Even granting it may be more logical to infer swallowed = died than swallowed = excreted intact from the angle's boxlike anus, onto a pile of matresses off camera (which is pretty much what happened in the real world), where did I say it was voluntary?
Actually, it does. The producers deliberately built a lifesize model of that part of R'lyeh that included the angle that looked obtuse but was actually acute, or whatever, and had it swallow one of the actors.
Eastern Tennessse. Just had an Earthquake last week (3.6 - trivial damage). We don't get big ones. If the whole New Madrid fault let loose with another 10.0 that people would feel in CA, it would dampened at the edge of the mid state plateau into a mere picture straightener. Tornados? A slight chance of them whenever a storm as big as Katrina makes it this far from the gulf (All little ole F-2s, again usually trivial damage. There have been a few dangerous ones, but it's not like those F4's and 5's in Oklahoma or Kansas, and the survivability closely approaches 100% if you don't live in a trailer park). Wildfires? Maybe, but its been so wet the last 8 years something's gonna have to change back big time first. Never in our history have we had one like those town eating things they get in Colorado, Nevada, and California. Flooding? Maybe downstream from TVA projects, but all the dams around here are real solid reinforced concrete construction, none of that earthen dam B.S., and there's lots of hills and ridges breaking up the floodable areas. Blizzards? yes, but we call it that if there's 8" of snow and a 15 MPH wind. In two days, it will be 44 F and all melted again, and if it's early march, the irises will be comeing up. For the rest, what's a Nor-Easter? Might see some 90 F days in mid-summer, but seldom a 100 F, and it sure won't last for days (and even at night like it does some places). Oh, and Tsunamis are quite predictable here, in fact I'll predict that a 1 mile diameter asteroid impacting the mid Atlantic at 21 Km/sec will not splash one over the mountains that rise to my east.
I was starting to think I was the only person still running the full Mozilla suite instead of Firefox (Proud 1.8.1b tester still wondering where the hell do my bug reports go?). Then I checked the site yesterday, and saw a Mozllla 1.7.11 release was out, dated 1st of August. For all the mammalian Firefox fans, there's still some life in the parent reptile.
OTO, I'll gladly try Opera. Heck, I still keep a working install of the off-by-one browser, http://www.offbyone.com/ as it beats going back to IE in an emergency. Opera pioneered several browser features, and will probably remain an innovator for at least a few more development cycles.
Hurricanes grow when over waters at 94 F or above, and shrink when passing through waters at 93 F or below. The larger the temperature variance around that line, the faster they gain or lose size. (And you can pick diameter, wind speed, or total mass of suspended water as a measure of size, with the realtionship holding for any of those.). That particular relationship is a well documented fact, based on continueous satelite observation of the ocean temperatures and time lapse observations of hurricanes during their whole existence over water.
There is an alternate theory that some scientists who disagree with theories of global warming and a link to hurricanes have suggested. This theory involves a 40 year hurricane cycle. Given your own claim that we have only 70 years data, there is no possible way to prove a 40 year period exists either - The possible +/- variation is much larger than the base number until we have observed several full cycles. This means that the only well defined competing theory we've got at this time is definitely not going to make a reliable prediction that would let us confirm it, except provisionally and in the most tentative ways, for a good 50 years or so. Even a simple, very nebulous prediction with no exact quantities specified, i.e. that we should see a relatively significant downturn sooner or later won't be testable for at least 10 years. No testability = no science (at least yet).
At this point, several of the global warming theorists have predicted that there would be a sharp isocline above which hurricanes would grow, and that warm cells in the tropical oceans would link up to where the total numbers would decrease as the total area of those cells increases, again with the break point where individual growth starts decreasing total cell numbers being just above that same 94 degree F isocline temperature.
They further predicted that these warm water cells would tend to form with long axi parellel to the equator, rather than getting larger equally along both axi or growing more vertically, and that the cells would tend to more eccentricity with increasing size, not less or the same. Both of these predictions apply to individual storms and not to seasons, and are borne out so far by observation of over 80 such storms of various sizes, without significant exceptions to these patterns.
Aside from just predicting an increased number of tropical storms (not just from over all historical 'guess'timates, but as measured from the 30 or so years when we have had enough space born observations to have a 100% accurate count of even storms too small to count as hurricanes), the theory predicts a higher percentage of those tropical storms will reach wind speeds sufficient to count as hurricanes. Note that the typical trend for a pseudo-scientific or flawed theoretical explanation is to assume several variables will vary roughly linearly with the same change in base conditions, not to take the added risk of predicting which ones will vary as a multiple or power function of which other ones.
It also predicts the spawning of storms after the end of the normal season (a date originally set to include a safety margin based on that era's observations). It predicts changes in other phenomina such as tornados and forest fire spawning conditions (some of which include meteorology and climateology for which we have thousands of years data (i.e. glacial core samples, ice cap and permafrost cores, and deep sea sedement samples).
The best competing theory says, "our theory predicts that you might see short term just what their theory definitely predicts, or you might see something different - either way, you'll see we were right in just 50 more years or so.". No one supporting the "hurricanes just run to cycles" theory is willing to go out on a limb and claim that tornado fluctuations in the American Midwest, for example, also fit that cycle (or
It's probably still possible for someone to make the basic idea of memes into a definition with rigor, if they have a good reputation in a science such as linguistics or even whatever they are calling cybernetics this year. That person would have to be a coalition builder, who could get a sizable number of scientists to endorse the same formal definition.
Blackmore seems to consistently remember a meme is a type of information that supposedly has some properties in common with biological life (like replication) in her work, and that is a good start, but what Dawkins initially pointed out was some examples of where that analogy breaks down. Ultimately, I think Blackmore would have to also define what properties of life-like things Memes _didn't_ have, AND eventually the theory would have to grow to explain how what memes include instead still works to produce a selection-like effect. If she manages to fully address the copying fidelity issue, or define what, in memes, corresponds to chromosomes, proteins or generations, I'll believe she can tackle the unlimited blending objection (which I regard as the most serious issue when it comes to Dawkins original list). I haven't read anything larger than summaries and articles from her yet, maybe she's actually working on this. She does have a good presence on the web, both by her site and by a lot of other links.
Bester had been in telepathic contact with quite a few people as they died and seen across the barrier between life and death. This was depicted in the series as a very risky thing to do, something that involved giving up a little of your own soul each time. Doing it without damned good reason was supposed to be 'evil' in a "I think I'll open that weird old book and pronounce a few Elder God's names just to see what happens" sense, like doing anything with enormous consequences just for a moment's kick and no thought of what else will follow. In a way, he knowingly embraced a fundamental evil, because he couldn't possibly have been too stupid to understand the consequences to his own soul and to the others he was watching die.
That's what led to him becoming willing to kill or enslave mundanes even when there were other options that might have even worked better. He became more and more willing to break a few eggs before checking to see if he really needed to make yet another omelet.
Most of soldiers 'legal' paperwork is just graded confidential. Records with information such as who a soldier names as his or her next of kin, or how many dependants they claim with the IRS certainly aren't normally classified secret. However, the information that a whole army reserve unit has just gone through a whole bunch of personnel record upgrades and gotten say 98% compliance from the individual soldiers makes a pretty good indicator that the unit is being made more quickly deployable, and likely is becoming one of the first units to be sent to a potential new hot spot. Units that are moving up in deployability or changing mission often show signs such as increased physical fitness emphasis, updated vaccinations, additional training time for new equipment, and additional training for forign languages, or selectively recruiting and transferring personnel that may be useful for a certain area.
