losing "most of what you send" is less of a problem. In fact, the inexhaustible nature of the power + the lack of cost for real estate are just two of the advantages orbital solar has over earth based.
However, from my reading of the subject, most of the loss is actually in the conversion from AC/DC to microwave, so again, having an inexhaustible power source at the sending end makes this much less of a problem, & also suggesting that the sending end might try other methods than conversion to AC/DC. If you have links discussing loss during transmission, I'd be most interested.
In any event, research into wireless energy transmission is steadily improving in efficiency and making SPS more and more attractive (Bright Future for Solar Power Satellites.
Further, most of the 'green' power methods involve extracting only a fraction of the available power (windmills shut down in high winds, for instance, so I think my original point stands.
Yeah, but that was a computer game...
on
Tidal Power a Reality
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I remember crashing comets into Mars in SimEarth too:-).
But the proposals for satellite solar power involve wide, low power beams, not enough per square meter to cause a fire or even burn the skin.
The beam, with many times the energy per square meter than unamplified sunlight, hits a large photovoltaic receiver.
Hanging out under the beam would not be good for you, but it would not be instantly fatal, either, and as another poster pointed out, a simple fix would be to turn off the transmitter if the ground station was not receiving the beam.
One can point out greater dangers involved in hangliding around windmills or diving near tidal generators: the best rule is 'don't do that' (or as Ogg said to Mog: fire is hurts!), but like the others, & unlike nuclear & fossil, no toxic exhaust or poisonous waste is made.
As far as a rogue power taking over a beam station, simply staying indoors would be a decent protection until anti-satellite weapons took out the very large target.
it's too bad all these little clean energy projects can't somehow pool their resources into building a few orbital solar satellites.
Tidal power will no doubt make sense in some areas, esp. where political or cultural factors make the increased costs (over fossil or nuclear) palatable & the local coastal conditions are right.
But it seems a better long term solution would be to combine the money and the political will into orbital solar, which has the potential to be cheaper than fossil, cleaner than tidal/wind/ground based solar, etc., and reach just about everywhere on the planet with the same basic technology.
In the DOI, when they say that all men are created equal, do you think that means they are created with an equal height, an equal hair color, and an equal amount of wealth?
No, obviously, the statement means that regardless of hair color, birth, height, wealth, all are equal as far as the govt. is concerned.
It would be a completely pointless statement if this equality at birth did not translate to equality under the law.
This truth does not, imho, imply any rights whatsoever.
It seems clear to me that the rights mentioned in the DOI were derived from the truth of equality: all have the same right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness; why? Because all are created equal.
How do you see that sentence parsing out any other way?
We are talking about the proper interpretation of the DOI, which he was instrumental in constructing. So I'd suggest that his opinion would trump either of ours.
Good, then we can let Tom settle it:
I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff.
If you read the rest of that letter, I think you will find that there is no evidence that Jefferson actually desired a "pseudo aristoi" where some were given more power due their height, color, or locale, & very much evidence that he desired the government to give all citizen and equal power to choose their leaders, that they may choose the best of themselves for the job.
the government has one regard in which it is required to treat all Americans as equals. That regard is the fourteenth amendment.
Completely wrong: Section 1 of the 14th is a limit on the powers of the States, not the Federal Govt.
As far as the Federal Govt. it's power wrt to making some more equal than others is supposed to be limited by the 10th Amendment. Sadly, for many folks the 10thA is meaningless, as they see the Constitution as telling them what rights they do have, rather than it's original purpose of telling the Federal Govt. what rights it has.
However, given the fact that the 10thA was not included merely to make space between the 9thA and the 11th, I would say that it is clear that the framers thought it would be self evident that the Federal Govt. was supposed to treat all citizens as having equal rights in all matters.
You have decided that the measure of equality is if all voices have an equal weight in choosing the system of government.
Yes, I say: Equal = Equal; one person = one equally weighted vote is an essential measure of equality, though certainly not the only one.
I do not agree with you. Tom Jefferson did not seem to agree with you.
Uh huh. Do you agree with ol'Tom regarding the right to own slaves?
Let's address the root of the matter: if the Govt. declared that a Female-American's vote counted 2x as much as a Male-American's vote, could you really say with a straight face that the Govt. is treating Female-Americans and Male-Americans as equals?
I think the answer is rather obviously negative.
Seems to me that same holds true for Montanan-Americans vs. Californian-Americans.
So I am (still) waiting for your explanation of by what logic "equal" can sometimes mean "not equal"?
