Do you realize what you are saying here in terms of power consumption? 250 kilowatts of power?
Assuming a 220 volt service, that is nearly 12,000 amps that will be needed in that circuit. A normal house connection to the grid only uses about 50 amps (if it is new construction... less for older homes).
Yeah, I've played with power on those levels before, but you are talking a major industrial power supply. If you are suggesting something that has banks of its own batteries and can deliver thousands of kilowatt-hours of energy in a short period of time and then taking on a trickle charge over the next several hours... perhaps I might believe it. That is still an incredible amount of energy... and it is energy that needs to be delivered in what ever form it might take.
At the very least, any such "filling station" for electric vehicles open to the general public would have to have their own private sub-station and/or power plant to handle the charge load that a typical 6 or 8 pump public gasoline station might handle.
Typically the "fast charge" batteries also don't have the raw energy that they claim... again in term of kilowatt-hours (or joules) that can be delivered. 10 gallons of gasoline packs a whole lot of energy in a small amount of volume and it is hard to get much more efficient than hydrocarbons for energy density.
Surprisingly, if you are talking about how far and quickly you can travel, somebody in good condition can outrun and outlast a horse simply by traveling on foot. The human body is "designed" by evolution to be a long distance runner and will beat horses.
Where a horse excels is that they can also haul a pile of goods and equipment.... or plow a field more efficiently than simply strapping a plow to your back and having your wife try to guide the thing going through the ground. Besides, in an agrarian society, finding a little extra food for the day to feed a horse isn't all that hard.
Seriously, there are a lot more places where you can get electricity, than places where you can get gasoline.
Just as important as finding sources of electric power, there are quite a few methods of storing electrical energy and ways to convert that back to electricity on demand than just using chemical batteries.
Considering that future energy sources are going to come from a wide variety of forms and places (wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro) it makes much more sense to tap into the common denominator of them all: electricity.
"just maybe"? My ten year old four-cylinder Opel Omega has a higher top speed than that. As for acceleration... well:
The Lotus Exige S, based on a similar platform to the one Tesla is using, does 0-100km/h in about 4.1 seconds, and costs ~40k less. A Porsche 997 Turbo could be as fast as 3.2 seconds, while the GT2 and GT3 have comparable times. The Nissan GT-R and Viper ACR are at about 3.5-3.3. The Caterham R500 is even better at about 2.88.
Ok, so the Caterham is a ridiculous car, but the others don't sacrifice much for the speed, and cost a reasonable amount of money (that is, we're not talking Veyron money here).
One huge difference here is that the Tesla is likely to give nearly the ideal acceleration for most of the ordinary consumers. There is no gear shift to enable and therefore no special skills for accelerating.... other than stomping on the gas pedal when the light turns green.
The times you are quoting above have usually been done by professional drivers who have spent a considerable amount of time with the engineers and have fine-tuned precisely when they should shift gears and are maximizing performance to get those times. I find it unlikely that even a good driver under more typical circumstances can obtain this sort of performance.
Still, your point is well taken, and there are other high performance automobiles that certainly can take on a Tesla Roadster at a similar if not slightly smaller price. It should also be noted that most of the other electric automobile manufacturers tend to make things that are glorified golf carts that would be lucky to get to 60 mph at all going downhill with hurricane force winds at the tail.... and you would be afraid of something breaking at that speed anyway.
A "reasonable price" is relative anyway... and besides, the resale value of a Tesla Roadster is currently higher than it costs to buy one direct from Tesla. My last car I purchased for $500 USD (admittedly not new, but it runs just fine).
One aspect of sunspot counts that makes it an invaluable tool for climate study is the significant historical data that goes back centuries. Counting sunspots pre-dates photography and nearly goes back to the time of Gutenberg's printing press. From this we can also compare some of the earliest accurate temperature measurements and certainly other historical records measuring ice thickness in various European and American rivers and lakes and other significant climatological trends.
While clearly solar activity cycles are not the only possible influence on the Earth's climate, it does indeed seem to be a major driver of several long-term trends that have been seen in the past. Again, because sunspot cycles have been measured for such a long period of time and the data about their measurement has been so widely and consistently disseminated, it is harder to fabricate false data.
Fabrication of scientific data has certainly been found in other fields besides climatology, and unfortunately it is much easier to hide and cover up such fabrication in this field as well. There are also some biases to the data collection methods that also are out of hand dismissed, such as monitoring locations that have the local environment change over time due to changes in the immediate plant community near the monitoring station.
One other known bias of scientific reports is that climate change, particularly "global warming", has seen significant bias in terms of funding. If the overwhelming number of scientific studies which are funded have a political bias to them (something which does not have a scientific basis or objective rationale), it is hard to counter that the data produced by these studies has objectivity as well. While I don't doubt the intelligence of the climatologists at the National Academy of Science, I do question their political and scientific neutrality. They are human and biases can naturally be found with nearly any organization... particularly ones that are funded by overtly political bodies like the United States Congress.
The point of a quality calendar is to coordinate the counting of the days (usually sunrises or sunsets historically) and the changes of the seasons... principally to predict with a modest margin of error when to plant seasonal agricultural products. That is the whole point of leap days and irregular lengths of months (the time scale tied loosely to lunar cycles).
As to if the orbital positions of the various planets, with emphasis on the Earth and perhaps Jupiter (a much, much stronger influence on the Sun gravitationally speaking) have on the sunspot cycles.... I have not heard of any particular correlation suggested. The typical 11 year sunspot cycle is less than the period of Jupiter's orbit, although other factors certainly can be pointed out as well.
What? Am I the only one here who posted to alt.vampires.flonk.flonk.flonk using tin?
Geez, I miss the real usenet.
I used to post in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
Similar meme and a bit earlier, if I'm not mistaken.
It seems like CleverNickNameposted in there a few times as well.... adding all that more irony to the newsgroup. Sad part, he often agreed with the criticism.
I don't know if that particular number of citizens is right, but that otherwise sounds good.