As an example old enough to have lost its nastier uses to anyone today, My first MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was in Telephone Central Office Repair (29N - That's become folded into other switching systems these days). The specialty had some ASIs (Additional Skill Identifiers) - those are two to four week additional courses only some soldiers stayed for- in this case ones specifically on various types of commercial, civilian-style telephone switching systems, from old rotary dial pulse types to DTMF). Units that were going to foreign countries with U.S. style phone systems, on rebuilding missions and such, often want people with an ASI appropriate to the types of phones used locally. So, at one point in the 90's any unit that asked for, say, 29N-B2's had probably just been told they were pulled off German or Korean deployment and going to Bosnia (or, at another point, Haiti).
Bulk data minimg of "official use only" or confidential records can easily assemble secret level information, and I'd claim it's possible for skilled espionage to get enough of the big picture to take a good guess at even Top Secret matters.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I took some time to actually research this, and here's my take:
Derivitive works involve a copyrighted (either still under copyright OR now public domain but formerly copyrighted) work being the source for another work that can also be awarded a copyright (These days that "can also be" is automaticly converted to an "is", but if that part of the law was stricken, say by a supreme court challenge, the derivitive definition wouldn't be affected.).
There is no crossing over from a patent or a trademark to a copyright, and you can't derive a work from them. In addition, you can't 'derive' a patent from another patent or a trademark from a trademark. For example, if a company draws a new, updated version of its logo, it can defend both the new version and the old one under trademark law, but the court doesn't care in a case involving the new design if the owner has allowed the old version 's trademark to lapse or not, and someone accused of infringing on the new trademark can't claim it was a derivitive work as part of their defense (or they can claim it, but it simply isn't relevant to anything in the eyes of the court).
This is one reason I oppose the whole idea of "intellectual property" as a blanket category. Many of the people who support it seem to want a nebulous, amorphous legal thing that lets them sue over types of "violations" that only apply to one type or subtype like they applied to all types. They want trademarks that don't have to be defended, patents that don't expire, trade secrets incorporated into patent diagrams, and perpetual copyrights on single words.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, and if you have a real legal concern, particularly re. copyright or trademark, you need to consult a liscenced professional for your specific jurisdiction and not take advice from random slashdotters.
Every single substance western civilization classes as a mind altering drug is chemically similar to a natural brain chemical, but is specifically not identical.
Heroin and all the other opiates get handled the same way in the brain as the natural endorphins. At some point in their breakdown process, they have a methyl group or other such feature sticking out that's different, the body slows down in handling it, or doesn't naturally produce nearly enough of some enzyme, and all sorts of related brain (and sometimes the rest of the body's) chemistry levels fluctuate wildly, producing both the enjoyable and unpleasant side effects. Levels of the natural brain chemical associated always display a damped sine wave curve as measured over the next few hours to several days.
LSD, Mescaline, Peyote etc, all pass through the system that regulates Serotonin, and all jam up the works somewhere in the process. The specific sticking points and the necessary solutions to keep these drugs from gumming up the works permanently on the part of the body are different, but the typical effects on brain chemestry are all at least roughly similar for that class of drugs. Note that the other, general body effects are all also at least roughly similar, and again a damped sine wave curve is produced.
All the amphetamines, E, and PCP have some effects on the adrenaline pathway for at least part of their breakdown. Again, all have at least roughly similar psychotropic and long term health effects, although Ecstasy and to a lesser extent PCP also spend some of their time affecting enzymes associated with the Serotonin pathway and have some effects in common with the classic 'halucinogens'. the damped sine wave curve can be observed for both Serotonin levels and for adrenal activity in the case of some of these drugs.
Alcohol is a brain affecting chemical. It fits the same pattern. The body produces an enzyme called Alcohol Reductase, because small amounts of alcohol are naturally produced from food in the digestive process. People who consume more alcohol than they can easily metabolize become drunk until the excess can be eliminated.
It's because of the cyclic over and under production of natural brain chemicals effect that people whose bodies adapt easily and swiftly to produce much greater quantities of reductase don't escape the long term health effects of excess consumption. Instead, if they become steady drinkers, they rapidly become the classic model alchoholics, and have huge long term risks of organic damage to the brain and general body functions even as their adaptability in reductase production may temporarily protect some other organs. The damped sine wave pattern is seen in several brain chemistry areas, including the blood sugars resulting from breakdown, the adrenaline pathways, and the sleep regulating chemicals.
Sugar (glucose) is a brain affecting chemical found in the bloodstream. Processed sugar (Dextrose) from sources such as cane syrup is a compound not found in nature in nearly such large amounts, and its metabolism requires first breaking the chemical bond that makes dextrose a double sized sugar. This is a bond that the body does not appear designed to deal with in nearly such quantities (as the average amount consumed per serving in western society these days). The levels of blood sugars actually found in the blood after consumption fluctuate in a manner and with amplitudes similar to endorphin, adrenaline or serotonin levels in drug use and abuse cases, and very distinctively different from the sort of fluctuations seen for most foods. Given that, the conclusion is that processed sugar is an abusable drug. Bulk observation of actual human subjects shows with what frequency potential for abuse turns or doesn't turn into an actual problem.
When Richard Dawkins coined the word "Meme", he also wrote that there were several major problems with the concept that would have to be overcome for it to mean anything useful, and that he was only writing about the idea of Memes in the hope that eventually someone would find solutions for those objections amd holes in the theory that he had already concieved, and any more that might come up.
All that's in "The Selfish Gene" - see for example Page 209 of the Oxford paperback edition, where Dawkins starts off by saying "Here I am on shaky ground...", and later on page 211 where he says "There is a problem here concerning the nature of competition...".
Since that time, the idea of memes has become widely accepted, all without anyone answering even a single one of Dawkins' own objections. Meme theory has lost any potential rigor or scientific value and become nothing more than a tool to avoid rational debate by disguising attacks against the person rather than the idea. Of course the definition's impenetrable.
But when you ride a freaking spaceship into honest-to-God SPACE, none of you ever have to pay taxes again after you blow up the asteroid, so it's worth it, right?
Certainly they can learn, but if you watch most people read the DSM-4 (for example) for the first time, they haven't learned how to apply the standards proportionately yet. I let my daughter borrow the III-R when she was about 14, and she kept saying "I've got some of these symptoms, should I be worried?". I'd ask her "Have you been feeling that way consistently for 6 months?", and the answer would be something like "No, just since reading the last paragraph.". Adults usually do a little better, but surprisingly not all that well without training.
Now as you would say "Only a couple qualify" you are likely understanding how serious the person's problems have to be.
Several of the 'predictions' definitely don't have testability, at least without a more accurate metric.
Societies will all have warriors, mamagers, & politicians? Which class does President/General Eisenhower fit in?
(and in either case, how was it possible for him to originate the famous remark about the military/industrial complex? - Surely if these claasses are quantifiable without general overlap, and he fit very well into two classes (as measured by reaching the top levels of both), it would be very hard for him of all people to see the potential problems of those groups combined?).
