Maybe the gap has been closed and exploration money can come from private sources.
Nope. Outer Space Treaty makes it impossible to recover the costs of exploration, since you're not allowed to actually claim anything up there as belonging to you.
Note also that the relevant government is required by that Treaty to authorize and provide supervision to any private party going into space from their soil.
For that matter, any activity in outer space can be blocked (at least temporarily), by ANY signatory to the Treaty at their discretion.
Seems to be the most costly way to generate electricity by a very large margin.
A typical nuclear power plant the size of the Fukushima complex will cost $20 billion or so to build (including money to get past the lawsuits from the treehuggers).
A typical coal-fired plant the same size will cost much less to build, but spend more than $60 billion over the thirty year lifespan of the nuke plant to buy coal.
Note that this isn't counting the cost for disposal of coal ash and such. Just the cost to get the coal to the plant.
They seem to be more numerous than they were before the Europeans moved into the area, but that's based on pre-Columbus population estimates that may be wildly off. Or not, since their pre-Columbian tech wouldn't support much population at the best of times.
Considering that the population of the US colonies was 2.5M in 1776 (much less 1492) and it being 300M, that's not exactly an achievement to have more people 500 years later.
With a stone-age level of technology and no draft animals to help them get out of that particular trap, there's no reason to expect Amerind populations to have changed much absent the introduction of Europeans.
Or were you assuming that if we were all much more enlightened, we'd have travelled 3000 miles each way to trade with stone-age savages?
Hint: about the only thing that the North American Natives had that was worth coming all this way was land.
quite a lot of their land was recently irradiated by exposed nuclear fuel burning,
I"ll bite. How much land was irradiated? And what's your evidence for your guess?
and they should really be evacuating about half of the fucking country.
Even assuming that the nuclear fuel was burning and freely releasing fission products, prevailing weather patterns mean that most of Japan was completely unaffected by this problem. Well, other than losing the 6 GW of electricity generation that they lost when the earthquake and tsunami screwed things up.
I never could understand how they regard the Orion as being a Mars vehicle when it has no room for exercise equipment.
When they were talking about using the Orion as a Mars vehicle, they meant that it was the part that the crew rode up to the Mars transit vehicle, and then rode back down to Earth when they came home.
Yawn. The opposite ideology, the equally wrong "Social Constructionism" dominates. So... were are these eugenicis scuttling around then?
MIght want to scroll up from your post a bit, and read some of the comments up there. Looks like quite a few people on/. would really love to have eugenics back in business.
but I gather Sanger was interested in contraception more as a tool of social reform than genetic tweeking. She wanted to stop the poor from breeding so heavily, as she viewed their high birth rate as one of the key things that kept them in poverty. Get them down from six children to just one, and they'd be more able to afford to get the one properly raised, educated, employed and no longer poor. Not true eugenics, as she was concerned only with socioeconomic factors rather than genetic.
From her book, A Plan for Peace:
Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
Mind you, she wasn't a Nazi sort of eugenicist:
"All the news from Germany is sad & horrible, and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right. The sudden antagonism in Germany against the Jews & the vitriolic hatred of them is spreading underground here & is far more dangerous than the aggressive policy of the Japanese in Manchuria.."
On the other hand, she wasn't really opposed to things like preventing inferior people from reproducing:
"The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."
On the other hand, she also said this:
"While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization."
Which ought to give her brainchild Planned Parenthood pause, but won't.
And I won't even get into her attitudes on masturbation, which were, by modern standards, peculiar. Note that I've never bothered to research the subject enough to know whether her attitudes were typical of the period she grew up in, so I won't go so far as to say she was a complete loon on the subject.
BTW, how's the native population doing in the States?
They're still disproportionally represented among high steel workers and alcoholics, both fields that they seem to have a genetic predisposition to.
They seem to be more numerous than they were before the Europeans moved into the area, but that's based on pre-Columbus population estimates that may be wildly off. Or not, since their pre-Columbian tech wouldn't support much population at the best of times.
Oh, and they're now no more susceptible to smallpox than the general population.
However the U.S reserves of pu-239 is approximately 70,000 tons, I'm too tired to dig out an exact reference for you at this time, but you may be interested in this National Geographic article [nationalgeographic.com] on the state of nuclear waste materials (as opposed to pu-239).
I read that article. Nor does it especially disturb me.
