresenting.
As for exploitation, I understand that it's voluntary (except for hardcore addicts, which there are not a few of). For entertainment fine. Anyone who hopes to make money at it is either lying to themselves or not really understanding where the money is coming from if they don't think they're exploiting people. The whole point, as you admit, is to try to play against people who aren't as good as you are and avoid playing against people who are better than you are. Terms like "fish" and "sharks" are clear language of exploitation.
Still, you know, that's how most of the rest of the real world works too. If you invest in anything and you don't know the rules and how to actually extract the value from it, you can certainly lose a lot more than a couple of hundred bucks at a table.
The difference between poker and the stock market is that the stock market is not (meant to be) a zero sum game (unless you want to be pedantic and do all your accounting from the perspective of the end of the universe). The prevalence of speculation in the stock market sadly makes investing a lot more like poker than it should be. Frankly, the stock market leaning more and more towards being a giant casino is one of the things that's been causing all the economic turmoil that's been going on. The stock market is meant to be for constructive investing. Money goes into ventures that need growth capital to produce real goods or services. Value is added. The real world has the benefit (and sometimes the downsides of being real), while poker is just a game. If you invest in the real world, it might turn out that the company isn't successful, or they're beaten by a competitor, or the entire earth might be hit by an asteroid and be destroyed. A hand of poker is just a hand of poker.
All this said, I don't think people should be stopped from gambling by law. Same for taking drugs, or indulging whatever consensual sexual predilections people may have or any other "vices". People should be warned, but, even if society thinks it's a mistake, they should still be allowed to go ahead.
If all players played correctly, you are right. It is a zero sum game
I'm right no matter how all players play. It's easy to figure out. At the end of the game, you add up all the money the winners won and all of the money the losers lost then subtract the latter from the former, it comes out to $0.00. The fact that better players take advantage of poorer players and end up with their money doesn't make it somehow not a zero sum game.
However, bear in mind, I never said *you* are an "average" player, in fact, I pretty much imply that you are not. I only said that profit is possible.
But you're on a public forum addressing the public. You're not addressing "sharks", you're addressing "fish" and telling them "you too can be a shark". That's exactly what the "sharks" want the "fish" to believe so that they can exploit them. People sitting around a poker table are just looking to exploit each other. Nothing is produced, wealth is just shuffled around so, for anyone to profit, there either needs to be a steady stream of fresh suckers, or a stable base of people who lose money consistently and don't quit playing. Sadly, the latter exist and can go a lifetime losing massive amounts of money and deluding themselves into thinking they're winning because they remember their victories but forget their losses.
The "fish"/"shark" metaphor actually works pretty well. The important thing to remember is that sharks are, in fact, just another type of fish.
With a proper size bankroll, and correct play, you can profit. Usually that goes more for poker against actual players
That depends on who the "you" is. If by "you" you mean the average poker player, then what you're suggesting is self-evidently wrong. Poker between a group of players is a zero sum game, therefore, the hypothetical "average" player breaks even. Add the house taking a cut, and the average player is losing money. Those who make money from poker are making money because the money is coming from suckers who hope that they'll make money from poker. Therefore, it's in the interest of good poker players to constantly try to push the image that "you" can make money playing poker because it helps ensure a fresh flow of suckers to the bottom rung of the pyramid scheme.
I guess my point is that they would not pay for it. How would you make them pay?
That's the problem isn't it. Corporations just won't or can't pay for many types of basic research. The best model is for government to do this research. The big question is what happens to the research after. Many people, myself included, feel that if the research is being paid for by our tax dollars that it should belong to everyone. What seems to happen, however, is a hybrid public/private system where we pay for the research and some private interest reaps monopoly profits from it through sweetheart deals.
I'm for public funding of research, but very pessimistic about how it actually ends up working out. I think that doing research into fission is a good idea, but I also think that, since the rewards of the research are going to go pretty much exclusively to commercial interests, that they should be paying for it.
