Actually, IIRC, humans have a very low radiation tolerance. Some of the characteristics that serve us well in other areas are counterproductive for surviving radiation.
For example, we hit reproductive maturity late. This means that the time period in which we might be subject to radiation damage, but can't start breeding yet, is longer. Say hello to sterility and genetic damage! We're omnivores at the top of the food chain, so irradiation of plant and animal life can work it's way up to us more easily, either by subjecting us to contaminated food, or to starvation if food sources die out. We're social animals, so we do not do as well when our numbers take a hit - individual humans can't survive alone as well as other animals. Our life expectancy is fairly long, so the likelyhood of getting cancer is higher in humans than in most other species, since cancer takes time to develop.
All of the above means that biologically we're particularly vulnerable to fallout. Culturally we're also reluctant to subject ourselves to risk - a 1 in 100 rate of radiation damage would be too high for humans to consider safe, and too small to affect most other species. Most animals in the wild don't live long enough to have to worry about cancer, and it takes an awful lot more radiation in the short term to aflict them with radiation poisoning or sterility.
In fact, in the case of the Chernobyl life, we evacuated low radiation areas where the lack of human presense is doing more good than the radiation is doing harm - either the animals are more resistant than us, or they are suffering losses to radiation that we would consider dangerous, but that local life doesn't especially notice.
Basically what it boils down to is that nuclear accidents and nuclear weapons are a larger problem for mankind than for the rest of the planet. I've always thought of radiation as more of a safety hazard than an environmental one.
So are you saying violent sex offenders who target children aren't psychopaths? What about psychopathic people who target men? (sorry to nitpick, but as someone who works in that field, some comments like that catch my attention)
It's alright to nitpick, since I am not entirely sure of the facts here. What I wrote was based on something I'd heard on a science show. From what I understood, when you look at sex offenders and psychopathy, thet have a tendancy towards A) violence and B) women of breeding age.
In other words, your typical serial rapist or rapist/murderer is a very likely candidate for psychopathy. Nonviolent offenders, or offenders who's victim of choice is male and/or prepubescent, are less likely candidates. The important word here is "likely", as from what I remember this is only a statistical pattern, not an absolute rule; it's quite possible for an individual offender to break the pattern. For example, a psychopathic nonviolent offender may work his way up to violence over time, in which case in his nonviolent phase he would still be a psychopath (he'd just be one who hasn't escalated to violence yet).
There are a couple points to remember here, the first being the fact that pedophilia is an unrelated disorder, so the number of people who are both pedo and psycho is small. The cross section between those two disorders may be almost unnoticable. All active child abusers are de facto sex offenders (some just haven't been caught in the act yet), but their incidence of psychopathy isn't neccesarily that high.
Also remember that the majority of violent psychopathic criminals are male. Monster, the movie you linked, to focused on someone who was an exception to that rule. And most men are heterosexual, so it would follow that even if psychos have the same ratio of gay:straight, you'd still mostly have heterosexual males (since females are a minority among psychos, and gays a minority among men).
Actually, psychopaths aren't emotionless. In fact, problems with anger management often go hand in hand with psychopathy. The particular problem with them in the clinical sense is lack of empathy and lack of guilt (this is oversimplified, but will serve well enough here). Their other emotional responses aren't totally normal, but neither are they absent.
So yes, a psycho could indeed murder in anger or a jealous rage. What a normal person would have more trouble with is premeditated murder, where it takes more than a momentary overreaction or lapse in judgement to push someone over the line.
I'd guess around 20% of the population, this is a guess and it could be wrong, but it's enough people that there are people in your family, friends, people at work (like your boss), and ex-girlfriends/ex-boyfriends who were/are psycho.
That's from the GP. This is from the parent:
Once again, I said the prison population, not the general population.
Both quotes are by you, Elucido. See the problem with this?
If you'd meant the prison population was 20% psychopathic, then you wouldn't be suggesting exes, bosses and the like as potential psychos in the first quote, unless you meant to imply that my boss is an ex-con. If you meant to say 20% of the people in prison are psychopathic, then say that, and don't give confusing examples.
And I didn't say that the number of psychopaths in the general population was 4-5%. The high number I found in under five minutes was 1% of females and 3% of males (which would mean 2% total). Now, is this figure accurate? I have no clue. But I utterly refuse to believe that 20% is even remotely possible in the general population.
It does sound possible for the prison population however, so I will cede that point for the sake of arguement. However, that also means that a whopping 80% of the people in prison are not psychopaths. In other words, 4/5 convicts would presumably feel guilt or remorse. In a thread that started on the subject of rehabilitation, I'd say that's important.