This is also, BTW, one of the reasons I don't think "terrorist groups" like Al Queida will ever independently develop nukes.... and if they steal them, they will not threaten with nukes.... they'll use them immediately. Likely right at the place where they are at in the first place. Hanging on to a nuke is far too much effort compared to obtaining them in the first place.
No, I didn't say it was the Iranian nuclear program... it was the Iraqi one under Hussein. Read what I wrote and don't assume more into this than you are making. Iraq clearly was intending to make nuclear bombs, but Israel did the whole world a huge favor by stopping the program cold... and it should be noted that Iraq doesn't have nuclear weapons today as a result, nor is there any possibility of them having those weapons in the near future.
Do you realize that there is a difference in culture background, language, customs, culture, and ideology between Iraq and Iran? Iran is the modern version of the Persian empire and Iraq (more or less) the embodiment of the Babylonian Empire.
BTW, if the desire was there, I certainly think both Syria and Egypt could dig up a nuke or two of their own. They both have received support from nuclear powers in the past that would hardly be called friendly to Israel.... and look up the position of both of these countries in terms of their international borders in relationship to Israel.
The nuclear genie came out of the bottle not in the 1970's, but the 1940's, and I have read science fiction magazines from the 1950's that had a pull-out supplement on "give this to your local terrorist" instructions on how to build a home-made nuclear bomb. Several of those articles are quite interesting and show the real problems that any nation wishing to develop nuclear weapons must go through. I live with the knowledge that any time my neighbors could die from a nuclear blast, and the relatively nearby U.S. Air Force base could end up landing on my back yard any day as well. At least I have a mountain range between me and that base, while my brother has the protection of a vinyl fence to hold back the nuclear blast.
I am very much aware of the problems and dangers of a nuclear war. How about you?
China? They've never really gone outside their borders after they were established, basically ever. They did however fight the US in North Korea. The US had the bomb, the Chinese didn't for another for 14 years. So that invalidates the deterrent argument.
Boy, is this massive ignorance of world history. Ever heard of the Kamikaze? I'm not talking the WWII ones, but the original "divine wind" that destroyed the Chinese naval invasion of Japan?
China, when they had political and military power to do something, essentially extended their empire to the limits of communications and logistical support as they could at the time.... and made a tactical decision to discontinue trade with India and the Middle-east at about the same time European traders were just starting to get their act together.
There are also a whole bunch of dead Vietnamese and Russians that would beg to differ about how "friendly" China has been about their current borders... and those are casualties that took place in the last half of the 20th Century. China drools over Siberia and would do anything they could to take that hunk of real estate... realizing that is one thing that might forge a strong alliance between the USA and Russia and might even get the hoards flowing over the Himalayas from India into Tibet. That all of those countries have nuclear weapons makes such a war all that more interesting.
South Africa and Kazakhstan gave up their nuclear weapons simply because they both had powerful friends who could protect them (or avenge them) in the case of a nuclear war, and it was simply getting too expensive for their respective countries to maintain the nukes they had.
BTW, does the Ukraine still have nukes? I think you can add that country to the list, but I'm not completely sure. Same reasons BTW, and it should be telling that a country the size of the Ukraine has problems maintaining a nuclear arsenal due to strictly economic reasons. The number of nuclear weapons in the UK and France is about at the limit of what those two countries can tolerate economically as well.
Israel's nuclear arsenal is there mainly because several of its neighbors either have nukes already or may get them in the near future (read Iran). Keep in mind that it was Israel and not the USA who bombed the Iraqi nuclear program back to the stone age.
It was really all over long before Reagan attempted to restart the cold war with the SS20 deployment in Europe. The USSR was imploding by then and it makes little more sense to claim Reagan stopped the cold war while trying very hard to do the opposite than a the bunch of Afgans that claim they collapsed the USSR. I know Reagan's a dead hero now but those of us old enough to have been reading newspapers at the time see things a little less simplisticly. It's depressing really that all that fear generated at the time was entirely pointless as political factions in the USSR were too busy squabbling to really notice.
That's all irrelvant to the current time anyway since todays Republicans and Democrats are a bit different - but I don't like seeing a major mistake presented as a victory.
The SS-20's were Soviet, not American weapons. That would have been an incredible accomplishment for Reagan to have deployed them in Europe.
While there were multiple causes of the final collapse of the Soviet Union, Reagan's re-armament plan ranging from the 500 ship Navy, massive increase in the size of the Army and increase in their training, together with Star Wars and other "toys" for the Air Force certainly had a major impact on its collapse. It was the deployment of the Pershing missiles (and later the Pershing II) that happened in Europe by the USA, and that was hardly the only weapons system deployed by the U.S. government.
Yeltsin's tour of America just prior to the final collapse of the Soviet Union was also quite telling. He stopped into the middle of Texas and went into a typical American grocery store. He noticed the store was incredibly well stocked... far better than the stores party members had access to in Russia. He also saw a woman buying food in quantities and of value (steaks, packaged dinners, and even luxury foods like wine) that he couldn't even afford as President of Russia. His jaw dropped when he was informed that the woman was paying for the stuff with Food Stamps (a form of social welfare for the poor in America). At that point, he knew his country would be doomed economically if the status quo of the time were maintained.
Yes, it is simplistic to say that Reagan single-handily ended the Cold War, but he certainly had a major impact and made the final push.... although the cost to America was hardly insignificant as well.
It will take a world government to make nuclear weapons go away. There is just no other solution. As long as there are countries and as long as people are people, governments will want nuclear weapons - and they will get them.
The only concern about a world government is that typically human governments tend to be tyrannical and oppressive of their citizens/subjects. Multiple countries at least gives the ability for citizens in one of those tyrannical states to flee (or at least plan to flee) those countries who are oppressive. The Berlin wall held for a number of years but eventually it did crumble due to the huge differences between one side vs. the other.
IMHO, one huge unified government will simply be one unified awful and oppressive government for everybody.
This said, I would have to agree that only such a world-wide government could completely eliminate nukes. Even that said, I don't see how knowledge of nuclear weapons can be eradicated on the off chance that such a world-wide government would eventually collapse and self-interested individuals would try to restart nuclear weapons programs in the coming centuries.
