Arguably much of the reason why most corporations are abandoning basic and pure research is largely due to government interference and the deliberate encouragement of mergers and hostile take-overs within the public equity markets. Tax policies substantially discourage corporate research, and certainly discourage any sort of long term investing where any sort of pot of money set aside for future expenses is quickly going to be taxed to oblivion.
In other words, the reason why government has to be the source of basic research is because the government has deemed itself to be the arbiter of what ought to be basic science for purely political reasons so it can reward those who play nice and according to the rules at the expense of those who have a contrarian point of view. If you don't have the right political connections, your research project is screwed.
For myself, I would rather that the government get out of the game of advanced and basic research, but that would imply that they trust their citizens to be capable of making their own decisions with their own money and not have to spend a minor fortune hiring a bunch of lawyers and accountants to hide the money in creative ways (including into the bank accounts of politicians).
Companies like AT&T used to have incredible basic research facilities including scientists that were routinely published in major scientific journals and even won Nobel Prizes. Bell Labs was a top notch facility for basic research, and little of it had a 5-10 year ROI. Much of what was done there was certainly for much longer term development.
Other companies like IBM and even Microsoft have R&D groups that even now are doing some amazing things. In fact, I wish that Microsoft as a company paid more attention to what their far out researchers were coming up with rather than simply letting the ideas die as a cute intellectual curiosity. Unfortunately these are, as you've pointed out, the exceptions to the rule rather than something typical with corporations.
I'm just saying it doesn't have to be this way and trusting democratic (little-d as in Thomas Jefferson's concept of a limited government) principles that people if left to themselves will usually get things right is by far and away healthier for freedom and will ultimately do more to advance scientific ideas than trying to shoehorn everything through some sort of gatekeeper who doesn't always know what is best.
Scaled Composites & Richard Branson came out with a statement that they are fully aware of some of these issues and that they are working on alternative fuels to perhaps mitigate this problem too. As you point out, there were many reasons why they went with this particular solution, where vehicle safety is one of the things that was of primary importance where they don't necessarily want to be on the bleeding edge of technical performance. The goal is to have an airline quality of performance for roughly how often this vehicle is going to be going into space, and to be able to "refuel" this spacecraft quickly.
How is the stuff from volcanoes any different? Volcanoes contain traces of just about every naturally occurring element including Uranium, extreme heat in its plume, and these compounds produced from a volcanic explosion certainly do make it to the stratosphere and sometimes even higher.
All at once (relatively speaking), in a plume from one point. Whereas the rocket exhaust originates over a much larger area
In this regard the rocket is much, much more focused to a very small area compared to a volcano, and a vast majority of this "soot" remains by definition in the troposphere where it rains down as... rain. It doesn't stay long in the sky. In other words, the impact of a particular rocket launch is minor compared to that of a volcano, so much so that it can be completely dismissed as having any significant impact on the global climate at all. It would take many more than 40k launches to make a difference.
As for "high altitude nuclear weapons tests" are concerned, define "high altitude" before you come to any conclusions. The problem with the high altitude tests that ended up creating the "Nuclear Test Ban Treaty" is that they were detonated at an altitude about where the Space Shuttle flies, and the fallout persisted for some time at that altitude in the form of charged particles trapped in the Van Allen Belts, causing persistent and long term ionizing radiation problems for folks and spacecraft that had to travel into space. That is not even a legitimate or remotely fair comparison to some ash that is left over at a much lower altitude.
The comparisons to major volcanic eruptions is very much spot on analysis as it is comparing the same things, and in some cases even the same compounds where the volcanic eruptions are going to be even more extreme in terms of heating conditions that produce those compounds.
The whole point is that the existing standards aren't accurate enough, and that the measurement devices are now accurate to the degree that measuring the mass loss from one day to the next can be accurately measured and compared to the mass loss in the other 40 official standards that are found around the world.
In other words, the standard isn't standard. That is the point! And it does need to be very frickin' accurate!
Not really. Once you have defined the mass in some physical terms, there are other ways which a "standard" can be created. The trick here is to define the mass in such a way that it can be reproduced with nothing more than the raw definition rather than having to do the painstaking task of trying to constantly compare it to the physical standard that exists somewhere.
They aren't really trying to make this new "standard" to be anything but close to the original standard. You shouldn't notice anything in terms of bathroom scales or anything that most people encounter in day to day life, but it will mean that the precision with which things will be measured can be improved with a more refined and updated standard.
There have been several other approaches to defining a mass standard that bypasses the need for a physical lump of anything at all, which is why this hasn't necessarily been the easiest thing to come to a consensus or agreement upon. Also, don't expect this to be the final word on mass either, as the definition of a second has changed even after they got rid of the physical standard of the rotational velocity of the Earth.
The problem has always been trying to decide upon what new standard might be the replacement, not necessarily that it needed to be replaced. There apparently were some objections to the Silicon sphere approach and there were some suggestions to try instead to use an electrical standard (so many watts & volts with a certain applied current that would exert a certain amount of force from which a mass standard could be derived) and some other approaches were considered. I'm not sure how many different ideas were presented, but it was more than a few and the Silicon sphere certainly isn't the only possible solution.
