No dude, serious, enlighten us all how does this creation work? I mean you take raw materials... oops, those are stolen... err.. appropriated from the dumb natives. Ok, never mind and then you make your slave... err.. worker.. make stuff for a fraction of what you gonna charge for it. No... that falls under stealing. Ok, so, instead you take.... err... an idea... no wait, that is based on all the ideas you appropriated from those who have gone before you.. Ah, what the heck lets call it Intellectual Property anyway and demand royalties! You are right, there is a way to create wealth. Too bad that after everything valuable is patented for eternity there will be no way to steal... err.. create new stuff. Back to the marrying and inhereiting parts I guess.
Man you are killing me. You are the very example of what he is talking about! Overpriced, chemicals laden, unknown origin "coffee" sold by company which believes that the "Starbucks image" constitutes 90% of the "product". "Fleecing the sucker" is the dictionary definition of this situation. And as he explained the purpose of Starbucks is to ammass capital by any means possible. Less actual tangible product and more "fluff" the better. The fact that you are so totally brainwashed to actually consider it to your advantage is hillarious.
The Iranian government had just been overthrown by radical extremists and they had taken several American citizens hostage, or don't you remember that little hostage crisis that arguably cost your man Carter the presidency.
Selective memory is one of those great shortcomings of the defenders of US policy. "We had no choice", "Poor us!", "They started it first, honest!". Guess what, the islamists were overthrowing an unpopular Shah who... wait for it.... US has installed, and while at it, overthrew a democratically elected (and resonably moderate to boot) government of Iran. I know, I know, there was no choice, the dudes wanted to nationalize oil and kick US oil companies out. You had to do it, no, no, THEY MADE YOU DO IT. Poor molested US and all those neccessary sacrifices it has to make....
Or would you prefer if the USSR, that shining beacon of freedom, democracy and human rights, would have won the Cold War? Why don't you ask some of the people who risked their lives crossing the Berlin Wall just how wonderful that would have been.
No I would like to see you both "lose". That would be the optimal scenario. USSR was deeply flawed and opressive but it had its purpose. Its purpose was to keep the US in check. Now the US is like a high on drugs teenager cruising the neighbourhood in his car with a gun on a passenger seat looking for somebody to shoot because he does not get enough "respect".
The problem is not capitalism per se, it's the destruction of free markets by "special interests"
Unfortunately those "special interests" are all of the market's participants of whom each and every one wants to run their own monopoly. So you are pitting the wits of elected officials, with our huge economies of scale separating them by light years from the voters on the ground, against super-rich people owning their own television networks. One does not need to be a genius to figure out the result of this contest.
he penultimate paragraph (starting with the letter BTW a commonly accepted acronym for "by the way") was remark indicating that the ECONOMIC policies Pinochet introduced were beneficial for Chile, it did not in any way express aproval of his person.
Let me clarify it for you since you are having difficulty with history and present economic situation in Chile: Allende came to power because Chile's economy was screwed up beyond belief with huge masses of dispossessed and starving poor working in near-slavery conditions and most of the country was being owned by US based cartels. Pinochet was a response of those who want to own everything on the planet. His job was to set an example as to what happens should the unwashed masses get uppity and try to get a better deal. He did his job splendidly. In the process he restored the "natural" order of things to Chile, and even improved it so that the new flashy "economicly viable" elite is the only thing visible to uneducated doofuses who use the FOX channel as their news source. In the meantime the disparity between the elite and the huge numbers of the working poor has grown. Overall the rich got very rich and everyone else got double-screwed under Pinochet. And thats his economic legacy that you claim was beneficial to Chile. Dont get me wrong, I fully understand where you stand. If it is good for the few rich up top it must be good for the country, right? After all only the rich count when one speaks of persons, the rest are merely wage-slaves, no? This is the very same way of thinking these darlings of "conservative thinking" like Regan and Bush embodify.
The fact for Pinochet is responsible for the death of other 3000 people (how of them were really communists who came from around the world to establish communism is our country, how many were just misguided brats or completly innocent bystanders, will never know becouse they didn't get a trail), does not magicly make Allende a good ruler
I was reading this with total astonishment, until I realised I am talking to a Bible-thumping troglodite who would gladly take part in Crusades if he were born in middle ages. I can almost hear that madman with a torch: "The communists are Evil and the Spawn Of Satan to be tortured and and burned on the stake so that the purifying fires can clense their souls!". Right. So it is quite all-right to murder, rape and pillage as long as the victims are "communists" or "misguided brats". To most foreigners in the world it is quite astonishing that a country professing so loudly the rule of law and democracy is on one hand supporting vicious thugs and on the other invading other countries "pre-emptively" on made-up pretexts. Not so to me, if there are people in the world like you who are inane enough to think the way you do. If there is something to be ever wished for by all sane people on this planet is that the likes of you never, ever, manage to take charge of the US completely for they would end the humanity with an uspeakable bloodbath trying to purge it of what your indoctrination tells you is "evil".
I wasn't justifing atrocities commited by Pinochets regime...
This thin veneer of civility was completelly torn off by your statement above.
.. only pointing out to that the greatgrandparents argument about a good democraticly elected communist government was absurd.
