The other advantage of using a fuel cell is that it makes it feasible to capture the CO2. In an ICE because you burn the fuel the concentration of CO2 in the exhaust is low, making it impracticable/expensive to capture the CO2.
In an oxygen-concentration fuel cell you burn the fuel to exhaust, just like in an engine. It's just that the oxygen is provided through the cell membrane on the way to the combustion, rather than being mixed (along with a lot of nitrogen and miscellaney) with the fuel before ignition. You lose the nitrogen from the exhaust but you've still got water vapor out the wazoo.
Cooling, condensing, separating, and storing the CO2 would be a major weight and energy cost.
Simpler to just use carbon-neutral fuels from renewable sources, so the carbon that's the carrier for your hydrogen (which is the main "fuel" in a hydrocarbon) came OUT of the atmosphere before running the vehicle put it back IN. Since an oxygen-concentration cell burns essentially anything that eats oxygen, you have a lot more options than with a internal combustion engine.
If they could also shrink the cost by a factor of 10 we would have a winner.
It's called "economy of scale".
When they're being built in hundred-thousand lots by automated factories several model years into vehicle production, the design and tooling costs have been largely paid off, and some competitive product is bidding for customers which creates price pressure, they will cost a lot less than the parts in the concept-car prototype or the first model year.
It turns it into a MORE efficient gasoline-powered vehicle when you're on a long trip. The fuel cell is better than a portable heat engine at burning fuel into electric power. (Perhaps even more efficient at converting fuel into shaft HP after converting the electricity, vs. going straight from an engine through a transmission). And you still have all the braking-scavenging advantages of a hybrid.
It's still an EVEN MORE efficient whatever-the-grid-is-using-powered vehicle when the trip is short enough to be powered entirely by the battery charge. (Even if the grid is driven by fossil fuels, big stationary plants are enough better than little portable engines to more than make up for the grid transmission and battery-charging-and-discharging losses.)
Your web site seems to describe the goal of the project as understanding how lightning propagates as it forms and how it initiates at a far lower voltage gradient than one would expect from the ionization requirements of air, or (equivalently) jumps gaps far longer than would be expected from the voltage.
I was under the impression that this, along with the jagged nature of the bolt, was already understood. And that it went something like this:
- A large enough charge accumulates, producing a strong field in the direction of a suitable opposing charge. But before the charge becomes large enough to ionize the air and jump the gap:
- A charged particle (typically a primary or secondary cosmic ray) passing through or very near the collection of charge, produces an ionization trail with a component along the voltage gradient.
- Some of the charge rushes to and along the path. This increases (and maintains) the ionization, redistributes the charge in a way that shortens the remaining gap, both increasing and focusing the field, and increses the size of the target for another ionizing particle.
- If another particle comes by before the ionization decays, the process repeats, with charge moving along the new path in the general direction of the opposing charge.
- Repeat until the remaining gap to a conductor, opposing charge accumulation, or similar path of opposite charge coming the other way, is short enough to be ionized by the now very concentrated field.
This explains, not just how an arc can form at far lower voltage gradient than exped, but also the jagged nature of the path (it follows random ionization trails going roughtly the right way), and the occasional forking (when a particle trail joins the extending arc somewhat back from the tip).
Please comment on whether this relates to your work. (I.e. Is this the explanation you're trying to find, confirm-or-falsify, or fill in details on? Are you looking for something else? Something additional?)
âoeThere is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.â - Henry Ford
It seems somewhere between Ford and outsourcing everything we can to india and china, industrialists became looters.
Actually it's that some business schools taught their students to be parasites on successful businesses:
1) Find a company with some sound guts that's fallen on temporary hard times.
2) Get hired on as CEO with big blocks of stock options and rules approved for bonuses that condition them on short-term bottom line.
3) Bring in your cronies on similar terms, replacing the upper layer with people loyal to you rather than the company, its shareholders, or its workers.
2) Cut investment in the future to make the bottom line good short-term, for a few quarters. Stop the research, fire the personnel that design the future products. Replace the local personnel that build the PRESENT product with cheaper offshore people (who have no loyalty, lore from the company's past, or connections to the company's remaining local engineering).
4) After a few quarters, announce you've turned the company around. Declare victory. Move on to the next sucker and cash out. (Profit!)
5) Let your successors take the blame when the house of cards to which you've reduced the company finally collapses.
These aren't the "industrialists" who built the enterprises. These are the predators who take it down and get the first and best chunk of meat from the still-struggling carcass.
Some time after Henry died, Ford Motor Company fell prey to such, and started to deteriorate. But the Ford family still had controlling interest. Eventually they saw what was happening, threw out the jackals, installed some better heads, and turned the company around again. Soon Ford products were better than the best Japanese and European imports. Come the recent economic troubles, while GM and Chrysler went down and got taken over by the government, Ford didn't need any bailouts and is still prospering.