The pound and the inch are defined as a matter of law in the USA in terms of metric units anyway (the inch is 2.54 cm exactly to as many decimal places as you want to make it) so accepting a new standard isn't going to be a problem. The question is if the larger international standards bodies are going to accept any new definition for the kilogram, of which the NIST is a part of those bodies... and which standard will apply.
The meter was defined as a fraction of the distance along the Prime Meridian from some crazy location in France to the North Pole, and the second was defined as 1/86400th of a day. The problem with these as a system to standardized measurements is that they aren't precise enough. A day can vary by quite a bit and it turns out that even over a fairly long period of time that the Earth still isn't constant. You have precession, slowing of the Earth due to the gravity of the Sun and the Moon tugging at the oceans (giving you tides BTW), variations in the orbit of the Earth, and other factors that make using the Earth as a physical constant for measuring time to be sort of pointless.
Ditto for the meter, as that spot in France that was the original standard for the meter is also moving due to geological forces... by a couple centimeters each year. Eventually it became a "meter bar" but even that isn't quite precise enough and becomes problematic when you try to duplicate the exact distance of a meter for measurements.
On top of these issues is also the isotopic purity of water, where different isotopes of Hydrogen and Oxygen can make a difference. "Heavy Water" really is heavier than ordinary water... the isotopes make a difference. If you say you need to use distilled water, even that has problems, depending on the source of that water and the method of distillation. On top of that, you need to define pressure, temperature, and other features into such a standard that gets really messy. Since pressure is defined in terms of mass, how do you get that standardized again?
You are correct that the rough definition you are quoting was the original definition of a gram at least to define the original concept, assuming "typical" atmospheric pressure on the Earth and that the water is in an open container in a humid environment (so the water doesn't evaporate too quickly before it is measured). The kilogram artifact as mentioned in this article was an attempt to avoid most of the problems associated with a water definition by defining a specific combination of supposedly "stable" metals. The combination of Platinum and Iridium was chosen explicitly because they weren't radioactive, resisted corrosion, and could be easily formed in a laboratory presuming that you had the proper dimensions measured in terms of meters (which were considered fairly accurate for measurement at the time). The problem is that the measurement equipment now currently exceeds the ability for even this fairly stable standard to maintain its mass, and the mass standards are apparently losing mass over time from oxidation and other chemical process simply by existing on the Earth. This happens very slowly, but it is happening, in spite of the fact that most mass standards are kept in double bell jars in a safe at a very secure facility. They are guarded stronger than most monetary reserves and you certainly aren't going to be given one of these standards to be sitting in your bare hand.
One thing about an executive order is that it is an "order" from the President to an employee of the U.S. government telling them how they are supposed to do their job. A simply and ordinary law passed by Congress can override this order, so it is subordinate to legislation passed by Congress.
Since the U.S. government is so huge and expansive, and the authority of even individual agents and employees so expansive, an executive order can have the effect and impact often that a law has, including the interpretation of deliberately left vague sections of various laws that have been enacted.
These "executive agreements" pretty much are done along similar lines, but unfortunately the courts are increasingly interpreting them as a form of treaties when in fact they aren't. That is a significant problem.
Where I have a problem with the ACTA is that it has been negotiated in secret. To me, treaties and for that matter any sort of government business should never be done in secret with the possible exception of military planning.and matters of a personal nature. I don't expect to know each time an elected official takes a dump, to give an example. But if they are making some key decisions and making major policy documents, those should be open to the public and be debated and discussed by the citizens as well. Copyright as an issue in particular serves nothing to keep hidden and by definition shouldn't be something classified as a national security secret.
I'm curious about what kind of energy losses come from a flywheel energy storage device? I am presuming that the purpose of this is to smooth out the power demand at a "refilling station" rather than to power individual vehicles. For some details, there is this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage#Uninterruptible_power_supply
What is scary to think about here is that these will likely be installed into "petrol stations" (gasoline stations to you insensitive Americans). Arcing electrical conduits with presumably high voltages and current draws to facilitate these kind of recharging centers for electric vehicles seems to be precisely what you don't want to have anywhere near extremely flammable liquids (gasoline, ethanol, propane, or even compressed natural gas). It seems to me that this may require setting up a whole independent network to get something like this going with some legislated distances between the charging areas and where petroleum distillates are being dispensed.
Fueling stations in their varieties usually wouldn't mind a minor add-on to expand their customer pool or to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but it would be interesting to see how these kind of charging stations might be set up.
One thing I have seen, however, is hotels, restaurants, and some other "tourist friendly" venues that are beginning to offer at least a 110-volt 30-amp circuit to their customers for use with electric automobiles. This isn't a big deal, draws comparatively little current anyway, and if you are staying in a hotel your vehicle can be fully charged when you wake up in the morning after a night in the hotel, or top off the charge while you are eating at a restaurant. It won't be fully recharged from being "empty" in six minutes, but it will get the job done without requiring some heavy gauge wiring to make the circuit work and is more likely to be what you will see including perhaps some "coin-operated" outlets at public parks where you can pay for just the access to the outlet.
