Here's a question: When you are accelerating a multi-ton mass at 3G up to the top of a tube that is 24 times higher than the highest skyscraper in the world, how do you keep it from buckling under the force?
By designing the structure to withstand the forces involved? If this is meant to be a trick question, it's not a very good one. A 10 metric ton mass at 1 G is about 9807 newtons. At 3G it's about 29,421 newtons. There's also the actual force of gravity, although it's acting in a different direction (at a rough guess I'd say the slope on this thing is 1 over 10 based on the concept art, so it's almost perpendicular to the 3 Gs) but we'll ignore that and just add it to the 3 G, so it's 39288 newtons. That's really not such an incredible force. Your comment sort of reminds me of people who criticize the concept of simulated centrifugal gravity on space stations who start to go on about the "incredible" stresses involved, not realizing that they're talking about the exact same magnitude of stress that terrestrial bridge-builders need to deal with.
The scale of such a structure would certainly be a big deal. But the masses, forces, pressures, and energies (although I will grant not the speeds) of such a system are miniscule compared to those dealt with on a regular, daily basis by all kinds of engineering that people interact with and take for granted.
Most of the Banks around here seem to use Diebold ATMs. The company that managed to infect its own ATM network with Windows viruses. One of the more common kinds of financial scams relies on the fact that cheques _never_ actually clear even though the banks have to clear them in a certain time frame. It can be two years later and suddenly a $50,000 cashiers cheque you deposited and your bank "cleared" is reversed. There have been tons of cases of billions of dollars being completely misused by bankers and being lost because the bank procedures and software that were meant to track the money could simply be bypassed and it looks like the ones that made the news are only the tip of the iceburg.
Based on that and other things, I'm going to have to say that, while _some_ of the systems banks use may be very good and amazingly precise, overall they do a terrible job considering that they're basically the underpinnings of the entire world economy.
How about Minister of Federal Information Technology? Or commissioner. A title that actually fits a government job. I suppose CTO is better than Czar (or Tsar, or whatever) though.
What could go wrong? Ok, they might discover that the ancient Martians developed genetic engineering that turns evil people (such as professional wrestlers turned actor) into monsters but... Wait, that sounds wrong somehow.
A few problems with that approach. Among other things, I don't think you'd want an incompressible (or at least difficult to compress) fluid between the outer and inner shell. If it's "pushing out" on the outer shell, then it's also pushing in on the inner shell. Not to mention that you actually want to be able to see out of the thing with a window. Given the complexity of a window and how well our cameras work these days, the window represents a whole lot of complex engineering for very little benefit, but if you're going to have a manned craft, you might as well have a window, otherwise you have to shrug your shoulders and mumble when someone asks you why you bothered to actually go down there rather than spend that engineering money on a telepresence system you could operate from a ship on the surface or even from the comfort of home. So, if you need a window, you would have to have a window in every layer of your system and figure out a very complex system with super-high precision optics that work properly even when the high pressure has warped their shape. Then there's your connections between the controls in the inner part of the sub and all the equipment outside. I imagine the sub has two or more power systems with one or more for the cockpit and one or more living at outside pressure for the outside of the sub and with all the equipment outside the cockpit controlled "wirelessly" (or using the whole cockpit hull for a "wire" anyway). Having nested shells is going to require such a system to be very complicated and to be multi-layered as well, with each layer presenting another point of failure. Overall, you're better off in just about every way if your multiple shells are all merged into one shell.
Essentially, the only special technology you need for a human to survive to that depth is a thick enough shell around them. Nothing technologically amazing or any new ideas needed. Having a well sealed hatch and a well-sealed window are the more complicated parts, since those may not deform evenly with the rest of the shell, but even those aren't really hugely complex engineering problems. The trickier problems are getting all the stuff that needs to survive _outside_ the shell to survive at that pressure and to not explode from internal pressure back up at sea-level. Every single little part needs to considered,and not just mechanically since, at that pressure, materials may have altered chemical and electrical properties. The cockpit is simple and well-understood by comparison.
