Re:Some monetary reasons to return to the moon
on
Back to the Moon
·
· Score: 1
You hear this sort of talk a lot among space enthusiasts, but unfortunately it is very unlikely that anyone will ever want to build a reactor that runs off of helium-3. Yes, you can make a reactor that burns helium-3, but it is much less technically challenging to build a reactor that runs off hydrogen and deuterium. Since there is an essentially unlimited supply of deuterium in the earth's oceans, it seems unlikely that anyone would want to build a reactor that's both more difficult to construct and requires fuel from the moon.
It should also be pointed out that you can make helium-3 in a conventional fusion reactor. Since building a helium-3 reactor is far more difficult than a deuterium or tritium fueled reactor, by the time you actually need helium-3 you will by necessity already have the technology to make it yourself.
it is theorized that there are over 1 million cubic tons,
with oil over $50 a barrel, and helium-3 then being worth
about 8 billion USD a ton, the total worth equalling 8,000 trillion USD.
People like to throw these sorts of numbers around when talking about the value of helium-3, but they always ignore one inconvenient fact: there's already helium-3 available on earth, and it's not selling for billions of dollars. You can order a cylinder off the internet to use in your physics research - but don't expect to cure the national debt with it.
The problem here (from the Chinese government's perspective) is that this guy took a ton of research money, blew through it without producing anything, and then resorted to industrial espionage when he realized that he wasn't going to be able to actually accomplish anything. They aren't pissed off about the espionage so much as the fact that he used the espionage to cover up his own colossal waste of the government's money.
I rather doubt that internet porn companies are making any money off of clever 14-year-olds who are able to get around the filter software that their parents put on the computer. I imagine that most of their income comes from adults who are able to actually pay them for access.
You have a point, but one can easily come up with many examples of things that are far more likely to kill you than terrorism that people have no control over and don't offer any reward. Cancer more-or-less ranomly kills about 500,000 people/year in the U.S., which means that over the last ten years it's been over one thousand times more likely to kill you than terrorism. Yet we only spend about $2.5 billion on cancer research every year. While that's a lot of money, I'm sure it's trivial compared to what the government spends "protecting us from terrorism". If we wanted to rationally allocate resources based on how likely something is to harm us, then based on our cancer research funding we should only be spending around $2.5 million to fight terrorism.
You seem to be confusing the total solar flux on the earth (which is indeed about 1 kw/m^2) with the solar flux on the earth's surface, which is substantially lower. Only a small fraction of the total solar energy that strikes the earth ever reaches the surface; most of it is reflected, scattered, or absorbed by the atmosphere. By the time sunlight reaches the ground you only have a flux of around 70-200 watts/m^2, depending on where in the world you live. As I recall the average solar flux on the U.S. around 150 watts/m^2; so you would need around 30 square kilometers to produce your 400 MW.
This is why some people like to talk about putting solar panels in space to send power back down to earth; your solar panels get a lot more power.
No, it doesn't even seem to work on scientific papers. I submitted four papers from the latest issue of Inorganic Chemistry and it thought 2 out of 4 were false:
Inauthentic: Assembly of a Heterobinuclear 2-D Network: A Rare Example of Endo- and Exocyclic Coordination of PdII/AgI in a Single Macrocycle.
Inauthentic: Pyrazolate-Bridging Dinucleating Ligands Containing Hydrogen-Bond Donors: Synthesis and Structure of Their Cobalt Analogues
Authentic: Manganese Complexes of 1,3,5-Triaza-7-phosphaadamantane (PTA): The First Nitrogen-Bound Transition-Metal Complex of PTA
Authentic: Structure, Luminescence, and Adsorption Properties of Two Chiral Microporous Metal-Organic Frameworks
Based on this (small) sampling, the program doesn't appear to do any better than if it were to guess randomly. I wonder if this thing is even supposed to work, or if it just returns a random result based on a hash of the paper or something?
