Horses work really well if you need to "live off the land" and have little in the way of technological infrastructure. They also have the ability to make more horses if you feed them and keep them happy, something that an automobile typically can't do without a whole lot more infrastructure (although the Ford Model T did have a power takeoff port that could be connected to machine tools like a lathe, drill press, and power anvil that in theory could be used to make more Model T automobiles if somebody with the skills to make them was available).
Horses are still used in ranch operations precisely because of this ability to operate in an area without technological infrastructure, even if cattle ranchers likely use satellite phones now. They don't work very well in a city because you need a place to keep them, and they do require regular daily maintenance that most city dwellers typically don't like to perform. Besides, one of the first "urban pollution" problems that got widespread press coverage in the late 19th Century was horse manure, something that automobiles were openly advertised as helping to clean up. All things considered, I think the pollution caused by automobiles is significantly easier to deal with than the amount of manure that would be generated if automobiles didn't exist. Most of the urban horse manure pollution was caused not so much by personal transportation systems (where mass transit was quite common in the late 19th Century) but rather by point to point cargo transportation not handled by the mass transit services.
The interesting thing about the refinery energy costs is that in theory a refinery could use crude oil for the production of their products (as an energy source in and of itself), but that they use electricity in part because it is cheaper to use electric heaters for the distillery stacks as well as running the pumps and other equipment at the refineries.
The ultimate point is that there is a rather large energy cost for refinery production of gasoline, something that is almost never mentioned when comparing different fuel sources. That the electric energy consumption used in the production of gasoline alone is sufficient to operate an electric automobile over the same distance that the gasoline would normally have provided with that gasoline. To me, that closes the case on electric automobiles even though I'd love to see better energy storage systems.
A funny thing about that whole mess is that electric automobiles were around in the 1890's, at about the same time the internal combustion engine (ICE) was developed. The problem was that electric automobiles couldn't get the driving range necessary to compete with the ICE and that manufacturing systems needed to make electric automobiles weren't really up to par in terms of the precision needed. Tesla Motors is even using a motor designed by Nikola Tesla around that same era that in theory could have been in competition with the ICE as well.
Another technology of the early automobile era was a steam engine, which had a previous century of development at the time, with the Stanley Steamer and a few other auto makers of the era. The main thing that killed steam engine technology was that the ICE could be mass produced at a cost much cheaper than a steam engine, thus the technology died.
The same thing can be said about electric automobiles, other than the fact that electric cars have always had an energy storage problem and thus short driving ranges. Modern consumer electronics is the catalyst that has changed the energy storage market, and is one of the reasons why you see a number of new electric vehicles in spite of even recent failed attempts at building those kind of cars, like the EV-1.
A major problem you haven't even touched is how converting cornfields to energy production also in turn drives up food prices, something that is happening already in terms of ethanol production with corn. A great many products that used to be made with corn are now switching to other food stocks, most notably a marked decrease in the production of corn oil and abandoning the use of corn meal in the production of pet food. I can't even imagine what would be happening if this was expanded significantly even more, where it would start to impact other food production areas as well.
Some things that differ between Musk vs. these research analysts is that Musk is in the industry and knows about plans for the future by not just himself but also several other auto manufactures in the future, including their marketing plans as well as the kinds of vehicles they intend to build. A research analyst mostly has access to public statements about this kind of stuff, not the back room wheeling and dealing that Musk is involved with at the moment.
While certainly no guarantee, it seems very likely that some long-range vehicles that will be much more affordable will be coming out, or at least that seems to be the gist of what Musk is talking about here. If purchasing an electric vehicle is no longer the $100k+ price tag and instead gets much closer to about $30k or less and is much more competitive with ordinary internal combustion engine automobiles, it seems nearly certain that the market penetration will improve significantly.
In a way Musk is also placing the bet anyway, as he is building up the Fremont, California plant, hiring production workers, and in general making some huge capital outlays for a publicly traded company (so he needs to disclose these financial decisions in a public forum) in a way that he can only recover the money being spent by having these much higher sales figures. In other words he is putting his money where his mouth is, and quite a bit of Tesla still uses his own personal wealth for operating capital. Not as much as was the case in the past, but it is still considerable.
Folks can certainly speculate on how they'll behave long-term in cars based on lab behavior, but I've seen a lot of stuff that works in a lab, but falls apart in the real world. I don't want to be an early adopter of these things. In a few years, when the kinks are worked out, great. Until then, I view batteries with suspicion.:-)
I'm sure there is now a statistical universe in terms of battery behavior "in the real world" to draw upon at this point, at least for Li-ion batteries used by Tesla and Fisker, not to mention the Nissan Leaf which also uses that technology. While certainly not numbering in the millions, there are now thousands of production automobiles in the hands of "ordinary" consumers who are using these vehicles for day to day tasks that can be compared against. Admittedly they have been used only for a couple of years now in terms of ordinary driving, and there were some problems with the battery systems in the early versions as well (including a rather scathing review by Martin Eberhard when he received his very early production model of the Roadster).
Your concern is justified, but I would dare say that the bugs and kinks are being worked out even now, where this concern is much less of a problem today than was the case for the early adopters. The auto companies building these vehicles are also very active with their customers in terms of doing recalls and fixing the bugs as they are found too.