And no, I'm not surprised at all that the USA has ~70 ktons of Pu-239. However, the size of the US's Pu-239 stockpile is irrelevant to the amount of Pu actually used in nuclear weapons in the USA. The amount of Pu required to make a Bomb is measured in low-double digit kg, not in large fractions of a ton.
I suggested that the creator should be allowed to sue (or perhaps claim would be a better word) if someone uses their work.
So instead of the lawyers getting rich on copyrights and patents, as happens now, you want the lawyers to get rich on things that aren't copyrighted and patented?
If you allow the creator to sue (or perhaps claim would be a better word), then you're going to make his lawyer rich. And the defendant's lawyer.
And if you don't think lawyers will be involved on both sides (yes, there's money to be made on both sides, so people will hire lawyers to make sure their piece of the pie is bigger than the other guy's piece), then you're high.
Now, ask some kid who knows metric how many meters are in a kilometer. How many centimeters are in a kilometer. Bet you that prepubescent child that know metric will give you an answer really fast, and be right every time. It's because metric is a concise system based on 10 that even an imbecile can understand it, and smart people make far fewer mistakes because it's a consistent system.
And after you've asked that prepubescent child how many centimeters are in a kilometer, ask him whether knowing that will ever matter.
The things we measure in miles we don't need to (or want to) measure in feet. The things you measure in km you won't ever want to measure in cm.
Caveat: yes, if you're in elementary school, sooner or later your teacher will ask you to make such a pointless conversion. And while she's asking the question, she'll be thinking "why would anyone need to know that?"
And let's not forget the long delay as they try to divide by 3.
If you think dividing by three is difficult, I can't say that I'm impressed...your argument makes it sound like "SI is the ideal measurement system for dolts who can't handle division and multiplication"....
Imperial measures, on the other hand, are totally psychotic. 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 5,280 feet to a mile. It is the type of nonsense that we would expect to see in Dr. Seuss story, not it real life.
Of course, hardly anyone ever converts from feet to miles or vice versa once they get out of school. It's 40 miles to my mother-in-law's house. Why would I possibly care that it's also 201200 feet?
It should also be noted that dividing or multiplying by three isn't really hard even for exceptionally stupid people, so feet-yard conversions are no big deal.
mass measurements relate back via water at 4 degrees celcius (water is most dense at this point). 1Kg of water is equal to 1 litre in volume, which fits into a cube 10cm to a side.
Umm, no. mass measurements relate back to a block of metal carefully stored in a climate-controlled room.
By the by, do SI users measure their weight in newtons (the correct unit) or kg (from what I remember from when I lived in Germany, the one they actually use)?
The point is that the EC was put into place because a popular election on a national scale would be inefficient to run. That was then and this is now. Now the popular vote is irrelevant due tot he way the EC is run and operated. It's a fix for a problem that is no longer a problem.
Get an amendment passed to rewrite that section of the Constitution if it bugs you that much.
Mind you, the small States that stand to be completely ignored by Presidential candidates probably wouldn't pass such an Amendment, but you never can tell.
US "damn... I guess they were right! There are no WMDs!! Our bad...
it should be noted, for completeness, that wikileaks reports that chemical and biological weapons (which ARE Weapons of Mass Destruction, like it or not) were being found in Iraq for years after the invasion of Iraq.
Don't want to waste a lot of time with this, but...
BLOCKQUOTE>Or, how about food security in the US:
Hunger in US [feedingamerica.org
Did you actually read this?
So, 37 million people need "emergency food assistance". But on average, only 5.7 million per week.
Looking at the descriptions of various levels of problem on this page, there are 37 million people who, on average once every six weeks aren't sure where their next meal is coming from.
Note that that doesn't mean they're going to be hungry the way, for instance a Somali defines hunger, or that they're going to miss that next meal. What it means is that they're NOT SURE where it'll come from.
Note that there isn't any indication on that page that we have any people who are, for lack of a better word, starving. Unlike, say, most everywhere else.
Note that the page mentions that 39% of them have to choose between paying for "rent or mortgage. Where else do we find people who own their own homes who are considered in abject poverty?
I also should note that the income descriptions provided (70% below poverty line, average income of $940) suggest a certain amount of cooking of the books. $940 is above the poverty line for a single person, no kids. The only way most of them can be below the poverty line with that average income is if most of them are on government assistance (which doesn't count as income, even if it spends just like income) or are illegals (who aren't allowed to get government assistance).