I have to disagree. Jargon helps people communicate easily when discussing complex topics; you come up with a new term that describes a complicated idea so that you can discuss the idea more efficiently and clearly. There certainly is plenty of legitimate jargon in the corporate world. When a manager says something like "We need to recapitalize and increase our market-share before considering an IPO," he's using jargon to express a lot of complicated ideas in a clear and efficient manner. When he says "We need to leverage our synergies to increase the value of our deliverables," that' not the case.
How appropriate. You respond to a claim that religion is unsubstantiated nonsense by attacking the education of the person making the claim, rather than actually respond to the claim itself.
There is indeed a vast body of religious/theological literature, but it all amounts to painstaking attempts to draw logical conclusions from premises that are completely lacking in support, and often are outright absurd. I'll cut off your ranting about how anyone who disagrees with you must be ignorant/uneducated in advance by noting that I most certainly have studied both religion and philosophy in many college-level classes, including the likes of Descartes, Pascal, and Aquinas.
Theologians like to start with a premise like "What if a mystical entity created all of space and time, then used his magic powers to interfere with the world on occasion?" It doesn't matter how rigorously you apply logic and reason to build conclusions from premises if your premises are unsubstantiated and ridiculous. If I suppose that a magic pink unicorn exists and proceed to make logical deductions from that premise, I'm not really engaging in a meaningful intellectual activity.
The original poster claimed he wanted a free labor market, when in reality what he wants is for the government to grant U.S. workers an artificial labor monopoly by excluding the competition. Of course that would be good for U.S. workers, since they could then demand a higher price for their labor - just as any monopolistic cartel can demand higher prices when there isn't any competition. Workers asking congress to decrease/limit H1-B visas is exactly analogous to General Motors asking congress to make it illegal for anyone to import and sell foreign cars because their profits are down and customers aren't willing to pay their asking price when cheaper alternatives are available.
If a business were trying to pull this sort of stunt, most everyone on slashdot would be up in arms about how the companies were just trying to legislate their way into a monopoly because they couldn't handle the competition.
Your final statement about murdering competition is ridiculous. A free market doesn't mean an anarchy with no laws - it simply means that there are no artificial government controls on who is allowed to supply goods/services, who is allowed to purchase goods/services, and what price the goods/services may sell for. Laws against murder only interfere with the labor free-market if you're a hitman.
The point is that the credit card companies make virtually no effort verify people's identities when they issue cards, then expect the honest people to jump through hoops to help them when they are burned by their own carelessness.
The problem is that universities grant textbook publishers a monopoly be requiring a certain specific textbook for each course. The school never says "Go buy a calculus book." If they did, there would probably be substantial price competition in the textbook market as publishers fought for market share among students who had a wide selection to choose from. Instead, the school says "Go buy this calculus book." Since the publishers know that the only students who will have an interest in buying their books in the first place are the ones who are required to buy them, there is no competition and they can charge whatever they want.
Publishers do have to compete at the level of the university teachers and administrators who get to select which textbook will be required, but since the people who make that decision won't ever have to actually purchase the book they aren't likely to care about price.
I disagree with your statement that corporations have ever had "essentially the same rights as an individual human." The rights of a corporation are severely restricted compared to the rights of an individual human. Corporations, for example, essentially do not have free speech rights. "Commercial speech" (with the explicit exception of the press) can be restricted almost at the government's whim - which is why the federal 'do no call' list isn't unconstitutional. There are countless other examples of commercial speech not enjoying the same protections as individual freedom of speech. Also, the property rights of corporations are far less secure than the property rights of individuals. These are just examples off the top of my head; it's been years since I had a class in this stuff, so someone who has studied it more recently could probably do a much better job enumerating the differences between corporate and individual rights.
Also, I would argue that many of the rights enjoyed by corporations are really just extensions of the rights of the people who make up the corporation. For example, a corporation can sue someone if they are wronged - but such a lawsuit would be in place of a suit by each individual person who had a stake in the corporation and was harmed.