Simply put, nuclear weapons should be considered a fact of life and the issue is not if they should be eliminated but how they should be used and when. All of the rest is naivety and burying your head in the sand.
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral, and not a military one. They would be very, very effective militarily.
Hardly. Iraq was incredibly easy to defeat, and the only reason why U.S. casualties have been happening since the capture of Saddam Hussein is the moral and ethical questions that would surround massive civilian casualties that most other invading armies of the world usually would do to stop insurgency. The main war in Iraq only lasted a month or so, so there was absolutely no need for nukes. Dealing with insurgency problems is not something you would use a nuke for anyway.
As far as Afghanistan is concerned..... what would you nuke? There is nothing of value in that country other than some poppy fields (opium FYI), and those are not good targets for nukes. Kabul might have been a legitimate target, except that conventional forces were capable of capturing and controlling that city very quickly with a minimal number of forces.
Some of the Pakistani cities near the border of Afghanistan might be legitimate targets, but that opens up a major question about the use of nukes against a proven nuclear power. Nuking even a city that openly proclaims support for the Taliban is likely to get a retaliatory strike on New York, DC, or Los Angeles. Again, it is military considerations here and not moral ones that are stopping the use of nukes in that theater of operations.
I think the opposition being suggested was more along the lines of "You have a gun, I don't, and you want to kill me, but if you shoot me EVERYONE will know. Your wife and friends will never talk to you again, the residents of your apartment building will get spat on in the street and know that it's because of you, and you'd better be able to grow your own food because there isn't a grocery store in 100 miles that'll still serve you. Now, have a long hard think about that and decide if it's still worth it..."
This works out fine for a smaller country like Kuwait and Costa Rica. They don't need nukes because there is always somebody out there who is willing to avenge the destruction of their countries.
Historically, there have always been "outlaws" that didn't give a damn about getting spat upon or being considered unwelcome in the community. As a wiki "sysop" I deal with these folks all of the time, including some very inventive trolls who keep coming back and even know how to push buttons emotionally on project leaders... so I'm talking about first hand knowledge of folks of this type that still exist even today.
What saves a community is the knowledge that there is some bad-ass guy that wishes to protect the community as a whole when one of these rogues come into town, and that they are given the tools necessary to fight off these trolls. In the case of countries, who might that bad-ass protector be?
Yes, I know in England that the constabulary has been historically unarmed and seemed to keep the order in English cities. Even so, the threat that weapons and somebody with a serious attitude to take your life was always there if you tried to resist and be a jerk. A police situation can always be escalated to a military situation... like what happened to the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas and other similar related incidents.
That would make you wrong again. In WWII, the USA had a huge involvement - both in terms of weapons supplied to allies and also in terms of soldiers.
In terms of the number of soldiers involved... and certainly in terms of casualties.... the U.S. figures were significantly dwarfed by nearly all of the other major players in WWII. Even in terms of absolute numbers of casualties, the U.S. Civil War was a much bloodier war and had a much larger and longer term impact economically and socially (on the American people).
This said, the material contributions of the USA were hardly insignificant, and American soldiers in Europe were certainly able to push the tipping point of the war in favor of the Allied forces... just as the USA had done earlier in WWI to an even lesser extent.
An interesting question comes to mind here.... would General Sherman have used a nuclear bomb on Atlanta on his drive to the sea... assuming of course that nukes had been available in the 1860's? That would certainly make a good alternative history novel.
Sure, the Red Army may have had a 10:1 numerical advantage in Europe, but how well does that play out if they start suffering 20:1 losses?
What you are pointing out was the state of the U.S. Army and the U.S. military in general after trillions of dollars were spent on it due to modernization and massive training programs were enacted during the Reagan administration. Also, Saddam Hussein was facing the army, quite literally (at least the VII corps and other units) who spent decades preparing to fight back the onslaught from the Fulda gap of the Red Army.
Frankly, I'm not sure that the current U.S. Army even has the resources to do something similar if we had to pull off an operation like Desert Storm today. That was a unique set of circumstances where Saddam Hussein certainly underestimated both the ability of and the resolve of the United States. I certainly don't think that the U.S. Army under Jimmy Carter could have pulled off a defense/liberation of Kuwait without nukes.
None of the above is fiction, none of it is speculation. I had the privilege several years ago of talking, over lunch at The Men's Club of Dallas, with a guy who turned out to be the only B-52 aircraft commander in the United States Air Force who didn't fly his airplane out to his Fail/Safe point that day. He and his crew had just landed from a training flight when the orders were given. As he and his crew were walking in, he met everyone else going out to their airplanes. He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
The Cuban Missile Crises is something that I believe is significantly downplayed by most high school and even university professors when covering modern American history. It is everything you claim and more.
Those who participated in the military at the time were of my father's generation, and to a man every single one of them knew the proverbial shit was hitting the fan at the time. Weapons lockers that were never, ever touched were opened and a massive mobilization of forces happened that was simply incredible. One guy I know was sitting in a Marine landing craft fully armed and provisioned for a month's operations about 20 miles from Havana when Khrushchev finally backed down. I don't know how much of that was saber rattling, but a full-out aggressive war was at least a very real possibility.
The world would have been very different if those plans had been put into motion, and it wasn't due to a lack of nukes or a President without balls. Similar incidents happened during the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations BTW, both of which get even less coverage than the Cuban Missile Crises. How World War III was avoided in 1973 is one of those facts of history that you have got to read about and investigate to believe, and just as remarkable.
While I appreciate the anecdotal reference here to supposedly a successful economic situation, I'm still not convinced that this company would have made less money without the patent process in place.
Nothing personal, but in your case it was a work for hire with a company who likely (you may confirm this) had deep pockets and was already in the business of selling chemicals to various customers. The proported purpose of a patent is to protect the lone inventor in a private lab/workshop... something I think it fails miserably at.
In this case, I'll bet the patents were used in a defensive mode, where the chemical processes were implemented with the understanding that a patent troll couldn't stop them. Chemical engineers do however have something of a fraternity and fewer small start-ups competing for business to keep out some of the worst aspects of patents that mechanical, computer, and software engineers have to contend with... I'll grant you that. DEA/ATF restrictions on chemical investigations only add to the mess of regs that chemists have to deal with.
