As a Libertarian myself since my early teenage years I find your situation interesting. It sounds to me like you would kind of like to be a Democrat, but they have become too totalitarian for you. Republicans have the Tea Party as a compromise between the mainstream Police State Republicans and Laissez-Faire Libertarians, but what compromise do Democrats have? Is there a middle ground (in terms of individual freedom) between Democrats and Libertarians? If not, there should be.
So you do want some kind of wealth redistribution scheme and safety net, some kind of forced charity, but you also want limits on how far the police can go in claiming you as their property? Put another way, maybe you would like all of the founding fathers' Lockean ideas of human rights respected except for property rights (aka the 'pursuit of happiness'). And you might support property rights for physical objects themselves, just not for money.
I buy non-cfc albuterol, and it's not 3x as expensive as the OTC stuff these guys are hawking. It's actually a little cheaper.
Is this in the US? If you know of an HFA inhaler for less than $20 USD for sale in the US please post the source.
Some Indian pharmacies sell both HFA and CFC salbutamol inhalers for under $3. In many countries Salbutamol inhalers can be had for around $6 without a prescription at any pharmacy.
Banning remaining CFC sources will accelerate the healing of ozone layer. And it's not like there are no good replacements available.
Do you have asthma? I do, and I find that the non-CFC HFA inhalers don't work for me. I have resorted to (illegally) ordering CFC inhalers from India and/or using a portable nebulizer, which is both less effective and less portable than the inhalers with propellants.
The problem with the HFA inhalers is that they don't propel the medicine strongly enough and the propellant itself may even be an irritant to some people. I have had times where it has at least seemed to make my asthma worse, not better.
OTOH, I'm not a big fan of primatene mist either. It is dangerous and actually causes pain in my chest. Although in an emergency it is often the only option available other than the ER for someone with asthma.
What kind of reward are you referring to? If you invent a superior product no one is stopping you from selling it. The real question is whether preventing others from selling it too is a net benefit or loss for society as a whole. Personally, I'm not sure, but I am sure that the current system is very, very broken. At the moment patents pretty much only benefit large companies with enough money to defend their patent in court. And even then, some Chinese company will still copy it. Anyone who only invents in the hope of getting a patent probably doesn't have any original ideas anyway. It is questionable whether it really fosters invention.
Most of what patents do is force inventors to document how their idea works.
Spoken like someone who has never tried to read a patent. Patents are deliberately written to be as vague as possible to keep as much trade secret protection as they can manage while still getting the monopoly. You can get away with being incredibly vague if you mention how someone sufficiently 'skilled in the art' would know what you are talking about often enough. Most patent examiners aren't skilled enough in the art themselves to really know if it is true. For practical purposes they get to have their cake and eat it too. The trade you are implying where society gets documented inventions in exchange for a monopoly is mostly fantasy. It only happens when you have a very incompetent patent attorney or try to write the patent application yourself.
Are you seriously claiming that HID lights are indistinguishable from halogen lights? You have seen HID lights, right? Do you also have difficulty distinguishing between fluorescent and incandescent bulbs?
Amateur astronomy for use as a guide laser. Despite the price, I may have to pick one of these up for aiming my radiotelescope. It also might work for killing bugs. Might not be powerful enough for that though.
1. Read a Stephen Baxter novel and get an idea. 2. Find exactly the right size asteroid and change it's orbit to collide with Earth at a point near Washington D.C. 3. Use a cover story about mining the asteroid even though that makes no economic sense. The same minerals can be found on Earth. 4. Accept the gratitude of the rest of the world. 5. Claim the giant crater where the U.S. used to be for the People's Republic of China. 6. ??? 7. Profit.
So what's worse - your default space radiation or some enriched nuclear fuel lying around or able to find its way inside your systems?
What's worse is never going there at all because you don't have a reliable, practical means of generating power for life support and manufacturing. Nuclear is the best tech we've got right now for off world colonies. Maybe some day we will develop something better, but for now it's all we've got.