For some reason I'm not quite clear on, your suggestion has made me think of _Star Trek IV_, when Scotty trades the formula for transparent aluminium for plexiglass to make the aquarium for the whales since plexiglass is the best substitute for transparent aluminium. I still to this day have not been able to fathom why they couldn't just use regular, non-transparent aluminium, or whatever metal the Klingon ships inner structure was made from to make their tank. Why did it need to be transparent? I don't know and I don't know why this conversation so strongly reminds me of that.
You make a lot of statements about what the study didn't account for, but I don't think you've even looked at it. From the study:
We conducted a nested case–control study in a cohort of 12 315 workers in eight non-metal mining facilities,
which included 198 lung cancer deaths and 562 incidence density–sampled control subjects. For each case
subject, we selected up to four control subjects, individually matched on mining facility, sex, race/ethnicity, and
birth year (within 5 years), from all workers who were alive before the day the case subject died. We estimated
diesel exhaust exposure, represented by respirable elemental carbon (REC), by job and year, for each subject,
based on an extensive retrospective exposure assessment at each mining facility. We conducted both categor- ical and continuous regression analyses adjusted for cigarette smoking and other potential confounding vari- ables (eg, history of employment in high-risk occupations for lung cancer and a history of respiratory disease) to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Analyses were both unlagged and lagged to exclude recent exposure such as that occurring in the 15 years directly before the date of death (case subjects)/ reference date (control subjects). All statistical tests were two-sided.
So there were controls. They didn't set up their own mine with no diesel equipment and run it for decades for comparison purposes, but they did control for other factors in their study.
A car engine, at high revolutions, puts out about as much CO and CO2 per second as a smoker does in a month.
The average smoker smokes about a pack a day. A pack of cigarettes contains about 20 grams of tobacco,additives and paper that actually gets burned when the cigarette is smoked. There are about 30 days in a month, so the average smoker burns about.6 kilograms of material in a month. The average car gas tank is probably around 20 gallons. Twenty gallons of gas is around 56 kilograms. So, a typical tank of gas contains about 93 times as much burnable material as a smoker smokes in a month. So, to burn as much in a second as a smoker smokes in a month, a car would need to be able to burn its entire supply of fuel in about a minute and a half. With the gas pedal floored and traveling at a very unsafe speed a typical car would still be hard pressed to burn up a full tank of fuel in two and a half hours (which is a hundred times one and a half minutes). So, assuming that the after-products of gasoline and cigarettes are roughly equivalent by weight, you're off by about two orders of magnitude.
Not that car exhaust is wonderful. It would be really nice to be able to eliminate it. It's sort of a necessary evil at the moment. Cigarette smoke... not so necessary. Especially for non smokers.
Regarding your desire to physically assault people who complain about cigarette smoke while surrounded by cars, I should point out that cigarette smoke is unfiltered (the filter is for the smoker, not those near to the smoker, and is minimally effective compared to the exhaust system on a car anyway) and quite frankly disgusting. Actual relative danger of the smoke aside, a very small exposure clings to skin, hair, and clothing much more effectively than car exhaust. Then the stench sticks to you all day.
Sorry, lost me there. Are you saying that _I_ am misrepresenting something, or was that one word your response to the question I asked at the end of my post?
Lawns are for walking on, in that it is reasonable to expect to be able to walk on grass and get at most yelled at by some guy in a rocking chair on his porch.
I personally feel that lawns are, in fact, for walking on. There are a surprisingly large number of people out there who feel that lawns are for fertilizing, landscaping, and mowing fanatically (not just theirs, but the lawn of anyone nearby, even people who like long grass) and _not_ for walking on or marring in any way. There are also plenty of people who feel that _their_ lawn is only for _them_ to walk on and no-one else. If a leaf blows onto their lawn from next door, they will attempt to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. Sometimes, in real life and not just in hypothetical examples, these people do booby-trap their lawns. Sometimes they put up a warning sign about it, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the booby trap is just a dangerous dog. When people get hurt by these booby traps or vicious dogs, the people who set the traps usually go to jail. The people walking on their lawn in many cases are kids who knew they weren't supposed to be there, but were ignoring the warnings and breaking the rules (and possibly the law), but the law as well as basic principles of justice, recognize that such infractions do not deserve maiming or death as punishment, and certainly not handed out arbitrarily by a vengeful property owner rather than a neutral authority.