I know of some power distribution lines that do some direct current power transmission between facilities and then convert that to AC when put into the local power grids. It isn't nearly as uncommon as you'd think, but you are correct that most power available to ordinary consumers is alternating current.
Forklifts, if they use batteries at all, are typically lead-acid batteries. Yeah, that is a ground-breaking technology there. I could see a bank of lead-acid batteries powering a fork-lift for a maximum duty cycle of 30 hours, with the typical being about 24 hours between charges.
There might be some vehicles like this with more "modern" types of batteries including NiMH and Li-Ion batteries, but I don't expect to see anything more exotic that hasn't been widely used already for applications of that nature.
This would be a perfect thread to "confess" to being a time traveler. I even thought of trying to come up with a much better "future history" story than "John Titor".
I figure it isn't worth my time to come up with such a story although it would sure be a whole lot of fun just to see the chain of a bunch of nerds yanked real hard.
There is the possibility that whatever changes you might try to make to change history would only backfire and cause many more problems.
Back in the 1920's there was a very strong pacifists movement including some attempts at very high levels of government to "outlaw war" through treaty and other means. This included naval armament limitations on the major world powers (Germany and Japan got the short end of the stick on these efforts... a lot of good that did) and doing things like the Geneva Convention.
If you really think you could have done better than some of the best minds and diplomats in the world to stop World War II, I would love to see you try. Assassinating Adolph Hitler right after the Beer Putsch might have helped a little bit, but even that wouldn't necessarily have fixed the problems of the era.
You might make a small difference on some key thing, and perhaps get some "green" technologies funded and developed a bit earlier if you went back in time, but I think it would be much harder to make a difference even if you tried.
I'm not saying that an individual can't make a difference, but it often is much harder than it seems and there certainly are social forces at play over history that often need to be resolved... and those methods of getting resolved often aren't pretty either. In going back in time the only advantage you would be able to have is some 20/20 hindsight on some key issues and some foreknowledge of what would be coming. If you read history, many of the crazy ideas you are suggesting were even tried... often by people who were quite wealthy. An easy way to lose money is to invest in something prematurely that is "ahead of its time".
Precisely! There are no cell towers in 1928, not to mention no technology capable of even remotely replicating one, so it couldn't be a cell phone. That's not to say it's not (possibly) some form of small communication device. But there's no clear image of what's in his/her/it's hand. Now if there was a Motorola or Nokia logo clearly visible, I'd be singing a different tune!
it's naive to assume that the idea of a handheld radio phone was beyond the conception of people at that time. It merely was not practical yet with the technology available at the time, in much the same way as the ideas of force fields, antigravity, artificial gravity, tractor beams, FTL travel, and teleportation are not beyond our comprehension, but the technology needed to make them happen is decades away, if not centuries.
By this same standard, someone might look at the hardware in Star Trek and assume that somebody had traveled back in time with a Palm Pilot. By this same standard, perhaps somebody traveled back in time and brought the creator of Dick Tracy one of the new cell phone watches that just came out a couple of years ago, some sixty-plus years after the concept first appeared in those comics.
There is a world of difference between a radio telephone and something like anti-gravity, tractor beams, and FTL travel. Radios were common and personal two-way communication was already happening over the air waves, although it was mostly experimentation by Ham Radio operators who came up with all kinds of crazy schemes for communications systems of a more personal level. Other than the miniaturization of electronic components, at least a simple cell phone circuit for at least the headset wouldn't have even been much of a stretch of the imagination for an electrical engineer of the era.
On the other hand, most of these other technologies that you mention are so far "out there" that the raw physics of how they could even work is either fringe science or simple unknown. By fringe I'm talking people who are totally discredited and generally considered cranks to even come up with some crazy and wild explanation for how they work. About the only thing you mention here that is even somewhat remotely feasible is teleportation.... something that has only recently been discovered and right now is only transporting a few atoms at a time... certainly not whole people or objects. I suppose a tera-Q-bit quantum computer might be able to teleport something macroscopic, and that is at least in the realm of something theoretically possible a couple of centuries of millennia from now. I would give even odds or worse that it will be functioning in the 23rd Century beyond a technical curiosity like how fusors currently allow desktop fusion reactors.
The one "Star Trek" invention that I never expected to see in my lifetime was the iPad... a flat screen portable computer running on its own power supply and being networked "wirelessly" to other computing devices, capable of voice input but a stylus could also be used directly on the screen instead if desired. The Star Trek writers called it a "Padd Computer".
If you are going back in time, at least to America, gold is a good universal exchange medium. The only time you really have to worry about gold being a major issue is between the Franklin Roosevelt era and the Carter era, when owning gold was considered illegal except for small quantities for jewelry and perhaps electronics.
Going back in time 82 years? A few gold coins weighing 1 troy ounce each would be very much welcomed. Then again, you would have to ask how many gold coins it would take to buy enough shares of stock to make a difference.
