I don't follow your logic. You have to put some energy into a magnetic field to set it up, but you have to put some energy into bending metal etc to build a solid reactor. With superconducting coils and nothing going on inside, the magnetic field costs nothing to maintain.
Of course, there is something going on inside, and it will cost energy to maintain the magnetic field. But I see no evidence that this should be of the same size as the energy produced. And I would have thought that the engineers working on devices like this would have thought of that at some point over the last thirty years. What you are suggesting is that every engineer/scientist who has worked on the project and its predecessors is a complete idiot.
As I understand it, the cost of maintaining the magnetic field increases as the surface of the container, i.e. as the square of dimension, and the energy produced as the volume of the container i.e. the cube of dimension. Therefore, by just scaling up, at some point power generation must exceed costs. Of course, that may be at an unattainably large volume, which is why we need more research before attempting to build one. But is is theoretically, if not commercially, a sure thing.
And the assumption that it is a scientific project, when it is actually an engineering project.
The output of a scientific project is a paper. With photographs, maybe, diagrams etc. But mainly, a paper that says "we have discovered something new about the universe".
The output of an engineering project is something useful. Civil engineers build useful roads, aeronautical engineers build useful planes, and so on.
The intention of ITER is to build a useful fusion reactor - eventually. There may be a lot of science done on the way there, and there may be a lot of people with science PhDs working on the project. But it is fundamentally an engineering project.
I don't see why the operating costs have to be high. Fuel costs will be negligible, so you must be assuming that there are significant wear-and-tear costs, requiring replacement of damaged reactor parts etc. It appears that you are making direct extrapolation from current technology, and assuming that none of the problems they are trying to solve are actually solved. As well as the main ITER site in France, there is a materials research establishment in Japan working to solve the materials problems which would be the main contributors to operating costs, I am not saying that they are certain to succeed, but your assumption seems to be that they are certain to fail.
How is 30GW of solar in Germany not a major amount of generation?
Also, the world still seems to consume the brunt of the electricity during the daytime hours, because we're mostly awake when it's light.
Because the maximum peak is in the early evening, after dark in winter. When solar power production is zero. Even on a cloudy day, a lot of that 30GW is not available. Are you happy to be able to work only on sunny days? Of course we use little energy after midnight. But we use a lot before, and we will need power stations to provide that on windless evenings,
My house uses partial electric heating, which I want in winter, when solar power is at its lowest.
The problem with the fashionably renewables is continuity of supply. Both wind and solar are intermittent. It was reported that one day a third of German's electricity was provided by wind, and four days later none was. Either you get used to having power only when the wind blows, or you need to have effectively 100% capacity in non-intermittent supplies.
Hydroelectric is an excellent renewable, but most of the sites near users have been exploited. Some of the solar variants with heat storage may work, particularly near the equator. But wind and photovoltaic solar are too erratic to be a major part of out power generation.
Security printing is a narrow and specialized industry. There are few printers, and even fewer suppliers of printing presses. China probably has some capability for its own needs, but probably cannot quickly churn out some presses for a foreign order. In six months, no problem.
Cash in circulation is not generally regarded as "the Money Supply". Banks create money by borrowing and re-lending without need for physical cash. When you buy a house, and probably when you buy a car, you do not go around with great wedges of notes. Such transactions are unaffected by physical cash, but are still part of the money system.
What this does is (as so often) screw the poor. The rich can have accounts, run up credit, then pay with a non-cash transaction. The poor, with no creditworthiness, will not be able to buy what they need without physical cash.
Spectacle is what they want. Exploding a bomb in a queue kills four or five, seriously injures the same number. Blowing up an airliner in the air kills hundreds, splashes bent metal across the countryside, and dominates the news for days.
There is not enough space up the human backside to hold a decent bomb, as proved experimentally. Someone tried to kill a Saudi prince with a bomb up the jacksie, exploded while embracing him. The prince escaped with moderate injuries.
