Our climate IS self-regulating, as well - at least within boundary limits. That we don't know what those boundaries are should terrify you. The implications of climate change can de-stabilize the socio-economic patterns we depend on - perhaps not as a species, but certainly as a civilisation.
The issue here isn't that the climate is changing or not.... anybody who studies geology notes that the climate has changed in the past and will in the future.
IMHO, the issue here is the demonizing of political viewpoints and not speaking the language of those who might be useful allies on environmental issues. Tying environmental concerns to completely irrelevant issues like social economic equity and abortion rights only paint those supporting concerns for the environment as Marijuana smoking, tie-dyed shirt wearing, anti-establishment hippies not worth serious consideration. Yes this is a broad stereotype that is not true in reality (although a few self-professed genuine hippies from the 1960's and 70's are involved in the environmental movement with some very gray hair now). Having Al Gore as the patron saint of the environmental movement doesn't help either and only further polarizes and makes the issue a partisan plank.
The largest complaint that holds legitimacy is that many of those promoting the "green movement" for concerns about the environment... including Al Gore... have an economic stake in the game that is going to get them quite wealthy if the rest of the world "goes green". The carbon cap and trade system, if implemented, is going to make Al Gore a very wealthy person.
The point that isn't addressed either is the need for massive economic restructuring of societies and dismissing hidden costs in that restructuring to make us less polluting. Furthermore, that economic restructuring has additional political agendas to promote things beyond environmental concerns... and forces those who might favor protecting the environment with having to choose to act against those changes.
I believe you can be pro-environment and conservative. You must talk about stewardship and personal responsibility for the environment. At the same time, you need to show people that it is in their self interest to reduce their impact on the environment. Also, those who think that environmental changes don't need governmental solutions need to be given a chance to succeed as well, and perhaps to show that non-governmental approaches may work better than government-sponsored nightmares like the carbon tax credit system.
I also think it is wrong headed to think that the Earth is a closed system, and ignores that there are economic, mineral, and energy sources that can be tapped elsewhere in the Solar System.
There is an unfortunate (to me) segment of the environmental movement that would like nothing more than the massive genocide of most of humanity (about 99% of us or more) and the economic suppression of the remaining survivors into a feudal society lead by a few enlightened individuals and the rest of humanity living like 10th Century European peasants. It is this that I am fighting against, not a concern for the environment. Be honest here and admit that the ultimate goal of many extreme environmentalists is to push humanity into that scenario.
While I do admire the quality of the software produced for the shuttle guidance computers, most software development budgets would never be able to sustain such scrutiny.
When you have billion dollar budgets and can pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per line of code, yeah, it makes sense to demand high standards for such software designs. That people's lives depend on that software working correctly the first time it is actually used, that makes it all that more important to get it right the first time.
While this breath analyzer device can be the difference between you getting arrested or being sent along on your way, few if any police departments could afford to pay the R&D costs or would be willing to buy equipment that has met this kind of standard.
While I would have to agree that for a device of this nature you would like to see high standards being applied, I think you need to take this into the real world for a minute.
Not trying to put a stereotype into this, but just imagine a software/electrical engineer with an H1-B visa who can barely read or speak English, is trying to read the specification document (if it exists at all in the first place) for a project like this that has a development budget of say $100,000 (rather typical for niche devices like this... or even on the high side). The total number of units sold is going to be on the order of about 1000 or so (if the device is popular in police departments), keeping in mind that this R&D budget has to be made up somehow.
Even if you are lucky to have a competent engineer actually working on this rather than whatever donkey had this project piled on their plate, the money is being used to simply get the product out the door. As long as it sort of works at all, that is good enough and most managers don't care about how neat and tidy the code might be.
BTW, don't get me started on electrical engineers who have had a few software courses thinking that they have the same skills as a formally trained CS graduate. Some of the worst coding practices (and in fairness, some of the best too) I've ever seen have come from electrical engineers. They know the circuitry rather well, but often their coding skills are sufficient only up to a couple thousand lines of code.
The worst coding example I've seen? How about a global variable named "temp", used in about 50 places (including a recursive subroutine) in the software. It shocked me that the software ran at all.
That may or may not be a flaw. It certainly isn't a true average, but an average isn't the only legitimate way to combine successive data values.
That said, I'm not sure why a rolling average like this would be used for this purpose. Is there a medically sound, scientifically reviewed 'proper' procedure to measure alcohol in breath? I have a fear that this was just thrown together by some programmers.
One of the points that needs to be made here is the original intended purpose of the equipment and the overall design goals. Is this equipment intended to be a screening device or something that is intended to be used for medical diagnostics? The standards here are on two completely different levels and shouldn't be considered the same thing.
Also, such a rolling average that weighs later measurements is reasonable so far as to eliminate outliers (a huge problem with analog measurement devices like this) and to note that the equipment isn't measuring what was the blood alcohol, but trying to show what it currently being measured.
My own software development experience for something like this was trying to read data coming from a radar gun being used to measure the speed of professional baseball players throwing a ball from the pitcher's mound. When I saw the raw data coming in from such devices, it was incredible about the range of data and the kind of outliers that were found. In this case the stadium owners (we were throwing the measured speed up on a display board in the stadium) wanted the pitching speed to be displayed automatically... so only when readings that were fairly typical for major league players would show up.
What we ended up doing was a mean of the last eight readings, with the readings going into a queue as they came in. Obvious outliers never made it into the queue... such as the speed of an airplane flying over the stadium or the speed of the manager's pace going to the mound, and by averaging it kept what noise in the readings still existed under control. The user interface also had parameters that could be adjusted to change the outlier ranges from game to game as necessary.
All analog measurements exhibit noise of some sort or another... either coming from the Analog/Digital conversion modules themselves (if poorly designed... unfortunately a common issue too) or from the fact that measurements of a particular sample can skew the data set.
I'll also be honest, quite often software is used to make up for cheap equipment and averaging of samples to give far more apparent accuracy than an objective review of the measuring device would be validated for on its own.
Since all 50 U.S. states have different laws on this point, and often even municipalities within the same state can have differing laws on the topic (DUI legislation is a state, not a federal issue), this isn't quite so cut and dried.
Also, even if the manufacturer guidelines suggest another blood test be done, often you will have a police agency take a shortcut and not bother to get the "second opinion"... and have the information from the device be the only piece of evidence presented in court.
I would have to agree with the sentiment here that most of the hand-held devices used by an ordinary police officer should only be a screening device... to rule out obvious exceptions and suggest a more through test. Erratic behavior that turns out not to be due to alcohol or common controlled substances may be a symptom of a much more serious problem.
Darwin should take care of reinforcing this lesson? You're seriously saying that people should learn that hot things burn by survival vs. death?
Yup!
