What if the government came up with some magic little box of tricks that stopped people from murdering. Would that be bad thing?
well if someone was threatening my life and the only way to stop would be murder in self-defense, I think it would be a bad thing.
According to the English Common Law, murder is "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought." If someone is threatening your life and you kill them to stop them, you did not murder them because:
No malice; you didn't kill them with intent to do them harm, you did it to protect yourself.
No forethought; you didn't go out looking to hurt someone, it was forced upon you.
Generally, no unlawfulness; self-defense is a lawful act and killing is reasonable if there was no other way to stop the threat in time (reasonable force).
All that aside, how could you possibly implement such a thing? If someone is carelessly or recklessly (but not maliciously) doing something that threatens to kill you or a member of your family, would the anti-murder device stop you from using a possibly-deadly amount of force to guarantee that they are stopped before anyone else gets hurt? I can see some validity in psychologically conditioning the chronically violent to put brakes on their impulses, but the world is just too complicated for any "anti-murder" device to work unless it is far smarter *and* quicker than a human being. At that point, humans are pretty much irrelevant anyway. --
Has anyone else ever avoided an accident by accelerating?
I've taken myself out of tight situations (much more likely to have a collision) into much less restricted ones by punching it on freeway entrance ramps and the like. I might briefly exceed 80 MPH doing this.
More to the point, what happens when the speed limiter kicks in when a driver mis-judges the available time to pass on a 2-lane road, and cannot get ahead in time to pull in? This leads to one of:
A head-on with the oncoming traffic.
A side-swipe with the traffic being passed.
A dive for the ditch, maybe colliding with trees or stones or a rollover.
Emergency braking by traffic on one or both sides of the road, leading to possible rear-end collisions.
This proposal is bone-headed in the extreme; perhaps it should be added to the cars of chronic lame drivers (along with reaction-time testers to stop them from driving while drunk/exhausted), but it would create at least as many problems as it solved for the masses. In this it reminds me of the flight-control system on the A320 which was directly responsible for the crash at the Paris Air Show some years back; because it was in "landing mode" it refused the pilot's command to throttle the engines up, and because it had inadequate power it refused the pilot's pitch-up force on the stick. Result: aircraft flew into a hill. Cause: Design of control software required pilot to press a "go around" button to get the aircraft to do what it was commanded to do. My analysis: It is dangerous and stupid to require persons who are operating vehicles to play games of "Simon Says" with some unthinking control system. --
4. Prevelence of aviation as a career and a science and not just barnstormers and wackos. Sure Lindberg started out this way but does flying around and doing crazy stunts suddently give my a liscence and redence as an actual trained and certified pilot? I guess those guys at the FAA are all wet huh?
For any regulatory agency like the FAA to do any worthwhile work, it requires a base of knowledge against which to judge things. Who do you think did the initial work which made it possible for the FAA to exist? It was individualists and barnstormers, pushing the envelope. Eventually they were marginalized, but without those tinkerers and dreamers going back to the Wrights and further (Otto Lilienthal, the Mongolfier brothers, Leonardo daVinci, and the folklorists who created the tale of Icarus) we wouldn't have any reason for the FAA to exist because we wouldn't be flying. The exact same thing applies to radio, to the automobile, the personal computer, and a whole heap of other things you take for granted. --
What happens when organic compounds are placed beside a radioactive source such as one of the transition metals? Would there not be a certain percentage of the C,O,H in the (say decaying vegetable fibres and microbes) which were converted to their radioactive isotopes by this? Unlikely. To convert hydrogen (protium) into its only radioactive isotope (tritium) you have to add two neutrons to it (fantasically unlikely to hit a single atom twice, especially since most radwaste isotopes are not neutron emitters). C-12 or C-13 into C-14 requires one or two neutrons as well. I'm not sure about oxygen, I'd have to check an isotope table and I don't have one handy; still, I doubt it very much. There are two possible ways of converting stable isotopes to radioactive ones by exposing them to non-neutron radiation. The first is gamma-activation, where a stable nucleus is kicked into a higher-energy metastable state by a gamma ray; when it decays to its base state, it emits another gamma ray. The other is by induced fission or neutron spallation (a particle or gamma kicks one or more nucleons out of the nucleus, yielding a radioactive nucleus). These processes are very inefficient even on the nuclei where they are possible. --
Damn, don't be so paranoid. There are bacteria that live in shit, but they don't find you appetizing. (Maybe you should feel insulted.;-)
If you'd read the article you'd know that D. Radiourans has been around for a couple billion years. Our entire evolution, from H. Sapiens Sapiens back to the first vertebrate, has been in an environment with D. Radiourans in it. You can stop worrying now, it's okay. --
These waste products then diffuse, as radioactive gases into the atmosphere.
