Third, Carmack is rally, trooly, rooly building his rocket himself in his backyard, just like Commander Keen. It's more a hobby (albeit a very expensive one) than a business.
If you're an organization that has favours it can dole out to the media, you can ensure to dole out those favours to somebody else for a little while until they get the message - for instance, if you're the White House and one of the TV networks breaks an embargo, you feed your next few juicy leaks to the other networks.
Less powerful organizations can simply refuse to pass on any more embargoed stories to the individual who breaks the embargo; it's a judgement call as to whether that's going to be worthwhile.
...is that mostly, federal funding runs from the rich states that vote solidly Democrat, to the poorer states that vote Republican. Republicans hate government except when it delivers pork to their own districts.
If the Randoids program were ever seriously considered for implementation I'd love to see how lonely they'd get politically:)
I've paid attention to Carmack's Armadillo site for years, and it's very entertaining stuff. But to characterise Armadillo Aerospace as a business seems to be a bit of a mischaracterisation; it seems more like a hobby to keep Carmack and his buddies amused on their days off rather than a serious business at this stage. If it was, he'd make progress a lot faster (because he wouldn't have to wait to the weekend to test, for instance).
They have built some very cool stuff, and it's great that they're prepared to share it with the rest of us. But they don't seem to be in it to make money any time soon.
In the UK and, generally, its former colonies, judges have much wider discretion on what penalties they impose after a conviction for an offence. So while the Riot Act might impose a maximum penalty of 10 years, it would be very rare for that maximum sentence to be used.
So you can't directly compare that maximum 10 year sentence with criminal penalties in the United States.
For those of you who are skeptical about the necessary nanotube unobtanium for the full space elevator becoming available any time soon, here's a link to a proposal that requires more feasible properties out of a tether, but still helps to lower launch costs a lot: Hypersonic Airplane Space Tether Orbital Launch (HASTOL) Study - Phase II.
Not trying to remedy the situation when a solution is sitting right in front of you is an easier copout. You say the problem is CO2. Well here's how to get rid of the CO2. So what's the problem?
Have you ever heard of the story of the cane toad? We in Australia introduced it in the 1930s in the belief that it would eat the cane beetle damaging Queensland sugarcane crops. Not only did it not eat the crops, it spread across the countryside, outcompeting native amphibians and killing predators that attacked it with poison secreted from glands. Stories like this, which are extremely common in Australian history, tend to make one skeptical of suggestions that "oh, we can fix this problem by just fiddling with ecosystems a bit".
Look, I'm not saying "don't do it". What I am saying is that such a widescale alteration of ocean ecosystems might have consequences as bad or worse than global warming itself, and you'd want pretty damned convincing evidence that a) it was going to work, and b) the negative consequences were not too bad, and c) it was the cheapest solution.
The scientific endgame is quite simple, as far as I'm concerned. The answer to the question "is, or was, there life on Mars?" is one of the most interesting scientific questions of our time. To explore this topic properly, either conducting a sufficient search to rule out life, or investigating its nature if it is or was there, can't really be done remotely.
OK, some choice quotes from the piece you've linked to, firstly on iron fertilization:
For example, simulations of iron fertilization of the oceans in the Southern Hemisphere initially showed that almost 8 billion tons of carbon would be absorbed by the ocean each year. Yet, after 500 years of continuous fertilization, the net increase in absorption would be less than 1 billion tons of carbon per year.
First, the previously sequestered carbon dioxide does eventually leak back out of the ocean, although the leakage rate is most rapid in the first years.
However, at best, it's only a partial solution to the problem, and it would involve ecosystem management on an unprecedented scale.
This kind of large-scale
And on solar radiation increases:
That does not mean industrial pollution has not been a significant factor, Willson cautioned.
Oh, and as far as "solar forcing" goes, you may wish to have a look at what RealClimate have to say. To sum up, there's very little good historical data on the topic, which makes it an easy copout for people seeking alternative explanations for warming.
Maybe. As this article says, it's not clear that small quantities of iron will do the trick. And what happens to the carbon once the algae die? Will it sink to the bottom and stay there as a solid, or will it be released into the atmosphere again (in which case as soon as we stop adding iron the problem comes back just as bad). And how badly are we going to stuff up marine ecosystems in the process?
For completeness, let's note that the RBMK design needs neither heavy water, nor enriched uranium. It is, however, the design whose flaws led to the Chernobyl accident, so I wouldn't be expecting any more of them to be built any time soon...
Japan has their own indigenous reactor companies, as well as their own uranium enrichment facility, as well as large stocks of plutonium on hand. They also have solid-fuel rockets that are sufficiently large to act as an ICBM. As FAS says, if they wanted a nuclear arsenal they could have one within a year, and the ICBMs to go with it. So buying Westinghouse is not an issue in that sense.
Unless you're going to go all economic nationalist and argue that the US should control its own corporate destiny the national security implications are pretty much nonexistent.
