The truth is, a number of dusty little abrahamic "deities" have hijacked the portions of the brain that evolved to appreciate Apple products...
It can be argued that religion and advertising have BOTH hijacked a portion of the brain that evolved to do something else (or possibly just showed up randomly, wasn't detrimental enough to get selected out, and hung around until random gene loss made it pervasive by eliminating the alternatives).
Religions can be quite detrimental to their adherents. So either the region's other hypothetical "proper function(s)" (like that of prion protein) is important or some religions convey enough survival benefits (like sickle cell trait vs. malaria) that the harm is more than offset by the benefit.
There has been a lot of debate about the reasons for biblical mandates among Jewish rabbis, and the kosher laws are no exception.
If you look at the kosher laws and compare them to the rituals practiced by the other religions in Egypt around the time of the exodus, you'll see an interesting relationship: Following the kosher laws means you can't participate in some important ritual of each of the other religions, and nearly all the kosher laws have at least one known religious ritual they block.
Example: One had a ritual feast with a main dish consisting of a young goat cooked in its mother's milk. Not kosher to eat a mix of meat and milk, so can't participate.
= = = =
Regarding pork: In addition to the issue of disease transmission due to similar biochemistry, pigs were also something of an ecological disaster for some of the enfironments in the area. Other religions than Judaism have (unexplained and apparently arbitrary) prohibitions on them.
When are people who are a part of the faithful herd (regardless of the faithful herd) going to accept that not being a member of your religion is not a leap of faith? (Answer: never)
IMHO you're getting this partly because you're misbranding yourself as an athiest when you appear to actually be a non-militant agnostic.
Non-god-belief comes in (at least) three forms:
- Athiesm: "I KNOW there is no God / are no dieties."
- Militant agnosticism: "I don't know if there is/are and I KNOW that YOU DON'T KNOW EITHER."
- Non-militant agnosticism: "I have no idea. (But non-belief doesn't seem to matter {except in interacting with militant believers} so Occam's razor argues that not assuming one exists is a more easily used working hypothesis)."
The first two are arguably religions.
Yes, some of them will STILL make the claim. Their memes run:
1) Blah
2) Blah blah
3) Blah blah blah...
100) Anyone who doesn't believe this will rot in hell. so they're trying to do you a big favor. B-b
"Optical rectennas" as a form of solar cell have been discussed since AT LEAST the late 1980s (when I heard them described by other people in the L5 society.
Well, that paper came out in 1975, before the era of molecular biology, back when people knew almost nothing about how the sense of smell, or pheromone detection worked.
Thanks.
The chemical "lock and key" theory had been around - and dominant - far before that, even if the "locks", "keys", and related signaling chains had not been identified.
Btw., a 'vibrational theory of olfaction', similar to what you cite, popularized by the book The Emperor of Scent (Random House, 2002) was thoroughly destroyed by Leslie Vosshall's research published in 2004 in Nature Neuroscience.
And I presume it also demolished Thomas Dykstra's 1994-1997 work.
Thanks for the correction. (I found the "infrared signature of pheromones" theory, but not its refutation, when hunting down the stuff on the log-periodic antenna-like structures I'd run into previously. Should have looked further, with such a flakey-sounding use for an infrared "radio" )
But that still leaves open the question of whether these structures, which seems clearly optimal for the purpose, ARE involved in electromagnetic wave detection, emission, and/or modulation (even if it's not for the detection of chemicals floating on the wind.) While structures so optimal for focusing electromagnetic waves might have been accidental fallout of some OTHER factor, would be easier to explain their pervasiveness if they actually DID have something to do with hacking EM waves.
Sensitive and directional detection of infrared would certainly be useful to, for instance, a flying insect: Avoidance of bats and detection of a potential mate's body heat are two uses that come to mind. And if both detection and modulated emission is possible using these structures you've got a "radio link" suitable both for communication between, and direction finding of, other members of the species. No "molecular infrared signature" required.
No surprise that the complaint comes from a ham. I have known a number of people who engineered radio systems for the military and intelligence community and every last one of them was also a ham.
If you're building fancy one-off radios for the spooks, building them for yourself for playing is trivial. And if you're INTERESTED enough in the tech to be good at engineering it you're probably interested enough to use it for a hobby.
