How many people does India send over here to feed hungry Americans? If you can name one I'll be impressed.
On the other hand, I can think of a lot of hungry Indians who have packed up everything and moved to North America to get a job so that they wouldn't be hungry anymore.
If you're hungry then take a demeaning, miserable, poorly-paying job at Wal-mart or McDonald's. Those jobs can't be offshored. I've served my time in customer service, and I was born here. There will always be crappy service jobs available...and I've noticed that most immigrants don't think they're too good to do them.
I can't seem to find it now, but Jordin Kare (of LLNL) had a nice presentation showing that a space elevator isn't really any cheaper than a RLV - even under when the space elevator assumes not-yet-existent materials like carbon nanotube composites with tensile strength approaching that of the raw fiber and the RLV is built only using existing technology.
Yes, but such a cheap RLV is also not-yet-existent. Yes, I'd be pleased to see a cheap RLV, but there would be problems once we really start to use the capacity.
RLV's are loud and polluting. A space elevator has the potential to be extremely efficient and generate no air pollution.
Another poster has observed that surviving reentry is less stressful with a space elevator--there's no smacking into the atmosphere at twenty times the speed of sound. I suspect that the risk of failure of a space elevator resulting in loss of life is likely lower, though I'll freely admit that we could make engineering assumptions to push that argument either way.
You can build a space elevator for higher capacity, in principle. Bulky unaerodynamic cargoes can ride the elevator. There's only so much cargo you can put in a practical RLV; for a space elevator you just add more and thicker cables.
I bet there are economies of scale associated with using the space elevator. Suppose I want to travel from Point A to Point B through undeveloped country. As an individual, I could take my Jeep and do it. It's certainly easier than building a railroad. However, if I want to bring all my friends along, at some point my investment in Jeeps starts to get larger than my investment in rail. What if I want some steel girders or a space station module at Point B? Not only that, if I want to double my rail capacity, I don't double my cost--I just lay down a second set of tracks on the same right-of-way. I can even use the original tracks to deliver tracklaying equipment.
This might be an excellent application for a RLV--delivery of materials to assemble the first space elevator.
The skies might get crowded with lots of reusable vehicles makig frequent launches--might be an air-traffic control nightmare, and nobody wants frequent sonic booms from reentering spacecraft.
A wholesale copy if credited to the original author, as far as I am aware (IANAL), is fine. A direct copy WITHOUT credit is plagerism.
Er, no. Even if you credit the original author, if you duplicate the work without permission then you've infringed his copyright. Even if you give Peter Jackson and New Line Cinemas full credit, you still aren't allowed to duplicate Return of the King and give copies to all of your friends. Website content is no different.
You may quote a website--in moderation, and with appropriate citation--for various purposes (fair use) but duplication of the whole thing (or a substantial part thereof) is out of bounds.
You are perfectly legal if you link to any content on the public internet. Obviously, you're also in the clear if you obtain permission in advance to mirror a site for someone.
If people used these 4 simple techniques, while it wouldn't be perfect, it would by my thoughts drop the number of infected machines down by three quarters, which will DRAMATICALLY reduce the efficiency and productivity of running a spamming business, and spammers won't have any choice but to leave you alone.
Tragically, people don't use those four simple techniques. Even after being told, they'll say "I'll do it tomorrow", or "it's too hard".
How do you get drunk drivers off the road?*
Polite programs in high schools from friendly, helpful city officials that say "please don't drink and drive, it's dangerous" are all well and good, and effective with a portion of the population. Past a certain point, you have to start saying, "we're going to pull you over and make you blow in the machine. If you've been drinking, we're going to take away your license and impound your car."
In this situation, these people are operating their computers in a way that makes them a menace to the rest of the users of the internet. Comcast has temporarily suspended their license until they can sober up.
*Obvious joke: Make them President and give them their own airplane...
You mean, an organization that has pledged to defend civil rights shouldn't use the legal tools at their disposal to fight defective voting systems...because the system that comes next might be worse?
However, if we could channel our destructive impulses elsewhere, perhaps we can go beyond "building a better gun" and make something more.
Indeed. You want a war? I'll give you a war. Right now I'm a graduate student. I'm cannon fodder in the war on cancer. Above and around me is a mighty academic machine that will burn through man-hours and money as fast as they're supplied. People walk the streets alive and safe today that wouldn't be here without our efforts. Innocent civilians still die because we haven't developed creative enough weapons for our generals to use.
