Or how about launching multiple redundant craft carrying supplies and land them separately? Then you don't need all those technologies that haven't been invented yet to work around the supply non-problem you mentioned.
Don't forget oxygen. Soil on earth has had very prolonged exposure to free oxygen. Not so in a lot of other places. Oxygen is, obviously, very reactive. That means that the chemistry of terrestrial and non-terrestrial soils might have a lot of differences. The non-terrestrial soils might be full of all kinds of toxins that you wouldn't find in terrestrial soils, not to mention that, without the same erosion and corrosion found on Earth, the actual particles are going to be a lot sharper and more abrasive. Of course, it might turn out that it only takes a relatively short exposure to oxygen, soil bacteria, worms, etc. before those aren't issues any more. At the moment, we need to be able to get into a position to actually experiment.
If Mars were made of solid gold, the price of gold would probably already be less than one tenth of what it is now, even without any way to go and get it. The price of gold is incredibly unstable and is based largely on perception. If Mars were made of gold, and the cost of returning a kilogram of gold to earth dropped below the current price of gold per kilogram (about $52,000), then the price of gold would have dropped to well below that before the shipment even arrived back on Earth. Ok, actually, there would be a period during which "martian gold" would sell at a huge premium just for novelty reasons, but that would wear off.
The problem is, you're thinking along the lines of basing space mining entirely on earth. Send out missions to deliver mining equipment and return spacecraft, fill the spacecraft, send out a resupply mission, etc. With some high value by mass ore whose value isn't over-inflated by market forces, found in high concentrations, that model might even be able to work by a slim margin. Realistically though, it probably won't. If we could bootstrap both mining and manufacturing in space, however, it might be a different story. Refined materials and even manufactured goods could be sent to Earth using an infrastructure that's almost entirely spacebound. The question becomes whether sustainable growth of an industrial base in space is possible or not. If it's absolutely impossible, I don't think anyone has ever delivered any convincing argument for why it is. If it isn't impossible, then what good reasons are there _not_ to do it?
First of all, very sorry about your wife's cancer. It really is terrible to watch a loved one go through that. As your personal experience shows, the US private insurance system is not an absolute failure in all cases. I don't think anyone was saying that. Based on the details you give, however, it doesn't sound like someone in the condition she was in would have had trouble being admitted into the hospital and getting treatment in a country with a socialized medical system either. I can't help speculating that, in some respects in either type of healthcare system, she may have been "lucky" to get a rare (but treatable) form of cancer than a more common form. Although it limits the pool of doctors who are competent to treat it, the type of doctor who knows anything about it is likely to have that knowledge and experience either from being highly specialized or just a very good doctor. I don't think her particular case says anything deep about either socialized medicine or private insurance. I wish her and you the best of luck as she goes through this.
For the broken toe example, with a severely broken toe, surgery might be required, but otherwise there's not a lot medical science can do. Generally, people will be able to tell themselves if it's that bad. For a typical fracture, there's not really much that can be done. An x-ray can verify if it's broken or not, then the doctor can give you the exact same advice to treat it that they would give if it weren't broken and it was some other toe injury causing pain. If it's bad enough, or more likely they wanted the patient to feel that something were being done, they might put it in a splint, which is something most people really could do themselves. For the most part, though, for that sort of thing, the doctor's advice is going to be to get rest, try to avoid walking on it more than necessary, maybe take a non-prescription medication to treat pain or discomfort, get plenty of fluids and eat well. Pretty much the same general advice they give for everything people come to them with where there's nothing to be done but let the body heal itself. Your Canadian friend's opinion on what the doctor would say and do was spot on, and seems to have been the exact same thing that happened to you with your doctor. Your Canadian friend thought that it would be necessary to wait in an emergency room, but she probably could have just made an appointment with a doctor like you did. For some reason, plenty of people on private insurance as well think that they have to go and wait in the emergency room for everything. What I do find surprising is that your doctor told you to stop by at a time of your choosing rather than setting an appointment. That's frankly amazing. I don't know of any doctor that operates that way, so I'm assuming you have some sort of relationship with this doctor beyond just doctor/patient.
They're forced by law to stabilize them, not to perform any and all forms of treatment they require. It basically means that if they have more than a few hours to live, they can be shown the door. That doesn't stop the occasional person from dying in the waiting room after being denied treatment of course.
People from all countries all over the world with all kinds of health care systems keep coming to all kinds of other countries for surgery. People go from Germany to the US for surgery, from the US to Germany for surgery, and from Russia to Mexico or Mexico to Russia, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes it's for financial reasons, sometimes it's to get a procedure that's banned in their home country, or for which there's a waiting list or scheduling issue for a qualified doctor, and sometimes it's because there simply isn't anyone in their own country either able or willing to provide the procedure, or at least who they trust to perform it. I think you fail to understand is that specialized medical fields tend to be a pretty small world. In some, pretty much all the practitioners in the world know each other.