If you subscribe to the theory that going back in time actually takes you to a "parallel universe" which is similar but not exactly the same as our own universe, you don't have to worry about the grandfather paradox. Killing your own grandpa will only mean that you won't be born in that alternate universe. That could have some significant impact upon world events, but causality wouldn't necessarily be violated. You could even go "looping" back to another very similar universe with your billions that you got from investing in Apple Computer & Microsoft back when they IPO'd.
And what do you do if you get bored with reading junk produced as "literature" these days and don't want to take the effort to find the stuff worthwhile?
Then again I would say this is a fault of American television and why the shows often suck. If you don't have a good story arc that holds the series together, or worse yet when you get to the end of a major story arc and the show is so popular that the money guys are begging that you continue the series, that is when the show really starts to fall apart.
In many ways, the production process is a part of the problem where there is so much uncertainty to if you are even going to be producing an episode tomorrow (some TV series are canceled even mid season during production and even while only some of the last episode is being filmed... being a second or later season doesn't seem to help here either). The people producing the shows generally want to put out a good product and while money is good they are more interested in pleasing their fans or doing something innovative and different.
As a result of this production process, the production people don't really put that much effort into a series arc. That works for some shows like Law & Order where you can put any two random episodes together and it doesn't really matter in terms of understanding the story. Not all television series seem to work like that, however, and that isn't even really good story telling either even if seems to be where most new television series are headed.
What hurt Caprica even more (having just seen some of the season 1.5 episodes) is that information needed to watch an episode is found in earlier episodes of the season. In other words, it is very much a serial where the whole season tells the story and not just one part. The problem with a series of that nature is that it sort of pushes away new viewers who don't have access to the first episode.
I thought the series was extremely well done, but it was very dark and in some ways very disturbing as well. Much of the first half-season dealt with virtual reality and MMORPGs in a way that I have never seen dealt with by a major media outlet before. The show's producers "get" what it is like to play in an MMORPG and if you want to see what one might be like in a couple hundred years, Caprica has a very good example of one that Zoe Greystone plays in. Then again, it also captures the MMORPG experience by having a bunch of kids playing around in a virtual environment where the parents don't know what the heck their kids are up to other than "playing with computers".
The second half-season deals more with the "STO", which is an Al-Queida-like terrorist organization which foreshadows the rise of the Cylons and goes into depth of how that organization is put together. Again, this is something that is certainly part of the backstory of Battlestar Galactica and being brought forward, but isn't easy for people to watch or the complex interplay between religions, where most normal "colonists" are polytheistic and the terrorist organization uses a monotheistic approach that echos Islam but isn't quite that either. Many people don't want to have religion crammed down their throats in this fashion, especially when it might be pointing out that their own religion could be just as corrupted.
The "bring back Battlestar Galactica" crowd finally got their day in the sun.... with something worthy of that adoration as well. While there were hold-outs like Richard Hatch (the actor, not the Survivor contestant) that finally gave the new incarnation his blessings, most fans of the old show starring Loren Greene were generally happen with the remake when it happened.
Then again it took nearly twenty years and something like the SciFy Channel to get it made in the first place.
I can only hope that Firefly gets that same kind of treatment when one of the current geeks who call themselves a browncoat finally get to a position where perhaps some quality science fiction programming gets made. Most people don't know quality science fiction if it hit them in the face.
But if you want to add another floor, you can usually get a permission from the city (or whatever), as long as they deem it safe and all. The company who sold you your house certainly doesn't get to decide.
A lot of home owners associations are either run by or subordinate to the subdivision developer. You can be sure you won't be allowed to add a second story to any house governed by a HOA.
Correction.... "home-owners associations" are set up and established by developers, but it is operated by and continued to exist by the home owners themselves. It becomes in essence another layer of government for you to worry about. In theory, most HOAs can be dissolved simply by have the owners get together and dump the organization, but in practice that is unlikely to happen except by neglect.
I technically belong to an HOA, but it has never been put together and most of the original home owners in my subdivision have since sold their homes where the subsequent owners didn't sign an HOA agreement in the purchase transaction. I'm not complaining as it was a lousy group to begin with and I may be the only HOA member left at this point... essentially I can amend an change the covenants to whatever I want at this point as the sole member of the group.
Many HOAs, however, usually have more than a few members who do care about being in control of their "neighborhoods" and thus put some teeth into the organization. It is something to worry about, but the developer doesn't maintain control unless they also own real estate in the subdivision. Usually for liability reasons they don't want that burden any longer than it takes to get rid of all of the lots in the subdivision.
That is why often those companies wanting to exercise more "control" instead lease the equipment rather than sell it. Cable companies have known about this for some time and refuse to sell their equipment to their customers. This way it isn't necessarily "your" equipment but rather it belongs to whoever made it in the first place. That way, they can claim that you really don't "own" the equipment.
In the case of most content providers, they are trying to go to a leasing model of content distribution where you only temporarily have the content instead of having ownership of a copy.