I can name several people I am at least somewhat acquainted with that have had bad things happen to them, and I have learned from their experiences... including related deaths.
There is this thing called a brain we have... which unfortunately not nearly used as often as it could be. And far too often people to pay the ultimate price for their ignorance.
The problem is distinguishing between *you*, supposedly an expert on the subject, with access to primary sources (not easily referenced otherwise) posting accurate information; and Joe Random Vandal, masquerading as an expert, claiming to have access to primary sources, posting false and misleading junk. Without fallacious appeals to authority.
If you have a reasonable solution, that does not involve taking a picture and scanning the manual, please share. (On second thought, in the age of accessible photomanipulation, even that may not be enough).
Somebody who is genuinely knowledgeable about a topic certainly should have a pretty sound grasp of what the "usual suspects" of legitimate sources about that topic would be. I find it rather difficult to believe that other than a very obscure topic where notability issues would be raised, that somebody could simply make up sources and information out of whole cloth and make it stick. The sources (even print-only sources or things from hard to reach archives) would still be eventually be discovered.
I suppose a hoax along the lines of Udo of Aachen would pass muster on a first glance, but even that wouldn't last too long. It would last about as long as this phony quotation that the main article talks about.
While I do have problems with folks who turn their nose up on primary sources on Wikipedia (like on a historical article that an editor thinks a congressional report by the participants in the event is a "primary source" and unreliable for citation), this is a far different issue than those who actually use Wikipedia as a location for publishing original research.
The main point of the "original research" exclusion is to take fringe theories like UFO "researchers" and those who are heavily into conspiracy theories and build an argument to keep these idea from dominating and taking over Wikipedia. The system works well in that regard, as such articles certainly are by far the minority of what is found on Wikipedia... and frequently deleted as well. That the original research rules also help to build better articles on even more "legitimate" topics is a bonus... and points out that it really is a good idea to have put this rule in place when it was devised in the first place. IMHO, this is an example of a highly successful Wikipedia policy in action, where it dealt with a potential weakness in Wikipedia in an honest and forthright fashion.
If only all Wikipedia policies were fashioned and carried out with such honesty and integrity.
With the exception of highly political pages like "Global Warming", "Barak Obama", and "George W. Bush", my experience with sane edit wars (scholarly disagreements) tends to ramp up the quality and value of the article... including better citations (or adding citations in the first place) and ferreting out biases in the sources being quoted.
There have been a few cases where an editor simply is being a prick, but they usually get dealt with in the end and legitimately challenged with their edits thrown out.
In spite of the fact this is an AC post, what is being said is in fact correct. If this "expert" was able to pull up a previously published book (listed elsewhere and obviously not self-published) that included a specific reference to this particular fact, it would be a legitimate citation and something that can be included in the article.
Unfortunately, many people who make claims of this nature either are not an expert, or are simply just lazy as all get out. Indeed, university professors seem to be some of the laziest of all of these type of folks, even if they do have a legitimately published article that has fine details about issues of this nature.
There is nothing wrong, IMHO, of listing something you know to be a fact but aren't quite sure of the citation on the discussion page of the article. I've done that more than once, and it has been used to seek out a legitimate citation from somebody who has access to other sources than I have at hand. In one case on Wikipedia, a general request for alternative sources ended up giving far more information than I had earlier even anticipated on even finding in the first place... far better than even most "experts" I had earlier asked on the topic.
The US was created for many reasons, one big one being because Britain didn't want us anymore(at least not enough to take us). Copyright law was not on the lips of the founding fathers. Tax law, and Torture, and lack of Due Process, where on their lips.
This isn't quite true either. Admittedly copyright was not the leading issue of the day, but abuses of crown copyright (including "eternal copyright" and having the legal code copyright protected and exclusively printed by a single "licensed" printing house) were among the various "abuses" that did trigger the revolution against England.
The stamp act in particular was one that incensed the publishers... where a stamp had to be paid for (and affixed to) anything created in a printing house. This also included schedules for certain items including the Bible that were simply prohibited from being published in America.
The first Bible printed in America was a translation of the King James Version of the Bible in one of the Algonquian languages. An English-language edition of the Bible didn't even get published in America until after the Declaration of Independence, and even then it was considered an act of rebellion. The British printers wanted the revenue from bible production, which is one of the reasons for this law. The reason I'm mentioning the Bible in particular is due to what should be obvious religious influences in the USA and how much publication of the scriptures is linked to political freedoms in general, and how absurd it sounds to be arrested for simply the act of copying the contents of the Bible... even a simple excerpt that today would be considered fair-use.
I should also note that copyright issues were important enough to the founders of the American Republic that the copyright clause was put into the very first article of the Constitution and put very strong limitations on its implementation that were designed to explicitly prohibit abuses as seen by English copyright law. In addition, one of the very first acts of the first Congress of the USA under the current constitution was the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790. This law was written by many of the original framers of the constitution and also set the model of what they desired in terms of copyright law. IMHO, this federal employee that is being honored by the original post is an example of somebody who clearly did not study, or really understand the abuses that lead to the copyright clause or why the original copyright act was written.
I believe this to be a mis-reading of the copyright act that is cited here, as the law doesn't really require the "American Geophysical Union" to obtain the actual copyright via transfer, as a simple legal license to the content (proprietary, exclusive, irrevokable) could effectively do the same thing that is done with 99% of the content that they publish.
It is situations like this where it is some lawyer who got scared because of some potential problems with content licensing and insisted on formal copyright transfer instead. Again, the law doesn't require this, but it does help clean up some legal loopholes that are rarely an issue anyway. The largest is if the original author re-publishes a paper in another journal without formal copyright transfer, it becomes merely a civil contract violation case rather than something which invokes copyright law.
The above has the copyright transferred, but the author retains a license to that content.
BTW, in a "work for hire" or something where a corporation actually owns the copyright (instead of just the "author" under license to a publisher), the term of a copyright is simply 75 years. This is the case of collaborative works like most motion pictures that are clearly owned by a company for liability reasons alone.
I do happen to agree with you on the fuzzy nature of the lifetime + arbitrary extra constant for copyrighted works, and simply saying that the limit is 50 years works for most people.
The most ingenuous solution I heard was to charge a filing fee of $1 * 10 ^ (decades of copyright term).... where every ten years you have to pay ten times the previous decade for copyright protection. The fee is payable in advance, so somebody could also arbitrarily establish their own copyright term ahead of time. The first 20 years or so would be free... for those who don't want to bother with filing for copyright protection or are of limited financial means. Seriously, if you haven't made money off of something in 20 years, do you really need copyright protection?
This way, if Disney or George Lucas want to put incredibly long copyrights on their works it becomes a business decision and the money goes into the general revenue fund rather than the campaign funds of their favorite senators. Putting Star Wars under 100 years of copyright protection would cost George Lucas about $10 million or so. Perhaps it might be something he'd consider, but it would also be obvious about things of this nature and wouldn't be a typical copyright term.