It's impossible to measure the general population unless you can test every single person in the general population
That is incorrect. You can never know with total certainty, but random sampling can give you a close enough margin of error that you know to within a percent or two. This isn't exacly a revelation; we've been using statistics to estimate how many of X there are in the general population for a very long time. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't have to be in order to be good enough.
However if 20% of prisoners think like this, well you know that a lot of people outside of prison think like this, certainly more than 5% in my opinion, but maybe less than 20%.
Depends on what assumptions you're working from. For example, I've seen the arguement made that ex-cons have a higher rate of sociopathy than people entering the prison population. That could imply that a penal environment breeds sociopathic/psychopathic tendancies. A person subjected to 10-20 years of prison life isn't going to be as mentally healthy as he was when he went in. Additionally, the rate of addiction and substance abuse rises in prison - that could be a contributing factor.
One could also argue that using the prison population as a barometer for the mental health of the general population is unwise.
I never said all psychopaths are criminals. I never said all psychopaths are violent. Read precisely what I said, psychopaths do not feel guilt, remorse, or empathy, and there are a lot of people who don't feel guilt, remorse or empathy, enuogh that I'd say it's normal. I'd guess around 20% of the population, this is a guess and it could be wrong, but it's enough people that there are people in your family, friends, people at work (like your boss), and ex-girlfriends/ex-boyfriends who were/are psycho. It's as common as any other trait, like fat people, everyone knows a few, or like short people, or tall people, etc.
The figure I got off a google search in all of about 5 minutes was 3% of men and 1% of women. Note that those were the high estimates, not the low ones. 20%? You're dreaming, or else you have a seriously negative view of humanity.
Moreover, you're asking me to prove things while you are, by your own admission, presenting your wild aproximate guesses as fact. You prove it.
The average people almost always commit suicide immediately after they commit violent acts.
Would this be another one of your wild guesses?
There is a high suicide rate in prison, and for people awaiting trial. And there are plenty of murder-suicides. But that's a hell of a long way from "average people almost always kill themselves after commiting violent acts". And moreover, most of the murder suicides aren't exactly average either.
Regardless of whether someone has commited a crime, most suicides are born of depression. This means that murderers who off themselve either planned suicide and decided in advance to take someone else with them (as in murder suicide, like the Columbine massacre), or else commited the crime, were driven to depression by guilt, and later killed themselves, which is not "immediately commiting suicide" as you phrased it. The impetus for self-preservation is stronger than guilt.
A killer who does not also take their own life is not a de facto psychopath, which is what you seem to be claiming.
Oh, I'd fully beleive that, on average, a higher percentage of psychopaths commit muder than healthy people. The number I usually see for psychopaths in the general population is about 2% (higher for men, lower for women). I could easily see that number rising by a signifigant factor if the population you surveyed was composed entirely of convicts - ie a survey done on death row would yield a much higher number of psychopaths than a survey done from a totally random sampling.
What I disagree with is the assertion that "average" people don't commit murder. It's quite possible for someone to be guilty of murder and not suffer from any mental illness. And this is important to the discussion - rehabilitation doesn't seem to do much good for psychopathy at present, whereas it does do some good for criminals who actually regret their actions. In other words, both extreme views ("all criminals can be rehabilitated" and "all criminals are irredemable/incurable") are equally wrong, as is typically the case with extremes.
The other point I disagree with is the assertion that psychopath = killer. There is an overlap to be sure, but it is not total. Not everyone who commits violent or sexual crimes is a psycho, and not every psycho is a dangerous offender.
All psychopaths, lack the capability to feel guilt, thats why they commit murders in the first place.
Psychopathy isn't exactly common you know. Contrary to popular opinion, most criminals aren't psychopathic. Moreover, those criminals suffering from it aren't automatically violent; a criminal psychopath can just as easily be an embezeller. In fact, one could argue that the best "white collar" criminal would be a clinical psychopath in a position of corporate power - they'd make a great CEO in the short term.
Now, that isn't to say there aren't violent psychopathic criminals. Most serial killers, and violent sex offenders who target adult women, would qualify. And it is true that they are extremely hard to rehabilitate (some would say impossible). But they aren't the only ones behind bars. In fact, I'm not even convinced they represent a signifigant fraction of violent criminals - the numbers I've seen vary wildly, which suggest to me that nobody knows how many of them exist with any certainty.
To give them as an example of the futility of rehabilitation is utterly ridiculous. It's like taking a rabid dog as a typical example of what most strays are like.
the average person would never be able to kill their wife because they'd feel guilt, remorse, empathy, psychopaths don't feel this.
The "average" person is quite capable of murder, given the right incentive, or the right lapse in judgement. Most "crimes of passion" would qualify. Do you really think somebody who, to give an example, kills their wife after catching her in bed with another person is automatically psycho? Granted a psychopath put in that position is more likely to commit violence than an average person, but that doesn't make the average person incapable of murder, it merely makes him statistically less likely to commit it.