Which happened to be completely correct as what is a "good" or a "bad" government was for the Chilean majority to decide in a democratic process and not for US based corporations, a hired thug and a bunch of greedy land owners in Chile who conspired to destroy that government when it didnt suit them instead of waiting for next election where their notion of "good" could have been defeated again. By your insane thinking, "good" is what YOU believe to be good, measured by your own yardstick (capitalist wealth, the stock exchange index, private hospitals, 60% of people with no healthcare, etc) and any other measurement (as
You mean this gentleman brought these kinds of riches to Chile?
You dork, whatever damage Allende did economically and no amount of self-indulgence by self-congratulatory but tiny wealthy minority of today's Chile who benefited from Pinochet's doings can possibly justify what that bastard and his backers did. You are just a brain-dead neocon who believes that obtaining "wealth" is the purpose of the universe and no cost in human lives, pain or misery is too great to achieve that goal for the priviledged few.
And herein lies the crux of the matter. Proponents of "true" capitalism believe that absoultely everything can be "property" and that all of it can be "private".
Take for example the so called "intellectual property". It means information. Infromation means thought. So "owning" thoughts and ideas is an inalienable right to a neo-con. Being able for example to "own" a part of a DNA genome and extorting money from farmers on whose fields some of that DNA ended up due to its self-replicating nature is something they see quite reasonable. Getting life-time royalties from people whose DNA was somehow modified is just an insignificant step away.
The whole problem stems from a simple-minded world view of a neo-con: if you can somehow get money for something that means it is "property". So if for years a disguisting machine spitting out, packaging and peddling intellectual garbage called "pop music" was functioning at a great profit due to various societal and technological reasons that means sound wave information is "property" and everyone with a CD-burner is a thief. The idea of "intellectual property" in a neo-con's mind trumps the idea of the ownership of your own body since if someoe decided to beam TV programming through it from a sattelite you still are unable to decode it even if the reciever was installed inside your rectum. And so on.
I am not sure what case of a Canadian Physician you are referring to exactly but mere mentioning of the words "intellectual" and "property" together gives away lack of any logic therein.
No, I am not. The neo-cons wish to have completely unrestricted capitalism with all those inevitable effects I described.
They believe some mystical "market forces" will keep everything in check and everyone well off and happy, in direct contradiction of every experience with such a system on the planet. In every case where the controls were removed or corrupted, a tiny group of ruthless egoists took over and abused entire societies for their own benefit. The fact that they sticked labels on their systems like "national socialism" or "communism" and did a lot of fast talking does not hide the fact that in both cases they practiced extreme forms of capitalizm, the first run by the wealthiest industrialists the other by the operators in the "politbureau". In case of USSR the state was the ultimate all-owning corporation with Stalin as its unqestionable CEO. In both cases when you complained, you just got their ultimate version of a "pink slip".
The neo-cons see CBC's reporting as something getting in their way and so they call it "biased". I, like most Canadians, favour controlled capitalist society whereby the negative effects of a greed based system are kept in check by regulation and public controlled social nets. Neo-cons hate this because the regulations are stopping them from robbing everyone blind and the social nets mean that they have to pay a portion of their income for the good of the commons.
Too bad for you. I like CBC they way they are, thank you very much. And I dont mind paying for it. CBC was the only channel in the sea of propaganda madness that gripped all of the US and some Canadian media during the Iraq war buildup and the war itself. You of course must deeply resent that, I know. How dare they! I know that some out in Alberta would prefer someone like Rush Limbaugh to be on CBC 24/7. Someone who would explain to the dumb masses the virtues of a pure dog-eat-dog capitalism where 1% has it all and 99% are starving wage-slaves who are supposed to solve all their hardships with prayer in church (because they are lazy idiots or God does not favour them). No government, no taxes, private everything (preferably a bunch of monopolies) and no social services. A neo-con's (aka Conservative Party of Canada member) dream. Over my and 80% of other Canadian's dead bodies, pal. I would rather have the thieving Liberals or bumbling NDP then any one of the George Bush wannabies. One Bush ought to be enough damage to the planet for a long time, thank you very much.
Call it a troll if you want but I hate right wing jackasses whining about possibly the LAST TV channel left with some integrity in Canada and in North America probably. Its the Crap News Network and FOX "news" all the way everywhere else.
BTW, I just noticed that due to some Slashdot database quirk, my original post which was addressed to the first article in this thread (the dude who feels sorry for poor MS and their property) was posted as a reply to your post. I assume that is why you answered instead of him.
Really? So what you are saying is: "You are nuts because I lack the facts to argue with you"?
Or are you so far gone into the jungle that any attempt at getting you to see the big picture and what are the root causes of all this IP mess is too difficult and therefore must be the domain of conspiracy theorists?
It is so sad that everyone is focusing on tiny minutia and byzantine legalese and has no time for re-examining the fundamental principles of the whole thing. You are too busy arguing over what style of a slave collar should you wear and if it goes with your shoes and when someone stops by and aks what the hell are you doing you go "Hah, a nutcase!" and keep on trying a tighter fitting one with a bejewelled chain.
In case you wonder I am dead serious about this. The question of what is "property" and what is not is one of fundamental issues that need to be sorted out properly in this time of great transformations of the way human societies are organized and connected. Instead it is being randomly muddled through under the guidance of corrupt politicians and greed-motivated robber barrons. The fact that excluding information from the classification of property has financial disadvantages to some, pales in comparison with the implications of the contrary position, doubly and triply so if one is to adopt it casually and without examining it like you and the general public seems to.