Was Eisenhower about as far from being a sociopath or psychopath as possible for a successful warrior/politician? (Maybe - It's at least a concevable claim, but for scientific testability, we'd probably need records from an alternative America where Patton became president). Is there any predictive value to be derived from both Napoleon and Hitler having been members of both the warrior and politician sets? Or in sociobiology, is Hitler's having recieved a concussion in WW1 more relevant to his subsequent behavior than whether he was in the warrior group at the time or not?
A testable prediction derived from such claims would be much more complex than these examples - maybe an equation expressing something about relative mobility between the manager, warrior, and politician sets as a function of real world stressors affecting the society, and with adjustment factors for how the society's political system worked, and for how much social mobility there was in general.
After all, if the society has a loose caste system, wars are infrequent and the average war lasts only three years, and that same society has eight year terms of office, there's going to be far fewer transitions of psychopaths across the group boundaries than if the reverses are true, just like there's going to be far fewer transitions of non-psycopaths. (It's easier to get elected on your war hero record if the war was over just a few months ago than if it ended five years ago and everyone has put it behind them - that's my own speculative prediction, as reasonable as several of these predictions, and just as much not a scientific theory).
While several of them are interesting, and a couple quite intreguing, before most of these predictions could be called elements of scientific theories, many such smaller, more specific predictions would need to be tested, and it would take getting some very reliable results before these would be viewed as possible theories, let alone being strong enough to support the arch-theory they all hopefully contribute to. I won't go into everything that would have to be proved on the Biology/Genetics side if that's to be incorporated into such a theory, but I'd say there are some links needed there as well.
While you're quite right that there is a particular risk of VF at frequencies similar to some of the neurosystem's natural heart control signal frequencies, there's a more important consideration:
AC at 50-60 Hz and 110 to 240 V still allows nerve impulses to transmit during the flat parts of the cycle so a person grabbing a line doesn't have their muscles lock, and can swiftly let go. DC in typical transmission ranges can override muscle control. Typically, the person is either somewhat protected, by being thrown forcibly away from the voltage source by their own muscle contractions, or becomes locked to the current source by their own grip and is electrocuted by sustained exposure. Chances are relatively close to 50/50 for either. Even being thrown by the current is not necessarily non-lethal, as muscle contraction in such cases has been known to break bones or damage internal organs, but being locked on for such time as it takes for someone else to cut power or breakers to engage is very frequently lethal.
Incidentally 50-60 Hz isn't the right frequency to cause ventricular fibrilation, it's just one of them. Low number multiples of the patient's pulse rate (typically the stress accelerated rate, since grabbing a live wire tends to count as an adrenaline booster) will produce much the same effect if they happen to be close to exact whole number multiples. (That's a range from about 8 to 40 Hz., with several peak risk points in it that vary by person)
If this paper is correct in its suggestion about overlapping pressure waves being the underlieing mechanism, and if what applies to pigs applies equally to humans, higher frequencies should also be just as dangerous at roughly similar total power imputs, probably (just my guess) for at least to 200 Hz. or so before the extrapolated relationship is likely to break down. http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/102/1 3/1569
On Earth, we have complex eyes (some of us), and we don't have "complete" radiation resistance (although some bacteria have a lot more than us higher organisms). I don't know of any other place offhand where it's different (maybe you do). You're arguement seems to sum up to a claim that the state of affairs in the only sample we can actually study is wildly anomalous, and if we could only see what's going on on a billion other planetary ecologies, we'd realize what a fluke Earth is. Maybe, but you're probably going to have to invent a stardrive to find any real proof of your intuition.
Several of your assumptions are just plain wrong (not trying to be offensive here, but it's hard to put it any more politely). For example vertebrate eyes obviously didn't develop by a "linear progression" of mutations at all, or they would be built in the same way as complex invertebrate eyes such as the octopi's. On Earth, nature (or whatever) has independently developed complex eyes along no less than 5 paths, which means there were at least that many possible routes to success, and probably some more that didn't get used.
Second, what's so hard about imagining a scenario? Even a very lousy eye is some use. An eye that only works in very bright light, or that only registers movement is still more useful than nothing. A frog dodges swooping birds with an eye that only registers a big gray blur at best, and even a frog with worse than usual eyes still has some chance of dodging. A poor quality eye may not spot an insect prey three feet away, but sometimes the possesser of that eye gets lucky and gets to within two feet range, where its eyes help, at least more than its competitor's eyes with only one foot range help that competitor.
As the proud posessor of a pair of corrective lenses to drag 20/200 nearsightedness up to 20/25, I can assure you there are still natural selective pressures operating on this ecology, and I'm just relieved I'm able to dodge some of them personally.
Third, why do we need to imagine the development doesn't dead end anywhere? Aren't there thousands of mammal types that dead-ended on developing stereo vision to keep their eyes on the sides of their heads? More that don't have color vision? Bees have very complex compound eyes - why don't all insects have thousands of eye-cells, and why are there some with only 7 cells/eye or so. Why do Horseshoe crabs have 9 eyes, counting the spots on the ventral surface near the tail that are very rudimentary - they have the genes for good compound eyes, so why build some of the simpler versions too?
If developing resistance to Cosmic Rays (in the amounts in question) is relatively as easy as developing complex eyes from photosensitve spots, then organisms might adapt to be resistant. That's 'might' as in even then there are no guarantees an ecology can adapt as fast as the radiation levels may be increasing, and life may just go belly up instead.
In the same way, if adapting is only as hard as adapting to a new germ or an organic toxin, we humans might be able to shortcult natural selection and make a vaccine against hard radiation.
A number of radiation medicine type experts have told me making something like a vaccine against hard radiation is precisely as difficult as making a vaccine against 50 caliber machine gun rounds.
Organisms just don't adapt to some things. Cheetahs sprint at 70 MPH, but nothing organic flies at Mach 5. Meteors have been falling on Earthly organisms, and volcanos erupting on them, for 3 billion years or so, but we still don't see lifeforms drinking molten lava or surviving in primary impact zones.
Drawbacks? Here's some, although they are neither (IMHO) all that serious, and I like this technology as a whole, and would say these won't stop it in the long run. 1. Heat - Focused mirrors in large banks are extremely hot at the focal points. When you're talking 500 Mw. output, your talking about lots of points inside that 4700 acre area where temperatures must be enormous (3,000 degrees F or so if the focus is at all tight).
Basically, anything that involves a huge energy differential has some potential for that energy to go in directions we don't want. The potential may be lower for some technologies than others, and this may well be one of the good ones, but by the very definition of energy (the ability to do work), there is no energy technology that can't do some work we don't want, whether it's a dam breaking and all that water working hard to wash away a town downstream, or mirrors getting focused on the wrong points, and the wrong things getting hot (like employees on site, or the supports and braces for other mirrors). 2. Not only can you not produce power at night, but cloudy days reduce your efficiency. Power draw on the grid is (usually) only less at night in the summer, when a lot of electricity is going to air conditioning. In winter, power draw is more for heating and people heat most on cold nights. Days are also shorter, plus sunlight is passing at shallower angles through the air and so has less energy per square foot, so even if this system is very, very efficient at the best of times, it becomes just half (or so) of a two part solution. At best, it's likely somewhat more than half, and maybe cuts fuel oil and coal use by a very nice 60-70%, but it simply can't do away with them entirely.
