In terms of aviation, there have been substantial improvements in many related technologies that can be applied to commercial aircraft since the original 747 made its first test flight. Indeed the 747 itself has changed many times and what is coming off the production line today in some ways doesn't even resemble the aircraft that was originally produced.
To pull this argument completely to pieces, Boeing even has plans to replace the 747 due to some of the changes in aviation technology that essentially require a complete clean-sheet redesign of the aircraft. There have been improvements in the technology, and sometimes when you have a wide swath of technological improvements it can be a good time to look at something new.
This said, as was the case for the 747 and the original J-2 engine, what is being expected out of these devices is precisely what was wanted when they were original built in the 1960's. It shouldn't be surprising that something very similar is able to perform the very same task. I use a toaster to warm my bread with a device that looks very similar to what my grandmother had when I was a little child.
So how long before I get a charging station on I-5 between Seattle and Portland?
As soon as you either pay for that recharging station or somebody else thinks they can make a profit from building one.
I'd be more impressed if somebody built a recharging station between Ely and Winnemucca in Nevada. Not that it would necessarily be all that profitable, but rather that it would show the electric car has finally arrived in America thus was built at all. I suspect that interstate highways would generally be good locations, however.
If this vehicle flops and nobody really buys them, the answer could be never.
While "most power" might not be from "renewables", quite a bit is. The point of the matter is that electricity can be generated from almost any sort of heat source or for that matter anything that moves at all and even that isn't strictly limited at a particular generation site to one form either.
Renewable forms include geo-thermal (not strictly renewable, but inexhaustable for the projected lifetime of humanity as a species), solar (ditto), wind, and hydro. Las Vegas has traditionally been powered mostly by hydro-electric facilities such as Hoover Dam.
The issue here is that we don't need to worry about "peak oil" as it is just another form of energy when it comes to electricity, and you can use the most efficient form of power generation wherever it happens to be.
It is also useful to note that the generation of petroleum fuels (gasoline, diesel, and others) at a distillery or refinery of such fuels actually consumes more power to create those fuels in the first place than they could typically produce. In other words, a petroleum refinery couldn't use gasoline it produces to power the refinery itself much less ship that gasoline it produces to anybody else. The typical source of power for a modern refinery? Electricity. In other words a Honda Civic or even other "high efficiency" gasoline vehicle needs to suck up a fairly substantial amount of electricity off of the power grid simply to operate, just in a more indirect fashion. Yes, refineries can use raw crude or "sludges" or by-products of the refining process to generate the heat needed for refining the crude, but that is just another source of heat. Besides, burning petroleum to heat the refinery also invokes all sorts of environmental laws where the refineries want to be "green" by going electric too.
Mind you, this aspect of petroleum fuel generation usually isn't even accounted for when trying to determine net "miles per gallon". Don't you think it would be much more efficient to simply plug your vehicle straight into the grid rather than using the electricity in a much more inefficient process?
Being able to execute a stock trade in sub-millisecond time has esoteric spin-off benefits at best, the profits it generates are wholly disproportionate to any benefit delivered to society.
What profits is it generating, in terms of who is getting the shaft in the end? That various market traders are busy sending shares back and forth to each other is really irrelevant in the long run. The "profit" they are making is off of short-term arbitrage.
For an average person like myself, if I trade shares of a company it will not even be impacted by this kind of trading, other than the price I buy or sell that stock for will be pretty close to the actual market value. The quick response "programmed trading" takes out market inefficiencies so they end up with those taking the risk instead of the small investor. THAT is the service these guys are providing, not fiddling around with thousands of trades each second or whatever it is that they do.
If anything, taxing all of this activity is only going to provide less of it, and increase market inefficiencies for much larger and much more obscene profits to be taken by these larger traders. There is a reason why Bill Gates is pushing for something like this, as he is much more likely to benefit from a tax change of this nature than those of us who are poor.
While I admit that I would like to see fewer economic resources devoted to Wall Street, the solution there is more deregulation and admitting more traders into the market place, not restricting people with taxes and reserving the real money making to just a few people with political connections instead. Or perhaps you are one of the well-connected people in this world and want to keep me from earning a living wage?
Every single scheme that has been derived that has any sort of arbitrary rules like you have described here end up only making the wealthy people even wealthier, as it creates market inefficiencies that they can exploit.
BTW, if you think you have a really impressive idea on how a market should work, I would strongly recommend that you at least attempt it on something like an MMORPG first with player to player item trades (especially raw material speculation markets). I've seen some game makers who have tried to put in rules very similar to the ones you are proposing here, only to see those market system crash and burn real hard in practice.
More importantly, when such rules are created, a "black market" shows up instead to take its spot if there isn't a "legal" alternative. I've seen it happen so many times I think it could even be called an economic "law" that such market manipulations are counter-productive. Most "day traders" who work the virtual markets in MMORPGs likely know more about economics on a practical level than most people with a PhD in economics. Those markets are even more brutal than anything you will find on Wall Street.
Florida has done quite well by repealing their income tax laws and not taxing any sort of retirement savings. Why else do you think all of those folks from NYC have moved to Florida for retirement? It isn't just NYC, but there certainly are a bunch of former New Yorkers living there.
If only more states/countries tried taxation experiments like that.
The problem with economics is that there are very few if any economic models that can be universally applied. If economics could ever get to the level of Psychohistory as Isaac Asimov suggested in his Foundation novels, perhaps it could be given a little more credibility.
There is the "supply/demand curve" and a few other general formulas, but you can't really predict anything other than general trends with those concepts. Something as simple as the Laffer curve can bring out intense debates among politicians and economists, both in terms of where we are in terms of taxation policy on that curve as well as even if the concept itself is valid at all. That the shape of that curve is unknown, much less orders of magnitude used in parameters to generate that curve or even what other variables might be used to skew the predictive ability of the curve might be sort of throw the whole concept out the window except in a broad fashion.