The main thing holding back NASA at the moment isn't their shitty new shuttles. It is PR, they don't have a groundswell of support. If there was a movement like the one to get a man on the moon we would be having massive innovation coming from every orifice. But most of the world doesn't care. So we are stifled.
I don't think it is an issue of if the rest of the world (or in the case of NASA... America, who is paying the bills) caring about spaceflight. There is certainly some support... at about the current funding levels that NASA seems to have.
The real problem facing NASA is a lack of a strong and compelling vision about what they should be doing. NASA was an agency designed to do two thing:
1) get people into space 2) get people to the Moon
NASA already accomplished these goals, so they are wandering around in the dark in search of another goal or mission to do. Going to Mars is perhaps one of these goals, but those with the political capital to make it happen don't want to push for such a lofty goal because the cost is going to be huge... and there are other things those politicians who set national policies want to accomplish.
George H. W. Bush made a lame attempt to push for Mars, and George W. Bush at least came up with the "Vision for Space Exploration" (VSE) to set a basic time frame. Unfortunately, he knew all too well that a more cost-effective trip to Mars would have to be done under the administrations of several U.S. Presidents.... something that is not going to happen if even one of them feels differently.
What we got instead is the Constellation program... warts and all. And boy does that have a whole lot of problems.
Even the assertion that everything we know about the Solar System besides the Earth and the Moon comes from robotic missions is a mistaken notion and a faulty assertion. Telescopes, radar dishes, and other sensing devices used on the Earth have been used for years (centuries actually) to give us some foundational knowledge about the planets.... so even here you can't cite 100% of the knowledge is gained through the robotic probes.
It is also really nitpicking over details here to say that planetary science is strictly knowledge that has been obtained even by both ground-based observatories and the robotic missions. I'm pointing out legitimately that the knowledge of the Solar System obtained even by taking a few samples from the Moon has so significantly expanded our knowledge of the Solar System that it has yet to really filter its way down into textbooks and become a part of the baseline knowledge of the universe. Even worse, NASA in their infinite wisdom refuses to open its mineral archives to legitimate scientific inquiry on the fear that the lunar samples they have are going to be the only ones they'll ever get for the next century.
In the debate between manned vs. unmanned spaceflight, I take issue with those who would cancel all manned spaceflight under the "hopeless romanticism" that you mentioned would have all of this boundless money pour into the unmanned spaceflight missions. Yes, for a time you might even see some spectacular breakthroughs in our knowledge of the universe compared to what we used to know, but I'm arguing that at some point you have to put the boots on the ground and get people there to see it for themselves.... for a great many reasons including the ones that I mentioned before. I also think it is unrealistic to think even unmanned missions would continue if manned spaceflight were canceled. I argue that the unmanned mission happen by them hanging on the coattails of the manned missions, but I digress on that point and is a whole separate argument.
The 21 month round trip flight you are mentioning (about 10-12 months each way) is something that has already been simulated multiple times including in-orbit tests aboard Skylab, Mir, and the ISS. It isn't nearly so impossible as you would make it seem, and that is assuming we are using a Hohmann transfer orbit and using only chemical rockets for that kind of trip. If you were to use other propulsion technologies, you can certainly get each leg of the trip under a month... or at least substantially less than the 21 months round trip that you are citing. Mars isn't quite so far away as you are implying, and existing technologies (no real unobtainium or ways to circumvent fundamental physics like Relativity) are available for such a trip. As Robert Heinlein stated so clearly, low-earth orbit is half-way to the solar system. That is a solved engineering problem and the rest isn't nearly so difficult.
The only reason a flight to Mars is going to be so incredibly expensive is because we are waiting on government bureaucrats to make it happen and using one of the most costly procurement models as the standard for its development. The motto for nearly everybody working on Apollo was "waste anything but time". They got to the Moon, but it was hardly cheap. If there was a compelling reason to get people to Mars by 2020, I have no doubt that America could build the vehicles and get folks there... but an Apollo/Manhattan Project type crash program is something that shouldn't happen. If you are in agreement with this, then perhaps we are talking and agreeing about the same thing from a different viewpoint.
From my own humble opinion, once there are large groups of private citizens in orbit around the Earth doing their stuff (space tourism, private space stations, early beginnings of space-based manufacturing) it will take active law enforcement and military actions to keep people from going to Mars or other bodies in the Solar System. No doubt there are going to be some idiots who are going to fire weapons in
I'm glad to see that somebody "in the know" and has a voice in these matters has this opinion. I was heartened at the "promotion" of Ceres by the IAU (even though the press seemed to emphasis the "demotion" of Pluto") with the reclassification of the term planet.
In my opinion, a Helio-centric definition will eventually fall apart as you try to classify celestial bodies. Clearly when more is known about exo-solar... around multiple star systems and more exotic configuration like an Earth-like body orbiting a gas giant in the habitable zone (none discovered yet, but don't tell me it can't happen) is going to really stretch these sort of definitions.... or when we find things between the size of Uranus and the Earth.
BTW, I made this comment about astronauts landing on another planet, because the astronauts who went there (James Lovell, Harrison Schmidt, Buzz Aldrin, James Irwin, and more) all asserted they either went by or actually landed on another planet. With the exception of the boredom of waiting and waiting to get there due to larger distances, there isn't much of a difference between landing on the Moon or other dwarf planets. If we go to those other bodies, I'm sure the methods will be nearly identical. It sure wasn't like landing on Phobos.
Can we ever overtake this? Good luck getting a object faster than Voyager 1.
If you are talking about getting an object to travel faster than Voyager 1 using nothing but rocket-based chemical propulsion methods.... yeah, you are correct. That is likely to be the all-time aviation record for some time to come.
There are things like Solar Sails, ion propulsion, and nuclear rocketry that all produce propulsion in some form or another that would easily be able to catch up to and overtake Voyager 1. Indeed, you could catch up and pass Voyager 1 using a really efficient nuclear rocket in about a month or so even now. Do the math if you don't believe me.... and I'm talking a constant acceleration of just 10 m/s^2 (about normal Earth-level gravity equivalent).
Voyager 1 is traveling using a method equivalent to trying to travel from Minneapolis to New Orleans by throwing a raft in the Mississippi and hoping you get there eventually without even rowing.
The Orion spaceship could, in theory, be built in orbit above the Van Allen belts... and certainly any residual radiation it would produce by blowing up nukes while in orbit would be irrelevant compared to other background radiation sources found in interplanetary space.
Yeah, that requires in-orbit assembly, but is that necessarily the end of the world as well? We're talking a spaceship, not a landing craft.
Robotic exploration already accounts for 100% of our success in visiting other planets.