Either way, I tend to think that "once every six weeks or so, you might not know where your next meal is coming from" is a lot different than "haven't eaten in two weeks (or two months)". Yes, even "hunger" is relative....
Oh, and note that "food insecurity" as defined on that web page applies to me. I don't know where my next meal is coming from. Might be Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro, might be scrounged out of the fridge. But I'm not sure, so I'm "food insecure".
And yes, I'm poking fun at definitions like "food insecure" and "food insecurity with hunger". Seems to me that in Zimbabwe, a lot of people would LOVE to meet either of those definitions. Way better than that old fashioned "starving" thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the USA? Russia? China? India? France? Germany? UK?
While there may be countries with "desirable launch areas" that haven't signed, everyone that's ever actually put something in orbit has signed it.
Other than vaporize when the Sun goes red-giant, you mean?
There really isn't a good reason why humans should not outlive the planet. Or the Sun, for that matter.
But we can't do the former without moving into space, and we can't do the latter without moving on out to the stars.
Nope. Outer Space Treaty makes it impossible to recover the costs of exploration, since you're not allowed to actually claim anything up there as belonging to you.
Note also that the relevant government is required by that Treaty to authorize and provide supervision to any private party going into space from their soil.
For that matter, any activity in outer space can be blocked (at least temporarily), by ANY signatory to the Treaty at their discretion.
Citation?
A typical nuclear power plant the size of the Fukushima complex will cost $20 billion or so to build (including money to get past the lawsuits from the treehuggers).
A typical coal-fired plant the same size will cost much less to build, but spend more than $60 billion over the thirty year lifespan of the nuke plant to buy coal.
Note that this isn't counting the cost for disposal of coal ash and such. Just the cost to get the coal to the plant.
Less than five is a good way of describing "zero".
If I were on my roof, I could see a nuclear power plant. Doesn't bother me at all.
If a coal plant were over there, I'd have moved years ago. Ditto tire-burning.
With a stone-age level of technology and no draft animals to help them get out of that particular trap, there's no reason to expect Amerind populations to have changed much absent the introduction of Europeans.
Or were you assuming that if we were all much more enlightened, we'd have travelled 3000 miles each way to trade with stone-age savages?
Hint: about the only thing that the North American Natives had that was worth coming all this way was land.
Too late...
I"ll bite. How much land was irradiated? And what's your evidence for your guess?
Even assuming that the nuclear fuel was burning and freely releasing fission products, prevailing weather patterns mean that most of Japan was completely unaffected by this problem. Well, other than losing the 6 GW of electricity generation that they lost when the earthquake and tsunami screwed things up.
Pu is NOT forever. It decays into something else after a while.
Of course, the mercury in coal IS forever....
When they were talking about using the Orion as a Mars vehicle, they meant that it was the part that the crew rode up to the Mars transit vehicle, and then rode back down to Earth when they came home.
Somehow, I have a hard time believing that Cloud Computing accounted for more electricity use than Germany did in 2007.
Or that it used 1/6 of the electricity used in the USA....
We already know how to do this. The anti-nuke hysterics in most countries have been fighting against implementation of the idea for 40 years.
It's called a Breeder Reactor, by the by.
MIght want to scroll up from your post a bit, and read some of the comments up there. Looks like quite a few people on /. would really love to have eugenics back in business.
And, no, the problem isn't peculiar to /.
From her book, A Plan for Peace:
Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
Mind you, she wasn't a Nazi sort of eugenicist:
"All the news from Germany is sad & horrible, and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right. The sudden antagonism in Germany against the Jews & the vitriolic hatred of them is spreading underground here & is far more dangerous than the aggressive policy of the Japanese in Manchuria.."
On the other hand, she wasn't really opposed to things like preventing inferior people from reproducing:
"The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."
On the other hand, she also said this:
"While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization."
Which ought to give her brainchild Planned Parenthood pause, but won't.
And I won't even get into her attitudes on masturbation, which were, by modern standards, peculiar. Note that I've never bothered to research the subject enough to know whether her attitudes were typical of the period she grew up in, so I won't go so far as to say she was a complete loon on the subject.
They're still disproportionally represented among high steel workers and alcoholics, both fields that they seem to have a genetic predisposition to.
They seem to be more numerous than they were before the Europeans moved into the area, but that's based on pre-Columbus population estimates that may be wildly off. Or not, since their pre-Columbian tech wouldn't support much population at the best of times.