Cleaning alcohol is exactly that, for cleaning not drinking. It says so right on the bottle. Have you really thought through what would happen if modern cleaning alcohol was not denatured, and the price left unchanged? I'm not sure that you have.
Alcohol is used for a lot more things than just cleaning. As for what would happen if modern cleaning alcohol were not denatured and the price were unchanged... I suppose more people would drink it... and the people who drink it already wouldn't get so sick and die as much? If you're positing that people would get drunk vastly more, I don't see how. Most people who want to get drunk seem to find a way to get drunk. As it stands, if you walk into any liquor store, there's a staggering array of products available and many of them are significantly more expensive than the absolute cheapest high-alcohol content liquor you can find, but they seem to sell anyway. I think most people who want vodka are still going to buy vodka in a fancy bottle even if the vodka in the plastic bottle labelled "rubbing alcohol" in the pharmacy section at wal~mart is cheaper. In the big picture, it seems that it would simply reduce cases of poisoning and reduce tax revenues slightly from people who, for the most part, are desperately poor anyway.
They did release the information that they poisoned it, but they kept the actual nature of the poisoning as secret as they could. Also, the intention was that customers of bootleggers, who didn't necessarily know where the alcohol came from would die and that all the blame would fall on the bootleggers.
What is currently done with rubbing alcohol is pretty stupid and dangerous as far as I'm concerned, but it isn't a patch on the extremes they went to during Prohibition.
If you let someone know something is poisonous and try to stop them from drinking it, how can you possibly be responsible for them drinking it and dying?
Gee, maybe because you poisoned in the first place specifically so that your warning not to drink it because you'll die would be true. What exactly do you think happens to you if you mine your lawn and put up warning signs saying "minefield, you will die if you walk here" when neighborhood kids get blown to little pieces?
No it was poisonous, industrial alcohol has always needed to be poisoned to be legal they just changed the ingredients of this poison to stop people getting around it.
Your statement is self-contradictory. You claim that the industrial ethanol was somehow magically poisonous despite the fact that, as you admit, it was only poisonous in order to kill people who tried to drink it. Now, some industrial alcohol did need more distillation to be safer for consumption while other industrial alcohol conversely was contaminated with benzene (although in pretty much safe trace amounts) from the extreme distillation process it had been through (to remove all the water). None of it was toxic on anything like the levels it became toxic after the poisoning program. Also, that "always needed to be poisoned" scenario you mention isn't really true. That program started during prohibition.
You said that "they did not add poison to kill people, they added it to make it not drinkable". The reason that it wasn't drinkable after the poison was added was because it killed people. The poison was a terror weapon designed to terrify people away from bootlegged alcohol for fear that they would die. To accomplish this goal, the poisoners were deliberately killing people.
I believe you that at no point were they trying to _secretly_ poison prohibition criminals. It wasn't much of a secret, they were reasonably up front about it. They did keep the information on the constantly changing mixture of poisons they were using secret so as to present a moving target to the chemists working for the bootleggers, however. The obvious consequence of this is that the bootleggers would be selling safe alcohol made from industrial alcohol one day and the next batch would be poisonous. You can claim that the poisoners were just naive innocents. I think that's unlikely, but even if it's true, it still makes them guilty of manslaughter.
Yeah, it kind of is a horrible crime when it wasn't poisonous (well, ok, it was, but no more than regular drinking alcohol) but they added poison specifically to kill people. When you make something dangerous specifically for the purpose of killing people, that's pretty horrible.
The difference being that adding a scent to natural gas saves lives, but adding poison to industrial alcohol definitely kills people. At least tens of thousands of people died from alcohol the government intentionally poisoned during prohibition. The government's position, of course, was that it was entirely the fault of the bootleggers who distilled that alcohol for human consumption and of the people who drank it. The reality is that it was a terror campaign run by the US government and the fact that those who died were breaking the law doesn't in any way excuse it.
On a side note, how about instituting a loan program for basic research, such that at any time you can either a) forgive the debt and transfer all results to the public domain or b) repay the loan from sales or royalties. Would that work?