Solar sails are not designed for power generation. They are designed for propulsion via the solar wind (charged particles, not light). I think what you are thinking of is just a very large photovoltaic panel, which is expensive, delicate, and doesn't last more than a couple of decades. Nuclear fission or even RTGs are much more practical, especially for Mars or Jovian moons etc. Without some kind of nuclear power generation missions to Mars or the outer solar system would be nearly impossible. Photovoltaics are really only practical when you are at an Earth or closer solar orbit.
Water from the moon, huh? I was kind of assuming we would have to bring all of our water and oxygen with us, and just recycle both as much as possible. If we have to depend on the presence of water ice we probably won't be able to have a lasting settlement there. It may be possible to extract water from rock, but it would be ridiculously difficult and labor intensive and probably not really feasible. Sending up rockets full of water (and oxygen) would probably be cheaper. We really need a damn space elevator. Then it would all be a lot easier. In terms of space travel and space colonization that would be THE breakthrough. Our gravity well here is awfully deep.
Before we even think about a permanent lunar settlement we need to think about lunar mining to extract iron, aluminum, copper, and uranium ore.
Then we need to work on solar (parabolic or fresnel) furnaces to melt the ore and process it into metal. The lack of oxygen will make some of the traditional smelting techniques more difficult however. We may have to live with metals with inferior properties because we have to invent a whole new metallurgy up there.
Having a working nuclear reactor there in the beginning would make everything a lot easier. I don't know if photovoltaics could supply enough power for things like earth (regolith) moving machinery.
In the beginning we could limit ourselves to collecting the loose regolith with solar powered bulldozers, backhoes, and more specialized mining equipment. For the heavier minerals underneath we'd have to wait for a higher power density solution.
Don't check your skepticism at the door. Science is all about skepticism. There is quite a bit of pressure to conform to consensus science, particularly when it comes to relativity. Here is what I have found:
Special Relativity = TRUE. You don't have to be a true believer to believe in the truth of SR. The ideas are understandable by human minds and are mostly testable and mostly well tested. With SR the ideas came first and the math came second. There are certainly aspects of SR that are non-intuitive, but they still maintain a certain base of plausibility. And of course the math is well proven.
General Relativity = Partially TRUE.
AFAICT, the math has been experimentally proven to a large degree. The equations can make more accurate predictions than Newton's simple equations. As such the field equations are incredibly useful tools and should be seen as just that: tools.
The field equations are a kind of mathematical model of reality which works and thus reflects the nature of reality, but it is no more a direct representation of that reality than a map is of a region of the earth. You wouldn't use a map to perform earth science experiments on regardless of how accurate that map may be. Instead you would use the earth directly.
My advice is to learn the tensor calculus field equations so that you can use them to make useful predictions, but be wary of the analogies that will be trotted out to try to give you a pseudo-understanding of how the mathematics relates to the real world.
Those 'implications' require further experiment to prove and verify. In some cases this may not be possible as some of the alleged implications of the mathematics are non-falsifiable and unprovable and can only be taken on faith. OTOH, some aspects of the general theory have experimental evidence. A scientist will accept the ideas which have sufficient experimental evidence and withhold judgment on the ideas that don't.
I think the difficulty of the mathematics makes people less skeptical about the theory itself than they would otherwise be. And Einstein's reputation makes it difficult to doubt any of his theories. So people tend to just accept the analogies in lieu of a genuine understanding of the ideas because they cannot understand the mathematics itself and the ideas are usually so non-intuitive that they seem impossible. Also the analogies seem kind of interesting and cool, which makes it more tempting to believe in the pseudo-understanding that they provide.
The book is for those seeking a conceptual understanding of the theory, not computational prowess.
Do you understand the theory conceptually? I ask because I don't think that's possible. I have no doubt that many people understand the mathematics, but the essence of what is behind the mathematics? I don't think any human now alive can claim that.
I think most of us are familiar with the analogies involving rubber mats, bowling balls and marbles etc, but those analogies were never intended to be the theory itself. Einstein was a mathematician first and physicist second. Minkowski was a pure mathematician. The mathematics is the theory. There is no shortcut to an understanding that doesn't exist.
