We already apply this idea to more than just proffessional misconduct. It's not "just" lawyers, doctors, etc who are barred from their proffesion when the do wrong; it's also sex offenders, theives, and other harder criminals who get barred, either by convention or law, from the jobs that are linked to their crimes in some way. The idea isn't just to punish the convicted person for proffesional misconduct, but also to prevent people from being put in a position where they can cause immense damage, and are a likely risk to do so.
Given the logic of barring someone from certain types of work to remove them from disasterous temptation, why would it be strange to apply the same idea in the corporate world? If an executive breaks the law, then he has shown himself to be a risk when running a business. We can either slap the corporation or the wrist, which does nothing (they'll see it as the cost of doing business), or we can dissolve the corporation by revoking their charter, which runs the risk of letting the executives resposible find new jobs and reoffend, or we can go straight to the core of the problem and bar them from the corporate world once they show themselves to be crooks. I favour the last two options when the offense is serious enough - it would be a way of both removing repeat offenders from the hiring pool, and detering people in power from misusing it.
Wow, that was quite the leap to conclusions. I make one crack about death penalties and suddenly I'm a bleeding heart california liberal. A bit quick tempered are we? Perhaps next time I'll make a bushism - that should really get a reaction outta you:-) How about a fox news joke?
Anyway you missed the subtext. Conservative states tend to favour the death penalty, and stiff punishment for crime in general, on the grounds that it acts as a deterrant and prevents a convict from getting a second chance to commit more crimes. The idea of a corporate death penalty is likewise grounded in that idea - make it unattractive enough to break the law as a CEO, and I'll guarantee that you'll see fewer corporate criminals.
Why I specified consevative states is simple; one of the two parties has to get the ball rolling, and it's easier to sell the republicans on the idea of cracking down on crime. Not the current administration, who are a bit to comfortable with big corrupt businesses, but rather the republican voters. Of course, it's always foolishly optimistic to try and use politicians against people who make large campaign contributions, but hey, a guy can dream...
Or revoke their corporate charter and bar the executives from doing business again. I'm all in favour of invoking this sort of punishment - it beats the hell outa fines, and ensures fewer repear offenders. Call it a corporate "death penalty", and I'm sure that it'll find support in the conservative parts of the US:-)
In places where geothermal is easy to get to (the low hanging fruit), it's being used. See Iceland for a good example of this. However, the energy output isn't even close to what we could get with fusion.
Geothermal, like solar, wind, etc, is a power source that draws passively from the environment, and all forms of passive power generation hinge on location. Solar power works in sunny climates, and in space. Tidal power works on the coast. Hyrdo works where there's a river to harness. None of these things work just anywhere.
You ask why we don't just drill a deep hole to get geothermal power regardless of location. I would ask you why you don't think we should construct deep canals to generate hyrdo power anywhere? After all, it's the same idea; alter the local enviroment to provide us with power.
When you look at it that way, you begin to see why it's not going to work terribly well - you can't expect to expand massive amounts of energy just to get at a passive energy source, especially not one that that's only moderately powerful. How deep do you have to dig to get at abundant geothermal energy in most parts of the world, and how long would it take to break even once you harnessed it?
Fusion, like nuclear, isn't passive. We aren't harnessing an existing energy source we're making our own. That generally avoids the aforementioned problems, and lets you put your power plant where it's needed, not where it's geographically convienient.
Also, side note, you are aware that fusion is an awful lot hotter than 1000 degrees, right? If it occured at those temperatures, we'd have the reactors already.
Just to clarify, their experimental results weren't consitantly replicable, but they were replicated at least once. IIRC, the heat generated in the so called "cold fusion" device is thought to have come from chemical reactions, rather than nuclear.
I think this was established based on the fact that the same results were found for hydrogen (H-1) as they were for deuterium (H-2). For those that don't remember their chemistry and/or physics, different isotopes of an element have the same chemical properties, so they will yeild the same results in a chemical reaction, but they have different nuclear properties, so they shouldn't be doing the same thing in a nuclear reaction. Therefor, if a reaction is identical for H-1 and H-2 (which are different stable isotopes of hyrdogen), it's a safe bet the cause is chemistry rather than fusion.