Why are we debating the Interstate Highway system? Ron Paul is all about doing things the constitutional way. Interstate roads are explicitly authorized in the constitution (look for "post roads"). Facilitating interstate transportation of people and goods is a legitimate federal function.
Also: The Interestate highway system (National Defence Highways) was a MILITARY project, promoted during his presidency by former general Eisenhower, as part of the "Cold War" and preparation for hot war. In addition to its uses for transporting industrial products and raw materials and otherwise supporting wartime transportation, it is designed so traffic can be diverted to one set of lanes while the other set is used as a runway for certain military aircraft, which can be hangered under an overpass. In time of war the whole country becomes an airfield.
The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was created in 1953.
Are you going to tell me that education has been on the decline since 1953 as well?
As someone who entered elementary school in 1953 I can assure you that the public education I experienced went downhill from then until I transferred to a non-public school in 1963. B-b
In particular, about six years later, when "social studies" (dumbed-down history) covered the founding of the US federal government, the textbook didn't bother to actually quote the declaration or the constitution. But it had a cute cartoon of two legislators stretching a scroll to illustrate the "Elastic Clause" and explained how this allowed the federal government to do just about anything the congresscritters wanted to do.
I know a lot of programers that are independent contractors. What they do is set up a corporation,
And if they and/or their family own more than 50% of the corporation the corporation is treated as a sham.
If this is the one I think it is, it's the reversal of the "safe harbor" provision of the tax law. Under that provision, if you say you are an independent contractor, it's assumed you are. So whomever hired you is NOT responsible if you don't send in your withholding/quarterlies or don't pay your income and social security taxes.
After the law passed, the assumption was that you - programmer, maid, store clerk "associate", etc - are actually an employee of your client. Even if you set up and are billing through a corporation or LLC. Your client is on the hook for your taxes (and penalties) if you don't pay up.
After a few major companies who thought they'd paid off a bunch of pricey contractors (who didn't pay their taxes) got socked by the IRS, nearly doubling the cost of those guys' work, most corps and other major consultant-users would hire independents. They would only go through a middleman firm. And such middlemen take a hefty cut. (Lowest I've seen is 15%, when I brought a customer and contract to a firm to handle the middleman stuff. Usually it's a BUNCH higher.)
Now there's no REQUIREMENT that a company not deal with you directly. And a few will take their chances. But for most of us, forget it. And the "less than half ownership" requirement to keep the tax man off your client's back means you don't control the company. So you're not an artisan. You're a serf.
The only contractors I know of who come even close to independence are a pair of guys, very close friends, who put together a two-man company and (I presume) sold off a sliver of it to somebody else.
For myself, since the law change I've only consulted through firms and have done most of my work as salaried. Salaried is a big cut in pay: ATMs used to ask me whether I'd typoed the amount when I deposited paychecks back during my consulting days.
By the way: I had heard the favor was for, not IBM, but Ross Perot, who (at the time) was running a big consulting firm named EDS. This was about when GM fired all the contractors and hired EDS to do all their IT work.
b) Their TV would be several feet away from either the floor or the ceiling (where those metal beams would be). The weak magnetic field of those beams would have no effect.
Back in the '60s I had an old (at the time) color TV - and a friend who worked at a used computer company. At one point he got hold of some alnico magnets out of the voice-coil actuators for some of the washing-machine style disk drives. He bought one over to my place. From diagonally across the living room + dining room + hall we were able to totally wreck the color on the TV just by rotating the magnet. Dipole field falls off with inverse CUBE and these magnets were only a few inches long (pole to pole). So a magnetized region on a floor joist I-beam right under the set whould have done a LOT more to that particular set.
If they did, you would see all kinds of dust, tools, keys inching towards the metal beam although having your keys suspended in air would be pretty cool.
Nope. Nowhere near that must field is required. Electron beams in shadow-mask tubes are exquisitely sensitive to small magnetic fields. If the field is strong enough to make a compass misbehave it's strong enough to tweak the color on those old sets.
Additionally, a flood of breakthroughs leaves the investors with a multiplicity of choices and the question of which will win. You have to have a practical, economically viable, producible, reliable, safe product that will be a big enough step ahead of the competition that people will switch and which will STAY ahead of the competition long enough to pay off the investment plus a profit commesurate with the risk.
You also need to have the government out of the way. If it is "picking winners" (ala Solyndra) and you're not picked, you're faced with competing against somebody else with perhaps a half billion of extra investment money. So you don't bother. Meanwhile those who ARE picked have governmental perverse incentive structures and administrative oversight. So they're likely to be as inefficient as other government operations and fail to produce a PROFITABLE product despite the heavy investment.
