I was speaking to a doctor chappie in Harley St, London the other day and he had a damning & startling assesment of the Iridium network.
What you really meant had to be clueless and hilarious assessment, because anyone who can do an inverse-square calculation already knows that the most power you could ever receive from an Iridium is far less than what nearby people get from UHF TV transmitters, and there are literally hundreds of those which have been operating for decades.
If I were you, I wouldn't go to that doctor again. I'd report him to the National Health Service, because he's obviously incompetent to the point of endangering his patients to the point where they will run away from imaginary dangers while ignoring real ones. --
In fact, IBM will likely make a profit on this deal. You PAY them $29.99 for recycling AND they get to sell or reuse theparts? Hey, I'll give you THAT deal! First of all, most solid state parts don't go bad very easily, so there is plenty for them to recover. Secondly, reselling used computers in third world countries can be fairly lucrative.
Unlikely on two counts.
Obsolete parts at the board/subassembly level, modems, slow/tiny RAM, and other parts are practically worthless because you can buy more reliable stuff new for very little already.
Obsolete chips are almost completely worthless, because you can't even unsolder them without a lot of labor and stress on the part. You might be able to incorporate the chip into something else if you're lucky, but the result will be nowhere near as reliable as the first unit.
I doubt that third-world countries have the legion of trained repair techs it would take to keep recycled and/or obsolete-repaired computers running, and that's before you consider the impact of obsolete interfaces for devices like disk drives. --
The lists that the guy will be given will be stripped of any identity or specific machine.
Sure, that's what they say. But how much personal information will be leaked in things like options on URLs? How much privacy will be breached by revealing the target of a page, like someone's web-mail account?
It's time for that school board to destroy the logs in the regular course of business. 72 hours should do it. Data which do not exist cannot be revealed. --
This is slightly OT, but I think that this is an awfully dark view of your future. You're giving yourself fair odds that you've stopped developing and growing in your artistic tastes. And in how much else? Do you see anything ahead that isn't just stuff you've already done, heard and thought?
I'm a bit older than you, and my tastes have gone through a couple of revolutions already. In my teens, it was rock, rock, rock - but I got bored silly of the top 40 stuff early on, too monotonous. Then I got hooked on jazz-fusion and other stuff. I haven't listened to rock in a couple of years (though I have some Joe Jackson and a little REM on my shelf), but I've got tons of hard-to-classify stuff like Spyro Gyra and UZEB along with some light jazz, harder fusion, older electronica like Tangerine Dream and some of the New Age/celtic stuff like Loreena McKennitt.
I'm starting to branch again, this time into bluesier artists like Chris Smither and I'm learning the attractions of classical. Ten years from now I may not listen to anything out of my current collection more than once a week, if that. I expect that it'll sit there until my future kids come along and start rifling through the old stuff to see what they can find, and give me huge grins when they re-discover the fun of "Optical Race" or even "Brain Salad Surgery".
I see a lot of new-to-me music in my future. I couldn't abide listening to the same old things for the rest of my life, and I don't see how you could either. This is where (getting back on-topic) I see the usefulness of services like Napster, whether they go corporate or not. They'll be there to let me get my hands on the stuff that tickles my changing fancy, whether it's Greg Howard or Rimski Korsakov. I'll shape the market by only paying for value; if they try packaging the same old crap for $20, I'll take my money elsewhere. Funny, most of my CD collection was bought used, I guess that's what I've been doing for the last 5 years....
A while back somebody came out with a portal.... Well part of that was you were required to give your passwords to this one site. Guess what the portal wasn't the best at keeping things secret.
The defect being, of course, that the portal never should have kept that information. It should have remained on the user's computer.
How many other problems related to other issues, like privacy, would be fixed by using the same design philosophy? Consider the user-profiling used by web advertisers. The avowed purpose is to give the user ads which interest them, and avoid showing the user ads which are not of interest. Why does this require the banner-ad site to be in the loop? These preferences could be collected and managed by the user's own computer, and never sent outside it; presented with a choice between several ads, the client-side preference machine could pick the one most aligned with the historical likes of the user. It would even be possible to make something to get rid of particular ads permanently; what need does a male user have for feminine hygiene products, or female users for Viagra? If this were configured as a client-side selection apparatus, privacy would be preserved and relevance even more so.