The current expected lifetime of the Li-ion batteries seems to be about 10 years, at least as good if not better than most Lead-acid batteries that have been used in automobiles for more than a century. I'm sure if you wanted to find an aftermarket manufacturer who could retrofit your Li-ion pack for a Lead-Acid pack (and significantly reduced driving range) you could find one eventually.
I sometimes wonder how the politically correct would think of Elon Musk as African-American. Technically in terms of birth place in the same sense that you have Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans and other such nonsense, he really is African-American, just not so much in terms of skin color. In his case he was even born in Africa and a citizen of an African nation before becoming a naturalized American citizen.
Skin color is just that, the amount of Melanin that is within the skin cells of the person being described and perhaps some other elements to their skin as well. While there are some other genetic traits that can be described jointly with the skin color, it is pretty shallow and doesn't really matter.
Besides, there has been so much inter-breeding between peoples of the Earth that I dare anybody to say they are 100% of any ethnicity or 0% of some other ethnicity. If they think so, they have likely been lied to by their parents or simply are clueless about their ancestry. More likely simply clueless I might add. Heck, there are still descendents of the Neanderthals running around (likely whose genes have spread throughout the entire human gene pool), and that is a readily identified different species, much less a "race". Yeah, cue the jokes if you will, but it is true none the less.
The preamble is not binding for the government. It is just a declaratory statement that may or may not be in the rest of the document, but merely stating the overall goals of the document.
Besides, "general welfare" can certainly mean things today that it didn't mean in the 18th Century when that document was written, as is indicated by the response that it can be used to pay for... almost anything that can be dreamed up by congress. That was not the purpose of Article I, where Congress had some very tight constraints over which it could legislate, with the assumption that any needful purpose of government not covered under specific authorities given to congress would be taken care of at the state level, as was largely the case for most of the history of the American Republic I might add too. If it wasn't listed in Article I or a subsequent amendments (such as the ability to regulate intoxicating beverages or to impose income taxes) then it wasn't something which could be done by Congress.
That most "constitutional scholars" try to pretend this isn't the case and in fact find all sort of crazy stuff that the federal government can do is more from a very "liberal" interpretation of the constitution (meaning it is treating the constitution as a guideline on governance alone and isn't even remotely binding in reality).
That the "general welfare" clause is tied directly to a national defense power should say something about the role the original framers of the U.S. Constitution wanted to limit even that clause.
Oh yeah, the preamble is pretty much useless, in terms of actual governance. If you tried to use the preamble as a part of a legal argument, you would be laughed out of court. Try it sometime, if you dare. School teachers have you memorize it because it provides a nice "executive summary" of the constitution, which is a legitimate role of a preamble in any governing document I might add. The same applies for a "mission statement" or "preamble" in corporate by-laws or some non-profit group charter as well.
...establish justice, ensure domestic traquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare....
Yeah, that quote is in the U.S. Constutition, but I don't think it means quite what you think it means. It isn't an enumerated power of the U.S. Congress but rather something in the preamble. The preamble doesn't hold any weight in terms of what the government can or can't do, all it does is establish why the constitution itself was written and the overall blueprint for what was anticipated for when it was written. There is another clause though:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
-- Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 1
That isn't saying the "general welfare" is to do whatever the hell Congress wants to do though. It is to provide for those things which will significantly impact America and could even threaten the existence of the country itself. I'll grant that the Manhattan project is something that might technically fit in the general welfare clause, and there could be some other similar kinds of projects done from time to time, where even Thomas Jefferson certainly paid for scientific research through federal funds (under the general welfare clause I might add).
But that is really stretching the bounds of the constitution and should be exceptional situations, not something ordinary.
The only place in the actual constitution which spells out how congress is to promote scientific inquiry is in the copyright & patent clause, not the general welfare clause:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
If you really want to have custom color schemes and some crazy formatting, you can always register your own account and select from several different themes that are already pre-built, or for the very adventurous try to roll your own. The bitching is about the default interface, which is kept rather ordinary.
If you want to see some wild and crazy layouts which can be done with the MediaWiki software, spend some time with the Wikia websites. Some of them are mundane, but there are some really crazy ways to add content that involve moving the buttons almost everywhere and doing some interesting things with the CSS scripts too.
On top of that, Wikia has been experimenting with the WYSIWYG interface for more than a year now, and in spite of that interface it tends to cause more problems than it is worth other than marking somebody as a "noob". I suppose that helps after a fashion to know who to watch out for that might just screw things up, particularly when you are a project administrator.
By far and away I see a whole bunch of people that simple need to learn not the wiki markup, but simply how to write the English language (or whatever language they choose to use for contributions including Klingon). Most of the new contributors that are struggling with the markup language also need some remedial writing classes to figure out how to write content of any kind, much less need some hand holding on how to put that content onto a page of any kind.
The Viking settlements on Greenland are on the coast, and are still green today. It's the mainland that's covered in ice and snow, but that has been the case for at least 100,000 years.
They may still be "green", but even today they aren't producing the kinds of crops that the Viking were growing during the Medieval Warm Period, which included vineyards in Scotland and other agriculture production in places that simply can't be done right now.
It is true that the locations for the Viking settlements are still "green", but that isn't the same thing as what brought the Vikings there in the first place.
Governments don't seem to do much to stop people from doing BASE jumping, except for perhaps trespassing laws that attempt to keep people from jumping off the roof of large buildings. More than a few of those who engage in such activity have been unsuccessful over the years as well.