Having said that: DEPLOYED battery technology is advancing rapidly - though by intermittent deployment of breakthroughs rather than a Moore's Law style exponential ramp. The latest generation of batteries has an efficiency and current capability that lets it do REAL regenerative braking energy scavenging and charge in times comparable to pumping gas (if you have a spare power plant to dedicate to your charging station B-) ) along with an energy density suitable for vehicles. It's being deployed in toys, laptop computers, and electric buses already. Expect it, or something even better, to be deployed in electric autos in another year or two.
Solar generated electricity has been past breakeven with grid power for small loads and new construction in remote locations for some time now. The price is still dropping and is ALMOST to the level where sunny suburbs will also reach breakeven, even without subsidies. Once they're substantially past that point AND the economy has recovered so homeowners can spend again, expect a great private solar power buildout.
To get such an effect you would have to have an active wide-band transmitter (to affect TV's,...
CRT TVs can be affected by moderate ambient DC (and low-frequency AC) mag fields - comparable to the local magnetic field from the Earth. They deflect the electron beam. Such a weak field wouldn't be noticed on a black-and-white TV. But on a color set - especially an older one - it can drastically affect both the color convergence and the interaction of the beams with the shadow mask, resulting in blotches of color, patchy or overall shifts in color (as beams are partially deflected to the wrong phosphor dot, and other visible effects. Magnetization of the shadow mask also does this.
A color set (especially an older one with the triangular gun arrangement and perhaps no - or a defective - automatic degausser) may need to be adjusted for its location and orientation in a room. And a magnetized steel beam would exacerbate the problem beyond that experienced from just the Earth's field.
A magnetized hull is detrimental to a number of electronic warfare devices. We're not so worried about mines, or even being detected, so much as we're concerned about the proper functioning of sonar, radar, gunplot, computers, etc ad nauseum.
Then somebody's not worrying about the right things.
A magnetized hull is a problem for:
- Magnetic compasses (and dip sensors) for input to the navigational system. (Not just on the ship itself, but also for other devices nearby, such as other ships.)
- Magnetometers for detecting enemy resources - like subs.
- The ship itself being detected due to its own magnetic field.
- CRT based displays (if the magnetization is extreme.)
The rest of the stuff you mention (sonar, radar (except for big CRT screens), computers, etc.) could really care less about fields resulting from stray magnetization of the hull. If a steel hull were completely saturated it still would be too weak to be an issue - except maybe for old-style ferrite floppy disks or reels of magnetic tape sitting directly against it.
Clothing is generally at least as opaque and/or randomly refracting in UV as in visible.
Some synthetics, though, are transparent in infrared. A few paparazzi have taken advantage of this by using IR film and snapping celebrities. If they happen to be wearing all IR-transparent clothing they look naked or dressed only in underwear (and slightly out-of-focus, since the longer wavelength results in visible issues that are just below eye resolution in visible wavelengths.)
Was a famous shot of a movie star debarking an airline via the roll-around stairway, published in a tabloid, a couple decades back.
There is probably a good reason why you have that filter there [eye lens opaque to UV] in the first place!
Or it could be a side effect of chemicals optimized to be a good lens, happening to limit the upper end of the visual spectrum below the sensitivity limit of the blue cones (but not creating a serious disadvantage thereby), as a side effect.
(Either way the retina would have evolved with the protection in place.)
I understand that the definitive text on ultraviolet astronomy was written about then by an astronomer who had also been through the operation.
For him astronomical objects with high UV emission were "naked eye objects". He could just look through the telescope eyepiece and zero in on interesting stuff, when others had to wait for the film to be developed.
Not as big a deal these days, with 'scopes aimed using semiconductor image sensors rather than naked eye. But may still be an advantage.
Sorry but the writers of the US Constitution never envisioned a world spanning organization with military like assets and have the objective of harming the United States.
Actually, they did. They were called things like "pirates".
The Constitution has a mechanism for going after them - whether they are state-sponsored or not. It is not a war on them or their state sponsors.
Part of this mechanism is called "Letters of Marque and Reprisal". These authorize private organizations to act as military auxiliaries, possibly enter foreign jurisdictions, seize designated people and assets, and haul them back for ajudication (or destroy them in the attempt, should it be unavoidable). Once ajudication is complete - if the decision goes the right way - the private organizations get to keep the assets, while the bad guys get to be punished for their crimes.
This isn't the first person that has been killed using a drone. What is so special about this particular case?
The government tried to indict this US citizen. If failed to get an indictment, for lack of evidence. Rather than gathering more evidence and trying again, the administration just ordered the military to hunt him down and kill him. If allowed to stand this sets the precedent that due process is dead, the president can kill anybody he wants, and citizenship is no defence.
Unless I've missed something in turn, the other people killed by US drones - even if they were targeted - were non-citizen enemy combatants or "collateral damage" bystanders, in actions taken under the rules of war and US rules of engagement. This particular hit opened an extra can of worms and created a personal threat for US voters at home and abroad.