Still, you get stuff like the Drake equation in astrophysics that has similar kinds of problems. That said, economics has nothing like E=mc^2 in terms of a formula that can be reliably predictable to multiple orders of accuracy.
Every analysis I've seen in the past shows that we get an incredible bang for the buck from NASA, in terms of the research they accomplish vs. their funding. But it's not worth anything because it is, by and large, pure research--which has no value to profit-obsessed corporate America.
If you really want to get into a NASA worshiping mode, you need to be very careful here. Yes, NASA can do some amazing things on a shoe string budget, and some of the projects and missions to other planets have panned out spectacularly well, as has other NASA basic research. The aviation research in particular (the first "A" in NASA that is often ignored) is not just very efficient but it also has tremendous value to "corporate America" so far as it has improved commercial aviation in ways that have impacted their bottom line and in general made travel in the skies in any form much safer. Certainly what NASA is doing to improve aircraft safety beats out everything combined by the Transportation Security Administration, especially lives saved by the tax dollars spent.
This said, there are spend thrifty programs at NASA, and at the moment the worst of those happen to be in the manned spaceflight arm of NASA. You certainly can't justify the expenditures toward Constellation or the SLS program, or frankly much of any of the new vehicle development efforts since the Space Shuttle was finally declared an "operational" system in the early 1980's. It has been one train wreck after another going through the concept grinding mill, and the track record that NASA has for actually getting a vehicle built is so miserable that to me it is a wonder they even still exist at all. The SLS architecture in particularly is to build a vehicle that has no defined mission to perform once it is built because the destination for which it is being designed won't exist when it is completed. And that is just scratching the surface of what the problems are for that vehicle. The James Webb Telescope is another huge waste of resources in a horribly mismanaged project.
Don't take this that I hate seeing tax dollars spent in space, as I think it has worked out real well in the past. But giving NASA a blank check doesn't help either and there are some real problems with that agency... mainly due to neglect by several administrations and an ambivalent congress that chooses to ignore the agency as well. There certainly are some major problems with American space policy, and white washing NASA to claim that the money spent there is necessarily going to be used effectively is not really true at the moment. Certainly you shouldn't claim that past performance is necessarily an indication of what is happening there now.
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It also didn't help that the British decided to build "light" ships with Aluminum and other metals instead of traditional steel construction in a fool hardy attempt to save fuel costs over combat survivability, and there were other problems that changed some of the designs for U.S. Navy ship that at the time were moving towards the concepts pioneered by the British and found to not really work in practice.
Then again, you always learn all kinds of interesting lessons when you engage in actual combat vs. simulators and power point presentations trying to convince senior officers or even members of congress what should be done. Far too often the real battles over what gets built happen in the Capitol building (or Westminster in London).
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For myself, I think restarting the Army Air Corps is a pretty good idea, at least in terms of making some aviation assets organic on the divisional level instead of having to request resources from a whole other branch of the military. Yes, I am aware of other parts of Army aviation, particular helicopter units.... which is where they were going to put the A-10 units if they ever got going again. Not into the helicopter units, but additional units organized along similar principles dedicated to the A-10.
You are correct that the USAF had a cow over the idea, and even the mere suggestion that there would be real aviation assets in the U.S. Army was enough to force at least a doctrinal reorganization in the Air Force.
That goes to the argument that copyright terms are simply too long. If copyright was allowed to expire, you would now be seeing scenes where Han Solo shoots Captain Kirk inside of Stargate Command when the Cylons have taken over, but the Browncoats are organizing a resistance movment to take it back.
While I might see something like that on YouTube, such "mashups" are generally illegal. It would make for some fun story telling, however.
Some of the first vinyl LP albums that I bought years ago have become unplayable due to scratches and hard usage. Contrary to what LP album manufacturers want you to believe, LP records won't last forever.
Well, something like that. The mythical "100 year compact disc" certainly was never believed, and all forms of data storage have problems. To get a very long lasting CD, it needed to be essentially an "archival quality" impression onto some durable material, preferably a metal like gold. You can buy such materials, but they are very expensive and generally are not in common usage because the expected life span of those discs aren't all that long.
DVD discs, and Blu-ray discs even more so, have even higher data density and thus are even more prone to accumulated errors.
From an historical perspective, the only way that any information has been preserved over long periods of time is to keep copying that information, preferably to distribute that information widely as well to as many people as possible so if a few copies of that information are lost it can be recovered from the redundancy alone. That certainly is the only way ancient texts such as the Greek literature like the Iliad and religious texts like the New Testament and Talmud have been preserved over the centuries.
It is also a part of human culture, where ideas are over time weeded out. This includes music, where the really bad stuff has simply been forgotten over time. Sometimes good stuff is lost too, but that is part of life. The reason why "classics" are so fondly remembers is that the awful stuff that was being made at the same time isn't remembered.
There was a rather large meteor when not just passed below the ISS altitude, but even made it briefly into the Earth's atmosphere to make a rather spectacular fireball:
It was visible during the day, and the photo was captured in Canada. It was speculated that this meteor would have done some significant damage, and that we were "lucky" it didn't hit. Some have estimated that this meteor was about 3m in diameter and would have made as much as a 3 kiloton explosion had it landed on the Earth's surface. I suppose that was impressive.
Both of those diagrams can be correct. Attempting to squish a 3-dimensional reality into two dimensions can lose all sorts of information. As a comparison, try to make a wire frame model of a cube and then rotate that cube around looking at the shadow being cast upon a flat surface. Depending on how it is rotated, the shadow can be a square, a rectangle with a line through the middle at some arbitrary location, a squished hexagon with triangles, or other harder shapes to describe.
