Have you ever actually seen this? Cats use the ground. They twist their body in opposite directions, no net angular momentum, alliaging one set of paws downward. Once they land they rapidly untwist themselves.
radiation is a function of temperature, area and a property called emissivity. it is linear in area and emissivity and goes as the fourth power of temp. so inside a solar cone presumably all radiation is interacting only with space temperature approximately 4 K. in the example given the object will get to about 280 K from ambient air temp and from rediative exchange with space it will release about 24010000 times as much energy to space as space sends to it which is where the cooling comes in. as long as this can overwhelm ambient warming the temp will be driven down.
actually yes. There are three reasonably practicle approaches to getting rid of/using nuclear waste.
Firstly the transuranics have unique chemical/radialogical properties that are commercially exploitable Am is used in smoke detectors and some artificial elements can be substituted for other expensive metals in catalysts. But I sense you want a more comprehensive plan so..
Secondly you can extract energy from them. At close of life cycle in a typical reactor roughly 20% of the heat energy is actually being produced by decay of various products. Therefore at end of cycle we could basically just dump the output from 5 reacors in a pile and run water through to boil getting a no effert reactor that according to your completely ridiculous lifetime would last for 50K years easy as an energy source.
Thirdly if you put fissionable material in a sufficiently high neutron flux they will fission resulting in much more stable atoms with half lives on the order of 100 years which refering to note two about we can use as an energy source until they are safe. Work is currently being done to make this commercially practicle but as the research is being persued by government agencies its not going terribly fast. However even they probably will have something in a generation or two which is plenty fast enough.
The article actually says 1/150th which means 30 megabucks to replace a traditional reactor which is a little high. However what I've seen on triing to make nuclear more economical suggests that mass producing smaller reactors should be significantly cheaper since capital outlays can be made to improve the efficiency of the process. My favorite candidates for this are power stations that where designed for the DEW line. They are power stations that weigh about 12 tons and prodoce about 30kW for thirty years. As for fallout that is largely a function of containment. Graphite moderated reactors, like chernoble, are so large that containment buildings for them are extremely expensive. So the soviets didn't build containment buildings for those reactors. If these really are this small and hopefully water moderated size/expense of containment should scale down and reduce fallout to near zero. In terms of engineering as long as you know what you have to face you can pretty much stop anything with enough concrete. Of greater concern to me is prolifatory implications. Sure Russia already has nukes but some of the nations interested in this don't. If they really do hope to be in the export business that needs to be carefully monitored. The hard part about constructing a nuke has always been getting your hands on fisile material. Even a non-breeder reactor will produce non-trivial amounts of chemically distinguishable fissiles over its fuel cycle. Thats what the big deal about plutonium is. You can build a bomb out of sufficiently enriched uranium or thorium but that is hard/expensive whereas you can chemically seperate plutonium from spent fuel much easier. Also most figures I've seen for costs of nuclear energy production call for costs under 2 cents per kW making this pretty expensive. Plus based on desalinization figures this looks to be approx. 20 kw which might be enough for a fifth of a miilion people in the artic circle but for those of you that want to use this in the first world, the energy use of the lifestyle which americans, canadians and western europeans have become accustomed takes about 10x that level of energy to maintain.
When I was in high school the competitions were conducted in ugh Pascal. It shifted to C after I graduated. If you can pick a language why not use perl with all of cpan at your disposal you should be able to crush the competition.
Whats the problem with a math bias? A cursory examination of history demonstraits that pretty much everybody whose intellectual fruits contributed to the miracles we get to expirence as apposed to knapping flint spearheads ranged from good to unbelievable at math.
The exeptions the Edisons and Faradays are quite instructive. The effort that they put forth is unbelievable and in Faraday's case the work more or less required the exegis of Maxwell so the rest of us could use and understand his observations.
Mathematical ability is not the be all end all of human ability obviously. The overwhelming import of social interation in human society is an obvious example of an attribute thet is important personal success which is supposedly the correlation basis of IQ tests. However if you where going to measure some single human ability in an attempt to identify the effemeral and multidemensional quality of 'intellegence' mathematical ability probably should be the one to pick.
Not quite the right criticisms
The real killer on wind and incidently tidal and simmilar notions is maintence. It would take something like 2.25 million windmills to match the USA's electrical output thats an insane number of moving parts combined with geographic disbursal plus the photogenic kills as wildlife gets mangled by the turbines and this tech isn't that attractive.