Seriously, I think it is wrong for the government to get involved in telling you what you should or shouldn't do on your own dime, or if a private group wants to get involved and help them out to be silly or stupid. Evel Knievel is an example of somebody who routinely took risks with his life and even got paid to do it (and broke most of the bones of his body along the way too). How is this stunt any different?
That is a nice story from a single author who has political biases along those lines, or at least the idea was promoted as a way to advance the plot. Real life is different, and ultimately more weird and unique than anything which could be written at the hand of a single author or even a small team.
That said, there are environmentalists today who want to keep Mars in its current pristine condition. Heck, there are folks complaining about potential air pollution issues (mainly from Oxygen being released from industrial activity) contaminating the atmosphere of the Moon. These folks need to be shown as the nut cases they really are, blocking humanity from taking its rightful place among the stars.
Based upon an intersting theory about how life may have started on Mars in the first place, sending people, plants, even a few rodents that might get loose would mostly be going back home rather than genuine contamination.
More than likely a few hunks of the Earth filled with bacteria and other life from the Earth made it to Mars as recently as the K-T event that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Concerns about contamination of the Martian ecology, as much that it may have, is way overblown and likely is already there, if not from stray meteors then from all of the spacecraft that have been landing or crashing into the surface of Mars over the past several decades.
Of all the things to worry about on Mars, this is dead last in terms of priority and is going to happen no matter how hard we may try to stop it, presuming that Mars isn't already contaminated as I've noted above. I'd put it very unlikely that Mars is as pristine as is claimed.
The pharmaceutical industry is not an example of an industry that needs special patent protection. rather, it is an industry that needs to be nationalised.
The problem with this notion is even wondering why the government needs to be involved in any sort of industry at all. Regulations to keep drug companies from killing off their customers and to destroy the quack medicine peddlers that existing in the past may be a good thing, but I so completely disagree with your notion here about this kind of government involvement in drug or medical research at all is patently absurd, particularly in America. The whole point of the U.S. Constitution, to explain the philosophy rather than appealing to the document, is to have a very limited government which performs only the most basic and essential services that are absolutely needed and simply can't be performed by private citizens on their own. Organizing a military defense is an example of one of those essential services of government.
Having federal government research into drugs is one of those powers that was not spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, and in fact it was patent protection which was the only method spelled out for promoting (much less performing) any sort of scientific research with federal funds. I'd dare say that any other federal funding of science is therefore technically unconstitutional.
More to my point I was trying to make, if you think such industries need to be nationalized, there certainly can be countries where that can happen where you can prove your point (or see such a concept fail miserably as I think it generally has when done elsewhere). Just don't force such BS on the one large country of the world where the founding principle was to get away from that kind of philosophy and to simply let people do whatever they damn well wanted to do on their own without the government getting in the way. Nationalizing an industry also implies that no private individual can on their own dime even get into such research... something that is so contrary to the principles of liberty that it infects and destroys other industries. So much is being done right now to kill genuine scientific research in America as it is through stupid regulations that stop even the raw investigation of scientific ideas that we sure as heck don't need more blocks to kill even more ideas that nationalizing would most certainly do.
The Pringle's Potato Chip is an example of a patented food (and well deserved I might add) in the sense that you had a stack of uniform chips and something that was rather innovative in terms of a snack food. That patent ran out, so there are now several companies making potato chips which look similar.
Because the round can is a trademark, similar cans can't be used, along with the trademark. I seriously doubt now that the brand is well established that their sales have gone down all that much since the patent expired. In other words, the patent system worked precisely as it should have, at least in America.
Generally speaking though I'd have to agree with you that patent protection isn't necessary even for "innovations" in many industries.
For myself, I usually do go for a nice keyboard, particularly with a desktop computer. I almost never buy that keyboard from the same place where I purchase the computer, where a cheap POS keyboard is usually included that I may hang onto as a back-up in case the nice keyboard fails (where I painfully use it for a couple of days).
Laptop keyboards are another story, but even there I've plugged in alternate keyboards into those laptops simply because either they are broken (but the laptop is otherwise in good shape). On laptops, the quality of the keyboard, at least in terms of how it feels, is one thing that makes a definite different in what I purchase though.
My reasoning for buying a quality keyboard has to do with how much I use it. If I'm expected to perform a full-time job on that computer, I had better damn well have an I/O interface that is worthy of my time on that machine. Farmers now have air conditioning, built-in CD players, and and enclosed cab with their tractors, I expect similar kinds of perks if you are going to seriously treat me as a professional. A quality keyboard is one of those things I expect from an employer.
On the other hand, I expect POS keyboards in public places like schools and universities in computer labs unless you have a system admin that cares about that sort of thing.
So my view, as a third person, is more "valuable" for most people, without them knowing whether anything I say on the matter is true or not? Especially if I provide pictures?
Pictures are especially relevant in today's day and age as most of the current generation of people are very visual, growing up with not just television but video games and more. I'm not exactly a spring chicken here, and I grew up with television myself, where you need to go back to my father (who was born just prior to World War II) who remembers as a kid listening to the serial radio shows that were common before television.
Besides, even very abstract thinking can have graphs, charts, or other visual aids. It takes time and effort to prepare them which is something that would cost money for a commercial publisher like Britannica.