I agree that corporations often behave very badly. However, this idea that corporations enjoy "the same rights as people" seems to have recently become a very popular misconception among anti-corporate activists, and - although it's probably great for getting other activists riled up - it really just makes people look ignorant when they go around repeating it.
Something that I've never really understood in these debates about different keyboard layouts: when do people actually type at their maximum typing speed anyway? I can type at about 50-60 words per minute, which is probably not very impressive by Slashdot standards. But I almost never get to actually type that fast - I have to stop to think about what I'm doing, whether it's composing a document or writing code. Even if switching to another layout allowed me to type at 80 words/minute, I don't think it would ever really increase my productivity.
"The FIRE case list is very heavily skewed toward positions favored by political and social conservatives..."
That's because it is far more common for liberal schools to punish conservative speech than for conservative schools to punish liberal speech. FIRE is happy to defend liberal students who have their free speech rights threatened by conservative administrations. It just doesn't happen that often. This is probably partly because conservative schools tend to be private, which exempts them from having to obey the 1st Amendment.
"...and their stance against programs aimed at recruiting and retaining people from underrepresented populations (defined by ethnicity, sexual identity, etc.) is disturbingly reactionary."
Sorry to have to break this to you, but most slashdotters have a distinctly libertarian bent and probably wouldn't (on average) support affirmative action.
If any country actually had a tax system like that, you would have a point. In the real world, however, you would be taxed 10% on your first $20,000 and 20% on everything *above* $20,000. So, if you made $20,001 your taxes would be $20,000*0.1 + $1*0.2.
Private for-profit businesses will only become interested in space when it's possible to, you know, make a profit. That's not possible at the moment. If it were, companies would be doing it already.
They can always acquit, but that's just because the way our court system is set up there is no way to stop them. Juries, both historically and according to modern law, are supposed to determine matters of fact; specifically, whether or not someone violated the law. They aren't supposed to decide they don't like the law and choose to return a 'not guilty' verdict simply because they don't support the law that the defendant is being charged with. Yes, it is possible for them to do it and get away with it, but it's not how the jury system is intended to work.
I think that would largely defeat the purpose of having them read the books. Contrary to what some of the English majors here might tell you, I really don't think that knowing the plot of 'Romeo and Juliet' will make you a better person or substantially improve your quality of life.
The real value of making kids read Shakespeare, in my opinion, is precisely that it's hard to read. You really have to think carefully about what it's supposed to be saying, take context clues from nearby parts, etc. It's great practice for reading complex, difficult-to-follow material. Making it easy to read nullifies a lot of the benefit that you can get from having to decipher it.
Look closely at Title 17. It doesn't grant you any "rights." It merely says that fair use is not a violation of copyright law. There's a big difference.
I'm afraid you're mistaken about this. Title 17 doesn't grant you an inalienable right to fair use; it merely states that it isn't a violation of copyright law for you to engage in fair use. Sony isn't under any obligation to make it easy, or even possible, for you to engage in fair use because of Title 17. They simply can't take you to court over it if you manage to.
I agree that the situation is bad. But in many ways, I really don't feel much sympathy for victims of things like this any more. Companies can get away with sticking disclaimers on every product and service under the sun because people are stupid sheep who are too lazy to not buy/use something that has a liability disclaimer. If a product of service comes with a disclaimer saying that you agree to not hold the company responsible for anything they do no matter how badly it screws you over, the only sane thing to do would be to refuse to buy it. If everyone did that, these disclaimers would vanish over night. If you agree to not hold someone responsible for anything that they do to you, well, you're a moron who practically deserves to get taken advantage of. Unfortunately the tiny minority of us who realize that it might not be a good idea to give companies the right to do whatever they want to us don't really have much choice any more because we're such a small part of the market that companies can afford to blow off our business.