Let's put this shit in perspective: 1 dead American-born cleric 100,000+ dead Iraqi civilians
Most of the 100,000+ dead Iraqui civilians were killed either as enemy combatants or "collateral damage" under rules of war. (A few were not. And in some of those cases soldiers are under criminal indictment at this moment.)
This one raises an additional issue: The guy in question was a US citizen and (after the government tried and failed to get an indictment due to insufficient evidence) was targeted personally for assassination, and killed, in violation of the 5th and 6th amendments.
This brings up the due process issue - even among those who think that the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens. And if it stands it sets the precedent that the US President can assassinate anybody he likes, citizenship is no defence, and due process is dead.
Given that this administration has already labelled people as terrorists for minting gold coins, carrying copies of the constitution, or being concerned about gun rights or the current economic situation, that's a personal threat to a lot of voters.
A lot of people on here are shouting about how we should have arrested this guy and put him on trial, anything else is a violation of his rights.... How were they supposed to arrest him? Without using magic, what kind of plan to arrest him does not involve a military operation that would result in more people being killed?
Don't need to arrest him. It's called "trial in absentia". If he won't show up he can be tried anyhow. Once he's convicted, the sentence could be executed by any effective means - including predator drones if applicable - without raising any due process issues.
The government TRIED to get an indictment. But they didn't have enough evidence to get one. Rather than trying again, succeeding, and getting a conviction, they just marked him for assassination and killed him. Oops!
How would you like them to do that if, say, some prankster phoned in a tip to the DHS that YOU were a terrorist?
Ron Paul talks a good game, but at the end of the day, when his "No" votes in Congress are overidden, he goes home and gets to walk away from those votes. Gary Johnson vetoed over 750 bills during his two terms as governor of New Mexico, and successfully defended all but two or those vetoes.
Members of the house don't get to exercise vetoes. The president does. This is Ron's third try to get into the Oval Office, where he COULD exercise vetoes. (And this time he's all-in on the Presidential run. He dropped his House reelection bid.)
After seeing his unblemished 30 year record of voting against anything he deems unconstitutional (and the large group of things he includes in that class, which happens to match very well with my own choices), I'm more prepared to trust Ron than Gary this time around.
It's fascinating how many people are worried that the U.S. government assassinated a U.S. citizen, rather than worrying that the U.S. government is assassinating people.
There are claims (and some legal doctrines) that certain of the enumerated rights only apply to citizens.
Many of the people against such assassinations believe those rights ARE rights of all, not just citizens. But the fact that this guy was a US citizen also brings in those who believe the rights are for a limited class.
It also hits close to home for US citizens (and thus US voters): Even being a citizen won't protect you from the runaway government's assassination teams.
So I have no problem with phrasing the argument to attract support from the larger containing set of voters. This makes it more likely that something will be done to fix the problem.
The part that weirds me out is how some well-known terrorist leader gets taken down and we're all of a sudden concerned about who we're killing over there? What about all the innocent people we're killing all the time? Nobody seems to care much about that.
Many DO care about it. But this particular killing raises additional issues.
The "innocent people we're killing all the time" mainly weren't individually targeted, but were killed in battle either as enemy combatants or as the unavoidable accidental "collateral damage" of dead bystanders in a war zone. Even in war you don't get to just kill anybody you think might be an enemy. There are a host of rules on who you can and can't target, and a number of US soldiers are currently facing criminal charges for shooting bystanders in violation of these rules. (I'm currently receiving unsolicited requests for donations for the defence funds for at least two of them.)
This guy was a (former?) US citizen. The government had, at one point, attempted to bring charges against him and was unable to come up with enough evidence to even get an indictment. So the executive branch targeted him, as an individual, for death, hunted him down, and killed him. Not in a battle under rules of engagement, but as an assassination.
What makes this a big deal is that it's no step at all from doing that to this guy and doing it to anybody else the President's men don't like - here or abroad. The Executive branch has already brought "terrorist" charges against a guy for minting gold coins. And Homeland Security issued an advisory labelling Tea Party tax protesters, people concerned about gun rights or the current economic and political climate, people carrying "political paraphernalia" (copies of the Constitution), as potential domestic terrorists.
Now that the executive branch claims the right to just assassinate "terrorists", even citizens, with no due process of law, what's to keep them from just killing people SUSPECTED OF using bitcoin, or bittorrent, or hacking a website, or contributing to WikiLeaks, or being members of Anonymous, or contributing to Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul,...
GP did not suggest "pumping the water up the hill"; instead, they suggested to let the hudrogen float up to the top of hills through tubes, then burn (still on high ground) said hydrogen, store locally the exhausts until cool enough, then let the water flow back downhill.
Which is a very roundabout way to pump water uphill.
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The other advantage of using a fuel cell is that it makes it feasible to capture the CO2. In an ICE because you burn the fuel the concentration of CO2 in the exhaust is low, making it impracticable/expensive to capture the CO2.
