"for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.'"
The people working on ITER clearly don't agree.
Well, probably not. But they're drawing paychecks from the project, so even beyond the obvious selection bias they have a vested interest in believing it will end up working. Or at least professing such a belief. But the last time I visited the ITER site it had the earliest possible commercial fusion reactor going live around the year 2050, with the cost/KWH of that plant many multiples of competing technologies. Absent a string of unlikely breakthroughs it's pretty difficult to imagine a scenario in which commercially-viable magnetic-confinement fusion exists for decades after that.
Let me stress that: If everything goes right ITER (and follow-on projects) will develop an uneconomical way to generate power more than forty years in the future.
Yeah, that's what I'm wondering as well. There are all sorts of directions we can go when Uranium is hard to get, but it'll take a few years to iron out all the kinks. I sure hope we don't wait until the last flake of yellowcake is gone before we start developing an alternative.
Plus the whole assembly will be dragged along by the part connected to Earth so it's not going straight out to geostationary. I've heard something like 60k miles.
lol no. The whole point of putting the top anchor into geostationary orbit is so it hangs directly overhead without putting stress on the cable. It might be a tiny bit higher to balance out the mass of the cable, but we're just talking a few kilometers here.
A space elevator, even if the cable could be made, has a ridiculous design flaw. Literally, a single failure anywhere in the cable, and there goes billions and billions worth of hardware. It is always teetering on the verge of catastrophic failure. (imagine what will happen to the station at the top of the cable)
Once you have one cable up adding more is comparatively easy. The loss of a single cable wouldn't be catastrophic.
I know this has been modded "funny", but it's absolutely true. My 70 year old parents went out and bought a Wii because they had so much fun playing it at a family gathering.
Calling a game "mature" because it's loaded with violence is just stupid. The main audience for that kind of game is adolescent boys not, in general, considered the most mature segment of society.
I think the answer is cost. Near where I live a company makes table salt. They have acres and acres of these shallow ponds, and when the tide comes in they open the valves, filling up the ponds. Then they close the valves and wait for a few days for it all to dry into this muddy slush that gets scooped up by heavy machinery and, I hope, purified.
Aside from the land itself the entire operation is so cheap it's almost free. Sure, you could somehow trap that water vapor and cool it enough to change it back to a liquid, but the increase in cost would be enormous on a percentage basis.
Along the same lines, I'd like to hear the author's explanation of why employees in finance continue to get paid more and more, even as more talent floods into that profession.
This is OBE. There are a lot of finance guy looking for a job. Graduates in investment banking today have almost no hope of employment unless they graduated from the very top universities. Having said that, let me say the very top guys in finance are probably worth the money to their employers. It's far more competitive than science - how good you are in an absolute sense is irrelevant. What matters is how good you are in relation to everyone else, and an almost-imperceptible difference in competence can mean the difference between making or losing a billion dollars. It's not much different than prize fighters - all the guys at the top are pretty close in raw ability, but the one who's actually the best pulls down multiples of the #2 guy's earnings.
For scientists an almost imperceptible difference in competence is, well, almost imperceptible. You can't demand a huge salary as a new physics grad because there are hundreds more who could probably do the job as well as you. How many Einsteins are out there, really? One every couple hundred years?
NASA tested a design that's already a white elephant before it's even done. We're trying to replace a system that's useless for anything practical because it costs too much, and NASA's great idea is to take all the expensive parts and use them for the next generation. Color me very unimpressed.
Other people are guessing nuclear thermal, but you still won't get enough thrust out of that kind of engine to get into orbit. At least, not with a solid core design. I'm thinking what they're really designing is something like VASIMR with a nuclear reactor for the power plant. That would be cutting-edge engineering, certainly, but not necessarily cutting-edge science.
Of course, what I'd really like to see is a gas core nuclear thermal engine. That would give you enough thrust:mass to get you to mars and back in a month or so from the earth's surface. As smart as the Ruskies are, though, I don't think they're gonna develop something like that with only $500m.
It goes far beyond the green light. I know a guy who's actually sold some scripts to Hollywood studios. The way it works is you start off with a great script (they have a lot to choose from). Then it goes through, literally, five or six rewrites by other writers who've been hired to add profitable elements. No love story? We need that to bring in the high school girls - we'll just shoe-horn one it. Are there enough character elements (aliens, robots, cars, etc) we can use to make cheaply manufactured merchandise? No? Well, we'll change the sidekick from a human to a robot with a simple enough form we can make Happy Meal toys for under $0.50. Are there any elements that might offend anyone in the world (international distribution is key)? We'll just cut those out, or we'll localize them in certain scenes so we can recut for different markets - sex for the Europeans, violence for the Americans. The Japanese get everything.