I've written many songs, but I never bothered to trademark them. One of them is called "Ballad of the Clueless Cunt" and it's dedicated to you.
You clearly understand the difference between trademarks, copyright, and patents, don't you. How about Sales marks and trade secrets to round things off?
Seriously, when you are done, I'd like to hear the song.... (aw, never mind)
That embarrassing defeat happened because the Army, Air Force, and Navy had to coordinate the entire operation via the joint-chiefs office and not something a bit lower down the food chain (as was clearly needed), that the three services needed to be on the same page the whole time, and that joint operations experience were something clearly needed.
From what I understand, the Air Force showed up two hours early, the Army on time, and the Navy two hours late.... just to point out but one of many problems with the operation at "Desert One". The collision of the helicopters shouldn't have been fatal (to kill the whole plan, not just a few airmen) except for the fact there was no "plan B" in place to deal with the laws of thermodynamics and/or Murphy's Law. Competent military planners would have at least anticipated some problems, of which this operation simply had to go "by the book" for it to be successful.
Had these guys pulled it off, they would have been treated as heroes and sent down Broadway on a ticker-tape parade, with Jimmy Carter likely to have achieved a second term. Those were the stakes here. Unfortunately, it didn't work out, in part due to the abysmal morale and various other problems in the military at the time. Indeed this was one of the things looked at very carefully when Reagan finally came into office, even though it is likely Carter already made many of the changes necessary to get missions like this to succeed in the future. Too late for him, however.
The U.S. military can pull something like this off now, and even keep it from the press that it even happened. Still, that is closing the barn doors after the cows escape, and gave encouragement for groups like Al-Queida to pull off their stuff against Americans.
I really think he does believe that the world is like Star Trek, where you can have a meeting with someone that totally hates you, and suddenly love breaks out
It worked for Jimmy Carter. Sort of.
Yeah, it worked until Iran decided to take over the U.S. Embassy and he discovered that the military was in such horrible shape that it couldn't do what he wanted them to do. The fiasco of the hostage rescue mission was so bad that the U.S. military spent years afterward trying to fix the problems.
Oh, I guess you were talking about the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks. Yeah, that seemed to work out real well.... just look at how well Gaza turned out.
But the thing is, you have to take the man at his word, and I think he really that naive. I really think he does believe that the world is like Star Trek, where you can have a meeting with someone that totally hates you, and suddenly love breaks out. There's nothing that tells me that he believes otherwise.
Obama is a great mirror.... people see precisely what they want to see and seemingly nothing more. I don't know how the man does it, and it is the reason why he got elected, but folks of diametrically opposed viewpoints can see that Mr. Obama supports their cause... or worry that he is opposed to their viewpoints.
It will be interesting to see where this goes, and if he is as naive as it seems right now. Reality seems to have a way of catching up to a U.S. President in one way or another very quickly.
He isn't naive. Nobody is gonna get rid of their nukes, especially the USA, and he knows it. It puts international pressure on countries who really have no business with them. It is just good politics.
In terms of countries that don't need nukes, I'd submit that any country with less than 10 million citizens (more or less) should never really consider having nuclear weapons. The main reason is one of cost and maintenance.
Nuclear weapons are costly... from the viewpoint of monitoring the weapons and using them. Not only does it require technically brilliant people to create them in the first place, but you have to have extremely skilled folks to even deploy them once you have an objective. Also, no sane (or even slightly insane) national leader would want nukes to be used except if and only if that leader really wants them used and has given explicit order for their use. That implies a security detail guarding these bombs from accidental use and from being stolen, concerns about the health of those who are handling the bombs, medical staff to monitor those health concerns, communications devices and procedures to relay the wishes of the national leaders, and bureaucratic oversight of the whole process.
Nuclear bombs can also be traced very well in terms of finding the origin of the fissile material that was used to make the bomb. Again this goes back to the security issues, where a nuke that is used can be traced back to a country of origin... that will also be a target of attack if found.
IMHO North Korea, to give an example, is too small to effectively operate nuclear weapons. They are making it a priority for various reasons and destroying what little of an economy they have to do it... but it is an unsustainable proposition for them. Given the issues involved, I don't see North Korea maintaining its weapons for too long, and I certainly don't see smaller countries trying either.
By the end of the projected total nuclear ban, there will be much stronger weapons than nuclear. Why stick to some outdated weapons?
This is so true. Within the next century, spacefaring nations will have access to thousands of asteroids and meteors, any one of which would be capable of doing nearly the same or much greater damage to cities and armies on the Earth than nuclear bombs currently are designed to perform... without (well.... maybe) some of the longer term problems like radioactive fall-out.
This is also assuming that large quantities of anti-matter aren't developed in an industrial process of some sort. Go ahead, figure out what a 1 kg pile of anti-matter will do and then figure out where you could stick it if you could build a small enough containment unit to only let it interact with ordinary matter when planned.
This is just a couple of "weapons of mass destruction" that I can think of off the top of my head, and that is just the tip of what may be coming. Genetically engineered viruses that somehow target specific ethic groups or other even more weird science fiction storylines could be thought of as well.
I'd have to agree that 1950's era nuclear weapon designs are going to seem like child's toys compared to what may be developed in the future. Nuclear weapons may be completely eliminated just as the U.S. military is eliminating chemical warfare weapons.... they are no longer needed because much stronger and more effective weapons capable of much more damage are already available.
have even developed patent-worthy concepts of my own.
That's false by definition.
explain.... how is that false? I just never made the effort (actually my employer didn't want to bother with the paperwork or expense) to get the ideas patented. The prior art was established by giving the product to a paying customer.... which while not as strong as filing a patent can at least be considered prior art as receipts can be found and prove it does what is claimed.
I thought it was stupid on the part of my employer, but it wasn't my call to make. Since it was a work for hire, I wouldn't have much in terms of rights to the ideas anyway so it wasn't worthy my own money to file the patent application. That is where it sucks to be a salaried engineer sometimes, and not all companies have that attitude about intellectual property where they take it for granted that they may have something valueable.