Even if you truly believe that those analogies are the theory they don't get you very far. There is not a single piece of experimental data supporting the analogies. Unlike the mathematics itself which has been well supported by experiment.
Even Einstein himself never claimed to understand the why of GR. GR is all about the math. The vague analogies sometimes bandied about aren't science. They are flights of fancy and completely unproven and were only ever used to try to explain the math to people who didn't understand the long tensor calculus equations. The math itself is the science. There is no way around the equations. GR cannot be explained with natural language. Only with mathematics.
So basically you are talking the equivalent of replicators. I wouldn't hold your breath. Fusion is always about 20 years away. Nanotech of the kind you are referring to is more like a perpetual 500-1000 years away.
Also, when you factor in environmental costs fusion may end up being cheaper due to less radioactive waste. Now if we could just figure out a way to live 20 years in the future.
2. China encourages the US to reduce the value of the dollar (inflation) by 50% and US complies by doubling the money supply.
3. The US pays china back their 1 billion which is now only worth 500 million pre-inflation dollars and and half as many yuan. For instance, pre-inflation 1 USD = 8 CNY, post-inflation 1 USD = 4 CNY.
4. Profit, but for whom? Not for China. Inflation is good if you are a debtor, but very bad if you are a creditor. And the longer it takes the debtor to pay the worse it gets.
The last thing China wants is US inflation. The US is quite keen on it at the moment though. It's one way of reducing the national debt. It's also an invisible tax. Their favorite kind.
It would make a terrible science fiction plot because globular cluster M13 (in the constellation Hercules) and Tau Sagittarii (in Sagittarius) are nowhere near each other as you already pointed out. I think we have enough scifi with major plot holes thank you very much.
The Wow! signal is genuinely creepy though. Still unexplained after all these years. It really could be evidence of an alien transmission that was accidentally sent in our direction. It is no more than a tiny fragment of course, but one that we have no way of explaining away. If it had been terrestrial in origin I think we would have seen more instances of that sort of thing since.
Tau Sagittarri is 120 light years away, about 6 times further away than Gliese 581, but I think the Wow! message makes it an excellent target for an interstellar visit after we send a ship to Gliese 581. We should also try transmitting a message in that direction like the Ukranians have already done with Gliese 581.
Every time an interstellar space travel article appears on slashdot it seems like everyone forgets the basics.
1. FTL is not necessary at all. A generation ship or unmanned vessel that can reach.1c or higher is quite practical for exploring many of the more interesting local star systems. Without FTL we won't be exploring Andromeda any time soon, but for local Milky Way systems it's not a problem or any kind of excuse for not exploring. We have some very interesting systems close by.
2. Spacecraft capable of 0.1c were buildable even half a century ago. They are certainly buildable now. They are just very expensive.
3. We now actually have somewhere interesting to go: the Gliese system. At only 20 light years away it would take no more than a couple of centuries to reach with current tech.
The first step toward an interstellar mission, either manned or unmanned (its systems would have to be hugely redundant if unmanned) would be to start a permanent manufacturing facility on the mooon and maybe at Lagrange points L1 or L2
The lunar facility would be responsible for mining, smelting, casting, and machining spacecraft parts from whatever ore can be extracted from the lunar surface. Scouting for lunar locations with useful ores like aluminum, magnesium, iron, silicon, other semiconductor elements, and uranium would be a first step.
The individual parts could then be ferried to a Lagrange point facility for final assembly of the spacecraft.
Setting up off world manufacturing itself might take us a century to get up and running, but it is a necessary first step to any sort of interstellar mission. Until/unless we can invent some kind of space/warp drive or cheap antimatter manufacturing we are stuck with fusion and that means off world manufacturing facilities.
Slashdot Mirror
So you advocate murder for anyone who advocates murder? Or does your rule only apply to people with dark skin and beards?