It's a production line. They're producing a product that's close enough to everything else that's successful they stand a really good chance of making money. The problem is if all the studios are working from the same play book the movies are so similar they won't do very well. And that's exactly what has happened - the production line works so well the market is swamped with product that's only different in the most superficial ways.
Yeah, that was my first thought. The thing had better correct for my aging eyes, or it'll look like a ten centimeter box of nothing hanging in the air. I can do that with an old flashbulb.
On the other hand, it might be just about right for an aiming reticle. Always wanted a skull gun.
My read is Oracle is using the threat of job losses to hold the EU's feet to the fire. No matter what kind of up-front work they've done it's a long, drawn out process. By threatening to cut jobs, especially jobs in Europe, Oracle hopes to apply political pressure on the regulators. Politicians don't like to be in a position where they might get blamed for job losses.
Skilling was just an example. I would argue that most of his criminality was a result of trying to cover up holes in the balance sheet they thought could be plugged with profits in the future. If you want to talk about outright fraud look at Madof's 150 year sentence. There have been a few multi-hundred-year sentences for guys in a position of trust who actually ran off with other peoples' money.
On the three strikes law, yeah, I agree it's pretty stupid. It seems like you ought to do no more than a few months for shoplifting no matter how many priors you have. But that's California for you - in the '70s and '80s we had really light punishments. Dan White got 7 1/2 years for killing two people, giving rise to the famous "twinkie defense". There were guys with 20 or 30 serious convictions that managed to convince parole boards this time they'd finally turn it around.
The easiest issue for a politician to make hay on is "tough on crime". There's a pretty large percentage of voters who will vote for the "tough on crime" guy without really thinking it through. So every campaign we end up with a game of "I'm tougher than he is".
"My opponent is soft on crime."
"No I'm not, I'm tougher than him. Look, I support life sentences for child molesters."
"Oh, that's nothing, I support the death penalty for child molesters. And rapists, and, uh, people who tear the tags off mattresses."
A few election cycles of "I'm tougher than he is" and you've got a guy in jail for the rest of his life for shoplifting. Part of the problem is you still read stories about guys who did something horrible, got a few years in jail, got out on parole, and then chopped up somebody's little girl. But what makes the papers isn't necessarily what drives good policy, and in any case these guys were originally sentenced when the law was much more forgiving. So the voters thing the law is still forgiving and keep voting for the toughest of the tough guys. I would argue the same kind of dynamic has been occurring for white collar crimes at the national level - the perception hasn't caught up with the reality yet.
Well, even young guys who get sentenced to 150 years sometimes get out in their lifetime.
Not for federal crimes they don't. There's no parole in the federal system for crimes committed since November of 1987 - you do every minute of your sentence unless you can get it reversed somehow or you can get a pardon.
This is exactly what I'm talking about - people remember an article they read twenty years ago about some heinous felon getting early release. Lots of voters read that same article and started baying for blood. Politicians responded. You still think a guy can get 150 years in the federal pen and still get out before he's dead, but it doesn't work that way.
Well, okay. But I wasn't arguing you'd get exactly the equivalent time as burglary. The original poster was trying to say these guys would get less than somebody would for simple possession. Which is wrong.
Do you get more time for burglary than you would for a white collar crime that netted you the same amount of money? Sure. But I'm okay with that, because no matter what the burglar intended, people get hurt during burglaries.
The point is that's not the high end of the scale at all. It's not that uncommon to see people who get, literally, hundreds of years for white collar crime. Madoff got 150 years. Now, granted, that's mostly symbolic for a guy in his 70s, but in general financial crimes are such that a prosecutor can usually throw a whole bunch of counts of 3-5 at you to end up with some eye-popping total.
If I were doing an over/under on these guys I'd say (assuming they're guilty as charged) they each get at least five years in jail for making stock moves that had a negligible effect on the price of the stock they were trading.
Nope. Most people don't realize it, but financial crimes in the US are punished pretty severely. Enron's Skilling got 24 years in jail for conspiracy to defraud investors. You can get less than that for killing somebody. Martha Stewart got six months for lying to an investigator (while she wasn't under oath) about something that wasn't a crime. As with drunk driving for awhile people have this idea the penalties are light, but in the meantime legislators are reacting to public anger and jacking up the sentences. It takes awhile for reality to sink in to the public consciousness. From here:
"You can certainly make the case that things have gotten too harsh," said Samuel W. Buell, a former Enron prosecutor who now teaches law at Washington University in St. Louis. "But the reason why things have gotten so harsh is we went through these years when sentences were too light. Maybe we need a correction in the other direction to get a happy medium."
