Some people are going to be using this to make 3D copies of cheap plastic items they own.
I'd like to see the following system put in place:
Every manufacturer of anything that has plastic components, is required to upload the components' specs to an escrow agency. Things like plastic cases, battery door covers, hinges, knobs, you name it, all will be escrowed.
While the manufacturer is in existence and offering spares for sale, you buy your replacement parts from them in the u$ual way.
After n years, or if the manufacturer goes under, the escrow agency releases the specs to the public.
You can then download the specs and print out your own replacement parts.
This wouldn't affect anyone's bottom line, and it wouldn't let you rip off their electronic components (which is where the real investment is at)... it would simply let you get replacement parts during those times when, traditionally, you couldn't.
Some companies might even choose to release their plans early, on their website or whatever, in order to get goodwill.
"when are you going to end this war on the middle east?"
A war ends the moment that one contestant decides he cannot win, thus becoming the loser. It can never end any sooner than that. Even if you kill all of your opponent's currently enlisted soldiers, it continues.
We could decide to lose at any time, sure, and then accept the consequences.
Or they could decide to lose. Have you given any thought to what an opponent considers in deciding that he cannot win? Hint: war is a contest of wills.
Have you then considered what course of action is incumbent on us, the outspoken citizens of one of the contesting countries, to take?
A page I dug up claims a single tree removes "on average 50 pounds (22 kg) of carbon dioxide annually over 40 years."
Here in the south, a loblolly pine will grow to 5 tons in 25 years. Of that 5 tons, half is wood (the other half is lignin and water), and of that wood, half is carbon (wood is made of sugar which is CHON). So that's around 1.25 tons of carbon per tree after 25 years, or about 100 pounds per year.
But that's here in the south where everything grows faster. Maybe your numbers are averaged to include hardwoods, which do indeed grow far more slowly.
In any case, 100 pounds of carbon equals a bit more than 300 pounds of CO2.
There is already a flock of rubber ducks roaming around the arctic, probably still caught in one of the pelagic LaGrange points where ocean currents circle endlessly. The ducks were in a container that washed off the deck of a cargo ship. That is very sad because the West will never quite recover from this heartbreaking loss of a vital ton of injection-molded plastic crap from China.
In any event, this news item shows that once again, the private sector has done it smaller, faster, and cheaper than those bureaucratic zeebs at NASA.
...once most forests get more than 15 years old they absorb more carbon dioxide than they release, and continue doing so for centuries...
Key questions:
1. Where are the trees putting the carbon? (Gaining additional wood weight I assume... but when they die and fall over, all the carbon is released again by bacteria.)
2. How fast are they sequestering it, compared to the rate at which a clearcut/replant forest would do so?
The lumber industry is greedy, remember? They want to grow the greatest amount of wood in the fastest possible time. They therefore are perfectly motivated to maximize carbon sequestration. And the way that they do it is: for most species, clearcut once every 25-50 years and then replant.
Clearcutting? What you say is mostly correct til the clearcutting part. Once you clear cut you disturb the previous Carbon equilibrium which makes clearcutting a loss for carbon sequestration. Not to mention the erosion, animal devestation, and other problems.
The fastest-growing (i.e. fastest carbon-sequestering) species of tree are not shade-tolerant. That is why production forests, by which I mean forests that are geared to sequester carbon into wood quickly, must be planted on clearcut fields.
Whenever someone squawks about clearcutting, you may infer that they know nothing at all about forestry.
Interesting thought. If new forests are storing carbon in their mass then why not bury the paper we use instead of recycling it and keep harvesting the carbon (wood) from continually planted trees? I guess the carbon gets released again anyway when the paper biodegrades in the landfills. If only we could figure out a way to store paper (plant matter) where it doesn't release it's carbon (e.g. coal), we could recapture it. Basic carbon cycle.
Yes, exactly. I've thought as much too. From the point of view of carbon sequestration, recycling paper and wood is the worst possible action to take. The stuff should be buried deeply enough to sit inert, rather than shallowly (as in a "sanitary landfill" where it will decompose and emit CO2 and methane.
Nor is "save a tree" a useful goal. If a tree is left mature and standing, then it isn't absorbing a significant amount of carbon any more, in the sense that it is not gaining wood weight at a decent rate. And all the carbon is re-emitted if it dies, falls, and rots. They've got to be clearcut, used, and buried, if the carbon is to remain sequestered.