Hardly. 100%? A dozen people made it to the Moon (arguably a dwarf planet... and called such by the astronauts who went there) and performed more and better science than all other exploration of the Moon by all previous and subsequent robotic explorations of that body. An additional dozen people... mostly aircraft test pilots... got to at least see the Moon close up.
There are a whole lot of reasons to send actual people to these places... and information that comes from somebody who is there sensing the environment with their own nervous system and capable of seeing, feeling, and otherwise sensing things that simply aren't or can't be identified remotely.
Futhermore, simply being in a different environment and having to face new challenges that other people haven't coped with before creates new thought processes (new neural pathways) and forces you to think in ways that creates additional knowledge.... and often those new ways of thinking can be applied to existing problems in a new context. Getting other people to other planets... and yes, even other star systems (eventually... as technology and space technologies permit) can do nothing but help improve nearly everything that we hold dear to ourselves as human.
BTW, I sure hope that at least some exploration of space is for personal gratification. Hell, I know it is.... that is why they put up with the bureaucratic bullshit, red tape, government committee meetings, press conferences, doctors probing in places you never knew existed in the first place, and all of the other headaches to spaceflight.
One shuttle astronaut that I read about had the experience of being able to face away from the Earth, the Shuttle, and all of the equipment he had for about 10 minutes during an EVA while the rest of the crew was putting away some equipment and dealing with some other tasks. The view of the heavens he was able to experience for that brief moment of time with nothing between him and starlight but a think piece of Lexan (and an inch or so of air) was a breathtaking experience this astronaut claimed made the whole experience of becoming an astronaut worth the effort. Other astronauts have said the same thing during their "break" times where a common privilege is to simply gaze at the Earth during one complete orbit. We need more people to enjoy these simple pleasures that come from spaceflight.... and I hope that poets, writers, and artists of all other types can experience something of that nature eventually and be able to give the rest of us a glimpse of what that sort of experience is like.
You could even argue that the modern environmental movement; global warming concerns, oceanic pollution, nuclear winter, ozone depletion, and much more; was initiated because a few astronauts had the privilege of being able to see the Earth rise up over the horizon while orbiting the Moon. NASA gave them instructions to take pictures... as many as they could click with their cameras (including cameras mounted remotely on their vehicle) of the surface of the Moon. But when these guys saw the Earth come up... they realized on the spot with no other instructions that they had to get some photos of the Earth as well. Even today, these are some of the most heavily requested photos from NASA and are arguably the most duplicated images in the history of mankind. These images would not have been made if it weren't for a person in orbit around the Moon to make them.... the bureaucrats planning the mission on the ground never thought of making them.
Don't even get me started on how limited the robotic missions have really been... even though what has been accomplished with the robotic missions has been incredible. There is a role for robotic exploration, but there is a role for a physical presence of human being in space as well.... and not just in low-earth orbit.
I have no idea why this comment was modded to "Insightful". What a waste of mod points. Funny, perhaps.
Considering the place where they are going to put this clock, it is going to be likely that in 50 years people will forget about its very existence or even know where to find the dang thing. It is going to be in eastern Nevada (U.S. state) near the top of a mountain. Hardly the best place for a parking lot for any reason.
About the only "famous" landmark of the area is the infamous "Area 51" that has been done to death in SciFi movies. I suppose archeologists from the future who are uncovering what actually happened at Groom Lake may accidentally discover this location as well. Perhaps.
The Mayan calendar doesn't "run out" in 2012... it merely goes through the equivalent of what we have with the Y10k bug... when date recording will move on to another digit to count the number of years.
You just need another digit in the "long count" for the Mayan calendar to keep the system going for another couple of millennia.
I would have to assume (and based on how they use dates that the Long Now Foundation is aware of this) that this proposed clock is going to take the Y10k bug seriously and compensate for it.
Knowing human irony, this clock will likely last for 100,000 years and not just 10,000 years. And being a 100k year old antique, nobody will want to modify it to count out the extra days/years necessary when that event happens.
Tesla decided to dump the multi-speed transmission, as the manufacturer of the tranny couldn't meet the torque and RPM specifications in the production vehicles. All sorts of finger pointing went with the issue, and it nearly took the whole company (Tesla) down with the lack of a quality transmission.
Oh, a two-speed transmission was built, but it only got a couple thousand miles on it before it had to be replaced. This blog entry goes into details on how the problem was finally "fixed", with what was a single-speed transmission.
The Tesla cells are kept at a much saner temperature level through the use of a coolant/heating system in the battery pack itself. This is something you couldn't afford to put onto your laptop.... and I dare say that a typical laptop will subject the batteries to much higher (and lower) temperatures and operating environments that cause much of the damage to laptop batteries.
Read the PDF file in the link above with the GP post. It covers all of this information and much more, including expected lifetime (which is on the order of about 7-10 years).
The only real problem I've heard about the Roadster is the issue with the battery pack not shutting down the coolant system when the vehicle is parked.... which causes a power drain on the battery and sucks power from the recharging unit even if you haven't driven it for awhile.
Actually, not even Hydrogen is the wave of the future because it remains a net negative energy source for the forseeable future.
Sorry for poking holes in what people are trying to do - considering I don't have a better idea myself.
I see this argument offered against hydrogen time and again. I'll also give this response:
Are you aware that in terms of energy required for distillation, refining, and powering the facilities that a typical gallon of gasoline consumes far more energy than it will ever release when burned inside of a vehicle? This is completely ignoring distribution losses (aka fueling the tanker trucks who deliver the gasoline to your local station and the vehicles which delivered the crude oil in the first place) and production losses (nearly all forms of petroleum production require at least a pump and sometimes more elaborate means to extract the crude).
When you get right down to it, the amount of energy required for a m^3 of hydrogen gas and the equivalent for gasoline or other petrochemical fuel (in terms of energy available to be released via combustion/fuel cells) is nearly identical or in fact favors hydrogen production. In both cases, you are not paying for energy production, but rather for fuel.... which can come in many different forms.
Where does the energy come from for refinery production? They mostly tap into the existing electric grid for the energy and buy it at industrial rates. Very rarely will they use raw crude for the production, and they couldn't sustain the facility off of the fuel that they produce if that were necessary.
The fact that it requires energy to crack hydrogen-based molecules (either hydrocarbons or water) is irrelvant in terms of the production of hydrogen as a fuel gas. Besides, hydrogen gas is much safer to handle than gasoline as well, given similar energy requirements. It can also be "manufactured" much closer to where it is used, and doesn't have wildly fluctuating prices in feeds stocks like petroleum.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh*
The atmosphere IS collecting energy.
Our climate IS self-regulating, as well - at least within boundary limits. That we don't know what those boundaries are should terrify you. The implications of climate change can de-stabilize the socio-economic patterns we depend on - perhaps not as a species, but certainly as a civilisation.