Mother Nature is the single most devious, creative, challenging adversary we can face. She has nearly unlimited resources, time, and personnel. She never has trouble getting funding, and her policies aren't hamstrug by any wimpy Geneva conventions. Her strategy constantly evolves and mutates. Some of her troops can double in number every twenty minutes as long as they're warm and well-fed.
You want a war to pour resources and talent into? I give you the War on Disease.
A good way for CA to distance themselves from SCO is to publically donate money to the OSDL defence fund. Issue press releases that you do so and that you don't approve of the SCO intimidation tactic.
Yeah, because IBM is doing just a terrible job of defending this lawsuit. I mean, their lawyers just plain suck.
If SCO was suing corporations that were in dire financial trouble or in desperate aid of competent legal help that would be one thing--but as long as they sue corporations that are prepared to fight (Autozone isn't small potatoes, and IBM...well, I don't need to say anything...) Donating money to OSDL is probably a Good Thing, but it's not really directly relevant to the SCO case.
CA doesn't need to distance itself--they've already said they think SCO's claims are bunk and that they didn't pay for the licences in question. What more do you want?
The problem is, your average teacher may not be prepared to deal with that sort of thing.
If a teacher asks students to write a paper on Martin Luther King Jr, that same teacher ought to have at least a passing familiarity with history. Consequently, he or she should be acquainted with the notions of propaganda, bias, and people with sociopolitical agendas who lie.
Surely these kids have heard of World War II. Propaganda isn't a new idea. Any teacher who assigns 'impressionable' children any sort of research project should recognize the opportunity to teach kids that propaganda didn't end when Hitler (sorry, Godwin) died. Incidentally, even if you block the worst sites on the school network, how are you going to keep the kids off these sites at home? They're not all going to write their papers in the lab on campus...
Yes, there are other environmental problems in the world. But as a wise man once said, try removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your brother's. People living in industrialised nations have the luxury of being in a good position to actually do something about this problem, but we can't do that if no one admits it is a problem.
Ouch. My remarks weren't intended to detract from the very serious issues of rampant non-recycling and non-reuse of computer hardware, nor did I mean to suggest that it's not worthwhile to investigate alternative manufacturing techniques. I further agree that many people buy more computer power than they need, and companies often upgrade too frequently.
However, the emphasis of both the front-page Slashdot story and the first part of the linked article was on the raw material and resource consumption of computer manufacturing. Unfortunately, neither source bothered to put that resource use into context. Fifteen hundred kilograms of water sounds like a lot to manufacture a little tiny computer, but it's a third of the amount of water you'd use to grow a kilogram of cotton, and a fiftieth of what you use in a year at home. Most North Americans waste 20 kilograms of drinking water every time they flush the toilet.
I think reusing computer hardware is an excellent idea. I think that trying to shock people with large numbers (1.8 tons of material to make a computer?) without placing them in context is sloppy journalism. If people in industrialized nations can make as much of a difference environmentally by fixing a leaky faucet or not spraying pesticides on their lawn, shouldn't that be addressed, too?
he kicker? We were the second year to use the book, and the first year's class had turned in a HUGE list of corrections to Moore. The second edition sprouted even more errors, and some of the errors from the first year were never corrected.
This reminds my of a story my mother told me. One of her mathematics teachers/professors (I don't remember whether she was in high school or university at the time) was publishing a new textbook. He paid the first student to find each error a quarter--which was actually a useful amount of money in those days. I doubt you could find a more dedicated bunch of proofreaders...
Every few years he would come out with a new edition of the book (he's on 6 right now), and the _only_ difference between each edition is the problems at the end of the chapters are scrambled (the numbers aren't even changed)!
I had a course in mathematical physics where I would get together with the professor (who didn't write the textbook) and several students after class and map out the changes between editions. I saved about a hundred bucks because I could use an old edition of the text.
The article cites the total mass of raw material to make the computer as being 1.8 tons--1800 kg. Let's break that down.
1500 kg of that is water. It's not used up--it's supposed to be treated and then sent down the drain. It gets recycled fairly quickly. My monitor doesn't contain a ton and a half of water--does yours? So where did that water go? We each use about 200 kg of water per day just in our homes--washing laundry, flushing toilets, showering. 1500 kg seems like a lot, but we each use that much every week.