If this happens anywhere, it'll be in the EU. The USA allows this tracking information to be collected and sold, so there is a powerful incentive to grab it even if the model is broken in serious ways. If the sale of that information is barred and even the keeping requires subject-review procedures, the incentive to collect it is lost (it costs money to keep data). At this point it makes far more sense to shove the work and the data down to the user's machine and never touch it at the server, and the privacy problem goes away. At this point, security becomes the user's problem. Most user machines are very insecure, but hacking one web site is a lot easier than hacking hundreds or thousands of individual PCs. --
If you could give giant ISPs more money NOT TO carry spammers than the spammer can give them TO carry them, then perhaps they might listen to your arguments.
Once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the dane. I like the idea someone posted for dealing with Canter & Seigel better. --
If I could vote, I'd vote for Ralph Nader. Why? Because I think he is left of our Democrats when it comes to the economy.
That's exactly why he'd be a disaster for the country. Look at the economies of Europe, most of which are run by left-of-Gore principles. Compare to the USA. Who's mired in unemployment and stagnation? To a great degree it's the most socialist economies in the EU, like France. The USA, run by well-right-of-Gore principles, is the economic engine that's helped drag Europe, Japan and the Asian economies out of their crises by importing massive amounts of goods and creating export jobs there.
It's hard to create jobs without a climate that's friendly to capital. Gore's policies don't seem to be all that capital-friendly, unless you are talking about mega-capital able to hire the guns to get around the arcana of the tax laws. Big corporations LOVE big government, because they can talk turkey and freeze out the competition. Little capital, like the people who need a million bucks to take their garage operation and try to make it a player, gets screwed. Nader would be worse than Gore for employment. I think his policies make sense for some environmental issues, but that makes him awfully narrow; it suits him for Sec'y of the Interior, but not president.
It would be nice if we could get someone in office who would be friendly to everyone except the people whose aim is to boss everyone around, namely the power-hungry. Harry Browne is the natural for this job. I'd say Jesse Ventura, but he doesn't want to seek national office and I can't say I blame him; every time he talks some sense the press and the bluenoses try to pillory him. 'Tis such a pity that sanity is Politically Incorrect these days. --
I use Yahoo because I don't have the luxury of being able to set up time-limited mail drops and other anti-spam measures. I get plenty of spam on Yahoo (probably due to inadequate obfuscation on a few posts I've made) but it's usually dumped in the bulk mail folder and not hard to deal with (mass-delete takes only a few clicks). Yahoo is actually not doing such a bad job.
If you ask a question and I've got the answer and take the time to write you, and you bounce my mail because I sent it from Yahoo, you can bet I'm not going to waste any more time trying to help you.
An idea I'd like to put forth for consideration: spam auctions. If your mailbox were your legal property and commercial use without compensating you was legally theft of service, you could let the spammers PAY YOU to read their stuff by auctioning off a limited number of mailings per day or week. I rather like the idea of every "GET ANYTHING ON ANYONE" piece in my mailbox being a quarter in my pocket. --
I haven't met a single person outside the USA who believes GW Bush is even remotely qualified to be president.
He's qualified to be the front-man for a committee, isn't he? We had pretty much the same with Reagan.
This question seems to be a litmus test for political leanings. A whole lot of people didn't care that Hillary Clinton, who was not on the ballot, was being given a huge amount of power to determine the course of 1/7 of the nation's economy (the late and un-lamented HillaryCare). In effect, the people who voted for WJC in 1992 were voting for the head of a committee as well. To turn around and condemn GWB for taking the same role is, well, a little hypocritical. --
Actually, my explicit statement was that it would draw energy away from harmful solutions like opposing growth and trying to insert government into a problem that the free market is handling much better than government dominated regimes (see ex-soviet block).
I'm a big fan of the free market myself, but I would beg you to tell me which of the following was a free-market initiative:
The Clean Air Act
The Clean Water Act
The ban on CFC's as aerosol propellants
The Montreal protocol, which forced the phaseout of CFC's
etc.
Face it, for every watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) there's a half-dozen NIMBY's, and a bunch of people who just don't give a damn. The latter are the folks who'll dump paint thinner down the storm drains because their water comes from someplace else, and the devil take the people downstream. Government has a place in this. --
And planting a tree in Israel doesn't turn it into a forest country.
The cedar tree is still the Lebanese national symbol; it's far from obvious to me that much of Israel cannot be forested to at least the extent that, say, Texas is. But that's a digression.