In an oxygen-concentration fuel cell you burn the fuel to exhaust, just like in an engine. It's just that the oxygen is provided through the cell membrane on the way to the combustion, rather than being mixed (along with a lot of nitrogen and miscellaney) with the fuel before ignition. You lose the nitrogen from the exhaust but you've still got water vapor out the wazoo.
Cooling, condensing, separating, and storing the CO2 would be a major weight and energy cost.
Simpler to just use carbon-neutral fuels from renewable sources, so the carbon that's the carrier for your hydrogen (which is the main "fuel" in a hydrocarbon) came OUT of the atmosphere before running the vehicle put it back IN. Since an oxygen-concentration cell burns essentially anything that eats oxygen, you have a lot more options than with a internal combustion engine.
If they could also shrink the cost by a factor of 10 we would have a winner.
It's called "economy of scale".
When they're being built in hundred-thousand lots by automated factories several model years into vehicle production, the design and tooling costs have been largely paid off, and some competitive product is bidding for customers which creates price pressure, they will cost a lot less than the parts in the concept-car prototype or the first model year.
It turns it into a MORE efficient gasoline-powered vehicle when you're on a long trip. The fuel cell is better than a portable heat engine at burning fuel into electric power. (Perhaps even more efficient at converting fuel into shaft HP after converting the electricity, vs. going straight from an engine through a transmission). And you still have all the braking-scavenging advantages of a hybrid.
It's still an EVEN MORE efficient whatever-the-grid-is-using-powered vehicle when the trip is short enough to be powered entirely by the battery charge. (Even if the grid is driven by fossil fuels, big stationary plants are enough better than little portable engines to more than make up for the grid transmission and battery-charging-and-discharging losses.)
Your web site seems to describe the goal of the project as understanding how lightning propagates as it forms and how it initiates at a far lower voltage gradient than one would expect from the ionization requirements of air, or (equivalently) jumps gaps far longer than would be expected from the voltage.
I was under the impression that this, along with the jagged nature of the bolt, was already understood. And that it went something like this:
- A large enough charge accumulates, producing a strong field in the direction of a suitable opposing charge. But before the charge becomes large enough to ionize the air and jump the gap:
- A charged particle (typically a primary or secondary cosmic ray) passing through or very near the collection of charge, produces an ionization trail with a component along the voltage gradient.
- Some of the charge rushes to and along the path. This increases (and maintains) the ionization, redistributes the charge in a way that shortens the remaining gap, both increasing and focusing the field, and increses the size of the target for another ionizing particle.
- If another particle comes by before the ionization decays, the process repeats, with charge moving along the new path in the general direction of the opposing charge.
- Repeat until the remaining gap to a conductor, opposing charge accumulation, or similar path of opposite charge coming the other way, is short enough to be ionized by the now very concentrated field.
This explains, not just how an arc can form at far lower voltage gradient than exped, but also the jagged nature of the path (it follows random ionization trails going roughtly the right way), and the occasional forking (when a particle trail joins the extending arc somewhat back from the tip).
Please comment on whether this relates to your work. (I.e. Is this the explanation you're trying to find, confirm-or-falsify, or fill in details on? Are you looking for something else? Something additional?)
Still faster than congress debating a bill.
Every bill that becomes law is that much less freedom. The slower the better.
âoeThere is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.â - Henry Ford
It seems somewhere between Ford and outsourcing everything we can to india and china, industrialists became looters.
Actually it's that some business schools taught their students to be parasites on successful businesses:
1) Find a company with some sound guts that's fallen on temporary hard times.
2) Get hired on as CEO with big blocks of stock options and rules approved for bonuses that condition them on short-term bottom line.
3) Bring in your cronies on similar terms, replacing the upper layer with people loyal to you rather than the company, its shareholders, or its workers.
2) Cut investment in the future to make the bottom line good short-term, for a few quarters. Stop the research, fire the personnel that design the future products. Replace the local personnel that build the PRESENT product with cheaper offshore people (who have no loyalty, lore from the company's past, or connections to the company's remaining local engineering).
4) After a few quarters, announce you've turned the company around. Declare victory. Move on to the next sucker and cash out. (Profit!)
5) Let your successors take the blame when the house of cards to which you've reduced the company finally collapses.
These aren't the "industrialists" who built the enterprises. These are the predators who take it down and get the first and best chunk of meat from the still-struggling carcass.
Some time after Henry died, Ford Motor Company fell prey to such, and started to deteriorate. But the Ford family still had controlling interest. Eventually they saw what was happening, threw out the jackals, installed some better heads, and turned the company around again. Soon Ford products were better than the best Japanese and European imports. Come the recent economic troubles, while GM and Chrysler went down and got taken over by the government, Ford didn't need any bailouts and is still prospering.