I see what you mean about nuetrons, but, relative to other things that are said to interact weakly, neutrons seem to interact pretty strongly. When physicists talk about things interacting weakly, they generally seem to be talking about things that are much harder to detect than neutrons which is what led to my objection.
Since fission power is actually a (theoretically) commercially successful industry, one could expect funding for fission research to be more readily available from private sources. More speculative, but still potentially valuable, research like fusion is more the domain of public funding. Then, when the public funding has produced something that could be commercially viable, the private interests get to swoop in and the ones with the right connections get patents on everything.
The safety issues you talk about for fission reactors shouldn't be much of an issue for fusion reactors. The huge problem in fusion is getting the fusion to even happen in the first place. Pretty much every system for getting it to work involves carefully pumping in a lot of energy in a controlled manner in some way or another to keep the fusion going. If the equipment regulating the fusion stops working, the fusion just stops. You shouldn't really be able to get a melt-down type situation where the fuel melts and pools and you have a self-sustaining reaction. You could still certainly get a boom of some sort from, for example, some sort of magnetic plasma containment failing. Then you have equipment damage and a radioactive cloud, but the reaction will have completely stopped. So, the maximum amount of pounding the containment vessel might have to take should be easy to calculate (for a nuclear physicist anyway) and a safe containment vessel could be designed. Not that it would ever be 100% safe. No industrial endeavour ever is. It would almost certainly be safer than a fission reactor however.
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While not a perfect conductor of heat, diamond is incredibly good at it. The rigidity of the crystalline structure is what makes it such a good heat conductor. Diamonds are used as heat sinks in some applications for this reason. The required rigid structure does limit the practicality for some applications. Carbon nanotubes are also very good conductors of heat along their lengths. So, bundles of very long carbon nanotubes could presumably make good flexible heat pipes.
length shrinks proportionally with the cross sectional area so nothing changes
All other things being equal, no it doesn't. The cross sectional area is two dimensional, whereas the length is one dimensional. This is really basic stuff. If you need an illustrative example, consider a bar with a square cross section. We will set the length of our example bar to ten times its other edges. We'll call the length of the cross-sectional square's edges n. So, the cross sectional area will be n^2 and the length will be 10n for any given n. ,90 so ratio is 9/10 ,80 so ratio is 4/5 ,70 so ratio is 7/10 ,60 so ratio is 3/5 ,50 so ratio is 1/2
For n=10, cross section is 100 and length is 100 so ratio is 1/1
For n=9, cross section is 81 and length is
For n=8, cross section is 64 and length is
For n=7, cross section is 49 and length is
For n=6, cross section is 36 and length is
For n=5, cross section is 25 and length is
For n=4, cross section is 16 and length is 40, so ratio is 2/5
For n=3, cross section is 9 and length is 30, so ratio is 3/10
For n=2, cross section is 4 and length is 20, so ratio is 1/5
For n=1, cross section is 1 and length is 10, so ratio is 1/10
So, by scaling down the length of the bar by a factor of 10, without altering the shape, the ratio of cross-section to length went from 1/1 to 1/10. Scaling down the length by another factor of ten would yield a ratio of 1/100 and so forth and so on.
If the superconductors can be kept out in vacuum, isolated from heat-generating parts of the ship, and shielded from sunlight, then the GGGP has a point. The superconductor could be kept cold with minimal cooling (it would still get some heat radiated from the rest of the ship, re-radiated from solar shields, etc.). The problem is that the kind of setup required may not be very practical in many of the places you'd actually want superconductors, such as in propulsion systems.
Of course, the high rates of fungal and bacterial infections in prisoners suggest another ethical problem.
Sorry for the "intentionally" I tacked on in my last post. These threads go all over the place and it was pretty rude of me to imply that.
Zero tolerance means zero responsibility, and they are made by smart people to avoid these kinds of problems.
I pretty much agree with that except for the part about them being made by smart people. You don't have to be smart to apply the CYA principle, you just have to be exercising standard human moral cowardice. That's not to say that a smart person can't decide on a zero-tolerance policy, but they're very frequently put in place by committees of people who truly don't understand what the consequences will be.