Slashdot Mirror
You hear this sort of talk a lot among space enthusiasts, but unfortunately it is very unlikely that anyone will ever want to build a reactor that runs off of helium-3. Yes, you can make a reactor that burns helium-3, but it is much less technically challenging to build a reactor that runs off hydrogen and deuterium. Since there is an essentially unlimited supply of deuterium in the earth's oceans, it seems unlikely that anyone would want to build a reactor that's both more difficult to construct and requires fuel from the moon.
It should also be pointed out that you can make helium-3 in a conventional fusion reactor. Since building a helium-3 reactor is far more difficult than a deuterium or tritium fueled reactor, by the time you actually need helium-3 you will by necessity already have the technology to make it yourself.
it is theorized that there are over 1 million cubic tons, with oil over $50 a barrel, and helium-3 then being worth about 8 billion USD a ton, the total worth equalling 8,000 trillion USD.
People like to throw these sorts of numbers around when talking about the value of helium-3, but they always ignore one inconvenient fact: there's already helium-3 available on earth, and it's not selling for billions of dollars. You can order a cylinder off the internet to use in your physics research - but don't expect to cure the national debt with it.
The problem here (from the Chinese government's perspective) is that this guy took a ton of research money, blew through it without producing anything, and then resorted to industrial espionage when he realized that he wasn't going to be able to actually accomplish anything. They aren't pissed off about the espionage so much as the fact that he used the espionage to cover up his own colossal waste of the government's money.
I rather doubt that internet porn companies are making any money off of clever 14-year-olds who are able to get around the filter software that their parents put on the computer. I imagine that most of their income comes from adults who are able to actually pay them for access.
You have a point, but one can easily come up with many examples of things that are far more likely to kill you than terrorism that people have no control over and don't offer any reward. Cancer more-or-less ranomly kills about 500,000 people/year in the U.S., which means that over the last ten years it's been over one thousand times more likely to kill you than terrorism. Yet we only spend about $2.5 billion on cancer research every year. While that's a lot of money, I'm sure it's trivial compared to what the government spends "protecting us from terrorism". If we wanted to rationally allocate resources based on how likely something is to harm us, then based on our cancer research funding we should only be spending around $2.5 million to fight terrorism.
You seem to be confusing the total solar flux on the earth (which is indeed about 1 kw/m^2) with the solar flux on the earth's surface, which is substantially lower. Only a small fraction of the total solar energy that strikes the earth ever reaches the surface; most of it is reflected, scattered, or absorbed by the atmosphere. By the time sunlight reaches the ground you only have a flux of around 70-200 watts/m^2, depending on where in the world you live. As I recall the average solar flux on the U.S. around 150 watts/m^2; so you would need around 30 square kilometers to produce your 400 MW.
This is why some people like to talk about putting solar panels in space to send power back down to earth; your solar panels get a lot more power.
No, it doesn't even seem to work on scientific papers. I submitted four papers from the latest issue of Inorganic Chemistry and it thought 2 out of 4 were false:
Inauthentic: Assembly of a Heterobinuclear 2-D Network: A Rare Example of Endo- and Exocyclic Coordination of PdII/AgI in a Single Macrocycle.
Inauthentic: Pyrazolate-Bridging Dinucleating Ligands Containing Hydrogen-Bond Donors: Synthesis and Structure of Their Cobalt Analogues
Authentic: Manganese Complexes of 1,3,5-Triaza-7-phosphaadamantane (PTA): The First Nitrogen-Bound Transition-Metal Complex of PTA
Authentic: Structure, Luminescence, and Adsorption Properties of Two Chiral Microporous Metal-Organic Frameworks
Based on this (small) sampling, the program doesn't appear to do any better than if it were to guess randomly. I wonder if this thing is even supposed to work, or if it just returns a random result based on a hash of the paper or something?
I have to disagree. Jargon helps people communicate easily when discussing complex topics; you come up with a new term that describes a complicated idea so that you can discuss the idea more efficiently and clearly. There certainly is plenty of legitimate jargon in the corporate world. When a manager says something like "We need to recapitalize and increase our market-share before considering an IPO," he's using jargon to express a lot of complicated ideas in a clear and efficient manner. When he says "We need to leverage our synergies to increase the value of our deliverables," that' not the case.