Now for the bad news - A power company that only needs 30% of the fuel oil it did won't see a full 70% savings - the way their contracts work, they will probably only see about a 50% savings on oil costs, so that financial 'damping' effect slows adoption of technologies like this. They have to prove themselves to conservative investors, and even then they have to offer big improvements and not just small ones, or they take 20 years or more to catch on.
This is a catch 22. If the technology caught on really fast, then basic macroeconomics holds fuel oil prices wouldn't continue to rise, because demand would decline. But since the technology simply can't catch on all that fast, places that haven't adopted it yet will continue to drive demand higher, the early adopters will get smaller discounts because they are buying only seasonally or in less bulk, and the rate of adoption will be slowed further.
Several sources of Aluminum are demonstrated and proven 'environmentally friendly' technologies (as much as technologies ever are). Take for example Alcoa's TN. plant, one of the largest single sources of refined Aluminum in the entire world (Historically, there have been entire decades when this was THE largest single source). Electric power for this facility comes entirely from four hydroelectric powerplants - Chilhowee, Calderwood, Cheoah and Santeetlah. Several other Aluminum operations, including Alcoa's own plants in Texas, have had more negative environmental impacts, and a few plants in the former Soviet Union have an abysmal record, but it's worth noting these are all much smaller operations.
The North American Aluminum industry currently uses about one-third recycled material in its products, with the goal of exceeding 50% by 2020 AD.
This goal may prove impossible to reach however, as the percentage of all aluminum ever produced that is bound up in long term/permanent objects such as buildings and industrial machinery is steadily increasing.
Aluminum is produced from Bauxite ore. The most significant environmental byproduct is caustic soda, which has been implicated in the amounts produced in contamination of rural water supplies, with (in humans) increased levels of Hypertension, 2 to 5 times that observed before mining came to the area (Given other lifestyle changes common at the time, this may not actually be primarily, let alone wholely, the result of increased sodium uptake from the local water supply).
In addition, the operations produce large amounts of typical red clay mud, which, while not particularly significant chemically, is produced in large quantities, roughly one ton of mud per ton of seperated ore. Runoff of this in rainy weather has a significant negative impact on streams and rivers, but is hard to isolate from other human adjustable sources of red clay runoff, such as non-contour plowing.
There is no way to rationally analyze "photovoltaic" process impact - common compounds that form a major portion of different cell designs include amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium selenide. Toxicity for these three compounds alone ranges from almost trivial to very high on the hazard list, and trying to discuss them as a group would be like discussing the risks of wild animal attacks, considering only box turtles, poodles gone dingo, and Bengal tigers, and taking an unweighted average for attacks without considering actual lethality. Figure in the differing risks of the mining byproduces for these three types as well, and talking about the risks of the industy as a collective is literally meaningless until we know which technologys will be used in what proportions.
Cadmium, Tellurium, and Indium are all heavy metals, mining them results in tailings that have Arsenic, Lead and other heav metals in various amounts. and the health risks to nearby communities and industry workers are all at least roughly analogous to those observed in industries such as Lead Acid battery manufacture, but the actual amounts of risk may differ by a couple of orders of magnetude, and it's not known yet how many of them can be mitigated.
So yes, melting Aluminum uses 'nasty' chemicals and electricity. Making Photovoltaics as a whole can't even be compared, but if we look at the designs that incorporate heavy metals we have some strong reasons to suspect that there's "nasty" and "Nasty!", (and just maybe "NAAASSSSTY!!!!").
"In May 1940, Henry Ford stated: "If it became necessary, the Ford Motor Company could, with the counsel of men like [Charles] Lindbergh and [Eddie] Rickenbacker, under our own supervision and without meddling by government agencies, swing into the production of a thousand airplanes of standard design a day."
It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that inspired Ford to begin a tremendous, all-out manufacturing effort. To the west of Dearborn, the giant Willow Run plant was built to produce B-24 Liberator bombers on an assembly line that was a mile long. The first bomber rolled off the line in May 1942, beginning the effective production of several hundred aircraft a month. Bombers were produced at the rate of one plane per hour, thereby confounding Ford's critics, who had called the plant undertaking "Willit Run." By the end of the war, Ford had built 86,865 complete aircraft, plus 57,851 airplane engines, thousands of engine superchargers and generators, and 4,291 military gliders."
You see Ford had some redeeming qualities that are organizationally absent in NASA:
- he was a pragmatist - he could work on a budget and stay in it - he could work on a schedule and stay in it - he set obtainable and worthwhile goals - he achieved the goals he set out to obtain
(In fact, either his first claim was a bit of a rhetorical exaggeration, or he had the shortcoming of setting his goals a little high and not always achieving them. 86,000 planes in a little over 3 years is not a thousand a day, it's just enough to damn well win a major war.).
Hey NASA - Last I looked Dick Rutan doesn't have a single one of the reputed major shortcomings of either Henry Ford or Howard Hughes, and seems to have several of their best features.
The US military has a set of special pay grades, ranging from Brigader General to full General (or Admirals in naval rank terms), for newly comissioned officers with 0 to less than 2 total years in service. Those are there in case of a general war, to offer men like Henry Ford's ablest assistants and ask them to accept if it's useful in expediting production.
Dick Rutan may not be the productive equal of Ford or Hughes, but I'm willing to bet he's at least up to the level of their production managers. You don't start someone like that at the bottom and make him work up through 20 layers of supervision. If you're confident enough, you hand him your most screwed up department, and give him enough authority to get the results you want. If you think he might not be up to the worst, you plug him in somewhere that's not so screwed up for a year to season him and hope like hell he matures enough to handle it, because you don't have any better alternatives. You start him off as the equivalent of a General, in other words.
If NASA won't take this approach, they must still think they have a better alternative. I'm not hearing it.
Right in one!
There was a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the late 1970's, just a year or so after the major copyright law revision that both extended the period again and did away with registration requirements. In essence, one point made by the court and spelled out in detail in the decision was that ALL U.S. copyright law is Federal. State laws further regulating copyright now have absolutely no force, even though in some places they have not yet been taken out of the state codes.
In addition, the Berne treaty on copyright has several clauses the U.S. either initially proposed or strongly supported in negotiations, all to the effect of changing clauses that read "Nations and their sovereign states" so that international copyright matters were resolved between "sovereign nations" only, so in the US, we apparently don't recognize the right of other nation's states to independently persue copyright violation claims either. (I don't know what other nations recognize any of their states as having sovereign rights, offhand, perhaps Mexico, but the Berne clauses seem to imply somewhere does or did).
Granted, whether it should be this way or not is at least debatable, and I'd actually be interested in seeing arguements why the individual states should be able to legislate copyright related areas, but federal only is very definitely the way it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Even granting it may be more logical to infer swallowed = died than swallowed = excreted intact from the angle's boxlike anus, onto a pile of matresses off camera (which is pretty much what happened in the real world), where did I say it was voluntary?
Actually, it does. The producers deliberately built a lifesize model of that part of R'lyeh that included the angle that looked obtuse but was actually acute, or whatever, and had it swallow one of the actors.