Elliptical orbits with only two points of reference (in the case of the NASA GIF image, the Earth and the Moon) really don't give enough details to understand how that orbit is meeting up with the orbital plane of the Earth and other details which would give you a more clear view of what is going on. The only way to really see this is with some 3-D glasses or a model you could walk around showing this interaction, where I don't think you would necessarily see the "perpendicular" crossing being so obvious.
This isn't scientists trying to yank your chain here, it is just that celestial navigation through the solar system is quite a bit harder than most people would think, and you have to be thinking more in three dimensions than the two you are used to doing when navigating upon the surface of an irregular spheroid like we typically do here on the Earth.
The issue here is the relative speed of the asteroid. It is very likely that it is moving from much further out in the Solar System, thus it will be moving a bit faster than the Earth/Moon.
None the less, this distance to the Earth will be plenty to significantly change the orbital characteristics of this asteroid as it goes around the Sun (due to the gravity of the Earth).
In terms of landing on an asteroid like this, there have been several proposals made to do just that, and there are several other candidate asteroids that will be passing just as close if not even closer over the next decade or so. Some of those missions even have been suggested to be manned missions to the asteroid, which could get quite interesting. One of the mission profiles is to head out to meet the asteroid about a month before it comes close to the Earth, and then do a "sample return" (manned or unmanned) using the Earth's atmosphere as an aerobrake. Obviously you need a much beefier heat shield than for ordinary LEO reentry, but it isn't as bad as it would seem and certainly is the realm of current aeronautical technology to accomplish. The SpaceX Dragon could easily cope with that kind of entry profile, to give an example.
The issue with this particular one is simply timing and getting something sent up before it passes. This particular asteroid is unlikely to get that kind of treatment mainly because it is a much more recent discovery (discovered in 2005 based on its designation), and it hasn't even received an asteroid number yet. This one might actually get a name... something that is missing for most new asteroid discoveries.
If you have a Sony Playstation which costs $4,800 USD, but it gives you a lifetime (of at least the unit) 4G wireless internet connection and unlimited HD quality video to download (anything from the Sony movie collection as well as several other major studios) as well as a web browser and some other fun apps, the price you may be paying for the thing starts to look a whole lot more attractive.
It all depends on what is included and how you perceive the value of what it is that you are getting. Paying $60k for an automobile may be a big ouch, but if you don't have to take it in every three months for an oil change, you don't have to bother checking for other auto fluids, and you don't have to even visit a gas station except to pick up a Slurpee or use the restroom, it starts to look a whole lot more attractive. Adding a solar panel system to the roof of your house can completely disconnect you from even the power grid so you don't even need to worry about power rate increases (or presuming that this device by Rossi works out.... a few hundred dollars is all you need to spend on the electric generators to power your car).
BTW, the Tesla Model S is looking more and more attractive, and it is a full-sized sedan with a 300 mile driving radius for a price of about $60k. With the other features of that car, I would hardly call it "being robbed blind". It is a bit pricy for my budget, but not overly so.
I agree that there certainly are industrial applications of these devices. The intellectual curiosity is more in terms of how a typical "cold fusion" cell could be used, as to the best of my knowledge none of them have even reached the level of neutron production that other kinds of neutron emitters have been able to create, unless you look at what those claiming aneutronic fusion have been supposedly measuring with calorimeters.
Where I'm seeing a huge canyon of results is where a leap of faith is necessary to believe these folks (Rossi, et. al.) have improved this design by several orders of magnitude. Until now, the only legitimate application for cold fusion was just another kind of neutron emitter and not a very good one at that. The neutron emitters you are using are likely derived from something that Philo Farnsworth built with his fusion studies. Farnsworth at least understood vacuum tube construction on a level I could only dream about.
The advantage of a neutron source which can be turned on and off like a light switch has several advantages so far as what you need to have happen during installation or when the device needs to be dismantled due to renovation or even repairs. Most "conventional" neutron sources are usually some sort of radioactive material (often something extracted from a nuclear fission reactor as a by-product) that is in some sort of lead-lined box that is opened from time to time as you need the neutrons. That tends to get very messy if something isn't properly aligned in the device, and "tweaking" radioactive material is not something I consider a long term career prospect, especially if I don't have access to a radioactive material handling lab.
Simply put, a fusion generator tends to be something much easier to use and then gives added bonuses of not having to worry about the "half-life" of the radioactive source, and allows you to "fine tune" the dosage or quantity of neutrons being produced simply by ramping up or down the voltage on the device. "Break-even" fusion isn't even a problem as it isn't even a goal. Essentially, it becomes a tool that is treated very similar to how medical X-ray equipment is being used, but with a much more energetic source on the sub-atomic level.
The "price" of the device is all subjective as the production of some radioactive sources has been heavily subsidized by the production of nuclear weapons and fission power plants. Perhaps that doesn't matter, but then again it takes all sorts of government clearance to get the radioactive material in the first place. Fusor reactors can be made by more ordinary mortals and have been made by high school students on the budget of an ordinary family in a first world country, or college students with money earned over the summer. So have x-ray machines, so it isn't necessarily something I would do without understanding the dangers involved.
How many people who went to a P. T. Barnum show honestly believed that he was disclosing new discoveries in science? He certainly never published in scientific journals any of his creations nor did he try to pass this stuff off to government institutions as if it was the real thing. Certainly he couldn't have been convicted of fraud, even with what was the understanding of the term at the time.
As to if this applies to Rossi, we'll see. I suppose what is being suggested right now is that this "customer" is fake and that this whole 1 MW power plant demonstration (actually just over 400 kW with the latest claim) is just a ruse for what may be the real suckers: those who might sign up after seeing this "demonstration" and try to purchase something like it.
If the "demonstrations' keep happening with anonymous "customers" and one of these boxes doesn't land on the desk of an avowed critic who can pull the thing apart and do some real tests on it, I am also going to continue to doubt the veracity of the claims being made. We'll see how that ends up. If this customer was real and Rossi just did a public con job, I would imagine that the litigious nature of Italian courts (apparently even worse than American courts in terms of how you can be tied up for almost anything) is something Rossi really shouldn't be seeking after. Certainly Italy would not be the prime spot for me to carry out such a scam if that is what I was trying to accomplish.