I don't know if any theory was put forward as to what sort of chemical reaction might have contaminated the results.
Actually, existing photoelectric cells are adequate for almost any solar power use. They're close to what we'd consider a mature techology.
The two best aplications for solar power are distributed generation and orbital power. The former involves putting solar cells on rooftops and the like, thereby getting power generated at the same site it's used in. The problem with this, and other forms of distributed power, is that they work best at suplimenting power generation - they aren't a replacement for power plants. We can however do this with existing tech to reduce our energy needs. Additionally, this requires an environment that gets enough sunlight - for example, this wouldn't work for about half the year where I live.
The second use for solar power is orbital power stations. You build a massive, spread out solar array in space and beam the power back via microwave to a ground based recieving station.
This has a few advantages: 1) There's no weather or day/night cycle to get in the way. Power output is constant. 2) Solar energy is stronger in orbit, since the sunlight is unfiltered (ie, a square meter of panel generates more power in space than at high noon on the ground). 3) We can build the solar array as large as we like, without worrying about the structural considerations of building in a gravity well, or the price of land to build on (both in dollars are habitat).
The catch is that lauch costs are still far too high. We'd need to be able to haul lots and lots of mass into orbit, not just the mass of the panels but other equiptment as well, for a lot less than it costs today to make this work.
If we could get to orbit however, we already have the solar tech to build this thing. And no, super effecient solar panels wouldn't solve the problem of launch cost, since there's only so much power you can get from X surface area, and even 100% effecient panels would need better launch tech to get up there in the numbers we'd need. Cheap panels also aren't an issue, since they're already the least expensive part of this arraingment.
Neither of these applications of solar power would benefit from tonnes of money spent on photoelectric R&D - the former because what it really needs is economy of scale and mainstream adoption, and the latter because what we lack is launch technology.
Fusion however is not a mature techology. And it fills a different role from solar - we can build fusion plants anywhere we'd like, whereas we're limited to either space or certain lattitudes for solar power.
Both solar and fusion are useful clean energy solutions. To suggest we pursue one and abandon the other, because the first is easy and the latter hard, is short sighted and foolish at best.
As safe as, maybe. Safer than fusion? Sorry, not really. How can something be safer when the object of comparison is completely safe already?
Assuming the artical you linked is correct, then the meltdown risk is minimal (they say improbable), and the waste less hazardous that with conventional fission reactors. With fusion, the meltdown risk is zero (a fusion plant can no more meltdown than a coal fired one), and the waste isn't just less hazardous, it's completely harmless - He4 is stable and chemically inert.
Both types of reactor, and the existing types of nuclear power, have the problem of neutron irradiation, so that point of comparison is the same all around. Fusion is more expensive and complex, so you are correct that thorium power would be simpler, but I'd say the lack of any fission waste products, and the complete inability to sustain a reaction when control is lost, makes fusion the safer of the two.
People keep asking this question, and it keeps getting answered...
No, a fusion reactor cannot explode, melt down, or otherwise catastrophically fail. In all likelyhood the reactor could fail badly enough to render it useless (anything running that much juice should be able to at least blow out its wiring), but the reaction stops if the reactor fails, plain and simple.
The whole reason a fission reactor is dangerous is because the reaction doesn't stop when control is lost, potentially leading to a chain reaction meltdown. Without the possibility of a chain reaction happening spontainiously, there can be no meltdown. This is precisely why fusion is so much harder to create in a lab, and why fusion reactors are so much safer.
I beleive the universe was sneezed out in the great green Arkleseizure. Every day, I pray for deliverance from the coming of the great white hankercheif...
I recall that being proposed for orbital power - you put a solar array in orbit, a recieving station on the ground, and beam the power back via microwave. The upshot was that the effeciency of ground based solar is much lower than that of orbital solar, due to the lack of atmospheric interference, which offsets the losses in transmission from converting electricity to microwaves then back again. Of course, for this to be workable, you'd need cheap launch technology... and try getting green energy folks to support space research.
What I don't know is how much power you're losing in the conversions. If it's greater than the amount you'd lose in transmission over power lines, then that's out. And I'm also not sure how you'd go about transmitting light (or other radiation). Would large scale fiber optic lines lose power over distance?