Eastern Tennessse. Just had an Earthquake last week (3.6 - trivial damage). We don't get big ones. If the whole New Madrid fault let loose with another 10.0 that people would feel in CA, it would dampened at the edge of the mid state plateau into a mere picture straightener.
Tornados? A slight chance of them whenever a storm as big as Katrina makes it this far from the gulf (All little ole F-2s, again usually trivial damage. There have been a few dangerous ones, but it's not like those F4's and 5's in Oklahoma or Kansas, and the survivability closely approaches 100% if you don't live in a trailer park).
Wildfires? Maybe, but its been so wet the last 8 years something's gonna have to change back big time first. Never in our history have we had one like those town eating things they get in Colorado, Nevada, and California.
Flooding? Maybe downstream from TVA projects, but all the dams around here are real solid reinforced concrete construction, none of that earthen dam B.S., and there's lots of hills and ridges breaking up the floodable areas.
Blizzards? yes, but we call it that if there's 8" of snow and a 15 MPH wind. In two days, it will be 44 F and all melted again, and if it's early march, the irises will be comeing up.
For the rest, what's a Nor-Easter? Might see some 90 F days in mid-summer, but seldom a 100 F, and it sure won't last for days (and even at night like it does some places). Oh, and Tsunamis are quite predictable here, in fact I'll predict that a 1 mile diameter asteroid impacting the mid Atlantic at 21 Km/sec will not splash one over the mountains that rise to my east.
I was starting to think I was the only person still running the full Mozilla suite instead of Firefox
(Proud 1.8.1b tester still wondering where the hell do my bug reports go?). Then I checked the site yesterday, and saw a Mozllla 1.7.11 release was out, dated 1st of August. For all the mammalian Firefox fans, there's still some life in the parent reptile.
OTO, I'll gladly try Opera. Heck, I still keep a working install of the off-by-one browser,
http://www.offbyone.com/
as it beats going back to IE in an emergency. Opera pioneered several browser features, and will probably remain an innovator for at least a few more development cycles.
Hurricanes grow when over waters at 94 F or above, and shrink when passing through waters at 93 F or below. The larger the temperature variance around that line, the faster they gain or lose size. (And you can pick diameter, wind speed, or total mass of suspended water as a measure of size, with the realtionship holding for any of those.). That particular relationship is a well documented fact, based on continueous satelite observation of the ocean temperatures and time lapse observations of hurricanes during their whole existence over water.
There is an alternate theory that some scientists who disagree with theories of global warming and a link to hurricanes have suggested. This theory involves a 40 year hurricane cycle. Given your own claim that we have only 70 years data, there is no possible way to prove a 40 year period exists either - The possible +/- variation is much larger than the base number until we have observed several full cycles. This means that the only well defined competing theory we've got at this time is definitely not going to make a reliable prediction that would let us confirm it, except provisionally and in the most tentative ways, for a good 50 years or so. Even a simple, very nebulous prediction with no exact quantities specified, i.e. that we should see a relatively significant downturn sooner or later won't be testable for at least 10 years. No testability = no science (at least yet).
At this point, several of the global warming theorists have predicted that there would be a sharp isocline above which hurricanes would grow, and that warm cells in the tropical oceans would link up to where the total numbers would decrease as the total area of those cells increases, again with the break point where individual growth starts decreasing total cell numbers being just above that same 94 degree F isocline temperature.
They further predicted that these warm water cells would tend to form with long axi parellel to the equator, rather than getting larger equally along both axi or growing more vertically, and that the cells would tend to more eccentricity with increasing size, not less or the same. Both of these predictions apply to individual storms and not to seasons, and are borne out so far by observation of over 80 such storms of various sizes, without significant exceptions to these patterns.
Aside from just predicting an increased number of tropical storms (not just from over all historical 'guess'timates, but as measured from the 30 or so years when we have had enough space born observations to have a 100% accurate count of even storms too small to count as hurricanes), the theory predicts a higher percentage of those tropical storms will reach wind speeds sufficient to count as hurricanes. Note that the typical trend for a pseudo-scientific or flawed theoretical explanation is to assume several variables will vary roughly linearly with the same change in base conditions, not to take the added risk of predicting which ones will vary as a multiple or power function of which other ones.
It also predicts the spawning of storms after the end of the normal season (a date originally set to include a safety margin based on that era's observations). It predicts changes in other phenomina such as tornados and forest fire spawning conditions (some of which include meteorology and climateology for which we have thousands of years data (i.e. glacial core samples, ice cap and permafrost cores, and deep sea sedement samples).
The best competing theory says, "our theory predicts that you might see short term just what their theory definitely predicts, or you might see something different - either way, you'll see we were right in just 50 more years or so.". No one supporting the "hurricanes just run to cycles" theory is willing to go out on a limb and claim that tornado fluctuations in the American Midwest, for example, also fit that cycle (or
It's probably still possible for someone to make the basic idea of memes into a definition with rigor, if they have a good reputation in a science such as linguistics or even whatever they are calling cybernetics this year. That person would have to be a coalition builder, who could get a sizable number of scientists to endorse the same formal definition.
Blackmore seems to consistently remember a meme is a type of information that supposedly has some properties in common with biological life (like replication) in her work, and that is a good start, but what Dawkins initially pointed out was some examples of where that analogy breaks down. Ultimately, I think Blackmore would have to also define what properties of life-like things Memes _didn't_ have, AND eventually the theory would have to grow to explain how what memes include instead still works to produce a selection-like effect. If she manages to fully address the copying fidelity issue, or define what, in memes, corresponds to chromosomes, proteins or generations, I'll believe she can tackle the unlimited blending objection (which I regard as the most serious issue when it comes to Dawkins original list). I haven't read anything larger than summaries and articles from her yet, maybe she's actually working on this. She does have a good presence on the web, both by her site and by a lot of other links.
Bester had been in telepathic contact with quite a few people as they died and seen across the barrier between life and death. This was depicted in the series as a very risky thing to do, something that involved giving up a little of your own soul each time. Doing it without damned good reason was supposed to be 'evil' in a "I think I'll open that weird old book and pronounce a few Elder God's names just to see what happens" sense, like doing anything with enormous consequences just for a moment's kick and no thought of what else will follow. In a way, he knowingly embraced a fundamental evil, because he couldn't possibly have been too stupid to understand the consequences to his own soul and to the others he was watching die.
That's what led to him becoming willing to kill or enslave mundanes even when there were other options that might have even worked better. He became more and more willing to break a few eggs before checking to see if he really needed to make yet another omelet.
Most of soldiers 'legal' paperwork is just graded confidential. Records with information such as who a soldier names as his or her next of kin, or how many dependants they claim with the IRS certainly aren't normally classified secret. However, the information that a whole army reserve unit has just gone through a whole bunch of personnel record upgrades and gotten say 98% compliance from the individual soldiers makes a pretty good indicator that the unit is being made more quickly deployable, and likely is becoming one of the first units to be sent to a potential new hot spot. Units that are moving up in deployability or changing mission often show signs such as increased physical fitness emphasis, updated vaccinations, additional training time for new equipment, and additional training for forign languages, or selectively recruiting and transferring personnel that may be useful for a certain area.