One issue that has been coming up on some forums about this device is wondering about the massive amounts of energy being produced cheaply by a device like this.... just like you've mentioned.
I think it is a very valid concern, where some people will no longer feel the need to insulate their homes or do energy conservation at all when you have energy levels this cheap. You will likely find at least in some communities these devices installed under sidewalks and municipal streets which keep the streets warm during the winter merely to thaw out the ice and snow. If you thought "global warming" was an issue before, that would be trivial in terms of heat retained through carbon pollution compared to when the average home is producing a megawatt of energy or more. Where does all of that heat energy finally end up? Will that make Minneapolis into a sub-tropical climate with all that heat?
This is being touted as a "green" form of energy, but even if it works there could be some substantial environmental issues we should be dealing with. Expensive petroleum has forced homes to become much better insulated today than most new construction required even 30 years ago. That trend to be better stewards of our environment might just get tossed out the window entirely with this technology.
None of this even remotely addresses issues like military applications, where you might have a portable (or at least a small crew-serviced) rail gun or perhaps a genuine "ray gun" like in the bad science fiction stories. Rossi seems to be a pacifist (the contract he signed with a couple of companies includes a "no military application" clause), but I don't see that restriction being maintained for too long. As somebody else said on a post I read, are they going to keep the Army from installing these "eCat" devices in barracks as a central heating plant?
Yeah, I'm worried about some of the implications of this technology, and these are very valid issues to address.
I agree that the role of federal & state highway taxes in the form of fuel surcharges will have an impact upon the available revenue to various levels of government for the construction of highways and even municipal streets if petroleum stops becoming a major fuel source. Some governments are already feeling the pinch and trying to find alternative solutions to the "problem" by doing stuff more exotic like installing a GPS device in your vehicle to measure mileage driven. They don't consider odometers to be reliable enough for the purpose of taxation, as altering an odometer is considered comparatively trivial to perform.
For myself, I think existing laws prohibiting the tampering of that device already common on all automobiles is something which should be sufficient for the job, other than the issue of what happens when a vehicle crosses state lines and is subject to another jurisdiction. Then again, fuel taxes have the same problem other than the fact that you aren't forced at gunpoint to buy fuel in another state. It is a legal tar pit in terms of balancing rights, obligations (if you consider highway maintenance to be an obligation of those who use them), and government responsibilities.
BTW, in regards to ultra capacitors, I have some deep reservations about the technology. It certainly has some excellent applications, but I'm not convinced that an electric automobile is necessarily the best application of the concept. Certainly using it for a quick recharge flies hard into the face of reality when you realize how much raw energy must be transferred when recharging an automobile just for an ordinary trip. As something connected to one of these "Energy Catalyzer" devices an ultra capacitor makes a whole lot more sense when in turn connected to an electric motor. Then again, its "quick recharge" capability isn't being used even if that happens but rather you are looking more at the high number of cycles that a capacitor can handle as opposed to what something like a Lithium-ion battery can handle. For a vehicle connected to the "power grid" alone for recharging using ultracaps as a replacement for a battery system, I doubt it will be a viable and practical solution.
You have never, ever encountered anyone who treats space "like a religion". You cannot name a single instance of this ever occuring.
There is of course groups like people from the Church of Scientology who will profess that some sort of aliens from another planet have come to the Earth in a way to corrupt humanity. And of course you also have Mormon philosophies of God living on Kolob and other astronomical references which might from a strained viewpoint get a religious bent toward activities in space.
Still, I'd have to agree here about those who are space advocates not being nearly so religious about their philosophies. Certainly it doesn't hold a candle to environmentalism or even sports franchises. Most of the time those who are involved with space advocacy are arguing over what approaches ought to be working and other internal feuds within the area of space advocacy that those on the outside looking in just shake their head and walk off even more confused than before. Perhaps that is where this AC poster is coming from.
Actually, it does put bread on the table. Publishing gets you grants, and almost all big grants (NSF, NIH, etc.) allow for a percentage to go straight to the PI as pay.
I knew a professor who not only got the percentage from the PI responsibility (in spite of not really even being involved in the research and instead handing most of the work to grad students), but that he weaseled his way into getting a healthy percentage of the department's "university overhead" money from various grants as the "grant coordinator" for the college. All supposedly above board.
Supposedly a seven digit annual income when all was said and done. Really not bad at all, and this was at a land-grant state university instead of a really prestigious university.
Allegedly Rossi has sold his house, and sold nearly every asset that he has to pour money into this project. Perhaps I'm missing something here, as the "nice salary" doesn't seem to be what has been going on.
I say allegedly as I don't know the guy personally, and there are some hallmarks of him being perhaps a scam artist because he has credentials from a known diploma mill (from California of all places).
Still, if this plant is not quite what he claims that it is, but if this "investor" or "customer" is more or less legitimate and not part of the scam to get other customers to buy the product, he could get into a world of hurt that an ordinary scammer wouldn't be caught doing. The amount of money involved (in the million dollar range) and the kinds of companies or people who would need a device like this on top of how easy it is to verify that it actually does what it claims to be doing (by running it for a couple weeks or months) would be enough to go after this guy in a real hurry if it fails to deliver.
When you are talking that kind of money, you can't "go underground" and try to hide by being anonymous and moving to a 3rd world country for awhile. That also ruins your chances at doing your next scam. Bernie Madoff certainly scammed that kind of money, but do you think he (Madoff) could ever pull off another scam, or even stay alive if he was released from prison? Yes, I'm being serious about the death threats too.