Apparently insects have similar antenna systems in their antennae to detect pheromones by their infrared signature. Also electret excitation structures attached other antenna structures to emit tuned infrared when pumped by grooming.
Maybe where you live. But, where I live, I'm paying 9.5 cents per kWh,... To break even in 4 years as you claim, the cost would have to drop to a bit more than $4,000, or about 57 cents/watt, installed. Where do I find these solar panels?
Panel prices have been dropping but they're not quite that low yet. There's a company in Florida that sells UL approved panels for about $2/watt and non-approved for about $1. (It changes from time to time. I get the impression they're selling cosmetic rejects from major manufacturers.)
Solar panels have been beyond price break-even for new construction in rural areas (where it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to put in grid power) for some years. Also for small stuff (yard lights, emergency phones, illuminated road signs, some billboards) where the load is small enough that the solar power system is cheaper than running grid power even though the grid is handy.
A dollar a watt for panels is about where solar becomes practical for houses in sunny suburban areas at current California progressive/socialized electric rates. (Note that it's not just the cost of the panels you have to amortize. You also need storage, an inverter, etc. Using the grid rather than batteries as "storage" means a much pricier inverter and more pricey red tape, while batteries need periodic replacement, and ongoing cost.)
The newsworthiness is that instead of only 250 million nantennas on one small square like in that INL page, these guys replicated a design onto an "8 inch round silicon wafer" with 10 billion antenna elements. And they did it with high detail and little loss between the "master print" and the copy.
The newsworthiness would HAVE to be in the fabrication and design details. "Optical rectennas" as a form of solar cell have been discussed since AT LEAST the late 1980s (when I heard them described by other people in the L5 society.)
And vacuum the dust out of your computer before going in for expensive repairs. (Yes I'm punning. And diverging from the thread.)
Had a friend with a computer that was slowing down, especially after running for a bit. Concerned about virii, friend took it to Fry's for a professional cleanout. Also bought a plugin backup drive (and paid to have the machine backed up before de-worming) and a different brand of antivirus software (switching from one major brand to another). Dropped about the cost of a new computer cleaning out the old one.
Turns out nothing suspicious was found on it. As the techie was handing it back (AFTER the bill had been paid) he mentioned that he'd vacuumed a lot of dust out of the CPU's heatsink and to try that again if it slows down again.
Apparently the problem was just that the airflow was restricted by dust and, when the machine got to crunching, the CPU thermal sensors and OS software were turning down the clock speed. B-b This feature (slowing down rather than burning out) has been deployed for years now.
So if the machine is slowing down, be sure to open the covers and give it a pass with the crevice tool before running up a big bill chasing possibly non-existent infections, failures, and configuration inadequacies.
I read this story like a week ago when it hit Fark. The owner went to the police and they told him to piss off they can't do anything. So thats when vigilante justice took over and got shit done.
1) This country and the states within it were founded by their own citizens, who delegated certain of their own powers to the government. Accordingly, the laws, police, and courts are just a formalization of "vigilante justice", with mechanisms to reduce errors that lead to erroneous punishment of the innocent, uneven application of penalties, excessive penalties, and the like.
When an organization, governmental or otherwise, claims a monopoly on a good or service AND fails to provide it, the population tends to take direct action to fill the void. You see that these days with law enforcement (which often can't be bothered with "small stuff" when there's "big stuff" with RICO benefits for the department to pursue.) You also see it with other things - like recorded music, drugs,...
2) In this case the police bailed out because the victim hadn't done the first step of filing the report. So the department may not have actually failed to do its function, and the vigilante action may have been premature (though the timing of the detection of the stolen property certainly argued for immediate action, which the police wouldn'[t provide).
3) Yes, this is a vigilante action. However, some people confuse self-defense with vigilantism. Self-defense would be things like fighting off an attacker during the attack (even if it injures or kills him) or chasing him down while he's still visible after the theft and grabbing back the stolen property. And it's also not vigilantism to come to the aid of someone under attack. Once the crook is out of sight, though, either personally hunting him down to recover the goods or administer punishment, or calling on (or organizing) an unsanctioned group to do so is vigilantism.