240 kg of fossil fuels. Well, that's a possibility. How is that assessed? That's (ballpark) a hundred gallons of gasoline. That's what someone living 25 miles from work might use in two months of commuting. It's not enough fuel to get your motorhome to the Grand Canyon and back for your vacation this summer. The figure also assumes that all the energy used to produce the computer comes from fossil fuels. If nuclear energy was used, that 240 kg of fuel corresponds to roughly 2 cubic centimetres (half a teaspoon) of unenriched uranium. If hydroelectricity was used, the cost would be kinetic energy from many tons of moving water. (See note above regarding the recycling of water.)
22 kg of 'chemicals'. Well, that's certainly vague. Water is a chemical. Some of those chemicals are acutely nasty. Some are moderately unpleasant. Some will be relatively harmless. Does that 22 kg include the finished product? I mean, the computer itself with CRT is probably up around ten or fifteen kilograms...
Other posters have already noted that a useful report would compare these totals to the resources used in the production of other products: home appliances, automobiles, cotton. (The Aral Sea is drying up largely because of cotton growing in the area. It takes about 5000 kg of water to grow one kilogram of cotton. The environmental costs of the pesticides and bleaches used in cotton production I will leave for another post.)
If he has ever been sued, just fire him. You don't want the risk... Isn't that what they are saying to us?
Actually, you can do that. For any reason--previous malpractice suits, insufficiently friendly bedside manner, doesn't like the Yankees, has a bad haircut--you can choose to leave your physician and find another doctor.
Your doctor has no such freedom. Your physician, once accepting you as a patient, can't give up on you. It's considered abandonment, and you can sue him for it. Go ahead--try that with your plumber.
By accepting someone as a patient, a doctor enters into a relationship he can't easily get out of. Is it unreasonable to expect him to do at least a little bit of checking?
If there were no malpractice insurance, there would be no deep pockets to go sue.
True, but what of legitimate cases of malpractice? Perhaps it should be a government-funded pool or something...but should there be no recourse for people genuinely severely affected by medical errors? If a doctor severs my spinal cord during surgery to remove an ingrown toenail, I would think that some form of compensation might be appropriate. Knowing that the doctor was bankrupted might satisfy some lust for revenge, but it won't pay for my nurse.
Give me just ONE instance of a screw up that would be "okay" because "people just make mistakes."
The grandparent poster may have poorly stated the case. Malpractice suits are appropriate and warranted when a doctor--through inattention, ineptitude, or God forbid, malice--makes a mistake. Malpractice insurance is designed to protect the physician and the patient when a genuine medical error occurs.
The problem has arisen that malpractice lawsuits are being filed whenever any undesirable outcome takes place. Despite a doctor performing perfectly, a patient might still suffer and choose to file a lawsuit.
The most expensive specialty (as far as malpractice insurance goes) is obstetrics. Are obstetricians really that much worse as physicians than other MDs? Of course not. Rather, pregnancy (and the birthing process) are inherently risky. If anything goes wrong at any stage, some people will look for someone--anyone--to blame. Those nice lawyers in the Yellow Pages would be more than happy to file suit to help ease the pain and punish a doctor for being unlucky.
The problem isn't people who sue when doctors make mistakes--the problem is people who sue when doctors do everything right...but are still unlucky.
I can legally buy my own general purpose antibiotics and knock out most anything.
Really? What are you doing that exposes you to so many bacterial infections?
Most common ailments from which people suffer (most coughs and colds, the flu) are viral infections. Antibiotics don't have any effect on them whatsoever.
By taking antibiotics for those diseases, you're doing yourself no good, and probably hurting yourself. First, you're knocking out the population of healthy, symbiotic bacteria in your gut that aid digestion and do a number of other useful things for you. Second, by knocking down the healthy population of bacteria, you leave behind a fertile open ground for nasty bacteria to colonize. Then you need antibiotics, perhaps...
...except that through the regular use of antibiotics, you encourage the evolution of bacterial strains resistant to common broad-spectrum antibiotics. That doesn't just screw you, by the way...it affects the rest of us too. Thanks.
Please, I encourage you to consult a physician (or at least a veterinarian) before self-medicating further.
There's a bacteria that can live in high radiation places due to high redundancy of DNA.