To presume all who commit crimes are suffering from mental illness, or are in some way less human, is a common error. We wish to distance ourselves from those we consider evil, by claiming that we could never do such a thing. But make no mistake; this is denial, plain and simple.
That's not to say that there aren't criminal psychopaths in the world; rather it is to admit that average, mentally healthy people, under the right conditions, can do things we as a society consider monsterous. For every psycho killing people at random, there are a dozen "average" people killing for revenge, for profit, for ideology, or for any number of other reasons.
It takes a lot more energy to kill someone than it does to warm them. Ever used a microwave? That certainly warms food quickly. Microwave radiation on that level could hurt like hell if you were exposed to it, but it would tak an awful lot more power than a kitchen appliance to fry you. We could certainly build an EM or particle weapon that could fry a human, but it wouldn't be easy. And power storage is a big issue.
Batteries don't actually have a lot of juice. Think about laptop batteries as an example - they run out of charge in no time, to the degree that power effeciency in laptops is a vital feature. Moreover, if you take out a laptop's battery, it sure as hell isn't small, so simply building a bigger battery isn't the best option. Think about electric cars - what's stopped them from being successful is their battery life (well, they have other problems too, but that's a biggie). Energy weapons would be even worse off, since you'd need a power supply that could discharge quickly, which favours capacitors over batteries (but gets you up against the smaller storage capacity of a capacitor).
Powerful enough to warm food and powerful enough to quickly kill a healthy adult human aren't the same.
Well, if the ballistic projectile is moving at the speed of light....:-)
Actually, I think that would probably work. Gravity bends the path of light too after all, so shouldn't a projectile moving at C follow the same path as a beam of light fired alongside it? Of course, a massive object cannot travel at C, so it's something of a moot point anyway....
Actually, I'm pretty sure that "gauss gun" is another way of saying coil gun, ie something like the device described in TFA that employs magnetic rings. Conversely, a rail gun is a device that uses conducting rails, and does not incorporate rings. Either setup can also be described as "mass drivers" in the case of large launch systems like the one in the article.
Both are high velocity projectile launchers that use magnetism instead of chemical propellant, but they aren't built the same way. For one thing, I was always under the impression that a coil gun needed to be superconductive to work properly, whereas a rail gun can be built using conventional conductors. For another, the projectile in a rail gun actually has to be in contact with the walls of the barrel, whereas a coil gun can suspend the projectile magnetically.
Of course, there might be some definition of gauss gun that I am not aware of that includes rail guns. But the device in TFA is most definately not a rail gun itself, since they describe it using superconductive magnetic rings.
Even better, imagine what will happen if their system is less than secure. Try and think about the damage a script kiddie could do if he got ahold of a list of people's passwords and phone numbers.
Or, even worse, if he found out how to send the signal to the phones sans password - after all, if the company is lazy, then maybe all they'd do is dial up the cell phone and send a general purpose "kill" signal. Figure out how to tell the cellphone that it's stolen while still in the possession of its owner, and you can make somebody very, very mad.
See, the difference is, when I talk in either technical or scientific terms, I am actually trying to say something. What I'm saying may not be easy to understand if you don't have the introductory background, but there is content to translate (and I'm pretty good at stating technical stuff in normal english if the need arises).
And, as far as that goes, someone with a better understanding of technology or science can easily go over my head if they start talking in specialized terms beyond the scope of my own knowledge - in such cases I usually understand that they are trying to say something, even if I don't quite get it, and a little background will usually clear things up for me.
When a manager speaks in business-speak, they are trying not to say anything. Business speak is "noise", with very little actual signal. They are deliberately trying to mask the fact that their ramblings have no useful or meaningful content. At best, they are using euphamisms to avoid unpleasant realities (ie, "downsized" as opposed to "fired"). At worst, they're trying to weasel out of actually doing their job.
If you were to translate most memos written in business jargon into readable english, they'd work out to about one sentance. If you were to translate a technical document into readable english, with all the relevant information kept (ie RAM written out as "random access memory") it would double in size.
From what I've seen of the management in big companies, the inability to speak clear english is an asset (I have yet to decipher what the hell a "paradigm shift" is). So outsourcing to another country where the locals don't speak english as their first language would be easy! All you have to do is sit them by a speakerphone and give them a binder containing all the latest buzzwords and impenetrable business-speak.
After all, it's not like with call centers, where people might actually complain when the speakers aren't understandable. Who'd be able to tell the difference? I'm sure such gems as "we're reorganizing to suit our core competency" makes just as much sense in Hindi!:-)
Right, because technology never improves beyond the prototype stage. Plus, while you may generate "some" electrictiy with solar, it'll never replace either fossil fuels or nuclear as a centralized means of power generation. As a distributed means of generation, it shows promise, so it is indeed a partial solution - but I must stress that it will never by itself be a full solution. Other tech is needed to have a completely green economy, particularly if we want to get rid of fossil fuels in our cars and other vehicles.