A great example of minimalism working in favor of evolution in humans is our intestinal tract.... at the end of our evolution, we discovered fire. Cooking causes most proteins to break up as well as largely disinfect the food
Actually our got 'way more complex to handle the toxins from cooking and living in smoke-filled areas. (For starters, some of the dioxins are moderate carcinogens for people and kills nearly any other animal - to the point of causing birds who fly through a plume of it to fall from the sky dead.)
What fire predigestion did is let us get away with a SMALLER digestive tract, not necessarily a SIMPLER one. Less mass to carry around, smaller equipment to build and maintain at cost in energy and material.
Automatic transmissions can already handle hills. No database required. What would a database-driven predictive shifter do?
In a hybrid: Optimize the operation of the engine on trips so:
- going through mountains you arrive at the highest pass with batteries near minimum charge - ready to recapture the energy of your descent from the mountain to power your trip across the following valley
- you arrive at the foothills with full charge to enable you to keep your speed going up the mountains, but
- you don't burn gas pumping up the charge when you're nearing a destination where you can get a grid-powered charge.
But why "prediction"? (Other than recording your preferred driving style on the route.) Tie it into the navigation computer, which can feed it the planned route and map with elevation data.
Curious when eBay is going to be requested to cough up profits from all the sales of counterfeit products over the years.
Ditto radio stations: I've heard so many viagra (and variants) and "make money at home" ads on radio lately that it's starting to sound like an email inbox with no spam filter.
They still prohibit ads for legal products that they don't like: [Google policy banning adds whose text or web site promotes weapons.]
They're a private company. They get to prohibit ads for anything they want to (provided they don't illegally discriminate between different sellers of similar products).
Don't like it? Use another search engine.
(I don't like their prohibition on weapons ads . But freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.)
Overuse of antibiotics leads to less effective antibiotics. So the effectiveness is a common resource which is not yours alone to squander.
Human use of antibiotics is a drop in the bucket compared to low-dose use of the same drugs in animals to decrease bacterial load. The latter is apparently a far more significant factor in the evolution of drug resistant bacterial strains.
As to "common resource", drugs are INVENTED. I'd love to view a competent libertarian analysis - and criticism of it - on whether treating a drug design as the private property of the inventor might lead to conservative treatment and delay of bacterial resistance development, whether this might end up with a net increase in medical benefits to the general population (due to more disease being cured) or decrease (from treatments not done due to overly conservative use or high price), whether patent expiration leads to overuse to maximise profit before the monopoly goes away, and how other government interventions would affect the cures/resistance tradeoff.
X ray cooling is massively higher in p+B11. So high in fact that you must pump more energy in than you get out, aka it cannot "ignite".
How does X-ray cooling cause problems for polywell, where the concentration mechanism is electrostatic attraction of nuclei to a high-electron-density virtual electrode, rather than plasma compression?
Now lets consider the fact that D+T fusion is not here yet and that He3 fusion is more than a 1000 times harder to do. In fact if you can run a He3 fusion plant you can run a DD fusion plant for a fraction of the cost since it is more that 10 times easier to do. Also the ash from DD is He3! It would be cheaper to have DD fusion He3 breeder reactors, than to mine the moon.
Not to mention B11 + H1 -> 3 He4, which is harder than D + D but IIRC easier than He3 + He3. It also releases no neutrons (except for a fraction of a percent from side-reactions when other junk in the plasma gets together) and the fusion energy is easy to convert to DC at a couple megavolts at better than 80% efficiency.
Existing DC power transmission technology already handles 0.8 megavolt and does so with stacks of semiconductor, so converting the DC to transmission-line AC is a solved problem. Boron and light hydrogen are both common and cheap down here.
Crossing my fingers for the Navy's / EMC2's Polywell project, though Dense Plasma Focus or other schemes are also promising.
Let's start investing now, so the price of alternative energy comes down and we can switch to them before energy prices skyrocket.
My point is that, as long as the government does the investing - in the form of picking their cronies as the winners, we WON'T get private investment. Meanwhile government cronies on the dole put on a big show of doing the development but always manage to avoid bringing anything to market - unless it's to kill some competition for a while. Government programs like this just about ALWAYS fail.