If it's pure CO2 they are capturing and storing, why don't they just release it into the Amazon rain forest?
Storing CO2 is not a viable solution, but giving it to the trees, who live on it and will convert it into 02, is!
Rainforests do not consume a net quantity C02. What carbon they do capture during photosynthesis is later reburned during respiration or released later during decomposition (e.g. bacteria, termites).
If rainforests were net consumers of CO2, then they would be accumulating a carbon store somewhere. This would take the form of vegetation mass (not increasing) or a coal seam somehow forming underneath all the tree roots (not observed). The carbon has to go somewhere if the trees are liberating any oxygen.
The only forests that do liberate oxygen and store carbon are young, growing forests. Mature forests are done -- they are in carbon equilibrium. Only young ones, which result from clearcutting and replanting, harvest carbon. This is why the US carbon credit program for forest owners will only pay out to folks who can prove that their forest is young growth.
And yes, I own a pine forest, and am sick of hearing about this crap.
I simply cannot find a more definitive point at which 'life' begins than at conception. It has nothing to do with my religion, but it is the most logical point at which you can say "Before that point, it was definitely not a human" and after that point "If we do not interfere, it will become a human". I've tried to rationalize abortion by looking at different stages of pregnancy, but I cannot find, or it hasn't yet been identified, that there is a singular event that bridges alive and not alive. Conception, is the most definitive point.
Looking for a 'single point' or other "bright line" won't help you solve the problem, because the same problem exists at the other end of human life, when questions arise about when a person can be unplugged.
The only way to satisfactorily solve the abortion question is to understand personhood as a continuum, or a bell-curve maybe, beginning at conception and ending at death. Along the way we have varying degrees of personness and a corresponding amount of rights. For example, children do not have full adult rights yet; parents can imprison them. Likewise, someone who has lost mental function and yet still breaths also does not have full adult rights.
Extend this reasoning backwards to conception and you can begin to see the shape of the answer.
I'll leave it as an excercise for the reader to wonder why they don't have to follow the law when they don't want to, but why they still use the law when it says things they like anyway.
In this regard, the Scientologists are completely different than the rest of us.
I'll explain the difference, Dumping is when a company sells a product below cost to bankrupt their competitors. Loss leaders are when a store sells a product below what they pay to draw in consumers and get sales.
'dumping' has a specific meaning in economics, and it refers to the practice of selling product in another country at a price far below that country's local cost. This can happen when the seller's country gives him a subsidy that lowers his costs. Tariffs are used to counteract that. A nice example of dumping and tariffs is the ongoing US-Canada softwood lumber squabble. We are currently on version IV of the agreement now and it still ain't right.
What you called 'dumping' is actually called 'predatory pricing'.
Dumping can be done as an act of predatory pricing, but not necessarily.
Every woman dreams of the perfect "fairy princes" wedding. Even the ones that say otherwise have that dream. If you are in any way responsible for that dream not coming true, you will pay for it for the rest of your life. It's nearly impossible to pull off that kind of wedding. Just don't be the fool who screws it up.
The real purpose of a wedding is to impress upon the participants that they are making a grave commitment... and that they are doing it in front of everyone they care about. This helps them stay loyal and attentive over the years ahead.
We humans take cues from our surroundings for how to act; we are natural role-players, and weddings and other ceremonies are implicitly designed to embed the role into our mind as deeply as possible.
We are also natural bargainers, and we tend to value a thing according to what it cost us, rather than its actual utility. Research shows that people will give higher ratings to widget A when it cost twice as much as widget B, even when widgets A and B are identical. Part of the value we assign to our marriage may likewise come from the amount of effort we expended to acquire it.
...which is why this prototype will never see production. They got their flourinert from an old supercomputer, and that's not a viable supply for fullscale production.
That makes me wonder about their motivations for this PR stunt. Venture capital, anyone?
More seriously, I wonder if transformer oil could be used for this sort of thing. Flourinert may be overkill... or maybe transformer oil has enough capacitance to cause problems for the extremely high frequencies used on PC motherboards. Anyone know?
Install Firefox, whack in AdBlock , NoScript, and FlashBlock and you have more privacy and security than with IE.