So, if you can provide something other than a few anecdotal examples for your insinuation, then we'll listen. Perhaps some real, meaningful, statistics. Otherwise, your question, rhetorical or not, has been answered.
Very expensive. Expensive enough that using cheap keyboards and regularly throwing them away might be better. Or at least using cheap keyboards, cleaning them with a process that might destroy them and throwing them away when they regularly break.
With proper design I think the heat approach would be doable in 90 seconds. Workbench heat guns provide pretty much instant oven-hot air at high speed. No reason something like that couldn't be built into this box along with air channels designed to apply the hot air exactly where needed and recirculate it. Alternatively, you could have heating elements built right into the keyboard (with contacts that are only connected when it's withdrawn into the box). Or you could do both. I see no reason you couldn't heat a thin keyboard to scorching hot inside 45 seconds, then cool it down to touchably hot in another 45 with a sustained blast of cool air. Sure some would probably survive, but that's going to be true for any sterilization method and, as the article points out, is so true for this particular device that it's not really worth using.
I would have to disagree that UV is the most viable killing method. Autoclaves are essentially 100% effective, for example, and all kinds of antiseptics are about 99.9% effective. UV does have a place in the arsenal, and niches where it's effective, but plenty of places where you can't use it. For example, you wouldn't want to shine a powerful UV lamp into a patients abdomen during surgery, you'd use antiseptics.
As for private hospitals buying into this. I can see it absolutely. They just amortize the cost and roll it into the $10 they charge for an aspirin, etc.
Yes, I know that it was in The Fine Summary. It mentions California laws, which lead to me writing:
Presumably this State law will only apply to sales of this doll in California. So if it's sold with a disclaimer: "not for sale in California" and they refuse to ship there, shouldn't it be in the clear?
Then you replied with a link with a vague description of Chinese laws regarding rights on likenesses, then I replied back that I can't find anything in what you've posted about those laws applying to non-chinese citizens or to the dead and that the California State Law protecting likenesses of the dead is, as far as I know, the only one of its kind in the US, then you replied back saying that there are such laws and they're in the summary. They're not. Just the California law which I addressed in my original post.
The "apparently" worries me a little there. Did this friend of yours also once need to be rushed to the hospital for food poisoning after eating at KFC where they pumped his stomach, analyzed the contents, and discovered he'd eaten rat meat?
Ah, looks like you'd be a fan of the Steering Wheel Spike. Since you're a pedestrian or cyclist, you might not be such a fan of the "pointy thing in the front" that's standard on all cars from the Badi Dea Motor Corporation.
"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!" "You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!" "You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!" (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7)
If it's hard for people to shoot arrows back at people who have the high ground at the top of a hill, it's hard for people to get their bows to the top of the hill in the first place. Ain't gonna happen, ever. See how easy it is to completely mock the Space Nuttery troll(s) with their own fallicies?
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the moon would be an impregnable fortress the way Heinlein described it (actually, it wasn't really all that impregnable in the book). Realistically, with modern technology, a magnetic mass driver on the moon would be easy to locate and target and easy to destroy with missiles from earth or high orbit regardless of ground defense lasers (if you can't land a nuke without it being shot down by laser, land a solid lump of metal at very high velocity). The book at least threw in a lot of political factors and didn't rely on the idea that the moon would be an impregnable fortress.
I'm not really arguing the military plausibility of anything Heinlein wrote in that book. I'm arguing that the argument you're using is nonsensical. Standard military practice forever has been to occupy defensible locations. They're considered defensible locations because, once you occupy them, it's hard for the enemy to hurt the occupiers and easy for the occupiers to hurt the enemy. Sometimes the occupiers get to be the occupiers by fighting extremely hard battles, but most of the time they do it by getting there first, or at least being the first to build up defenses. So from a military perspective, occupying difficult terrain is a force multiplier. It may only be a little harder to climb up a hill than to cross flat terrain, but with fortified enemies at the top shooting at you, it's a lot harder. So, although it is hard to get people and supplies to the moon, there's just no comparison to how difficult it would be in the middle of a shooting war.
As a matter of fact, I hadn't looked at the keyboard. I'd read the article and, now that I look at it again, it seems the article contains some sort of video, but it's messed up and won't display properly in my browser. So I'd just assumed there was no picture of it. I did a search for the keyboard and found a picture. So, it seems that the keyboard retracts into a big bulky enclosure to be "sterilized". Wow. Considering the horrible job it apparently does, that just makes this even worse. So, obviously I take back what I said about this not being able to use significant amounts of UVC and UVB because of human exposure. On the other hand, this makes me wonder why they didn't just use heat. There's no good reason that you can't make a keyboard that can survive well in excess of 100 degrees celcius. You just move the electronics out into a hermetically sealed box inside the enclosure and the keyboard can be made of metal, heat-resistant plastics, silicone rubber membrane, etc. with a ribbon cable connecting it to the electronics module. You retract it, heat it up instead of using UV, blow air on it to cool it and pop it out again. Virtually guaranteed to be more effective.