>blockquote>You could have a monarchy, and a ducal system, in which those truths are respected.
No, in a traditional monarchy and/or ducal oligarchy, the dukes and the king inherit positions of greater power than other folks, thus, by definition, are not created equal.
One might construct a elective monarchy, however, if all citizens of that monarchy do not have an equal say in who becomes king, then they are not all equal.
Your vote for president is *not* the weight of your equality.
Right, I said that above. The measure of equality (in the context of an elective system) is if all voices have an equal weight in choosing the system of government. If some voices are given more weight due to birth or location, then then all are not equal.
Frankly, this all seems self evident from the definition of equal. If you are using a different definition or see some way that "equal" individuals can be granted (not by earning nor by election) different amounts of power and yet remain equal, then perhaps you should explain, as I can see no logic to your points using the standard definition of 'equal', both as it is used today and as it was used (in letter and spirit) in the 18th century.
Look up the 10th Amendment. The Constitution is a limit on the rights of the Government, not a limit on the rights of individuals. IOW, the rights mentioned in the DOI are self evident , they are therefore guaranteed above and before other rights, specifically by the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution. In fact the concern that folks might think that the Constitution only guaranteed the rights mentioned therin was the REASON the 10 Amendment was WRITTEN!
Not that anyone ever reads the thing anymore.
Explain to me how your vote for president is the measure of your equal protection under the law.
Hey, Jim Crow was built on the fact that most folks don't get what you don't get.
But you are misinterpreting what I said above: the measure of equality is not that every person gets a vote for president. The measure rather is that every person's vote is given equal weight. Again, the evidence for this is in the defintion.
Or do you hold it as a self evident truth that all might be created equal but by moving to another state they can modify their equality points????
"Union of States" pretty much died with the Civil War and was buried with the 14thA.
What kind of "union" is it that a member cannot leave?
As far as why folks can't understand why we are not a democracy, that seems to be a common mistake of Americans, so many of us great and small think we live in one:
There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future--and that freedom is an ebbing tide.
But we Americans know that this is not true.
FDR, 1941
Mebbe it's cause in the wars and conflicts of this century so often being termed battles of "democracy" vs. "fascism" or "communism", folks just thought "Representative Republicanism vs. Fascism lacked a certain ring?
But don't feel bad, I often get frustrated by folks who don't seem to be able to tell the difference between democracy and capitalism...
Bush didn't win a majority of the popular vote, and neither did Clinton.
Seems a bit silly. The point was I think that Gore won the popular vote: eg more people voted for him than anyone else. Clinton also had more people vote for him than anyone else in 92' and '96.
The unique thing about the US was that the power of the Govt. was supposed to be limited by the Constitution, & those limits were supposed to need much more than a simple majority to change.
?? There are plenty of systems "in human history" which have lasted longer than 200 years.
But the US system is not supposed to be judged by it's longevity, anyway. It is supposed to be judged by how well it secures the universal rights to equality, liberty, & pursuit of happiness to it's citizens.
Which is what this article is about: the current system, regardless of it's age, is not doing the best possible job to secure the right of all equality to all.
The President is elected by popular vote, to represent individual Americans (at least when the US is trying to sell Democracy as the best policy to other nations).
The interests of individual states should be adequatly represented by the state's advocates: Congress.
"Moving to a popular system doesn't do squat for the rural farmers in Montana, any more than the current system does."
Well it would probably do alot less for Montana farmers & other rural farmers, who get scads of welfare under the current system for growing crops where no crops have grown before (or should ever be grown) Farm Subsidies That Kill.
But for the individual American it would do alot more to relizing the dream of equality & make US claims to be a Democracy and an example of Free Market success much more accurate.
"If you took away only one of the quirks, so that small states don't get their bonus, Gore would have won by like (I forget) 36 or 44 electoral votes. But the actual popular vote still would have been incredibly narrow. There's no reason we should give Gore his manipulation, and not Bush."
If the small state's bonus was removed, Bush would have campaigned differently, or the Reps. would have chosen a more centrist candidate.
In either case, it's nonsense to say that giving one American 1/2 a vote is fair, ever. It's a violation of the core principle of America: all men are created equal.
& if we give up on attempting to realise the principle of equality merely to preserve an artificially rurally skewed political stance, than we really should also admit that we meanly lost the last best hope a while back, and don't really care about getting it back (so long as our guy is in the White House).