That bacteria would be Deinococcus radiodurans. Literally, 'strange berry that withstands radiation'. Its trick is actually several copies of important genes on different chromosomes, so that it can line up a good copy with a bad one and rapidly make the repair to damaged DNA. From this site:
Among the many characteristics of D. radiodurans, a few of the most noteworthy include an extreme resistance to genotoxic chemicals, oxidative damage, high levels of ionizing and ultraviolet radiation, and dehydration. The ability to survive such extreme environments is attributed to D. radiodurans ability to repair damaged chromosomes. It is known that heat, dehydration and radiation causes double-strand breaks in chromosomal DNA. D. radiodurans will repair these chromosome fragments, usually within 12-24 hours, using a two-system process with the latter being the most crucial method. Initially, D. radiodurans use a process called single-strand annealing to reconnect some chromosome fragments. Next, D. radiodurans use a process known as homologous recombination, where a modified yet efficient RecA protein patches double-strand breaks. RecA protein works by cutting usable DNA from another molecule and inserting it into the damaged strand.
However, these repair methods alone are not unique to D. radiodurans, which therefore cannot account for its radiation resistance. The aforementioned statement has led scientists to propose the "Life Saver" hypothesis. The hypothesis states, that in order to speed homologous recombination, D. radiodurans align copies of its genome so that identical DNA sequences are near each other. This proposal is now entirely possible due to the verification that D. radiodurans genes come packaged in four distinct circular chromosomes, thus giving stacked loops of DNA and resembling a Life Saver. To add to the list of radiation protective traits, D. radiodurans also possess carotenoid pigments, oxygen toxicity defense enzymes, and a distinctive outer membrane. First, carotenoids, which cause red pigmentation, are thought to act as free radical scavengers, thus increasing resistance to DNA damage by hydroxyl radicals. Next, high levels of enzymes such as superoxide dismutase and catalase both play a role in effective defense mechanisms against oxygen toxicity. Finally, a cell wall forming three or more layers with complex outer membrane lipids and a thick peptidoglycan layer containing the amino acid omithine also serves to protect D. radiodurans from lethal doses of radiation.
The genome for D. radiodurans is available from TIGR.
At my high school, I once lost half a semester's work on a video project due to their (moronic) synching software crashing halfway through.
Yep, you're right. That does sound like moronic synching software. And backups would seem to have been a good idea.
Then again, this was a high school we're talking about. Nobody dies, nobody loses any money, life goes on in the rest of the world if students lose some files.
The parent poster doesn't mention when this anecdote dates from. If he was doing video editing not that many years ago, he might well have been soaking up a significant amount of the school's total available networked storage, and backing it up might have represented an 'unreasonable' expenditure of time and money for the local sysadmin...who might have also had teaching duties, but also had to repair vandalized equipment, manage hardware from new to eight years old from six different vendors running three different operating systems, and plead for funding from the school board.
The sysadmin might have made backups of 'critical' stuff to keep the network and frequently used applications running, but figured that most students would only use the network for doing research and writing papers small enough to fit on a floppy.
If I was going to do large, long-term work on a network that seemed held together by chewing gum and prayer, I might be tempted to ask the sysadmin about it. If I was going to do a project that sucked up significant shared storage resources, I might mention it out of courtesy, too.
And the parent poster has learned a valuable lesson about keeping backups, hasn't he? (The rest of us have all been burned by a drive failure or the like once, and then we learned.) Bummer about losing half a semester's work, but going two or three months without making a backup...?
I'm a graduate student, and I know that the networked storage at my institution is mirrored instantaneously offsite, and backed up to tape every evening. I don't take it off the network until it's been burned to two CDs--one for the office and one offsite at home--as well as a live copy on my local hard drive. (Everyone checks their CD backups periodically, right?)
On the other hand the moon has no atmosphere. So launches from the moon could easily be done with a rail gun.
Quite right. Rail guns only work for cargo, however. Squishy people do much better with a space elevator. I wouldn't be surprised if the two technologies even existed in tandem. You could certainly make use of a rail gun in constructing an elevator, for that matter.
1 kg of iron going at 2/3 * c has 2E16J of kinetic energy (about 4.8 megatons of TNT) and will take approx 2s (1.925s by my calculation) to cover the distance from the Moon to Earth. Most 'battlefield' nuclear weapons are about 25 kilotons, so you'd probably only need a mass of about 0.5g (plus whatever you expect to burn up in the atmosphere) to enable a very, very capable artillery battery.
Apologies to the parent; I'm going to be a bit brutal...