I agree that the attention shown to airports and air travel is disproportionate. Unfortunately, some security is needed. But not much more than before 9/11. The action of reinforcing the cockpit door has secured against that attack vector - plus the fact that 9/11 was a surprise which cannot be repeated: pilots will no longer surrender to box cutters even if the door is opened. Most of the rest is security theatre.
Because, rather than "more metal than expected", which is nearly always innocuous, it say "EXPLOSIVES!". If your X-Ray showed something explicitly gun shaped, as opposed to something just not understood, I bet the grope would be a lot less friendly. If there are explosives, the security staff would be in reasonable fear that they themselves are at risk if a suicide bomber blows himself up on detection, whereas a gun strapped to the back is not yet a danger.
Relevant comment. Contrary to what most people think, the false positive rate is far more important than the false negative rate. If it has a false negative (i.e. missing real bombs) rate, it will still succeed in its main task, of deterring would be bombers, because they will not take a 95% chance of detection. (Assuming, of course, the false negatives are random). On the other hand, if it has a false positive rate of 0.1%, that is a false alarm for about one in four aircraft boardings, which it totally unacceptable, And, as you say, a recent visit to a rifle range would be highly likely to trigger a false positive. They need to tune the false positives down to less than 0.001% while still keeping false negatives to just a few percent. Which may not be easy.
I saw Comet Hale Bopp quite clearly from beside a pool in a Las Vegas hotel, surely one of the most light polluted places in the world. I saw it much more clearly from my home in the English countryside, but a good comet can get through a lot of pollution.
Deterrence does not mean the same as prevention. The death penalty undoubtedly prevents the criminal re-offending - as would lifetime incarceration. But it does not appear to deter the people from committing similar offences. The sort of people who would be deterred by the death penalty are also the sort of people who would never commit the kind of offence that allows the death penalty.
In the context of the price of a Boeing 777, the price difference between Android and Apple is negligible.At a guess, I think they would prefer Apple's locked-down software policy. They positively want the walled garden.
Also, of course, lead times in aviation are long. It could well be that Android tablets were not out when they started developing this.
I imagine these would be "controlled" iPads, updated by the flight management staff of the airline. They are running a specialised app from Jeppesen, who have benn producing flight charts for ever, so I should imagine it probably has a custom and controlled update system.
Just because they use consumer equipment, they don't have to use it in the consumer manner.
While I can accept that freedom of speech includes the freedom to lie, it includes the duty to accept the consequences of lying.
So I would say that anybody who made a purchase based on a premeditated lie should be able to request not only a refund of anything paid but punitive damages. It should refund all customers who bought the lied about product, say, three times the amount they paid plus allowance for disruption and time wasted.
/We/ are not dumping that energy into the system. The sun is. All we are doing is stopping a tiny fraction of the energy that the sun dumps on the earth from escaping.
Given that turning the sun "up" and "down" (the seasons) can make differences of many tens of degrees, the idea that changing the effective reflectivity can change the average temperature by a degree or two does not seem to me unreasonable. What we are doing is painting the earth blacker in the infra-red. And anybody knows how much more a black surface heats up compared to a white one in strong sunlight.
The court has first to determine that the case was frivolous (assuming the law is properly drafted). Courts are familiar with the idea of honest but wrong complainants, and would not wish to punish them. Insofar as the court has an interest - which they are supposed not to, but obviously do - they would not wish to have the strangling effect that you describe, because it would reduce their work. So i don't think you need worry about the court classifying every loser as frivolous.
In the UK, where allocation of costs against losing litigants is common, there is a concept of constructive support. If a body can be shown to have been funding an action, then they can become liable for costs laid against the litigant they were funding. Precisely to avoid this sort of blocking. Obviously, the support has to be shown to the court's satisfaction, but that is usually straightforward.