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Do you realize what you are saying here in terms of power consumption? 250 kilowatts of power?
Assuming a 220 volt service, that is nearly 12,000 amps that will be needed in that circuit. A normal house connection to the grid only uses about 50 amps (if it is new construction... less for older homes).
Yeah, I've played with power on those levels before, but you are talking a major industrial power supply. If you are suggesting something that has banks of its own batteries and can deliver thousands of kilowatt-hours of energy in a short period of time and then taking on a trickle charge over the next several hours... perhaps I might believe it. That is still an incredible amount of energy... and it is energy that needs to be delivered in what ever form it might take.
At the very least, any such "filling station" for electric vehicles open to the general public would have to have their own private sub-station and/or power plant to handle the charge load that a typical 6 or 8 pump public gasoline station might handle.
Typically the "fast charge" batteries also don't have the raw energy that they claim... again in term of kilowatt-hours (or joules) that can be delivered. 10 gallons of gasoline packs a whole lot of energy in a small amount of volume and it is hard to get much more efficient than hydrocarbons for energy density.
Surprisingly, if you are talking about how far and quickly you can travel, somebody in good condition can outrun and outlast a horse simply by traveling on foot. The human body is "designed" by evolution to be a long distance runner and will beat horses.
Where a horse excels is that they can also haul a pile of goods and equipment.... or plow a field more efficiently than simply strapping a plow to your back and having your wife try to guide the thing going through the ground. Besides, in an agrarian society, finding a little extra food for the day to feed a horse isn't all that hard.
Seriously, there are a lot more places where you can get electricity, than places where you can get gasoline.
Just as important as finding sources of electric power, there are quite a few methods of storing electrical energy and ways to convert that back to electricity on demand than just using chemical batteries.
Considering that future energy sources are going to come from a wide variety of forms and places (wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro) it makes much more sense to tap into the common denominator of them all: electricity.
"just maybe"? My ten year old four-cylinder Opel Omega has a higher top speed than that. As for acceleration... well:
The Lotus Exige S, based on a similar platform to the one Tesla is using, does 0-100km/h in about 4.1 seconds, and costs ~40k less. A Porsche 997 Turbo could be as fast as 3.2 seconds, while the GT2 and GT3 have comparable times. The Nissan GT-R and Viper ACR are at about 3.5-3.3. The Caterham R500 is even better at about 2.88.
Ok, so the Caterham is a ridiculous car, but the others don't sacrifice much for the speed, and cost a reasonable amount of money (that is, we're not talking Veyron money here).
One huge difference here is that the Tesla is likely to give nearly the ideal acceleration for most of the ordinary consumers. There is no gear shift to enable and therefore no special skills for accelerating.... other than stomping on the gas pedal when the light turns green.
The times you are quoting above have usually been done by professional drivers who have spent a considerable amount of time with the engineers and have fine-tuned precisely when they should shift gears and are maximizing performance to get those times. I find it unlikely that even a good driver under more typical circumstances can obtain this sort of performance.
Still, your point is well taken, and there are other high performance automobiles that certainly can take on a Tesla Roadster at a similar if not slightly smaller price. It should also be noted that most of the other electric automobile manufacturers tend to make things that are glorified golf carts that would be lucky to get to 60 mph at all going downhill with hurricane force winds at the tail.... and you would be afraid of something breaking at that speed anyway.
A "reasonable price" is relative anyway... and besides, the resale value of a Tesla Roadster is currently higher than it costs to buy one direct from Tesla. My last car I purchased for $500 USD (admittedly not new, but it runs just fine).
One aspect of sunspot counts that makes it an invaluable tool for climate study is the significant historical data that goes back centuries. Counting sunspots pre-dates photography and nearly goes back to the time of Gutenberg's printing press. From this we can also compare some of the earliest accurate temperature measurements and certainly other historical records measuring ice thickness in various European and American rivers and lakes and other significant climatological trends.
While clearly solar activity cycles are not the only possible influence on the Earth's climate, it does indeed seem to be a major driver of several long-term trends that have been seen in the past. Again, because sunspot cycles have been measured for such a long period of time and the data about their measurement has been so widely and consistently disseminated, it is harder to fabricate false data.
Fabrication of scientific data has certainly been found in other fields besides climatology, and unfortunately it is much easier to hide and cover up such fabrication in this field as well. There are also some biases to the data collection methods that also are out of hand dismissed, such as monitoring locations that have the local environment change over time due to changes in the immediate plant community near the monitoring station.
One other known bias of scientific reports is that climate change, particularly "global warming", has seen significant bias in terms of funding. If the overwhelming number of scientific studies which are funded have a political bias to them (something which does not have a scientific basis or objective rationale), it is hard to counter that the data produced by these studies has objectivity as well. While I don't doubt the intelligence of the climatologists at the National Academy of Science, I do question their political and scientific neutrality. They are human and biases can naturally be found with nearly any organization... particularly ones that are funded by overtly political bodies like the United States Congress.
The point of a quality calendar is to coordinate the counting of the days (usually sunrises or sunsets historically) and the changes of the seasons... principally to predict with a modest margin of error when to plant seasonal agricultural products. That is the whole point of leap days and irregular lengths of months (the time scale tied loosely to lunar cycles).
As to if the orbital positions of the various planets, with emphasis on the Earth and perhaps Jupiter (a much, much stronger influence on the Sun gravitationally speaking) have on the sunspot cycles.... I have not heard of any particular correlation suggested. The typical 11 year sunspot cycle is less than the period of Jupiter's orbit, although other factors certainly can be pointed out as well.
What? Am I the only one here who posted to alt.vampires.flonk.flonk.flonk using tin?
Geez, I miss the real usenet.
I used to post in alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
Similar meme and a bit earlier, if I'm not mistaken.
It seems like CleverNickNameposted in there a few times as well.... adding all that more irony to the newsgroup. Sad part, he often agreed with the criticism.
I don't know if that particular number of citizens is right, but that otherwise sounds good.