Opera 9.52 (the latest version) has popup site preferences that allow you to control whether each site can: set cookies for itself, set cookies for other sites, run java, run javascript, run flash or other plugins, use sound, use animated gifs, etc. And there are popup global settings as well in case you just need to toggle them on for a minute. Combined with the latest HOSTS file from those anti-advertising guys, it is teh lovely internets.
You're obviously fighting an up-hill struggle. Going straight to the CEO is both a good and bad idea - if it works you'll get immediate affect, but it's likely to be ignored.
Rarely does the statement "You've got a problem and you need to solve it" ever get a good response.
If you say "We have a problem, this is how other people solve it, and this is what I will need to solve it. Give me the budget and I'll solve the problem." then you are vastly more likely to get what you want. Then you'll have to deliver, but if you are like me (not that I am the best way to be), you'll find the responsibility gratifying and the deadline invigorating.
[...] 400 million years for the formation of oceans on a newly-formed rocky earth followed by the spontaneous auto-formation of ancient bio-molecules, membranes, and proteins that could function as a living cell. Hardly seems long enough.
The problem with these sorts of conjectures is that 400,000,000 doesn't fit into our mind's eye, and so our feeling about what will fit within 400,000,000 years is wildly inaccurate.
For example, you can't feel about how many marbles will fit into 400,000,000 cubic feet without reconstructing the problem into mathematics.
This technology could make an invisible cloak, not an invisibility cloak. You could see right through the cloak, at the person wearing it.
A true invisibility cloak must gather every incident photon and then re-emit it out the other side of the cloak as if it had passed through the wearer. That would require a highly magical system of fiberoptic cables (currently impossible), or else require measuring both the velocity and position of each photon (forever possible).
It would also have to do something with all the photons being emitted by the wearer, particularly the infrared photons (heat rays).
This is true. The founders believed that we have inalienable rights, which means that they are granted by God, not the government. The government is not allowed to try to take them away.
Some of them were xtian and thus believed as much... but many were freemasons who rejected all the invisible-guy-in-the-sky crapola. To the latter, 'inalienable' means "anyone who interferes with you is wrong, and the state ought to protect you".
In any case, it is perilous to base your rights on the assertion that some god granted them to you, because anyone else might just claim you're wrong, and how could the matter ever be settled? In other words, if you take a shortcut to certainty ("God said so"), you are building your house upon the sand.
This means that the zebra, which is one of the prizes for doing this, will become an anti-status symbol, because it will signal that its rider has levelled using triple-experience.
This also means that WoW is behaving more like real life. In real life, time is money, and so we permit moneyed people to spend their money in order to save time. WoW has so far resisted such an arrangement, because non-moneyed people screech so loud when it happens... but now that is changing.
It's not direct yet; you can't yet spend $x to start out at level y... but this refer-a-friend thing is a giant leap in that direction (ala triple experience).
Can you lower your demand for health care? Consumers have no recourse. It's not like you can say, "Well that's a little high for heart surgery, I think I'll shop around first". or "I suppose I don't really need those antibiotics this week".
Yes you can, by a startling amount. Read about what happened when Canada added a five-dollar copay to their universal health coverage. It proved, once and for all, just how elastic a lot of our demand for health care is.
Well, software development is not just code, there's also requirements gathering and design, among others. I'm not saying Adaptive Path didn't jump the gun, but the coding part is easy enough with excellent developers, design, and communication.
Well, the colonizing-another-planet part is easy enough with excellent engineers, design, and communication.
Well, the world-peace part is easy enough with excellent leaders, design, and communication.
Well, the find-the-higgs part is easy enough with excellent scientists, design, and communication.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see the following system put in place:
This wouldn't affect anyone's bottom line, and it wouldn't let you rip off their electronic components (which is where the real investment is at)... it would simply let you get replacement parts during those times when, traditionally, you couldn't.
Some companies might even choose to release their plans early, on their website or whatever, in order to get goodwill.
A war ends the moment that one contestant decides he cannot win, thus becoming the loser. It can never end any sooner than that. Even if you kill all of your opponent's currently enlisted soldiers, it continues.
We could decide to lose at any time, sure, and then accept the consequences.
Or they could decide to lose. Have you given any thought to what an opponent considers in deciding that he cannot win? Hint: war is a contest of wills.