Your error lies in your unfounded basic assumptions that were beaten into you by decades of social manipulation and brainwashing. Let me spell it for you: Information Is NOT Property. I wont go into a huge tyrade here, let it be said that the fact most media and seemingly reasonable people believe otherwise does not change the fundamental equasion: information = thought = parts of our very souls. If you allow information to be "property", you propose the most evil and insideous kind of slavery ever conceived, where our very thoughts can be owned and controlled (their material expression at the moment - for now...) by others.
GPL is a defensive mechanism that exists only because the playing field is so tilted in the favour of would be slave masters that its almost vertical. GPL is a clever exploit, in essence a legal trick guaranteeing freedom to some slaves by twisting and abusing the very words of the paperwork that makes them "property" to their slave-master.
How can we develop a safe design if no one will let us experiment with scale engines?
I dont see a problem here really, NASA has some sealed facility under construction for testing of nuclear propulsion and I doubt that a lot of panic could be produced by an underground facility in the middle of Nevada desert. Even though I dont believe that current designs are feasible for general purpose use due to all those reasons we discussed (even though many of them are strictly political) I would be the last one to propose halting research. Even if clean engines do not emerge from the process, I am sure there might be some unexpected insights into some other systems and that alone is good enough to continue reasonable (but not wasteful defense contractor style pork) research levels.
The simple answer is that they don't know why the skin doesn't seem to fully repair the damage
That maybe so, but it does not in any way reduce the power of their message, I venture to guess that an opinion of a friendly MD around the corner carries far more weight with average citizen than what you can put forward no matter how scientific. You have your work cut out for you. I think we will get "clean" (as in no possiblity of radioactive pollutants) nuclear engines invented sooner then you will manage to convince enough people to use the ones you describe.
The uranium itself is kept spinning in a vortex to reduce the amount of pressure on the silica.
The way I understood, the mechanics of such a vortex would actually produce pressure on the sillica, not only due to pressure of the gas itself but of centrifugal force caused by the vortex. If you read the article you pointed me to, the guy there is talking about a system whereby a portion of the hydrogen is redirected to flow over the sillica in effort to cool it and more to the point: "equalize pressures".
The silica would quickly break (not much force there) and the uranium would splatter against the outer walls of the engine.
Not exactly, what would actually happen is that the whole mess: uranium fluoride, bits of sillica, hydrogen fuel and possibly some pellets from the emergency "scram shotgun" would be ejected through the venturi since for a brief period of time the engine would continue to function with the hydrogen propellant already inside and still expanding due to the residual heat. So you would end up with essentially all the uranium fluoride (described even in that article as "nasty stuff") outside of the engine as a nice cloud of higly radioactive (although no longer plasma) gas. Now imagine this happening during early stages of takeoff from Cape Canaveral or during final stages of power descent towards the landing pad somewhere in the US and the resulting hysteria among citizenry would make you regret you ever heard the world "nuclear".
And that is why radiation early in life won't kill you later in life.
I am not sure if the medical estabilishment agrees with you on this one. What about all those warnings against sun-tanning? Virtually all the dermathologists are jumping up and down waving arms about how sun-tanning (exposure to UV radiation but it would be the same kind of principle) can lead to skin cancer later on in life (they are talking 40 years of age and later). Also should there ever be a release of some tiney particles of a few thousand atoms each of radioactive material which then would get into food/air/whatnot and get absorbed into the body and sit in one spot irradiating a small area of it, there is your continuous exposure scenario.
NASA launches toward the ocean so that anything that blows up doesn't land on populated areas..
Lets assume for the moment that it is possible to do so, that would then preclude using the engines for anything similiar to the Space Shuttle, a vehicle that returns to Earth and lands within the US.
I read the entire article and it explains well the advantages of a nuclear rocket but it does glosses over (as most enthusiasts tend to do) some inherent issues like the fact that the sillica shield around the bulb can just explosively fail (because it is under pressure from inside and outside and is in fact that "mechanical" stress point I was eluding to earlier) and no amount of "scram" devices will help that one. Also the article is being dissmissive about our negative past nuclear history and talks about 1950-60s with nostalgy as some sort of glory days. Huge amounts of abuses and wild risks that governments back then took are so damning and well entrenched in our collective minds that it does the proponent's cause more damage bringing those dark days up then pretending they never existed.
My personal feeling (that has not changed much during this discussion I am afraid) is that nuclear powered engines will be (at least in reasonable future) only feasible in 2 cases:
1.Interplanetary use whereby they get transported to orbit in "off" state as cargo with all the fuel locked down safely and ignited far away from Earth, thus reducing vastly their usefulness and totally eliminating their advantages as Earth-to-orbit propulsion means
2. By the governemts of countries like China with their neo-feudal political systems who consider potential deaths of thousands from any number of half-baked large scale space program failures (not neccarilly nuclear) a cheap price for the achievement of the ambitions of world domination by their egomaniacal Lords and Masters.
I think any use of universally deployed nuclear rocketry as you would like to see it is dependant on developement of some sort of system where noone (especially die hard skeptics) can fathom a way for nuclear material to get out of the system. Fusion would probably be something along the line as long as the by-products of hydrogen fusing into helium or some such are not radioactive.