Why are we debating the Interstate Highway system? Ron Paul is all about doing things the constitutional way. Interstate roads are explicitly authorized in the constitution (look for "post roads"). Facilitating interstate transportation of people and goods is a legitimate federal function.
Also: The Interestate highway system (National Defence Highways) was a MILITARY project, promoted during his presidency by former general Eisenhower, as part of the "Cold War" and preparation for hot war. In addition to its uses for transporting industrial products and raw materials and otherwise supporting wartime transportation, it is designed so traffic can be diverted to one set of lanes while the other set is used as a runway for certain military aircraft, which can be hangered under an overpass. In time of war the whole country becomes an airfield.
The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was created in 1953.
Are you going to tell me that education has been on the decline since 1953 as well?
As someone who entered elementary school in 1953 I can assure you that the public education I experienced went downhill from then until I transferred to a non-public school in 1963. B-b
In particular, about six years later, when "social studies" (dumbed-down history) covered the founding of the US federal government, the textbook didn't bother to actually quote the declaration or the constitution. But it had a cute cartoon of two legislators stretching a scroll to illustrate the "Elastic Clause" and explained how this allowed the federal government to do just about anything the congresscritters wanted to do.
I know a lot of programers that are independent contractors. What they do is set up a corporation,
And if they and/or their family own more than 50% of the corporation the corporation is treated as a sham.
If this is the one I think it is, it's the reversal of the "safe harbor" provision of the tax law. Under that provision, if you say you are an independent contractor, it's assumed you are. So whomever hired you is NOT responsible if you don't send in your withholding/quarterlies or don't pay your income and social security taxes.
After the law passed, the assumption was that you - programmer, maid, store clerk "associate", etc - are actually an employee of your client. Even if you set up and are billing through a corporation or LLC. Your client is on the hook for your taxes (and penalties) if you don't pay up.
After a few major companies who thought they'd paid off a bunch of pricey contractors (who didn't pay their taxes) got socked by the IRS, nearly doubling the cost of those guys' work, most corps and other major consultant-users would hire independents. They would only go through a middleman firm. And such middlemen take a hefty cut. (Lowest I've seen is 15%, when I brought a customer and contract to a firm to handle the middleman stuff. Usually it's a BUNCH higher.)
Now there's no REQUIREMENT that a company not deal with you directly. And a few will take their chances. But for most of us, forget it. And the "less than half ownership" requirement to keep the tax man off your client's back means you don't control the company. So you're not an artisan. You're a serf.
The only contractors I know of who come even close to independence are a pair of guys, very close friends, who put together a two-man company and (I presume) sold off a sliver of it to somebody else.
For myself, since the law change I've only consulted through firms and have done most of my work as salaried. Salaried is a big cut in pay: ATMs used to ask me whether I'd typoed the amount when I deposited paychecks back during my consulting days.
By the way: I had heard the favor was for, not IBM, but Ross Perot, who (at the time) was running a big consulting firm named EDS. This was about when GM fired all the contractors and hired EDS to do all their IT work.
a) Who uses CRT's still?
People who already have them.
b) Their TV would be several feet away from either the floor or the ceiling (where those metal beams would be). The weak magnetic field of those beams would have no effect.
Back in the '60s I had an old (at the time) color TV - and a friend who worked at a used computer company. At one point he got hold of some alnico magnets out of the voice-coil actuators for some of the washing-machine style disk drives. He bought one over to my place. From diagonally across the living room + dining room + hall we were able to totally wreck the color on the TV just by rotating the magnet. Dipole field falls off with inverse CUBE and these magnets were only a few inches long (pole to pole). So a magnetized region on a floor joist I-beam right under the set whould have done a LOT more to that particular set.
If they did, you would see all kinds of dust, tools, keys inching towards the metal beam although having your keys suspended in air would be pretty cool.
Nope. Nowhere near that must field is required. Electron beams in shadow-mask tubes are exquisitely sensitive to small magnetic fields. If the field is strong enough to make a compass misbehave it's strong enough to tweak the color on those old sets.
Additionally, a flood of breakthroughs leaves the investors with a multiplicity of choices and the question of which will win. You have to have a practical, economically viable, producible, reliable, safe product that will be a big enough step ahead of the competition that people will switch and which will STAY ahead of the competition long enough to pay off the investment plus a profit commesurate with the risk.
You also need to have the government out of the way. If it is "picking winners" (ala Solyndra) and you're not picked, you're faced with competing against somebody else with perhaps a half billion of extra investment money. So you don't bother. Meanwhile those who ARE picked have governmental perverse incentive structures and administrative oversight. So they're likely to be as inefficient as other government operations and fail to produce a PROFITABLE product despite the heavy investment.