As an example old enough to have lost its nastier uses to anyone today, My first MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was in Telephone Central Office Repair (29N - That's become folded into other switching systems these days). The specialty had some ASIs (Additional Skill Identifiers) - those are two to four week additional courses only some soldiers stayed for- in this case ones specifically on various types of commercial, civilian-style telephone switching systems, from old rotary dial pulse types to DTMF). Units that were going to foreign countries with U.S. style phone systems, on rebuilding missions and such, often want people with an ASI appropriate to the types of phones used locally. So, at one point in the 90's any unit that asked for, say, 29N-B2's had probably just been told they were pulled off German or Korean deployment and going to Bosnia (or, at another point, Haiti).
Bulk data minimg of "official use only" or confidential records can easily assemble secret level information, and I'd claim it's possible for skilled espionage to get enough of the big picture to take a good guess at even Top Secret matters.
If you actually get Tentaclix up and running, and will swear it's as good as, say, the current Kubuntu, I'll give it a try.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I took some time to actually research this, and here's my take:
Derivitive works involve a copyrighted (either still under copyright OR now public domain but formerly copyrighted) work being the source for another work that can also be awarded a copyright (These days that "can also be" is automaticly converted to an "is", but if that part of the law was stricken, say by a supreme court challenge, the derivitive definition wouldn't be affected.).
There is no crossing over from a patent or a trademark to a copyright, and you can't derive a work from them. In addition, you can't 'derive' a patent from another patent or a trademark from a trademark. For example, if a company draws a new, updated version of its logo, it can defend both the new version and the old one under trademark law, but the court doesn't care in a case involving the new design if the owner has allowed the old version 's trademark to lapse or not, and someone accused of infringing on the new trademark can't claim it was a derivitive work as part of their defense (or they can claim it, but it simply isn't relevant to anything in the eyes of the court).
This is one reason I oppose the whole idea of "intellectual property" as a blanket category. Many of the people who support it seem to want a nebulous, amorphous legal thing that lets them sue over types of "violations" that only apply to one type or subtype like they applied to all types. They want trademarks that don't have to be defended, patents that don't expire, trade secrets incorporated into patent diagrams, and perpetual copyrights on single words.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, and if you have a real legal concern, particularly re. copyright or trademark, you need to consult a liscenced professional for your specific jurisdiction and not take advice from random slashdotters.
Every single substance western civilization classes as a mind altering drug is chemically similar to a natural brain chemical, but is specifically not identical.
Heroin and all the other opiates get handled the same way in the brain as the natural endorphins. At some point in their breakdown process, they have a methyl group or other such feature sticking out that's different, the body slows down in handling it, or doesn't naturally produce nearly enough of some enzyme, and all sorts of related brain (and sometimes the rest of the body's) chemistry levels fluctuate wildly, producing both the enjoyable and unpleasant side effects. Levels of the natural brain chemical associated always display a damped sine wave curve as measured over the next few hours to several days.
LSD, Mescaline, Peyote etc, all pass through the system that regulates Serotonin, and all jam up the works somewhere in the process. The specific sticking points and the necessary solutions to keep these drugs from gumming up the works permanently on the part of the body are different, but the typical effects on brain chemestry are all at least roughly similar for that class of drugs. Note that the other, general body effects are all also at least roughly similar, and again a damped sine wave curve is produced.
All the amphetamines, E, and PCP have some effects on the adrenaline pathway for at least part of their breakdown. Again, all have at least roughly similar psychotropic and long term health effects, although Ecstasy and to a lesser extent PCP also spend some of their time affecting enzymes associated with the Serotonin pathway and have some effects in common with the classic 'halucinogens'. the damped sine wave curve can be observed for both Serotonin levels and for adrenal activity in the case of some of these drugs.
Alcohol is a brain affecting chemical. It fits the same pattern. The body produces an enzyme called Alcohol Reductase, because small amounts of alcohol are naturally produced from food in the digestive process. People who consume more alcohol than they can easily metabolize become drunk until the excess can be eliminated.
It's because of the cyclic over and under production of natural brain chemicals effect that people whose bodies adapt easily and swiftly to produce much greater quantities of reductase don't escape the long term health effects of excess consumption. Instead, if they become steady drinkers, they rapidly become the classic model alchoholics, and have huge long term risks of organic damage to the brain and general body functions even as their adaptability in reductase production may temporarily protect some other organs. The damped sine wave pattern is seen in several brain chemistry areas, including the blood sugars resulting from breakdown, the adrenaline pathways, and the sleep regulating chemicals.
Sugar (glucose) is a brain affecting chemical found in the bloodstream. Processed sugar (Dextrose) from sources such as cane syrup is a compound not found in nature in nearly such large amounts, and its metabolism requires first breaking the chemical bond that makes dextrose a double sized sugar. This is a bond that the body does not appear designed to deal with in nearly such quantities (as the average amount consumed per serving in western society these days). The levels of blood sugars actually found in the blood after consumption fluctuate in a manner and with amplitudes similar to endorphin, adrenaline or serotonin levels in drug use and abuse cases, and very distinctively different from the sort of fluctuations seen for most foods. Given that, the conclusion is that processed sugar is an abusable drug. Bulk observation of actual human subjects shows with what frequency potential for abuse turns or doesn't turn into an actual problem.
When Richard Dawkins coined the word "Meme", he also wrote that there were several major problems with the concept that would have to be overcome for it to mean anything useful, and that he was only writing about the idea of Memes in the hope that eventually someone would find solutions for those objections amd holes in the theory that he had already concieved, and any more that might come up.
All that's in "The Selfish Gene" - see for example Page 209 of the Oxford paperback edition, where Dawkins starts off by saying "Here I am on shaky ground...", and later on page 211 where he says "There is a problem here concerning the nature of competition...".
Since that time, the idea of memes has become widely accepted, all without anyone answering even a single one of Dawkins' own objections. Meme theory has lost any potential rigor or scientific value and become nothing more than a tool to avoid rational debate by disguising attacks against the person rather than the idea. Of course the definition's impenetrable.
But when you ride a freaking spaceship into honest-to-God SPACE, none of you ever have to pay taxes again after you blow up the asteroid, so it's worth it, right?
I think people can learn to tell the difference.
Certainly they can learn, but if you watch most people read the DSM-4 (for example) for the first time, they haven't learned how to apply the standards proportionately yet. I let my daughter borrow the III-R when she was about 14, and she kept saying "I've got some of these symptoms, should I be worried?". I'd ask her "Have you been feeling that way consistently for 6 months?", and the answer would be something like "No, just since reading the last paragraph.". Adults usually do a little better, but surprisingly not all that well without training.
Now as you would say "Only a couple qualify" you are likely understanding how serious the person's problems have to be.
Several of the 'predictions' definitely don't have testability, at least without a more accurate metric.
Societies will all have warriors, mamagers, & politicians? Which class does President/General Eisenhower fit in?
(and in either case, how was it possible for him to originate the famous remark about the military/industrial complex? - Surely if these claasses are quantifiable without general overlap, and he fit very well into two classes (as measured by reaching the top levels of both), it would be very hard for him of all people to see the potential problems of those groups combined?).