As for the ozone layer extending to 41km. That's inside the stratosphere. Per the article you linked to, the ozone layer "is mainly located in the lower portion of the stratosphere from approximately 20 to 30 kilometres (12 to 19 mi) above Earth, though the thickness varies seasonally and geographically." Also, "Ozone concentrations are greatest between about 20 and 40 kilometres (12 and 25 mi), where they range from about 2 to 8 parts per million". Also "UV-C, which would be very harmful to all living things, is entirely screened out by ozone at around 35 kilometres (115,000 ft) altitude" which means that it is still present, probably at decent quantaties, sometimes at a lower level, sometimes at quite a high level depending on season, geography and other factors, at 41 kilometers. Also, a maximum sample height of 41 km doesn't mean they can't be present higher than that. Sorry, I'm going to have to stick by my original point which was that there's a vast amount of populated biosphere on earth exposed to pretty much the full UV output of the sun for bacteria to evolve UV resistance, so UV sterilizing don't really provide an evolutionary pressure that doesn't already exist in abundance elsewhere on our planet.
I should also note that I made absolutely no argument one way or the other on whether or not UV resistance could actually be obtained by bacteria under these conditions. It doesn't matter to my point if they survive under those conditions or die off, just that the bacteria are there and are exposed. I should note also that whatever mechanism they have to survive UV radiation may be retained if these bacteria adapt back to life on the surface and that horizontal transfer of the trait could occur to other bacteria. Presumably there have been bacteria living up there on the scale of hundreds of millions or maybe a billion years. In any case, I don't think that UV resistant superbugs are much of a problem. Hospitals hardly rely on UV exclusively and it's not commonly used to treat infections in humans as far as I know.
Anyway, I think we can both agree that this keyboard is mostly just a gimmick.
There are laws in the US protecting his likeness as well, but, as fas as I know, they don't apply after he's dead. As far as I know, this California State protecting a likeness for 75 years after death is the only one of its kind. Presumably, it's because Hollywood actors are worried that their corpses will be virtually re-animated with CGI to star in new movies and that's an abomination against nature they won't stand for. Unless their descendants get money for it anyway.
So, the critical questions aren't whether likenesses are protected in China. I actually did expect that they were. The critical questions are A. does that Chinese law apply to people worldwide or, like the US Government does for much of the US Constitution, does the Chinese government only apply this law to its own citizens and B. does the Chinese government apply this law to the dead? The article you've provided does not include those details.
Presumably this State law will only apply to sales of this doll in California. So if it's sold with a disclaimer: "not for sale in California" and they refuse to ship there, shouldn't it be in the clear?
The President certainly isn't absolved of responsibility by this token, but neither is he directly responsible for every action of every employee of the Executive branch.
Wrong. Ever heard "the buck stops here"? A far superior President once had a sign on his desk that had this inscribed on it.
There are some tables you should look at in the wikipedia article on capital punishment by the United States military. You should note a number of executions for crimes such as rape and murder, including those from the year 1945 to the year 1953, during which time Harry S. Truman, the President you mentioned (unless you meant Carter, who apparently either had the original sign or a copy on his desk), was President of the United States. Despite the sign, Truman wasn't hanged or shot, nor did he experience any punishment or censure for these crimes. I'm not suggesting that he should, of course.
Now obviously, you can't expect the President to be involved in every single Executive branch employee's problems, like if there's some discipline problem or whatever. However, the President is responsible for setting policy, and if his underlings are setting their own policy in contradiction to his policy, then that President is completely ineffectual. He has the power to fire any underling under him, and in any normal organization, that usually means the person directly under him who isn't keeping his department in line. You talk of CEOs; do you think a CEO would stand for it if one of his department heads was running around making press releases contradicting the CEO's own statements to the press, and making the CEO look like a moron? Or do you think a CEO would stand for it if a bunch of employees in his company were doing things making the company look bad, getting them bad press, and the department head over those people refused to do anything about it? Of course not; the CEO would direct his department head(s) to correct the problem, and if they don't do it to his satisfaction, he fires their asses and puts someone else in their place. The whole purpose of an executive officer is to get things done.
Generally, in most large organizations, people who aren't at the top levels get on with their jobs the way they've always done them and only pay token respect to policies set by some ephemeral overboss. Top-level guys get fired (ok, they 'resign') all the time, but it's still generally business as usual for most of the organization. The lobbying groups manage to capture most of the important people and positions in these organizations as well as the elected politicians.