The issue here isn't that the climate is changing or not.... anybody who studies geology notes that the climate has changed in the past and will in the future.
IMHO, the issue here is the demonizing of political viewpoints and not speaking the language of those who might be useful allies on environmental issues. Tying environmental concerns to completely irrelevant issues like social economic equity and abortion rights only paint those supporting concerns for the environment as Marijuana smoking, tie-dyed shirt wearing, anti-establishment hippies not worth serious consideration. Yes this is a broad stereotype that is not true in reality (although a few self-professed genuine hippies from the 1960's and 70's are involved in the environmental movement with some very gray hair now). Having Al Gore as the patron saint of the environmental movement doesn't help either and only further polarizes and makes the issue a partisan plank.
The largest complaint that holds legitimacy is that many of those promoting the "green movement" for concerns about the environment... including Al Gore... have an economic stake in the game that is going to get them quite wealthy if the rest of the world "goes green". The carbon cap and trade system, if implemented, is going to make Al Gore a very wealthy person.
The point that isn't addressed either is the need for massive economic restructuring of societies and dismissing hidden costs in that restructuring to make us less polluting. Furthermore, that economic restructuring has additional political agendas to promote things beyond environmental concerns... and forces those who might favor protecting the environment with having to choose to act against those changes.
I believe you can be pro-environment and conservative. You must talk about stewardship and personal responsibility for the environment. At the same time, you need to show people that it is in their self interest to reduce their impact on the environment. Also, those who think that environmental changes don't need governmental solutions need to be given a chance to succeed as well, and perhaps to show that non-governmental approaches may work better than government-sponsored nightmares like the carbon tax credit system.
I also think it is wrong headed to think that the Earth is a closed system, and ignores that there are economic, mineral, and energy sources that can be tapped elsewhere in the Solar System.
There is an unfortunate (to me) segment of the environmental movement that would like nothing more than the massive genocide of most of humanity (about 99% of us or more) and the economic suppression of the remaining survivors into a feudal society lead by a few enlightened individuals and the rest of humanity living like 10th Century European peasants. It is this that I am fighting against, not a concern for the environment. Be honest here and admit that the ultimate goal of many extreme environmentalists is to push humanity into that scenario.
While I do admire the quality of the software produced for the shuttle guidance computers, most software development budgets would never be able to sustain such scrutiny.
When you have billion dollar budgets and can pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per line of code, yeah, it makes sense to demand high standards for such software designs. That people's lives depend on that software working correctly the first time it is actually used, that makes it all that more important to get it right the first time.
While this breath analyzer device can be the difference between you getting arrested or being sent along on your way, few if any police departments could afford to pay the R&D costs or would be willing to buy equipment that has met this kind of standard.
While I would have to agree that for a device of this nature you would like to see high standards being applied, I think you need to take this into the real world for a minute.
Not trying to put a stereotype into this, but just imagine a software/electrical engineer with an H1-B visa who can barely read or speak English, is trying to read the specification document (if it exists at all in the first place) for a project like this that has a development budget of say $100,000 (rather typical for niche devices like this... or even on the high side). The total number of units sold is going to be on the order of about 1000 or so (if the device is popular in police departments), keeping in mind that this R&D budget has to be made up somehow.
Even if you are lucky to have a competent engineer actually working on this rather than whatever donkey had this project piled on their plate, the money is being used to simply get the product out the door. As long as it sort of works at all, that is good enough and most managers don't care about how neat and tidy the code might be.
BTW, don't get me started on electrical engineers who have had a few software courses thinking that they have the same skills as a formally trained CS graduate. Some of the worst coding practices (and in fairness, some of the best too) I've ever seen have come from electrical engineers. They know the circuitry rather well, but often their coding skills are sufficient only up to a couple thousand lines of code.
The worst coding example I've seen? How about a global variable named "temp", used in about 50 places (including a recursive subroutine) in the software. It shocked me that the software ran at all.
That may or may not be a flaw. It certainly isn't a true average, but an average isn't the only legitimate way to combine successive data values.
That said, I'm not sure why a rolling average like this would be used for this purpose. Is there a medically sound, scientifically reviewed 'proper' procedure to measure alcohol in breath? I have a fear that this was just thrown together by some programmers.
One of the points that needs to be made here is the original intended purpose of the equipment and the overall design goals. Is this equipment intended to be a screening device or something that is intended to be used for medical diagnostics? The standards here are on two completely different levels and shouldn't be considered the same thing.
Also, such a rolling average that weighs later measurements is reasonable so far as to eliminate outliers (a huge problem with analog measurement devices like this) and to note that the equipment isn't measuring what was the blood alcohol, but trying to show what it currently being measured.
My own software development experience for something like this was trying to read data coming from a radar gun being used to measure the speed of professional baseball players throwing a ball from the pitcher's mound. When I saw the raw data coming in from such devices, it was incredible about the range of data and the kind of outliers that were found. In this case the stadium owners (we were throwing the measured speed up on a display board in the stadium) wanted the pitching speed to be displayed automatically... so only when readings that were fairly typical for major league players would show up.
What we ended up doing was a mean of the last eight readings, with the readings going into a queue as they came in. Obvious outliers never made it into the queue... such as the speed of an airplane flying over the stadium or the speed of the manager's pace going to the mound, and by averaging it kept what noise in the readings still existed under control. The user interface also had parameters that could be adjusted to change the outlier ranges from game to game as necessary.
All analog measurements exhibit noise of some sort or another... either coming from the Analog/Digital conversion modules themselves (if poorly designed... unfortunately a common issue too) or from the fact that measurements of a particular sample can skew the data set.
I'll also be honest, quite often software is used to make up for cheap equipment and averaging of samples to give far more apparent accuracy than an objective review of the measuring device would be validated for on its own.
Since all 50 U.S. states have different laws on this point, and often even municipalities within the same state can have differing laws on the topic (DUI legislation is a state, not a federal issue), this isn't quite so cut and dried.
Also, even if the manufacturer guidelines suggest another blood test be done, often you will have a police agency take a shortcut and not bother to get the "second opinion"... and have the information from the device be the only piece of evidence presented in court.
I would have to agree with the sentiment here that most of the hand-held devices used by an ordinary police officer should only be a screening device... to rule out obvious exceptions and suggest a more through test. Erratic behavior that turns out not to be due to alcohol or common controlled substances may be a symptom of a much more serious problem.
Darwin should take care of reinforcing this lesson? You're seriously saying that people should learn that hot things burn by survival vs. death?
Yup!
I can name several people I am at least somewhat acquainted with that have had bad things happen to them, and I have learned from their experiences... including related deaths.
There is this thing called a brain we have... which unfortunately not nearly used as often as it could be. And far too often people to pay the ultimate price for their ignorance.