A perfectly parralel ray of light through total vacuum would be completely effecient (or at least it's effeciency would not diminish with distance), and also thouroughly impossible.
Like someone else said, what you're thinking of is high temperature superconductors.
Superconductive materials transmit electricity without resistance. A 10 meter long superconductive cable will have the same losses in transmission as a 10 kilometer one. I am unsure whether this is because the resistance is zero, or so close as makes no difference, but the upshot is vastly improved effeciency for any proccess that is ineffecient due to electrical losses.
The problem is that most superconductive materials only remain superconductive if they're very very cold. Unless you fancy equipping your transmission lines with cryogenic plants, you can't use them to carry power. There has been a lot of work on "high temperature" superconductors ("high" in this case can mean what we'd consider ambient temperature), but AFAIK we don't have a solution yet.
Ironically much of the research into these materials is tied into magnetic confinement for fusion research - if you're using a magnetic field to confine the fusion plant's plasma, then you'll get much better results with superconductive coils than you would with normal materials (though under the circumstances, we might be able to get away with low temperature superconductors, since the energy lost to running the cryo plant is offset by the energy saved from higher magnetic field effeciency).
Congratulations on what is easily the most apt user ID on/.:-P
Minor quibble though - I wouldn't call this "creating the conditions that led to the creation of the universe". Fusion =! the big bang - this is more like recreating a dwarf star (one which can burn deuterium, but not elemental hydrogen).
Though it's still obviously a big deal, from a science/engineering/environmental perspective.
Ay, but that's part of the problem. The longer a person remains in a PVS, the worse their prognosis is. What are you supposed to do in that kind of situation? Keep them on life support, hoping for a miracle cure to emerge (and knowing that every year in which a cure doesn't emerge, the likelyhood of it working on the patient drops a bit further due to brain degradation), or letting them die with dignity?
Even in an ideal world, where brain damage could be reversed, I suspect there'd be an upper limit on how long the damaged person can afford to wait. And there is the unanswerable question in the Schiavo case of just how much damage was done when her heart failed in the first place - how much, if anything, a wonderdrug or other treatment could bring back. Chemo induced remission could be seen as miraculous - it's something we couldn't have done decades ago - but even then there is no guarantee it'll always work, or that you can get the cancer diagnosed in time.
Based on the site, the majority seem libertarian, which is quite different, and neither inherently right nor left.
We oppose censorship most of the time, DRM all the time and we're against government invasions of privacy to a far greater degree than most people. Socially, that makes/.ers classic libertarians.
Also, what does these sites being removed from google news have to do with liberal bias? As far as I'm concerned, the idea that anything bigoted must be right wing is innacurate - there are plenty of islamaphobes and racists on the left as well.
The only reason the sites that attack islam are considered conservative by default is the present US administration's "war in terror" - and (lip service aside) that administration is not "conservative" in the classic sense of the word, ie fiscally responsible, opposed to large invasive government, etc.
Uh, "Congress shall enact no laws" actually, and in this case, they haven't. This is a private corporation (it's easy to get those mixed up with gov'ts these days) filtering news content.
Whether you agree with them or not, free speech isn't the issue - private censorship is. And even there it's a tad dicey - is it censorship if blogs (which are not news) are removed from a news aggregator due to racist content?
Also, what is the other side to censor here? If we censor racists, then we must also censor... who exactly?
Depends on your outlook. I would view the loss of my mind and identity the same way I'd view my death. Which I guess is why I wonder if we'd be doing someone a favour by "saving" them, when it won't really be the same person who comes out the other side.
I don't know whether that plasticity would return or not. Actually, if we could restore a braindead person, then giving them back all the mental maeliability they had as an infant would probably be trivial. The real pain would be rehab; imagine trying to re-teach everything - absolutely everything - a person learns in their childhood all over again.
As for the pruning thing, that is a very interesting question. I guess we could probably do it if we could pull off all the other miracles we're talking about in getting a braindead person healthy. The problem might be testing it - this is not the sort of thing you can easily test on animals, and the ethical problems with human trials would be a big hurdle.