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Arguably much of the reason why most corporations are abandoning basic and pure research is largely due to government interference and the deliberate encouragement of mergers and hostile take-overs within the public equity markets. Tax policies substantially discourage corporate research, and certainly discourage any sort of long term investing where any sort of pot of money set aside for future expenses is quickly going to be taxed to oblivion.
In other words, the reason why government has to be the source of basic research is because the government has deemed itself to be the arbiter of what ought to be basic science for purely political reasons so it can reward those who play nice and according to the rules at the expense of those who have a contrarian point of view. If you don't have the right political connections, your research project is screwed.
For myself, I would rather that the government get out of the game of advanced and basic research, but that would imply that they trust their citizens to be capable of making their own decisions with their own money and not have to spend a minor fortune hiring a bunch of lawyers and accountants to hide the money in creative ways (including into the bank accounts of politicians).
Companies like AT&T used to have incredible basic research facilities including scientists that were routinely published in major scientific journals and even won Nobel Prizes. Bell Labs was a top notch facility for basic research, and little of it had a 5-10 year ROI. Much of what was done there was certainly for much longer term development.
Other companies like IBM and even Microsoft have R&D groups that even now are doing some amazing things. In fact, I wish that Microsoft as a company paid more attention to what their far out researchers were coming up with rather than simply letting the ideas die as a cute intellectual curiosity. Unfortunately these are, as you've pointed out, the exceptions to the rule rather than something typical with corporations.
I'm just saying it doesn't have to be this way and trusting democratic (little-d as in Thomas Jefferson's concept of a limited government) principles that people if left to themselves will usually get things right is by far and away healthier for freedom and will ultimately do more to advance scientific ideas than trying to shoehorn everything through some sort of gatekeeper who doesn't always know what is best.
Scaled Composites & Richard Branson came out with a statement that they are fully aware of some of these issues and that they are working on alternative fuels to perhaps mitigate this problem too. As you point out, there were many reasons why they went with this particular solution, where vehicle safety is one of the things that was of primary importance where they don't necessarily want to be on the bleeding edge of technical performance. The goal is to have an airline quality of performance for roughly how often this vehicle is going to be going into space, and to be able to "refuel" this spacecraft quickly.
How is the stuff from volcanoes any different? Volcanoes contain traces of just about every naturally occurring element including Uranium, extreme heat in its plume, and these compounds produced from a volcanic explosion certainly do make it to the stratosphere and sometimes even higher.
In this regard the rocket is much, much more focused to a very small area compared to a volcano, and a vast majority of this "soot" remains by definition in the troposphere where it rains down as... rain. It doesn't stay long in the sky. In other words, the impact of a particular rocket launch is minor compared to that of a volcano, so much so that it can be completely dismissed as having any significant impact on the global climate at all. It would take many more than 40k launches to make a difference.
As for "high altitude nuclear weapons tests" are concerned, define "high altitude" before you come to any conclusions. The problem with the high altitude tests that ended up creating the "Nuclear Test Ban Treaty" is that they were detonated at an altitude about where the Space Shuttle flies, and the fallout persisted for some time at that altitude in the form of charged particles trapped in the Van Allen Belts, causing persistent and long term ionizing radiation problems for folks and spacecraft that had to travel into space. That is not even a legitimate or remotely fair comparison to some ash that is left over at a much lower altitude.
The comparisons to major volcanic eruptions is very much spot on analysis as it is comparing the same things, and in some cases even the same compounds where the volcanic eruptions are going to be even more extreme in terms of heating conditions that produce those compounds.
Because growing a kilogram sphere of Silicon using 19th Century technology was not possible, you insensitive clod!
BTW, a kilo of pure Silicon does look cool.
You could always freeze the water if you needed a comparison :)
BTW, I agree with your sentiment, I just had to say that though.
Amen to this post and mod it up! Seriously!
The whole point is that the existing standards aren't accurate enough, and that the measurement devices are now accurate to the degree that measuring the mass loss from one day to the next can be accurately measured and compared to the mass loss in the other 40 official standards that are found around the world.
In other words, the standard isn't standard. That is the point! And it does need to be very frickin' accurate!
Not really. Once you have defined the mass in some physical terms, there are other ways which a "standard" can be created. The trick here is to define the mass in such a way that it can be reproduced with nothing more than the raw definition rather than having to do the painstaking task of trying to constantly compare it to the physical standard that exists somewhere.
They aren't really trying to make this new "standard" to be anything but close to the original standard. You shouldn't notice anything in terms of bathroom scales or anything that most people encounter in day to day life, but it will mean that the precision with which things will be measured can be improved with a more refined and updated standard.
There have been several other approaches to defining a mass standard that bypasses the need for a physical lump of anything at all, which is why this hasn't necessarily been the easiest thing to come to a consensus or agreement upon. Also, don't expect this to be the final word on mass either, as the definition of a second has changed even after they got rid of the physical standard of the rotational velocity of the Earth.
The problem has always been trying to decide upon what new standard might be the replacement, not necessarily that it needed to be replaced. There apparently were some objections to the Silicon sphere approach and there were some suggestions to try instead to use an electrical standard (so many watts & volts with a certain applied current that would exert a certain amount of force from which a mass standard could be derived) and some other approaches were considered. I'm not sure how many different ideas were presented, but it was more than a few and the Silicon sphere certainly isn't the only possible solution.