The problem is distinguishing between *you*, supposedly an expert on the subject, with access to primary sources (not easily referenced otherwise) posting accurate information; and Joe Random Vandal, masquerading as an expert, claiming to have access to primary sources, posting false and misleading junk. Without fallacious appeals to authority.
If you have a reasonable solution, that does not involve taking a picture and scanning the manual, please share.
(On second thought, in the age of accessible photomanipulation, even that may not be enough).
Somebody who is genuinely knowledgeable about a topic certainly should have a pretty sound grasp of what the "usual suspects" of legitimate sources about that topic would be. I find it rather difficult to believe that other than a very obscure topic where notability issues would be raised, that somebody could simply make up sources and information out of whole cloth and make it stick. The sources (even print-only sources or things from hard to reach archives) would still be eventually be discovered.
I suppose a hoax along the lines of Udo of Aachen would pass muster on a first glance, but even that wouldn't last too long. It would last about as long as this phony quotation that the main article talks about.
While I do have problems with folks who turn their nose up on primary sources on Wikipedia (like on a historical article that an editor thinks a congressional report by the participants in the event is a "primary source" and unreliable for citation), this is a far different issue than those who actually use Wikipedia as a location for publishing original research.
The main point of the "original research" exclusion is to take fringe theories like UFO "researchers" and those who are heavily into conspiracy theories and build an argument to keep these idea from dominating and taking over Wikipedia. The system works well in that regard, as such articles certainly are by far the minority of what is found on Wikipedia... and frequently deleted as well. That the original research rules also help to build better articles on even more "legitimate" topics is a bonus... and points out that it really is a good idea to have put this rule in place when it was devised in the first place. IMHO, this is an example of a highly successful Wikipedia policy in action, where it dealt with a potential weakness in Wikipedia in an honest and forthright fashion.
If only all Wikipedia policies were fashioned and carried out with such honesty and integrity.
With the exception of highly political pages like "Global Warming", "Barak Obama", and "George W. Bush", my experience with sane edit wars (scholarly disagreements) tends to ramp up the quality and value of the article... including better citations (or adding citations in the first place) and ferreting out biases in the sources being quoted.
There have been a few cases where an editor simply is being a prick, but they usually get dealt with in the end and legitimately challenged with their edits thrown out.
In spite of the fact this is an AC post, what is being said is in fact correct. If this "expert" was able to pull up a previously published book (listed elsewhere and obviously not self-published) that included a specific reference to this particular fact, it would be a legitimate citation and something that can be included in the article.
Unfortunately, many people who make claims of this nature either are not an expert, or are simply just lazy as all get out. Indeed, university professors seem to be some of the laziest of all of these type of folks, even if they do have a legitimately published article that has fine details about issues of this nature.
There is nothing wrong, IMHO, of listing something you know to be a fact but aren't quite sure of the citation on the discussion page of the article. I've done that more than once, and it has been used to seek out a legitimate citation from somebody who has access to other sources than I have at hand. In one case on Wikipedia, a general request for alternative sources ended up giving far more information than I had earlier even anticipated on even finding in the first place... far better than even most "experts" I had earlier asked on the topic.
No.
The US was created for many reasons, one big one being because Britain didn't want us anymore(at least not enough to take us). Copyright law was not on the lips of the founding fathers. Tax law, and Torture, and lack of Due Process, where on their lips.
This isn't quite true either. Admittedly copyright was not the leading issue of the day, but abuses of crown copyright (including "eternal copyright" and having the legal code copyright protected and exclusively printed by a single "licensed" printing house) were among the various "abuses" that did trigger the revolution against England.
The stamp act in particular was one that incensed the publishers... where a stamp had to be paid for (and affixed to) anything created in a printing house. This also included schedules for certain items including the Bible that were simply prohibited from being published in America.
The first Bible printed in America was a translation of the King James Version of the Bible in one of the Algonquian languages. An English-language edition of the Bible didn't even get published in America until after the Declaration of Independence, and even then it was considered an act of rebellion. The British printers wanted the revenue from bible production, which is one of the reasons for this law. The reason I'm mentioning the Bible in particular is due to what should be obvious religious influences in the USA and how much publication of the scriptures is linked to political freedoms in general, and how absurd it sounds to be arrested for simply the act of copying the contents of the Bible... even a simple excerpt that today would be considered fair-use.
I should also note that copyright issues were important enough to the founders of the American Republic that the copyright clause was put into the very first article of the Constitution and put very strong limitations on its implementation that were designed to explicitly prohibit abuses as seen by English copyright law. In addition, one of the very first acts of the first Congress of the USA under the current constitution was the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790. This law was written by many of the original framers of the constitution and also set the model of what they desired in terms of copyright law. IMHO, this federal employee that is being honored by the original post is an example of somebody who clearly did not study, or really understand the abuses that lead to the copyright clause or why the original copyright act was written.
I believe this to be a mis-reading of the copyright act that is cited here, as the law doesn't really require the "American Geophysical Union" to obtain the actual copyright via transfer, as a simple legal license to the content (proprietary, exclusive, irrevokable) could effectively do the same thing that is done with 99% of the content that they publish.
It is situations like this where it is some lawyer who got scared because of some potential problems with content licensing and insisted on formal copyright transfer instead. Again, the law doesn't require this, but it does help clean up some legal loopholes that are rarely an issue anyway. The largest is if the original author re-publishes a paper in another journal without formal copyright transfer, it becomes merely a civil contract violation case rather than something which invokes copyright law.
The above has the copyright transferred, but the author retains a license to that content.
BTW, in a "work for hire" or something where a corporation actually owns the copyright (instead of just the "author" under license to a publisher), the term of a copyright is simply 75 years. This is the case of collaborative works like most motion pictures that are clearly owned by a company for liability reasons alone.
I do happen to agree with you on the fuzzy nature of the lifetime + arbitrary extra constant for copyrighted works, and simply saying that the limit is 50 years works for most people.
The most ingenuous solution I heard was to charge a filing fee of $1 * 10 ^ (decades of copyright term).... where every ten years you have to pay ten times the previous decade for copyright protection. The fee is payable in advance, so somebody could also arbitrarily establish their own copyright term ahead of time. The first 20 years or so would be free... for those who don't want to bother with filing for copyright protection or are of limited financial means. Seriously, if you haven't made money off of something in 20 years, do you really need copyright protection?
This way, if Disney or George Lucas want to put incredibly long copyrights on their works it becomes a business decision and the money goes into the general revenue fund rather than the campaign funds of their favorite senators. Putting Star Wars under 100 years of copyright protection would cost George Lucas about $10 million or so. Perhaps it might be something he'd consider, but it would also be obvious about things of this nature and wouldn't be a typical copyright term.