The funny thing actually is that if we had the techology to cause neurological plasticity and neuron pruning, we'd probably ban it, fear it, or at least put heavy restrictions on it, given the abuses that could come out of it. Can you imagine what a totalitarian government would do with a way "reeducate" dissidents? We've already got people up in arms over GM tech, stem cells and human cloning, and those are all relatively minor by comparison.
Well, you still could rather easily with google proper rather than google news. But I do see your point - it's hard to find odd sites when you don't know what to look for.
You do have to ask though - is this information really news? These are blogs after all, and not reliable sources of factual information. I can see the arguement against censoring them, but at the same time there's a strong case to be made for keeping propaganda, regardless of its motivation, out of a news aggregator. Of course if that standard was applied evenly, they'd probably have to remove a whole lot more than just the fringe...
I'm undecided whether I'm with google on this one or not, to be honest.
Sociey doesn't prevent you from killing yourself - it only treats you the same way it treats anyone else found ODing or bleeding to death, or whatever. It's just that medical proffesionals aren't instruced by law or common practice to treat possible suicide cases any differently. Technically suicide is legal in most places, though assisted suicide is another matter.
As for refusing medical treatment, that depends on the circumstances. You'll note that, for example, people in mental hospitals can't refuse to take their meds. If you're bleeding on the sidewalk, I don't think the paramedics are going to listen to you if you tell them to stop trying to treat your wounds.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think you misunderstand why we as a society try and save people from suicide attempts, and allow people to refuse things like chemo.
Well, to point out the obvious, long term PVS leads to degradation of the brain. In the Schiavo case that's being brought up in this thread, what remained of her brain had severly atropied, and much of the higher brain centers had been replaced with spinal fluid.
If someone's family memeber were brain dead, then waiting for a miracle cure might not be an option. After all, if it takes ten years for even a partial cure to become available, then that's ten years in which the afflicted is slipping further and further away. This sort of drug might help someone who gets hit by a car tommorow, but it probably won't do much good for someone who got hit by one years ago and has been dead to the world since.
Yes, well I did specify that we'd need to be able to reverse braindeath (something this new drug doesn't do). That would mean something like cloning technology or medically created regeneration.
But I was thinking more specifically of the Schiavo case the OP brings up. Assuming we could have restored the parts of her brain that had liquified, would we have done her any good to do so? After all, instead of death, what you're instead giving the person is a sort of brain wipe.
Do we consider a person dead if the human aspect (the conscious mind) is gone? And is giving the braindead a new mind actually healing them, or merely condeming them to an existance of perpetual infancy? Because in the case of Terri Schiavo, even with miracle technology that we don't have yet, those are the only forseeable options.
You cannot expect to restore software when the hard drive has not only crashed and died, but has actually melted, no matter what kind of data recovery you have... and the information kept on a hard drive is more recoverable than the information stored in a human brain. Like I said, the ethics are complicated.
I seem to recall that her autopsy found what was essentially mush where her neocortex would be. I would tend to guess that that kind of damage really is irreparable - but IANANeurologist, so I don't know for sure.
Assuming we could fully repair braindeath (ie, restore the brain when higher functions have been lost), what would remain of the original person? Would we have an adult with infantile brain capabilities, a blank slate? How much of a person's identity is hardcoded? And what are the ethics of the situation - do we revive someone knowing that we'd be making them start over from scratch (and maybe not even that - most of early learning is made possible by infantile brain "plasticity", which an adult brain lacks).
Which will immediately lead to a new Greenpeace campaign - Save the Morlocs!:-P
Actually, I've always sort of wondered what nuclear waste would do if we got it into the mantle - would it sink or float? I'd tend it assume that most if it would sink, given that you tend to get metals like iron in the core, which leads to the assumption that the mantle is less dense than iron, which means that heavier metals like uranium introduced to that environment would tend to go down. Of course, there are already radioactives in the mantle, so I might be mistaken...
Oh, and just to further clarify, I did specify in my post that the plant would likely have to be dedicated to hydrogen production. However the simplified point was that nuclear -> hydrogen via superheated electrolysis is much more effecient than nuclear -> electricity -> low temperature electrolysis.