As for the 3rd person overview as opposed to a 1st person article written by the actual discoverer, sometimes it helps to be a little more dispassionate. Quite often if you are close to the subject you have a hard time being objective. There are a couple of articles on Wikipedia that I happen to be a little too close to the subject (one is a good friend who has a Wikipedia article about him... and is notable with secondary reliable sources) as well as a couple of different things where I simply don't participate in the article writing explicitly because I am not being objective. I do participate on the talk pages and try to correct factual errors on those topics and being close to the source I can also provide information and sometimes secondary sources useful for article development that I pass along to other editors who are a bit more distant and certainly more objective to the article than I am.
It is like the difference between an autobiography and a biography. The autobiography tends to gloss over details that may be negative or perhaps overly emphasize certain struggles precisely because you can't really be objective about the topic when you are writing about yourself. This isn't to say that autobiographies should be avoided, as they can be an interesting read and provide some very interesting insights about the life of a person, but they aren't objective and should be viewed with skepticism in terms of their accuracy and objectivity. An objective biography which is written many years later can sometimes pull up facts or information that would never get into an autobiography.
The Saturn V first stage used rocket-grade kerosene, not Hydrogen. Kerosene is much easier to work with than Hydrogen as you don't need to store it in an insulated tank and has nearly the same ISP as Liquid Hydrogen when other factors are taken into consideration.
Not that fuel costs for those big rockets is much of a concern anyway.
Ask any space cadet born after about 1980 what their opinion of the Orion spacecraft is and nuclear thrust will never enter the conversation.
I don't know what you consider to be a space cadet other than somebody studying aerospace engineering at the U.S. military academy in Colorado Spring, Colorado (those are some genuine space cadets who will even be getting commissions in the military and in a few cases have even gone into space after graduation).
That aside, anybody who has done even the most rudimentary study of aerospace engineering would have heard about this program, and in fact when the name "Orion" was first mentioned as a vehicle the connection to nuclear thrust was indeed the very first thing mentioned. That is nuclear thrust as in nuclear bombs being used as thrust and not even something like NERVA which only used nuclear reactors as a means for generating energy for thrust. Declassified film footage of the tests is on YouTube if you care to look (they used TNT instead of nuclear bombs for the proof of concept).
As far as the Von Braun white paper about the Orion vehicle, I'm sure it will turn up eventually. I don't know what deep secrets he may have disclosed in the paper, but the musings of a former Nazi SS officer about the topic would certainly make an interesting read.
Is the continued commitment to solid fuel rockets. I feel it is very dangerous to put humans on anything that has solid rocket(s), even if they're boosters.
Your comment is strong evidence that everything is relative. The original Orion design called for a nuclear bomb powered spacecraft. Now, what were you saying about solid rocket fuel?
I always thought the name of the Orion capsule was odd given the name history. I can only presume the name was either completely coincidental by a clueless bureaucrat who never studied space history, or it was a deliberate naming choice knowing full well about the earlier program... either to bury that earlier program for good or hint at some future propulsion method.
I'd like to hope it was a clueless suit that never took an aerospace engineering course in their life and got their job as a patronage perk from helping with an election campaign.
No The Constellation program was cancelled. The Orion capsule and the SLS portions were kept.
SLS wasn't necessarily kept, but rather transformed into a make-work project, hence the title of the program commonly called the "Senate Launch System" after the engineers who designed the spacecraft in the upper house of the national legislature in America. I had no idea that Orrin Hatch and Richard Shelby had advanced degrees in aerospace engineering, but they certainly laid down enough requirements that they sure demonstrated that capability.
That rocket sure has all of the hallmarks of being designed by a congressional committee too, where pesky things like physics and mechanical strength are perceived to be as mutable as the U.S. Constitution.
Deep space travel is fairy tale for the foreseeable future. Orion is either: (1) a joke (2) somebody is fleecing the treasury for funding for as long as nobody raises any alarm.
I'm incline to believe it is #2.
We needed the biggest rocket ever built even to this day (Saturn V) just to get to the moon. Mars is at least 200x farther away.
While Mars is 200x farther away, in terms of energy costs needed to get there it isn't nearly so bad. By far and away the most "expensive" thing to do in terms of spaceflight is simply getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO), as the Earth's gravity well is nasty, as is trying to fly out of the atmosphere with as little drag as possible.
If you look at the Delta-v budget for getting to Mars compared to the Moon, in theory Mars is "cheaper" (assuming bulk goods and robots moving in Hohmann transfer orbits and other energy saving ways to travel between planets). There are also other propulsion systems like Ion propulsion and VASMR that can make the trip much, much faster and don't require a huge gas tank in order to function (both can operate off of solar cells, RTGs or even nuclear reactors as an energy source, and the thrust going at a measurable fraction of the speed of light thus giving insane looking ISP values). Stuff like that doesn't work in terms of getting people into LEO, but it works just fine in interplanetary space.
The Moon is close enough that such exotic propulsion systems are not really economical for manned spaceflight, thus you need the monster disintegrating pyramid like the Saturn V.
The physical distance may be huge, but it isn't as bad as it would seem, particularly since spacecraft enroute to Mars don't experience drag unlike spacecraft in Star Wars or a motor vehicle traveling cross-country.