Well your argument is good to explain a possiblity of dying from immediate exposure but what about long-term carcinogenic and other health risks. You understand that those will be more of a fear then immediate exposure. Look at asbestos and the havoc that wreaks.
You probably already have some in your backyard. Raining some from an engine would NOT increase it by that much. It certainly wouldn't kill you in the time it takes for the nuclear energy commission to clean up your neighborhood..
For a guy so well educated in the technology you surely have funny concept of human psychology. Lemme translate your statement for you this way:
------
.... Studio anchor:
And now to Joe Sensation our correspondent at the site of the nuclear disaster...
*camera cuts to a dude dressed up in something reminescent of 19th century diving suit with huge gas mask filter, scuba diving tank who holds his mike with a pair of pincers*
Joe (muffled through the gas mask): Indeed George, it is a place of chaos and panic...
*camera pans to some other dude in hazmat suit carrying a crying toddler and back to the reporter*
George: We are so proud of you risking your life for the good of the nation..
Joe: (with false modesty) I am merely doing my duty, it is these poor souls, these unfortunate Americans who are paying the price for the monstrous, God-defying ambitions of these so called scientists..
George (with disguist): Madmen is more like it..
Joe (sternly): In the last hour I heard much less generous names for them...
*camera pans to some tanker truck spraying everything in sight with foamy liquid*
George (with deeply concerned voice): This must be devastating for the residents!
Joe: The costs will be enormous, they are talking of digging up the soil, the real estate market is in a tailspin. Fortunately help is on the way, the Governor has declared state emergency, the few FEMA staff who did not resist the call-up order are arriving and the legal experts at Litigious Ambulance Chasers Inc have offered their services to the citizens......
--- 6 months later ----
*At a back of a seedy motel in Houston (the only thing the new re-organized NASA could afford for the press conference), an upset scientist waving a report to the 3 half-dozing reporters in the audience*
Professor: And as we were saying all along there were only no more then 2 grams of actual nuclear material deposited in the entire state!..."
------
On another note the GNCR concept escapes me, it looks like the propellant is injected into a swirl of super hot uranium gas and then ejected along with portions of the gas via the venturi... isnt this producing a continuous stream of radioactive material out the back of the rocket?
...If fully dispersed, it won't add a significant amount of uranium to the surface of the Earth.
Ha, while that is true for the Earth as a whole, it might add politically significant amount of uranium isotopes to some dude's backyard in Florida and that counts 100x more than all the output of coal plants combined globally.
...The most likely design is...
I must admit that from what you are describing the engine would look completely different from what I have seen in some old magazines, it must be some completely new concept, if you have some links to sites (with pretty diagrams for ignoramuses) I would appreciate.
As to me yelling, I appologise, I thought I was being wittingly humorous pointing out how your point of view would be received by, for instance, some local media reporter.
Usually I tell people that the whole thing would be engineered like RTGs.
I understand I am being difficult to convince but I find that very hard to swallow. RTGs can be made as sealed armored units and there is not much going on inside then low-yeld nuclear decay in a solid state material. RTG container could fail if driven with sufficient force into some solid object but one could set up the course so in that case as you indicated it hits the ocean. Nuclear engine on the other hand is in a state where very high velocity, very high energy mechanical events are going on as the propellant is being transfered and accellerated through it. Thus if something goes wrong with the propellant path (for example some disruption in flow resulting in the propellant flow developing unstable characteristics and cavitating into the side of the reactor) the whole thing will BLOW! And since the reactor is already in the melt-down state the hot and very highly radioactive fuel will be just perfect to disperse with maximum impact. We are talking orders of magnitude differences in difficulties of design between RTGs and engines.
I see that but you are going about it the wrong way. You are trying to persuade me that the effects of a nuclear engine explosion (I dont mean meltdown just some sort of mechanical failure in the chamber where all those hi-preassure propellant energy transfers occur) are not going to be much of a health hazard. I was pointing out that even if so, the argument is difficult to prove and the general public, myself included will remain doubtful and will choose to err on the side of caution. Ergo no nuclear engines will fly. What you must do is to show that there is a way to make absolutely sure that the engine is incapable of dispersing nuclear material even after exploding. That means fancy engineering or use of such engines only in interplanetary space. But trying to discount the effects of a potential disaster is a completely ineffective strategy in this case.
Chemical spills here in the US have done more damage and killed more people than that!
You still dont understand the issue. If the nuclear powered rocket presents a danger that connects in minds of the public to anything like a chemical spill your project is doomed. Radiation is particularly insideous because it presents great psychological impact of being an invisible and undetectable by human senses killer. The public does not trust the government or its agencies with something like that in fear that they would lie to them about the presence or levels of radiation. You are dealing not only with dangers of radiation (which are clearly there) but the problem of credibility where some scientists (and that was the reason I pointed to that article although it was being "debunked") have opinions that go contrary to the official government or nuclear lobby's assessments. So any proponent of nuclear engines must prove the safety of the system beyond any doubt of any Joe Sixpak's and Jane Doe's.
AKAImBatman, man, you really do believe that nuclear power is something that Granma should have in her backyard to power the garden sprinklers and so that her cat has a nice place on top of the reactor to warm itself..
You clearly havent spoken to anyone who lived anywhere near Chernobyl as I have. Hundreds of square kilometers around the place are unhabitable and the amount of birth defects in the area along the path of the fallout occured ALL THE WAY TO FRIGGING BRITAIN!