As for "fusion reactor may never work", have you even been paying attention? They're already starting to work! Hell, RTFA, the Chinese are begining to develop them - and what they're doing today is still far less than what ITER can accomplish. Sticking your head in the sand and saying that "it'll never work", when we've already gotten past some of the hardest obstacles (namely, actually getting a controlled fusion reaction, and maintaining it for any duration under confinement) is willfully stupid. It's like claiming we're never going to put a man in space after we'd already sent unmanned vehicles up. The fact that it's taken thirty years to get this far with fusion is a testament to the slow nature of R&D, and a sign that fusion projects are badly underfunded (despite what the GP seems to think).
What, at a few kilograms of deuterium per year? It would take us millenia to run out of fuel, and even then we wouldn't make a significant dent in water levels. Hell, D is only about 1 atom of hydrogen out of every 6000+, the other 5999+ being regular hydrogen, which isn't usable in this type of reactor (meaning if we ran out of D, which as I said would take millenia, we'd still have 5999/6000 of our total water supply).
And if we did have fusion reactors capable of using up our water supply by fusing truely massive quantities of elemental hydrogen, we'd be able to use them abord spacecraft and just import the damn hydrogen from somewhere else in the solar system. It's only the most common element in the universe after all.
Well, IANAEOS (expert on solar), but it's been my understanding that the advances in solar panel effeciency leveled off after we got past a certain point due to physical limitations imposed by thermodynamics. Moreover, I know 30% sounds cruddy, but that's 30% of the sunlight hitting the panel being converted into electricity. From a practical standpoint, that's damn good.
I'd be inclined to wonder how effecient the other power sources we have that use energy originating from the sun compare, in terms of effeciency. For example, fossil fuels have a few million years head start to build up energy stores, and hydro power is using the planet-wide hydrological cycle - both cases where scale negates the need for effeciency.
Direct conversion of sunlight may never reach high levels of power effeciency. In fact I'd say what matters more is economic effeciency (they don't need to be super-effecient if we can mass produce them cheaply enough). However, that isn't a problem that requires government funded R&D so much as it requires widespread adoption by the public. If we started building homes with solar roofs wherever the local climate allows, then I suspect solar will be a more useful part of the energy equation.
This doesn't remove the need for centralized power generation though, which is where fusion would be a godsend. I'm all for a combination approach to solving our energy needs, but I can't think of anything that comes close to fusion for building a clean power plant.
We already do that. Flip side is, a fusion reaction would need far less water than a thirsty population, so it wouldn't contribute to scarcity. Moreover most of what we fight over is fresh water, whereas current deuterium extraction facilities use seawater IIRC.
Plus, if we stop fouling up our water supplies once we have cleaner energy available, wouldn't that reduce the need to fight over water, instead of vice-versa?
If you have some design for a solar power generator that can even come close to the output of a fusion reactor, then please, by all means, post it. Or patent it - I'm sure you'd make a fortune.
Of course I somehow doubt that. After all, photoelectric solar panels are already close to their maximum possible energy effeciency. We could get far better effeciency out of them if we put them in orbit and beamed the power back, given that doing so would get around the problems associated with the atmosphere, but our current space program doesn't even come close to adequate for such a task.
For a point of comparison, fusion is already hitting breakeven. So much for "wasted" money these past thirty years, eh? The fact that something takes time and effort does not make it worthless.
If you seriously want power from sunlight, burn oil or coal. After all, the energy in fossil fuels comes from sunlight introduced into the biosphere millions of years ago. In fact one could argue that fossil fuels are the worlds oldest natural solar battery. And unlike solar energy, which loses much in transmission, oil is easily transportable. You can extract and use it in places where the sun doesn't shine.
Of course, it also burns dirty as hell. Even ignoring climate change, burning fossil fuels releases all sorts of crap into the air, from heavy metals, to soot, to radioactives. But lord knows, if you want to utilize that "fusion reactor up in the sky", you can do so today for all your energy needs - no fancy new tech required.
Plus, who ever said fusion and solar were incompatible solutions? Governments spend a pittance on both of them (yeah it sounds like a lot, but look at their overall budget for comparison), so impling that they favour one over the other is utter rubbish. If you want to get really technical, some of the budget for the space program over the past decades paid for solar panel development, as well as things like fuel cell technology, so it's hardly as though green power has been ignored.