The pound and the inch are defined as a matter of law in the USA in terms of metric units anyway (the inch is 2.54 cm exactly to as many decimal places as you want to make it) so accepting a new standard isn't going to be a problem. The question is if the larger international standards bodies are going to accept any new definition for the kilogram, of which the NIST is a part of those bodies... and which standard will apply.
The meter was defined as a fraction of the distance along the Prime Meridian from some crazy location in France to the North Pole, and the second was defined as 1/86400th of a day. The problem with these as a system to standardized measurements is that they aren't precise enough. A day can vary by quite a bit and it turns out that even over a fairly long period of time that the Earth still isn't constant. You have precession, slowing of the Earth due to the gravity of the Sun and the Moon tugging at the oceans (giving you tides BTW), variations in the orbit of the Earth, and other factors that make using the Earth as a physical constant for measuring time to be sort of pointless.
Ditto for the meter, as that spot in France that was the original standard for the meter is also moving due to geological forces... by a couple centimeters each year. Eventually it became a "meter bar" but even that isn't quite precise enough and becomes problematic when you try to duplicate the exact distance of a meter for measurements.
On top of these issues is also the isotopic purity of water, where different isotopes of Hydrogen and Oxygen can make a difference. "Heavy Water" really is heavier than ordinary water... the isotopes make a difference. If you say you need to use distilled water, even that has problems, depending on the source of that water and the method of distillation. On top of that, you need to define pressure, temperature, and other features into such a standard that gets really messy. Since pressure is defined in terms of mass, how do you get that standardized again?
You are correct that the rough definition you are quoting was the original definition of a gram at least to define the original concept, assuming "typical" atmospheric pressure on the Earth and that the water is in an open container in a humid environment (so the water doesn't evaporate too quickly before it is measured). The kilogram artifact as mentioned in this article was an attempt to avoid most of the problems associated with a water definition by defining a specific combination of supposedly "stable" metals. The combination of Platinum and Iridium was chosen explicitly because they weren't radioactive, resisted corrosion, and could be easily formed in a laboratory presuming that you had the proper dimensions measured in terms of meters (which were considered fairly accurate for measurement at the time). The problem is that the measurement equipment now currently exceeds the ability for even this fairly stable standard to maintain its mass, and the mass standards are apparently losing mass over time from oxidation and other chemical process simply by existing on the Earth. This happens very slowly, but it is happening, in spite of the fact that most mass standards are kept in double bell jars in a safe at a very secure facility. They are guarded stronger than most monetary reserves and you certainly aren't going to be given one of these standards to be sitting in your bare hand.
One thing about an executive order is that it is an "order" from the President to an employee of the U.S. government telling them how they are supposed to do their job. A simply and ordinary law passed by Congress can override this order, so it is subordinate to legislation passed by Congress.
Since the U.S. government is so huge and expansive, and the authority of even individual agents and employees so expansive, an executive order can have the effect and impact often that a law has, including the interpretation of deliberately left vague sections of various laws that have been enacted.
These "executive agreements" pretty much are done along similar lines, but unfortunately the courts are increasingly interpreting them as a form of treaties when in fact they aren't. That is a significant problem.
Where I have a problem with the ACTA is that it has been negotiated in secret. To me, treaties and for that matter any sort of government business should never be done in secret with the possible exception of military planning.and matters of a personal nature. I don't expect to know each time an elected official takes a dump, to give an example. But if they are making some key decisions and making major policy documents, those should be open to the public and be debated and discussed by the citizens as well. Copyright as an issue in particular serves nothing to keep hidden and by definition shouldn't be something classified as a national security secret.
I'm curious about what kind of energy losses come from a flywheel energy storage device? I am presuming that the purpose of this is to smooth out the power demand at a "refilling station" rather than to power individual vehicles. For some details, there is this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage#Uninterruptible_power_supply
What is scary to think about here is that these will likely be installed into "petrol stations" (gasoline stations to you insensitive Americans). Arcing electrical conduits with presumably high voltages and current draws to facilitate these kind of recharging centers for electric vehicles seems to be precisely what you don't want to have anywhere near extremely flammable liquids (gasoline, ethanol, propane, or even compressed natural gas). It seems to me that this may require setting up a whole independent network to get something like this going with some legislated distances between the charging areas and where petroleum distillates are being dispensed.
Fueling stations in their varieties usually wouldn't mind a minor add-on to expand their customer pool or to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but it would be interesting to see how these kind of charging stations might be set up.
One thing I have seen, however, is hotels, restaurants, and some other "tourist friendly" venues that are beginning to offer at least a 110-volt 30-amp circuit to their customers for use with electric automobiles. This isn't a big deal, draws comparatively little current anyway, and if you are staying in a hotel your vehicle can be fully charged when you wake up in the morning after a night in the hotel, or top off the charge while you are eating at a restaurant. It won't be fully recharged from being "empty" in six minutes, but it will get the job done without requiring some heavy gauge wiring to make the circuit work and is more likely to be what you will see including perhaps some "coin-operated" outlets at public parks where you can pay for just the access to the outlet.