The point is that, at worst, you have an irrelevancy in these ozone creating machines. They would be no more harmful than pet rocks and just might be a bit more useful. This would contrast very favorably with current environmental proposals such as the Kyoto treaty which would close the economic opportunity door on a lot of people, slowing growth.
You're assuming that the effort going into making ozone machines is ex nihilo. It's not; it comes from the supply of physical and political capital available for addressing environmental problems. Finding safer ways to use cheap substances like propane and isobutane to replace refrigerants would actually increase the effective wealth of poor countries, because these materials are cheaper than CFC's or HFC's. They also have minimal greenhouse potential. Dumping effort into ozone-generating robot airplanes would be wasted.
Kyoto is some people's bogeyman, but they'd probably have a different take on the issue if they lived in a place like Mozambique. It's awfully hard to work yourself out of poverty if your shop, tools and home are washed away or destroyed by massive floods. The climate is changing; coral records show that El Nino episodes have gone from one every 15 years or so to 1 in 3 in the last 150 years, and recently they have been intensifying. If this change has any anthropogenic contributions, we are damaging ourselves. It's like smashing windows to increase employment among glass plant workers and glaziers; you're not getting ahead, just going in circles.
The USA could probably produce the same GNP on about half the fossil fuel used today, by going to state of the art powerplants (e.g. combined-cycle gas turbine electric generators at 60% efficiency, vs. old steam turbine plants at 30%), pushing co-generation everywhere it can go, and changing the mix of vehicles on the roads. What we can buy here is also on the market to the world, and those same fuel-saving technologies would be a boon for every third-world nation which has to import fuel (which is most of them). How much richer would those countries be if they hadn't been spending lots of money on expensive OPEC oil? That's money down the drain, but money in the future is not. So perhaps the question should be, why should we avoid the deployment of our best-available technologies around the world and development of ones which we know can be achieved, when the main entities that would be hurt are some polluting industries and a number of nasty dictatorships? --
The question is, will a couple hundred pounds be enough payload to do anything truly significant?
Hell, yeah. Think what your cell phone can do with an ounce of electronics. Multiply that by a thousand, and you're only up to sixty or so pounds. Antennas aren't difficult to lighten up; anything you can do with a bar or plate of metal, you can do with aluminum foil on top of graphite composite.
And don't forget that Moore's Law is still in effect. You might want to call these birds down every 6 months just for upgrades. --
Are you trolling, or didn't you know that the other product of the H2/O2 fuel cell is H2O (water)? You save the water you generate overnight, and use solar power to turn it back into H2 and O2 during the day. --
Are there any EE or CE folks out there who could share how to calculate the ozone created per kw fed into a Tesla coil?
That kind of information is hard to come by.
Still, you can get a ball-park estimate by guesstimating your efficiency of conversion of O2 into atomic oxygen; atomic oxygen is then available to combine with O2 to form O3. (This is the job normally performed by EUV, extreme ultra-violet. This light can't get through to the ground very well because it's too energetic; it gets absorbed in the process of snapping molecules apart. Lesser ultraviolet is absorbed in the process of breaking O3 up into O2+O, but the O just recombines with O2 to form more O3. And heat. It's the heat released in this process that's largely responsible for the stratosphere warming up with increasing altitude, which keeps it stratified.)
What you are proposing is to replace all the atomic oxygen that's recombined into O2 by chlorine catalysts with fresh. I think you'll find that humanity doesn't generate enough electricity to do this. --
What when [name any tiny but critical part] turns out to have not such a long lifetime?
The aircraft comes down, either under control or out of control.
If it's under control, it either lands for repairs or is put down somewhere safe.
If it's out of control, it gets snared by the first tree it hits and turned into wreckage. Remember, this is a gadget designed to fly under the power of sunlight; it can't weigh much. The previous versions have resembled tissue-covered model airplanes. In a fight between the airplane and your house, the house would win handily (besides, the typical cruising speed of this thing near sea level is probably under 20 MPH). --
The difficulty you run into is air pressure. You need a certain mass of helium to support a given weight of airship, and the volume occupied by the lifting gas goes by V = nRT/P. At a possible loitering altitude of 70,000 feet, you are talking about 16 times the volume of the same gas at sea level.