As to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as I recall the entire city's top soil was removed and the human sufferring for decades after the fact is so documented that I find it preposterous that you would be so dismissive of it.
Even if nuclear power indeed did "little damage" as you claim, "litte" is a very relative term and I sincerely doubt that the general public holds your point of view on these matters. And I dont want to be offensive but you are starting to sound like a completely uncritical nuclear power nut who would let himself be irradiated and go "Look ma! Nothing happened to me!" and then die painfully out of press camera range.
I can just see that! A hi-altitude explosion over the ocean + wind from the east... Seriously, if something goes wrong with that thing, the point of greatest stress, and thus the most likely source of a catastrofic failure with something like a nuclear engine is at the very core of the reactor!. So we are talking a spectactular hi-altitude BOOM with lots and lots of fine radio-active particles and nice glo-clowd with fallout marching in unpredictable weather controlled direction. Even if you try to launch with wind blowing east, these things can float for days as the Chernobyl excercise proved conclusively. You would have to do much better then that before you could avoid screaming mobs storming the NASA gates before any attempt at launching something like that.
I can see how it works that way and I was thinking along the same lines until I visualized the following: what happens to say Apollo command module and a LEM trying to dock to each other in orbit. If the LEM needs to adjust its position to align in the orbit's plane it would just fire its (relatively small) thrusters "up/down". Well if the angular momentum was so huge, it would require some serious honking thrusters to align out of plane! If the wee little thruster can make the LEN change position in/out of plane of the Command module by what must be in effect a good fraction of a degree...
Well thats all fine and dandy for sealed, air-tight, low power electricity generating units. I guess they could be made to surivive serious impacts although I would have some doubts after how many re-inforced black boxes fair in airliner crashes and we are talking possibly much lesser speeds of impact there. What the poster above was talking about is full scale nuclear engines/reactors! I would think the issues here would be much more complex and difficult than what is essentially an armored, welded-shut bank safe with plutonium in it.
...an out of plane burn adds no energy to the system, rather, angular momentum is preserved and the burn only serves to point the angular momentum vector (normal to the orbital plane) in a new direction (same magnitude)
Well that is precisely why I would think the inclination change would be very cheap energy/propellant wise and thats why I cant understand those huge fuel expenses you had pointed out at that NASA page.
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No dude, serious, enlighten us all how does this creation work? I mean you take raw materials ... oops, those are stolen ... err .. appropriated from the dumb natives. Ok, never mind and then you make your slave... err.. worker.. make stuff for a fraction of what you gonna charge for it. No... that falls under stealing. Ok, so, instead you take.... err... an idea ... no wait, that is based on all the ideas you appropriated from those who have gone before you.. Ah, what the heck lets call it Intellectual Property anyway and demand royalties! You are right, there is a way to create wealth. Too bad that after everything valuable is patented for eternity there will be no way to steal ... err.. create new stuff. Back to the marrying and inhereiting parts I guess.
Man you are killing me. You are the very example of what he is talking about! Overpriced, chemicals laden, unknown origin "coffee" sold by company which believes that the "Starbucks image" constitutes 90% of the "product". "Fleecing the sucker" is the dictionary definition of this situation. And as he explained the purpose of Starbucks is to ammass capital by any means possible. Less actual tangible product and more "fluff" the better. The fact that you are so totally brainwashed to actually consider it to your advantage is hillarious.
Selective memory is one of those great shortcomings of the defenders of US policy. "We had no choice", "Poor us!", "They started it first, honest!". Guess what, the islamists were overthrowing an unpopular Shah who ... wait for it.... US has installed, and while at it, overthrew a democratically elected (and resonably moderate to boot) government of Iran. I know, I know, there was no choice, the dudes wanted to nationalize oil and kick US oil companies out. You had to do it, no, no, THEY MADE YOU DO IT. Poor molested US and all those neccessary sacrifices it has to make ....
Or would you prefer if the USSR, that shining beacon of freedom, democracy and human rights, would have won the Cold War? Why don't you ask some of the people who risked their lives crossing the Berlin Wall just how wonderful that would have been.
No I would like to see you both "lose". That would be the optimal scenario. USSR was deeply flawed and opressive but it had its purpose. Its purpose was to keep the US in check. Now the US is like a high on drugs teenager cruising the neighbourhood in his car with a gun on a passenger seat looking for somebody to shoot because he does not get enough "respect".
Unfortunately those "special interests" are all of the market's participants of whom each and every one wants to run their own monopoly. So you are pitting the wits of elected officials, with our huge economies of scale separating them by light years from the voters on the ground, against super-rich people owning their own television networks. One does not need to be a genius to figure out the result of this contest.
Let me clarify it for you since you are having difficulty with history and present economic situation in Chile: Allende came to power because Chile's economy was screwed up beyond belief with huge masses of dispossessed and starving poor working in near-slavery conditions and most of the country was being owned by US based cartels. Pinochet was a response of those who want to own everything on the planet. His job was to set an example as to what happens should the unwashed masses get uppity and try to get a better deal. He did his job splendidly. In the process he restored the "natural" order of things to Chile, and even improved it so that the new flashy "economicly viable" elite is the only thing visible to uneducated doofuses who use the FOX channel as their news source. In the meantime the disparity between the elite and the huge numbers of the working poor has grown. Overall the rich got very rich and everyone else got double-screwed under Pinochet. And thats his economic legacy that you claim was beneficial to Chile. Dont get me wrong, I fully understand where you stand. If it is good for the few rich up top it must be good for the country, right? After all only the rich count when one speaks of persons, the rest are merely wage-slaves, no? This is the very same way of thinking these darlings of "conservative thinking" like Regan and Bush embodify.