We can pursue solar power in the mean time without the assistance of the governement - go out and buy some for your own use, get your home off the grid (assuming you haven't done so already). No new R&D is required to make solar a viable partial solution to our energy needs, and at the same time, there is little R&D that could ever turn it into a full solution. Conversely we cannot pursue fusion power in the same fashion - the goals are too long term for the private sector to be interested in. Your point is a classic false dichotomy.
Actually, you don't lose mass when you burn something. Chemical combustion converts potential chemical energy into heat, but the end products mass as much as the starting ones. All the energy in a gallon of gas is the energy that went into producing it.
But technically yes, when you talk about fusion reactors you should say "converted more energy from mass than it took to fuse said mass". So the phrasing from the article/summary is technically in error, but most people who know their physics can grasp what they actually mean.
I'm pretty sure the problem with that is commercial viability, not any physical limitation. Remember that the reaction only needs to excede it's energy input by a tiny amount in order to break even, so it's not a simple jump from a net energy positive reator to a power generator.
I'm pretty sure that if we improved the tech to the point where producing useful levels of energy was possible, then we'd have already passed the threshold for ignition; ie making the reaction self-renewing is an intermediate step between breakeven fusion and commercial fusion regardless.
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Would that be with a uranium slug? :-)
Actually, IIRC, humans have a very low radiation tolerance. Some of the characteristics that serve us well in other areas are counterproductive for surviving radiation.
For example, we hit reproductive maturity late. This means that the time period in which we might be subject to radiation damage, but can't start breeding yet, is longer. Say hello to sterility and genetic damage! We're omnivores at the top of the food chain, so irradiation of plant and animal life can work it's way up to us more easily, either by subjecting us to contaminated food, or to starvation if food sources die out. We're social animals, so we do not do as well when our numbers take a hit - individual humans can't survive alone as well as other animals. Our life expectancy is fairly long, so the likelyhood of getting cancer is higher in humans than in most other species, since cancer takes time to develop.
All of the above means that biologically we're particularly vulnerable to fallout. Culturally we're also reluctant to subject ourselves to risk - a 1 in 100 rate of radiation damage would be too high for humans to consider safe, and too small to affect most other species. Most animals in the wild don't live long enough to have to worry about cancer, and it takes an awful lot more radiation in the short term to aflict them with radiation poisoning or sterility.
In fact, in the case of the Chernobyl life, we evacuated low radiation areas where the lack of human presense is doing more good than the radiation is doing harm - either the animals are more resistant than us, or they are suffering losses to radiation that we would consider dangerous, but that local life doesn't especially notice.
Basically what it boils down to is that nuclear accidents and nuclear weapons are a larger problem for mankind than for the rest of the planet. I've always thought of radiation as more of a safety hazard than an environmental one.
In other words, your typical serial rapist or rapist/murderer is a very likely candidate for psychopathy. Nonviolent offenders, or offenders who's victim of choice is male and/or prepubescent, are less likely candidates. The important word here is "likely", as from what I remember this is only a statistical pattern, not an absolute rule; it's quite possible for an individual offender to break the pattern. For example, a psychopathic nonviolent offender may work his way up to violence over time, in which case in his nonviolent phase he would still be a psychopath (he'd just be one who hasn't escalated to violence yet).
There are a couple points to remember here, the first being the fact that pedophilia is an unrelated disorder, so the number of people who are both pedo and psycho is small. The cross section between those two disorders may be almost unnoticable. All active child abusers are de facto sex offenders (some just haven't been caught in the act yet), but their incidence of psychopathy isn't neccesarily that high.
Also remember that the majority of violent psychopathic criminals are male. Monster, the movie you linked, to focused on someone who was an exception to that rule. And most men are heterosexual, so it would follow that even if psychos have the same ratio of gay:straight, you'd still mostly have heterosexual males (since females are a minority among psychos, and gays a minority among men).
Actually, psychopaths aren't emotionless. In fact, problems with anger management often go hand in hand with psychopathy. The particular problem with them in the clinical sense is lack of empathy and lack of guilt (this is oversimplified, but will serve well enough here). Their other emotional responses aren't totally normal, but neither are they absent.
So yes, a psycho could indeed murder in anger or a jealous rage. What a normal person would have more trouble with is premeditated murder, where it takes more than a momentary overreaction or lapse in judgement to push someone over the line.
Both quotes are by you, Elucido. See the problem with this?
If you'd meant the prison population was 20% psychopathic, then you wouldn't be suggesting exes, bosses and the like as potential psychos in the first quote, unless you meant to imply that my boss is an ex-con. If you meant to say 20% of the people in prison are psychopathic, then say that, and don't give confusing examples.
And I didn't say that the number of psychopaths in the general population was 4-5%. The high number I found in under five minutes was 1% of females and 3% of males (which would mean 2% total). Now, is this figure accurate? I have no clue. But I utterly refuse to believe that 20% is even remotely possible in the general population.