Your shell has to be big enough to hold all of this gas, even when it's very thin (and doesn't displace a lot of air). The shell still has to sustain its weight, so it doesn't lose mass very fast as the design is scaled to higher and higher maximum altitudes. I don't know how high you can go before modern materials give you a machine that is effectively 100% shell and no payload, but 70,000 feet may be into the region of diminishing returns.
A blimp, or a superpressure balloon with an internal ballonet (to hold its shape during launch and the initial ascent) might be more tractable than a rigid airship. If I were designing this, I'd add a second ballonet inside the helium space to hold hydrogen for rapid ascent, and dump the hydrogen as the machine got up to altitude (and the air ballonet was already empty). --
Thanks for that little pointer.
One question for the legal-eagles: is this kind of punitive reaction to a social statement at all tortious? It's pretty obvious to me that the principal's (written!) statement of cause for the suspension,
...disrupted school activities or otherwise willfully defied the valid authority of supervisors, teachers, administrators, other school officials or other school personnel in the performance of their duties...
is nothing but hot air. He was an obvious non-conformist. He was elected to a position (homecoming king) by the student body. They wanted to see what he would do. They got to see it. How's that a disruption?
It looks to me like Griffiths has a cause of action against the school for defamation (the statement quoted above is proof), as well as loss of academic standing if they won't let him make up work for those two days. Who's up for financing a suit against the school demanding that the school rescind Griffiths' suspension, allow him to make up the work, and pay damages? I'd like to see at least one of these martinet administrators who expects students to dance like puppets on their strings lose his job over it, and I want the rest worried enough that they won't pull this crap any more. At the very least, if they are going to make harassment of non-conformists an official value of the institution we should make them hurt. If it costs enough money, even the taxpayers will refuse to stand for it and demand that it stop. --
I guess my question is how can we (consumers) make use of the.sucks domain (and domain names like the ones in this article) without getting in trouble?
I can only think of one way to do this, and that is to make any attempt to harass critics, parodists, and other persons exercising free speech have a cost that no company is willing to pay.
There is something like this in the public-participation arena, called SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Because of the abuses of SLAPPs by companies trying to silence their opponents, many US states now have anti-SLAPP laws. Not only are SLAPPs tossed out of court, but the damages one can recover in the counter-suit against a SLAPP is enough to really hurt. Bottom line: SLAPPs have essentially stopped where these laws are in effect.
We need something like the SLAPP law to defend opinion and parody, including and especially in all parts of the Internet. If Guinness wound up being on the hook for some millions of dollars (and had to give the domains back), they wouldn't be pulling this crap in front of the WIPO. They'd have to grin and bear it. Somehow I don't see them suffering; of all the Guinness drinkers in the world, how many of them are going to care that one person with a domain thinks that they suck? Instead, they felt they had to be the bully. They've lost my sympathy, totally. I shall never again buy any Guinness product.
The real problem is implementation. Getting something like a SLAPP law recognized by the [bought and paid for corporate lackies of the] WIPO is going to take a lot of doing. It might be easier to declare geekdom a religion and issue a fatwa against the execs of Guinness, Digital Convergence, the RIAA, DVD-CCA and all the rest. Not necessarily more productive, but easier (and certainly quicker). --
Guess where the surplus came from? Thats right! Capital gains taxation.
Actually, the surplus came from activity that wasn't stifled by excessive taxation; cap-gains taxes couldn't have done it.
Want proof? Look at the IRS stats on individual income. Check out href=http://ftp.fedworld.gov/pub/ irs -soi/98inprel.exe. Look at just the individual income figures (note, this does not include corporate income, excise or severance taxes, or any other source of Federal tax revenue). Capital gains accounts for all of 8% of all individual income, and an even lower proportion of total taxes. We could eliminate the capital-gains tax and still have a surplus.
I think we should. Getting rid of the capital gains tax would get rid of a lot of accountants and tax bureaucrats. It would eliminate any incentive for people to keep their money locked up in poorly-performing investments just to avoid having to pay the taxes required to get into better ones. And it would make mutual-fund investing an even better deal for the little guy (none of this crap about having to pay capital-gains taxes because the fund sold some stuff at a profit in order to buy some other stuff).
Getting rid of the capital gains tax would eliminate a bunch of obstacles and disincentives in the economy. It would probably help; it doesn't yield enough tax revenue to really hurt. --
more than 80% of all wealth generated by the stock market has gone to the wealthiest 10% of the population. They make much of it through speculation, or buying mass quanities of a particular stock or group of stocks, driving up the price beyond that of the small investor.