The parent points out (with the math) that the individual Montanan's vote counts TWICE as much as the individual Californian's, as clear a violation of 14th Amendment as can be found, if the USSC actually were interetested in that old rag.
Better habitat for wildlife, more places for people to live, less erosion of the actual coast, etc.
Of course, it won't be so good for the surfers and the folks who paid lots of money to live right on the edge, but for the rest of us (animals & plants included) it would be very nice to have lots of places to live on the coastal shelf.
"A square yard of land reclaimed from the North Sea costs about 260 guilders, or about $130. The same size patch of mainland can cost more than triple that."
Or the next terrorists with suitcase nukes or truck bombs?
I mean we already have dozens of ways to stop trucks and commercial air planes.
The ABL is a great defense against WMD _missels_, but we have better defenses against _states_ that might launch missels: massive retaliation. From US vs Irag epsiode 1 to India v. Pakistan, evidense is MAD works.
Meanwhile, the ABL will not work well at all against human carried warheads, the most common forms of attack we are likely to suffer, the only real defense against these is to make the lives of the cannon fodder more pleasent than the glory of dying for the cause...
of the blitzkrieg, siege of Stalingrad, Dresden, Battle of Britain, etc., Pearl & WTC, terrible as they were, were far outscored on the death and destruction scale by dozens of WWII battles in Europe.
Heck even the Civil War was mostly soldiers killing soldiers in small towns or empty fields, you'd have to go back to Fredericksburg or Atlanta to find the kind of total devastation of entire cities (& most of the cities of a nation) that a European means when saying "widepsread destruction".
Say IBM gets a 100million $ contract to write a killler database for.gov, then gets to turn around and sell that db commercially.
So Oracle (& MySQL AB) gets to help pay for code for a competitor?
Seems more fair & logical to release all publically funded code under an open license so that all the folks who have supported the writing of the code can use it.
How does MT compare to PostNuke?
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 1
Interested, working with PN for big project, but we are currently deciding whether to code a few features that it sounds like MT already has.
If there was a law saying no one can repeat material critical of the Govt., for instance, it would apply to "all other peopole" as well as the press, right?
Which of course is why the framers included freedom of the press with freedom of speech in the same protection: Congress shall make NO law that reduces the scope of either.
> If patents were not enforcable, this diagnostic tool and many, many other medical treatments would not exist.
Baloney. Basic genetic research is carried out mostly using public funds.
There is no reason increased public funding covering the last mile, coupled with non-profit release of the information (to recoup the basic costs) couldn't do just as well in the last mile popularization of new treatments as it does in basic research.
Other than a fanatic belief that the holy free market is better than logic and reason, that is...
Slashdot Mirror
losing "most of what you send" is less of a problem. In fact, the inexhaustible nature of the power + the lack of cost for real estate are just two of the advantages orbital solar has over earth based.
However, from my reading of the subject, most of the loss is actually in the conversion from AC/DC to microwave, so again, having an inexhaustible power source at the sending end makes this much less of a problem, & also suggesting that the sending end might try other methods than conversion to AC/DC. If you have links discussing loss during transmission, I'd be most interested.
In any event, research into wireless energy transmission is steadily improving in efficiency and making SPS more and more attractive (Bright Future for Solar Power Satellites.
Further, most of the 'green' power methods involve extracting only a fraction of the available power (windmills shut down in high winds, for instance, so I think my original point stands.
I remember crashing comets into Mars in SimEarth too:-).
But the proposals for satellite solar power involve wide, low power beams, not enough per square meter to cause a fire or even burn the skin.
The beam, with many times the energy per square meter than unamplified sunlight, hits a large photovoltaic receiver.
Hanging out under the beam would not be good for you, but it would not be instantly fatal, either, and as another poster pointed out, a simple fix would be to turn off the transmitter if the ground station was not receiving the beam.
One can point out greater dangers involved in hangliding around windmills or diving near tidal generators: the best rule is 'don't do that' (or as Ogg said to Mog: fire is hurts!), but like the others, & unlike nuclear & fossil, no toxic exhaust or poisonous waste is made.
As far as a rogue power taking over a beam station, simply staying indoors would be a decent protection until anti-satellite weapons took out the very large target.
More: The World Needs Energy from Space
it's too bad all these little clean energy projects can't somehow pool their resources into building a few orbital solar satellites.
Tidal power will no doubt make sense in some areas, esp. where political or cultural factors make the increased costs (over fossil or nuclear) palatable & the local coastal conditions are right.