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We already apply this idea to more than just proffessional misconduct. It's not "just" lawyers, doctors, etc who are barred from their proffesion when the do wrong; it's also sex offenders, theives, and other harder criminals who get barred, either by convention or law, from the jobs that are linked to their crimes in some way. The idea isn't just to punish the convicted person for proffesional misconduct, but also to prevent people from being put in a position where they can cause immense damage, and are a likely risk to do so.
Given the logic of barring someone from certain types of work to remove them from disasterous temptation, why would it be strange to apply the same idea in the corporate world? If an executive breaks the law, then he has shown himself to be a risk when running a business. We can either slap the corporation or the wrist, which does nothing (they'll see it as the cost of doing business), or we can dissolve the corporation by revoking their charter, which runs the risk of letting the executives resposible find new jobs and reoffend, or we can go straight to the core of the problem and bar them from the corporate world once they show themselves to be crooks. I favour the last two options when the offense is serious enough - it would be a way of both removing repeat offenders from the hiring pool, and detering people in power from misusing it.
Wow, that was quite the leap to conclusions. I make one crack about death penalties and suddenly I'm a bleeding heart california liberal. A bit quick tempered are we? Perhaps next time I'll make a bushism - that should really get a reaction outta you :-) How about a fox news joke?
Anyway you missed the subtext. Conservative states tend to favour the death penalty, and stiff punishment for crime in general, on the grounds that it acts as a deterrant and prevents a convict from getting a second chance to commit more crimes. The idea of a corporate death penalty is likewise grounded in that idea - make it unattractive enough to break the law as a CEO, and I'll guarantee that you'll see fewer corporate criminals.
Why I specified consevative states is simple; one of the two parties has to get the ball rolling, and it's easier to sell the republicans on the idea of cracking down on crime. Not the current administration, who are a bit to comfortable with big corrupt businesses, but rather the republican voters. Of course, it's always foolishly optimistic to try and use politicians against people who make large campaign contributions, but hey, a guy can dream...
Or revoke their corporate charter and bar the executives from doing business again. I'm all in favour of invoking this sort of punishment - it beats the hell outa fines, and ensures fewer repear offenders. Call it a corporate "death penalty", and I'm sure that it'll find support in the conservative parts of the US :-)
In places where geothermal is easy to get to (the low hanging fruit), it's being used. See Iceland for a good example of this. However, the energy output isn't even close to what we could get with fusion.
Geothermal, like solar, wind, etc, is a power source that draws passively from the environment, and all forms of passive power generation hinge on location. Solar power works in sunny climates, and in space. Tidal power works on the coast. Hyrdo works where there's a river to harness. None of these things work just anywhere.
You ask why we don't just drill a deep hole to get geothermal power regardless of location. I would ask you why you don't think we should construct deep canals to generate hyrdo power anywhere? After all, it's the same idea; alter the local enviroment to provide us with power.
When you look at it that way, you begin to see why it's not going to work terribly well - you can't expect to expand massive amounts of energy just to get at a passive energy source, especially not one that that's only moderately powerful. How deep do you have to dig to get at abundant geothermal energy in most parts of the world, and how long would it take to break even once you harnessed it?
Fusion, like nuclear, isn't passive. We aren't harnessing an existing energy source we're making our own. That generally avoids the aforementioned problems, and lets you put your power plant where it's needed, not where it's geographically convienient.
Also, side note, you are aware that fusion is an awful lot hotter than 1000 degrees, right? If it occured at those temperatures, we'd have the reactors already.
Just to clarify, their experimental results weren't consitantly replicable, but they were replicated at least once. IIRC, the heat generated in the so called "cold fusion" device is thought to have come from chemical reactions, rather than nuclear.
I think this was established based on the fact that the same results were found for hydrogen (H-1) as they were for deuterium (H-2). For those that don't remember their chemistry and/or physics, different isotopes of an element have the same chemical properties, so they will yeild the same results in a chemical reaction, but they have different nuclear properties, so they shouldn't be doing the same thing in a nuclear reaction. Therefor, if a reaction is identical for H-1 and H-2 (which are different stable isotopes of hyrdogen), it's a safe bet the cause is chemistry rather than fusion.
I don't know if any theory was put forward as to what sort of chemical reaction might have contaminated the results.
Actually, existing photoelectric cells are adequate for almost any solar power use. They're close to what we'd consider a mature techology.