How about the reverse of that question? Can any rational number be expressed as a sum the powers of irrational numbers like pi or e?
Yes, I'm talking about a numerical system that uses a radix of pi, so pi == 10. For extra homework, can e or i be expressed as a sum of powers of pi?
Seriously, I don't know the answer to this question, but it is an interesting side trip through mathematical esoterica.
The main thing holding back NASA at the moment isn't their shitty new shuttles. It is PR, they don't have a groundswell of support. If there was a movement like the one to get a man on the moon we would be having massive innovation coming from every orifice. But most of the world doesn't care. So we are stifled.
I don't think it is an issue of if the rest of the world (or in the case of NASA... America, who is paying the bills) caring about spaceflight. There is certainly some support... at about the current funding levels that NASA seems to have.
The real problem facing NASA is a lack of a strong and compelling vision about what they should be doing. NASA was an agency designed to do two thing:
1) get people into space
2) get people to the Moon
NASA already accomplished these goals, so they are wandering around in the dark in search of another goal or mission to do. Going to Mars is perhaps one of these goals, but those with the political capital to make it happen don't want to push for such a lofty goal because the cost is going to be huge... and there are other things those politicians who set national policies want to accomplish.
George H. W. Bush made a lame attempt to push for Mars, and George W. Bush at least came up with the "Vision for Space Exploration" (VSE) to set a basic time frame. Unfortunately, he knew all too well that a more cost-effective trip to Mars would have to be done under the administrations of several U.S. Presidents.... something that is not going to happen if even one of them feels differently.
What we got instead is the Constellation program... warts and all. And boy does that have a whole lot of problems.
Even the assertion that everything we know about the Solar System besides the Earth and the Moon comes from robotic missions is a mistaken notion and a faulty assertion. Telescopes, radar dishes, and other sensing devices used on the Earth have been used for years (centuries actually) to give us some foundational knowledge about the planets.... so even here you can't cite 100% of the knowledge is gained through the robotic probes.
It is also really nitpicking over details here to say that planetary science is strictly knowledge that has been obtained even by both ground-based observatories and the robotic missions. I'm pointing out legitimately that the knowledge of the Solar System obtained even by taking a few samples from the Moon has so significantly expanded our knowledge of the Solar System that it has yet to really filter its way down into textbooks and become a part of the baseline knowledge of the universe. Even worse, NASA in their infinite wisdom refuses to open its mineral archives to legitimate scientific inquiry on the fear that the lunar samples they have are going to be the only ones they'll ever get for the next century.
In the debate between manned vs. unmanned spaceflight, I take issue with those who would cancel all manned spaceflight under the "hopeless romanticism" that you mentioned would have all of this boundless money pour into the unmanned spaceflight missions. Yes, for a time you might even see some spectacular breakthroughs in our knowledge of the universe compared to what we used to know, but I'm arguing that at some point you have to put the boots on the ground and get people there to see it for themselves.... for a great many reasons including the ones that I mentioned before. I also think it is unrealistic to think even unmanned missions would continue if manned spaceflight were canceled. I argue that the unmanned mission happen by them hanging on the coattails of the manned missions, but I digress on that point and is a whole separate argument.
The 21 month round trip flight you are mentioning (about 10-12 months each way) is something that has already been simulated multiple times including in-orbit tests aboard Skylab, Mir, and the ISS. It isn't nearly so impossible as you would make it seem, and that is assuming we are using a Hohmann transfer orbit and using only chemical rockets for that kind of trip. If you were to use other propulsion technologies, you can certainly get each leg of the trip under a month... or at least substantially less than the 21 months round trip that you are citing. Mars isn't quite so far away as you are implying, and existing technologies (no real unobtainium or ways to circumvent fundamental physics like Relativity) are available for such a trip. As Robert Heinlein stated so clearly, low-earth orbit is half-way to the solar system. That is a solved engineering problem and the rest isn't nearly so difficult.
The only reason a flight to Mars is going to be so incredibly expensive is because we are waiting on government bureaucrats to make it happen and using one of the most costly procurement models as the standard for its development. The motto for nearly everybody working on Apollo was "waste anything but time". They got to the Moon, but it was hardly cheap. If there was a compelling reason to get people to Mars by 2020, I have no doubt that America could build the vehicles and get folks there... but an Apollo/Manhattan Project type crash program is something that shouldn't happen. If you are in agreement with this, then perhaps we are talking and agreeing about the same thing from a different viewpoint.
From my own humble opinion, once there are large groups of private citizens in orbit around the Earth doing their stuff (space tourism, private space stations, early beginnings of space-based manufacturing) it will take active law enforcement and military actions to keep people from going to Mars or other bodies in the Solar System. No doubt there are going to be some idiots who are going to fire weapons in
I'm glad to see that somebody "in the know" and has a voice in these matters has this opinion. I was heartened at the "promotion" of Ceres by the IAU (even though the press seemed to emphasis the "demotion" of Pluto") with the reclassification of the term planet.
In my opinion, a Helio-centric definition will eventually fall apart as you try to classify celestial bodies. Clearly when more is known about exo-solar... around multiple star systems and more exotic configuration like an Earth-like body orbiting a gas giant in the habitable zone (none discovered yet, but don't tell me it can't happen) is going to really stretch these sort of definitions.... or when we find things between the size of Uranus and the Earth.
BTW, I made this comment about astronauts landing on another planet, because the astronauts who went there (James Lovell, Harrison Schmidt, Buzz Aldrin, James Irwin, and more) all asserted they either went by or actually landed on another planet. With the exception of the boredom of waiting and waiting to get there due to larger distances, there isn't much of a difference between landing on the Moon or other dwarf planets. If we go to those other bodies, I'm sure the methods will be nearly identical. It sure wasn't like landing on Phobos.
Can we ever overtake this? Good luck getting a object faster than Voyager 1.
If you are talking about getting an object to travel faster than Voyager 1 using nothing but rocket-based chemical propulsion methods.... yeah, you are correct. That is likely to be the all-time aviation record for some time to come.
There are things like Solar Sails, ion propulsion, and nuclear rocketry that all produce propulsion in some form or another that would easily be able to catch up to and overtake Voyager 1. Indeed, you could catch up and pass Voyager 1 using a really efficient nuclear rocket in about a month or so even now. Do the math if you don't believe me.... and I'm talking a constant acceleration of just 10 m/s^2 (about normal Earth-level gravity equivalent).
Voyager 1 is traveling using a method equivalent to trying to travel from Minneapolis to New Orleans by throwing a raft in the Mississippi and hoping you get there eventually without even rowing.
The Orion spaceship could, in theory, be built in orbit above the Van Allen belts... and certainly any residual radiation it would produce by blowing up nukes while in orbit would be irrelevant compared to other background radiation sources found in interplanetary space.