This is also, BTW, one of the reasons I don't think "terrorist groups" like Al Queida will ever independently develop nukes.... and if they steal them, they will not threaten with nukes.... they'll use them immediately. Likely right at the place where they are at in the first place. Hanging on to a nuke is far too much effort compared to obtaining them in the first place.
No, I didn't say it was the Iranian nuclear program... it was the Iraqi one under Hussein. Read what I wrote and don't assume more into this than you are making. Iraq clearly was intending to make nuclear bombs, but Israel did the whole world a huge favor by stopping the program cold... and it should be noted that Iraq doesn't have nuclear weapons today as a result, nor is there any possibility of them having those weapons in the near future.
Do you realize that there is a difference in culture background, language, customs, culture, and ideology between Iraq and Iran? Iran is the modern version of the Persian empire and Iraq (more or less) the embodiment of the Babylonian Empire.
BTW, if the desire was there, I certainly think both Syria and Egypt could dig up a nuke or two of their own. They both have received support from nuclear powers in the past that would hardly be called friendly to Israel.... and look up the position of both of these countries in terms of their international borders in relationship to Israel.
The nuclear genie came out of the bottle not in the 1970's, but the 1940's, and I have read science fiction magazines from the 1950's that had a pull-out supplement on "give this to your local terrorist" instructions on how to build a home-made nuclear bomb. Several of those articles are quite interesting and show the real problems that any nation wishing to develop nuclear weapons must go through. I live with the knowledge that any time my neighbors could die from a nuclear blast, and the relatively nearby U.S. Air Force base could end up landing on my back yard any day as well. At least I have a mountain range between me and that base, while my brother has the protection of a vinyl fence to hold back the nuclear blast.
I am very much aware of the problems and dangers of a nuclear war. How about you?
China? They've never really gone outside their borders after they were established, basically ever. They did however fight the US in North Korea. The US had the bomb, the Chinese didn't for another for 14 years. So that invalidates the deterrent argument.
Boy, is this massive ignorance of world history. Ever heard of the Kamikaze? I'm not talking the WWII ones, but the original "divine wind" that destroyed the Chinese naval invasion of Japan?
China, when they had political and military power to do something, essentially extended their empire to the limits of communications and logistical support as they could at the time.... and made a tactical decision to discontinue trade with India and the Middle-east at about the same time European traders were just starting to get their act together.
There are also a whole bunch of dead Vietnamese and Russians that would beg to differ about how "friendly" China has been about their current borders... and those are casualties that took place in the last half of the 20th Century. China drools over Siberia and would do anything they could to take that hunk of real estate... realizing that is one thing that might forge a strong alliance between the USA and Russia and might even get the hoards flowing over the Himalayas from India into Tibet. That all of those countries have nuclear weapons makes such a war all that more interesting.
South Africa and Kazakhstan gave up their nuclear weapons simply because they both had powerful friends who could protect them (or avenge them) in the case of a nuclear war, and it was simply getting too expensive for their respective countries to maintain the nukes they had.
BTW, does the Ukraine still have nukes? I think you can add that country to the list, but I'm not completely sure. Same reasons BTW, and it should be telling that a country the size of the Ukraine has problems maintaining a nuclear arsenal due to strictly economic reasons. The number of nuclear weapons in the UK and France is about at the limit of what those two countries can tolerate economically as well.
Israel's nuclear arsenal is there mainly because several of its neighbors either have nukes already or may get them in the near future (read Iran). Keep in mind that it was Israel and not the USA who bombed the Iraqi nuclear program back to the stone age.
It was really all over long before Reagan attempted to restart the cold war with the SS20 deployment in Europe. The USSR was imploding by then and it makes little more sense to claim Reagan stopped the cold war while trying very hard to do the opposite than a the bunch of Afgans that claim they collapsed the USSR. I know Reagan's a dead hero now but those of us old enough to have been reading newspapers at the time see things a little less simplisticly. It's depressing really that all that fear generated at the time was entirely pointless as political factions in the USSR were too busy squabbling to really notice.
That's all irrelvant to the current time anyway since todays Republicans and Democrats are a bit different - but I don't like seeing a major mistake presented as a victory.
The SS-20's were Soviet, not American weapons. That would have been an incredible accomplishment for Reagan to have deployed them in Europe.
While there were multiple causes of the final collapse of the Soviet Union, Reagan's re-armament plan ranging from the 500 ship Navy, massive increase in the size of the Army and increase in their training, together with Star Wars and other "toys" for the Air Force certainly had a major impact on its collapse. It was the deployment of the Pershing missiles (and later the Pershing II) that happened in Europe by the USA, and that was hardly the only weapons system deployed by the U.S. government.
Yeltsin's tour of America just prior to the final collapse of the Soviet Union was also quite telling. He stopped into the middle of Texas and went into a typical American grocery store. He noticed the store was incredibly well stocked... far better than the stores party members had access to in Russia. He also saw a woman buying food in quantities and of value (steaks, packaged dinners, and even luxury foods like wine) that he couldn't even afford as President of Russia. His jaw dropped when he was informed that the woman was paying for the stuff with Food Stamps (a form of social welfare for the poor in America). At that point, he knew his country would be doomed economically if the status quo of the time were maintained.
Yes, it is simplistic to say that Reagan single-handily ended the Cold War, but he certainly had a major impact and made the final push.... although the cost to America was hardly insignificant as well.
It will take a world government to make nuclear weapons go away. There is just no other solution. As long as there are countries and as long as people are people, governments will want nuclear weapons - and they will get them.
The only concern about a world government is that typically human governments tend to be tyrannical and oppressive of their citizens/subjects. Multiple countries at least gives the ability for citizens in one of those tyrannical states to flee (or at least plan to flee) those countries who are oppressive. The Berlin wall held for a number of years but eventually it did crumble due to the huge differences between one side vs. the other.
IMHO, one huge unified government will simply be one unified awful and oppressive government for everybody.
This said, I would have to agree that only such a world-wide government could completely eliminate nukes. Even that said, I don't see how knowledge of nuclear weapons can be eradicated on the off chance that such a world-wide government would eventually collapse and self-interested individuals would try to restart nuclear weapons programs in the coming centuries.