It does sound possible for the prison population however, so I will cede that point for the sake of arguement. However, that also means that a whopping 80% of the people in prison are not psychopaths. In other words, 4/5 convicts would presumably feel guilt or remorse. In a thread that started on the subject of rehabilitation, I'd say that's important.
That is incorrect. You can never know with total certainty, but random sampling can give you a close enough margin of error that you know to within a percent or two. This isn't exacly a revelation; we've been using statistics to estimate how many of X there are in the general population for a very long time. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't have to be in order to be good enough.
Depends on what assumptions you're working from. For example, I've seen the arguement made that ex-cons have a higher rate of sociopathy than people entering the prison population. That could imply that a penal environment breeds sociopathic/psychopathic tendancies. A person subjected to 10-20 years of prison life isn't going to be as mentally healthy as he was when he went in. Additionally, the rate of addiction and substance abuse rises in prison - that could be a contributing factor.
One could also argue that using the prison population as a barometer for the mental health of the general population is unwise.
Moreover, you're asking me to prove things while you are, by your own admission, presenting your wild aproximate guesses as fact. You prove it.
Would this be another one of your wild guesses?
There is a high suicide rate in prison, and for people awaiting trial. And there are plenty of murder-suicides. But that's a hell of a long way from "average people almost always kill themselves after commiting violent acts". And moreover, most of the murder suicides aren't exactly average either.
Regardless of whether someone has commited a crime, most suicides are born of depression. This means that murderers who off themselve either planned suicide and decided in advance to take someone else with them (as in murder suicide, like the Columbine massacre), or else commited the crime, were driven to depression by guilt, and later killed themselves, which is not "immediately commiting suicide" as you phrased it. The impetus for self-preservation is stronger than guilt.
A killer who does not also take their own life is not a de facto psychopath, which is what you seem to be claiming.
Oh, I'd fully beleive that, on average, a higher percentage of psychopaths commit muder than healthy people. The number I usually see for psychopaths in the general population is about 2% (higher for men, lower for women). I could easily see that number rising by a signifigant factor if the population you surveyed was composed entirely of convicts - ie a survey done on death row would yield a much higher number of psychopaths than a survey done from a totally random sampling.
What I disagree with is the assertion that "average" people don't commit murder. It's quite possible for someone to be guilty of murder and not suffer from any mental illness. And this is important to the discussion - rehabilitation doesn't seem to do much good for psychopathy at present, whereas it does do some good for criminals who actually regret their actions. In other words, both extreme views ("all criminals can be rehabilitated" and "all criminals are irredemable/incurable") are equally wrong, as is typically the case with extremes.
The other point I disagree with is the assertion that psychopath = killer. There is an overlap to be sure, but it is not total. Not everyone who commits violent or sexual crimes is a psycho, and not every psycho is a dangerous offender.
Now, that isn't to say there aren't violent psychopathic criminals. Most serial killers, and violent sex offenders who target adult women, would qualify. And it is true that they are extremely hard to rehabilitate (some would say impossible). But they aren't the only ones behind bars. In fact, I'm not even convinced they represent a signifigant fraction of violent criminals - the numbers I've seen vary wildly, which suggest to me that nobody knows how many of them exist with any certainty.
To give them as an example of the futility of rehabilitation is utterly ridiculous. It's like taking a rabid dog as a typical example of what most strays are like.
The "average" person is quite capable of murder, given the right incentive, or the right lapse in judgement. Most "crimes of passion" would qualify. Do you really think somebody who, to give an example, kills their wife after catching her in bed with another person is automatically psycho? Granted a psychopath put in that position is more likely to commit violence than an average person, but that doesn't make the average person incapable of murder, it merely makes him statistically less likely to commit it.
To presume all who commit crimes are suffering from mental illness, or are in some way less human, is a common error. We wish to distance ourselves from those we consider evil, by claiming that we could never do such a thing. But make no mistake; this is denial, plain and simple.
That's not to say that there aren't criminal psychopaths in the world; rather it is to admit that average, mentally healthy people, under the right conditions, can do things we as a society consider monsterous. For every psycho killing people at random, there are a dozen "average" people killing for revenge, for profit, for ideology, or for any number of other reasons.
It takes a lot more energy to kill someone than it does to warm them. Ever used a microwave? That certainly warms food quickly. Microwave radiation on that level could hurt like hell if you were exposed to it, but it would tak an awful lot more power than a kitchen appliance to fry you. We could certainly build an EM or particle weapon that could fry a human, but it wouldn't be easy. And power storage is a big issue.