You were going to get this 25 kT of energy to put into the system from where? And you're going to give it to the projectile how?
Two thirds of the speed of light is pretty damn quick. You'll get a few miles per second of that from falling down the gravity well, but that leaves you short by two hundred thousand kilometers (~120,000 mi.) per second.
Let's assume that your launcher is a linear accelerator a hundred miles long, built on the moon. If we assume a roughly linear acceleration, our rock will spend 0.001 second from rest to launch. On average over each mile of the launcher, you need to transfer to a half gram of material the energy equivalent of 250 tons of TNT, and you need to do it in ten microseconds. Roughly, that's ten to the sixteenth watts flowing, delivering ten to the eleventh joules.
Using as-yet-undeveloped capacitors with diamond dielectric, you might get an energy storage density of 2.5E4 J/kg. To store 1E11 J comes out to 4E6 kg, or four thousand tons of capacitor. (Existing technology is probably about an order of magnitude worse.) Per mile of accelerator. I haven't worked out the mechanical stresses on the accelerator imposed by Newton's third law, but you can bet they'd be brutal, too.
So...to store the energy to fire once will require four hundred thousand tons of capacitors. At best. To charge them, let's say we have a good-sized nuclear power plant churning out 2000 MW. To collect 1E13 joules will take 5000 seconds, or about ninety minutes...assuming no losses.
What does that give us? A weapon located inconveniently on the Moon that costs a fortune to build and maintain, and can fire a 25 kT 'bomb' once every hour and a half. Oh, and it's useless at least twelve hours per day when the targets are on the opposite side of the Earth.
By the way, did you think any country is going to stand by and let any other country build one of these things? Yeah, I know--it's a fun idea...but totally impractical unless we have some real engineering miracles. And you'd probably be better off militarily building smaller versions for use on the battlefield.
Right now, he's spending seventeen cents per day (roughly) on the paper-based method, and he considers that expensive.
To all the posters telling him to get a Palm with keyboard, bear in mind that he could use paper for a year and a half before approaching a hundred dollars spent under the current system.
This neglects the cost of consumables like batteries, and assumes a very low hardware cost. The time to recover his investment gets even longer if he ever discovers cheap laser printing. Paper also handles being dropped remarkably well.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, I can think of a lot of hungry Indians who have packed up everything and moved to North America to get a job so that they wouldn't be hungry anymore.
If you're hungry then take a demeaning, miserable, poorly-paying job at Wal-mart or McDonald's. Those jobs can't be offshored. I've served my time in customer service, and I was born here. There will always be crappy service jobs available...and I've noticed that most immigrants don't think they're too good to do them.
Yes, but such a cheap RLV is also not-yet-existent. Yes, I'd be pleased to see a cheap RLV, but there would be problems once we really start to use the capacity.
RLV's are loud and polluting. A space elevator has the potential to be extremely efficient and generate no air pollution.
Another poster has observed that surviving reentry is less stressful with a space elevator--there's no smacking into the atmosphere at twenty times the speed of sound. I suspect that the risk of failure of a space elevator resulting in loss of life is likely lower, though I'll freely admit that we could make engineering assumptions to push that argument either way.
You can build a space elevator for higher capacity, in principle. Bulky unaerodynamic cargoes can ride the elevator. There's only so much cargo you can put in a practical RLV; for a space elevator you just add more and thicker cables.
I bet there are economies of scale associated with using the space elevator. Suppose I want to travel from Point A to Point B through undeveloped country. As an individual, I could take my Jeep and do it. It's certainly easier than building a railroad. However, if I want to bring all my friends along, at some point my investment in Jeeps starts to get larger than my investment in rail. What if I want some steel girders or a space station module at Point B? Not only that, if I want to double my rail capacity, I don't double my cost--I just lay down a second set of tracks on the same right-of-way. I can even use the original tracks to deliver tracklaying equipment.
This might be an excellent application for a RLV--delivery of materials to assemble the first space elevator.
The skies might get crowded with lots of reusable vehicles makig frequent launches--might be an air-traffic control nightmare, and nobody wants frequent sonic booms from reentering spacecraft.
Er, no. Even if you credit the original author, if you duplicate the work without permission then you've infringed his copyright. Even if you give Peter Jackson and New Line Cinemas full credit, you still aren't allowed to duplicate Return of the King and give copies to all of your friends. Website content is no different.