The two best aplications for solar power are distributed generation and orbital power. The former involves putting solar cells on rooftops and the like, thereby getting power generated at the same site it's used in. The problem with this, and other forms of distributed power, is that they work best at suplimenting power generation - they aren't a replacement for power plants. We can however do this with existing tech to reduce our energy needs. Additionally, this requires an environment that gets enough sunlight - for example, this wouldn't work for about half the year where I live.
The second use for solar power is orbital power stations. You build a massive, spread out solar array in space and beam the power back via microwave to a ground based recieving station.
This has a few advantages:
1) There's no weather or day/night cycle to get in the way. Power output is constant.
2) Solar energy is stronger in orbit, since the sunlight is unfiltered (ie, a square meter of panel generates more power in space than at high noon on the ground).
3) We can build the solar array as large as we like, without worrying about the structural considerations of building in a gravity well, or the price of land to build on (both in dollars are habitat).
The catch is that lauch costs are still far too high. We'd need to be able to haul lots and lots of mass into orbit, not just the mass of the panels but other equiptment as well, for a lot less than it costs today to make this work.
If we could get to orbit however, we already have the solar tech to build this thing. And no, super effecient solar panels wouldn't solve the problem of launch cost, since there's only so much power you can get from X surface area, and even 100% effecient panels would need better launch tech to get up there in the numbers we'd need. Cheap panels also aren't an issue, since they're already the least expensive part of this arraingment.
Neither of these applications of solar power would benefit from tonnes of money spent on photoelectric R&D - the former because what it really needs is economy of scale and mainstream adoption, and the latter because what we lack is launch technology.
Fusion however is not a mature techology. And it fills a different role from solar - we can build fusion plants anywhere we'd like, whereas we're limited to either space or certain lattitudes for solar power.
Both solar and fusion are useful clean energy solutions. To suggest we pursue one and abandon the other, because the first is easy and the latter hard, is short sighted and foolish at best.
As safe as, maybe. Safer than fusion? Sorry, not really. How can something be safer when the object of comparison is completely safe already?
Assuming the artical you linked is correct, then the meltdown risk is minimal (they say improbable), and the waste less hazardous that with conventional fission reactors. With fusion, the meltdown risk is zero (a fusion plant can no more meltdown than a coal fired one), and the waste isn't just less hazardous, it's completely harmless - He4 is stable and chemically inert.
Both types of reactor, and the existing types of nuclear power, have the problem of neutron irradiation, so that point of comparison is the same all around. Fusion is more expensive and complex, so you are correct that thorium power would be simpler, but I'd say the lack of any fission waste products, and the complete inability to sustain a reaction when control is lost, makes fusion the safer of the two.
*sigh*
People keep asking this question, and it keeps getting answered...
No, a fusion reactor cannot explode, melt down, or otherwise catastrophically fail. In all likelyhood the reactor could fail badly enough to render it useless (anything running that much juice should be able to at least blow out its wiring), but the reaction stops if the reactor fails, plain and simple.
The whole reason a fission reactor is dangerous is because the reaction doesn't stop when control is lost, potentially leading to a chain reaction meltdown. Without the possibility of a chain reaction happening spontainiously, there can be no meltdown. This is precisely why fusion is so much harder to create in a lab, and why fusion reactors are so much safer.
I beleive the universe was sneezed out in the great green Arkleseizure. Every day, I pray for deliverance from the coming of the great white hankercheif...
I recall that being proposed for orbital power - you put a solar array in orbit, a recieving station on the ground, and beam the power back via microwave. The upshot was that the effeciency of ground based solar is much lower than that of orbital solar, due to the lack of atmospheric interference, which offsets the losses in transmission from converting electricity to microwaves then back again. Of course, for this to be workable, you'd need cheap launch technology... and try getting green energy folks to support space research.
What I don't know is how much power you're losing in the conversions. If it's greater than the amount you'd lose in transmission over power lines, then that's out. And I'm also not sure how you'd go about transmitting light (or other radiation). Would large scale fiber optic lines lose power over distance?
A perfectly parralel ray of light through total vacuum would be completely effecient (or at least it's effeciency would not diminish with distance), and also thouroughly impossible.