WITHOUT the government winner-picking we'd likely ALREADY HAVE affordable alternatives. Investors are very good at figuring out where the money will be coming from in a few years and positioning themselves to sell whatever will get them some.
But they're ALSO good at figuring out that the government will steal some particular cash cow once it's giving milk. So when that's a big risk they don't breed it in the first place.
I thought "rare earth" metals were not so rare, but China is pretty much the only place mining them at scale. Instead of finding alternatives, why not just start mining?
China is the main source right now because they were selling it cheap. Now they're hanging on to it for their own industries and the price is rising. So it makes sense to reopen existing mines.
Wasn't there some in Canada, eh?
There's a bunch just West of Ely NV. And they're starting up a mining operation right now. Nice boost to the town's economy. (My wife and I noticed this when passing through there last fall.)
When fuel is cheap, and likely to stay that way, why invest a bunch of money developing more expensive energy sources that won't pay off for decades?
When existing fuels are about to get expensive it may make sense to develop these pricey alternatives - IF the fuels will STAY expensive once they're developed.
Of course no investor in his right mind will invest in the research if the government is going to hand out millions of bucks to their cronies so said cronies can take over the new market.
Such winner-picking handouts are what we've been seeing for a couple decades now in the renewable energy industries. This handout-to-cronies is just the latest example.
Want cheap energy alternatives to burning fossil fuels? Figure out how to make the government STOP handouts such as this, STOP putting regulatory barriers in the way of deployment, and make this hands-off behavior BELIEVABLE and DEPENDABLE for the decade or so it will take to devvelop, deploy, and profit from an oil replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
The truth is, a number of dusty little abrahamic "deities" have hijacked the portions of the brain that evolved to appreciate Apple products ...
It can be argued that religion and advertising have BOTH hijacked a portion of the brain that evolved to do something else (or possibly just showed up randomly, wasn't detrimental enough to get selected out, and hung around until random gene loss made it pervasive by eliminating the alternatives).
Religions can be quite detrimental to their adherents. So either the region's other hypothetical "proper function(s)" (like that of prion protein) is important or some religions convey enough survival benefits (like sickle cell trait vs. malaria) that the harm is more than offset by the benefit.
There has been a lot of debate about the reasons for biblical mandates among Jewish rabbis, and the kosher laws are no exception.
If you look at the kosher laws and compare them to the rituals practiced by the other religions in Egypt around the time of the exodus, you'll see an interesting relationship: Following the kosher laws means you can't participate in some important ritual of each of the other religions, and nearly all the kosher laws have at least one known religious ritual they block.
Example: One had a ritual feast with a main dish consisting of a young goat cooked in its mother's milk. Not kosher to eat a mix of meat and milk, so can't participate.
= = = =
Regarding pork: In addition to the issue of disease transmission due to similar biochemistry, pigs were also something of an ecological disaster for some of the enfironments in the area. Other religions than Judaism have (unexplained and apparently arbitrary) prohibitions on them.
When are people who are a part of the faithful herd (regardless of the faithful herd) going to accept that not being a member of your religion is not a leap of faith?
(Answer: never)
IMHO you're getting this partly because you're misbranding yourself as an athiest when you appear to actually be a non-militant agnostic.
Non-god-belief comes in (at least) three forms:
- Athiesm: "I KNOW there is no God / are no dieties."
- Militant agnosticism: "I don't know if there is/are and I KNOW that YOU DON'T KNOW EITHER."
- Non-militant agnosticism: "I have no idea. (But non-belief doesn't seem to matter {except in interacting with militant believers} so Occam's razor argues that not assuming one exists is a more easily used working hypothesis)."
The first two are arguably religions.
Yes, some of them will STILL make the claim. Their memes run: ...
1) Blah
2) Blah blah
3) Blah blah blah
100) Anyone who doesn't believe this will rot in hell.
so they're trying to do you a big favor. B-b
Invented in 1972: Link to survey of previous work
Make that "proposed in 1972".
As fabrication technologies improved since, various ways to actually do it, or do parts of it (of which this is the latest), have been invented.
This one seems to be a new family of antenna array and interconnect structures without any new work on the underlying rectification mechanism.