I'm assuming this is just an rfid system and not something more elaborate. The question becomes what happens to students who are reported absent by malfunctioning or poorly set up equipment and incorrect information in databases?. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a problem since the student would be able to verify their presence some other way, then the problem would be conscientiously addressed and corrected. This is the real world, however. In the real world, school administrators tend to be authoritarians and extremely blunt thinkers. The prevalence of ill-thought out "zero tolerance" policies in the area of education makes this perfectly clear. Students identified as absent by this system probably won't be given a chance to prove their innocence and may stand a good chance of being punished more harshly if they try.
Ok. The Bayh-Dole Act gives small businesses and non-profits (including universities) the right to patents from government-funded research they perform. Once they own the patents, the rest of us have to pay to benefit for the research funded by our tax dollars. You shouldn't really need a specific example of this since the intent of the act is pretty clear, but there are some right in the article I linked to. It mentions, for example, the legal case In Re Petition of CellPro, Inc. It's clear from the brief summary in the article that Johns Hopkins got the patent for stem cell research conducted with government funding, then licensed the patents to Baxter.
Oh, then there's another great one:
In In the Case of NORVIR[7], the NIH received a request[8] from Essential Inventions, supported by the public and members of the United States Congress, to exercise march-in rights for patents owned by Abbott Labs covering the drug ritonavir, sold under the trade name Norvir, a prescription drug used in the treatment of AIDS. Abbott had recently raised the price of Norvir 400% for U.S. customers (but not for consumers in any other country), and had refused to license ritonavir to another company for purposes for providing protease inhibitors coformulated with ritonavir. The NIH denied the petition finding no grounds to exercise its march-in rights. The NIH cited:
* The availability of Norvir to patients with AIDS
* That there was no evidence that health and safety needs were not adequately met by Abbott, and
* That the NIH should not address the issue of drug pricing, only Congress.
Really wonderful. That and the other examples there show that not only can government funded research be patented, but there's no mandatory licensing or price control on the patents. So, not only are there sweetheart deals, but there can be sweetheart deals where companies making a drug that some people require to _live_ can undersupply the drug, but no-one else is legally allowed to take up the slack. Really great.
Yes, only in raw cash terms. However, since the sentence that inspired my original reply was "with a proper size bankroll, and correct play, you can profit" and the poster was talking in raw cash terms, raw cash is the context of the discussion. You can't just pull a context switch and invalidate what I was saying retroactively. If I said: "with a proper size bankroll, and correct [skiing], you can profit [monetarily from helicopter skiing on glaciers]", the fact that it's entertaining isn't going to change the fact that you don't profit monetarily from it. Same for all kinds of entertaining activities you can insert instead of poker.
At this point I think you must just be intentionally misunderstanding what I'm saying to doggedly make your point. I'm not disagreeing with you, I was disagreeing with the GGGGP who basically said that wind will hit the edges of a field of grass and stop, as if it were a purely 2 dimensional phenomenon. The reality is that wind is still going to hit the top of that field of grass, just like it's going to hit the top of a forest of trees.
Except of course for patents that are granted to various organizations whose research is funded all or in part by tax dollars, and all the research that isn't freely released to the public, etc. etc.
By "hypothetical average" I mean the mean average player. The mean average profit in a poker game is 0 unless there's a house taking a cut, in which case it's negative. There's more leeway for the median player to possibly be making money, but that requires some truly remarkable losers to provide the profit for everyone else. It depends quite a lot on how you determine the median also. You can simply take all the people who have ever played poker and find the one in the middle, or you can rank them in one of a number of different ways based on the number of hands of poker they've each played and other information, then pick the one in the middle. Pretty much any way you can do it, you can be assured that the median average poker player is going to be losing money.
The comment I replied to said:
"Blades of grass are occluded by other blades of grass in the field so only the edges of the field get full contact with the wind.