Oh, and they're now no more susceptible to smallpox than the general population.
I read that article. Nor does it especially disturb me.
And no, I'm not surprised at all that the USA has ~70 ktons of Pu-239. However, the size of the US's Pu-239 stockpile is irrelevant to the amount of Pu actually used in nuclear weapons in the USA. The amount of Pu required to make a Bomb is measured in low-double digit kg, not in large fractions of a ton.
So instead of the lawyers getting rich on copyrights and patents, as happens now, you want the lawyers to get rich on things that aren't copyrighted and patented?
If you allow the creator to sue (or perhaps claim would be a better word), then you're going to make his lawyer rich. And the defendant's lawyer.
And if you don't think lawyers will be involved on both sides (yes, there's money to be made on both sides, so people will hire lawyers to make sure their piece of the pie is bigger than the other guy's piece), then you're high.
So, you're saying that SI people don't even know the units of their own system well enough to pick the right ones?
The argument that SI makes more sense would make more sense if all the people using SI actually knew which units go with which measurement.
It should also be noted that the value of surface gravity varies (slightly) over the Earth's surface. So, no, mass and weight are NOT interchangeable.
And after you've asked that prepubescent child how many centimeters are in a kilometer, ask him whether knowing that will ever matter.
The things we measure in miles we don't need to (or want to) measure in feet. The things you measure in km you won't ever want to measure in cm.
Caveat: yes, if you're in elementary school, sooner or later your teacher will ask you to make such a pointless conversion. And while she's asking the question, she'll be thinking "why would anyone need to know that?"
If you think dividing by three is difficult, I can't say that I'm impressed...your argument makes it sound like "SI is the ideal measurement system for dolts who can't handle division and multiplication"....
Of course, hardly anyone ever converts from feet to miles or vice versa once they get out of school. It's 40 miles to my mother-in-law's house. Why would I possibly care that it's also 201200 feet?
It should also be noted that dividing or multiplying by three isn't really hard even for exceptionally stupid people, so feet-yard conversions are no big deal.
Umm, no. mass measurements relate back to a block of metal carefully stored in a climate-controlled room.
By the by, do SI users measure their weight in newtons (the correct unit) or kg (from what I remember from when I lived in Germany, the one they actually use)?
Get an amendment passed to rewrite that section of the Constitution if it bugs you that much.
Mind you, the small States that stand to be completely ignored by Presidential candidates probably wouldn't pass such an Amendment, but you never can tell.
it should be noted, for completeness, that wikileaks reports that chemical and biological weapons (which ARE Weapons of Mass Destruction, like it or not) were being found in Iraq for years after the invasion of Iraq.
Don't want to waste a lot of time with this, but...
BLOCKQUOTE>Or, how about food security in the US:
Hunger in US [feedingamerica.org
Did you actually read this?
So, 37 million people need "emergency food assistance". But on average, only 5.7 million per week.
Looking at the descriptions of various levels of problem on this page, there are 37 million people who, on average once every six weeks aren't sure where their next meal is coming from.
Note that that doesn't mean they're going to be hungry the way, for instance a Somali defines hunger, or that they're going to miss that next meal. What it means is that they're NOT SURE where it'll come from.
Note that there isn't any indication on that page that we have any people who are, for lack of a better word, starving. Unlike, say, most everywhere else.
Note that the page mentions that 39% of them have to choose between paying for "rent or mortgage. Where else do we find people who own their own homes who are considered in abject poverty?
I also should note that the income descriptions provided (70% below poverty line, average income of $940) suggest a certain amount of cooking of the books. $940 is above the poverty line for a single person, no kids. The only way most of them can be below the poverty line with that average income is if most of them are on government assistance (which doesn't count as income, even if it spends just like income) or are illegals (who aren't allowed to get government assistance).
Either way, I tend to think that "once every six weeks or so, you might not know where your next meal is coming from" is a lot different than "haven't eaten in two weeks (or two months)". Yes, even "hunger" is relative....
Oh, and note that "food insecurity" as defined on that web page applies to me. I don't know where my next meal is coming from. Might be Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro, might be scrounged out of the fridge. But I'm not sure, so I'm "food insecure".
And yes, I'm poking fun at definitions like "food insecure" and "food insecurity with hunger". Seems to me that in Zimbabwe, a lot of people would LOVE to meet either of those definitions. Way better than that old fashioned "starving" thing.