As a Libertarian myself since my early teenage years I find your situation interesting. It sounds to me like you would kind of like to be a Democrat, but they have become too totalitarian for you. Republicans have the Tea Party as a compromise between the mainstream Police State Republicans and Laissez-Faire Libertarians, but what compromise do Democrats have? Is there a middle ground (in terms of individual freedom) between Democrats and Libertarians? If not, there should be.
So you do want some kind of wealth redistribution scheme and safety net, some kind of forced charity, but you also want limits on how far the police can go in claiming you as their property? Put another way, maybe you would like all of the founding fathers' Lockean ideas of human rights respected except for property rights (aka the 'pursuit of happiness'). And you might support property rights for physical objects themselves, just not for money.
I buy non-cfc albuterol, and it's not 3x as expensive as the OTC stuff these guys are hawking. It's actually a little cheaper.
Is this in the US? If you know of an HFA inhaler for less than $20 USD for sale in the US please post the source.
Some Indian pharmacies sell both HFA and CFC salbutamol inhalers for under $3. In many countries Salbutamol inhalers can be had for around $6 without a prescription at any pharmacy.
You were supposed to prime the old inhalers too. Manufacturers always recommend that. Every primed spray is money in their pocket.
Banning remaining CFC sources will accelerate the healing of ozone layer. And it's not like there are no good replacements available.
Do you have asthma? I do, and I find that the non-CFC HFA inhalers don't work for me. I have resorted to (illegally) ordering CFC inhalers from India and/or using a portable nebulizer, which is both less effective and less portable than the inhalers with propellants.
The problem with the HFA inhalers is that they don't propel the medicine strongly enough and the propellant itself may even be an irritant to some people. I have had times where it has at least seemed to make my asthma worse, not better.
OTOH, I'm not a big fan of primatene mist either. It is dangerous and actually causes pain in my chest. Although in an emergency it is often the only option available other than the ER for someone with asthma.
What kind of reward are you referring to? If you invent a superior product no one is stopping you from selling it. The real question is whether preventing others from selling it too is a net benefit or loss for society as a whole. Personally, I'm not sure, but I am sure that the current system is very, very broken. At the moment patents pretty much only benefit large companies with enough money to defend their patent in court. And even then, some Chinese company will still copy it. Anyone who only invents in the hope of getting a patent probably doesn't have any original ideas anyway. It is questionable whether it really fosters invention.
Most of what patents do is force inventors to document how their idea works.
Spoken like someone who has never tried to read a patent. Patents are deliberately written to be as vague as possible to keep as much trade secret protection as they can manage while still getting the monopoly. You can get away with being incredibly vague if you mention how someone sufficiently 'skilled in the art' would know what you are talking about often enough. Most patent examiners aren't skilled enough in the art themselves to really know if it is true. For practical purposes they get to have their cake and eat it too. The trade you are implying where society gets documented inventions in exchange for a monopoly is mostly fantasy. It only happens when you have a very incompetent patent attorney or try to write the patent application yourself.
Just wait until Pistole hears of this.
Are you seriously claiming that HID lights are indistinguishable from halogen lights? You have seen HID lights, right? Do you also have difficulty distinguishing between fluorescent and incandescent bulbs?
And what hobby requires the use of 1W laser??
Amateur astronomy for use as a guide laser. Despite the price, I may have to pick one of these up for aiming my radiotelescope. It also might work for killing bugs. Might not be powerful enough for that though.
Have you tried turning indexing off and seeing how much you like it then? As far as I'm concerned Windows 7 doesn't have a search feature.
1. Read a Stephen Baxter novel and get an idea.
2. Find exactly the right size asteroid and change it's orbit to collide with Earth at a point near Washington D.C.
3. Use a cover story about mining the asteroid even though that makes no economic sense. The same minerals can be found on Earth.
4. Accept the gratitude of the rest of the world.
5. Claim the giant crater where the U.S. used to be for the People's Republic of China.
6. ???
7. Profit.
I guess the Russian band PPK never heard about this. MLK and Chernobyl
So what's worse - your default space radiation or some enriched nuclear fuel lying around or able to find its way inside your systems?