It is a common practice in most email clients. They store the addresses of everybody with you have exchanged emails. My GMail account certainly remembers everybody I have sent an email to. "A few hundred" would be consistent with a member of the customer service team handling customer issues by email. I suggest this would be almost universal practice - does your email client not keep an addressbook? I know of no email client which does not keep addresses until I explicitly delete them.
Presumably because the had received and handled emails from users. You don't need to "export" the email address, you just need to be the person designated to handle a customer issue. Their email address then goes to your addressbook, and anybody who hacks your account can read your addressbook.
"The punishment should fit the crime". Yes, life is unfair. The whole point of the justice system is to try and bring some fairness to it. If the justice system is perceived as unfair, it loses all legitimacy. The whole point of having prosecution and defence attorneys, juries, rules of evidence etc. is seen to be scrupulously fair. If you then say, basically, that punishment is a lottery: it depends not on what you did, but on what others you know nothing about did, you undermine the whole principle of justice.
And shoplifting is not a collective action: people usually do it individually. If people work as teams, perhaps distracting assistants while an accomplice steals, that is collective action and both should be punished for the crime, But collective punishments generally are regarded as uncivilised and (inter alias) banned by the Geneva Convention.
So the punishment for a crime depends not on what you did, but on what others did? If you stole a candy bar, you should be punished for the unknown person who stole a diamond necklace?
I agree about do the crime/do the time. But for your crimes, not someone else's. If it is right to fine someone 100 times the value for shoplifting, it is right whether they are the only shoplifter in town or one of a thousand. Making any punishment depend upon how many others are doing it is unfair.
Except that they catch probably 1% of all shoplifters, so that the single miscreant would get fined 100 times the cost of what they stole, which seems to deny equity. And the store has only to catch a single shoplifter to claim back the millions they lose to all shoplifters all across the country. Not condoning shoplifting, but people should be punished for their own crimes, not for those of others,
It is estimated that 10% of driver speed on the motorway, So catch one speeder and fine him for the 2 million or so others you haven't caught. Justice?
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I don't follow your logic. You have to put some energy into a magnetic field to set it up, but you have to put some energy into bending metal etc to build a solid reactor. With superconducting coils and nothing going on inside, the magnetic field costs nothing to maintain.
Of course, there is something going on inside, and it will cost energy to maintain the magnetic field. But I see no evidence that this should be of the same size as the energy produced. And I would have thought that the engineers working on devices like this would have thought of that at some point over the last thirty years. What you are suggesting is that every engineer/scientist who has worked on the project and its predecessors is a complete idiot.
As I understand it, the cost of maintaining the magnetic field increases as the surface of the container, i.e. as the square of dimension, and the energy produced as the volume of the container i.e. the cube of dimension. Therefore, by just scaling up, at some point power generation must exceed costs. Of course, that may be at an unattainably large volume, which is why we need more research before attempting to build one. But is is theoretically, if not commercially, a sure thing.
And the assumption that it is a scientific project, when it is actually an engineering project.
The output of a scientific project is a paper. With photographs, maybe, diagrams etc. But mainly, a paper that says "we have discovered something new about the universe".
The output of an engineering project is something useful. Civil engineers build useful roads, aeronautical engineers build useful planes, and so on.
The intention of ITER is to build a useful fusion reactor - eventually. There may be a lot of science done on the way there, and there may be a lot of people with science PhDs working on the project. But it is fundamentally an engineering project.
I don't see why the operating costs have to be high. Fuel costs will be negligible, so you must be assuming that there are significant wear-and-tear costs, requiring replacement of damaged reactor parts etc. It appears that you are making direct extrapolation from current technology, and assuming that none of the problems they are trying to solve are actually solved. As well as the main ITER site in France, there is a materials research establishment in Japan working to solve the materials problems which would be the main contributors to operating costs, I am not saying that they are certain to succeed, but your assumption seems to be that they are certain to fail.
How is 30GW of solar in Germany not a major amount of generation?
Also, the world still seems to consume the brunt of the electricity during the daytime hours, because we're mostly awake when it's light.