Batteries don't actually have a lot of juice. Think about laptop batteries as an example - they run out of charge in no time, to the degree that power effeciency in laptops is a vital feature. Moreover, if you take out a laptop's battery, it sure as hell isn't small, so simply building a bigger battery isn't the best option. Think about electric cars - what's stopped them from being successful is their battery life (well, they have other problems too, but that's a biggie). Energy weapons would be even worse off, since you'd need a power supply that could discharge quickly, which favours capacitors over batteries (but gets you up against the smaller storage capacity of a capacitor).
Powerful enough to warm food and powerful enough to quickly kill a healthy adult human aren't the same.
Half-Life seems more probably every day :-)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to brush up on my crowbar skills.
Oops, yeah, that's what I meant. The way I wrote it is unclear - it should indeed be "object with mass".
Well, if the ballistic projectile is moving at the speed of light.... :-)
Actually, I think that would probably work. Gravity bends the path of light too after all, so shouldn't a projectile moving at C follow the same path as a beam of light fired alongside it? Of course, a massive object cannot travel at C, so it's something of a moot point anyway....
Both are high velocity projectile launchers that use magnetism instead of chemical propellant, but they aren't built the same way. For one thing, I was always under the impression that a coil gun needed to be superconductive to work properly, whereas a rail gun can be built using conventional conductors. For another, the projectile in a rail gun actually has to be in contact with the walls of the barrel, whereas a coil gun can suspend the projectile magnetically.
Of course, there might be some definition of gauss gun that I am not aware of that includes rail guns. But the device in TFA is most definately not a rail gun itself, since they describe it using superconductive magnetic rings.
Even better, imagine what will happen if their system is less than secure. Try and think about the damage a script kiddie could do if he got ahold of a list of people's passwords and phone numbers.
Or, even worse, if he found out how to send the signal to the phones sans password - after all, if the company is lazy, then maybe all they'd do is dial up the cell phone and send a general purpose "kill" signal. Figure out how to tell the cellphone that it's stolen while still in the possession of its owner, and you can make somebody very, very mad.
See, the difference is, when I talk in either technical or scientific terms, I am actually trying to say something. What I'm saying may not be easy to understand if you don't have the introductory background, but there is content to translate (and I'm pretty good at stating technical stuff in normal english if the need arises).
And, as far as that goes, someone with a better understanding of technology or science can easily go over my head if they start talking in specialized terms beyond the scope of my own knowledge - in such cases I usually understand that they are trying to say something, even if I don't quite get it, and a little background will usually clear things up for me.
When a manager speaks in business-speak, they are trying not to say anything. Business speak is "noise", with very little actual signal. They are deliberately trying to mask the fact that their ramblings have no useful or meaningful content. At best, they are using euphamisms to avoid unpleasant realities (ie, "downsized" as opposed to "fired"). At worst, they're trying to weasel out of actually doing their job.
If you were to translate most memos written in business jargon into readable english, they'd work out to about one sentance. If you were to translate a technical document into readable english, with all the relevant information kept (ie RAM written out as "random access memory") it would double in size.
From what I've seen of the management in big companies, the inability to speak clear english is an asset (I have yet to decipher what the hell a "paradigm shift" is). So outsourcing to another country where the locals don't speak english as their first language would be easy! All you have to do is sit them by a speakerphone and give them a binder containing all the latest buzzwords and impenetrable business-speak.
After all, it's not like with call centers, where people might actually complain when the speakers aren't understandable. Who'd be able to tell the difference? I'm sure such gems as "we're reorganizing to suit our core competency" makes just as much sense in Hindi!
Right, because technology never improves beyond the prototype stage. Plus, while you may generate "some" electrictiy with solar, it'll never replace either fossil fuels or nuclear as a centralized means of power generation. As a distributed means of generation, it shows promise, so it is indeed a partial solution - but I must stress that it will never by itself be a full solution. Other tech is needed to have a completely green economy, particularly if we want to get rid of fossil fuels in our cars and other vehicles.
As for "fusion reactor may never work", have you even been paying attention? They're already starting to work! Hell, RTFA, the Chinese are begining to develop them - and what they're doing today is still far less than what ITER can accomplish. Sticking your head in the sand and saying that "it'll never work", when we've already gotten past some of the hardest obstacles (namely, actually getting a controlled fusion reaction, and maintaining it for any duration under confinement) is willfully stupid. It's like claiming we're never going to put a man in space after we'd already sent unmanned vehicles up. The fact that it's taken thirty years to get this far with fusion is a testament to the slow nature of R&D, and a sign that fusion projects are badly underfunded (despite what the GP seems to think).
What, at a few kilograms of deuterium per year? It would take us millenia to run out of fuel, and even then we wouldn't make a significant dent in water levels. Hell, D is only about 1 atom of hydrogen out of every 6000+, the other 5999+ being regular hydrogen, which isn't usable in this type of reactor (meaning if we ran out of D, which as I said would take millenia, we'd still have 5999/6000 of our total water supply).