Was Eisenhower about as far from being a sociopath or psychopath as possible for a successful warrior/politician? (Maybe - It's at least a concevable claim, but for scientific testability, we'd probably need records from an alternative America where Patton became president). Is there any predictive value to be derived from both Napoleon and Hitler having been members of both the warrior and politician sets? Or in sociobiology, is Hitler's having recieved a concussion in WW1 more relevant to his subsequent behavior than whether he was in the warrior group at the time or not?
A testable prediction derived from such claims would be much more complex than these examples - maybe an equation expressing something about relative mobility between the manager, warrior, and politician sets as a function of real world stressors affecting the society, and with adjustment factors for how the society's political system worked, and for how much social mobility there was in general.
After all, if the society has a loose caste system, wars are infrequent and the average war lasts only three years, and that same society has eight year terms of office, there's going to be far fewer transitions of psychopaths across the group boundaries than if the reverses are true, just like there's going to be far fewer transitions of non-psycopaths. (It's easier to get elected on your war hero record if the war was over just a few months ago than if it ended five years ago and everyone has put it behind them - that's my own speculative prediction, as reasonable as several of these predictions, and just as much not a scientific theory).
While several of them are interesting, and a couple quite intreguing, before most of these predictions could be called elements of scientific theories, many such smaller, more specific predictions would need to be tested, and it would take getting some very reliable results before these would be viewed as possible theories, let alone being strong enough to support the arch-theory they all hopefully contribute to. I won't go into everything that would have to be proved on the Biology/Genetics side if that's to be incorporated into such a theory, but I'd say there are some links needed there as well.
Now, do they have reasonable cause to get his ISP records, I dunno, forbidden fruit & all
Did you mean "fruit of the poisonous tree"?
The Tesla quote to match this is "If Edison had thought more, he wouldn't have sweated so much!"
While you're quite right that there is a particular risk of VF at frequencies similar to some of the neurosystem's natural heart control signal frequencies, there's a more important consideration:1 3/1569
AC at 50-60 Hz and 110 to 240 V still allows nerve impulses to transmit during the flat parts of the cycle so a person grabbing a line doesn't have their muscles lock, and can swiftly let go. DC in typical transmission ranges can override muscle control. Typically, the person is either somewhat protected, by being thrown forcibly away from the voltage source by their own muscle contractions, or becomes locked to the current source by their own grip and is electrocuted by sustained exposure. Chances are relatively close to 50/50 for either. Even being thrown by the current is not necessarily non-lethal, as muscle contraction in such cases has been known to break bones or damage internal organs, but being locked on for such time as it takes for someone else to cut power or breakers to engage is very frequently lethal.
Incidentally 50-60 Hz isn't the right frequency to cause ventricular fibrilation, it's just one of them. Low number multiples of the patient's pulse rate (typically the stress accelerated rate, since grabbing a live wire tends to count as an adrenaline booster) will produce much the same effect if they happen to be close to exact whole number multiples. (That's a range from about 8 to 40 Hz., with several peak risk points in it that vary by person)
If this paper is correct in its suggestion about overlapping pressure waves being the underlieing mechanism, and if what applies to pigs applies equally to humans, higher frequencies should also be just as dangerous at roughly similar total power imputs, probably (just my guess) for at least to 200 Hz. or so before the extrapolated relationship is likely to break down.
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/102/
On Earth, we have complex eyes (some of us), and we don't have "complete" radiation resistance (although some bacteria have a lot more than us higher organisms). I don't know of any other place offhand where it's different (maybe you do). You're arguement seems to sum up to a claim that the state of affairs in the only sample we can actually study is wildly anomalous, and if we could only see what's going on on a billion other planetary ecologies, we'd realize what a fluke Earth is. Maybe, but you're probably going to have to invent a stardrive to find any real proof of your intuition.
Several of your assumptions are just plain wrong (not trying to be offensive here, but it's hard to put it any more politely). For example vertebrate eyes obviously didn't develop by a "linear progression" of mutations at all, or they would be built in the same way as complex invertebrate eyes such as the octopi's. On Earth, nature (or whatever) has independently developed complex eyes along no less than 5 paths, which means there were at least that many possible routes to success, and probably some more that didn't get used.
Second, what's so hard about imagining a scenario? Even a very lousy eye is some use. An eye that only works in very bright light, or that only registers movement is still more useful than nothing. A frog dodges swooping birds with an eye that only registers a big gray blur at best, and even a frog with worse than usual eyes still has some chance of dodging. A poor quality eye may not spot an insect prey three feet away, but sometimes the possesser of that eye gets lucky and gets to within two feet range, where its eyes help, at least more than its competitor's eyes with only one foot range help that competitor.
As the proud posessor of a pair of corrective lenses to drag 20/200 nearsightedness up to 20/25, I can assure you there are still natural selective pressures operating on this ecology, and I'm just relieved I'm able to dodge some of them personally.
Third, why do we need to imagine the development doesn't dead end anywhere? Aren't there thousands of mammal types that dead-ended on developing stereo vision to keep their eyes on the sides of their heads? More that don't have color vision? Bees have very complex compound eyes - why don't all insects have thousands of eye-cells, and why are there some with only 7 cells/eye or so. Why do Horseshoe crabs have 9 eyes, counting the spots on the ventral surface near the tail that are very rudimentary - they have the genes for good compound eyes, so why build some of the simpler versions too?
If developing resistance to Cosmic Rays (in the amounts in question) is relatively as easy as developing complex eyes from photosensitve spots, then organisms might adapt to be resistant. That's 'might' as in even then there are no guarantees an ecology can adapt as fast as the radiation levels may be increasing, and life may just go belly up instead.
In the same way, if adapting is only as hard as adapting to a new germ or an organic toxin, we humans might be able to shortcult natural selection and make a vaccine against hard radiation.
A number of radiation medicine type experts have told me making something like a vaccine against hard radiation is precisely as difficult as making a vaccine against 50 caliber machine gun rounds.
Organisms just don't adapt to some things. Cheetahs sprint at 70 MPH, but nothing organic flies at Mach 5. Meteors have been falling on Earthly organisms, and volcanos erupting on them, for 3 billion years or so, but we still don't see lifeforms drinking molten lava or surviving in primary impact zones.
Drawbacks? Here's some, although they are neither (IMHO) all that serious, and I like this technology as a whole, and would say these won't stop it in the long run.
1. Heat - Focused mirrors in large banks are extremely hot at the focal points. When you're talking 500 Mw. output, your talking about lots of points inside that 4700 acre area where temperatures must be enormous (3,000 degrees F or so if the focus is at all tight).
Basically, anything that involves a huge energy differential has some potential for that energy to go in directions we don't want. The potential may be lower for some technologies than others, and this may well be one of the good ones, but by the very definition of energy (the ability to do work), there is no energy technology that can't do some work we don't want, whether it's a dam breaking and all that water working hard to wash away a town downstream, or mirrors getting focused on the wrong points, and the wrong things getting hot (like employees on site, or the supports and braces for other mirrors).
2. Not only can you not produce power at night, but cloudy days reduce your efficiency. Power draw on the grid is (usually) only less at night in the summer, when a lot of electricity is going to air conditioning. In winter, power draw is more for heating and people heat most on cold nights. Days are also shorter, plus sunlight is passing at shallower angles through the air and so has less energy per square foot, so even if this system is very, very efficient at the best of times, it becomes just half (or so) of a two part solution. At best, it's likely somewhat more than half, and maybe cuts fuel oil and coal use by a very nice 60-70%, but it simply can't do away with them entirely.