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Horses work really well if you need to "live off the land" and have little in the way of technological infrastructure. They also have the ability to make more horses if you feed them and keep them happy, something that an automobile typically can't do without a whole lot more infrastructure (although the Ford Model T did have a power takeoff port that could be connected to machine tools like a lathe, drill press, and power anvil that in theory could be used to make more Model T automobiles if somebody with the skills to make them was available).
Horses are still used in ranch operations precisely because of this ability to operate in an area without technological infrastructure, even if cattle ranchers likely use satellite phones now. They don't work very well in a city because you need a place to keep them, and they do require regular daily maintenance that most city dwellers typically don't like to perform. Besides, one of the first "urban pollution" problems that got widespread press coverage in the late 19th Century was horse manure, something that automobiles were openly advertised as helping to clean up. All things considered, I think the pollution caused by automobiles is significantly easier to deal with than the amount of manure that would be generated if automobiles didn't exist. Most of the urban horse manure pollution was caused not so much by personal transportation systems (where mass transit was quite common in the late 19th Century) but rather by point to point cargo transportation not handled by the mass transit services.
The interesting thing about the refinery energy costs is that in theory a refinery could use crude oil for the production of their products (as an energy source in and of itself), but that they use electricity in part because it is cheaper to use electric heaters for the distillery stacks as well as running the pumps and other equipment at the refineries.
The ultimate point is that there is a rather large energy cost for refinery production of gasoline, something that is almost never mentioned when comparing different fuel sources. That the electric energy consumption used in the production of gasoline alone is sufficient to operate an electric automobile over the same distance that the gasoline would normally have provided with that gasoline. To me, that closes the case on electric automobiles even though I'd love to see better energy storage systems.
A funny thing about that whole mess is that electric automobiles were around in the 1890's, at about the same time the internal combustion engine (ICE) was developed. The problem was that electric automobiles couldn't get the driving range necessary to compete with the ICE and that manufacturing systems needed to make electric automobiles weren't really up to par in terms of the precision needed. Tesla Motors is even using a motor designed by Nikola Tesla around that same era that in theory could have been in competition with the ICE as well.
Another technology of the early automobile era was a steam engine, which had a previous century of development at the time, with the Stanley Steamer and a few other auto makers of the era. The main thing that killed steam engine technology was that the ICE could be mass produced at a cost much cheaper than a steam engine, thus the technology died.
The same thing can be said about electric automobiles, other than the fact that electric cars have always had an energy storage problem and thus short driving ranges. Modern consumer electronics is the catalyst that has changed the energy storage market, and is one of the reasons why you see a number of new electric vehicles in spite of even recent failed attempts at building those kind of cars, like the EV-1.
A major problem you haven't even touched is how converting cornfields to energy production also in turn drives up food prices, something that is happening already in terms of ethanol production with corn. A great many products that used to be made with corn are now switching to other food stocks, most notably a marked decrease in the production of corn oil and abandoning the use of corn meal in the production of pet food. I can't even imagine what would be happening if this was expanded significantly even more, where it would start to impact other food production areas as well.
Some things that differ between Musk vs. these research analysts is that Musk is in the industry and knows about plans for the future by not just himself but also several other auto manufactures in the future, including their marketing plans as well as the kinds of vehicles they intend to build. A research analyst mostly has access to public statements about this kind of stuff, not the back room wheeling and dealing that Musk is involved with at the moment.
While certainly no guarantee, it seems very likely that some long-range vehicles that will be much more affordable will be coming out, or at least that seems to be the gist of what Musk is talking about here. If purchasing an electric vehicle is no longer the $100k+ price tag and instead gets much closer to about $30k or less and is much more competitive with ordinary internal combustion engine automobiles, it seems nearly certain that the market penetration will improve significantly.
In a way Musk is also placing the bet anyway, as he is building up the Fremont, California plant, hiring production workers, and in general making some huge capital outlays for a publicly traded company (so he needs to disclose these financial decisions in a public forum) in a way that he can only recover the money being spent by having these much higher sales figures. In other words he is putting his money where his mouth is, and quite a bit of Tesla still uses his own personal wealth for operating capital. Not as much as was the case in the past, but it is still considerable.
Folks can certainly speculate on how they'll behave long-term in cars based on lab behavior, but I've seen a lot of stuff that works in a lab, but falls apart in the real world. I don't want to be an early adopter of these things. In a few years, when the kinks are worked out, great. Until then, I view batteries with suspicion. :-)
I'm sure there is now a statistical universe in terms of battery behavior "in the real world" to draw upon at this point, at least for Li-ion batteries used by Tesla and Fisker, not to mention the Nissan Leaf which also uses that technology. While certainly not numbering in the millions, there are now thousands of production automobiles in the hands of "ordinary" consumers who are using these vehicles for day to day tasks that can be compared against. Admittedly they have been used only for a couple of years now in terms of ordinary driving, and there were some problems with the battery systems in the early versions as well (including a rather scathing review by Martin Eberhard when he received his very early production model of the Roadster).
Your concern is justified, but I would dare say that the bugs and kinks are being worked out even now, where this concern is much less of a problem today than was the case for the early adopters. The auto companies building these vehicles are also very active with their customers in terms of doing recalls and fixing the bugs as they are found too.
The current expected lifetime of the Li-ion batteries seems to be about 10 years, at least as good if not better than most Lead-acid batteries that have been used in automobiles for more than a century. I'm sure if you wanted to find an aftermarket manufacturer who could retrofit your Li-ion pack for a Lead-Acid pack (and significantly reduced driving range) you could find one eventually.