The fact for Pinochet is responsible for the death of other 3000 people (how of them were really communists who came from around the world to establish communism is our country, how many were just misguided brats or completly innocent bystanders, will never know becouse they didn't get a trail), does not magicly make Allende a good ruler
I was reading this with total astonishment, until I realised I am talking to a Bible-thumping troglodite who would gladly take part in Crusades if he were born in middle ages. I can almost hear that madman with a torch: "The communists are Evil and the Spawn Of Satan to be tortured and and burned on the stake so that the purifying fires can clense their souls!". Right. So it is quite all-right to murder, rape and pillage as long as the victims are "communists" or "misguided brats". To most foreigners in the world it is quite astonishing that a country professing so loudly the rule of law and democracy is on one hand supporting vicious thugs and on the other invading other countries "pre-emptively" on made-up pretexts. Not so to me, if there are people in the world like you who are inane enough to think the way you do. If there is something to be ever wished for by all sane people on this planet is that the likes of you never, ever, manage to take charge of the US completely for they would end the humanity with an uspeakable bloodbath trying to purge it of what your indoctrination tells you is "evil".
I wasn't justifing atrocities commited by Pinochets regime...
This thin veneer of civility was completelly torn off by your statement above.
Which happened to be completely correct as what is a "good" or a "bad" government was for the Chilean majority to decide in a democratic process and not for US based corporations, a hired thug and a bunch of greedy land owners in Chile who conspired to destroy that government when it didnt suit them instead of waiting for next election where their notion of "good" could have been defeated again. By your insane thinking, "good" is what YOU believe to be good, measured by your own yardstick (capitalist wealth, the stock exchange index, private hospitals, 60% of people with no healthcare, etc) and any other measurement (as
You dork, whatever damage Allende did economically and no amount of self-indulgence by self-congratulatory but tiny wealthy minority of today's Chile who benefited from Pinochet's doings can possibly justify what that bastard and his backers did. You are just a brain-dead neocon who believes that obtaining "wealth" is the purpose of the universe and no cost in human lives, pain or misery is too great to achieve that goal for the priviledged few.
Take for example the so called "intellectual property". It means information. Infromation means thought. So "owning" thoughts and ideas is an inalienable right to a neo-con. Being able for example to "own" a part of a DNA genome and extorting money from farmers on whose fields some of that DNA ended up due to its self-replicating nature is something they see quite reasonable. Getting life-time royalties from people whose DNA was somehow modified is just an insignificant step away.
The whole problem stems from a simple-minded world view of a neo-con: if you can somehow get money for something that means it is "property". So if for years a disguisting machine spitting out, packaging and peddling intellectual garbage called "pop music" was functioning at a great profit due to various societal and technological reasons that means sound wave information is "property" and everyone with a CD-burner is a thief. The idea of "intellectual property" in a neo-con's mind trumps the idea of the ownership of your own body since if someoe decided to beam TV programming through it from a sattelite you still are unable to decode it even if the reciever was installed inside your rectum. And so on.
I am not sure what case of a Canadian Physician you are referring to exactly but mere mentioning of the words "intellectual" and "property" together gives away lack of any logic therein.
They believe some mystical "market forces" will keep everything in check and everyone well off and happy, in direct contradiction of every experience with such a system on the planet. In every case where the controls were removed or corrupted, a tiny group of ruthless egoists took over and abused entire societies for their own benefit. The fact that they sticked labels on their systems like "national socialism" or "communism" and did a lot of fast talking does not hide the fact that in both cases they practiced extreme forms of capitalizm, the first run by the wealthiest industrialists the other by the operators in the "politbureau". In case of USSR the state was the ultimate all-owning corporation with Stalin as its unqestionable CEO. In both cases when you complained, you just got their ultimate version of a "pink slip".
The neo-cons see CBC's reporting as something getting in their way and so they call it "biased". I, like most Canadians, favour controlled capitalist society whereby the negative effects of a greed based system are kept in check by regulation and public controlled social nets. Neo-cons hate this because the regulations are stopping them from robbing everyone blind and the social nets mean that they have to pay a portion of their income for the good of the commons.
It seems it is you who is confused.
Call it a troll if you want but I hate right wing jackasses whining about possibly the LAST TV channel left with some integrity in Canada and in North America probably. Its the Crap News Network and FOX "news" all the way everywhere else.
BTW, I just noticed that due to some Slashdot database quirk, my original post which was addressed to the first article in this thread (the dude who feels sorry for poor MS and their property) was posted as a reply to your post. I assume that is why you answered instead of him.
Or are you so far gone into the jungle that any attempt at getting you to see the big picture and what are the root causes of all this IP mess is too difficult and therefore must be the domain of conspiracy theorists?
It is so sad that everyone is focusing on tiny minutia and byzantine legalese and has no time for re-examining the fundamental principles of the whole thing. You are too busy arguing over what style of a slave collar should you wear and if it goes with your shoes and when someone stops by and aks what the hell are you doing you go "Hah, a nutcase!" and keep on trying a tighter fitting one with a bejewelled chain.