That could be a pretty good idea. As for government involvement in the production rather than just the research, it's not like government doesn't do this all the time in all kinds of industries it wants to promote. It does plenty of that kind of stuff for oil companies. As I understand the Solyndra case, it wasn't strictly speaking a handout, it was a loan guarantee. As it stands, the company assets still exist and it's being restructured so it's not actually necessarily dead and, if it is, it still has assets that can be sold to get at least some of the $535 million back. In the long run, it's a lot of smoke and very little fire.
Well, yes, but it's not just a question of market conditions and competition, it's also a question of commitment. The Chinese government might have made a better choice about what technologies to back (or maybe they just made a safer choice), but they also won't waffle as much in their commitment as the US does. The whole point of product research is to develop something that can compete, but there's plenty of products that can compete, just not until a lot of development money has been sunk into them. When it comes to helping to fund things like that, the US government can be very fickle.
They all failed because they can't compete with China. US solar companies can't compete with Chinese solar companies because the Chinese government backs its renewable tech companies while the US doesn't.
The one big problem with landfill gas in internal combustion engines is the siloxanes. When they're burned, they deposit a layer of hard silicon dioxide that can build up inside an engine and eventually destroy it. It was my understanding that it was still difficult to filter them out. Do you know if the trucks have specially made engines, or do they have a good method of processing/filtering the gas?
Yeah, but some of the things that the President pretty much has absolute authority to do, as head of the armed forces, which he promised to do, he hasn't done.
Well, it seems likely that Martian colonists can supply their own water and breathing air on Mars. Oxygen can be extracted straight from the trace amounts in the atmosphere or broken down from CO2, or extracted from perchlorates. Water can be extracted directly from the ground in many places. If they can do that, they can get by on less than a ton of dried supplies per year. A lifetime of supplies for one astronaut still make up a lot of weight (a Saturn V could only get about 40 tons of supplies to Mars), but they could be landed without landing craft. All it would take would be chutes and maybe an airbag. So, growing food on Mars doesn't have to be done right off the bat.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a question: When you are accelerating a multi-ton mass at 3G up to the top of a tube that is 24 times higher than the highest skyscraper in the world, how do you keep it from buckling under the force?
By designing the structure to withstand the forces involved? If this is meant to be a trick question, it's not a very good one. A 10 metric ton mass at 1 G is about 9807 newtons. At 3G it's about 29,421 newtons. There's also the actual force of gravity, although it's acting in a different direction (at a rough guess I'd say the slope on this thing is 1 over 10 based on the concept art, so it's almost perpendicular to the 3 Gs) but we'll ignore that and just add it to the 3 G, so it's 39288 newtons. That's really not such an incredible force. Your comment sort of reminds me of people who criticize the concept of simulated centrifugal gravity on space stations who start to go on about the "incredible" stresses involved, not realizing that they're talking about the exact same magnitude of stress that terrestrial bridge-builders need to deal with.
The scale of such a structure would certainly be a big deal. But the masses, forces, pressures, and energies (although I will grant not the speeds) of such a system are miniscule compared to those dealt with on a regular, daily basis by all kinds of engineering that people interact with and take for granted.
Most of the Banks around here seem to use Diebold ATMs. The company that managed to infect its own ATM network with Windows viruses. One of the more common kinds of financial scams relies on the fact that cheques _never_ actually clear even though the banks have to clear them in a certain time frame. It can be two years later and suddenly a $50,000 cashiers cheque you deposited and your bank "cleared" is reversed. There have been tons of cases of billions of dollars being completely misused by bankers and being lost because the bank procedures and software that were meant to track the money could simply be bypassed and it looks like the ones that made the news are only the tip of the iceburg.
Based on that and other things, I'm going to have to say that, while _some_ of the systems banks use may be very good and amazingly precise, overall they do a terrible job considering that they're basically the underpinnings of the entire world economy.
How about Minister of Federal Information Technology? Or commissioner. A title that actually fits a government job. I suppose CTO is better than Czar (or Tsar, or whatever) though.
What could go wrong? Ok, they might discover that the ancient Martians developed genetic engineering that turns evil people (such as professional wrestlers turned actor) into monsters but... Wait, that sounds wrong somehow.
But... won't your space airline _be_ a corporation?