Well, obviously there's no law forcing them into ghettos - even France couldn't get away with quite such a blatent violation of US law.
Are you implying that France has any obligation in regards to US law? I genuinely don't understand your point.
Isn't France one of the American states?
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It is a joke, get over it.
I sometimes wonder how the politically correct would think of Elon Musk as African-American. Technically in terms of birth place in the same sense that you have Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans and other such nonsense, he really is African-American, just not so much in terms of skin color. In his case he was even born in Africa and a citizen of an African nation before becoming a naturalized American citizen.
Skin color is just that, the amount of Melanin that is within the skin cells of the person being described and perhaps some other elements to their skin as well. While there are some other genetic traits that can be described jointly with the skin color, it is pretty shallow and doesn't really matter.
Besides, there has been so much inter-breeding between peoples of the Earth that I dare anybody to say they are 100% of any ethnicity or 0% of some other ethnicity. If they think so, they have likely been lied to by their parents or simply are clueless about their ancestry. More likely simply clueless I might add. Heck, there are still descendents of the Neanderthals running around (likely whose genes have spread throughout the entire human gene pool), and that is a readily identified different species, much less a "race". Yeah, cue the jokes if you will, but it is true none the less.
The preamble is not binding for the government. It is just a declaratory statement that may or may not be in the rest of the document, but merely stating the overall goals of the document.
Besides, "general welfare" can certainly mean things today that it didn't mean in the 18th Century when that document was written, as is indicated by the response that it can be used to pay for... almost anything that can be dreamed up by congress. That was not the purpose of Article I, where Congress had some very tight constraints over which it could legislate, with the assumption that any needful purpose of government not covered under specific authorities given to congress would be taken care of at the state level, as was largely the case for most of the history of the American Republic I might add too. If it wasn't listed in Article I or a subsequent amendments (such as the ability to regulate intoxicating beverages or to impose income taxes) then it wasn't something which could be done by Congress.
That most "constitutional scholars" try to pretend this isn't the case and in fact find all sort of crazy stuff that the federal government can do is more from a very "liberal" interpretation of the constitution (meaning it is treating the constitution as a guideline on governance alone and isn't even remotely binding in reality).
That the "general welfare" clause is tied directly to a national defense power should say something about the role the original framers of the U.S. Constitution wanted to limit even that clause.
Oh yeah, the preamble is pretty much useless, in terms of actual governance. If you tried to use the preamble as a part of a legal argument, you would be laughed out of court. Try it sometime, if you dare. School teachers have you memorize it because it provides a nice "executive summary" of the constitution, which is a legitimate role of a preamble in any governing document I might add. The same applies for a "mission statement" or "preamble" in corporate by-laws or some non-profit group charter as well.
Yeah, that quote is in the U.S. Constutition, but I don't think it means quite what you think it means. It isn't an enumerated power of the U.S. Congress but rather something in the preamble. The preamble doesn't hold any weight in terms of what the government can or can't do, all it does is establish why the constitution itself was written and the overall blueprint for what was anticipated for when it was written. There is another clause though:
-- Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 1
That isn't saying the "general welfare" is to do whatever the hell Congress wants to do though. It is to provide for those things which will significantly impact America and could even threaten the existence of the country itself. I'll grant that the Manhattan project is something that might technically fit in the general welfare clause, and there could be some other similar kinds of projects done from time to time, where even Thomas Jefferson certainly paid for scientific research through federal funds (under the general welfare clause I might add).
But that is really stretching the bounds of the constitution and should be exceptional situations, not something ordinary.
The only place in the actual constitution which spells out how congress is to promote scientific inquiry is in the copyright & patent clause, not the general welfare clause:
-- Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 1
If you really want to have custom color schemes and some crazy formatting, you can always register your own account and select from several different themes that are already pre-built, or for the very adventurous try to roll your own. The bitching is about the default interface, which is kept rather ordinary.
If you want to see some wild and crazy layouts which can be done with the MediaWiki software, spend some time with the Wikia websites. Some of them are mundane, but there are some really crazy ways to add content that involve moving the buttons almost everywhere and doing some interesting things with the CSS scripts too.
On top of that, Wikia has been experimenting with the WYSIWYG interface for more than a year now, and in spite of that interface it tends to cause more problems than it is worth other than marking somebody as a "noob". I suppose that helps after a fashion to know who to watch out for that might just screw things up, particularly when you are a project administrator.
By far and away I see a whole bunch of people that simple need to learn not the wiki markup, but simply how to write the English language (or whatever language they choose to use for contributions including Klingon). Most of the new contributors that are struggling with the markup language also need some remedial writing classes to figure out how to write content of any kind, much less need some hand holding on how to put that content onto a page of any kind.
The Viking settlements on Greenland are on the coast, and are still green today. It's the mainland that's covered in ice and snow, but that has been the case for at least 100,000 years.
They may still be "green", but even today they aren't producing the kinds of crops that the Viking were growing during the Medieval Warm Period, which included vineyards in Scotland and other agriculture production in places that simply can't be done right now.
It is true that the locations for the Viking settlements are still "green", but that isn't the same thing as what brought the Vikings there in the first place.