That only happens if the element in question is metabolized to a gas. I can only think of a few elements for which this is true:
Tritium (metabolized to water vapor)
Carbon-14 (metabolized to radioactive CO2)
Radon and xenon are already gases (noble gases at that), so it makes no difference; they're already gone. Most radwaste is composed of alkali metals, alkali earths and transition metals with the occasional halogen thrown in (astatine, I-129, I-131). These will not be metabolized to gases, so they'd have to escape some other way. --
What comes out of a reactor has less available energy in it than before, but it's dumping it really fast. Think of the difference between a candle flame and a bonfire; the power output of the bonfire makes it dangerous to be up close to it. You could burn the same mass of candles one at a time and barely keep your hands warm.
Dumping the spent fuel back into the uranium mines is superficially attractive, if you don't care that the radioisotopes have a wide variety of chemical properties and many will not stay put under the same conditions as uranium. Not staying put is bad; you do not want this stuff in your drinking water, for example. Ideally you'd separate the stuff in the spent fuel according to its chemical properties and dispose of the stuff that needs disposal in the way which keeps it in one place until it's harmless. This also allows the unused uranium and the plutonium produced in the reactor to be recycled, keeping them out of the waste stream entirely. Check out this Argonne National Lab link for a technical look at what some of the waste-disposal technology might look like. For some reason the Greens don't like this, though. Given that nuclear power emits absolutely no CO2 and nuclear accidents are far more problematic for humans than the environment in general, I have to wonder what the fuss is all about. --
What if this bug got into say, the storage tank at a dairy farm, for example. Or maybe the pipes that carry peanut butter in a candy bar factory?
It seems to be a natural soil bacterium, so it's probably gotten into every milk-tank and peanut-butter factory at one time or another. Normal cleaning and disinfectants appear to be more than sufficient to deal with it. --
but if these bacterium can eat just about everything, survive a nuclear blast and still keep on ticking...what happens if they set their sights on US?
From the article:
The pink-colored bacterium smells like rotten cabbage. It was discovered in canned meat in 1956.
It is believed to be 2 billion years old, making it one of Earth's earliest life forms. Scientists believe it evolved when Earth was bombarded with more radiation than today.
Basically, this bug is really good at handling free radicals. If it was discovered in canned meat, it's probably anaerobic and wouldn't like humans too much. In any event, just because something is good at gene repair doesn't mean it could survive long with a human immune system looking for it. This bug has been in the environment thousands of times as long as humans have been on the earth; we've obviously learned to deal with them (on the biomolecular level). Teaching the bug a few new tricks like eating solvents or pesticides isn't going to make it better at invading humans, so we would appear to be quite safe. --
Oil-eating bacteria have evolved quite naturally; you'll find them anywhere there are natural oil seeps. After they do their job, they become food for other things. Playing God? Well, yeah; if God had decided to play with supertankers full of crude, He would have made a hungry bug to eat the spills too! It's our problem, though, so we get to make the means to fix it. --
"Normal" toxic waste can be processed by bugs, but radioactive stuff would kill the bacteria. Splicing the bioremediation genes into a rad-hardened bug lets the bug eat the toxics even if they're mixed with radioactive stuff. If you have a bug that can eat all the benzene, toluene, and other stuff and turn them into CO2 and H2O, you've got a nice bio-friendly way to concentrate the radioactive leftovers.
The rad-hard bug may be able to incorporate and immobilize radioactive stuff that would otherwise leach through the soil; a normal bug would be killed by the radiation before it could process very much, even if it had an affinity.
By concentrating, reducing or otherwise altering the state of the radio-goo, the bugs may make it possible to do a much better job of isolating what's left.