I know of some power distribution lines that do some direct current power transmission between facilities and then convert that to AC when put into the local power grids. It isn't nearly as uncommon as you'd think, but you are correct that most power available to ordinary consumers is alternating current.
Forklifts, if they use batteries at all, are typically lead-acid batteries. Yeah, that is a ground-breaking technology there. I could see a bank of lead-acid batteries powering a fork-lift for a maximum duty cycle of 30 hours, with the typical being about 24 hours between charges.
There might be some vehicles like this with more "modern" types of batteries including NiMH and Li-Ion batteries, but I don't expect to see anything more exotic that hasn't been widely used already for applications of that nature.
This would be a perfect thread to "confess" to being a time traveler. I even thought of trying to come up with a much better "future history" story than "John Titor".
I figure it isn't worth my time to come up with such a story although it would sure be a whole lot of fun just to see the chain of a bunch of nerds yanked real hard.
There is the possibility that whatever changes you might try to make to change history would only backfire and cause many more problems.
Back in the 1920's there was a very strong pacifists movement including some attempts at very high levels of government to "outlaw war" through treaty and other means. This included naval armament limitations on the major world powers (Germany and Japan got the short end of the stick on these efforts... a lot of good that did) and doing things like the Geneva Convention.
If you really think you could have done better than some of the best minds and diplomats in the world to stop World War II, I would love to see you try. Assassinating Adolph Hitler right after the Beer Putsch might have helped a little bit, but even that wouldn't necessarily have fixed the problems of the era.
You might make a small difference on some key thing, and perhaps get some "green" technologies funded and developed a bit earlier if you went back in time, but I think it would be much harder to make a difference even if you tried.
I'm not saying that an individual can't make a difference, but it often is much harder than it seems and there certainly are social forces at play over history that often need to be resolved... and those methods of getting resolved often aren't pretty either. In going back in time the only advantage you would be able to have is some 20/20 hindsight on some key issues and some foreknowledge of what would be coming. If you read history, many of the crazy ideas you are suggesting were even tried... often by people who were quite wealthy. An easy way to lose money is to invest in something prematurely that is "ahead of its time".
it's naive to assume that the idea of a handheld radio phone was beyond the conception of people at that time. It merely was not practical yet with the technology available at the time, in much the same way as the ideas of force fields, antigravity, artificial gravity, tractor beams, FTL travel, and teleportation are not beyond our comprehension, but the technology needed to make them happen is decades away, if not centuries.
By this same standard, someone might look at the hardware in Star Trek and assume that somebody had traveled back in time with a Palm Pilot. By this same standard, perhaps somebody traveled back in time and brought the creator of Dick Tracy one of the new cell phone watches that just came out a couple of years ago, some sixty-plus years after the concept first appeared in those comics.
There is a world of difference between a radio telephone and something like anti-gravity, tractor beams, and FTL travel. Radios were common and personal two-way communication was already happening over the air waves, although it was mostly experimentation by Ham Radio operators who came up with all kinds of crazy schemes for communications systems of a more personal level. Other than the miniaturization of electronic components, at least a simple cell phone circuit for at least the headset wouldn't have even been much of a stretch of the imagination for an electrical engineer of the era.
On the other hand, most of these other technologies that you mention are so far "out there" that the raw physics of how they could even work is either fringe science or simple unknown. By fringe I'm talking people who are totally discredited and generally considered cranks to even come up with some crazy and wild explanation for how they work. About the only thing you mention here that is even somewhat remotely feasible is teleportation.... something that has only recently been discovered and right now is only transporting a few atoms at a time... certainly not whole people or objects. I suppose a tera-Q-bit quantum computer might be able to teleport something macroscopic, and that is at least in the realm of something theoretically possible a couple of centuries of millennia from now. I would give even odds or worse that it will be functioning in the 23rd Century beyond a technical curiosity like how fusors currently allow desktop fusion reactors.
The one "Star Trek" invention that I never expected to see in my lifetime was the iPad... a flat screen portable computer running on its own power supply and being networked "wirelessly" to other computing devices, capable of voice input but a stylus could also be used directly on the screen instead if desired. The Star Trek writers called it a "Padd Computer".
If you are going back in time, at least to America, gold is a good universal exchange medium. The only time you really have to worry about gold being a major issue is between the Franklin Roosevelt era and the Carter era, when owning gold was considered illegal except for small quantities for jewelry and perhaps electronics.
Going back in time 82 years? A few gold coins weighing 1 troy ounce each would be very much welcomed. Then again, you would have to ask how many gold coins it would take to buy enough shares of stock to make a difference.
If you subscribe to the theory that going back in time actually takes you to a "parallel universe" which is similar but not exactly the same as our own universe, you don't have to worry about the grandfather paradox. Killing your own grandpa will only mean that you won't be born in that alternate universe. That could have some significant impact upon world events, but causality wouldn't necessarily be violated. You could even go "looping" back to another very similar universe with your billions that you got from investing in Apple Computer & Microsoft back when they IPO'd.