Note that the poster referred to "only the edges of the field". That was the part I was disagreeing with. A house and multi-story apartment building with the same footprint have the same size roof. Plant grass on top of either and, when the wind blows, the grass on the apartment building will get about the same amount of wind as the house, all other things being equal.
That's an interesting point. The problem I see with it though is that virtually all games are played for entertainment value and the actual entertainment value is pretty much an intangible. If you want to say that poker isn't a zero sum game because of the intangible entertainment value, then the term "zero sum game" has just lost all meaning, because all games may have an intangible entertainment value, making it impossible to determine if they are zero sum or not. So, although your argument is interesting, it isn't convincing.
That is a fact. Therefore you are wrong.
The problem there is that you were using fuzzy logic while I was working on the strict definition. You can state anything you like and call it a fact.
Some exceptional players, who also have the right lucky breaks at the right times, can make a career out of gambling. Just like some exceptional athletes, who also have the right lucky breaks at the right times, can make a career out of sports. The vast majority of people cannot.
The mathematical mean poker player breaks exactly even. As for the MEDIAN poker player. They're almost certain to be net losers, not net winners. You said "Low stakes live games are LOADED with them". If the games are loaded with a particular type of player, then that means a representative of that type of player is going to be the median, not a representative of the money-making players. It probably depends a bit on how you determine the median point. The "ATM" poker players you mention are probably not going to play as many hands of poker over their lifetimes as the professionals, unless they're hopeless addicts (of course, there are plenty of hopeless addicts), but they seem to be replaced by plenty of fresh ATMS. Poker is going to be like any predator/prey relationship with an order of magnitude more prey than predators.
That's certainly your opinion of the situation
The part about poker, and other similar gambling systems being zero sum games isn't my opinion, it's just a fact. It is _literally_ a game where the average amount of money won is zero, except when there's a house to take a cut, in which case it's worse than a zero sum game. I don't see how that part of what I said could be viewed as an opinion. Every success by one player in poker is precisely balanced with one or more players failure.
Some people can make money with poker, the math guarantees it (except when there's a house taking a cut, of course), but telling a general audience that they can make money with poker is false. General audience means average case. The mean average poker player will break even (once again, unless there's a house taking a cut, in which case they will lose money). As for the median average poker player, the expected distribution almost guarantees that they'll also be losing money (it might depend on how you're determining the mean: based on number of hands played, simple number of players, etc. but they're virtually guaranteed to be net losers). So the majority of poker players lose money to the few who profit from it. It's not untrue that someone can make money from it. That's obvious. It's the _typical_ experience you seemed to be misrepresenting.
As for exploitation, I understand that it's voluntary (except for hardcore addicts, which there are not a few of). For entertainment fine. Anyone who hopes to make money at it is either lying to themselves or not really understanding where the money is coming from if they don't think they're exploiting people. The whole point, as you admit, is to try to play against people who aren't as good as you are and avoid playing against people who are better than you are. Terms like "fish" and "sharks" are clear language of exploitation.
Still, you know, that's how most of the rest of the real world works too. If you invest in anything and you don't know the rules and how to actually extract the value from it, you can certainly lose a lot more than a couple of hundred bucks at a table.
The difference between poker and the stock market is that the stock market is not (meant to be) a zero sum game (unless you want to be pedantic and do all your accounting from the perspective of the end of the universe). The prevalence of speculation in the stock market sadly makes investing a lot more like poker than it should be. Frankly, the stock market leaning more and more towards being a giant casino is one of the things that's been causing all the economic turmoil that's been going on. The stock market is meant to be for constructive investing. Money goes into ventures that need growth capital to produce real goods or services. Value is added. The real world has the benefit (and sometimes the downsides of being real), while poker is just a game. If you invest in the real world, it might turn out that the company isn't successful, or they're beaten by a competitor, or the entire earth might be hit by an asteroid and be destroyed. A hand of poker is just a hand of poker.
All this said, I don't think people should be stopped from gambling by law. Same for taking drugs, or indulging whatever consensual sexual predilections people may have or any other "vices". People should be warned, but, even if society thinks it's a mistake, they should still be allowed to go ahead.