Breaking down a chemical compound does not change anything about the nuclei of the atoms from which it is made. If you have radioactive technetium salts and you convert them to technetium metal, it is still going to be just as radioactive as it was before. What changes is its solubility and other chemical properties. In the case of technetium the metal is insoluble, so you can immobilize it (and prevent it from leaching anywhere) by reducing it to the metallic state. --
The Bhopal tragedy was not caused by failure to follow safety regulations.
Yes, it was. There were severe deficiencies in maintenance at Bhopal compared to other Union Carbide plants. This included maintenance of safety systems.
The main problem was that the systems as well as the backups failed simultaneously. A failed storage tank, failed backup tank, failed cooler occurred simultneously.
The main problem was that the cooling system for the methyl isocyanate tank used water in the loop, and the coil developed a leak. This was known, but not fixed. I do not recall there being a backup tank, and the addition of water to methyl isocyanate creates heat, causing the tank pressure to go over limits and the vent valve to open. The tank vented to a flare stack, where any material that had to be dumped would be burned. The real problem was the lack of maintenance of the flare stack, which was not operational. The methyl isocyanate went up the flare stack, into the air, and onto the people downwind with the observed results.
Worse was that the company management tried to claim that the company was *not* responsible for what happened.
This is correct; by all rights, Union Carbide is not.
The Indian government is responsible for what happened. Under India's home-rule laws, Union Carbide was required to appoint Indian managers for its plants, and was unable to do anything meaningful about the neglected maintenance. The Indian manager at Bhopal neglected to do the required maintenance at the plant, and the rest is history. Union Carbide bears no more moral responsibility for the deaths and injuries at Bhopal than Ford bears for the slave-labor conditions at its plants in Germany from 1941-44. Their control had been usurped by a government bent on its own goals. Your government, BTW, which has also written the plant history you're being taught in class. --
I've seen footage of that Mariner launch, and the booster failed due to a negatively-damped yaw oscillation. This is consistent with a lack of a hyphen (negative sign) in the PID loop for yaw control; I don't see how averaging velocity would have anything to do with it. --
You're making the same two mistakes again. You're assuming:
a.) Religion has anything to do with biology (Christian Science, anyone?), and b.) That what I posted is what I believe, rather than a position I assumed for the sake of argument (to underscore a deeper point).
Both assumptions are false, and you're not doing so hot in the depth department. --
I know plenty of biology, thank you. And neurology, and Christianity (I am one such, nominally). I know that 2/3 of all fertilized human ova (naturally) fail to live to term, which makes it very obvious that they aren't terribly important. What you don't know about sarcasm, religious freedom and trolling is obvious from your response.
Part of religious freedom is that you have to allow people the right to believe, and even do, things that you personally think are heretical, idolatrous, or just plain repugnant. "But it's a baby!", I hear people screaming. That's wrong. They should be saying, "I believe it's a baby." If it was theirs, they'd treat it as a baby. If it was mine, maybe I'd treat it as a baby too. But if it's someone else's, it's for neither of us to say. If something happens to it and it's never born, I have no more business railing against this than if the condom never broke. Other people's freedom includes the right to do things I wouldn't want to do, which is one of the reasons I'd Vote Libertarian.
If someone's religion doesn't allow for CPR (say, coming back from "the dead" makes you a zombie and dooms your soul), neither of us has any business forcing them to either have CPR or perform CPR. If someone's belief is that having a baby at a particular time, place, or situation is wrong, that's not my business or yours either no matter what we would do. It's that pesky religious freedom thing again. I'm sure it bugs you, but there it is. --
They forgot to include the rights of unborn babies.
Ain't no such thing; it's a baby when it's born, not before. If you're Christian, you know that Adam became a living soul when God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. Before birth you're not breathing, QED. Bible verses pertaining to certain prophets should be read in their entirety before drawing conclusions... and even that doesn't count if you're not Christian.