I think the drug laws are pretty stupid, too, but where I live first time offenders never get jail time for possession. You can usually avoid jail on the second conviction as well if you don't have a bunch of other stuff on your record. By the third one, well, you're an idiot who's going to jail for being an idiot. But only for a few months.
And no federal government yet has represented California's interests. Hell we don't even get 80 cents on the dollar back in federal tax money, and what we do get is so wrapped in pork and idiotic regulations it costs almost as much as we get to use. Hell without the drain of the federal government California would be a profitable state (and yes, that includes if we hired our own army)
Probably not. I see people throwing around numbers like that, but like every other kind of accounting the number you end up with depends on what you include in your analysis. Some things they tend to forget about:
Water. California receives, at essentially no cost, a hell of a lot of water from the Colorado river. If we actually had to pay for that water we'd be worse off than we are now. Assuming, of course, it was actually available for purchase. You think low flow toilets are bad? Imagine a California in a permanent state of drought and with virtually no agriculture.
The bank bailout. We've got a pretty big financial center in San Francisco, and a lot of other states ended up ponying up part of that $700B bank bailout that isn't going to help them. Not directly, anyway. I'm sure New York ended up with the lion's share of that money, but I'll bet California was #2.
Intellectual property. The US is constantly trading other things away in international agreements in order to make sure Hollywood gets its cut when movies are watched around the world. If Cali was off on its own, how much leverage do you think the state would have, and how much incentive would the other 49 states have to browbeat and cajole other countries into respecting film rights?
Real Estate. 50% of the non-performing real estate loans are in California. Because of FHA and Fanny Mae, the federal taxpayer is going to wind up writing off untold billions as a result.
Transportation. The biggest discrepancy between the states tends to be transportation funding. States with small populations get disproportionate amounts of money for highways and bridges. But who does it benefit when California produce is shipped through Nevada to some other state for sale? Not the people of Nevada.
I suspect if you included all this in the analysis you'd find California a net beneficiary of federal largess.
Who would want to work there? It's a good thing we'll probably get national health care, because the construction workers are gonna need it when their thyroid glands swell up to the size of a cantaloupe.
The US has a first-to-invent standard instead of the first-to-file standard you see in some other countries. If you can show you invented something before the other guy did (which usually requires a fair amount of documentation), you can get a patent even after the invention is in general use. You can also invalidate existing patents for the same invention. Of course there are all sorts of legal caveats, but that's the gist of it. The fact that the patent application was filed in 2006 doesn't necessarily mean they can't win.
Population growth at the time was such that if you didn't add lanes traffic would simply continue to get worse. I guess if the solution is to let things get so unbearable that nobody wants to live there, then of course you have a point.
This is wrong. I grew up in Southern California - they added lanes all the time. When a lane was added it really would solve the problem on that freeway for a short time. Of course the congestion came back, but the reason was people kept moving there from other places. "Induced demand" is only real if by that you mean "we created a nice place to live so people have come from other places to live here, and now there are too many of them for the infrastructure we have."
In point of fact I agree with you about trains - they're a much more pleasant way to travel. For a lot of reasons. But if we're going to spend $45 billion dollars on transportation in California, I'd rather see the LA subway finished than a rail line that will only be marginally better than flying.
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So what you're saying is this thing will be great for killing ants at a distance?
Well, probably not. But they're drawing paychecks from the project, so even beyond the obvious selection bias they have a vested interest in believing it will end up working. Or at least professing such a belief. But the last time I visited the ITER site it had the earliest possible commercial fusion reactor going live around the year 2050, with the cost/KWH of that plant many multiples of competing technologies. Absent a string of unlikely breakthroughs it's pretty difficult to imagine a scenario in which commercially-viable magnetic-confinement fusion exists for decades after that.
Let me stress that: If everything goes right ITER (and follow-on projects) will develop an uneconomical way to generate power more than forty years in the future.
Yeah, that's what I'm wondering as well. There are all sorts of directions we can go when Uranium is hard to get, but it'll take a few years to iron out all the kinks. I sure hope we don't wait until the last flake of yellowcake is gone before we start developing an alternative.
lol no. The whole point of putting the top anchor into geostationary orbit is so it hangs directly overhead without putting stress on the cable. It might be a tiny bit higher to balance out the mass of the cable, but we're just talking a few kilometers here.
Once you have one cable up adding more is comparatively easy. The loss of a single cable wouldn't be catastrophic.