And what do you do if you get bored with reading junk produced as "literature" these days and don't want to take the effort to find the stuff worthwhile?
I guess get on Slashdot and bitch about life.
Then again I would say this is a fault of American television and why the shows often suck. If you don't have a good story arc that holds the series together, or worse yet when you get to the end of a major story arc and the show is so popular that the money guys are begging that you continue the series, that is when the show really starts to fall apart.
In many ways, the production process is a part of the problem where there is so much uncertainty to if you are even going to be producing an episode tomorrow (some TV series are canceled even mid season during production and even while only some of the last episode is being filmed... being a second or later season doesn't seem to help here either). The people producing the shows generally want to put out a good product and while money is good they are more interested in pleasing their fans or doing something innovative and different.
As a result of this production process, the production people don't really put that much effort into a series arc. That works for some shows like Law & Order where you can put any two random episodes together and it doesn't really matter in terms of understanding the story. Not all television series seem to work like that, however, and that isn't even really good story telling either even if seems to be where most new television series are headed.
What hurt Caprica even more (having just seen some of the season 1.5 episodes) is that information needed to watch an episode is found in earlier episodes of the season. In other words, it is very much a serial where the whole season tells the story and not just one part. The problem with a series of that nature is that it sort of pushes away new viewers who don't have access to the first episode.
I thought the series was extremely well done, but it was very dark and in some ways very disturbing as well. Much of the first half-season dealt with virtual reality and MMORPGs in a way that I have never seen dealt with by a major media outlet before. The show's producers "get" what it is like to play in an MMORPG and if you want to see what one might be like in a couple hundred years, Caprica has a very good example of one that Zoe Greystone plays in. Then again, it also captures the MMORPG experience by having a bunch of kids playing around in a virtual environment where the parents don't know what the heck their kids are up to other than "playing with computers".
The second half-season deals more with the "STO", which is an Al-Queida-like terrorist organization which foreshadows the rise of the Cylons and goes into depth of how that organization is put together. Again, this is something that is certainly part of the backstory of Battlestar Galactica and being brought forward, but isn't easy for people to watch or the complex interplay between religions, where most normal "colonists" are polytheistic and the terrorist organization uses a monotheistic approach that echos Islam but isn't quite that either. Many people don't want to have religion crammed down their throats in this fashion, especially when it might be pointing out that their own religion could be just as corrupted.
The "bring back Battlestar Galactica" crowd finally got their day in the sun.... with something worthy of that adoration as well. While there were hold-outs like Richard Hatch (the actor, not the Survivor contestant) that finally gave the new incarnation his blessings, most fans of the old show starring Loren Greene were generally happen with the remake when it happened.
Then again it took nearly twenty years and something like the SciFy Channel to get it made in the first place.
I can only hope that Firefly gets that same kind of treatment when one of the current geeks who call themselves a browncoat finally get to a position where perhaps some quality science fiction programming gets made. Most people don't know quality science fiction if it hit them in the face.
So what law have you successfully gotten repealed? Working hard on that DMCA? Wiretap immunity? Patriot act? etc?
This is also why it is so important to stop bad legislation in the first place from getting passed than trying to repeal it later.
But if you want to add another floor, you can usually get a permission from the city (or whatever), as long as they deem it safe and all. The company who sold you your house certainly doesn't get to decide.
A lot of home owners associations are either run by or subordinate to the subdivision developer. You can be sure you won't be allowed to add a second story to any house governed by a HOA.
Correction.... "home-owners associations" are set up and established by developers, but it is operated by and continued to exist by the home owners themselves. It becomes in essence another layer of government for you to worry about. In theory, most HOAs can be dissolved simply by have the owners get together and dump the organization, but in practice that is unlikely to happen except by neglect.
I technically belong to an HOA, but it has never been put together and most of the original home owners in my subdivision have since sold their homes where the subsequent owners didn't sign an HOA agreement in the purchase transaction. I'm not complaining as it was a lousy group to begin with and I may be the only HOA member left at this point... essentially I can amend an change the covenants to whatever I want at this point as the sole member of the group.
Many HOAs, however, usually have more than a few members who do care about being in control of their "neighborhoods" and thus put some teeth into the organization. It is something to worry about, but the developer doesn't maintain control unless they also own real estate in the subdivision. Usually for liability reasons they don't want that burden any longer than it takes to get rid of all of the lots in the subdivision.
"Uhhh... no it isn't yours."
Absurd. Of course the phone/box/whatever is mine.
That is why often those companies wanting to exercise more "control" instead lease the equipment rather than sell it. Cable companies have known about this for some time and refuse to sell their equipment to their customers. This way it isn't necessarily "your" equipment but rather it belongs to whoever made it in the first place. That way, they can claim that you really don't "own" the equipment.
In the case of most content providers, they are trying to go to a leasing model of content distribution where you only temporarily have the content instead of having ownership of a copy.