Yeah, that requires in-orbit assembly, but is that necessarily the end of the world as well? We're talking a spaceship, not a landing craft.
Robotic exploration already accounts for 100% of our success in visiting other planets.
Hardly. 100%? A dozen people made it to the Moon (arguably a dwarf planet... and called such by the astronauts who went there) and performed more and better science than all other exploration of the Moon by all previous and subsequent robotic explorations of that body. An additional dozen people... mostly aircraft test pilots... got to at least see the Moon close up.
There are a whole lot of reasons to send actual people to these places... and information that comes from somebody who is there sensing the environment with their own nervous system and capable of seeing, feeling, and otherwise sensing things that simply aren't or can't be identified remotely.
Futhermore, simply being in a different environment and having to face new challenges that other people haven't coped with before creates new thought processes (new neural pathways) and forces you to think in ways that creates additional knowledge.... and often those new ways of thinking can be applied to existing problems in a new context. Getting other people to other planets... and yes, even other star systems (eventually... as technology and space technologies permit) can do nothing but help improve nearly everything that we hold dear to ourselves as human.
BTW, I sure hope that at least some exploration of space is for personal gratification. Hell, I know it is.... that is why they put up with the bureaucratic bullshit, red tape, government committee meetings, press conferences, doctors probing in places you never knew existed in the first place, and all of the other headaches to spaceflight.
One shuttle astronaut that I read about had the experience of being able to face away from the Earth, the Shuttle, and all of the equipment he had for about 10 minutes during an EVA while the rest of the crew was putting away some equipment and dealing with some other tasks. The view of the heavens he was able to experience for that brief moment of time with nothing between him and starlight but a think piece of Lexan (and an inch or so of air) was a breathtaking experience this astronaut claimed made the whole experience of becoming an astronaut worth the effort. Other astronauts have said the same thing during their "break" times where a common privilege is to simply gaze at the Earth during one complete orbit. We need more people to enjoy these simple pleasures that come from spaceflight.... and I hope that poets, writers, and artists of all other types can experience something of that nature eventually and be able to give the rest of us a glimpse of what that sort of experience is like.
You could even argue that the modern environmental movement; global warming concerns, oceanic pollution, nuclear winter, ozone depletion, and much more; was initiated because a few astronauts had the privilege of being able to see the Earth rise up over the horizon while orbiting the Moon. NASA gave them instructions to take pictures... as many as they could click with their cameras (including cameras mounted remotely on their vehicle) of the surface of the Moon. But when these guys saw the Earth come up... they realized on the spot with no other instructions that they had to get some photos of the Earth as well. Even today, these are some of the most heavily requested photos from NASA and are arguably the most duplicated images in the history of mankind. These images would not have been made if it weren't for a person in orbit around the Moon to make them.... the bureaucrats planning the mission on the ground never thought of making them.
Don't even get me started on how limited the robotic missions have really been... even though what has been accomplished with the robotic missions has been incredible. There is a role for robotic exploration, but there is a role for a physical presence of human being in space as well.... and not just in low-earth orbit.
I have no idea why this comment was modded to "Insightful". What a waste of mod points. Funny, perhaps.
Considering the place where they are going to put this clock, it is going to be likely that in 50 years people will forget about its very existence or even know where to find the dang thing. It is going to be in eastern Nevada (U.S. state) near the top of a mountain. Hardly the best place for a parking lot for any reason.
About the only "famous" landmark of the area is the infamous "Area 51" that has been done to death in SciFi movies. I suppose archeologists from the future who are uncovering what actually happened at Groom Lake may accidentally discover this location as well. Perhaps.
The Mayan calendar doesn't "run out" in 2012... it merely goes through the equivalent of what we have with the Y10k bug... when date recording will move on to another digit to count the number of years.
You just need another digit in the "long count" for the Mayan calendar to keep the system going for another couple of millennia.
I would have to assume (and based on how they use dates that the Long Now Foundation is aware of this) that this proposed clock is going to take the Y10k bug seriously and compensate for it.
Knowing human irony, this clock will likely last for 100,000 years and not just 10,000 years. And being a 100k year old antique, nobody will want to modify it to count out the extra days/years necessary when that event happens.
Tesla decided to dump the multi-speed transmission, as the manufacturer of the tranny couldn't meet the torque and RPM specifications in the production vehicles. All sorts of finger pointing went with the issue, and it nearly took the whole company (Tesla) down with the lack of a quality transmission.
Oh, a two-speed transmission was built, but it only got a couple thousand miles on it before it had to be replaced. This blog entry goes into details on how the problem was finally "fixed", with what was a single-speed transmission.
The Tesla cells are kept at a much saner temperature level through the use of a coolant/heating system in the battery pack itself. This is something you couldn't afford to put onto your laptop.... and I dare say that a typical laptop will subject the batteries to much higher (and lower) temperatures and operating environments that cause much of the damage to laptop batteries.
Read the PDF file in the link above with the GP post. It covers all of this information and much more, including expected lifetime (which is on the order of about 7-10 years).
The only real problem I've heard about the Roadster is the issue with the battery pack not shutting down the coolant system when the vehicle is parked.... which causes a power drain on the battery and sucks power from the recharging unit even if you haven't driven it for awhile.
Actually, not even Hydrogen is the wave of the future because it remains a net negative energy source for the forseeable future.
Sorry for poking holes in what people are trying to do - considering I don't have a better idea myself.
I see this argument offered against hydrogen time and again. I'll also give this response:
Are you aware that in terms of energy required for distillation, refining, and powering the facilities that a typical gallon of gasoline consumes far more energy than it will ever release when burned inside of a vehicle? This is completely ignoring distribution losses (aka fueling the tanker trucks who deliver the gasoline to your local station and the vehicles which delivered the crude oil in the first place) and production losses (nearly all forms of petroleum production require at least a pump and sometimes more elaborate means to extract the crude).
When you get right down to it, the amount of energy required for a m^3 of hydrogen gas and the equivalent for gasoline or other petrochemical fuel (in terms of energy available to be released via combustion/fuel cells) is nearly identical or in fact favors hydrogen production. In both cases, you are not paying for energy production, but rather for fuel.... which can come in many different forms.
Where does the energy come from for refinery production? They mostly tap into the existing electric grid for the energy and buy it at industrial rates. Very rarely will they use raw crude for the production, and they couldn't sustain the facility off of the fuel that they produce if that were necessary.
The fact that it requires energy to crack hydrogen-based molecules (either hydrocarbons or water) is irrelvant in terms of the production of hydrogen as a fuel gas. Besides, hydrogen gas is much safer to handle than gasoline as well, given similar energy requirements. It can also be "manufactured" much closer to where it is used, and doesn't have wildly fluctuating prices in feeds stocks like petroleum.