You may quote a website--in moderation, and with appropriate citation--for various purposes (fair use) but duplication of the whole thing (or a substantial part thereof) is out of bounds.
You are perfectly legal if you link to any content on the public internet. Obviously, you're also in the clear if you obtain permission in advance to mirror a site for someone.
Google's not evil. Their web site says so.
Lengthy Wired article on the challenges they've faced in battling evil.
Tragically, people don't use those four simple techniques. Even after being told, they'll say "I'll do it tomorrow", or "it's too hard".
How do you get drunk drivers off the road?*
Polite programs in high schools from friendly, helpful city officials that say "please don't drink and drive, it's dangerous" are all well and good, and effective with a portion of the population. Past a certain point, you have to start saying, "we're going to pull you over and make you blow in the machine. If you've been drinking, we're going to take away your license and impound your car."
In this situation, these people are operating their computers in a way that makes them a menace to the rest of the users of the internet. Comcast has temporarily suspended their license until they can sober up.
*Obvious joke: Make them President and give them their own airplane...
You mean, an organization that has pledged to defend civil rights shouldn't use the legal tools at their disposal to fight defective voting systems...because the system that comes next might be worse?
That's a great democracy we've got here.
Indeed. You want a war? I'll give you a war. Right now I'm a graduate student. I'm cannon fodder in the war on cancer. Above and around me is a mighty academic machine that will burn through man-hours and money as fast as they're supplied. People walk the streets alive and safe today that wouldn't be here without our efforts. Innocent civilians still die because we haven't developed creative enough weapons for our generals to use.
Mother Nature is the single most devious, creative, challenging adversary we can face. She has nearly unlimited resources, time, and personnel. She never has trouble getting funding, and her policies aren't hamstrug by any wimpy Geneva conventions. Her strategy constantly evolves and mutates. Some of her troops can double in number every twenty minutes as long as they're warm and well-fed.
You want a war to pour resources and talent into? I give you the War on Disease.
Yeah, because IBM is doing just a terrible job of defending this lawsuit. I mean, their lawyers just plain suck.
If SCO was suing corporations that were in dire financial trouble or in desperate aid of competent legal help that would be one thing--but as long as they sue corporations that are prepared to fight (Autozone isn't small potatoes, and IBM...well, I don't need to say anything...) Donating money to OSDL is probably a Good Thing, but it's not really directly relevant to the SCO case.
CA doesn't need to distance itself--they've already said they think SCO's claims are bunk and that they didn't pay for the licences in question. What more do you want?
If a teacher asks students to write a paper on Martin Luther King Jr, that same teacher ought to have at least a passing familiarity with history. Consequently, he or she should be acquainted with the notions of propaganda, bias, and people with sociopolitical agendas who lie.
Surely these kids have heard of World War II. Propaganda isn't a new idea. Any teacher who assigns 'impressionable' children any sort of research project should recognize the opportunity to teach kids that propaganda didn't end when Hitler (sorry, Godwin) died. Incidentally, even if you block the worst sites on the school network, how are you going to keep the kids off these sites at home? They're not all going to write their papers in the lab on campus...
Ouch. My remarks weren't intended to detract from the very serious issues of rampant non-recycling and non-reuse of computer hardware, nor did I mean to suggest that it's not worthwhile to investigate alternative manufacturing techniques. I further agree that many people buy more computer power than they need, and companies often upgrade too frequently.
However, the emphasis of both the front-page Slashdot story and the first part of the linked article was on the raw material and resource consumption of computer manufacturing. Unfortunately, neither source bothered to put that resource use into context. Fifteen hundred kilograms of water sounds like a lot to manufacture a little tiny computer, but it's a third of the amount of water you'd use to grow a kilogram of cotton, and a fiftieth of what you use in a year at home. Most North Americans waste 20 kilograms of drinking water every time they flush the toilet.
I think reusing computer hardware is an excellent idea. I think that trying to shock people with large numbers (1.8 tons of material to make a computer?) without placing them in context is sloppy journalism. If people in industrialized nations can make as much of a difference environmentally by fixing a leaky faucet or not spraying pesticides on their lawn, shouldn't that be addressed, too?
This reminds my of a story my mother told me. One of her mathematics teachers/professors (I don't remember whether she was in high school or university at the time) was publishing a new textbook. He paid the first student to find each error a quarter--which was actually a useful amount of money in those days. I doubt you could find a more dedicated bunch of proofreaders...