Governments don't seem to do much to stop people from doing BASE jumping, except for perhaps trespassing laws that attempt to keep people from jumping off the roof of large buildings. More than a few of those who engage in such activity have been unsuccessful over the years as well.
Seriously, I think it is wrong for the government to get involved in telling you what you should or shouldn't do on your own dime, or if a private group wants to get involved and help them out to be silly or stupid. Evel Knievel is an example of somebody who routinely took risks with his life and even got paid to do it (and broke most of the bones of his body along the way too). How is this stunt any different?
That is a nice story from a single author who has political biases along those lines, or at least the idea was promoted as a way to advance the plot. Real life is different, and ultimately more weird and unique than anything which could be written at the hand of a single author or even a small team.
That said, there are environmentalists today who want to keep Mars in its current pristine condition. Heck, there are folks complaining about potential air pollution issues (mainly from Oxygen being released from industrial activity) contaminating the atmosphere of the Moon. These folks need to be shown as the nut cases they really are, blocking humanity from taking its rightful place among the stars.
Based upon an intersting theory about how life may have started on Mars in the first place, sending people, plants, even a few rodents that might get loose would mostly be going back home rather than genuine contamination.
More than likely a few hunks of the Earth filled with bacteria and other life from the Earth made it to Mars as recently as the K-T event that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Concerns about contamination of the Martian ecology, as much that it may have, is way overblown and likely is already there, if not from stray meteors then from all of the spacecraft that have been landing or crashing into the surface of Mars over the past several decades.
Of all the things to worry about on Mars, this is dead last in terms of priority and is going to happen no matter how hard we may try to stop it, presuming that Mars isn't already contaminated as I've noted above. I'd put it very unlikely that Mars is as pristine as is claimed.
The pharmaceutical industry is not an example of an industry that needs special patent protection. rather, it is an industry that needs to be nationalised.
The problem with this notion is even wondering why the government needs to be involved in any sort of industry at all. Regulations to keep drug companies from killing off their customers and to destroy the quack medicine peddlers that existing in the past may be a good thing, but I so completely disagree with your notion here about this kind of government involvement in drug or medical research at all is patently absurd, particularly in America. The whole point of the U.S. Constitution, to explain the philosophy rather than appealing to the document, is to have a very limited government which performs only the most basic and essential services that are absolutely needed and simply can't be performed by private citizens on their own. Organizing a military defense is an example of one of those essential services of government.
Having federal government research into drugs is one of those powers that was not spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, and in fact it was patent protection which was the only method spelled out for promoting (much less performing) any sort of scientific research with federal funds. I'd dare say that any other federal funding of science is therefore technically unconstitutional.
More to my point I was trying to make, if you think such industries need to be nationalized, there certainly can be countries where that can happen where you can prove your point (or see such a concept fail miserably as I think it generally has when done elsewhere). Just don't force such BS on the one large country of the world where the founding principle was to get away from that kind of philosophy and to simply let people do whatever they damn well wanted to do on their own without the government getting in the way. Nationalizing an industry also implies that no private individual can on their own dime even get into such research... something that is so contrary to the principles of liberty that it infects and destroys other industries. So much is being done right now to kill genuine scientific research in America as it is through stupid regulations that stop even the raw investigation of scientific ideas that we sure as heck don't need more blocks to kill even more ideas that nationalizing would most certainly do.
The Pringle's Potato Chip is an example of a patented food (and well deserved I might add) in the sense that you had a stack of uniform chips and something that was rather innovative in terms of a snack food. That patent ran out, so there are now several companies making potato chips which look similar.
Because the round can is a trademark, similar cans can't be used, along with the trademark. I seriously doubt now that the brand is well established that their sales have gone down all that much since the patent expired. In other words, the patent system worked precisely as it should have, at least in America.
Generally speaking though I'd have to agree with you that patent protection isn't necessary even for "innovations" in many industries.
For myself, I usually do go for a nice keyboard, particularly with a desktop computer. I almost never buy that keyboard from the same place where I purchase the computer, where a cheap POS keyboard is usually included that I may hang onto as a back-up in case the nice keyboard fails (where I painfully use it for a couple of days).
Laptop keyboards are another story, but even there I've plugged in alternate keyboards into those laptops simply because either they are broken (but the laptop is otherwise in good shape). On laptops, the quality of the keyboard, at least in terms of how it feels, is one thing that makes a definite different in what I purchase though.
My reasoning for buying a quality keyboard has to do with how much I use it. If I'm expected to perform a full-time job on that computer, I had better damn well have an I/O interface that is worthy of my time on that machine. Farmers now have air conditioning, built-in CD players, and and enclosed cab with their tractors, I expect similar kinds of perks if you are going to seriously treat me as a professional. A quality keyboard is one of those things I expect from an employer.
On the other hand, I expect POS keyboards in public places like schools and universities in computer labs unless you have a system admin that cares about that sort of thing.
So my view, as a third person, is more "valuable" for most people, without them knowing whether anything I say on the matter is true or not? Especially if I provide pictures?
Pictures are especially relevant in today's day and age as most of the current generation of people are very visual, growing up with not just television but video games and more. I'm not exactly a spring chicken here, and I grew up with television myself, where you need to go back to my father (who was born just prior to World War II) who remembers as a kid listening to the serial radio shows that were common before television.
Besides, even very abstract thinking can have graphs, charts, or other visual aids. It takes time and effort to prepare them which is something that would cost money for a commercial publisher like Britannica.