"Pro-life" laws are nothing more than religious discrimination and infringements of the freedom of conscience. --
Indeed. I took the quiz on the candidate finder website, and here's how they ranked:
73 Harry Browne 56 John Hagelin 50 David McReynolds 47 Bill Bradley 47 George W. Bush 45 Orrin Hatch 44 Alan Keyes 44 Howard Phillips 38 Malcolm (Steve) Forbes Jr. 38 Patrick J. (Pat) Buchanan 37 Albert Gore Jr. 37 John S. McCain 36 Ralph Nader 35 Gary L. Bauer 34 Donald Trump 21 Warren Beatty
The only real surprise I had was finding the socialist candidate at 50%, only 3 points above Dubya and Bradley. --
Actually, the scare over DDT has now been discredited.
...NOT. The evidence that DDT leads to eggshell thinning in birds and threatened the extinction of species like the peregrine falcon and the American bald eagle is absolutely airtight. --
The canards on the TU-144 are not for control per se, they are for takeoff and landing. The canards are retractable, and provide nose-up force which can be countered by down-flaperon in the rear. This allows the flaperons to produce additional lift at low speed and lower the nose attitude at landing speed. This, from the Jan. 2000 issue of Flying, IIRC (read it at the book store, didn't buy it). --
For example, the Chernobyl reactor didn't "melt down", it caught fire.
Not quite. It had a power surge due to being operated incorrectly, leading to a steam explosion. The steam explosion put graphite moderator in contact with white-hot naked fuel pellets (as well as removing the lid on the reactor), and that led to the fire.
There were numerous other air disasters they could have mentioned (like the DC-10 incident where an engine fell off, destroying hydraulic lines in the process. Turned out they'd been using a fork-lift to remove/replace the engine for servicing, messing up the mounting bolts).
And even that needn't have led to loss of the aircraft. When the engine fell off, both hydraulic systems for the left wing slat were taken out, and the slat retracted. This left the aircraft in an asymmetrical configuration, but it was still flyable; it was going fast enough that the wing did not stall even without the slats on that side. The pilot noticed that he'd lost an engine, and slowed down to the engine-out best-climb speed. This was below the stall speed for the now-slatless left wing, the aircraft uncontrollably rolled to the left, and it went into the ground with the loss of everyone on board. All this because the pilot had no way of knowing that he'd lost hydraulics and symmetry along with that engine.
IIRC, transport aircraft now have indicators to flag these failures to the flight crew. --
To too many Americans, Systeme Internationale is one of those Frog things. Look, those people eat blue moldy goat cheese, would you want to buy a measurement system from them?;-) --
I dunno, automotive-grade chips (-40/+105 C temperature range) would handle the steaming part just fine as long as they were cooled with water (and thus wouldn't exceed 100 C device temperature). The effect of bubbling coolant on the lens focus is another matter.;-) --
I myself live in an island in the mediterranean -- Cyprus. Can these courts do anything to me?
IANAL, but I went through a LOT of civil-procedure stuff when my girlfriend was in law school...
To do anything to you, the court has to have three kinds of jurisdiction:
Subject matter jurisdiction:the court has to be able to rule on the matter involved.
Personal jurisdiction:the court has to be able to make rulings which pertain to you.
Physical jurisdiction:the court has to be able to make rulings about the place where the activities took place.
My non-lawyerly judgement is that the court in California has no physical jurisdiction in Cyprus, and no personal jurisdiction over you (unless you are a US national, and maybe not even then).To do anything to you, the DVD consortium's lawyers would have to get a court in Cyprus to do their bidding. --
Slashdot Mirror
- No malice; you didn't kill them with intent to do them harm, you did it to protect yourself.
- No forethought; you didn't go out looking to hurt someone, it was forced upon you.
- Generally, no unlawfulness; self-defense is a lawful act and killing is reasonable if there was no other way to stop the threat in time (reasonable force).
All that aside, how could you possibly implement such a thing? If someone is carelessly or recklessly (but not maliciously) doing something that threatens to kill you or a member of your family, would the anti-murder device stop you from using a possibly-deadly amount of force to guarantee that they are stopped before anyone else gets hurt? I can see some validity in psychologically conditioning the chronically violent to put brakes on their impulses, but the world is just too complicated for any "anti-murder" device to work unless it is far smarter *and* quicker than a human being. At that point, humans are pretty much irrelevant anyway.--
More to the point, what happens when the speed limiter kicks in when a driver mis-judges the available time to pass on a 2-lane road, and cannot get ahead in time to pull in? This leads to one of:
- A head-on with the oncoming traffic.