Have you then considered what course of action is incumbent on us, the outspoken citizens of one of the contesting countries, to take?
Here in the south, a loblolly pine will grow to 5 tons in 25 years. Of that 5 tons, half is wood (the other half is lignin and water), and of that wood, half is carbon (wood is made of sugar which is CHON). So that's around 1.25 tons of carbon per tree after 25 years, or about 100 pounds per year.
But that's here in the south where everything grows faster. Maybe your numbers are averaged to include hardwoods, which do indeed grow far more slowly.
In any case, 100 pounds of carbon equals a bit more than 300 pounds of CO2.
As the owner of a softwood lumber plantation, I assure you that you are hilariously mistaken.
And never mind the cost of the land itself, which is high and still rising, especially if the land is easily accessible from civilization.
In any event, the CO2 will remain sequestered only if the trees are harvested, preserved as a product like lumber or paper, and *not* recycled.
There is already a flock of rubber ducks roaming around the arctic, probably still caught in one of the pelagic LaGrange points where ocean currents circle endlessly. The ducks were in a container that washed off the deck of a cargo ship. That is very sad because the West will never quite recover from this heartbreaking loss of a vital ton of injection-molded plastic crap from China.
In any event, this news item shows that once again, the private sector has done it smaller, faster, and cheaper than those bureaucratic zeebs at NASA.
Key questions:
1. Where are the trees putting the carbon? (Gaining additional wood weight I assume... but when they die and fall over, all the carbon is released again by bacteria.)
2. How fast are they sequestering it, compared to the rate at which a clearcut/replant forest would do so?
The lumber industry is greedy, remember? They want to grow the greatest amount of wood in the fastest possible time. They therefore are perfectly motivated to maximize carbon sequestration. And the way that they do it is: for most species, clearcut once every 25-50 years and then replant.
The fastest-growing (i.e. fastest carbon-sequestering) species of tree are not shade-tolerant. That is why production forests, by which I mean forests that are geared to sequester carbon into wood quickly, must be planted on clearcut fields.
Whenever someone squawks about clearcutting, you may infer that they know nothing at all about forestry.
Yes, exactly. I've thought as much too. From the point of view of carbon sequestration, recycling paper and wood is the worst possible action to take. The stuff should be buried deeply enough to sit inert, rather than shallowly (as in a "sanitary landfill" where it will decompose and emit CO2 and methane.
Nor is "save a tree" a useful goal. If a tree is left mature and standing, then it isn't absorbing a significant amount of carbon any more, in the sense that it is not gaining wood weight at a decent rate. And all the carbon is re-emitted if it dies, falls, and rots. They've got to be clearcut, used, and buried, if the carbon is to remain sequestered.
Rainforests do not consume a net quantity C02. What carbon they do capture during photosynthesis is later reburned during respiration or released later during decomposition (e.g. bacteria, termites).
If rainforests were net consumers of CO2, then they would be accumulating a carbon store somewhere. This would take the form of vegetation mass (not increasing) or a coal seam somehow forming underneath all the tree roots (not observed). The carbon has to go somewhere if the trees are liberating any oxygen.
The only forests that do liberate oxygen and store carbon are young, growing forests. Mature forests are done -- they are in carbon equilibrium. Only young ones, which result from clearcutting and replanting, harvest carbon. This is why the US carbon credit program for forest owners will only pay out to folks who can prove that their forest is young growth.
And yes, I own a pine forest, and am sick of hearing about this crap.
Only if you did something very silly like mount it on a fixed axis, rather than a three-axis gimble.
Looking for a 'single point' or other "bright line" won't help you solve the problem, because the same problem exists at the other end of human life, when questions arise about when a person can be unplugged.
The only way to satisfactorily solve the abortion question is to understand personhood as a continuum, or a bell-curve maybe, beginning at conception and ending at death. Along the way we have varying degrees of personness and a corresponding amount of rights. For example, children do not have full adult rights yet; parents can imprison them. Likewise, someone who has lost mental function and yet still breaths also does not have full adult rights.
Extend this reasoning backwards to conception and you can begin to see the shape of the answer.
In this regard, the Scientologists are completely different than the rest of us.
Where 'completely' means 'not a bit'.