The existence of "amber waves of grain" in wheat fields and so forth, your hypotheses doesn't seen to hold up to real world observation.
If all players played correctly, you are right. It is a zero sum game
I'm right no matter how all players play. It's easy to figure out. At the end of the game, you add up all the money the winners won and all of the money the losers lost then subtract the latter from the former, it comes out to $0.00. The fact that better players take advantage of poorer players and end up with their money doesn't make it somehow not a zero sum game.
However, bear in mind, I never said *you* are an "average" player, in fact, I pretty much imply that you are not. I only said that profit is possible.
But you're on a public forum addressing the public. You're not addressing "sharks", you're addressing "fish" and telling them "you too can be a shark". That's exactly what the "sharks" want the "fish" to believe so that they can exploit them. People sitting around a poker table are just looking to exploit each other. Nothing is produced, wealth is just shuffled around so, for anyone to profit, there either needs to be a steady stream of fresh suckers, or a stable base of people who lose money consistently and don't quit playing. Sadly, the latter exist and can go a lifetime losing massive amounts of money and deluding themselves into thinking they're winning because they remember their victories but forget their losses.
The "fish"/"shark" metaphor actually works pretty well. The important thing to remember is that sharks are, in fact, just another type of fish.
With a proper size bankroll, and correct play, you can profit. Usually that goes more for poker against actual players
That depends on who the "you" is. If by "you" you mean the average poker player, then what you're suggesting is self-evidently wrong. Poker between a group of players is a zero sum game, therefore, the hypothetical "average" player breaks even. Add the house taking a cut, and the average player is losing money. Those who make money from poker are making money because the money is coming from suckers who hope that they'll make money from poker. Therefore, it's in the interest of good poker players to constantly try to push the image that "you" can make money playing poker because it helps ensure a fresh flow of suckers to the bottom rung of the pyramid scheme.
I guess my point is that they would not pay for it. How would you make them pay?
That's the problem isn't it. Corporations just won't or can't pay for many types of basic research. The best model is for government to do this research. The big question is what happens to the research after. Many people, myself included, feel that if the research is being paid for by our tax dollars that it should belong to everyone. What seems to happen, however, is a hybrid public/private system where we pay for the research and some private interest reaps monopoly profits from it through sweetheart deals.
I'm for public funding of research, but very pessimistic about how it actually ends up working out. I think that doing research into fission is a good idea, but I also think that, since the rewards of the research are going to go pretty much exclusively to commercial interests, that they should be paying for it.
I see what you mean about nuetrons, but, relative to other things that are said to interact weakly, neutrons seem to interact pretty strongly. When physicists talk about things interacting weakly, they generally seem to be talking about things that are much harder to detect than neutrons which is what led to my objection.
Since fission power is actually a (theoretically) commercially successful industry, one could expect funding for fission research to be more readily available from private sources. More speculative, but still potentially valuable, research like fusion is more the domain of public funding. Then, when the public funding has produced something that could be commercially viable, the private interests get to swoop in and the ones with the right connections get patents on everything.
The safety issues you talk about for fission reactors shouldn't be much of an issue for fusion reactors. The huge problem in fusion is getting the fusion to even happen in the first place. Pretty much every system for getting it to work involves carefully pumping in a lot of energy in a controlled manner in some way or another to keep the fusion going. If the equipment regulating the fusion stops working, the fusion just stops. You shouldn't really be able to get a melt-down type situation where the fuel melts and pools and you have a self-sustaining reaction. You could still certainly get a boom of some sort from, for example, some sort of magnetic plasma containment failing. Then you have equipment damage and a radioactive cloud, but the reaction will have completely stopped. So, the maximum amount of pounding the containment vessel might have to take should be easy to calculate (for a nuclear physicist anyway) and a safe containment vessel could be designed. Not that it would ever be 100% safe. No industrial endeavour ever is. It would almost certainly be safer than a fission reactor however.