Solar lack of energy density is pretty much the killer. Even if we lick the energy sink problem you still basically have to do all generation localally so cities and the wealth they imply go away.
Hydro does indeed have an upper limit and is also geographically dependent. However the primary difficulty is environmental. Creating lakes and large scale land scaping is expensive and increadibly unpopular.
Nuclear is limited largely by law. There are ways to exploit non-fissile heavy elements as fuel sources but since the Carter administration the popular method, breeders and fuel reprocessing, has been illegal in the US for domestic energy production. During Clinton's tenure a plant was started to reprocess for everybody else but america is still burning though its sources.
The important thing about energy production and use is what the stuff costs not how efficient it is. Thats why hydro pumping stations work to move energy production from low to high demand cycle. This is also the key point to pursue in terms of strategies to move toward energy security. The cheapest forms of energy known are fission and coal. The drawback of these is poor portability and scalability. It would be impracticle to put fission reactors in cars for example. The popularity of oil comes from its flexibility of use and has been pointed out with better battery technology we could use cheaper energy sources for general fuel use. While I agree that research into alternatives to oil are in the long term interest of the non-middle eastern nations the far more important pursuit is the radical reduction of the cost of energy. This is obviously not achievable by merely paying part of the bill out of general revenue. Currently well as of a few moths ago http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/pdf/pages/sec1_13. pdf the energy cost for your car was cheaper then what we had coming out of the outlets in out homes. That is the important number to pursue.
With the comming advent of 64 bit processors the potential size of the instruction set will be able to vastly excede any reasonable limit. the hardware could implement RAM as a database w/ SQL to get info and have C or C++ or java VM or python interpreter or even all four implemented in silicon. I realize you'ld want the base instruction set to be pretty damn mature but imagine the advantages of writing a fourth gen language that was machine code.
I prefer a radical departure in which creators can set a monetary protection on thier work and then be taxed on that. For a Disney or Microsoft they can maintain indefinite copyrights, at generally exorbatant costs which are then recovered by govenment, and for those with shallower pockets holding a copyright would rapidly become uneconomic. Actually it would be uneconomic for these giants as well but may be done for prestige.
How about overturning the twelfth amendmant allowing state legislatures to appoint senators. Simutaneously make election to the house national and 'petition' driven. Each person will be able to choose a single representative and the 435 or heck push it up to 501 top vote getters are in. This makes the house in Tom Wolfe's phase "a heaving crapshoot" with the sort of parlimentary shenaigans we see elsewhere likely and the senate will have a constituency of a few dozen professional pols watching them like hawks. The major problem is idividuals will tend to subordinate to issues but that seems to be a systemic problem of government in general. Anyway bonus no districts no gerrymandering.
Actually I feel that the price of IP should be self assessed so in this case MS could claim ownership of FAT and say that that ownership was worth $20.00. If they do that you, I, or anybody else could give them an engraving of Andy Jackson and we would then own FAT and could either release it to the public domain or change the price so MS doesn't buy it back. However if they didn't want to sell at $20 they could jack up the price say to $20Giga-bucks, but for that priviledge they'ld owe back taxes and penalties for the last few years!
As to the return on patents I'm well aware that progress isn't required in my lifetime, but my point is that rate of progress is the only metric worth argueing about. If the maximum rate of progress could be achieved with 100% return of revenue from an idea (an indefinite patent) then I'ld be all for that. If a zero return pulled it off instead (complete abolition of USPTO) then that's what I advocate. The answer is almost certainly between these extremes and I've never seen any research that might allow us to actually guage where it might be. The research I have seen is in terms of the percentage of the expected value of an idea which is recovered by the owner, note owner not creator, and that is apparently over 99%. It seems hard for me to believe that an idea with only 1% of its commecial life left is really a "vital and refreshed public domain".
Whats so wrong with creating a valuable idea and expecting to profit from it.....?
Nothing.
Wrong. I've pointed this out before and its a point of view that seems overlooked in the debate. The constitutional power to grant exclusive rights to creators is purposed to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". That is the only thing that is important. Now I agree that giving economic incentive is a powerfull force to get people working and certainly a corporation had better expect a better return than whatever the marginal return is from the alternative investments available to it or why do they even exist. However maneuvers like this while legal go beyond objectional as this post lengthely attests that it is and become somehow anti-constitutional if I may introduce such a concept. That is the law is not unconstitutional and I'm sure they complied with the law to get thier patents, but the situation, moreso in other cases but also here, is clearly working against the constitutional clause.