The "Executive Branch" of government consists of pretty much everyone who works directly or indirectly for the government who isn't part of the legislative or judicial branches, which means pretty much everyone. That includes people at state and municipal levels. It includes all the soldiers and the firemen and the police officers and the park rangers, etc. It's millions and millions of people.
Absolutely wrong. Obviously, you're completely clueless about basic civics. The Federal government is distinct from State and local governments, and the Federal government has very limited authority over state and local governments (basically they threaten to withhold highway funds if States don't comply). So NO, the President is not the boss for police officers, any more than he's the boss for some random Securitas employee. If the Pres doesn't like some cop, the only thing he can do is use political pressure to remove him, and that's it. Why do you think Joe Arpaio is still in power even though Obama hates him?
I know there's a distinction between state executive branches and the federal one, but it's not a bright line. Which executive branch are the various states National
Wrote a longer response to the reply below yours. Just in short, it turns out there are bacteria that get their day in the sun, and above the ozone layer, no less.
If the UV produced by this and other UV sterilizing sources are not meager, and the UV-C and UV-B these lamps put out are as incredibly damaging as you say, why would anyone want a keyboard that, by your account, would be far more dangerous to them than any bacteria living on their keyboard? I mean, if you're going to use something that's damaging to humans anyway - burning their skin and potentially causing deadly melanomas - why not just just use a keyboard with keys with a surface temperature of 80 degrees celcius or so. That way, they would stay sterile, but a fast touch typist could probably avoid burns and not get cancer. Otherwise, I expect that the UV radiation is adulterated to contain little or no UVC and not really all that much UV-B, not unlike a day in the sun.
In any case, plenty of bacteria exist in Earth's atmosphere, I'm pretty sure I've heard they can even be found in the stratosphere, so no reason for them not to be exposed to UV light above the ozone layer (although they would probably be killed by it). Huh, as a matter of fact, after that last sentence, I did a google search and found this. So it looks like not only are there micro-organisms that make it that high, but they also do have high UV tolerance. Score one for adaptability.
Apologies to you if you are unemployed, self-employed, or you work for a small company, but the President of the US is their boss in the same way that the president or CEO of the company you work for is your boss. In other words, the President is the theoretical big boss of the executive branch, but he's not actually expected to stop by each employee's desk every day to see how their projects are coming along. The President certainly isn't absolved of responsibility by this token, but neither is he directly responsible for every action of every employee of the Executive branch.
The "Executive Branch" of government consists of pretty much everyone who works directly or indirectly for the government who isn't part of the legislative or judicial branches, which means pretty much everyone. That includes people at state and municipal levels. It includes all the soldiers and the firemen and the police officers and the park rangers, etc. It's millions and millions of people. The President would barely have enough working hours during an entire term to read all of their names out loud. Do you think your typical RMV worker even notices much when the President changes?
All that said, I think that the Obama administration does pander to the interest of media industries in a corrupt manner. But this kind of copyright law strong-arming by the US went on during the previous administration too. Obama might be slightly more in the pocket of Hollywood than the last guy, but they all care a lot more about their corporate buddies than they do their actual citizens (and justify it to themselves and others using "trickle down economics"-style rhetoric).
I can see the double slit experiment with my own eyes. Does the word quantum apply to wave-particle duality? Also, isn't the alteration of rhodopsin from reaction with a photon a quantum effect, making the word 'quantum' apply to everything you can see with your own eye?
Doesn't seem like the sort of thing you can really successfully nit-pick about in a place filled with pedants like this.
It depends on the type of superconductor. With the right setup, the fields become locked to each other so that you can levitate over, under, off to the side, etc. That falls under the category of things you can call "maglev". Of course, this video is faked, but the things it depicts are perfectly real, if imperfectly presented in this fake.
You do realize that the vast majority of the executive branch doesn't change when the President changes, right? For that matter, most of them carry on doing the same things they've always done, in the same ways they've always done them, often with no real guiding influence from above and sometimes contrary to instructions from above. Not to say that the Obama administration is doing a good job or that it's not plainly corrupt like most presidential administrations, but there's a lot of entrenched, non-elected people working in the executive branch.
China owns 8% of dollar. If they sold all their dollars, dollar would drop 8%.
Really? Is that the way it works? Sorry if I'm completely ignorant of the way this market works. Why would one large player completely selling out of the market only affect the price by the amount that player holds? I'm just asking because in just about any other market I've heard of, that kind of move would trigger a huge drop as other players struggle to be the first to abandon what they see as a sinking ship (even if their intention is just to sell high and then buy low later). Why would it be different in this market?
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Or how about launching multiple redundant craft carrying supplies and land them separately? Then you don't need all those technologies that haven't been invented yet to work around the supply non-problem you mentioned.