But it seems a better long term solution would be to combine the money and the political will into orbital solar, which has the potential to be cheaper than fossil, cleaner than tidal/wind/ground based solar, etc., and reach just about everywhere on the planet with the same basic technology.
It would be a completely pointless statement if this equality at birth did not translate to equality under the law. It seems clear to me that the rights mentioned in the DOI were derived from the truth of equality: all have the same right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness; why? Because all are created equal.
How do you see that sentence parsing out any other way?
Good, then we can let Tom settle it: If you read the rest of that letter, I think you will find that there is no evidence that Jefferson actually desired a "pseudo aristoi" where some were given more power due their height, color, or locale, & very much evidence that he desired the government to give all citizen and equal power to choose their leaders, that they may choose the best of themselves for the job.
Completely wrong: Section 1 of the 14th is a limit on the powers of the States, not the Federal Govt.
As far as the Federal Govt. it's power wrt to making some more equal than others is supposed to be limited by the 10th Amendment. Sadly, for many folks the 10thA is meaningless, as they see the Constitution as telling them what rights they do have, rather than it's original purpose of telling the Federal Govt. what rights it has.
However, given the fact that the 10thA was not included merely to make space between the 9thA and the 11th, I would say that it is clear that the framers thought it would be self evident that the Federal Govt. was supposed to treat all citizens as having equal rights in all matters.
Uh huh. Do you agree with ol'Tom regarding the right to own slaves?
Let's address the root of the matter: if the Govt. declared that a Female-American's vote counted 2x as much as a Male-American's vote, could you really say with a straight face that the Govt. is treating Female-Americans and Male-Americans as equals?
I think the answer is rather obviously negative.
Seems to me that same holds true for Montanan-Americans vs. Californian-Americans.
So I am (still) waiting for your explanation of by what logic "equal" can sometimes mean "not equal"?
No, in a traditional monarchy and/or ducal oligarchy, the dukes and the king inherit positions of greater power than other folks, thus, by definition, are not created equal.
One might construct a elective monarchy, however, if all citizens of that monarchy do not have an equal say in who becomes king, then they are not all equal.
Right, I said that above. The measure of equality (in the context of an elective system) is if all voices have an equal weight in choosing the system of government. If some voices are given more weight due to birth or location, then then all are not equal.
Frankly, this all seems self evident from the definition of equal. If you are using a different definition or see some way that "equal" individuals can be granted (not by earning nor by election) different amounts of power and yet remain equal, then perhaps you should explain, as I can see no logic to your points using the standard definition of 'equal', both as it is used today and as it was used (in letter and spirit) in the 18th century.
Thanks!
Look up the 10th Amendment. The Constitution is a limit on the rights of the Government, not a limit on the rights of individuals. IOW, the rights mentioned in the DOI are self evident , they are therefore guaranteed above and before other rights, specifically by the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution. In fact the concern that folks might think that the Constitution only guaranteed the rights mentioned therin was the REASON the 10 Amendment was WRITTEN!
Not that anyone ever reads the thing anymore. Hey, Jim Crow was built on the fact that most folks don't get what you don't get.
But you are misinterpreting what I said above: the measure of equality is not that every person gets a vote for president. The measure rather is that every person's vote is given equal weight. Again, the evidence for this is in the defintion.
Or do you hold it as a self evident truth that all might be
created equal but by moving to another state they can modify their equality points????
What kind of "union" is it that a member cannot leave?
As far as why folks can't understand why we are not a democracy, that seems to be a common mistake of Americans, so many of us great and small think we live in one:
FDR, 1941
Mebbe it's cause in the wars and conflicts of this century so often being termed battles of "democracy" vs. "fascism" or "communism", folks just thought "Representative Republicanism vs. Fascism lacked a certain ring?
But don't feel bad, I often get frustrated by folks who don't seem to be able to tell the difference between democracy and capitalism...
not Republic vs. Democracy.
In history, both have devolved to dictatorship.
The unique thing about the US was that the power of the Govt. was supposed to be limited by the Constitution, & those limits were supposed to need much more than a simple majority to change.
If you are going to bring margin of error into it (which I think we should).
Then of course Fla. was also a tie, with or without hand counts.
If we decide that 11 men choose the president, then the core principle holds that all Americans have an equal say in who those 11 men are.
If we elect the President by popular vote, then the core principle holds that all Americans get an equal vote.
We establish a government to secure this principle (again, check your DOI) of equality, not to limit it or to subvert it.
Giving some Americans a greater say in electing the president simply because of the state they live in violates that principle.