Because the maximum peak is in the early evening, after dark in winter. When solar power production is zero. Even on a cloudy day, a lot of that 30GW is not available. Are you happy to be able to work only on sunny days? Of course we use little energy after midnight. But we use a lot before, and we will need power stations to provide that on windless evenings,
My house uses partial electric heating, which I want in winter, when solar power is at its lowest.
The problem with the fashionably renewables is continuity of supply. Both wind and solar are intermittent. It was reported that one day a third of German's electricity was provided by wind, and four days later none was. Either you get used to having power only when the wind blows, or you need to have effectively 100% capacity in non-intermittent supplies.
Hydroelectric is an excellent renewable, but most of the sites near users have been exploited. Some of the solar variants with heat storage may work, particularly near the equator. But wind and photovoltaic solar are too erratic to be a major part of out power generation.
Security printing is a narrow and specialized industry. There are few printers, and even fewer suppliers of printing presses. China probably has some capability for its own needs, but probably cannot quickly churn out some presses for a foreign order. In six months, no problem.
Cash in circulation is not generally regarded as "the Money Supply". Banks create money by borrowing and re-lending without need for physical cash. When you buy a house, and probably when you buy a car, you do not go around with great wedges of notes. Such transactions are unaffected by physical cash, but are still part of the money system.
What this does is (as so often) screw the poor. The rich can have accounts, run up credit, then pay with a non-cash transaction. The poor, with no creditworthiness, will not be able to buy what they need without physical cash.
Spectacle is what they want. Exploding a bomb in a queue kills four or five, seriously injures the same number. Blowing up an airliner in the air kills hundreds, splashes bent metal across the countryside, and dominates the news for days.
There is not enough space up the human backside to hold a decent bomb, as proved experimentally. Someone tried to kill a Saudi prince with a bomb up the jacksie, exploded while embracing him. The prince escaped with moderate injuries.
I agree that the attention shown to airports and air travel is disproportionate. Unfortunately, some security is needed. But not much more than before 9/11. The action of reinforcing the cockpit door has secured against that attack vector - plus the fact that 9/11 was a surprise which cannot be repeated: pilots will no longer surrender to box cutters even if the door is opened. Most of the rest is security theatre.
Because, rather than "more metal than expected", which is nearly always innocuous, it say "EXPLOSIVES!". If your X-Ray showed something explicitly gun shaped, as opposed to something just not understood, I bet the grope would be a lot less friendly. If there are explosives, the security staff would be in reasonable fear that they themselves are at risk if a suicide bomber blows himself up on detection, whereas a gun strapped to the back is not yet a danger.
Relevant comment. Contrary to what most people think, the false positive rate is far more important than the false negative rate. If it has a false negative (i.e. missing real bombs) rate, it will still succeed in its main task, of deterring would be bombers, because they will not take a 95% chance of detection. (Assuming, of course, the false negatives are random). On the other hand, if it has a false positive rate of 0.1%, that is a false alarm for about one in four aircraft boardings, which it totally unacceptable, And, as you say, a recent visit to a rifle range would be highly likely to trigger a false positive. They need to tune the false positives down to less than 0.001% while still keeping false negatives to just a few percent. Which may not be easy.
I saw Comet Hale Bopp quite clearly from beside a pool in a Las Vegas hotel, surely one of the most light polluted places in the world. I saw it much more clearly from my home in the English countryside, but a good comet can get through a lot of pollution.
Deterrence does not mean the same as prevention. The death penalty undoubtedly prevents the criminal re-offending - as would lifetime incarceration. But it does not appear to deter the people from committing similar offences. The sort of people who would be deterred by the death penalty are also the sort of people who would never commit the kind of offence that allows the death penalty.
In the context of the price of a Boeing 777, the price difference between Android and Apple is negligible.At a guess, I think they would prefer Apple's locked-down software policy. They positively want the walled garden.
Also, of course, lead times in aviation are long. It could well be that Android tablets were not out when they started developing this.