I know this has been modded "funny", but it's absolutely true. My 70 year old parents went out and bought a Wii because they had so much fun playing it at a family gathering.
Calling a game "mature" because it's loaded with violence is just stupid. The main audience for that kind of game is adolescent boys not, in general, considered the most mature segment of society.
I think the answer is cost. Near where I live a company makes table salt. They have acres and acres of these shallow ponds, and when the tide comes in they open the valves, filling up the ponds. Then they close the valves and wait for a few days for it all to dry into this muddy slush that gets scooped up by heavy machinery and, I hope, purified.
Aside from the land itself the entire operation is so cheap it's almost free. Sure, you could somehow trap that water vapor and cool it enough to change it back to a liquid, but the increase in cost would be enormous on a percentage basis.
This is OBE. There are a lot of finance guy looking for a job. Graduates in investment banking today have almost no hope of employment unless they graduated from the very top universities. Having said that, let me say the very top guys in finance are probably worth the money to their employers. It's far more competitive than science - how good you are in an absolute sense is irrelevant. What matters is how good you are in relation to everyone else, and an almost-imperceptible difference in competence can mean the difference between making or losing a billion dollars. It's not much different than prize fighters - all the guys at the top are pretty close in raw ability, but the one who's actually the best pulls down multiples of the #2 guy's earnings.
For scientists an almost imperceptible difference in competence is, well, almost imperceptible. You can't demand a huge salary as a new physics grad because there are hundreds more who could probably do the job as well as you. How many Einsteins are out there, really? One every couple hundred years?
NASA tested a design that's already a white elephant before it's even done. We're trying to replace a system that's useless for anything practical because it costs too much, and NASA's great idea is to take all the expensive parts and use them for the next generation. Color me very unimpressed.
Other people are guessing nuclear thermal, but you still won't get enough thrust out of that kind of engine to get into orbit. At least, not with a solid core design. I'm thinking what they're really designing is something like VASIMR with a nuclear reactor for the power plant. That would be cutting-edge engineering, certainly, but not necessarily cutting-edge science.
Of course, what I'd really like to see is a gas core nuclear thermal engine. That would give you enough thrust:mass to get you to mars and back in a month or so from the earth's surface. As smart as the Ruskies are, though, I don't think they're gonna develop something like that with only $500m.
It goes far beyond the green light. I know a guy who's actually sold some scripts to Hollywood studios. The way it works is you start off with a great script (they have a lot to choose from). Then it goes through, literally, five or six rewrites by other writers who've been hired to add profitable elements. No love story? We need that to bring in the high school girls - we'll just shoe-horn one it. Are there enough character elements (aliens, robots, cars, etc) we can use to make cheaply manufactured merchandise? No? Well, we'll change the sidekick from a human to a robot with a simple enough form we can make Happy Meal toys for under $0.50. Are there any elements that might offend anyone in the world (international distribution is key)? We'll just cut those out, or we'll localize them in certain scenes so we can recut for different markets - sex for the Europeans, violence for the Americans. The Japanese get everything.
It's a production line. They're producing a product that's close enough to everything else that's successful they stand a really good chance of making money. The problem is if all the studios are working from the same play book the movies are so similar they won't do very well. And that's exactly what has happened - the production line works so well the market is swamped with product that's only different in the most superficial ways.
Yeah, that was my first thought. The thing had better correct for my aging eyes, or it'll look like a ten centimeter box of nothing hanging in the air. I can do that with an old flashbulb.
On the other hand, it might be just about right for an aiming reticle. Always wanted a skull gun.
My read is Oracle is using the threat of job losses to hold the EU's feet to the fire. No matter what kind of up-front work they've done it's a long, drawn out process. By threatening to cut jobs, especially jobs in Europe, Oracle hopes to apply political pressure on the regulators. Politicians don't like to be in a position where they might get blamed for job losses.
Skilling was just an example. I would argue that most of his criminality was a result of trying to cover up holes in the balance sheet they thought could be plugged with profits in the future. If you want to talk about outright fraud look at Madof's 150 year sentence. There have been a few multi-hundred-year sentences for guys in a position of trust who actually ran off with other peoples' money.
On the three strikes law, yeah, I agree it's pretty stupid. It seems like you ought to do no more than a few months for shoplifting no matter how many priors you have. But that's California for you - in the '70s and '80s we had really light punishments. Dan White got 7 1/2 years for killing two people, giving rise to the famous "twinkie defense". There were guys with 20 or 30 serious convictions that managed to convince parole boards this time they'd finally turn it around.