Simply put, nuclear weapons should be considered a fact of life and the issue is not if they should be eliminated but how they should be used and when. All of the rest is naivety and burying your head in the sand.
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral, and not a military one. They would be very, very effective militarily.
Hardly. Iraq was incredibly easy to defeat, and the only reason why U.S. casualties have been happening since the capture of Saddam Hussein is the moral and ethical questions that would surround massive civilian casualties that most other invading armies of the world usually would do to stop insurgency. The main war in Iraq only lasted a month or so, so there was absolutely no need for nukes. Dealing with insurgency problems is not something you would use a nuke for anyway.
As far as Afghanistan is concerned..... what would you nuke? There is nothing of value in that country other than some poppy fields (opium FYI), and those are not good targets for nukes. Kabul might have been a legitimate target, except that conventional forces were capable of capturing and controlling that city very quickly with a minimal number of forces.
Some of the Pakistani cities near the border of Afghanistan might be legitimate targets, but that opens up a major question about the use of nukes against a proven nuclear power. Nuking even a city that openly proclaims support for the Taliban is likely to get a retaliatory strike on New York, DC, or Los Angeles. Again, it is military considerations here and not moral ones that are stopping the use of nukes in that theater of operations.
I think the opposition being suggested was more along the lines of "You have a gun, I don't, and you want to kill me, but if you shoot me EVERYONE will know. Your wife and friends will never talk to you again, the residents of your apartment building will get spat on in the street and know that it's because of you, and you'd better be able to grow your own food because there isn't a grocery store in 100 miles that'll still serve you. Now, have a long hard think about that and decide if it's still worth it..."
This works out fine for a smaller country like Kuwait and Costa Rica. They don't need nukes because there is always somebody out there who is willing to avenge the destruction of their countries.
Historically, there have always been "outlaws" that didn't give a damn about getting spat upon or being considered unwelcome in the community. As a wiki "sysop" I deal with these folks all of the time, including some very inventive trolls who keep coming back and even know how to push buttons emotionally on project leaders... so I'm talking about first hand knowledge of folks of this type that still exist even today.
What saves a community is the knowledge that there is some bad-ass guy that wishes to protect the community as a whole when one of these rogues come into town, and that they are given the tools necessary to fight off these trolls. In the case of countries, who might that bad-ass protector be?
Yes, I know in England that the constabulary has been historically unarmed and seemed to keep the order in English cities. Even so, the threat that weapons and somebody with a serious attitude to take your life was always there if you tried to resist and be a jerk. A police situation can always be escalated to a military situation... like what happened to the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas and other similar related incidents.
That would make you wrong again. In WWII, the USA had a huge involvement - both in terms of weapons supplied to allies and also in terms of soldiers.
In terms of the number of soldiers involved... and certainly in terms of casualties.... the U.S. figures were significantly dwarfed by nearly all of the other major players in WWII. Even in terms of absolute numbers of casualties, the U.S. Civil War was a much bloodier war and had a much larger and longer term impact economically and socially (on the American people).
This said, the material contributions of the USA were hardly insignificant, and American soldiers in Europe were certainly able to push the tipping point of the war in favor of the Allied forces... just as the USA had done earlier in WWI to an even lesser extent.
An interesting question comes to mind here.... would General Sherman have used a nuclear bomb on Atlanta on his drive to the sea... assuming of course that nukes had been available in the 1860's? That would certainly make a good alternative history novel.
Sure, the Red Army may have had a 10:1 numerical advantage in Europe, but how well does that play out if they start suffering 20:1 losses?
What you are pointing out was the state of the U.S. Army and the U.S. military in general after trillions of dollars were spent on it due to modernization and massive training programs were enacted during the Reagan administration. Also, Saddam Hussein was facing the army, quite literally (at least the VII corps and other units) who spent decades preparing to fight back the onslaught from the Fulda gap of the Red Army.
Frankly, I'm not sure that the current U.S. Army even has the resources to do something similar if we had to pull off an operation like Desert Storm today. That was a unique set of circumstances where Saddam Hussein certainly underestimated both the ability of and the resolve of the United States. I certainly don't think that the U.S. Army under Jimmy Carter could have pulled off a defense/liberation of Kuwait without nukes.
None of the above is fiction, none of it is speculation. I had the privilege several years ago of talking, over lunch at The Men's Club of Dallas, with a guy who turned out to be the only B-52 aircraft commander in the United States Air Force who didn't fly his airplane out to his Fail/Safe point that day. He and his crew had just landed from a training flight when the orders were given. As he and his crew were walking in, he met everyone else going out to their airplanes. He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
The Cuban Missile Crises is something that I believe is significantly downplayed by most high school and even university professors when covering modern American history. It is everything you claim and more.
Those who participated in the military at the time were of my father's generation, and to a man every single one of them knew the proverbial shit was hitting the fan at the time. Weapons lockers that were never, ever touched were opened and a massive mobilization of forces happened that was simply incredible. One guy I know was sitting in a Marine landing craft fully armed and provisioned for a month's operations about 20 miles from Havana when Khrushchev finally backed down. I don't know how much of that was saber rattling, but a full-out aggressive war was at least a very real possibility.
The world would have been very different if those plans had been put into motion, and it wasn't due to a lack of nukes or a President without balls. Similar incidents happened during the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations BTW, both of which get even less coverage than the Cuban Missile Crises. How World War III was avoided in 1973 is one of those facts of history that you have got to read about and investigate to believe, and just as remarkable.
While I appreciate the anecdotal reference here to supposedly a successful economic situation, I'm still not convinced that this company would have made less money without the patent process in place.
Nothing personal, but in your case it was a work for hire with a company who likely (you may confirm this) had deep pockets and was already in the business of selling chemicals to various customers. The proported purpose of a patent is to protect the lone inventor in a private lab/workshop... something I think it fails miserably at.
In this case, I'll bet the patents were used in a defensive mode, where the chemical processes were implemented with the understanding that a patent troll couldn't stop them. Chemical engineers do however have something of a fraternity and fewer small start-ups competing for business to keep out some of the worst aspects of patents that mechanical, computer, and software engineers have to contend with... I'll grant you that. DEA/ATF restrictions on chemical investigations only add to the mess of regs that chemists have to deal with.