In case you wonder I am dead serious about this. The question of what is "property" and what is not is one of fundamental issues that need to be sorted out properly in this time of great transformations of the way human societies are organized and connected. Instead it is being randomly muddled through under the guidance of corrupt politicians and greed-motivated robber barrons. The fact that excluding information from the classification of property has financial disadvantages to some, pales in comparison with the implications of the contrary position, doubly and triply so if one is to adopt it casually and without examining it like you and the general public seems to.
GPL is a defensive mechanism that exists only because the playing field is so tilted in the favour of would be slave masters that its almost vertical. GPL is a clever exploit, in essence a legal trick guaranteeing freedom to some slaves by twisting and abusing the very words of the paperwork that makes them "property" to their slave-master.
I dont see a problem here really, NASA has some sealed facility under construction for testing of nuclear propulsion and I doubt that a lot of panic could be produced by an underground facility in the middle of Nevada desert. Even though I dont believe that current designs are feasible for general purpose use due to all those reasons we discussed (even though many of them are strictly political) I would be the last one to propose halting research. Even if clean engines do not emerge from the process, I am sure there might be some unexpected insights into some other systems and that alone is good enough to continue reasonable (but not wasteful defense contractor style pork) research levels.
That maybe so, but it does not in any way reduce the power of their message, I venture to guess that an opinion of a friendly MD around the corner carries far more weight with average citizen than what you can put forward no matter how scientific. You have your work cut out for you. I think we will get "clean" (as in no possiblity of radioactive pollutants) nuclear engines invented sooner then you will manage to convince enough people to use the ones you describe.
The uranium itself is kept spinning in a vortex to reduce the amount of pressure on the silica.
The way I understood, the mechanics of such a vortex would actually produce pressure on the sillica, not only due to pressure of the gas itself but of centrifugal force caused by the vortex. If you read the article you pointed me to, the guy there is talking about a system whereby a portion of the hydrogen is redirected to flow over the sillica in effort to cool it and more to the point: "equalize pressures".
The silica would quickly break (not much force there) and the uranium would splatter against the outer walls of the engine.
Not exactly, what would actually happen is that the whole mess: uranium fluoride, bits of sillica, hydrogen fuel and possibly some pellets from the emergency "scram shotgun" would be ejected through the venturi since for a brief period of time the engine would continue to function with the hydrogen propellant already inside and still expanding due to the residual heat. So you would end up with essentially all the uranium fluoride (described even in that article as "nasty stuff") outside of the engine as a nice cloud of higly radioactive (although no longer plasma) gas. Now imagine this happening during early stages of takeoff from Cape Canaveral or during final stages of power descent towards the landing pad somewhere in the US and the resulting hysteria among citizenry would make you regret you ever heard the world "nuclear".
I am not sure if the medical estabilishment agrees with you on this one. What about all those warnings against sun-tanning? Virtually all the dermathologists are jumping up and down waving arms about how sun-tanning (exposure to UV radiation but it would be the same kind of principle) can lead to skin cancer later on in life (they are talking 40 years of age and later). Also should there ever be a release of some tiney particles of a few thousand atoms each of radioactive material which then would get into food/air/whatnot and get absorbed into the body and sit in one spot irradiating a small area of it, there is your continuous exposure scenario.
NASA launches toward the ocean so that anything that blows up doesn't land on populated areas..
Lets assume for the moment that it is possible to do so, that would then preclude using the engines for anything similiar to the Space Shuttle, a vehicle that returns to Earth and lands within the US.
I read the entire article and it explains well the advantages of a nuclear rocket but it does glosses over (as most enthusiasts tend to do) some inherent issues like the fact that the sillica shield around the bulb can just explosively fail (because it is under pressure from inside and outside and is in fact that "mechanical" stress point I was eluding to earlier) and no amount of "scram" devices will help that one. Also the article is being dissmissive about our negative past nuclear history and talks about 1950-60s with nostalgy as some sort of glory days. Huge amounts of abuses and wild risks that governments back then took are so damning and well entrenched in our collective minds that it does the proponent's cause more damage bringing those dark days up then pretending they never existed.
My personal feeling (that has not changed much during this discussion I am afraid) is that nuclear powered engines will be (at least in reasonable future) only feasible in 2 cases:
1.Interplanetary use whereby they get transported to orbit in "off" state as cargo with all the fuel locked down safely and ignited far away from Earth, thus reducing vastly their usefulness and totally eliminating their advantages as Earth-to-orbit propulsion means
2. By the governemts of countries like China with their neo-feudal political systems who consider potential deaths of thousands from any number of half-baked large scale space program failures (not neccarilly nuclear) a cheap price for the achievement of the ambitions of world domination by their egomaniacal Lords and Masters.
I think any use of universally deployed nuclear rocketry as you would like to see it is dependant on developement of some sort of system where noone (especially die hard skeptics) can fathom a way for nuclear material to get out of the system. Fusion would probably be something along the line as long as the by-products of hydrogen fusing into helium or some such are not radioactive.
Well your argument is good to explain a possiblity of dying from immediate exposure but what about long-term carcinogenic and other health risks. You understand that those will be more of a fear then immediate exposure. Look at asbestos and the havoc that wreaks.