- A side-swipe with the traffic being passed.
- A dive for the ditch, maybe colliding with trees or stones or a rollover.
- Emergency braking by traffic on one or both sides of the road, leading to possible rear-end collisions.
This proposal is bone-headed in the extreme; perhaps it should be added to the cars of chronic lame drivers (along with reaction-time testers to stop them from driving while drunk/exhausted), but it would create at least as many problems as it solved for the masses. In this it reminds me of the flight-control system on the A320 which was directly responsible for the crash at the Paris Air Show some years back; because it was in "landing mode" it refused the pilot's command to throttle the engines up, and because it had inadequate power it refused the pilot's pitch-up force on the stick. Result: aircraft flew into a hill. Cause: Design of control software required pilot to press a "go around" button to get the aircraft to do what it was commanded to do. My analysis: It is dangerous and stupid to require persons who are operating vehicles to play games of "Simon Says" with some unthinking control system.--
--
What happens when organic compounds are placed beside a radioactive source such as one of the transition metals? Would there not be a certain percentage of the C,O,H in the (say decaying vegetable fibres and microbes) which were converted to their radioactive isotopes by this? Unlikely. To convert hydrogen (protium) into its only radioactive isotope (tritium) you have to add two neutrons to it (fantasically unlikely to hit a single atom twice, especially since most radwaste isotopes are not neutron emitters). C-12 or C-13 into C-14 requires one or two neutrons as well. I'm not sure about oxygen, I'd have to check an isotope table and I don't have one handy; still, I doubt it very much. There are two possible ways of converting stable isotopes to radioactive ones by exposing them to non-neutron radiation. The first is gamma-activation, where a stable nucleus is kicked into a higher-energy metastable state by a gamma ray; when it decays to its base state, it emits another gamma ray. The other is by induced fission or neutron spallation (a particle or gamma kicks one or more nucleons out of the nucleus, yielding a radioactive nucleus). These processes are very inefficient even on the nuclei where they are possible.
--
If you'd read the article you'd know that D. Radiourans has been around for a couple billion years. Our entire evolution, from H. Sapiens Sapiens back to the first vertebrate, has been in an environment with D. Radiourans in it. You can stop worrying now, it's okay.
--
- Tritium (metabolized to water vapor)
- Carbon-14 (metabolized to radioactive CO2)
Radon and xenon are already gases (noble gases at that), so it makes no difference; they're already gone. Most radwaste is composed of alkali metals, alkali earths and transition metals with the occasional halogen thrown in (astatine, I-129, I-131). These will not be metabolized to gases, so they'd have to escape some other way.--
Dumping the spent fuel back into the uranium mines is superficially attractive, if you don't care that the radioisotopes have a wide variety of chemical properties and many will not stay put under the same conditions as uranium. Not staying put is bad; you do not want this stuff in your drinking water, for example. Ideally you'd separate the stuff in the spent fuel according to its chemical properties and dispose of the stuff that needs disposal in the way which keeps it in one place until it's harmless. This also allows the unused uranium and the plutonium produced in the reactor to be recycled, keeping them out of the waste stream entirely. Check out this Argonne National Lab link for a technical look at what some of the waste-disposal technology might look like. For some reason the Greens don't like this, though. Given that nuclear power emits absolutely no CO2 and nuclear accidents are far more problematic for humans than the environment in general, I have to wonder what the fuss is all about.
--
--
--
Oil-eating bacteria have evolved quite naturally; you'll find them anywhere there are natural oil seeps. After they do their job, they become food for other things. Playing God? Well, yeah; if God had decided to play with supertankers full of crude, He would have made a hungry bug to eat the spills too! It's our problem, though, so we get to make the means to fix it.
--
--
Breaking down a chemical compound does not change anything about the nuclei of the atoms from which it is made. If you have radioactive technetium salts and you convert them to technetium metal, it is still going to be just as radioactive as it was before. What changes is its solubility and other chemical properties. In the case of technetium the metal is insoluble, so you can immobilize it (and prevent it from leaching anywhere) by reducing it to the metallic state.