Now for the bad news - A power company that only needs 30% of the fuel oil it did won't see a full 70% savings - the way their contracts work, they will probably only see about a 50% savings on oil costs, so that financial 'damping' effect slows adoption of technologies like this. They have to prove themselves to conservative investors, and even then they have to offer big improvements and not just small ones, or they take 20 years or more to catch on.
This is a catch 22. If the technology caught on really fast, then basic macroeconomics holds fuel oil prices wouldn't continue to rise, because demand would decline. But since the technology simply can't catch on all that fast, places that haven't adopted it yet will continue to drive demand higher, the early adopters will get smaller discounts because they are buying only seasonally or in less bulk, and the rate of adoption will be slowed further.
Several sources of Aluminum are demonstrated and proven 'environmentally friendly' technologies (as much as technologies ever are). Take for example Alcoa's TN. plant, one of the largest single sources of refined Aluminum in the entire world (Historically, there have been entire decades when this was THE largest single source). Electric power for this facility comes entirely from four hydroelectric powerplants - Chilhowee, Calderwood, Cheoah and Santeetlah. Several other Aluminum operations, including Alcoa's own plants in Texas, have had more negative environmental impacts, and a few plants in the former Soviet Union have an abysmal record, but it's worth noting these are all much smaller operations.
The North American Aluminum industry currently uses about one-third recycled material in its products, with the goal of exceeding 50% by 2020 AD.
This goal may prove impossible to reach however, as the percentage of all aluminum ever produced that is bound up in long term/permanent objects such as buildings and industrial machinery is steadily increasing.
Aluminum is produced from Bauxite ore. The most significant environmental byproduct is caustic soda, which has been implicated in the amounts produced in contamination of rural water supplies, with (in humans) increased levels of Hypertension, 2 to 5 times that observed before mining came to the area (Given other lifestyle changes common at the time, this may not actually be primarily, let alone wholely, the result of increased sodium uptake from the local water supply).
In addition, the operations produce large amounts of typical red clay mud, which, while not particularly significant chemically, is produced in large quantities, roughly one ton of mud per ton of seperated ore. Runoff of this in rainy weather has a significant negative impact on streams and rivers, but is hard to isolate from other human adjustable sources of red clay runoff, such as non-contour plowing.
There is no way to rationally analyze "photovoltaic" process impact - common compounds that form a major portion of different cell designs include amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium selenide. Toxicity for these three compounds alone ranges from almost trivial to very high on the hazard list, and trying to discuss them as a group would be like discussing the risks of wild animal attacks, considering only box turtles, poodles gone dingo, and Bengal tigers, and taking an unweighted average for attacks without considering actual lethality. Figure in the differing risks of the mining byproduces for these three types as well, and talking about the risks of the industy as a collective is literally meaningless until we know which technologys will be used in what proportions.
Cadmium, Tellurium, and Indium are all heavy metals, mining them results in tailings that have Arsenic, Lead and other heav metals in various amounts. and the health risks to nearby communities and industry workers are all at least roughly analogous to those observed in industries such as Lead Acid battery manufacture, but the actual amounts of risk may differ by a couple of orders of magnetude, and it's not known yet how many of them can be mitigated.
So yes, melting Aluminum uses 'nasty' chemicals and electricity. Making Photovoltaics as a whole can't even be compared, but if we look at the designs that incorporate heavy metals we have some strong reasons to suspect that there's "nasty" and "Nasty!", (and just maybe "NAAASSSSTY!!!!").
Whoops, My bad!
"In May 1940, Henry Ford stated: "If it became necessary, the Ford Motor Company could, with the counsel of men like [Charles] Lindbergh and [Eddie] Rickenbacker, under our own supervision and without meddling by government agencies, swing into the production of a thousand airplanes of standard design a day."
e x1.html
It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that inspired Ford to begin a tremendous, all-out manufacturing effort. To the west of Dearborn, the giant Willow Run plant was built to produce B-24 Liberator bombers on an assembly line that was a mile long. The first bomber rolled off the line in May 1942, beginning the effective production of several hundred aircraft a month. Bombers were produced at the rate of one plane per hour, thereby confounding Ford's critics, who had called the plant undertaking "Willit Run." By the end of the war, Ford had built 86,865 complete aircraft, plus 57,851 airplane engines, thousands of engine superchargers and generators, and 4,291 military gliders."
We'll stop there, without counting the Tanks, APCs, and Jeeps. Boldface highlighting is by my choice. Here's a link to the rest of the story.
http://www.thehistorynet.com/wwii/blhenryford/ind
You see Ford had some redeeming qualities that are organizationally absent in NASA:
- he was a pragmatist
- he could work on a budget and stay in it
- he could work on a schedule and stay in it
- he set obtainable and worthwhile goals
- he achieved the goals he set out to obtain
(In fact, either his first claim was a bit of a rhetorical exaggeration, or he had the shortcoming of setting his goals a little high and not always achieving them. 86,000 planes in a little over 3 years is not a thousand a day, it's just enough to damn well win a major war.).
Hey NASA - Last I looked Dick Rutan doesn't have a single one of the reputed major shortcomings of either Henry Ford or Howard Hughes, and seems to have several of their best features.
The US military has a set of special pay grades, ranging from Brigader General to full General (or Admirals in naval rank terms), for newly comissioned officers with 0 to less than 2 total years in service. Those are there in case of a general war, to offer men like Henry Ford's ablest assistants and ask them to accept if it's useful in expediting production.
Dick Rutan may not be the productive equal of Ford or Hughes, but I'm willing to bet he's at least up to the level of their production managers. You don't start someone like that at the bottom and make him work up through 20 layers of supervision. If you're confident enough, you hand him your most screwed up department, and give him enough authority to get the results you want. If you think he might not be up to the worst, you plug him in somewhere that's not so screwed up for a year to season him and hope like hell he matures enough to handle it, because you don't have any better alternatives. You start him off as the equivalent of a General, in other words.
If NASA won't take this approach, they must still think they have a better alternative. I'm not hearing it.
Right in one!
There was a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the late 1970's, just a year or so after the major copyright law revision that both extended the period again and did away with registration requirements. In essence, one point made by the court and spelled out in detail in the decision was that ALL U.S. copyright law is Federal. State laws further regulating copyright now have absolutely no force, even though in some places they have not yet been taken out of the state codes.
In addition, the Berne treaty on copyright has several clauses the U.S. either initially proposed or strongly supported in negotiations, all to the effect of changing clauses that read "Nations and their sovereign states" so that international copyright matters were resolved between "sovereign nations" only, so in the US, we apparently don't recognize the right of other nation's states to independently persue copyright violation claims either. (I don't know what other nations recognize any of their states as having sovereign rights, offhand, perhaps Mexico, but the Berne clauses seem to imply somewhere does or did).
Granted, whether it should be this way or not is at least debatable, and I'd actually be interested in seeing arguements why the individual states should be able to legislate copyright related areas, but federal only is very definitely the way it is.