Is there a remedy? I believe so, I'ld like IP to have a value and then that property value be taxed. If someone pays you the value of your property you must give it up or increase the price and pay back taxes. If taxes become too onerous you can release to public domain and stop paying anything. This should be able to port the current system and the taxes collected which should have a low rate can pay for more support for USPTO infrastructure an improvment of which it is generally agreed is required for the information age.
Biologists can already copyright dna and protien sequences w/o knowing what they are thats basically just a fact. IP thought truly requires complete destruction/reconstruction to focus things properly before we decide to throw out the bill of rights.
Clause 8: 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;
Its is important to note that this statement is basically greedy on the part of the public. The reason for USPTO is to benefit those of us without patents by making the technology curve keep going up. If the tech curve goes up with a one year monopoly, mission accomplished. What is not here even by implication is that the creator of an idea has any right to the profit from it. Those techies who disagree are free to send every scrap of everything you will ever have to the estates of either Turing or Plank depending on your hard/software affilliation.
Anyway if corporations want real security they should use peer reviewed crypto like everyone else has to rather than try to outlaw knowledge.
What we ought to do is have a property tax copyrights and patents. The owners of intellectual property could set the price of their inventions then anybody that ponies up the scratch can take it from them unless the inventor ups the price and pays a huge penalty and some back taxes. If the tax is to onerous one can always lower the cost or even release the IP to public domain. You could also get rid of time limits with this since the cost of protecting IP indefinately would be general prohibative. The increased revenue could fund an effective and staffed USPTO.
Actually reprocessing isn't the only option. The is research going on now to use a spallation neutron generator to burn up the fissile and fissionable products of a nuclear reaction. this leaves the much shorter lived products which can be used as a heat/energy source while waiting for it to become safe
Slashdot Mirror
try this instead (same answer) X^X^X... = 2 log(X)(X^X^X...) = log(X)2 (X^X^X...)(log(X)X) = log(X)2 2*1=log(X)2 1 = log(X)2^1/2 X = 2^1/2
Have you ever actually seen this? Cats use the ground. They twist their body in opposite directions, no net angular momentum, alliaging one set of paws downward. Once they land they rapidly untwist themselves.
radiation is a function of temperature, area and a property called emissivity. it is linear in area and emissivity and goes as the fourth power of temp. so inside a solar cone presumably all radiation is interacting only with space temperature approximately 4 K. in the example given the object will get to about 280 K from ambient air temp and from rediative exchange with space it will release about 24010000 times as much energy to space as space sends to it which is where the cooling comes in. as long as this can overwhelm ambient warming the temp will be driven down.
actually yes. There are three reasonably practicle approaches to getting rid of/using nuclear waste.
Firstly the transuranics have unique chemical/radialogical properties that are commercially exploitable Am is used in smoke detectors and some artificial elements can be substituted for other expensive metals in catalysts. But I sense you want a more comprehensive plan so..
Secondly you can extract energy from them. At close of life cycle in a typical reactor roughly 20% of the heat energy is actually being produced by decay of various products. Therefore at end of cycle we could basically just dump the output from 5 reacors in a pile and run water through to boil getting a no effert reactor that according to your completely ridiculous lifetime would last for 50K years easy as an energy source.
Thirdly if you put fissionable material in a sufficiently high neutron flux they will fission resulting in much more stable atoms with half lives on the order of 100 years which refering to note two about we can use as an energy source until they are safe. Work is currently being done to make this commercially practicle but as the research is being persued by government agencies its not going terribly fast. However even they probably will have something in a generation or two which is plenty fast enough.