You forget that high-priced stocks tend to split, bringing share prices back within the small investor's reach.
But who cares? What you are saying is that the big guys are basically taking each other's money for the stock when it gets into those rarefied reaches of share price. Near as I can tell, this means:
The little guy isn't buying, so won't lose any money if the price tanks.
The little guys who bought early get a chance to take a lot of money from the big guys.
I don't think that's quite the conclusion you wanted, but I don't see how you escape it given your premises. --
Slashdot Mirror
If I were you, I wouldn't go to that doctor again. I'd report him to the National Health Service, because he's obviously incompetent to the point of endangering his patients to the point where they will run away from imaginary dangers while ignoring real ones.
--
- Obsolete parts at the board/subassembly level, modems, slow/tiny RAM, and other parts are practically worthless because you can buy more reliable stuff new for very little already.
- Obsolete chips are almost completely worthless, because you can't even unsolder them without a lot of labor and stress on the part. You might be able to incorporate the chip into something else if you're lucky, but the result will be nowhere near as reliable as the first unit.
I doubt that third-world countries have the legion of trained repair techs it would take to keep recycled and/or obsolete-repaired computers running, and that's before you consider the impact of obsolete interfaces for devices like disk drives.--
It's time for that school board to destroy the logs in the regular course of business. 72 hours should do it. Data which do not exist cannot be revealed.
--
I'm a bit older than you, and my tastes have gone through a couple of revolutions already. In my teens, it was rock, rock, rock - but I got bored silly of the top 40 stuff early on, too monotonous. Then I got hooked on jazz-fusion and other stuff. I haven't listened to rock in a couple of years (though I have some Joe Jackson and a little REM on my shelf), but I've got tons of hard-to-classify stuff like Spyro Gyra and UZEB along with some light jazz, harder fusion, older electronica like Tangerine Dream and some of the New Age/celtic stuff like Loreena McKennitt.
I'm starting to branch again, this time into bluesier artists like Chris Smither and I'm learning the attractions of classical. Ten years from now I may not listen to anything out of my current collection more than once a week, if that. I expect that it'll sit there until my future kids come along and start rifling through the old stuff to see what they can find, and give me huge grins when they re-discover the fun of "Optical Race" or even "Brain Salad Surgery".
I see a lot of new-to-me music in my future. I couldn't abide listening to the same old things for the rest of my life, and I don't see how you could either. This is where (getting back on-topic) I see the usefulness of services like Napster, whether they go corporate or not. They'll be there to let me get my hands on the stuff that tickles my changing fancy, whether it's Greg Howard or Rimski Korsakov. I'll shape the market by only paying for value; if they try packaging the same old crap for $20, I'll take my money elsewhere. Funny, most of my CD collection was bought used, I guess that's what I've been doing for the last 5 years....
I am the consumer. Hear me roar.
--
However, every succeeding orbiter has been lighter, and thus capable of better performance. The engines have improved a fair bit too.
--
How many other problems related to other issues, like privacy, would be fixed by using the same design philosophy? Consider the user-profiling used by web advertisers. The avowed purpose is to give the user ads which interest them, and avoid showing the user ads which are not of interest. Why does this require the banner-ad site to be in the loop? These preferences could be collected and managed by the user's own computer, and never sent outside it; presented with a choice between several ads, the client-side preference machine could pick the one most aligned with the historical likes of the user. It would even be possible to make something to get rid of particular ads permanently; what need does a male user have for feminine hygiene products, or female users for Viagra? If this were configured as a client-side selection apparatus, privacy would be preserved and relevance even more so.
If this happens anywhere, it'll be in the EU. The USA allows this tracking information to be collected and sold, so there is a powerful incentive to grab it even if the model is broken in serious ways. If the sale of that information is barred and even the keeping requires subject-review procedures, the incentive to collect it is lost (it costs money to keep data). At this point it makes far more sense to shove the work and the data down to the user's machine and never touch it at the server, and the privacy problem goes away. At this point, security becomes the user's problem. Most user machines are very insecure, but hacking one web site is a lot easier than hacking hundreds or thousands of individual PCs.