Like someone else said, what you're thinking of is high temperature superconductors.
Superconductive materials transmit electricity without resistance. A 10 meter long superconductive cable will have the same losses in transmission as a 10 kilometer one. I am unsure whether this is because the resistance is zero, or so close as makes no difference, but the upshot is vastly improved effeciency for any proccess that is ineffecient due to electrical losses.
The problem is that most superconductive materials only remain superconductive if they're very very cold. Unless you fancy equipping your transmission lines with cryogenic plants, you can't use them to carry power. There has been a lot of work on "high temperature" superconductors ("high" in this case can mean what we'd consider ambient temperature), but AFAIK we don't have a solution yet.
Ironically much of the research into these materials is tied into magnetic confinement for fusion research - if you're using a magnetic field to confine the fusion plant's plasma, then you'll get much better results with superconductive coils than you would with normal materials (though under the circumstances, we might be able to get away with low temperature superconductors, since the energy lost to running the cryo plant is offset by the energy saved from higher magnetic field effeciency).
"gnats on an elaphant"... BadAnalogyGuy
/. :-P
Congratulations on what is easily the most apt user ID on
Minor quibble though - I wouldn't call this "creating the conditions that led to the creation of the universe". Fusion =! the big bang - this is more like recreating a dwarf star (one which can burn deuterium, but not elemental hydrogen).
Though it's still obviously a big deal, from a science/engineering/environmental perspective.
Ay, but that's part of the problem. The longer a person remains in a PVS, the worse their prognosis is. What are you supposed to do in that kind of situation? Keep them on life support, hoping for a miracle cure to emerge (and knowing that every year in which a cure doesn't emerge, the likelyhood of it working on the patient drops a bit further due to brain degradation), or letting them die with dignity?
Even in an ideal world, where brain damage could be reversed, I suspect there'd be an upper limit on how long the damaged person can afford to wait. And there is the unanswerable question in the Schiavo case of just how much damage was done when her heart failed in the first place - how much, if anything, a wonderdrug or other treatment could bring back. Chemo induced remission could be seen as miraculous - it's something we couldn't have done decades ago - but even then there is no guarantee it'll always work, or that you can get the cancer diagnosed in time.
Based on the site, the majority seem libertarian, which is quite different, and neither inherently right nor left.
/.ers classic libertarians.
We oppose censorship most of the time, DRM all the time and we're against government invasions of privacy to a far greater degree than most people. Socially, that makes
Also, what does these sites being removed from google news have to do with liberal bias? As far as I'm concerned, the idea that anything bigoted must be right wing is innacurate - there are plenty of islamaphobes and racists on the left as well.
The only reason the sites that attack islam are considered conservative by default is the present US administration's "war in terror" - and (lip service aside) that administration is not "conservative" in the classic sense of the word, ie fiscally responsible, opposed to large invasive government, etc.
Uh, "Congress shall enact no laws" actually, and in this case, they haven't. This is a private corporation (it's easy to get those mixed up with gov'ts these days) filtering news content.
Whether you agree with them or not, free speech isn't the issue - private censorship is. And even there it's a tad dicey - is it censorship if blogs (which are not news) are removed from a news aggregator due to racist content?
Also, what is the other side to censor here? If we censor racists, then we must also censor... who exactly?
Depends on your outlook. I would view the loss of my mind and identity the same way I'd view my death. Which I guess is why I wonder if we'd be doing someone a favour by "saving" them, when it won't really be the same person who comes out the other side.
I don't know whether that plasticity would return or not. Actually, if we could restore a braindead person, then giving them back all the mental maeliability they had as an infant would probably be trivial. The real pain would be rehab; imagine trying to re-teach everything - absolutely everything - a person learns in their childhood all over again.
As for the pruning thing, that is a very interesting question. I guess we could probably do it if we could pull off all the other miracles we're talking about in getting a braindead person healthy. The problem might be testing it - this is not the sort of thing you can easily test on animals, and the ethical problems with human trials would be a big hurdle.