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In terms of aviation, there have been substantial improvements in many related technologies that can be applied to commercial aircraft since the original 747 made its first test flight. Indeed the 747 itself has changed many times and what is coming off the production line today in some ways doesn't even resemble the aircraft that was originally produced.
To pull this argument completely to pieces, Boeing even has plans to replace the 747 due to some of the changes in aviation technology that essentially require a complete clean-sheet redesign of the aircraft. There have been improvements in the technology, and sometimes when you have a wide swath of technological improvements it can be a good time to look at something new.
This said, as was the case for the 747 and the original J-2 engine, what is being expected out of these devices is precisely what was wanted when they were original built in the 1960's. It shouldn't be surprising that something very similar is able to perform the very same task. I use a toaster to warm my bread with a device that looks very similar to what my grandmother had when I was a little child.
So how long before I get a charging station on I-5 between Seattle and Portland?
As soon as you either pay for that recharging station or somebody else thinks they can make a profit from building one.
I'd be more impressed if somebody built a recharging station between Ely and Winnemucca in Nevada. Not that it would necessarily be all that profitable, but rather that it would show the electric car has finally arrived in America thus was built at all. I suspect that interstate highways would generally be good locations, however.
If this vehicle flops and nobody really buys them, the answer could be never.
While "most power" might not be from "renewables", quite a bit is. The point of the matter is that electricity can be generated from almost any sort of heat source or for that matter anything that moves at all and even that isn't strictly limited at a particular generation site to one form either.
Renewable forms include geo-thermal (not strictly renewable, but inexhaustable for the projected lifetime of humanity as a species), solar (ditto), wind, and hydro. Las Vegas has traditionally been powered mostly by hydro-electric facilities such as Hoover Dam.
The issue here is that we don't need to worry about "peak oil" as it is just another form of energy when it comes to electricity, and you can use the most efficient form of power generation wherever it happens to be.
It is also useful to note that the generation of petroleum fuels (gasoline, diesel, and others) at a distillery or refinery of such fuels actually consumes more power to create those fuels in the first place than they could typically produce. In other words, a petroleum refinery couldn't use gasoline it produces to power the refinery itself much less ship that gasoline it produces to anybody else. The typical source of power for a modern refinery? Electricity. In other words a Honda Civic or even other "high efficiency" gasoline vehicle needs to suck up a fairly substantial amount of electricity off of the power grid simply to operate, just in a more indirect fashion. Yes, refineries can use raw crude or "sludges" or by-products of the refining process to generate the heat needed for refining the crude, but that is just another source of heat. Besides, burning petroleum to heat the refinery also invokes all sorts of environmental laws where the refineries want to be "green" by going electric too.
Mind you, this aspect of petroleum fuel generation usually isn't even accounted for when trying to determine net "miles per gallon". Don't you think it would be much more efficient to simply plug your vehicle straight into the grid rather than using the electricity in a much more inefficient process?
Being able to execute a stock trade in sub-millisecond time has esoteric spin-off benefits at best, the profits it generates are wholly disproportionate to any benefit delivered to society.
What profits is it generating, in terms of who is getting the shaft in the end? That various market traders are busy sending shares back and forth to each other is really irrelevant in the long run. The "profit" they are making is off of short-term arbitrage.
For an average person like myself, if I trade shares of a company it will not even be impacted by this kind of trading, other than the price I buy or sell that stock for will be pretty close to the actual market value. The quick response "programmed trading" takes out market inefficiencies so they end up with those taking the risk instead of the small investor. THAT is the service these guys are providing, not fiddling around with thousands of trades each second or whatever it is that they do.
If anything, taxing all of this activity is only going to provide less of it, and increase market inefficiencies for much larger and much more obscene profits to be taken by these larger traders. There is a reason why Bill Gates is pushing for something like this, as he is much more likely to benefit from a tax change of this nature than those of us who are poor.
While I admit that I would like to see fewer economic resources devoted to Wall Street, the solution there is more deregulation and admitting more traders into the market place, not restricting people with taxes and reserving the real money making to just a few people with political connections instead. Or perhaps you are one of the well-connected people in this world and want to keep me from earning a living wage?
Every single scheme that has been derived that has any sort of arbitrary rules like you have described here end up only making the wealthy people even wealthier, as it creates market inefficiencies that they can exploit.
BTW, if you think you have a really impressive idea on how a market should work, I would strongly recommend that you at least attempt it on something like an MMORPG first with player to player item trades (especially raw material speculation markets). I've seen some game makers who have tried to put in rules very similar to the ones you are proposing here, only to see those market system crash and burn real hard in practice.
More importantly, when such rules are created, a "black market" shows up instead to take its spot if there isn't a "legal" alternative. I've seen it happen so many times I think it could even be called an economic "law" that such market manipulations are counter-productive. Most "day traders" who work the virtual markets in MMORPGs likely know more about economics on a practical level than most people with a PhD in economics. Those markets are even more brutal than anything you will find on Wall Street.
Florida has done quite well by repealing their income tax laws and not taxing any sort of retirement savings. Why else do you think all of those folks from NYC have moved to Florida for retirement? It isn't just NYC, but there certainly are a bunch of former New Yorkers living there.
If only more states/countries tried taxation experiments like that.
The problem with economics is that there are very few if any economic models that can be universally applied. If economics could ever get to the level of Psychohistory as Isaac Asimov suggested in his Foundation novels, perhaps it could be given a little more credibility.
There is the "supply/demand curve" and a few other general formulas, but you can't really predict anything other than general trends with those concepts. Something as simple as the Laffer curve can bring out intense debates among politicians and economists, both in terms of where we are in terms of taxation policy on that curve as well as even if the concept itself is valid at all. That the shape of that curve is unknown, much less orders of magnitude used in parameters to generate that curve or even what other variables might be used to skew the predictive ability of the curve might be sort of throw the whole concept out the window except in a broad fashion.