'dumping' has a specific meaning in economics, and it refers to the practice of selling product in another country at a price far below that country's local cost. This can happen when the seller's country gives him a subsidy that lowers his costs. Tariffs are used to counteract that. A nice example of dumping and tariffs is the ongoing US-Canada softwood lumber squabble. We are currently on version IV of the agreement now and it still ain't right.
What you called 'dumping' is actually called 'predatory pricing'.
Dumping can be done as an act of predatory pricing, but not necessarily.
The real purpose of a wedding is to impress upon the participants that they are making a grave commitment... and that they are doing it in front of everyone they care about. This helps them stay loyal and attentive over the years ahead.
We humans take cues from our surroundings for how to act; we are natural role-players, and weddings and other ceremonies are implicitly designed to embed the role into our mind as deeply as possible.
We are also natural bargainers, and we tend to value a thing according to what it cost us, rather than its actual utility. Research shows that people will give higher ratings to widget A when it cost twice as much as widget B, even when widgets A and B are identical. Part of the value we assign to our marriage may likewise come from the amount of effort we expended to acquire it.
...which is why this prototype will never see production. They got their flourinert from an old supercomputer, and that's not a viable supply for fullscale production.
That makes me wonder about their motivations for this PR stunt. Venture capital, anyone?
More seriously, I wonder if transformer oil could be used for this sort of thing. Flourinert may be overkill... or maybe transformer oil has enough capacitance to cause problems for the extremely high frequencies used on PC motherboards. Anyone know?
I would like to have seen Montana.
Opera 9.52 (the latest version) has popup site preferences that allow you to control whether each site can: set cookies for itself, set cookies for other sites, run java, run javascript, run flash or other plugins, use sound, use animated gifs, etc. And there are popup global settings as well in case you just need to toggle them on for a minute. Combined with the latest HOSTS file from those anti-advertising guys, it is teh lovely internets.
Rarely does the statement "You've got a problem and you need to solve it" ever get a good response.
If you say "We have a problem, this is how other people solve it, and this is what I will need to solve it. Give me the budget and I'll solve the problem." then you are vastly more likely to get what you want. Then you'll have to deliver, but if you are like me (not that I am the best way to be), you'll find the responsibility gratifying and the deadline invigorating.
When solo gaming gets boring, try switching the controller to your other hand. It feels like it's someone else playing with your wii.
The problem with these sorts of conjectures is that 400,000,000 doesn't fit into our mind's eye, and so our feeling about what will fit within 400,000,000 years is wildly inaccurate.
For example, you can't feel about how many marbles will fit into 400,000,000 cubic feet without reconstructing the problem into mathematics.
This technology could make an invisible cloak, not an invisibility cloak. You could see right through the cloak, at the person wearing it.
A true invisibility cloak must gather every incident photon and then re-emit it out the other side of the cloak as if it had passed through the wearer. That would require a highly magical system of fiberoptic cables (currently impossible), or else require measuring both the velocity and position of each photon (forever possible).
It would also have to do something with all the photons being emitted by the wearer, particularly the infrared photons (heat rays).
Some of them were xtian and thus believed as much... but many were freemasons who rejected all the invisible-guy-in-the-sky crapola. To the latter, 'inalienable' means "anyone who interferes with you is wrong, and the state ought to protect you".
In any case, it is perilous to base your rights on the assertion that some god granted them to you, because anyone else might just claim you're wrong, and how could the matter ever be settled? In other words, if you take a shortcut to certainty ("God said so"), you are building your house upon the sand.
This means that the zebra, which is one of the prizes for doing this, will become an anti-status symbol, because it will signal that its rider has levelled using triple-experience.
This also means that WoW is behaving more like real life. In real life, time is money, and so we permit moneyed people to spend their money in order to save time. WoW has so far resisted such an arrangement, because non-moneyed people screech so loud when it happens... but now that is changing.
It's not direct yet; you can't yet spend $x to start out at level y... but this refer-a-friend thing is a giant leap in that direction (ala triple experience).
Yes you can, by a startling amount. Read about what happened when Canada added a five-dollar copay to their universal health coverage. It proved, once and for all, just how elastic a lot of our demand for health care is.
Well, the colonizing-another-planet part is easy enough with excellent engineers, design, and communication.
Well, the world-peace part is easy enough with excellent leaders, design, and communication.
Well, the find-the-higgs part is easy enough with excellent scientists, design, and communication.