"Optical rectennas" as a form of solar cell have been discussed since AT LEAST the late 1980s (when I heard them described by other people in the L5 society.
Apparently it was originally proposed in 1972 by Robert Baley.
Here's a link to a 2004 survey of previous work.
Well, that paper came out in 1975, before the era of molecular biology, back when people knew almost nothing about how the sense of smell, or pheromone detection worked.
Thanks.
The chemical "lock and key" theory had been around - and dominant - far before that, even if the "locks", "keys", and related signaling chains had not been identified.
Btw., a 'vibrational theory of olfaction', similar to what you cite, popularized by the book The Emperor of Scent (Random House, 2002) was thoroughly destroyed by Leslie Vosshall's research published in 2004 in Nature Neuroscience.
And I presume it also demolished Thomas Dykstra's 1994-1997 work.
Thanks for the correction. (I found the "infrared signature of pheromones" theory, but not its refutation, when hunting down the stuff on the log-periodic antenna-like structures I'd run into previously. Should have looked further, with such a flakey-sounding use for an infrared "radio" )
But that still leaves open the question of whether these structures, which seems clearly optimal for the purpose, ARE involved in electromagnetic wave detection, emission, and/or modulation (even if it's not for the detection of chemicals floating on the wind.) While structures so optimal for focusing electromagnetic waves might have been accidental fallout of some OTHER factor, would be easier to explain their pervasiveness if they actually DID have something to do with hacking EM waves.
Sensitive and directional detection of infrared would certainly be useful to, for instance, a flying insect: Avoidance of bats and detection of a potential mate's body heat are two uses that come to mind. And if both detection and modulated emission is possible using these structures you've got a "radio link" suitable both for communication between, and direction finding of, other members of the species. No "molecular infrared signature" required.
No surprise that the complaint comes from a ham. I have known a number of people who engineered radio systems for the military and intelligence community and every last one of them was also a ham.
If you're building fancy one-off radios for the spooks, building them for yourself for playing is trivial. And if you're INTERESTED enough in the tech to be good at engineering it you're probably interested enough to use it for a hobby.
Antennae are for bugs.
Funny you should mention that.
Apparently insects have similar antenna systems in their antennae to detect pheromones by their infrared signature. Also electret excitation structures attached other antenna structures to emit tuned infrared when pumped by grooming.
Here's one reference.
Maybe where you live. But, where I live, I'm paying 9.5 cents per kWh, ... To break even in 4 years as you claim, the cost would have to drop to a bit more than $4,000, or about 57 cents/watt, installed. Where do I find these solar panels?
Panel prices have been dropping but they're not quite that low yet. There's a company in Florida that sells UL approved panels for about $2/watt and non-approved for about $1. (It changes from time to time. I get the impression they're selling cosmetic rejects from major manufacturers.)
Solar panels have been beyond price break-even for new construction in rural areas (where it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to put in grid power) for some years. Also for small stuff (yard lights, emergency phones, illuminated road signs, some billboards) where the load is small enough that the solar power system is cheaper than running grid power even though the grid is handy.
A dollar a watt for panels is about where solar becomes practical for houses in sunny suburban areas at current California progressive/socialized electric rates. (Note that it's not just the cost of the panels you have to amortize. You also need storage, an inverter, etc. Using the grid rather than batteries as "storage" means a much pricier inverter and more pricey red tape, while batteries need periodic replacement, and ongoing cost.)
The newsworthiness is that instead of only 250 million nantennas on one small square like in that INL page, these guys replicated a design onto an "8 inch round silicon wafer" with 10 billion antenna elements. And they did it with high detail and little loss between the "master print" and the copy.
The newsworthiness would HAVE to be in the fabrication and design details. "Optical rectennas" as a form of solar cell have been discussed since AT LEAST the late 1980s (when I heard them described by other people in the L5 society.)
If you're not a pulmonologist, stop breathing.
And vacuum the dust out of your computer before going in for expensive repairs. (Yes I'm punning. And diverging from the thread.)
Had a friend with a computer that was slowing down, especially after running for a bit. Concerned about virii, friend took it to Fry's for a professional cleanout. Also bought a plugin backup drive (and paid to have the machine backed up before de-worming) and a different brand of antivirus software (switching from one major brand to another). Dropped about the cost of a new computer cleaning out the old one.