I've written many songs, but I never bothered to trademark them. One of them is called "Ballad of the Clueless Cunt" and it's dedicated to you.
You clearly understand the difference between trademarks, copyright, and patents, don't you. How about Sales marks and trade secrets to round things off?
Seriously, when you are done, I'd like to hear the song.... (aw, never mind)
That embarrassing defeat happened because the Army, Air Force, and Navy had to coordinate the entire operation via the joint-chiefs office and not something a bit lower down the food chain (as was clearly needed), that the three services needed to be on the same page the whole time, and that joint operations experience were something clearly needed.
From what I understand, the Air Force showed up two hours early, the Army on time, and the Navy two hours late.... just to point out but one of many problems with the operation at "Desert One". The collision of the helicopters shouldn't have been fatal (to kill the whole plan, not just a few airmen) except for the fact there was no "plan B" in place to deal with the laws of thermodynamics and/or Murphy's Law. Competent military planners would have at least anticipated some problems, of which this operation simply had to go "by the book" for it to be successful.
Had these guys pulled it off, they would have been treated as heroes and sent down Broadway on a ticker-tape parade, with Jimmy Carter likely to have achieved a second term. Those were the stakes here. Unfortunately, it didn't work out, in part due to the abysmal morale and various other problems in the military at the time. Indeed this was one of the things looked at very carefully when Reagan finally came into office, even though it is likely Carter already made many of the changes necessary to get missions like this to succeed in the future. Too late for him, however.
The U.S. military can pull something like this off now, and even keep it from the press that it even happened. Still, that is closing the barn doors after the cows escape, and gave encouragement for groups like Al-Queida to pull off their stuff against Americans.
I really think he does believe that the world is like Star Trek, where you can have a meeting with someone that totally hates you, and suddenly love breaks out
It worked for Jimmy Carter. Sort of.
Yeah, it worked until Iran decided to take over the U.S. Embassy and he discovered that the military was in such horrible shape that it couldn't do what he wanted them to do. The fiasco of the hostage rescue mission was so bad that the U.S. military spent years afterward trying to fix the problems.
Oh, I guess you were talking about the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks. Yeah, that seemed to work out real well.... just look at how well Gaza turned out.
But the thing is, you have to take the man at his word, and I think he really that naive. I really think he does believe that the world is like Star Trek, where you can have a meeting with someone that totally hates you, and suddenly love breaks out. There's nothing that tells me that he believes otherwise.
Obama is a great mirror.... people see precisely what they want to see and seemingly nothing more. I don't know how the man does it, and it is the reason why he got elected, but folks of diametrically opposed viewpoints can see that Mr. Obama supports their cause... or worry that he is opposed to their viewpoints.
It will be interesting to see where this goes, and if he is as naive as it seems right now. Reality seems to have a way of catching up to a U.S. President in one way or another very quickly.
He isn't naive. Nobody is gonna get rid of their nukes, especially the USA, and he knows it. It puts international pressure on countries who really have no business with them. It is just good politics.
In terms of countries that don't need nukes, I'd submit that any country with less than 10 million citizens (more or less) should never really consider having nuclear weapons. The main reason is one of cost and maintenance.
Nuclear weapons are costly... from the viewpoint of monitoring the weapons and using them. Not only does it require technically brilliant people to create them in the first place, but you have to have extremely skilled folks to even deploy them once you have an objective. Also, no sane (or even slightly insane) national leader would want nukes to be used except if and only if that leader really wants them used and has given explicit order for their use. That implies a security detail guarding these bombs from accidental use and from being stolen, concerns about the health of those who are handling the bombs, medical staff to monitor those health concerns, communications devices and procedures to relay the wishes of the national leaders, and bureaucratic oversight of the whole process.
Nuclear bombs can also be traced very well in terms of finding the origin of the fissile material that was used to make the bomb. Again this goes back to the security issues, where a nuke that is used can be traced back to a country of origin... that will also be a target of attack if found.
IMHO North Korea, to give an example, is too small to effectively operate nuclear weapons. They are making it a priority for various reasons and destroying what little of an economy they have to do it... but it is an unsustainable proposition for them. Given the issues involved, I don't see North Korea maintaining its weapons for too long, and I certainly don't see smaller countries trying either.
By the end of the projected total nuclear ban, there will be much stronger weapons than nuclear. Why stick to some outdated weapons?
This is so true. Within the next century, spacefaring nations will have access to thousands of asteroids and meteors, any one of which would be capable of doing nearly the same or much greater damage to cities and armies on the Earth than nuclear bombs currently are designed to perform... without (well.... maybe) some of the longer term problems like radioactive fall-out.
This is also assuming that large quantities of anti-matter aren't developed in an industrial process of some sort. Go ahead, figure out what a 1 kg pile of anti-matter will do and then figure out where you could stick it if you could build a small enough containment unit to only let it interact with ordinary matter when planned.
This is just a couple of "weapons of mass destruction" that I can think of off the top of my head, and that is just the tip of what may be coming. Genetically engineered viruses that somehow target specific ethic groups or other even more weird science fiction storylines could be thought of as well.
I'd have to agree that 1950's era nuclear weapon designs are going to seem like child's toys compared to what may be developed in the future. Nuclear weapons may be completely eliminated just as the U.S. military is eliminating chemical warfare weapons.... they are no longer needed because much stronger and more effective weapons capable of much more damage are already available.
That's false by definition.
explain.... how is that false? I just never made the effort (actually my employer didn't want to bother with the paperwork or expense) to get the ideas patented. The prior art was established by giving the product to a paying customer.... which while not as strong as filing a patent can at least be considered prior art as receipts can be found and prove it does what is claimed.
I thought it was stupid on the part of my employer, but it wasn't my call to make. Since it was a work for hire, I wouldn't have much in terms of rights to the ideas anyway so it wasn't worthy my own money to file the patent application. That is where it sucks to be a salaried engineer sometimes, and not all companies have that attitude about intellectual property where they take it for granted that they may have something valueable.