Having said that: DEPLOYED battery technology is advancing rapidly - though by intermittent deployment of breakthroughs rather than a Moore's Law style exponential ramp. The latest generation of batteries has an efficiency and current capability that lets it do REAL regenerative braking energy scavenging and charge in times comparable to pumping gas (if you have a spare power plant to dedicate to your charging station B-) ) along with an energy density suitable for vehicles. It's being deployed in toys, laptop computers, and electric buses already. Expect it, or something even better, to be deployed in electric autos in another year or two.
Solar generated electricity has been past breakeven with grid power for small loads and new construction in remote locations for some time now. The price is still dropping and is ALMOST to the level where sunny suburbs will also reach breakeven, even without subsidies. Once they're substantially past that point AND the economy has recovered so homeowners can spend again, expect a great private solar power buildout.
To get such an effect you would have to have an active wide-band transmitter (to affect TV's, ...
CRT TVs can be affected by moderate ambient DC (and low-frequency AC) mag fields - comparable to the local magnetic field from the Earth. They deflect the electron beam. Such a weak field wouldn't be noticed on a black-and-white TV. But on a color set - especially an older one - it can drastically affect both the color convergence and the interaction of the beams with the shadow mask, resulting in blotches of color, patchy or overall shifts in color (as beams are partially deflected to the wrong phosphor dot, and other visible effects. Magnetization of the shadow mask also does this.
A color set (especially an older one with the triangular gun arrangement and perhaps no - or a defective - automatic degausser) may need to be adjusted for its location and orientation in a room. And a magnetized steel beam would exacerbate the problem beyond that experienced from just the Earth's field.
A magnetized hull is detrimental to a number of electronic warfare devices. We're not so worried about mines, or even being detected, so much as we're concerned about the proper functioning of sonar, radar, gunplot, computers, etc ad nauseum.
Then somebody's not worrying about the right things.
A magnetized hull is a problem for:
- Magnetic compasses (and dip sensors) for input to the navigational system. (Not just on the ship itself, but also for other devices nearby, such as other ships.)
- Magnetometers for detecting enemy resources - like subs.
- The ship itself being detected due to its own magnetic field.
- CRT based displays (if the magnetization is extreme.)
The rest of the stuff you mention (sonar, radar (except for big CRT screens), computers, etc.) could really care less about fields resulting from stray magnetization of the hull. If a steel hull were completely saturated it still would be too weak to be an issue - except maybe for old-style ferrite floppy disks or reels of magnetic tape sitting directly against it.
Clothing is generally at least as opaque and/or randomly refracting in UV as in visible.
Some synthetics, though, are transparent in infrared. A few paparazzi have taken advantage of this by using IR film and snapping celebrities. If they happen to be wearing all IR-transparent clothing they look naked or dressed only in underwear (and slightly out-of-focus, since the longer wavelength results in visible issues that are just below eye resolution in visible wavelengths.)
Was a famous shot of a movie star debarking an airline via the roll-around stairway, published in a tabloid, a couple decades back.
There is probably a good reason why you have that filter there [eye lens opaque to UV] in the first place!
Or it could be a side effect of chemicals optimized to be a good lens, happening to limit the upper end of the visual spectrum below the sensitivity limit of the blue cones (but not creating a serious disadvantage thereby), as a side effect.
(Either way the retina would have evolved with the protection in place.)
I understand that the definitive text on ultraviolet astronomy was written about then by an astronomer who had also been through the operation.
For him astronomical objects with high UV emission were "naked eye objects". He could just look through the telescope eyepiece and zero in on interesting stuff, when others had to wait for the film to be developed.
Not as big a deal these days, with 'scopes aimed using semiconductor image sensors rather than naked eye. But may still be an advantage.
Sorry but the writers of the US Constitution never envisioned a world spanning organization with military like assets and have the objective of harming the United States.
Actually, they did. They were called things like "pirates".
The Constitution has a mechanism for going after them - whether they are state-sponsored or not. It is not a war on them or their state sponsors.
Part of this mechanism is called "Letters of Marque and Reprisal". These authorize private organizations to act as military auxiliaries, possibly enter foreign jurisdictions, seize designated people and assets, and haul them back for ajudication (or destroy them in the attempt, should it be unavoidable). Once ajudication is complete - if the decision goes the right way - the private organizations get to keep the assets, while the bad guys get to be punished for their crimes.
The issue is that he was hunted down and executed when he had NOT BEEN CONVICTED of being a traitor.
This isn't the first person that has been killed using a drone. What is so special about this particular case?
The government tried to indict this US citizen. If failed to get an indictment, for lack of evidence. Rather than gathering more evidence and trying again, the administration just ordered the military to hunt him down and kill him. If allowed to stand this sets the precedent that due process is dead, the president can kill anybody he wants, and citizenship is no defence.
Unless I've missed something in turn, the other people killed by US drones - even if they were targeted - were non-citizen enemy combatants or "collateral damage" bystanders, in actions taken under the rules of war and US rules of engagement. This particular hit opened an extra can of worms and created a personal threat for US voters at home and abroad.