Still, you get stuff like the Drake equation in astrophysics that has similar kinds of problems. That said, economics has nothing like E=mc^2 in terms of a formula that can be reliably predictable to multiple orders of accuracy.
Every analysis I've seen in the past shows that we get an incredible bang for the buck from NASA, in terms of the research they accomplish vs. their funding. But it's not worth anything because it is, by and large, pure research--which has no value to profit-obsessed corporate America.
If you really want to get into a NASA worshiping mode, you need to be very careful here. Yes, NASA can do some amazing things on a shoe string budget, and some of the projects and missions to other planets have panned out spectacularly well, as has other NASA basic research. The aviation research in particular (the first "A" in NASA that is often ignored) is not just very efficient but it also has tremendous value to "corporate America" so far as it has improved commercial aviation in ways that have impacted their bottom line and in general made travel in the skies in any form much safer. Certainly what NASA is doing to improve aircraft safety beats out everything combined by the Transportation Security Administration, especially lives saved by the tax dollars spent.
This said, there are spend thrifty programs at NASA, and at the moment the worst of those happen to be in the manned spaceflight arm of NASA. You certainly can't justify the expenditures toward Constellation or the SLS program, or frankly much of any of the new vehicle development efforts since the Space Shuttle was finally declared an "operational" system in the early 1980's. It has been one train wreck after another going through the concept grinding mill, and the track record that NASA has for actually getting a vehicle built is so miserable that to me it is a wonder they even still exist at all. The SLS architecture in particularly is to build a vehicle that has no defined mission to perform once it is built because the destination for which it is being designed won't exist when it is completed. And that is just scratching the surface of what the problems are for that vehicle. The James Webb Telescope is another huge waste of resources in a horribly mismanaged project.
Don't take this that I hate seeing tax dollars spent in space, as I think it has worked out real well in the past. But giving NASA a blank check doesn't help either and there are some real problems with that agency... mainly due to neglect by several administrations and an ambivalent congress that chooses to ignore the agency as well. There certainly are some major problems with American space policy, and white washing NASA to claim that the money spent there is necessarily going to be used effectively is not really true at the moment. Certainly you shouldn't claim that past performance is necessarily an indication of what is happening there now.
It also didn't help that the British decided to build "light" ships with Aluminum and other metals instead of traditional steel construction in a fool hardy attempt to save fuel costs over combat survivability, and there were other problems that changed some of the designs for U.S. Navy ship that at the time were moving towards the concepts pioneered by the British and found to not really work in practice.
Then again, you always learn all kinds of interesting lessons when you engage in actual combat vs. simulators and power point presentations trying to convince senior officers or even members of congress what should be done. Far too often the real battles over what gets built happen in the Capitol building (or Westminster in London).
For myself, I think restarting the Army Air Corps is a pretty good idea, at least in terms of making some aviation assets organic on the divisional level instead of having to request resources from a whole other branch of the military. Yes, I am aware of other parts of Army aviation, particular helicopter units.... which is where they were going to put the A-10 units if they ever got going again. Not into the helicopter units, but additional units organized along similar principles dedicated to the A-10.
You are correct that the USAF had a cow over the idea, and even the mere suggestion that there would be real aviation assets in the U.S. Army was enough to force at least a doctrinal reorganization in the Air Force.
That goes to the argument that copyright terms are simply too long. If copyright was allowed to expire, you would now be seeing scenes where Han Solo shoots Captain Kirk inside of Stargate Command when the Cylons have taken over, but the Browncoats are organizing a resistance movment to take it back.
While I might see something like that on YouTube, such "mashups" are generally illegal. It would make for some fun story telling, however.
Some of the first vinyl LP albums that I bought years ago have become unplayable due to scratches and hard usage. Contrary to what LP album manufacturers want you to believe, LP records won't last forever.
Well, something like that. The mythical "100 year compact disc" certainly was never believed, and all forms of data storage have problems. To get a very long lasting CD, it needed to be essentially an "archival quality" impression onto some durable material, preferably a metal like gold. You can buy such materials, but they are very expensive and generally are not in common usage because the expected life span of those discs aren't all that long.
DVD discs, and Blu-ray discs even more so, have even higher data density and thus are even more prone to accumulated errors.
From an historical perspective, the only way that any information has been preserved over long periods of time is to keep copying that information, preferably to distribute that information widely as well to as many people as possible so if a few copies of that information are lost it can be recovered from the redundancy alone. That certainly is the only way ancient texts such as the Greek literature like the Iliad and religious texts like the New Testament and Talmud have been preserved over the centuries.
It is also a part of human culture, where ideas are over time weeded out. This includes music, where the really bad stuff has simply been forgotten over time. Sometimes good stuff is lost too, but that is part of life. The reason why "classics" are so fondly remembers is that the awful stuff that was being made at the same time isn't remembered.
There was a rather large meteor when not just passed below the ISS altitude, but even made it briefly into the Earth's atmosphere to make a rather spectacular fireball:
http://www.coldsplinters.com/2010/08/the-great-daylight-1972-fireball/
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Daylight_1972_Fireball
It was visible during the day, and the photo was captured in Canada. It was speculated that this meteor would have done some significant damage, and that we were "lucky" it didn't hit. Some have estimated that this meteor was about 3m in diameter and would have made as much as a 3 kiloton explosion had it landed on the Earth's surface. I suppose that was impressive.
Both of those diagrams can be correct. Attempting to squish a 3-dimensional reality into two dimensions can lose all sorts of information. As a comparison, try to make a wire frame model of a cube and then rotate that cube around looking at the shadow being cast upon a flat surface. Depending on how it is rotated, the shadow can be a square, a rectangle with a line through the middle at some arbitrary location, a squished hexagon with triangles, or other harder shapes to describe.