--
--
It's hard to create jobs without a climate that's friendly to capital. Gore's policies don't seem to be all that capital-friendly, unless you are talking about mega-capital able to hire the guns to get around the arcana of the tax laws. Big corporations LOVE big government, because they can talk turkey and freeze out the competition. Little capital, like the people who need a million bucks to take their garage operation and try to make it a player, gets screwed. Nader would be worse than Gore for employment. I think his policies make sense for some environmental issues, but that makes him awfully narrow; it suits him for Sec'y of the Interior, but not president.
It would be nice if we could get someone in office who would be friendly to everyone except the people whose aim is to boss everyone around, namely the power-hungry. Harry Browne is the natural for this job. I'd say Jesse Ventura, but he doesn't want to seek national office and I can't say I blame him; every time he talks some sense the press and the bluenoses try to pillory him. 'Tis such a pity that sanity is Politically Incorrect these days.
--
If you ask a question and I've got the answer and take the time to write you, and you bounce my mail because I sent it from Yahoo, you can bet I'm not going to waste any more time trying to help you.
An idea I'd like to put forth for consideration: spam auctions. If your mailbox were your legal property and commercial use without compensating you was legally theft of service, you could let the spammers PAY YOU to read their stuff by auctioning off a limited number of mailings per day or week. I rather like the idea of every "GET ANYTHING ON ANYONE" piece in my mailbox being a quarter in my pocket.
--
This question seems to be a litmus test for political leanings. A whole lot of people didn't care that Hillary Clinton, who was not on the ballot, was being given a huge amount of power to determine the course of 1/7 of the nation's economy (the late and un-lamented HillaryCare). In effect, the people who voted for WJC in 1992 were voting for the head of a committee as well. To turn around and condemn GWB for taking the same role is, well, a little hypocritical.
--
--
- The Clean Air Act
- The Clean Water Act
- The ban on CFC's as aerosol propellants
- The Montreal protocol, which forced the phaseout of CFC's
- etc.
Face it, for every watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) there's a half-dozen NIMBY's, and a bunch of people who just don't give a damn. The latter are the folks who'll dump paint thinner down the storm drains because their water comes from someplace else, and the devil take the people downstream. Government has a place in this.--
Kyoto is some people's bogeyman, but they'd probably have a different take on the issue if they lived in a place like Mozambique. It's awfully hard to work yourself out of poverty if your shop, tools and home are washed away or destroyed by massive floods. The climate is changing; coral records show that El Nino episodes have gone from one every 15 years or so to 1 in 3 in the last 150 years, and recently they have been intensifying. If this change has any anthropogenic contributions, we are damaging ourselves. It's like smashing windows to increase employment among glass plant workers and glaziers; you're not getting ahead, just going in circles.
The USA could probably produce the same GNP on about half the fossil fuel used today, by going to state of the art powerplants (e.g. combined-cycle gas turbine electric generators at 60% efficiency, vs. old steam turbine plants at 30%), pushing co-generation everywhere it can go, and changing the mix of vehicles on the roads. What we can buy here is also on the market to the world, and those same fuel-saving technologies would be a boon for every third-world nation which has to import fuel (which is most of them). How much richer would those countries be if they hadn't been spending lots of money on expensive OPEC oil? That's money down the drain, but money in the future is not. So perhaps the question should be, why should we avoid the deployment of our best-available technologies around the world and development of ones which we know can be achieved, when the main entities that would be hurt are some polluting industries and a number of nasty dictatorships?
--
And don't forget that Moore's Law is still in effect. You might want to call these birds down every 6 months just for upgrades.
--
Are you trolling, or didn't you know that the other product of the H2/O2 fuel cell is H2O (water)? You save the water you generate overnight, and use solar power to turn it back into H2 and O2 during the day.
--
Still, you can get a ball-park estimate by guesstimating your efficiency of conversion of O2 into atomic oxygen; atomic oxygen is then available to combine with O2 to form O3. (This is the job normally performed by EUV, extreme ultra-violet. This light can't get through to the ground very well because it's too energetic; it gets absorbed in the process of snapping molecules apart. Lesser ultraviolet is absorbed in the process of breaking O3 up into O2+O, but the O just recombines with O2 to form more O3. And heat. It's the heat released in this process that's largely responsible for the stratosphere warming up with increasing altitude, which keeps it stratified.)
What you are proposing is to replace all the atomic oxygen that's recombined into O2 by chlorine catalysts with fresh. I think you'll find that humanity doesn't generate enough electricity to do this.