Don't forget oxygen. Soil on earth has had very prolonged exposure to free oxygen. Not so in a lot of other places. Oxygen is, obviously, very reactive. That means that the chemistry of terrestrial and non-terrestrial soils might have a lot of differences. The non-terrestrial soils might be full of all kinds of toxins that you wouldn't find in terrestrial soils, not to mention that, without the same erosion and corrosion found on Earth, the actual particles are going to be a lot sharper and more abrasive. Of course, it might turn out that it only takes a relatively short exposure to oxygen, soil bacteria, worms, etc. before those aren't issues any more. At the moment, we need to be able to get into a position to actually experiment.
If Mars were made of solid gold, the price of gold would probably already be less than one tenth of what it is now, even without any way to go and get it. The price of gold is incredibly unstable and is based largely on perception. If Mars were made of gold, and the cost of returning a kilogram of gold to earth dropped below the current price of gold per kilogram (about $52,000), then the price of gold would have dropped to well below that before the shipment even arrived back on Earth. Ok, actually, there would be a period during which "martian gold" would sell at a huge premium just for novelty reasons, but that would wear off.
The problem is, you're thinking along the lines of basing space mining entirely on earth. Send out missions to deliver mining equipment and return spacecraft, fill the spacecraft, send out a resupply mission, etc. With some high value by mass ore whose value isn't over-inflated by market forces, found in high concentrations, that model might even be able to work by a slim margin. Realistically though, it probably won't. If we could bootstrap both mining and manufacturing in space, however, it might be a different story. Refined materials and even manufactured goods could be sent to Earth using an infrastructure that's almost entirely spacebound. The question becomes whether sustainable growth of an industrial base in space is possible or not. If it's absolutely impossible, I don't think anyone has ever delivered any convincing argument for why it is. If it isn't impossible, then what good reasons are there _not_ to do it?
First of all, very sorry about your wife's cancer. It really is terrible to watch a loved one go through that. As your personal experience shows, the US private insurance system is not an absolute failure in all cases. I don't think anyone was saying that. Based on the details you give, however, it doesn't sound like someone in the condition she was in would have had trouble being admitted into the hospital and getting treatment in a country with a socialized medical system either. I can't help speculating that, in some respects in either type of healthcare system, she may have been "lucky" to get a rare (but treatable) form of cancer than a more common form. Although it limits the pool of doctors who are competent to treat it, the type of doctor who knows anything about it is likely to have that knowledge and experience either from being highly specialized or just a very good doctor. I don't think her particular case says anything deep about either socialized medicine or private insurance. I wish her and you the best of luck as she goes through this.
For the broken toe example, with a severely broken toe, surgery might be required, but otherwise there's not a lot medical science can do. Generally, people will be able to tell themselves if it's that bad. For a typical fracture, there's not really much that can be done. An x-ray can verify if it's broken or not, then the doctor can give you the exact same advice to treat it that they would give if it weren't broken and it was some other toe injury causing pain. If it's bad enough, or more likely they wanted the patient to feel that something were being done, they might put it in a splint, which is something most people really could do themselves. For the most part, though, for that sort of thing, the doctor's advice is going to be to get rest, try to avoid walking on it more than necessary, maybe take a non-prescription medication to treat pain or discomfort, get plenty of fluids and eat well. Pretty much the same general advice they give for everything people come to them with where there's nothing to be done but let the body heal itself. Your Canadian friend's opinion on what the doctor would say and do was spot on, and seems to have been the exact same thing that happened to you with your doctor. Your Canadian friend thought that it would be necessary to wait in an emergency room, but she probably could have just made an appointment with a doctor like you did. For some reason, plenty of people on private insurance as well think that they have to go and wait in the emergency room for everything. What I do find surprising is that your doctor told you to stop by at a time of your choosing rather than setting an appointment. That's frankly amazing. I don't know of any doctor that operates that way, so I'm assuming you have some sort of relationship with this doctor beyond just doctor/patient.
They're forced by law to stabilize them, not to perform any and all forms of treatment they require. It basically means that if they have more than a few hours to live, they can be shown the door. That doesn't stop the occasional person from dying in the waiting room after being denied treatment of course.
It looks like it's about 38% of GDP vs about 28% of GDP in the US. Meanwhile, US healthcare costs are about 17% of GDP.
People from all countries all over the world with all kinds of health care systems keep coming to all kinds of other countries for surgery. People go from Germany to the US for surgery, from the US to Germany for surgery, and from Russia to Mexico or Mexico to Russia, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes it's for financial reasons, sometimes it's to get a procedure that's banned in their home country, or for which there's a waiting list or scheduling issue for a qualified doctor, and sometimes it's because there simply isn't anyone in their own country either able or willing to provide the procedure, or at least who they trust to perform it. I think you fail to understand is that specialized medical fields tend to be a pretty small world. In some, pretty much all the practitioners in the world know each other.