Elliptical orbits with only two points of reference (in the case of the NASA GIF image, the Earth and the Moon) really don't give enough details to understand how that orbit is meeting up with the orbital plane of the Earth and other details which would give you a more clear view of what is going on. The only way to really see this is with some 3-D glasses or a model you could walk around showing this interaction, where I don't think you would necessarily see the "perpendicular" crossing being so obvious.
This isn't scientists trying to yank your chain here, it is just that celestial navigation through the solar system is quite a bit harder than most people would think, and you have to be thinking more in three dimensions than the two you are used to doing when navigating upon the surface of an irregular spheroid like we typically do here on the Earth.
The issue here is the relative speed of the asteroid. It is very likely that it is moving from much further out in the Solar System, thus it will be moving a bit faster than the Earth/Moon.
None the less, this distance to the Earth will be plenty to significantly change the orbital characteristics of this asteroid as it goes around the Sun (due to the gravity of the Earth).
In terms of landing on an asteroid like this, there have been several proposals made to do just that, and there are several other candidate asteroids that will be passing just as close if not even closer over the next decade or so. Some of those missions even have been suggested to be manned missions to the asteroid, which could get quite interesting. One of the mission profiles is to head out to meet the asteroid about a month before it comes close to the Earth, and then do a "sample return" (manned or unmanned) using the Earth's atmosphere as an aerobrake. Obviously you need a much beefier heat shield than for ordinary LEO reentry, but it isn't as bad as it would seem and certainly is the realm of current aeronautical technology to accomplish. The SpaceX Dragon could easily cope with that kind of entry profile, to give an example.
The issue with this particular one is simply timing and getting something sent up before it passes. This particular asteroid is unlikely to get that kind of treatment mainly because it is a much more recent discovery (discovered in 2005 based on its designation), and it hasn't even received an asteroid number yet. This one might actually get a name... something that is missing for most new asteroid discoveries.
If you have a Sony Playstation which costs $4,800 USD, but it gives you a lifetime (of at least the unit) 4G wireless internet connection and unlimited HD quality video to download (anything from the Sony movie collection as well as several other major studios) as well as a web browser and some other fun apps, the price you may be paying for the thing starts to look a whole lot more attractive.
It all depends on what is included and how you perceive the value of what it is that you are getting. Paying $60k for an automobile may be a big ouch, but if you don't have to take it in every three months for an oil change, you don't have to bother checking for other auto fluids, and you don't have to even visit a gas station except to pick up a Slurpee or use the restroom, it starts to look a whole lot more attractive. Adding a solar panel system to the roof of your house can completely disconnect you from even the power grid so you don't even need to worry about power rate increases (or presuming that this device by Rossi works out.... a few hundred dollars is all you need to spend on the electric generators to power your car).
BTW, the Tesla Model S is looking more and more attractive, and it is a full-sized sedan with a 300 mile driving radius for a price of about $60k. With the other features of that car, I would hardly call it "being robbed blind". It is a bit pricy for my budget, but not overly so.
I guess I was missing your POV. Sorry about that.
I agree that there certainly are industrial applications of these devices. The intellectual curiosity is more in terms of how a typical "cold fusion" cell could be used, as to the best of my knowledge none of them have even reached the level of neutron production that other kinds of neutron emitters have been able to create, unless you look at what those claiming aneutronic fusion have been supposedly measuring with calorimeters.
Where I'm seeing a huge canyon of results is where a leap of faith is necessary to believe these folks (Rossi, et. al.) have improved this design by several orders of magnitude. Until now, the only legitimate application for cold fusion was just another kind of neutron emitter and not a very good one at that. The neutron emitters you are using are likely derived from something that Philo Farnsworth built with his fusion studies. Farnsworth at least understood vacuum tube construction on a level I could only dream about.
The advantage of a neutron source which can be turned on and off like a light switch has several advantages so far as what you need to have happen during installation or when the device needs to be dismantled due to renovation or even repairs. Most "conventional" neutron sources are usually some sort of radioactive material (often something extracted from a nuclear fission reactor as a by-product) that is in some sort of lead-lined box that is opened from time to time as you need the neutrons. That tends to get very messy if something isn't properly aligned in the device, and "tweaking" radioactive material is not something I consider a long term career prospect, especially if I don't have access to a radioactive material handling lab.
Simply put, a fusion generator tends to be something much easier to use and then gives added bonuses of not having to worry about the "half-life" of the radioactive source, and allows you to "fine tune" the dosage or quantity of neutrons being produced simply by ramping up or down the voltage on the device. "Break-even" fusion isn't even a problem as it isn't even a goal. Essentially, it becomes a tool that is treated very similar to how medical X-ray equipment is being used, but with a much more energetic source on the sub-atomic level.
The "price" of the device is all subjective as the production of some radioactive sources has been heavily subsidized by the production of nuclear weapons and fission power plants. Perhaps that doesn't matter, but then again it takes all sorts of government clearance to get the radioactive material in the first place. Fusor reactors can be made by more ordinary mortals and have been made by high school students on the budget of an ordinary family in a first world country, or college students with money earned over the summer. So have x-ray machines, so it isn't necessarily something I would do without understanding the dangers involved.
How many people who went to a P. T. Barnum show honestly believed that he was disclosing new discoveries in science? He certainly never published in scientific journals any of his creations nor did he try to pass this stuff off to government institutions as if it was the real thing. Certainly he couldn't have been convicted of fraud, even with what was the understanding of the term at the time.
As to if this applies to Rossi, we'll see. I suppose what is being suggested right now is that this "customer" is fake and that this whole 1 MW power plant demonstration (actually just over 400 kW with the latest claim) is just a ruse for what may be the real suckers: those who might sign up after seeing this "demonstration" and try to purchase something like it.