The easiest issue for a politician to make hay on is "tough on crime". There's a pretty large percentage of voters who will vote for the "tough on crime" guy without really thinking it through. So every campaign we end up with a game of "I'm tougher than he is".
"My opponent is soft on crime."
"No I'm not, I'm tougher than him. Look, I support life sentences for child molesters."
"Oh, that's nothing, I support the death penalty for child molesters. And rapists, and, uh, people who tear the tags off mattresses."
A few election cycles of "I'm tougher than he is" and you've got a guy in jail for the rest of his life for shoplifting. Part of the problem is you still read stories about guys who did something horrible, got a few years in jail, got out on parole, and then chopped up somebody's little girl. But what makes the papers isn't necessarily what drives good policy, and in any case these guys were originally sentenced when the law was much more forgiving. So the voters thing the law is still forgiving and keep voting for the toughest of the tough guys. I would argue the same kind of dynamic has been occurring for white collar crimes at the national level - the perception hasn't caught up with the reality yet.
You guys should be very proud of your arm on the ISS. Seems to be the most useful bit on the whole thing.
Not for federal crimes they don't. There's no parole in the federal system for crimes committed since November of 1987 - you do every minute of your sentence unless you can get it reversed somehow or you can get a pardon.
This is exactly what I'm talking about - people remember an article they read twenty years ago about some heinous felon getting early release. Lots of voters read that same article and started baying for blood. Politicians responded. You still think a guy can get 150 years in the federal pen and still get out before he's dead, but it doesn't work that way.
Well, okay. But I wasn't arguing you'd get exactly the equivalent time as burglary. The original poster was trying to say these guys would get less than somebody would for simple possession. Which is wrong.
Do you get more time for burglary than you would for a white collar crime that netted you the same amount of money? Sure. But I'm okay with that, because no matter what the burglar intended, people get hurt during burglaries.
The point is that's not the high end of the scale at all. It's not that uncommon to see people who get, literally, hundreds of years for white collar crime. Madoff got 150 years. Now, granted, that's mostly symbolic for a guy in his 70s, but in general financial crimes are such that a prosecutor can usually throw a whole bunch of counts of 3-5 at you to end up with some eye-popping total.
If I were doing an over/under on these guys I'd say (assuming they're guilty as charged) they each get at least five years in jail for making stock moves that had a negligible effect on the price of the stock they were trading.
Nope. Most people don't realize it, but financial crimes in the US are punished pretty severely. Enron's Skilling got 24 years in jail for conspiracy to defraud investors. You can get less than that for killing somebody. Martha Stewart got six months for lying to an investigator (while she wasn't under oath) about something that wasn't a crime. As with drunk driving for awhile people have this idea the penalties are light, but in the meantime legislators are reacting to public anger and jacking up the sentences. It takes awhile for reality to sink in to the public consciousness. From here:
I think the drug laws are pretty stupid, too, but where I live first time offenders never get jail time for possession. You can usually avoid jail on the second conviction as well if you don't have a bunch of other stuff on your record. By the third one, well, you're an idiot who's going to jail for being an idiot. But only for a few months.
Probably not. I see people throwing around numbers like that, but like every other kind of accounting the number you end up with depends on what you include in your analysis. Some things they tend to forget about:
I suspect if you included all this in the analysis you'd find California a net beneficiary of federal largess.
Magnet current? Like, in a transformer?
Who would want to work there? It's a good thing we'll probably get national health care, because the construction workers are gonna need it when their thyroid glands swell up to the size of a cantaloupe.
The US has a first-to-invent standard instead of the first-to-file standard you see in some other countries. If you can show you invented something before the other guy did (which usually requires a fair amount of documentation), you can get a patent even after the invention is in general use. You can also invalidate existing patents for the same invention. Of course there are all sorts of legal caveats, but that's the gist of it. The fact that the patent application was filed in 2006 doesn't necessarily mean they can't win.
Population growth at the time was such that if you didn't add lanes traffic would simply continue to get worse. I guess if the solution is to let things get so unbearable that nobody wants to live there, then of course you have a point.
This is wrong. I grew up in Southern California - they added lanes all the time. When a lane was added it really would solve the problem on that freeway for a short time. Of course the congestion came back, but the reason was people kept moving there from other places. "Induced demand" is only real if by that you mean "we created a nice place to live so people have come from other places to live here, and now there are too many of them for the infrastructure we have."
In point of fact I agree with you about trains - they're a much more pleasant way to travel. For a lot of reasons. But if we're going to spend $45 billion dollars on transportation in California, I'd rather see the LA subway finished than a rail line that will only be marginally better than flying.