What's worse is never going there at all because you don't have a reliable, practical means of generating power for life support and manufacturing. Nuclear is the best tech we've got right now for off world colonies. Maybe some day we will develop something better, but for now it's all we've got.
Solar sails are not designed for power generation. They are designed for propulsion via the solar wind (charged particles, not light). I think what you are thinking of is just a very large photovoltaic panel, which is expensive, delicate, and doesn't last more than a couple of decades. Nuclear fission or even RTGs are much more practical, especially for Mars or Jovian moons etc. Without some kind of nuclear power generation missions to Mars or the outer solar system would be nearly impossible. Photovoltaics are really only practical when you are at an Earth or closer solar orbit.
Water from the moon, huh? I was kind of assuming we would have to bring all of our water and oxygen with us, and just recycle both as much as possible. If we have to depend on the presence of water ice we probably won't be able to have a lasting settlement there. It may be possible to extract water from rock, but it would be ridiculously difficult and labor intensive and probably not really feasible. Sending up rockets full of water (and oxygen) would probably be cheaper. We really need a damn space elevator. Then it would all be a lot easier. In terms of space travel and space colonization that would be THE breakthrough. Our gravity well here is awfully deep.
Before we even think about a permanent lunar settlement we need to think about lunar mining to extract iron, aluminum, copper, and uranium ore.
Then we need to work on solar (parabolic or fresnel) furnaces to melt the ore and process it into metal. The lack of oxygen will make some of the traditional smelting techniques more difficult however. We may have to live with metals with inferior properties because we have to invent a whole new metallurgy up there.
Having a working nuclear reactor there in the beginning would make everything a lot easier. I don't know if photovoltaics could supply enough power for things like earth (regolith) moving machinery.
In the beginning we could limit ourselves to collecting the loose regolith with solar powered bulldozers, backhoes, and more specialized mining equipment. For the heavier minerals underneath we'd have to wait for a higher power density solution.
Don't check your skepticism at the door. Science is all about skepticism. There is quite a bit of pressure to conform to consensus science, particularly when it comes to relativity. Here is what I have found:
Special Relativity = TRUE. You don't have to be a true believer to believe in the truth of SR. The ideas are understandable by human minds and are mostly testable and mostly well tested. With SR the ideas came first and the math came second. There are certainly aspects of SR that are non-intuitive, but they still maintain a certain base of plausibility. And of course the math is well proven.
General Relativity = Partially TRUE.
AFAICT, the math has been experimentally proven to a large degree. The equations can make more accurate predictions than Newton's simple equations. As such the field equations are incredibly useful tools and should be seen as just that: tools.
The field equations are a kind of mathematical model of reality which works and thus reflects the nature of reality, but it is no more a direct representation of that reality than a map is of a region of the earth. You wouldn't use a map to perform earth science experiments on regardless of how accurate that map may be. Instead you would use the earth directly.
My advice is to learn the tensor calculus field equations so that you can use them to make useful predictions, but be wary of the analogies that will be trotted out to try to give you a pseudo-understanding of how the mathematics relates to the real world.
Those 'implications' require further experiment to prove and verify. In some cases this may not be possible as some of the alleged implications of the mathematics are non-falsifiable and unprovable and can only be taken on faith. OTOH, some aspects of the general theory have experimental evidence. A scientist will accept the ideas which have sufficient experimental evidence and withhold judgment on the ideas that don't.
I think the difficulty of the mathematics makes people less skeptical about the theory itself than they would otherwise be. And Einstein's reputation makes it difficult to doubt any of his theories. So people tend to just accept the analogies in lieu of a genuine understanding of the ideas because they cannot understand the mathematics itself and the ideas are usually so non-intuitive that they seem impossible. Also the analogies seem kind of interesting and cool, which makes it more tempting to believe in the pseudo-understanding that they provide.
Uh, you do understand that the question was about general relativity, right?
The book is for those seeking a conceptual understanding of the theory, not computational prowess.
Do you understand the theory conceptually? I ask because I don't think that's possible. I have no doubt that many people understand the mathematics, but the essence of what is behind the mathematics? I don't think any human now alive can claim that.