If the "demonstrations' keep happening with anonymous "customers" and one of these boxes doesn't land on the desk of an avowed critic who can pull the thing apart and do some real tests on it, I am also going to continue to doubt the veracity of the claims being made. We'll see how that ends up. If this customer was real and Rossi just did a public con job, I would imagine that the litigious nature of Italian courts (apparently even worse than American courts in terms of how you can be tied up for almost anything) is something Rossi really shouldn't be seeking after. Certainly Italy would not be the prime spot for me to carry out such a scam if that is what I was trying to accomplish.
One issue that has been coming up on some forums about this device is wondering about the massive amounts of energy being produced cheaply by a device like this.... just like you've mentioned.
I think it is a very valid concern, where some people will no longer feel the need to insulate their homes or do energy conservation at all when you have energy levels this cheap. You will likely find at least in some communities these devices installed under sidewalks and municipal streets which keep the streets warm during the winter merely to thaw out the ice and snow. If you thought "global warming" was an issue before, that would be trivial in terms of heat retained through carbon pollution compared to when the average home is producing a megawatt of energy or more. Where does all of that heat energy finally end up? Will that make Minneapolis into a sub-tropical climate with all that heat?
This is being touted as a "green" form of energy, but even if it works there could be some substantial environmental issues we should be dealing with. Expensive petroleum has forced homes to become much better insulated today than most new construction required even 30 years ago. That trend to be better stewards of our environment might just get tossed out the window entirely with this technology.
None of this even remotely addresses issues like military applications, where you might have a portable (or at least a small crew-serviced) rail gun or perhaps a genuine "ray gun" like in the bad science fiction stories. Rossi seems to be a pacifist (the contract he signed with a couple of companies includes a "no military application" clause), but I don't see that restriction being maintained for too long. As somebody else said on a post I read, are they going to keep the Army from installing these "eCat" devices in barracks as a central heating plant?
Yeah, I'm worried about some of the implications of this technology, and these are very valid issues to address.
I agree that the role of federal & state highway taxes in the form of fuel surcharges will have an impact upon the available revenue to various levels of government for the construction of highways and even municipal streets if petroleum stops becoming a major fuel source. Some governments are already feeling the pinch and trying to find alternative solutions to the "problem" by doing stuff more exotic like installing a GPS device in your vehicle to measure mileage driven. They don't consider odometers to be reliable enough for the purpose of taxation, as altering an odometer is considered comparatively trivial to perform.
For myself, I think existing laws prohibiting the tampering of that device already common on all automobiles is something which should be sufficient for the job, other than the issue of what happens when a vehicle crosses state lines and is subject to another jurisdiction. Then again, fuel taxes have the same problem other than the fact that you aren't forced at gunpoint to buy fuel in another state. It is a legal tar pit in terms of balancing rights, obligations (if you consider highway maintenance to be an obligation of those who use them), and government responsibilities.
BTW, in regards to ultra capacitors, I have some deep reservations about the technology. It certainly has some excellent applications, but I'm not convinced that an electric automobile is necessarily the best application of the concept. Certainly using it for a quick recharge flies hard into the face of reality when you realize how much raw energy must be transferred when recharging an automobile just for an ordinary trip. As something connected to one of these "Energy Catalyzer" devices an ultra capacitor makes a whole lot more sense when in turn connected to an electric motor. Then again, its "quick recharge" capability isn't being used even if that happens but rather you are looking more at the high number of cycles that a capacitor can handle as opposed to what something like a Lithium-ion battery can handle. For a vehicle connected to the "power grid" alone for recharging using ultracaps as a replacement for a battery system, I doubt it will be a viable and practical solution.
Thank you for that reference. I really do intend to look it up and study the town.
You have never, ever encountered anyone who treats space "like a religion". You cannot name a single instance of this ever occuring.
There is of course groups like people from the Church of Scientology who will profess that some sort of aliens from another planet have come to the Earth in a way to corrupt humanity. And of course you also have Mormon philosophies of God living on Kolob and other astronomical references which might from a strained viewpoint get a religious bent toward activities in space.
Still, I'd have to agree here about those who are space advocates not being nearly so religious about their philosophies. Certainly it doesn't hold a candle to environmentalism or even sports franchises. Most of the time those who are involved with space advocacy are arguing over what approaches ought to be working and other internal feuds within the area of space advocacy that those on the outside looking in just shake their head and walk off even more confused than before. Perhaps that is where this AC poster is coming from.
Actually, it does put bread on the table. Publishing gets you grants, and almost all big grants (NSF, NIH, etc.) allow for a percentage to go straight to the PI as pay.
I knew a professor who not only got the percentage from the PI responsibility (in spite of not really even being involved in the research and instead handing most of the work to grad students), but that he weaseled his way into getting a healthy percentage of the department's "university overhead" money from various grants as the "grant coordinator" for the college. All supposedly above board.
Supposedly a seven digit annual income when all was said and done. Really not bad at all, and this was at a land-grant state university instead of a really prestigious university.
Allegedly Rossi has sold his house, and sold nearly every asset that he has to pour money into this project. Perhaps I'm missing something here, as the "nice salary" doesn't seem to be what has been going on.
I say allegedly as I don't know the guy personally, and there are some hallmarks of him being perhaps a scam artist because he has credentials from a known diploma mill (from California of all places).
Still, if this plant is not quite what he claims that it is, but if this "investor" or "customer" is more or less legitimate and not part of the scam to get other customers to buy the product, he could get into a world of hurt that an ordinary scammer wouldn't be caught doing. The amount of money involved (in the million dollar range) and the kinds of companies or people who would need a device like this on top of how easy it is to verify that it actually does what it claims to be doing (by running it for a couple weeks or months) would be enough to go after this guy in a real hurry if it fails to deliver.
When you are talking that kind of money, you can't "go underground" and try to hide by being anonymous and moving to a 3rd world country for awhile. That also ruins your chances at doing your next scam. Bernie Madoff certainly scammed that kind of money, but do you think he (Madoff) could ever pull off another scam, or even stay alive if he was released from prison? Yes, I'm being serious about the death threats too.