As for the 3rd person overview as opposed to a 1st person article written by the actual discoverer, sometimes it helps to be a little more dispassionate. Quite often if you are close to the subject you have a hard time being objective. There are a couple of articles on Wikipedia that I happen to be a little too close to the subject (one is a good friend who has a Wikipedia article about him... and is notable with secondary reliable sources) as well as a couple of different things where I simply don't participate in the article writing explicitly because I am not being objective. I do participate on the talk pages and try to correct factual errors on those topics and being close to the source I can also provide information and sometimes secondary sources useful for article development that I pass along to other editors who are a bit more distant and certainly more objective to the article than I am.
It is like the difference between an autobiography and a biography. The autobiography tends to gloss over details that may be negative or perhaps overly emphasize certain struggles precisely because you can't really be objective about the topic when you are writing about yourself. This isn't to say that autobiographies should be avoided, as they can be an interesting read and provide some very interesting insights about the life of a person, but they aren't objective and should be viewed with skepticism in terms of their accuracy and objectivity. An objective biography which is written many years later can sometimes pull up facts or information that would never get into an autobiography.
I'd hate to see what you think of 0x10^c as a game then.
The Saturn V first stage used rocket-grade kerosene, not Hydrogen. Kerosene is much easier to work with than Hydrogen as you don't need to store it in an insulated tank and has nearly the same ISP as Liquid Hydrogen when other factors are taken into consideration.
Not that fuel costs for those big rockets is much of a concern anyway.
Ask any space cadet born after about 1980 what their opinion of the Orion spacecraft is and nuclear thrust will never enter the conversation.
I don't know what you consider to be a space cadet other than somebody studying aerospace engineering at the U.S. military academy in Colorado Spring, Colorado (those are some genuine space cadets who will even be getting commissions in the military and in a few cases have even gone into space after graduation).
That aside, anybody who has done even the most rudimentary study of aerospace engineering would have heard about this program, and in fact when the name "Orion" was first mentioned as a vehicle the connection to nuclear thrust was indeed the very first thing mentioned. That is nuclear thrust as in nuclear bombs being used as thrust and not even something like NERVA which only used nuclear reactors as a means for generating energy for thrust. Declassified film footage of the tests is on YouTube if you care to look (they used TNT instead of nuclear bombs for the proof of concept).
As far as the Von Braun white paper about the Orion vehicle, I'm sure it will turn up eventually. I don't know what deep secrets he may have disclosed in the paper, but the musings of a former Nazi SS officer about the topic would certainly make an interesting read.
Is the continued commitment to solid fuel rockets. I feel it is very dangerous to put humans on anything that has solid rocket(s), even if they're boosters.
Your comment is strong evidence that everything is relative. The original Orion design called for a nuclear bomb powered spacecraft. Now, what were you saying about solid rocket fuel?
I always thought the name of the Orion capsule was odd given the name history. I can only presume the name was either completely coincidental by a clueless bureaucrat who never studied space history, or it was a deliberate naming choice knowing full well about the earlier program... either to bury that earlier program for good or hint at some future propulsion method.
I'd like to hope it was a clueless suit that never took an aerospace engineering course in their life and got their job as a patronage perk from helping with an election campaign.
No The Constellation program was cancelled. The Orion capsule and the SLS portions were kept.
SLS wasn't necessarily kept, but rather transformed into a make-work project, hence the title of the program commonly called the "Senate Launch System" after the engineers who designed the spacecraft in the upper house of the national legislature in America. I had no idea that Orrin Hatch and Richard Shelby had advanced degrees in aerospace engineering, but they certainly laid down enough requirements that they sure demonstrated that capability.
That rocket sure has all of the hallmarks of being designed by a congressional committee too, where pesky things like physics and mechanical strength are perceived to be as mutable as the U.S. Constitution.
Deep space travel is fairy tale for the foreseeable future.
Orion is either:
(1) a joke
(2) somebody is fleecing the treasury for funding for as long as nobody raises any alarm.
I'm incline to believe it is #2.
We needed the biggest rocket ever built even to this day (Saturn V) just to get to the moon.
Mars is at least 200x farther away.
While Mars is 200x farther away, in terms of energy costs needed to get there it isn't nearly so bad. By far and away the most "expensive" thing to do in terms of spaceflight is simply getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO), as the Earth's gravity well is nasty, as is trying to fly out of the atmosphere with as little drag as possible.
If you look at the Delta-v budget for getting to Mars compared to the Moon, in theory Mars is "cheaper" (assuming bulk goods and robots moving in Hohmann transfer orbits and other energy saving ways to travel between planets). There are also other propulsion systems like Ion propulsion and VASMR that can make the trip much, much faster and don't require a huge gas tank in order to function (both can operate off of solar cells, RTGs or even nuclear reactors as an energy source, and the thrust going at a measurable fraction of the speed of light thus giving insane looking ISP values). Stuff like that doesn't work in terms of getting people into LEO, but it works just fine in interplanetary space.
The Moon is close enough that such exotic propulsion systems are not really economical for manned spaceflight, thus you need the monster disintegrating pyramid like the Saturn V.
The physical distance may be huge, but it isn't as bad as it would seem, particularly since spacecraft enroute to Mars don't experience drag unlike spacecraft in Star Wars or a motor vehicle traveling cross-country.