And if we did have fusion reactors capable of using up our water supply by fusing truely massive quantities of elemental hydrogen, we'd be able to use them abord spacecraft and just import the damn hydrogen from somewhere else in the solar system. It's only the most common element in the universe after all.
Well, IANAEOS (expert on solar), but it's been my understanding that the advances in solar panel effeciency leveled off after we got past a certain point due to physical limitations imposed by thermodynamics. Moreover, I know 30% sounds cruddy, but that's 30% of the sunlight hitting the panel being converted into electricity. From a practical standpoint, that's damn good.
I'd be inclined to wonder how effecient the other power sources we have that use energy originating from the sun compare, in terms of effeciency. For example, fossil fuels have a few million years head start to build up energy stores, and hydro power is using the planet-wide hydrological cycle - both cases where scale negates the need for effeciency.
Direct conversion of sunlight may never reach high levels of power effeciency. In fact I'd say what matters more is economic effeciency (they don't need to be super-effecient if we can mass produce them cheaply enough). However, that isn't a problem that requires government funded R&D so much as it requires widespread adoption by the public. If we started building homes with solar roofs wherever the local climate allows, then I suspect solar will be a more useful part of the energy equation.
This doesn't remove the need for centralized power generation though, which is where fusion would be a godsend. I'm all for a combination approach to solving our energy needs, but I can't think of anything that comes close to fusion for building a clean power plant.
A better question would be how they managed to cram everyone in China into the same place at the same time. Methinks someone used a "noclip" cheat
We already do that. Flip side is, a fusion reaction would need far less water than a thirsty population, so it wouldn't contribute to scarcity. Moreover most of what we fight over is fresh water, whereas current deuterium extraction facilities use seawater IIRC.
Plus, if we stop fouling up our water supplies once we have cleaner energy available, wouldn't that reduce the need to fight over water, instead of vice-versa?
Whoops, you're right. I stand corrected.
If you have some design for a solar power generator that can even come close to the output of a fusion reactor, then please, by all means, post it. Or patent it - I'm sure you'd make a fortune.
Of course I somehow doubt that. After all, photoelectric solar panels are already close to their maximum possible energy effeciency. We could get far better effeciency out of them if we put them in orbit and beamed the power back, given that doing so would get around the problems associated with the atmosphere, but our current space program doesn't even come close to adequate for such a task.
For a point of comparison, fusion is already hitting breakeven. So much for "wasted" money these past thirty years, eh? The fact that something takes time and effort does not make it worthless.
If you seriously want power from sunlight, burn oil or coal. After all, the energy in fossil fuels comes from sunlight introduced into the biosphere millions of years ago. In fact one could argue that fossil fuels are the worlds oldest natural solar battery. And unlike solar energy, which loses much in transmission, oil is easily transportable. You can extract and use it in places where the sun doesn't shine.
Of course, it also burns dirty as hell. Even ignoring climate change, burning fossil fuels releases all sorts of crap into the air, from heavy metals, to soot, to radioactives. But lord knows, if you want to utilize that "fusion reactor up in the sky", you can do so today for all your energy needs - no fancy new tech required.
Plus, who ever said fusion and solar were incompatible solutions? Governments spend a pittance on both of them (yeah it sounds like a lot, but look at their overall budget for comparison), so impling that they favour one over the other is utter rubbish. If you want to get really technical, some of the budget for the space program over the past decades paid for solar panel development, as well as things like fuel cell technology, so it's hardly as though green power has been ignored.
We can pursue solar power in the mean time without the assistance of the governement - go out and buy some for your own use, get your home off the grid (assuming you haven't done so already). No new R&D is required to make solar a viable partial solution to our energy needs, and at the same time, there is little R&D that could ever turn it into a full solution. Conversely we cannot pursue fusion power in the same fashion - the goals are too long term for the private sector to be interested in. Your point is a classic false dichotomy.
Actually, you don't lose mass when you burn something. Chemical combustion converts potential chemical energy into heat, but the end products mass as much as the starting ones. All the energy in a gallon of gas is the energy that went into producing it.
But technically yes, when you talk about fusion reactors you should say "converted more energy from mass than it took to fuse said mass". So the phrasing from the article/summary is technically in error, but most people who know their physics can grasp what they actually mean.
I'm pretty sure the problem with that is commercial viability, not any physical limitation. Remember that the reaction only needs to excede it's energy input by a tiny amount in order to break even, so it's not a simple jump from a net energy positive reator to a power generator.
I'm pretty sure that if we improved the tech to the point where producing useful levels of energy was possible, then we'd have already passed the threshold for ignition; ie making the reaction self-renewing is an intermediate step between breakeven fusion and commercial fusion regardless.