So, if you can provide something other than a few anecdotal examples for your insinuation, then we'll listen. Perhaps some real, meaningful, statistics. Otherwise, your question, rhetorical or not, has been answered.
Very expensive. Expensive enough that using cheap keyboards and regularly throwing them away might be better. Or at least using cheap keyboards, cleaning them with a process that might destroy them and throwing them away when they regularly break.
With proper design I think the heat approach would be doable in 90 seconds. Workbench heat guns provide pretty much instant oven-hot air at high speed. No reason something like that couldn't be built into this box along with air channels designed to apply the hot air exactly where needed and recirculate it. Alternatively, you could have heating elements built right into the keyboard (with contacts that are only connected when it's withdrawn into the box). Or you could do both. I see no reason you couldn't heat a thin keyboard to scorching hot inside 45 seconds, then cool it down to touchably hot in another 45 with a sustained blast of cool air. Sure some would probably survive, but that's going to be true for any sterilization method and, as the article points out, is so true for this particular device that it's not really worth using.
I would have to disagree that UV is the most viable killing method. Autoclaves are essentially 100% effective, for example, and all kinds of antiseptics are about 99.9% effective. UV does have a place in the arsenal, and niches where it's effective, but plenty of places where you can't use it. For example, you wouldn't want to shine a powerful UV lamp into a patients abdomen during surgery, you'd use antiseptics.
As for private hospitals buying into this. I can see it absolutely. They just amortize the cost and roll it into the $10 they charge for an aspirin, etc.
Yes, I know that it was in The Fine Summary. It mentions California laws, which lead to me writing:
Presumably this State law will only apply to sales of this doll in California. So if it's sold with a disclaimer: "not for sale in California" and they refuse to ship there, shouldn't it be in the clear?
Then you replied with a link with a vague description of Chinese laws regarding rights on likenesses, then I replied back that I can't find anything in what you've posted about those laws applying to non-chinese citizens or to the dead and that the California State Law protecting likenesses of the dead is, as far as I know, the only one of its kind in the US, then you replied back saying that there are such laws and they're in the summary. They're not. Just the California law which I addressed in my original post.
The "apparently" worries me a little there. Did this friend of yours also once need to be rushed to the hospital for food poisoning after eating at KFC where they pumped his stomach, analyzed the contents, and discovered he'd eaten rat meat?
Ah, looks like you'd be a fan of the Steering Wheel Spike. Since you're a pedestrian or cyclist, you might not be such a fan of the "pointy thing in the front" that's standard on all cars from the Badi Dea Motor Corporation.
"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know."
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"
"You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!"
"You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!"
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7)
If it's hard for people to shoot arrows back at people who have the high ground at the top of a hill, it's hard for people to get their bows to the top of the hill in the first place. Ain't gonna happen, ever. See how easy it is to completely mock the Space Nuttery troll(s) with their own fallicies?
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the moon would be an impregnable fortress the way Heinlein described it (actually, it wasn't really all that impregnable in the book). Realistically, with modern technology, a magnetic mass driver on the moon would be easy to locate and target and easy to destroy with missiles from earth or high orbit regardless of ground defense lasers (if you can't land a nuke without it being shot down by laser, land a solid lump of metal at very high velocity). The book at least threw in a lot of political factors and didn't rely on the idea that the moon would be an impregnable fortress.
I'm not really arguing the military plausibility of anything Heinlein wrote in that book. I'm arguing that the argument you're using is nonsensical. Standard military practice forever has been to occupy defensible locations. They're considered defensible locations because, once you occupy them, it's hard for the enemy to hurt the occupiers and easy for the occupiers to hurt the enemy. Sometimes the occupiers get to be the occupiers by fighting extremely hard battles, but most of the time they do it by getting there first, or at least being the first to build up defenses. So from a military perspective, occupying difficult terrain is a force multiplier. It may only be a little harder to climb up a hill than to cross flat terrain, but with fortified enemies at the top shooting at you, it's a lot harder. So, although it is hard to get people and supplies to the moon, there's just no comparison to how difficult it would be in the middle of a shooting war.
Yeah, but those laurels get a little uncomfortable to rest on after a while don't they?