The article actually says 1/150th which means 30 megabucks to replace a traditional reactor which is a little high. However what I've seen on triing to make nuclear more economical suggests that mass producing smaller reactors should be significantly cheaper since capital outlays can be made to improve the efficiency of the process. My favorite candidates for this are power stations that where designed for the DEW line. They are power stations that weigh about 12 tons and prodoce about 30kW for thirty years. As for fallout that is largely a function of containment. Graphite moderated reactors, like chernoble, are so large that containment buildings for them are extremely expensive. So the soviets didn't build containment buildings for those reactors. If these really are this small and hopefully water moderated size/expense of containment should scale down and reduce fallout to near zero. In terms of engineering as long as you know what you have to face you can pretty much stop anything with enough concrete. Of greater concern to me is prolifatory implications. Sure Russia already has nukes but some of the nations interested in this don't. If they really do hope to be in the export business that needs to be carefully monitored. The hard part about constructing a nuke has always been getting your hands on fisile material. Even a non-breeder reactor will produce non-trivial amounts of chemically distinguishable fissiles over its fuel cycle. Thats what the big deal about plutonium is. You can build a bomb out of sufficiently enriched uranium or thorium but that is hard/expensive whereas you can chemically seperate plutonium from spent fuel much easier. Also most figures I've seen for costs of nuclear energy production call for costs under 2 cents per kW making this pretty expensive. Plus based on desalinization figures this looks to be approx. 20 kw which might be enough for a fifth of a miilion people in the artic circle but for those of you that want to use this in the first world, the energy use of the lifestyle which americans, canadians and western europeans have become accustomed takes about 10x that level of energy to maintain.
When I was in high school the competitions were conducted in ugh Pascal. It shifted to C after I graduated. If you can pick a language why not use perl with all of cpan at your disposal you should be able to crush the competition.
Whats the problem with a math bias? A cursory examination of history demonstraits that pretty much everybody whose intellectual fruits contributed to the miracles we get to expirence as apposed to knapping flint spearheads ranged from good to unbelievable at math. The exeptions the Edisons and Faradays are quite instructive. The effort that they put forth is unbelievable and in Faraday's case the work more or less required the exegis of Maxwell so the rest of us could use and understand his observations. Mathematical ability is not the be all end all of human ability obviously. The overwhelming import of social interation in human society is an obvious example of an attribute thet is important personal success which is supposedly the correlation basis of IQ tests. However if you where going to measure some single human ability in an attempt to identify the effemeral and multidemensional quality of 'intellegence' mathematical ability probably should be the one to pick.
Not quite the right criticisms The real killer on wind and incidently tidal and simmilar notions is maintence. It would take something like 2.25 million windmills to match the USA's electrical output thats an insane number of moving parts combined with geographic disbursal plus the photogenic kills as wildlife gets mangled by the turbines and this tech isn't that attractive. Solar lack of energy density is pretty much the killer. Even if we lick the energy sink problem you still basically have to do all generation localally so cities and the wealth they imply go away. Hydro does indeed have an upper limit and is also geographically dependent. However the primary difficulty is environmental. Creating lakes and large scale land scaping is expensive and increadibly unpopular. Nuclear is limited largely by law. There are ways to exploit non-fissile heavy elements as fuel sources but since the Carter administration the popular method, breeders and fuel reprocessing, has been illegal in the US for domestic energy production. During Clinton's tenure a plant was started to reprocess for everybody else but america is still burning though its sources.
We should definitly do it like this http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990807& mode=classic
The important thing about energy production and use is what the stuff costs not how efficient it is. Thats why hydro pumping stations work to move energy production from low to high demand cycle. This is also the key point to pursue in terms of strategies to move toward energy security. The cheapest forms of energy known are fission and coal. The drawback of these is poor portability and scalability. It would be impracticle to put fission reactors in cars for example. The popularity of oil comes from its flexibility of use and has been pointed out with better battery technology we could use cheaper energy sources for general fuel use. While I agree that research into alternatives to oil are in the long term interest of the non-middle eastern nations the far more important pursuit is the radical reduction of the cost of energy. This is obviously not achievable by merely paying part of the bill out of general revenue. Currently well as of a few moths ago http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/pdf/pages/sec1_13. pdf the energy cost for your car was cheaper then what we had coming out of the outlets in out homes. That is the important number to pursue.
Comon pentagon diebold's vote security is garbage too. Get rid of this stupid idea and replaceit it with another one.
With the comming advent of 64 bit processors the potential size of the instruction set will be able to vastly excede any reasonable limit. the hardware could implement RAM as a database w/ SQL to get info and have C or C++ or java VM or python interpreter or even all four implemented in silicon. I realize you'ld want the base instruction set to be pretty damn mature but imagine the advantages of writing a fourth gen language that was machine code.