A few problems with that approach. Among other things, I don't think you'd want an incompressible (or at least difficult to compress) fluid between the outer and inner shell. If it's "pushing out" on the outer shell, then it's also pushing in on the inner shell. Not to mention that you actually want to be able to see out of the thing with a window. Given the complexity of a window and how well our cameras work these days, the window represents a whole lot of complex engineering for very little benefit, but if you're going to have a manned craft, you might as well have a window, otherwise you have to shrug your shoulders and mumble when someone asks you why you bothered to actually go down there rather than spend that engineering money on a telepresence system you could operate from a ship on the surface or even from the comfort of home. So, if you need a window, you would have to have a window in every layer of your system and figure out a very complex system with super-high precision optics that work properly even when the high pressure has warped their shape. Then there's your connections between the controls in the inner part of the sub and all the equipment outside. I imagine the sub has two or more power systems with one or more for the cockpit and one or more living at outside pressure for the outside of the sub and with all the equipment outside the cockpit controlled "wirelessly" (or using the whole cockpit hull for a "wire" anyway). Having nested shells is going to require such a system to be very complicated and to be multi-layered as well, with each layer presenting another point of failure. Overall, you're better off in just about every way if your multiple shells are all merged into one shell.
Essentially, the only special technology you need for a human to survive to that depth is a thick enough shell around them. Nothing technologically amazing or any new ideas needed. Having a well sealed hatch and a well-sealed window are the more complicated parts, since those may not deform evenly with the rest of the shell, but even those aren't really hugely complex engineering problems. The trickier problems are getting all the stuff that needs to survive _outside_ the shell to survive at that pressure and to not explode from internal pressure back up at sea-level. Every single little part needs to considered,and not just mechanically since, at that pressure, materials may have altered chemical and electrical properties. The cockpit is simple and well-understood by comparison.
For some reason I'm not quite clear on, your suggestion has made me think of _Star Trek IV_, when Scotty trades the formula for transparent aluminium for plexiglass to make the aquarium for the whales since plexiglass is the best substitute for transparent aluminium. I still to this day have not been able to fathom why they couldn't just use regular, non-transparent aluminium, or whatever metal the Klingon ships inner structure was made from to make their tank. Why did it need to be transparent? I don't know and I don't know why this conversation so strongly reminds me of that.
You make a lot of statements about what the study didn't account for, but I don't think you've even looked at it. From the study:
We conducted a nested case–control study in a cohort of 12 315 workers in eight non-metal mining facilities,
which included 198 lung cancer deaths and 562 incidence density–sampled control subjects. For each case
subject, we selected up to four control subjects, individually matched on mining facility, sex, race/ethnicity, and
birth year (within 5 years), from all workers who were alive before the day the case subject died. We estimated
diesel exhaust exposure, represented by respirable elemental carbon (REC), by job and year, for each subject,
based on an extensive retrospective exposure assessment at each mining facility. We conducted both categor-
ical and continuous regression analyses adjusted for cigarette smoking and other potential confounding vari-
ables (eg, history of employment in high-risk occupations for lung cancer and a history of respiratory disease)
to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Analyses were both unlagged and lagged to
exclude recent exposure such as that occurring in the 15 years directly before the date of death (case subjects)/
reference date (control subjects). All statistical tests were two-sided.
So there were controls. They didn't set up their own mine with no diesel equipment and run it for decades for comparison purposes, but they did control for other factors in their study.
A car engine, at high revolutions, puts out about as much CO and CO2 per second as a smoker does in a month.
The average smoker smokes about a pack a day. A pack of cigarettes contains about 20 grams of tobacco,additives and paper that actually gets burned when the cigarette is smoked. There are about 30 days in a month, so the average smoker burns about .6 kilograms of material in a month. The average car gas tank is probably around 20 gallons. Twenty gallons of gas is around 56 kilograms. So, a typical tank of gas contains about 93 times as much burnable material as a smoker smokes in a month. So, to burn as much in a second as a smoker smokes in a month, a car would need to be able to burn its entire supply of fuel in about a minute and a half. With the gas pedal floored and traveling at a very unsafe speed a typical car would still be hard pressed to burn up a full tank of fuel in two and a half hours (which is a hundred times one and a half minutes). So, assuming that the after-products of gasoline and cigarettes are roughly equivalent by weight, you're off by about two orders of magnitude.