I imagine these would be "controlled" iPads, updated by the flight management staff of the airline. They are running a specialised app from Jeppesen, who have benn producing flight charts for ever, so I should imagine it probably has a custom and controlled update system.
Just because they use consumer equipment, they don't have to use it in the consumer manner.
While I can accept that freedom of speech includes the freedom to lie, it includes the duty to accept the consequences of lying.
So I would say that anybody who made a purchase based on a premeditated lie should be able to request not only a refund of anything paid but punitive damages. It should refund all customers who bought the lied about product, say, three times the amount they paid plus allowance for disruption and time wasted.
/We/ are not dumping that energy into the system. The sun is. All we are doing is stopping a tiny fraction of the energy that the sun dumps on the earth from escaping.
Given that turning the sun "up" and "down" (the seasons) can make differences of many tens of degrees, the idea that changing the effective reflectivity can change the average temperature by a degree or two does not seem to me unreasonable. What we are doing is painting the earth blacker in the infra-red. And anybody knows how much more a black surface heats up compared to a white one in strong sunlight.
The court has first to determine that the case was frivolous (assuming the law is properly drafted). Courts are familiar with the idea of honest but wrong complainants, and would not wish to punish them. Insofar as the court has an interest - which they are supposed not to, but obviously do - they would not wish to have the strangling effect that you describe, because it would reduce their work. So i don't think you need worry about the court classifying every loser as frivolous.
In the UK, where allocation of costs against losing litigants is common, there is a concept of constructive support. If a body can be shown to have been funding an action, then they can become liable for costs laid against the litigant they were funding. Precisely to avoid this sort of blocking. Obviously, the support has to be shown to the court's satisfaction, but that is usually straightforward.
My Vodafone dongle and 3 MiFi are both relabelled Huawei products. I think there are a lot of them around, but rebranded by the phone companies.
It is a common practice in most email clients. They store the addresses of everybody with you have exchanged emails. My GMail account certainly remembers everybody I have sent an email to. "A few hundred" would be consistent with a member of the customer service team handling customer issues by email. I suggest this would be almost universal practice - does your email client not keep an addressbook? I know of no email client which does not keep addresses until I explicitly delete them.
Presumably because the had received and handled emails from users. You don't need to "export" the email address, you just need to be the person designated to handle a customer issue. Their email address then goes to your addressbook, and anybody who hacks your account can read your addressbook.
Just an example of what is regarded as minimum civilised behaviour.
"The punishment should fit the crime". Yes, life is unfair. The whole point of the justice system is to try and bring some fairness to it. If the justice system is perceived as unfair, it loses all legitimacy. The whole point of having prosecution and defence attorneys, juries, rules of evidence etc. is seen to be scrupulously fair. If you then say, basically, that punishment is a lottery: it depends not on what you did, but on what others you know nothing about did, you undermine the whole principle of justice.
And shoplifting is not a collective action: people usually do it individually. If people work as teams, perhaps distracting assistants while an accomplice steals, that is collective action and both should be punished for the crime, But collective punishments generally are regarded as uncivilised and (inter alias) banned by the Geneva Convention.
So the punishment for a crime depends not on what you did, but on what others did? If you stole a candy bar, you should be punished for the unknown person who stole a diamond necklace?
I agree about do the crime/do the time. But for your crimes, not someone else's. If it is right to fine someone 100 times the value for shoplifting, it is right whether they are the only shoplifter in town or one of a thousand. Making any punishment depend upon how many others are doing it is unfair.
Except that they catch probably 1% of all shoplifters, so that the single miscreant would get fined 100 times the cost of what they stole, which seems to deny equity. And the store has only to catch a single shoplifter to claim back the millions they lose to all shoplifters all across the country. Not condoning shoplifting, but people should be punished for their own crimes, not for those of others,
It is estimated that 10% of driver speed on the motorway, So catch one speeder and fine him for the 2 million or so others you haven't caught. Justice?