I prefer a radical departure in which creators can set a monetary protection on thier work and then be taxed on that. For a Disney or Microsoft they can maintain indefinite copyrights, at generally exorbatant costs which are then recovered by govenment, and for those with shallower pockets holding a copyright would rapidly become uneconomic. Actually it would be uneconomic for these giants as well but may be done for prestige.
How about overturning the twelfth amendmant allowing state legislatures to appoint senators. Simutaneously make election to the house national and 'petition' driven. Each person will be able to choose a single representative and the 435 or heck push it up to 501 top vote getters are in. This makes the house in Tom Wolfe's phase "a heaving crapshoot" with the sort of parlimentary shenaigans we see elsewhere likely and the senate will have a constituency of a few dozen professional pols watching them like hawks. The major problem is idividuals will tend to subordinate to issues but that seems to be a systemic problem of government in general. Anyway bonus no districts no gerrymandering.
Actually I feel that the price of IP should be self assessed so in this case MS could claim ownership of FAT and say that that ownership was worth $20.00. If they do that you, I, or anybody else could give them an engraving of Andy Jackson and we would then own FAT and could either release it to the public domain or change the price so MS doesn't buy it back. However if they didn't want to sell at $20 they could jack up the price say to $20Giga-bucks, but for that priviledge they'ld owe back taxes and penalties for the last few years!
As to the return on patents I'm well aware that progress isn't required in my lifetime, but my point is that rate of progress is the only metric worth argueing about. If the maximum rate of progress could be achieved with 100% return of revenue from an idea (an indefinite patent) then I'ld be all for that. If a zero return pulled it off instead (complete abolition of USPTO) then that's what I advocate. The answer is almost certainly between these extremes and I've never seen any research that might allow us to actually guage where it might be. The research I have seen is in terms of the percentage of the expected value of an idea which is recovered by the owner, note owner not creator, and that is apparently over 99%. It seems hard for me to believe that an idea with only 1% of its commecial life left is really a "vital and refreshed public domain".
Whats so wrong with creating a valuable idea and expecting to profit from it.....?
Nothing.
Wrong. I've pointed this out before and its a point of view that seems overlooked in the debate. The constitutional power to grant exclusive rights to creators is purposed to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". That is the only thing that is important. Now I agree that giving economic incentive is a powerfull force to get people working and certainly a corporation had better expect a better return than whatever the marginal return is from the alternative investments available to it or why do they even exist. However maneuvers like this while legal go beyond objectional as this post lengthely attests that it is and become somehow anti-constitutional if I may introduce such a concept. That is the law is not unconstitutional and I'm sure they complied with the law to get thier patents, but the situation, moreso in other cases but also here, is clearly working against the constitutional clause.
Is there a remedy? I believe so, I'ld like IP to have a value and then that property value be taxed. If someone pays you the value of your property you must give it up or increase the price and pay back taxes. If taxes become too onerous you can release to public domain and stop paying anything. This should be able to port the current system and the taxes collected which should have a low rate can pay for more support for USPTO infrastructure an improvment of which it is generally agreed is required for the information age.
Biologists can already copyright dna and protien sequences w/o knowing what they are thats basically just a fact. IP thought truly requires complete destruction/reconstruction to focus things properly before we decide to throw out the bill of rights.
Clause 8: 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;
Its is important to note that this statement is basically greedy on the part of the public. The reason for USPTO is to benefit those of us without patents by making the technology curve keep going up. If the tech curve goes up with a one year monopoly, mission accomplished. What is not here even by implication is that the creator of an idea has any right to the profit from it. Those techies who disagree are free to send every scrap of everything you will ever have to the estates of either Turing or Plank depending on your hard/software affilliation. Anyway if corporations want real security they should use peer reviewed crypto like everyone else has to rather than try to outlaw knowledge.
What we ought to do is have a property tax copyrights and patents. The owners of intellectual property could set the price of their inventions then anybody that ponies up the scratch can take it from them unless the inventor ups the price and pays a huge penalty and some back taxes. If the tax is to onerous one can always lower the cost or even release the IP to public domain. You could also get rid of time limits with this since the cost of protecting IP indefinately would be general prohibative. The increased revenue could fund an effective and staffed USPTO.
Actually reprocessing isn't the only option. The is research going on now to use a spallation neutron generator to burn up the fissile and fissionable products of a nuclear reaction. this leaves the much shorter lived products which can be used as a heat/energy source while waiting for it to become safe