Not that car exhaust is wonderful. It would be really nice to be able to eliminate it. It's sort of a necessary evil at the moment. Cigarette smoke... not so necessary. Especially for non smokers.
Regarding your desire to physically assault people who complain about cigarette smoke while surrounded by cars, I should point out that cigarette smoke is unfiltered (the filter is for the smoker, not those near to the smoker, and is minimally effective compared to the exhaust system on a car anyway) and quite frankly disgusting. Actual relative danger of the smoke aside, a very small exposure clings to skin, hair, and clothing much more effectively than car exhaust. Then the stench sticks to you all day.
Misrepresentation.
Sorry, lost me there. Are you saying that _I_ am misrepresenting something, or was that one word your response to the question I asked at the end of my post?
Lawns are for walking on, in that it is reasonable to expect to be able to walk on grass and get at most yelled at by some guy in a rocking chair on his porch.
I personally feel that lawns are, in fact, for walking on. There are a surprisingly large number of people out there who feel that lawns are for fertilizing, landscaping, and mowing fanatically (not just theirs, but the lawn of anyone nearby, even people who like long grass) and _not_ for walking on or marring in any way. There are also plenty of people who feel that _their_ lawn is only for _them_ to walk on and no-one else. If a leaf blows onto their lawn from next door, they will attempt to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. Sometimes, in real life and not just in hypothetical examples, these people do booby-trap their lawns. Sometimes they put up a warning sign about it, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the booby trap is just a dangerous dog. When people get hurt by these booby traps or vicious dogs, the people who set the traps usually go to jail. The people walking on their lawn in many cases are kids who knew they weren't supposed to be there, but were ignoring the warnings and breaking the rules (and possibly the law), but the law as well as basic principles of justice, recognize that such infractions do not deserve maiming or death as punishment, and certainly not handed out arbitrarily by a vengeful property owner rather than a neutral authority.
Cleaning alcohol is exactly that, for cleaning not drinking. It says so right on the bottle. Have you really thought through what would happen if modern cleaning alcohol was not denatured, and the price left unchanged? I'm not sure that you have.
Alcohol is used for a lot more things than just cleaning. As for what would happen if modern cleaning alcohol were not denatured and the price were unchanged... I suppose more people would drink it... and the people who drink it already wouldn't get so sick and die as much? If you're positing that people would get drunk vastly more, I don't see how. Most people who want to get drunk seem to find a way to get drunk. As it stands, if you walk into any liquor store, there's a staggering array of products available and many of them are significantly more expensive than the absolute cheapest high-alcohol content liquor you can find, but they seem to sell anyway. I think most people who want vodka are still going to buy vodka in a fancy bottle even if the vodka in the plastic bottle labelled "rubbing alcohol" in the pharmacy section at wal~mart is cheaper. In the big picture, it seems that it would simply reduce cases of poisoning and reduce tax revenues slightly from people who, for the most part, are desperately poor anyway.
They did release the information that they poisoned it, but they kept the actual nature of the poisoning as secret as they could. Also, the intention was that customers of bootleggers, who didn't necessarily know where the alcohol came from would die and that all the blame would fall on the bootleggers.
What is currently done with rubbing alcohol is pretty stupid and dangerous as far as I'm concerned, but it isn't a patch on the extremes they went to during Prohibition.
If you let someone know something is poisonous and try to stop them from drinking it, how can you possibly be responsible for them drinking it and dying?
Gee, maybe because you poisoned in the first place specifically so that your warning not to drink it because you'll die would be true. What exactly do you think happens to you if you mine your lawn and put up warning signs saying "minefield, you will die if you walk here" when neighborhood kids get blown to little pieces?
No it was poisonous, industrial alcohol has always needed to be poisoned to be legal they just changed the ingredients of this poison to stop people getting around it.