As a matter of fact, I hadn't looked at the keyboard. I'd read the article and, now that I look at it again, it seems the article contains some sort of video, but it's messed up and won't display properly in my browser. So I'd just assumed there was no picture of it. I did a search for the keyboard and found a picture. So, it seems that the keyboard retracts into a big bulky enclosure to be "sterilized". Wow. Considering the horrible job it apparently does, that just makes this even worse. So, obviously I take back what I said about this not being able to use significant amounts of UVC and UVB because of human exposure. On the other hand, this makes me wonder why they didn't just use heat. There's no good reason that you can't make a keyboard that can survive well in excess of 100 degrees celcius. You just move the electronics out into a hermetically sealed box inside the enclosure and the keyboard can be made of metal, heat-resistant plastics, silicone rubber membrane, etc. with a ribbon cable connecting it to the electronics module. You retract it, heat it up instead of using UV, blow air on it to cool it and pop it out again. Virtually guaranteed to be more effective.
As for the ozone layer extending to 41km. That's inside the stratosphere. Per the article you linked to, the ozone layer "is mainly located in the lower portion of the stratosphere from approximately 20 to 30 kilometres (12 to 19 mi) above Earth, though the thickness varies seasonally and geographically." Also, "Ozone concentrations are greatest between about 20 and 40 kilometres (12 and 25 mi), where they range from about 2 to 8 parts per million". Also "UV-C, which would be very harmful to all living things, is entirely screened out by ozone at around 35 kilometres (115,000 ft) altitude" which means that it is still present, probably at decent quantaties, sometimes at a lower level, sometimes at quite a high level depending on season, geography and other factors, at 41 kilometers. Also, a maximum sample height of 41 km doesn't mean they can't be present higher than that. Sorry, I'm going to have to stick by my original point which was that there's a vast amount of populated biosphere on earth exposed to pretty much the full UV output of the sun for bacteria to evolve UV resistance, so UV sterilizing don't really provide an evolutionary pressure that doesn't already exist in abundance elsewhere on our planet.
I should also note that I made absolutely no argument one way or the other on whether or not UV resistance could actually be obtained by bacteria under these conditions. It doesn't matter to my point if they survive under those conditions or die off, just that the bacteria are there and are exposed. I should note also that whatever mechanism they have to survive UV radiation may be retained if these bacteria adapt back to life on the surface and that horizontal transfer of the trait could occur to other bacteria. Presumably there have been bacteria living up there on the scale of hundreds of millions or maybe a billion years. In any case, I don't think that UV resistant superbugs are much of a problem. Hospitals hardly rely on UV exclusively and it's not commonly used to treat infections in humans as far as I know.
Anyway, I think we can both agree that this keyboard is mostly just a gimmick.
There are laws in the US protecting his likeness as well, but, as fas as I know, they don't apply after he's dead. As far as I know, this California State protecting a likeness for 75 years after death is the only one of its kind. Presumably, it's because Hollywood actors are worried that their corpses will be virtually re-animated with CGI to star in new movies and that's an abomination against nature they won't stand for. Unless their descendants get money for it anyway.
So, the critical questions aren't whether likenesses are protected in China. I actually did expect that they were. The critical questions are A. does that Chinese law apply to people worldwide or, like the US Government does for much of the US Constitution, does the Chinese government only apply this law to its own citizens and B. does the Chinese government apply this law to the dead? The article you've provided does not include those details.
Presumably this State law will only apply to sales of this doll in California. So if it's sold with a disclaimer: "not for sale in California" and they refuse to ship there, shouldn't it be in the clear?
The President certainly isn't absolved of responsibility by this token, but neither is he directly responsible for every action of every employee of the Executive branch.
Wrong. Ever heard "the buck stops here"? A far superior President once had a sign on his desk that had this inscribed on it.
There are some tables you should look at in the wikipedia article on capital punishment by the United States military. You should note a number of executions for crimes such as rape and murder, including those from the year 1945 to the year 1953, during which time Harry S. Truman, the President you mentioned (unless you meant Carter, who apparently either had the original sign or a copy on his desk), was President of the United States. Despite the sign, Truman wasn't hanged or shot, nor did he experience any punishment or censure for these crimes. I'm not suggesting that he should, of course.
Now obviously, you can't expect the President to be involved in every single Executive branch employee's problems, like if there's some discipline problem or whatever. However, the President is responsible for setting policy, and if his underlings are setting their own policy in contradiction to his policy, then that President is completely ineffectual. He has the power to fire any underling under him, and in any normal organization, that usually means the person directly under him who isn't keeping his department in line. You talk of CEOs; do you think a CEO would stand for it if one of his department heads was running around making press releases contradicting the CEO's own statements to the press, and making the CEO look like a moron? Or do you think a CEO would stand for it if a bunch of employees in his company were doing things making the company look bad, getting them bad press, and the department head over those people refused to do anything about it? Of course not; the CEO would direct his department head(s) to correct the problem, and if they don't do it to his satisfaction, he fires their asses and puts someone else in their place. The whole purpose of an executive officer is to get things done.