State's rights should not take precedent over the 3 self evident truths, which governments (including State governments) are established to secure.
> It's an unmatched record in human history,
?? There are plenty of systems "in human history" which have lasted longer than 200 years.
But the US system is not supposed to be judged by it's longevity, anyway. It is supposed to be judged by how well it secures the universal rights to equality, liberty, & pursuit of happiness to it's citizens.
Which is what this article is about: the current system, regardless of it's age, is not doing the best possible job to secure the right of all equality to all.
The President is elected by popular vote, to represent individual Americans (at least when the US is trying to sell Democracy as the best policy to other nations).
The interests of individual states should be adequatly represented by the state's advocates: Congress.
Well it would probably do alot less for Montana farmers & other rural farmers, who get scads of welfare under the current system for growing crops where no crops have grown before (or should ever be grown) Farm Subsidies That Kill.
But for the individual American it would do alot more to relizing the dream of equality & make US claims to be a Democracy and an example of Free Market success much more accurate.
In either case, it's nonsense to say that giving one American 1/2 a vote is fair, ever. It's a violation of the core principle of America: all men are created equal.
& if we give up on attempting to realise the principle of equality merely to preserve an artificially rurally skewed political stance, than we really should also admit that we meanly lost the last best hope a while back, and don't really care about getting it back (so long as our guy is in the White House).
The parent points out (with the math) that the individual Montanan's vote counts TWICE as much as the individual Californian's, as clear a violation of 14th Amendment as can be found, if the USSC actually were interetested in that old rag.
for folks to live on?
Better habitat for wildlife, more places for people to live, less erosion of the actual coast, etc.
Of course, it won't be so good for the surfers and the folks who paid lots of money to live right on the edge, but for the rest of us (animals & plants included) it would be very nice to have lots of places to live on the coastal shelf.
It's not just my crazy idea: Dutch planners eye a new frontier: the raging North Sea
"A square yard of land reclaimed from the North Sea costs about 260 guilders, or about $130. The same size patch of mainland can cost more than triple that."
do against human carried warheads?
Or the next terrorists with suitcase nukes or truck bombs?
I mean we already have dozens of ways to stop trucks and commercial air planes.
The ABL is a great defense against WMD _missels_, but we have better defenses against _states_ that might launch missels: massive retaliation. From US vs Irag epsiode 1 to India v. Pakistan, evidense is MAD works.
Meanwhile, the ABL will not work well at all against human carried warheads, the most common forms of attack we are likely to suffer, the only real defense against these is to make the lives of the cannon fodder more pleasent than the glory of dying for the cause...
of the blitzkrieg, siege of Stalingrad, Dresden, Battle of Britain, etc., Pearl & WTC, terrible as they were, were far outscored on the death and destruction scale by dozens of WWII battles in Europe.
Heck even the Civil War was mostly soldiers killing soldiers in small towns or empty fields, you'd have to go back to Fredericksburg or Atlanta to find the kind of total devastation of entire cities (& most of the cities of a nation) that a European means when saying "widepsread destruction".
though.
.gov, then gets to turn around and sell that db commercially.
Say IBM gets a 100million $ contract to write a killler database for
So Oracle (& MySQL AB) gets to help pay for code for a competitor?
Seems more fair & logical to release all publically funded code under an open license so that all the folks who have supported the writing of the code can use it.
Interested, working with PN for big project, but we are currently deciding whether to code a few features that it sounds like MT already has.
PostNuke CMS
You implement free code and tweak or add new code for parts of the project the free stuff doesn't do.
Then release the tweaked and added code back into the community for others to use on other paying projects.
Balmer says it's communism, but really it seems more like natural capitalism, before the advent of worldwide patents & copyrights....
If there was a law saying no one can repeat material critical of the Govt., for instance, it would apply to "all other peopole" as well as the press, right?
Which of course is why the framers included freedom of the press with freedom of speech in the same protection: Congress shall make NO law that reduces the scope of either.
But who reads that old rag anymore?
Niether "security risk" nor "obstructing justice" is a valid reason (accding to the Constitution) for abridging the freedom of the press.
Amendment I
> If patents were not enforcable, this diagnostic tool and many, many other medical treatments would not exist.
Baloney. Basic genetic research is carried out mostly using public funds.
There is no reason increased public funding covering the last mile, coupled with non-profit release of the information (to recoup the basic costs) couldn't do just as well in the last mile popularization of new treatments as it does in basic research.
Other than a fanatic belief that the holy free market is better than logic and reason, that is...