Your statement is self-contradictory. You claim that the industrial ethanol was somehow magically poisonous despite the fact that, as you admit, it was only poisonous in order to kill people who tried to drink it. Now, some industrial alcohol did need more distillation to be safer for consumption while other industrial alcohol conversely was contaminated with benzene (although in pretty much safe trace amounts) from the extreme distillation process it had been through (to remove all the water). None of it was toxic on anything like the levels it became toxic after the poisoning program. Also, that "always needed to be poisoned" scenario you mention isn't really true. That program started during prohibition.
You said that "they did not add poison to kill people, they added it to make it not drinkable". The reason that it wasn't drinkable after the poison was added was because it killed people. The poison was a terror weapon designed to terrify people away from bootlegged alcohol for fear that they would die. To accomplish this goal, the poisoners were deliberately killing people.
I believe you that at no point were they trying to _secretly_ poison prohibition criminals. It wasn't much of a secret, they were reasonably up front about it. They did keep the information on the constantly changing mixture of poisons they were using secret so as to present a moving target to the chemists working for the bootleggers, however. The obvious consequence of this is that the bootleggers would be selling safe alcohol made from industrial alcohol one day and the next batch would be poisonous. You can claim that the poisoners were just naive innocents. I think that's unlikely, but even if it's true, it still makes them guilty of manslaughter.
Yeah, it kind of is a horrible crime when it wasn't poisonous (well, ok, it was, but no more than regular drinking alcohol) but they added poison specifically to kill people. When you make something dangerous specifically for the purpose of killing people, that's pretty horrible.
The difference being that adding a scent to natural gas saves lives, but adding poison to industrial alcohol definitely kills people. At least tens of thousands of people died from alcohol the government intentionally poisoned during prohibition. The government's position, of course, was that it was entirely the fault of the bootleggers who distilled that alcohol for human consumption and of the people who drank it. The reality is that it was a terror campaign run by the US government and the fact that those who died were breaking the law doesn't in any way excuse it.
Are you alive? If the answer is yes, then you have strong evidence for life existing in the universe.
The big problem with the Fermi paradox is that the earth isn't covered in a kilometer deep layer of cats.
Within _a_ century, not the same century.
On a side note, how about instituting a loan program for basic research, such that at any time you can either a) forgive the debt and transfer all results to the public domain or b) repay the loan from sales or royalties. Would that work?
That could be a pretty good idea. As for government involvement in the production rather than just the research, it's not like government doesn't do this all the time in all kinds of industries it wants to promote. It does plenty of that kind of stuff for oil companies. As I understand the Solyndra case, it wasn't strictly speaking a handout, it was a loan guarantee. As it stands, the company assets still exist and it's being restructured so it's not actually necessarily dead and, if it is, it still has assets that can be sold to get at least some of the $535 million back. In the long run, it's a lot of smoke and very little fire.
Well, yes, but it's not just a question of market conditions and competition, it's also a question of commitment. The Chinese government might have made a better choice about what technologies to back (or maybe they just made a safer choice), but they also won't waffle as much in their commitment as the US does. The whole point of product research is to develop something that can compete, but there's plenty of products that can compete, just not until a lot of development money has been sunk into them. When it comes to helping to fund things like that, the US government can be very fickle.
I don't think you read the parent post very carefully. Read the last line.
They all failed because they can't compete with China. US solar companies can't compete with Chinese solar companies because the Chinese government backs its renewable tech companies while the US doesn't.
The one big problem with landfill gas in internal combustion engines is the siloxanes. When they're burned, they deposit a layer of hard silicon dioxide that can build up inside an engine and eventually destroy it. It was my understanding that it was still difficult to filter them out. Do you know if the trucks have specially made engines, or do they have a good method of processing/filtering the gas?
Yeah, but some of the things that the President pretty much has absolute authority to do, as head of the armed forces, which he promised to do, he hasn't done.
Well, it seems likely that Martian colonists can supply their own water and breathing air on Mars. Oxygen can be extracted straight from the trace amounts in the atmosphere or broken down from CO2, or extracted from perchlorates. Water can be extracted directly from the ground in many places. If they can do that, they can get by on less than a ton of dried supplies per year. A lifetime of supplies for one astronaut still make up a lot of weight (a Saturn V could only get about 40 tons of supplies to Mars), but they could be landed without landing craft. All it would take would be chutes and maybe an airbag. So, growing food on Mars doesn't have to be done right off the bat.