Let's put this shit in perspective:
1 dead American-born cleric
100,000+ dead Iraqi civilians
Most of the 100,000+ dead Iraqui civilians were killed either as enemy combatants or "collateral damage" under rules of war. (A few were not. And in some of those cases soldiers are under criminal indictment at this moment.)
This one raises an additional issue: The guy in question was a US citizen and (after the government tried and failed to get an indictment due to insufficient evidence) was targeted personally for assassination, and killed, in violation of the 5th and 6th amendments.
This brings up the due process issue - even among those who think that the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens. And if it stands it sets the precedent that the US President can assassinate anybody he likes, citizenship is no defence, and due process is dead.
Given that this administration has already labelled people as terrorists for minting gold coins, carrying copies of the constitution, or being concerned about gun rights or the current economic situation, that's a personal threat to a lot of voters.
A lot of people on here are shouting about how we should have arrested this guy and put him on trial, anything else is a violation of his rights. ... How were they supposed to arrest him? Without using magic, what kind of plan to arrest him does not involve a military operation that would result in more people being killed?
Don't need to arrest him. It's called "trial in absentia". If he won't show up he can be tried anyhow. Once he's convicted, the sentence could be executed by any effective means - including predator drones if applicable - without raising any due process issues.
The government TRIED to get an indictment. But they didn't have enough evidence to get one. Rather than trying again, succeeding, and getting a conviction, they just marked him for assassination and killed him. Oops!
How would you like them to do that if, say, some prankster phoned in a tip to the DHS that YOU were a terrorist?
Ron Paul talks a good game, but at the end of the day, when his "No" votes in Congress are overidden, he goes home and gets to walk away from those votes. Gary Johnson vetoed over 750 bills during his two terms as governor of New Mexico, and successfully defended all but two or those vetoes.
Members of the house don't get to exercise vetoes. The president does. This is Ron's third try to get into the Oval Office, where he COULD exercise vetoes. (And this time he's all-in on the Presidential run. He dropped his House reelection bid.)
After seeing his unblemished 30 year record of voting against anything he deems unconstitutional (and the large group of things he includes in that class, which happens to match very well with my own choices), I'm more prepared to trust Ron than Gary this time around.
It's fascinating how many people are worried that the U.S. government assassinated a U.S. citizen, rather than worrying that the U.S. government is assassinating people.
There are claims (and some legal doctrines) that certain of the enumerated rights only apply to citizens.
Many of the people against such assassinations believe those rights ARE rights of all, not just citizens. But the fact that this guy was a US citizen also brings in those who believe the rights are for a limited class.
It also hits close to home for US citizens (and thus US voters): Even being a citizen won't protect you from the runaway government's assassination teams.
So I have no problem with phrasing the argument to attract support from the larger containing set of voters. This makes it more likely that something will be done to fix the problem.
The part that weirds me out is how some well-known terrorist leader gets taken down and we're all of a sudden concerned about who we're killing over there? What about all the innocent people we're killing all the time? Nobody seems to care much about that.
Many DO care about it. But this particular killing raises additional issues.
The "innocent people we're killing all the time" mainly weren't individually targeted, but were killed in battle either as enemy combatants or as the unavoidable accidental "collateral damage" of dead bystanders in a war zone. Even in war you don't get to just kill anybody you think might be an enemy. There are a host of rules on who you can and can't target, and a number of US soldiers are currently facing criminal charges for shooting bystanders in violation of these rules. (I'm currently receiving unsolicited requests for donations for the defence funds for at least two of them.)
This guy was a (former?) US citizen. The government had, at one point, attempted to bring charges against him and was unable to come up with enough evidence to even get an indictment. So the executive branch targeted him, as an individual, for death, hunted him down, and killed him. Not in a battle under rules of engagement, but as an assassination.
What makes this a big deal is that it's no step at all from doing that to this guy and doing it to anybody else the President's men don't like - here or abroad. The Executive branch has already brought "terrorist" charges against a guy for minting gold coins. And Homeland Security issued an advisory labelling Tea Party tax protesters, people concerned about gun rights or the current economic and political climate, people carrying "political paraphernalia" (copies of the Constitution), as potential domestic terrorists.
Now that the executive branch claims the right to just assassinate "terrorists", even citizens, with no due process of law, what's to keep them from just killing people SUSPECTED OF using bitcoin, or bittorrent, or hacking a website, or contributing to WikiLeaks, or being members of Anonymous, or contributing to Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, ...
GP did not suggest "pumping the water up the hill"; instead, they suggested to let the hudrogen float up to the top of hills through tubes, then burn (still on high ground) said hydrogen, store locally the exhausts until cool enough, then let the water flow back downhill.
Which is a very roundabout way to pump water uphill.