You probably already have some in your backyard. Raining some from an engine would NOT increase it by that much. It certainly wouldn't kill you in the time it takes for the nuclear energy commission to clean up your neighborhood..
For a guy so well educated in the technology you surely have funny concept of human psychology. Lemme translate your statement for you this way:
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On another note the GNCR concept escapes me, it looks like the propellant is injected into a swirl of super hot uranium gas and then ejected along with portions of the gas via the venturi... isnt this producing a continuous stream of radioactive material out the back of the rocket?
Ha, while that is true for the Earth as a whole, it might add politically significant amount of uranium isotopes to some dude's backyard in Florida and that counts 100x more than all the output of coal plants combined globally.
I must admit that from what you are describing the engine would look completely different from what I have seen in some old magazines, it must be some completely new concept, if you have some links to sites (with pretty diagrams for ignoramuses) I would appreciate.
As to me yelling, I appologise, I thought I was being wittingly humorous pointing out how your point of view would be received by, for instance, some local media reporter.
I understand I am being difficult to convince but I find that very hard to swallow. RTGs can be made as sealed armored units and there is not much going on inside then low-yeld nuclear decay in a solid state material. RTG container could fail if driven with sufficient force into some solid object but one could set up the course so in that case as you indicated it hits the ocean. Nuclear engine on the other hand is in a state where very high velocity, very high energy mechanical events are going on as the propellant is being transfered and accellerated through it. Thus if something goes wrong with the propellant path (for example some disruption in flow resulting in the propellant flow developing unstable characteristics and cavitating into the side of the reactor) the whole thing will BLOW! And since the reactor is already in the melt-down state the hot and very highly radioactive fuel will be just perfect to disperse with maximum impact. We are talking orders of magnitude differences in difficulties of design between RTGs and engines.
I see that but you are going about it the wrong way. You are trying to persuade me that the effects of a nuclear engine explosion (I dont mean meltdown just some sort of mechanical failure in the chamber where all those hi-preassure propellant energy transfers occur) are not going to be much of a health hazard. I was pointing out that even if so, the argument is difficult to prove and the general public, myself included will remain doubtful and will choose to err on the side of caution. Ergo no nuclear engines will fly. What you must do is to show that there is a way to make absolutely sure that the engine is incapable of dispersing nuclear material even after exploding. That means fancy engineering or use of such engines only in interplanetary space. But trying to discount the effects of a potential disaster is a completely ineffective strategy in this case.
You still dont understand the issue. If the nuclear powered rocket presents a danger that connects in minds of the public to anything like a chemical spill your project is doomed. Radiation is particularly insideous because it presents great psychological impact of being an invisible and undetectable by human senses killer. The public does not trust the government or its agencies with something like that in fear that they would lie to them about the presence or levels of radiation. You are dealing not only with dangers of radiation (which are clearly there) but the problem of credibility where some scientists (and that was the reason I pointed to that article although it was being "debunked") have opinions that go contrary to the official government or nuclear lobby's assessments. So any proponent of nuclear engines must prove the safety of the system beyond any doubt of any Joe Sixpak's and Jane Doe's.
You clearly havent spoken to anyone who lived anywhere near Chernobyl as I have. Hundreds of square kilometers around the place are unhabitable and the amount of birth defects in the area along the path of the fallout occured ALL THE WAY TO FRIGGING BRITAIN!
As to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as I recall the entire city's top soil was removed and the human sufferring for decades after the fact is so documented that I find it preposterous that you would be so dismissive of it.
Even if nuclear power indeed did "little damage" as you claim, "litte" is a very relative term and I sincerely doubt that the general public holds your point of view on these matters. And I dont want to be offensive but you are starting to sound like a completely uncritical nuclear power nut who would let himself be irradiated and go "Look ma! Nothing happened to me!" and then die painfully out of press camera range.
I can just see that! A hi-altitude explosion over the ocean + wind from the east... Seriously, if something goes wrong with that thing, the point of greatest stress, and thus the most likely source of a catastrofic failure with something like a nuclear engine is at the very core of the reactor!. So we are talking a spectactular hi-altitude BOOM with lots and lots of fine radio-active particles and nice glo-clowd with fallout marching in unpredictable weather controlled direction. Even if you try to launch with wind blowing east, these things can float for days as the Chernobyl excercise proved conclusively. You would have to do much better then that before you could avoid screaming mobs storming the NASA gates before any attempt at launching something like that.
I can see how it works that way and I was thinking along the same lines until I visualized the following: what happens to say Apollo command module and a LEM trying to dock to each other in orbit. If the LEM needs to adjust its position to align in the orbit's plane it would just fire its (relatively small) thrusters "up/down". Well if the angular momentum was so huge, it would require some serious honking thrusters to align out of plane! If the wee little thruster can make the LEN change position in/out of plane of the Command module by what must be in effect a good fraction of a degree...
Well thats all fine and dandy for sealed, air-tight, low power electricity generating units. I guess they could be made to surivive serious impacts although I would have some doubts after how many re-inforced black boxes fair in airliner crashes and we are talking possibly much lesser speeds of impact there. What the poster above was talking about is full scale nuclear engines/reactors! I would think the issues here would be much more complex and difficult than what is essentially an armored, welded-shut bank safe with plutonium in it.
Well that is precisely why I would think the inclination change would be very cheap energy/propellant wise and thats why I cant understand those huge fuel expenses you had pointed out at that NASA page.