Turns out nothing suspicious was found on it. As the techie was handing it back (AFTER the bill had been paid) he mentioned that he'd vacuumed a lot of dust out of the CPU's heatsink and to try that again if it slows down again.
Apparently the problem was just that the airflow was restricted by dust and, when the machine got to crunching, the CPU thermal sensors and OS software were turning down the clock speed. B-b This feature (slowing down rather than burning out) has been deployed for years now.
So if the machine is slowing down, be sure to open the covers and give it a pass with the crevice tool before running up a big bill chasing possibly non-existent infections, failures, and configuration inadequacies.
I read this story like a week ago when it hit Fark. The owner went to the police and they told him to piss off they can't do anything. So thats when vigilante justice took over and got shit done.
1) This country and the states within it were founded by their own citizens, who delegated certain of their own powers to the government. Accordingly, the laws, police, and courts are just a formalization of "vigilante justice", with mechanisms to reduce errors that lead to erroneous punishment of the innocent, uneven application of penalties, excessive penalties, and the like.
When an organization, governmental or otherwise, claims a monopoly on a good or service AND fails to provide it, the population tends to take direct action to fill the void. You see that these days with law enforcement (which often can't be bothered with "small stuff" when there's "big stuff" with RICO benefits for the department to pursue.) You also see it with other things - like recorded music, drugs, ...
2) In this case the police bailed out because the victim hadn't done the first step of filing the report. So the department may not have actually failed to do its function, and the vigilante action may have been premature (though the timing of the detection of the stolen property certainly argued for immediate action, which the police wouldn'[t provide).
3) Yes, this is a vigilante action. However, some people confuse self-defense with vigilantism. Self-defense would be things like fighting off an attacker during the attack (even if it injures or kills him) or chasing him down while he's still visible after the theft and grabbing back the stolen property. And it's also not vigilantism to come to the aid of someone under attack. Once the crook is out of sight, though, either personally hunting him down to recover the goods or administer punishment, or calling on (or organizing) an unsanctioned group to do so is vigilantism.
He lost all that and never "had time" to make a police report. Does that sound a bit strange to you? It does to me.
I take it you've never used a bargain air fare that was non-refundable and non-reschedulable?
A great example of minimalism working in favor of evolution in humans is our intestinal tract. ... at the end of our evolution, we discovered fire. Cooking causes most proteins to break up as well as largely disinfect the food
Actually our got 'way more complex to handle the toxins from cooking and living in smoke-filled areas. (For starters, some of the dioxins are moderate carcinogens for people and kills nearly any other animal - to the point of causing birds who fly through a plume of it to fall from the sky dead.)
What fire predigestion did is let us get away with a SMALLER digestive tract, not necessarily a SIMPLER one. Less mass to carry around, smaller equipment to build and maintain at cost in energy and material.
Automatic transmissions can already handle hills. No database required. What would a database-driven predictive shifter do?
In a hybrid: Optimize the operation of the engine on trips so:
- going through mountains you arrive at the highest pass with batteries near minimum charge - ready to recapture the energy of your descent from the mountain to power your trip across the following valley
- you arrive at the foothills with full charge to enable you to keep your speed going up the mountains, but
- you don't burn gas pumping up the charge when you're nearing a destination where you can get a grid-powered charge.
But why "prediction"? (Other than recording your preferred driving style on the route.) Tie it into the navigation computer, which can feed it the planned route and map with elevation data.
... they're not going to be starved out by people avoiding retail outlets and RIAA-affiliated publishers any time soon.
Curious when eBay is going to be requested to cough up profits from all the sales of counterfeit products over the years.
Ditto radio stations: I've heard so many viagra (and variants) and "make money at home" ads on radio lately that it's starting to sound like an email inbox with no spam filter.
They still prohibit ads for legal products that they don't like: [Google policy banning adds whose text or web site promotes weapons.]
They're a private company. They get to prohibit ads for anything they want to (provided they don't illegally discriminate between different sellers of similar products).
Don't like it? Use another search engine.
(I don't like their prohibition on weapons ads . But freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.)
Overuse of antibiotics leads to less effective antibiotics. So the effectiveness is a common resource which is not yours alone to squander.