I had a course in mathematical physics where I would get together with the professor (who didn't write the textbook) and several students after class and map out the changes between editions. I saved about a hundred bucks because I could use an old edition of the text.
1500 kg of that is water. It's not used up--it's supposed to be treated and then sent down the drain. It gets recycled fairly quickly. My monitor doesn't contain a ton and a half of water--does yours? So where did that water go? We each use about 200 kg of water per day just in our homes--washing laundry, flushing toilets, showering. 1500 kg seems like a lot, but we each use that much every week.
240 kg of fossil fuels. Well, that's a possibility. How is that assessed? That's (ballpark) a hundred gallons of gasoline. That's what someone living 25 miles from work might use in two months of commuting. It's not enough fuel to get your motorhome to the Grand Canyon and back for your vacation this summer. The figure also assumes that all the energy used to produce the computer comes from fossil fuels. If nuclear energy was used, that 240 kg of fuel corresponds to roughly 2 cubic centimetres (half a teaspoon) of unenriched uranium. If hydroelectricity was used, the cost would be kinetic energy from many tons of moving water. (See note above regarding the recycling of water.)
22 kg of 'chemicals'. Well, that's certainly vague. Water is a chemical. Some of those chemicals are acutely nasty. Some are moderately unpleasant. Some will be relatively harmless. Does that 22 kg include the finished product? I mean, the computer itself with CRT is probably up around ten or fifteen kilograms...
Other posters have already noted that a useful report would compare these totals to the resources used in the production of other products: home appliances, automobiles, cotton. (The Aral Sea is drying up largely because of cotton growing in the area. It takes about 5000 kg of water to grow one kilogram of cotton. The environmental costs of the pesticides and bleaches used in cotton production I will leave for another post.)
Actually, you can do that. For any reason--previous malpractice suits, insufficiently friendly bedside manner, doesn't like the Yankees, has a bad haircut--you can choose to leave your physician and find another doctor.
Your doctor has no such freedom. Your physician, once accepting you as a patient, can't give up on you. It's considered abandonment, and you can sue him for it. Go ahead--try that with your plumber.
By accepting someone as a patient, a doctor enters into a relationship he can't easily get out of. Is it unreasonable to expect him to do at least a little bit of checking?
True, but what of legitimate cases of malpractice? Perhaps it should be a government-funded pool or something...but should there be no recourse for people genuinely severely affected by medical errors? If a doctor severs my spinal cord during surgery to remove an ingrown toenail, I would think that some form of compensation might be appropriate. Knowing that the doctor was bankrupted might satisfy some lust for revenge, but it won't pay for my nurse.
The grandparent poster may have poorly stated the case. Malpractice suits are appropriate and warranted when a doctor--through inattention, ineptitude, or God forbid, malice--makes a mistake. Malpractice insurance is designed to protect the physician and the patient when a genuine medical error occurs.
The problem has arisen that malpractice lawsuits are being filed whenever any undesirable outcome takes place. Despite a doctor performing perfectly, a patient might still suffer and choose to file a lawsuit.
The most expensive specialty (as far as malpractice insurance goes) is obstetrics. Are obstetricians really that much worse as physicians than other MDs? Of course not. Rather, pregnancy (and the birthing process) are inherently risky. If anything goes wrong at any stage, some people will look for someone--anyone--to blame. Those nice lawyers in the Yellow Pages would be more than happy to file suit to help ease the pain and punish a doctor for being unlucky.
The problem isn't people who sue when doctors make mistakes--the problem is people who sue when doctors do everything right...but are still unlucky.
Really? What are you doing that exposes you to so many bacterial infections?
Most common ailments from which people suffer (most coughs and colds, the flu) are viral infections. Antibiotics don't have any effect on them whatsoever.
By taking antibiotics for those diseases, you're doing yourself no good, and probably hurting yourself. First, you're knocking out the population of healthy, symbiotic bacteria in your gut that aid digestion and do a number of other useful things for you. Second, by knocking down the healthy population of bacteria, you leave behind a fertile open ground for nasty bacteria to colonize. Then you need antibiotics, perhaps...
Please, I encourage you to consult a physician (or at least a veterinarian) before self-medicating further.
The judicial system is bound by the laws of the land. Blame rests with the people who make laws, not the ones who enforce and arbitrate them.