--
The Indian government is responsible for what happened. Under India's home-rule laws, Union Carbide was required to appoint Indian managers for its plants, and was unable to do anything meaningful about the neglected maintenance. The Indian manager at Bhopal neglected to do the required maintenance at the plant, and the rest is history. Union Carbide bears no more moral responsibility for the deaths and injuries at Bhopal than Ford bears for the slave-labor conditions at its plants in Germany from 1941-44. Their control had been usurped by a government bent on its own goals. Your government, BTW, which has also written the plant history you're being taught in class.
--
I've seen footage of that Mariner launch, and the booster failed due to a negatively-damped yaw oscillation. This is consistent with a lack of a hyphen (negative sign) in the PID loop for yaw control; I don't see how averaging velocity would have anything to do with it.
--
a.) Religion has anything to do with biology (Christian Science, anyone?), and
b.) That what I posted is what I believe, rather than a position I assumed for the sake of argument (to underscore a deeper point).
Both assumptions are false, and you're not doing so hot in the depth department.
--
Part of religious freedom is that you have to allow people the right to believe, and even do, things that you personally think are heretical, idolatrous, or just plain repugnant. "But it's a baby!", I hear people screaming. That's wrong. They should be saying, "I believe it's a baby." If it was theirs, they'd treat it as a baby. If it was mine, maybe I'd treat it as a baby too. But if it's someone else's, it's for neither of us to say. If something happens to it and it's never born, I have no more business railing against this than if the condom never broke. Other people's freedom includes the right to do things I wouldn't want to do, which is one of the reasons I'd Vote Libertarian.
If someone's religion doesn't allow for CPR (say, coming back from "the dead" makes you a zombie and dooms your soul), neither of us has any business forcing them to either have CPR or perform CPR. If someone's belief is that having a baby at a particular time, place, or situation is wrong, that's not my business or yours either no matter what we would do. It's that pesky religious freedom thing again. I'm sure it bugs you, but there it is.
--
- Discuss theology, or
- Allow others the right to differ, and act on those differences,
and look, I caught one. And a coward who won't even stand behind it, either. No surprises there.--
"Pro-life" laws are nothing more than religious discrimination and infringements of the freedom of conscience.
--
73 Harry Browne
56 John Hagelin
50 David McReynolds
47 Bill Bradley
47 George W. Bush
45 Orrin Hatch
44 Alan Keyes
44 Howard Phillips
38 Malcolm (Steve) Forbes Jr.
38 Patrick J. (Pat) Buchanan
37 Albert Gore Jr.
37 John S. McCain
36 Ralph Nader
35 Gary L. Bauer
34 Donald Trump
21 Warren Beatty
The only real surprise I had was finding the socialist candidate at 50%, only 3 points above Dubya and Bradley.
--
--
The canards on the TU-144 are not for control per se, they are for takeoff and landing. The canards are retractable, and provide nose-up force which can be countered by down-flaperon in the rear. This allows the flaperons to produce additional lift at low speed and lower the nose attitude at landing speed. This, from the Jan. 2000 issue of Flying, IIRC (read it at the book store, didn't buy it).
--
IIRC, transport aircraft now have indicators to flag these failures to the flight crew.
--
To too many Americans, Systeme Internationale is one of those Frog things. Look, those people eat blue moldy goat cheese, would you want to buy a measurement system from them? ;-)
--
I dunno, automotive-grade chips (-40/+105 C temperature range) would handle the steaming part just fine as long as they were cooled with water (and thus wouldn't exceed 100 C device temperature). The effect of bubbling coolant on the lens focus is another matter. ;-)
--
To do anything to you, the court has to have three kinds of jurisdiction:
- Subject matter jurisdiction:the court has to be able to rule on the matter involved.
- Personal jurisdiction:the court has to be able to make rulings which pertain to you.
- Physical jurisdiction:the court has to be able to make rulings about the place where the activities took place.
My non-lawyerly judgement is that the court in California has no physical jurisdiction in Cyprus, and no personal jurisdiction over you (unless you are a US national, and maybe not even then).To do anything to you, the DVD consortium's lawyers would have to get a court in Cyprus to do their bidding.--