How appropriate. You respond to a claim that religion is unsubstantiated nonsense by attacking the education of the person making the claim, rather than actually respond to the claim itself.
There is indeed a vast body of religious/theological literature, but it all amounts to painstaking attempts to draw logical conclusions from premises that are completely lacking in support, and often are outright absurd. I'll cut off your ranting about how anyone who disagrees with you must be ignorant/uneducated in advance by noting that I most certainly have studied both religion and philosophy in many college-level classes, including the likes of Descartes, Pascal, and Aquinas.
Theologians like to start with a premise like "What if a mystical entity created all of space and time, then used his magic powers to interfere with the world on occasion?" It doesn't matter how rigorously you apply logic and reason to build conclusions from premises if your premises are unsubstantiated and ridiculous. If I suppose that a magic pink unicorn exists and proceed to make logical deductions from that premise, I'm not really engaging in a meaningful intellectual activity.
The original poster claimed he wanted a free labor market, when in reality what he wants is for the government to grant U.S. workers an artificial labor monopoly by excluding the competition. Of course that would be good for U.S. workers, since they could then demand a higher price for their labor - just as any monopolistic cartel can demand higher prices when there isn't any competition. Workers asking congress to decrease/limit H1-B visas is exactly analogous to General Motors asking congress to make it illegal for anyone to import and sell foreign cars because their profits are down and customers aren't willing to pay their asking price when cheaper alternatives are available.
If a business were trying to pull this sort of stunt, most everyone on slashdot would be up in arms about how the companies were just trying to legislate their way into a monopoly because they couldn't handle the competition.
Your final statement about murdering competition is ridiculous. A free market doesn't mean an anarchy with no laws - it simply means that there are no artificial government controls on who is allowed to supply goods/services, who is allowed to purchase goods/services, and what price the goods/services may sell for. Laws against murder only interfere with the labor free-market if you're a hitman.
The point is that the credit card companies make virtually no effort verify people's identities when they issue cards, then expect the honest people to jump through hoops to help them when they are burned by their own carelessness.
The problem is that universities grant textbook publishers a monopoly be requiring a certain specific textbook for each course. The school never says "Go buy a calculus book." If they did, there would probably be substantial price competition in the textbook market as publishers fought for market share among students who had a wide selection to choose from. Instead, the school says "Go buy this calculus book." Since the publishers know that the only students who will have an interest in buying their books in the first place are the ones who are required to buy them, there is no competition and they can charge whatever they want.
Publishers do have to compete at the level of the university teachers and administrators who get to select which textbook will be required, but since the people who make that decision won't ever have to actually purchase the book they aren't likely to care about price.
I disagree with your statement that corporations have ever had "essentially the same rights as an individual human." The rights of a corporation are severely restricted compared to the rights of an individual human. Corporations, for example, essentially do not have free speech rights. "Commercial speech" (with the explicit exception of the press) can be restricted almost at the government's whim - which is why the federal 'do no call' list isn't unconstitutional. There are countless other examples of commercial speech not enjoying the same protections as individual freedom of speech. Also, the property rights of corporations are far less secure than the property rights of individuals. These are just examples off the top of my head; it's been years since I had a class in this stuff, so someone who has studied it more recently could probably do a much better job enumerating the differences between corporate and individual rights.
Also, I would argue that many of the rights enjoyed by corporations are really just extensions of the rights of the people who make up the corporation. For example, a corporation can sue someone if they are wronged - but such a lawsuit would be in place of a suit by each individual person who had a stake in the corporation and was harmed.
I agree that corporations often behave very badly. However, this idea that corporations enjoy "the same rights as people" seems to have recently become a very popular misconception among anti-corporate activists, and - although it's probably great for getting other activists riled up - it really just makes people look ignorant when they go around repeating it.