Human use of antibiotics is a drop in the bucket compared to low-dose use of the same drugs in animals to decrease bacterial load. The latter is apparently a far more significant factor in the evolution of drug resistant bacterial strains.
As to "common resource", drugs are INVENTED. I'd love to view a competent libertarian analysis - and criticism of it - on whether treating a drug design as the private property of the inventor might lead to conservative treatment and delay of bacterial resistance development, whether this might end up with a net increase in medical benefits to the general population (due to more disease being cured) or decrease (from treatments not done due to overly conservative use or high price), whether patent expiration leads to overuse to maximise profit before the monopoly goes away, and how other government interventions would affect the cures/resistance tradeoff.
Anything else though should be fair game.
We're agreed there.
X ray cooling is massively higher in p+B11. So high in fact that you must pump more energy in than you get out, aka it cannot "ignite".
How does X-ray cooling cause problems for polywell, where the concentration mechanism is electrostatic attraction of nuclei to a high-electron-density virtual electrode, rather than plasma compression?
Java is Java.. there generally would not be a "linux version", or any platform specific version.. sort of the whole point of this.
Which is why I neverenable java, period. If a site requires it, they don't need my eyeball time.
Now lets consider the fact that D+T fusion is not here yet and that He3 fusion is more than a 1000 times harder to do. In fact if you can run a He3 fusion plant you can run a DD fusion plant for a fraction of the cost since it is more that 10 times easier to do. Also the ash from DD is He3! It would be cheaper to have DD fusion He3 breeder reactors, than to mine the moon.
Not to mention B11 + H1 -> 3 He4, which is harder than D + D but IIRC easier than He3 + He3. It also releases no neutrons (except for a fraction of a percent from side-reactions when other junk in the plasma gets together) and the fusion energy is easy to convert to DC at a couple megavolts at better than 80% efficiency.
Existing DC power transmission technology already handles 0.8 megavolt and does so with stacks of semiconductor, so converting the DC to transmission-line AC is a solved problem. Boron and light hydrogen are both common and cheap down here.
Crossing my fingers for the Navy's / EMC2's Polywell project, though Dense Plasma Focus or other schemes are also promising.
Let's start investing now, so the price of alternative energy comes down and we can switch to them before energy prices skyrocket.
My point is that, as long as the government does the investing - in the form of picking their cronies as the winners, we WON'T get private investment. Meanwhile government cronies on the dole put on a big show of doing the development but always manage to avoid bringing anything to market - unless it's to kill some competition for a while. Government programs like this just about ALWAYS fail.
WITHOUT the government winner-picking we'd likely ALREADY HAVE affordable alternatives. Investors are very good at figuring out where the money will be coming from in a few years and positioning themselves to sell whatever will get them some.
But they're ALSO good at figuring out that the government will steal some particular cash cow once it's giving milk. So when that's a big risk they don't breed it in the first place.
I thought "rare earth" metals were not so rare, but China is pretty much the only place mining them at scale. Instead of finding alternatives, why not just start mining?
China is the main source right now because they were selling it cheap. Now they're hanging on to it for their own industries and the price is rising. So it makes sense to reopen existing mines.
Wasn't there some in Canada, eh?
There's a bunch just West of Ely NV. And they're starting up a mining operation right now. Nice boost to the town's economy. (My wife and I noticed this when passing through there last fall.)
When fuel is cheap, and likely to stay that way, why invest a bunch of money developing more expensive energy sources that won't pay off for decades?
When existing fuels are about to get expensive it may make sense to develop these pricey alternatives - IF the fuels will STAY expensive once they're developed.
Of course no investor in his right mind will invest in the research if the government is going to hand out millions of bucks to their cronies so said cronies can take over the new market.
Such winner-picking handouts are what we've been seeing for a couple decades now in the renewable energy industries. This handout-to-cronies is just the latest example.
Want cheap energy alternatives to burning fossil fuels? Figure out how to make the government STOP handouts such as this, STOP putting regulatory barriers in the way of deployment, and make this hands-off behavior BELIEVABLE and DEPENDABLE for the decade or so it will take to devvelop, deploy, and profit from an oil replacement.