Obligatory link to the Elvish Name Generator. (Hobbit Name Generator also available.)
That bacteria would be Deinococcus radiodurans. Literally, 'strange berry that withstands radiation'. Its trick is actually several copies of important genes on different chromosomes, so that it can line up a good copy with a bad one and rapidly make the repair to damaged DNA. From this site:
The genome for D. radiodurans is available from TIGR.Yep, you're right. That does sound like moronic synching software. And backups would seem to have been a good idea.
Then again, this was a high school we're talking about. Nobody dies, nobody loses any money, life goes on in the rest of the world if students lose some files.
The parent poster doesn't mention when this anecdote dates from. If he was doing video editing not that many years ago, he might well have been soaking up a significant amount of the school's total available networked storage, and backing it up might have represented an 'unreasonable' expenditure of time and money for the local sysadmin...who might have also had teaching duties, but also had to repair vandalized equipment, manage hardware from new to eight years old from six different vendors running three different operating systems, and plead for funding from the school board.
The sysadmin might have made backups of 'critical' stuff to keep the network and frequently used applications running, but figured that most students would only use the network for doing research and writing papers small enough to fit on a floppy.
If I was going to do large, long-term work on a network that seemed held together by chewing gum and prayer, I might be tempted to ask the sysadmin about it. If I was going to do a project that sucked up significant shared storage resources, I might mention it out of courtesy, too.
And the parent poster has learned a valuable lesson about keeping backups, hasn't he? (The rest of us have all been burned by a drive failure or the like once, and then we learned.) Bummer about losing half a semester's work, but going two or three months without making a backup...?
I'm a graduate student, and I know that the networked storage at my institution is mirrored instantaneously offsite, and backed up to tape every evening. I don't take it off the network until it's been burned to two CDs--one for the office and one offsite at home--as well as a live copy on my local hard drive. (Everyone checks their CD backups periodically, right?)
Quite right. Rail guns only work for cargo, however. Squishy people do much better with a space elevator. I wouldn't be surprised if the two technologies even existed in tandem. You could certainly make use of a rail gun in constructing an elevator, for that matter.
Apologies to the parent; I'm going to be a bit brutal...
You were going to get this 25 kT of energy to put into the system from where? And you're going to give it to the projectile how?
Two thirds of the speed of light is pretty damn quick. You'll get a few miles per second of that from falling down the gravity well, but that leaves you short by two hundred thousand kilometers (~120,000 mi.) per second.
Let's assume that your launcher is a linear accelerator a hundred miles long, built on the moon. If we assume a roughly linear acceleration, our rock will spend 0.001 second from rest to launch. On average over each mile of the launcher, you need to transfer to a half gram of material the energy equivalent of 250 tons of TNT, and you need to do it in ten microseconds. Roughly, that's ten to the sixteenth watts flowing, delivering ten to the eleventh joules.
Using as-yet-undeveloped capacitors with diamond dielectric, you might get an energy storage density of 2.5E4 J/kg. To store 1E11 J comes out to 4E6 kg, or four thousand tons of capacitor. (Existing technology is probably about an order of magnitude worse.) Per mile of accelerator. I haven't worked out the mechanical stresses on the accelerator imposed by Newton's third law, but you can bet they'd be brutal, too.
So...to store the energy to fire once will require four hundred thousand tons of capacitors. At best. To charge them, let's say we have a good-sized nuclear power plant churning out 2000 MW. To collect 1E13 joules will take 5000 seconds, or about ninety minutes...assuming no losses.
What does that give us? A weapon located inconveniently on the Moon that costs a fortune to build and maintain, and can fire a 25 kT 'bomb' once every hour and a half. Oh, and it's useless at least twelve hours per day when the targets are on the opposite side of the Earth.
By the way, did you think any country is going to stand by and let any other country build one of these things? Yeah, I know--it's a fun idea...but totally impractical unless we have some real engineering miracles. And you'd probably be better off militarily building smaller versions for use on the battlefield.
Right now, he's spending seventeen cents per day (roughly) on the paper-based method, and he considers that expensive.
To all the posters telling him to get a Palm with keyboard, bear in mind that he could use paper for a year and a half before approaching a hundred dollars spent under the current system.
This neglects the cost of consumables like batteries, and assumes a very low hardware cost. The time to recover his investment gets even longer if he ever discovers cheap laser printing. Paper also handles being dropped remarkably well.