Something that I've never really understood in these debates about different keyboard layouts: when do people actually type at their maximum typing speed anyway? I can type at about 50-60 words per minute, which is probably not very impressive by Slashdot standards. But I almost never get to actually type that fast - I have to stop to think about what I'm doing, whether it's composing a document or writing code. Even if switching to another layout allowed me to type at 80 words/minute, I don't think it would ever really increase my productivity.
"The FIRE case list is very heavily skewed toward positions favored by political and social conservatives..."
That's because it is far more common for liberal schools to punish conservative speech than for conservative schools to punish liberal speech. FIRE is happy to defend liberal students who have their free speech rights threatened by conservative administrations. It just doesn't happen that often. This is probably partly because conservative schools tend to be private, which exempts them from having to obey the 1st Amendment.
"...and their stance against programs aimed at recruiting and retaining people from underrepresented populations (defined by ethnicity, sexual identity, etc.) is disturbingly reactionary."
Sorry to have to break this to you, but most slashdotters have a distinctly libertarian bent and probably wouldn't (on average) support affirmative action.
If any country actually had a tax system like that, you would have a point. In the real world, however, you would be taxed 10% on your first $20,000 and 20% on everything *above* $20,000. So, if you made $20,001 your taxes would be $20,000*0.1 + $1*0.2.
Private for-profit businesses will only become interested in space when it's possible to, you know, make a profit. That's not possible at the moment. If it were, companies would be doing it already.
You know, I somehow suspect that the MSNBC site will be able to handle the traffic...
They can always acquit, but that's just because the way our court system is set up there is no way to stop them. Juries, both historically and according to modern law, are supposed to determine matters of fact; specifically, whether or not someone violated the law. They aren't supposed to decide they don't like the law and choose to return a 'not guilty' verdict simply because they don't support the law that the defendant is being charged with. Yes, it is possible for them to do it and get away with it, but it's not how the jury system is intended to work.
The funny thing is, contrary to what the shalshdot summary say the article doesn't say anything about genes.
Thanks, slashdot editors...
I think that would largely defeat the purpose of having them read the books. Contrary to what some of the English majors here might tell you, I really don't think that knowing the plot of 'Romeo and Juliet' will make you a better person or substantially improve your quality of life.
The real value of making kids read Shakespeare, in my opinion, is precisely that it's hard to read. You really have to think carefully about what it's supposed to be saying, take context clues from nearby parts, etc. It's great practice for reading complex, difficult-to-follow material. Making it easy to read nullifies a lot of the benefit that you can get from having to decipher it.
I suppose I should have said that they can't take you to court under the Copyright Act, if you want to get pedantic about it.
Look closely at Title 17. It doesn't grant you any "rights." It merely says that fair use is not a violation of copyright law. There's a big difference.
I'm afraid you're mistaken about this. Title 17 doesn't grant you an inalienable right to fair use; it merely states that it isn't a violation of copyright law for you to engage in fair use. Sony isn't under any obligation to make it easy, or even possible, for you to engage in fair use because of Title 17. They simply can't take you to court over it if you manage to.
I agree that the situation is bad. But in many ways, I really don't feel much sympathy for victims of things like this any more. Companies can get away with sticking disclaimers on every product and service under the sun because people are stupid sheep who are too lazy to not buy/use something that has a liability disclaimer. If a product of service comes with a disclaimer saying that you agree to not hold the company responsible for anything they do no matter how badly it screws you over, the only sane thing to do would be to refuse to buy it. If everyone did that, these disclaimers would vanish over night. If you agree to not hold someone responsible for anything that they do to you, well, you're a moron who practically deserves to get taken advantage of. Unfortunately the tiny minority of us who realize that it might not be a good idea to give companies the right to do whatever they want to us don't really have much choice any more because we're such a small part of the market that companies can afford to blow off our business.
I believe it's established that the "credible and imminent" exception can only be applied to spoken words, and never applies to written speach.