Generally, in most large organizations, people who aren't at the top levels get on with their jobs the way they've always done them and only pay token respect to policies set by some ephemeral overboss. Top-level guys get fired (ok, they 'resign') all the time, but it's still generally business as usual for most of the organization. The lobbying groups manage to capture most of the important people and positions in these organizations as well as the elected politicians.
The "Executive Branch" of government consists of pretty much everyone who works directly or indirectly for the government who isn't part of the legislative or judicial branches, which means pretty much everyone. That includes people at state and municipal levels. It includes all the soldiers and the firemen and the police officers and the park rangers, etc. It's millions and millions of people.
Absolutely wrong. Obviously, you're completely clueless about basic civics. The Federal government is distinct from State and local governments, and the Federal government has very limited authority over state and local governments (basically they threaten to withhold highway funds if States don't comply). So NO, the President is not the boss for police officers, any more than he's the boss for some random Securitas employee. If the Pres doesn't like some cop, the only thing he can do is use political pressure to remove him, and that's it. Why do you think Joe Arpaio is still in power even though Obama hates him?
I know there's a distinction between state executive branches and the federal one, but it's not a bright line. Which executive branch are the various states National
Wrote a longer response to the reply below yours. Just in short, it turns out there are bacteria that get their day in the sun, and above the ozone layer, no less.
If the UV produced by this and other UV sterilizing sources are not meager, and the UV-C and UV-B these lamps put out are as incredibly damaging as you say, why would anyone want a keyboard that, by your account, would be far more dangerous to them than any bacteria living on their keyboard? I mean, if you're going to use something that's damaging to humans anyway - burning their skin and potentially causing deadly melanomas - why not just just use a keyboard with keys with a surface temperature of 80 degrees celcius or so. That way, they would stay sterile, but a fast touch typist could probably avoid burns and not get cancer. Otherwise, I expect that the UV radiation is adulterated to contain little or no UVC and not really all that much UV-B, not unlike a day in the sun.
In any case, plenty of bacteria exist in Earth's atmosphere, I'm pretty sure I've heard they can even be found in the stratosphere, so no reason for them not to be exposed to UV light above the ozone layer (although they would probably be killed by it). Huh, as a matter of fact, after that last sentence, I did a google search and found this. So it looks like not only are there micro-organisms that make it that high, but they also do have high UV tolerance. Score one for adaptability.
Apologies to you if you are unemployed, self-employed, or you work for a small company, but the President of the US is their boss in the same way that the president or CEO of the company you work for is your boss. In other words, the President is the theoretical big boss of the executive branch, but he's not actually expected to stop by each employee's desk every day to see how their projects are coming along. The President certainly isn't absolved of responsibility by this token, but neither is he directly responsible for every action of every employee of the Executive branch.
The "Executive Branch" of government consists of pretty much everyone who works directly or indirectly for the government who isn't part of the legislative or judicial branches, which means pretty much everyone. That includes people at state and municipal levels. It includes all the soldiers and the firemen and the police officers and the park rangers, etc. It's millions and millions of people. The President would barely have enough working hours during an entire term to read all of their names out loud. Do you think your typical RMV worker even notices much when the President changes?
All that said, I think that the Obama administration does pander to the interest of media industries in a corrupt manner. But this kind of copyright law strong-arming by the US went on during the previous administration too. Obama might be slightly more in the pocket of Hollywood than the last guy, but they all care a lot more about their corporate buddies than they do their actual citizens (and justify it to themselves and others using "trickle down economics"-style rhetoric).
I can see the double slit experiment with my own eyes. Does the word quantum apply to wave-particle duality? Also, isn't the alteration of rhodopsin from reaction with a photon a quantum effect, making the word 'quantum' apply to everything you can see with your own eye?
Doesn't seem like the sort of thing you can really successfully nit-pick about in a place filled with pedants like this.
It depends on the type of superconductor. With the right setup, the fields become locked to each other so that you can levitate over, under, off to the side, etc. That falls under the category of things you can call "maglev". Of course, this video is faked, but the things it depicts are perfectly real, if imperfectly presented in this fake.
You do realize that the vast majority of the executive branch doesn't change when the President changes, right? For that matter, most of them carry on doing the same things they've always done, in the same ways they've always done them, often with no real guiding influence from above and sometimes contrary to instructions from above. Not to say that the Obama administration is doing a good job or that it's not plainly corrupt like most presidential administrations, but there's a lot of entrenched, non-elected people working in the executive branch.
DCTech wrote:
Really? Is that the way it works? Sorry if I'm completely ignorant of the way this market works. Why would one large player completely selling out of the market only affect the price by the amount that player holds? I'm just asking because in just about any other market I've heard of, that kind of move would trigger a huge drop as other players struggle to be the first to abandon what they see as a sinking ship (even if their intention is just to sell high and then buy low later). Why would it be different in this market?