--
If it's under control, it either lands for repairs or is put down somewhere safe.
If it's out of control, it gets snared by the first tree it hits and turned into wreckage. Remember, this is a gadget designed to fly under the power of sunlight; it can't weigh much. The previous versions have resembled tissue-covered model airplanes. In a fight between the airplane and your house, the house would win handily (besides, the typical cruising speed of this thing near sea level is probably under 20 MPH).
--
Your shell has to be big enough to hold all of this gas, even when it's very thin (and doesn't displace a lot of air). The shell still has to sustain its weight, so it doesn't lose mass very fast as the design is scaled to higher and higher maximum altitudes. I don't know how high you can go before modern materials give you a machine that is effectively 100% shell and no payload, but 70,000 feet may be into the region of diminishing returns.
A blimp, or a superpressure balloon with an internal ballonet (to hold its shape during launch and the initial ascent) might be more tractable than a rigid airship. If I were designing this, I'd add a second ballonet inside the helium space to hold hydrogen for rapid ascent, and dump the hydrogen as the machine got up to altitude (and the air ballonet was already empty).
--
You're so ignorant (can't even spell Stirling correctly) that I'm going to assume that your post is a joke.
--
It looks to me like Griffiths has a cause of action against the school for defamation (the statement quoted above is proof), as well as loss of academic standing if they won't let him make up work for those two days. Who's up for financing a suit against the school demanding that the school rescind Griffiths' suspension, allow him to make up the work, and pay damages? I'd like to see at least one of these martinet administrators who expects students to dance like puppets on their strings lose his job over it, and I want the rest worried enough that they won't pull this crap any more. At the very least, if they are going to make harassment of non-conformists an official value of the institution we should make them hurt. If it costs enough money, even the taxpayers will refuse to stand for it and demand that it stop.
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There is something like this in the public-participation arena, called SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Because of the abuses of SLAPPs by companies trying to silence their opponents, many US states now have anti-SLAPP laws. Not only are SLAPPs tossed out of court, but the damages one can recover in the counter-suit against a SLAPP is enough to really hurt. Bottom line: SLAPPs have essentially stopped where these laws are in effect.
We need something like the SLAPP law to defend opinion and parody, including and especially in all parts of the Internet. If Guinness wound up being on the hook for some millions of dollars (and had to give the domains back), they wouldn't be pulling this crap in front of the WIPO. They'd have to grin and bear it. Somehow I don't see them suffering; of all the Guinness drinkers in the world, how many of them are going to care that one person with a domain thinks that they suck? Instead, they felt they had to be the bully. They've lost my sympathy, totally. I shall never again buy any Guinness product.
The real problem is implementation. Getting something like a SLAPP law recognized by the [bought and paid for corporate lackies of the] WIPO is going to take a lot of doing. It might be easier to declare geekdom a religion and issue a fatwa against the execs of Guinness, Digital Convergence, the RIAA, DVD-CCA and all the rest. Not necessarily more productive, but easier (and certainly quicker).
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Want proof? Look at the IRS stats on individual income. Check out href=http://ftp.fedworld.gov/pub/ irs -soi/98inprel.exe. Look at just the individual income figures (note, this does not include corporate income, excise or severance taxes, or any other source of Federal tax revenue). Capital gains accounts for all of 8% of all individual income, and an even lower proportion of total taxes. We could eliminate the capital-gains tax and still have a surplus.
I think we should. Getting rid of the capital gains tax would get rid of a lot of accountants and tax bureaucrats. It would eliminate any incentive for people to keep their money locked up in poorly-performing investments just to avoid having to pay the taxes required to get into better ones. And it would make mutual-fund investing an even better deal for the little guy (none of this crap about having to pay capital-gains taxes because the fund sold some stuff at a profit in order to buy some other stuff).
Getting rid of the capital gains tax would eliminate a bunch of obstacles and disincentives in the economy. It would probably help; it doesn't yield enough tax revenue to really hurt.
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But who cares? What you are saying is that the big guys are basically taking each other's money for the stock when it gets into those rarefied reaches of share price. Near as I can tell, this means:
- The little guy isn't buying, so won't lose any money if the price tanks.
- The little guys who bought early get a chance to take a lot of money from the big guys.
I don't think that's quite the conclusion you wanted, but I don't see how you escape it given your premises.--
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Very good. A right without a remedy or means to exercise it is no right at all.
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