I think most of us are familiar with the analogies involving rubber mats, bowling balls and marbles etc, but those analogies were never intended to be the theory itself. Einstein was a mathematician first and physicist second. Minkowski was a pure mathematician. The mathematics is the theory. There is no shortcut to an understanding that doesn't exist.
Even if you truly believe that those analogies are the theory they don't get you very far. There is not a single piece of experimental data supporting the analogies. Unlike the mathematics itself which has been well supported by experiment.
Even Einstein himself never claimed to understand the why of GR. GR is all about the math. The vague analogies sometimes bandied about aren't science. They are flights of fancy and completely unproven and were only ever used to try to explain the math to people who didn't understand the long tensor calculus equations. The math itself is the science. There is no way around the equations. GR cannot be explained with natural language. Only with mathematics.
So basically you are talking the equivalent of replicators. I wouldn't hold your breath. Fusion is always about 20 years away. Nanotech of the kind you are referring to is more like a perpetual 500-1000 years away.
Also, when you factor in environmental costs fusion may end up being cheaper due to less radioactive waste. Now if we could just figure out a way to live 20 years in the future.
1. China lends the US 1 billion dollars.
2. China encourages the US to reduce the value of the dollar (inflation) by 50% and US complies by doubling the money supply.
3. The US pays china back their 1 billion which is now only worth 500 million pre-inflation dollars and and half as many yuan. For instance, pre-inflation 1 USD = 8 CNY, post-inflation 1 USD = 4 CNY.
4. Profit, but for whom? Not for China. Inflation is good if you are a debtor, but very bad if you are a creditor. And the longer it takes the debtor to pay the worse it gets.
The last thing China wants is US inflation. The US is quite keen on it at the moment though. It's one way of reducing the national debt. It's also an invisible tax. Their favorite kind.
It would make a terrible science fiction plot because globular cluster M13 (in the constellation Hercules) and Tau Sagittarii (in Sagittarius) are nowhere near each other as you already pointed out. I think we have enough scifi with major plot holes thank you very much.
The Wow! signal is genuinely creepy though. Still unexplained after all these years. It really could be evidence of an alien transmission that was accidentally sent in our direction. It is no more than a tiny fragment of course, but one that we have no way of explaining away. If it had been terrestrial in origin I think we would have seen more instances of that sort of thing since.
Tau Sagittarri is 120 light years away, about 6 times further away than Gliese 581, but I think the Wow! message makes it an excellent target for an interstellar visit after we send a ship to Gliese 581. We should also try transmitting a message in that direction like the Ukranians have already done with Gliese 581.
Every time an interstellar space travel article appears on slashdot it seems like everyone forgets the basics.
1. FTL is not necessary at all. A generation ship or unmanned vessel that can reach .1c or higher is quite practical for exploring many of the more interesting local star systems. Without FTL we won't be exploring Andromeda any time soon, but for local Milky Way systems it's not a problem or any kind of excuse for not exploring. We have some very interesting systems close by.
2. Spacecraft capable of 0.1c were buildable even half a century ago. They are certainly buildable now. They are just very expensive.
3. We now actually have somewhere interesting to go: the Gliese system. At only 20 light years away it would take no more than a couple of centuries to reach with current tech.
The first step toward an interstellar mission, either manned or unmanned (its systems would have to be hugely redundant if unmanned) would be to start a permanent manufacturing facility on the mooon and maybe at Lagrange points L1 or L2
The lunar facility would be responsible for mining, smelting, casting, and machining spacecraft parts from whatever ore can be extracted from the lunar surface. Scouting for lunar locations with useful ores like aluminum, magnesium, iron, silicon, other semiconductor elements, and uranium would be a first step.
The individual parts could then be ferried to a Lagrange point facility for final assembly of the spacecraft.
Setting up off world manufacturing itself might take us a century to get up and running, but it is a necessary first step to any sort of interstellar mission. Until/unless we can invent some kind of space/warp drive or cheap antimatter manufacturing we are stuck with fusion and that means off world manufacturing facilities.