The funny thing actually is that if we had the techology to cause neurological plasticity and neuron pruning, we'd probably ban it, fear it, or at least put heavy restrictions on it, given the abuses that could come out of it. Can you imagine what a totalitarian government would do with a way "reeducate" dissidents? We've already got people up in arms over GM tech, stem cells and human cloning, and those are all relatively minor by comparison.
Well, you still could rather easily with google proper rather than google news. But I do see your point - it's hard to find odd sites when you don't know what to look for.
You do have to ask though - is this information really news? These are blogs after all, and not reliable sources of factual information. I can see the arguement against censoring them, but at the same time there's a strong case to be made for keeping propaganda, regardless of its motivation, out of a news aggregator. Of course if that standard was applied evenly, they'd probably have to remove a whole lot more than just the fringe...
I'm undecided whether I'm with google on this one or not, to be honest.
Sociey doesn't prevent you from killing yourself - it only treats you the same way it treats anyone else found ODing or bleeding to death, or whatever. It's just that medical proffesionals aren't instruced by law or common practice to treat possible suicide cases any differently. Technically suicide is legal in most places, though assisted suicide is another matter.
As for refusing medical treatment, that depends on the circumstances. You'll note that, for example, people in mental hospitals can't refuse to take their meds. If you're bleeding on the sidewalk, I don't think the paramedics are going to listen to you if you tell them to stop trying to treat your wounds.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think you misunderstand why we as a society try and save people from suicide attempts, and allow people to refuse things like chemo.
Well, to point out the obvious, long term PVS leads to degradation of the brain. In the Schiavo case that's being brought up in this thread, what remained of her brain had severly atropied, and much of the higher brain centers had been replaced with spinal fluid.
If someone's family memeber were brain dead, then waiting for a miracle cure might not be an option. After all, if it takes ten years for even a partial cure to become available, then that's ten years in which the afflicted is slipping further and further away. This sort of drug might help someone who gets hit by a car tommorow, but it probably won't do much good for someone who got hit by one years ago and has been dead to the world since.
Yes, well I did specify that we'd need to be able to reverse braindeath (something this new drug doesn't do). That would mean something like cloning technology or medically created regeneration.
But I was thinking more specifically of the Schiavo case the OP brings up. Assuming we could have restored the parts of her brain that had liquified, would we have done her any good to do so? After all, instead of death, what you're instead giving the person is a sort of brain wipe.
Do we consider a person dead if the human aspect (the conscious mind) is gone? And is giving the braindead a new mind actually healing them, or merely condeming them to an existance of perpetual infancy? Because in the case of Terri Schiavo, even with miracle technology that we don't have yet, those are the only forseeable options.
You cannot expect to restore software when the hard drive has not only crashed and died, but has actually melted, no matter what kind of data recovery you have... and the information kept on a hard drive is more recoverable than the information stored in a human brain. Like I said, the ethics are complicated.
I seem to recall that her autopsy found what was essentially mush where her neocortex would be. I would tend to guess that that kind of damage really is irreparable - but IANANeurologist, so I don't know for sure.
Assuming we could fully repair braindeath (ie, restore the brain when higher functions have been lost), what would remain of the original person? Would we have an adult with infantile brain capabilities, a blank slate? How much of a person's identity is hardcoded? And what are the ethics of the situation - do we revive someone knowing that we'd be making them start over from scratch (and maybe not even that - most of early learning is made possible by infantile brain "plasticity", which an adult brain lacks).
It's not an easy question...
"Great!!! Finally they found medicine for my boss!!"
:-P After all, there has to be something to repair, right?
Nah, at a guess the drug will only work when the vegatable has a still-functional brain
Which will immediately lead to a new Greenpeace campaign - Save the Morlocs! :-P
Actually, I've always sort of wondered what nuclear waste would do if we got it into the mantle - would it sink or float? I'd tend it assume that most if it would sink, given that you tend to get metals like iron in the core, which leads to the assumption that the mantle is less dense than iron, which means that heavier metals like uranium introduced to that environment would tend to go down. Of course, there are already radioactives in the mantle, so I might be mistaken...
Oh, and just to further clarify, I did specify in my post that the plant would likely have to be dedicated to hydrogen production. However the simplified point was that nuclear -> hydrogen via superheated electrolysis is much more effecient than nuclear -> electricity -> low temperature electrolysis.