"From what I understand Octopi are easily smarter than a cat or a dog, so the one in the video might just be trying to play with the lights and thrusters.
I wouldn't go quite that far. Some dogs are pretty damn smart. This page suggests that they learn faster than a rat, but ultimately can't learn a skill as well. Additionally, one of the things that makes us treat dogs as "intelligent" is their ability to understand instructions from us. Octopuses are solitary animals, so they wouldn't have that ability. They're the geeks of the animal world. Wikipedia claims that they are "Suppposedly as smart as the average housecat", but doesn't source the claim.
I'm sure propaganda put together by a group with the deep understanding of other cultures exhibited by the US military, under the direction of a political leadership that has shown an equally deep understanding of other cultures, as the natural outgrowth of a nation whose deep understanding and affinity for other other cultures is reknowned, will be particularly effective.
I can't find the reference I read this in, but apparently the Pentagon only maintains a few detailed, official battle plans at any given time. At the moment, that would probably be restricted to the obvious ones- Iran, North Korea, Syria, defending Taiwan, the nuclear plans for Russia and China, and maybe a couple of others. So, no, it's pretty unlikely they maintain a battle plan for invading Canada.
A fair question. My evidence is only my own experience, but as a long-time contributor to the Wikipedia, and a long-time marker of student assignments, you develop a sixth sense for writing that has come from some other source. One dead giveaway is very high-quality writing that doesn't follow Wikipedia conventions; generally, original contributors with good writing also make the effort to follow Wikipedia formatting and writing style. A specific example is journalistic flourishes in the writing; this is strongly discouraged on Wikipedia on the basis that such flourishes impede comprehension.
Another strong giveaway is breaches of the "neutral point of view" policy - such as a wildly enthusiastic biography of somebody in the arts. 99 times out of 100, these are ripped straight from the artist's own site.
I could be horribly wrong, but my gut feeling is that the vast majority of articles I've examined are original.
Wikipedia has a policy that explicitly prohibits the use of Wikipedia to publish original research. This policy is pretty rigidly enforced; I've come across one or two borderline cases but generally somebody's pet theories get deleted. There's nothing stopping an academic publishing their research on a Wiki of their own (or one set up for original research) but such a Wiki is not Wikipedia.
As for stability, there's nothing stopping you citing a specific version of an article; however, I can't wait for the efforts for a "stable version" to get off the ground so that articles that are in a good state are more resistant to drifting into mediocrity or worse.
Yes, there is undoubtedly some plagiarism and copyright violation, the levels of undetected plagiarism are quite low, particularly in the more prominent articles. Sure, the Wikipedia's "possible copyright violations" page is kept busy, but when you consider the hundreds of thousands of articles it makes up a tiny fraction of the content.
I believe that undetected plagiarism on Wikipedia will actually become a less serious rather than more serious problem as time goes by. Google Book Search will help track down plagarism from printed sources, as well as online ones.
If economics didn't allow that, there would be something seriously wrong with economics.
The beauty of fossil fuels is that the end product of thousands of years of solar radiation and natural biological and geological processes have concentrated that solar energy in a convenient product. Is it any surprise that it's harder to replicate the whole process ourselves?
I don't see how it should be impossible to generate electricity at day time and store it until night time, especially if you have much more energy than you need to begin with.
It's not impossible, but with present or near-term technologies it's very, very expensive. See grid energy storage for a quick survey of the current state of play. Note that aside from pumped-storage and compressed air, none of these technologies are out of the small-scale trial stage.
I think we are discussing apples and oranges. My point is that we don't have time to implement "perfect" technologies; we need to implement the best we have right now.
We haven't looked for uranium nearly as hard as we've looked for, say, oil. There's almost certainly a lot more of the stuff out there that we haven't found yet. In any case, if there's a supply crunch either "conventional" breeder reactors, or thorium breeders, are perfectly feasible, and we could supply the world's energy requirements with them for thousands of years.
As for solar energy, this is a nice piece of religion that doesn't stack up for three very simple reasons:
It's way, way more expensive than anything we're currently using, including wind power. That's why wind farms have been going up all over the place, not solar arrays.
We can't store energy cheaply enough, and on a large enough scale, to run an electricity grid.
Neither of these problems are going to be solved quick enough to prevent China and India, particularly, building the biggest set of coal-fired power stations, belching lethal pollutants (which will kill millions of their own citizens) and greenhouse gases (which might just send the US and Europe into an Ice Age, flood much of Bangladesh, send Australia into perpetual drought, and so on...), the world has ever seen.
Nuclear energy is the only thing that's available now that can replace coal and gas at anything like a comparable cost and without releasing greenhouse gases.
The key points are essentially correct: the net energy return from making ethanol from corn (or just about any other conventional crop) are marginal, and there's not enough agricultural land to make a significant dent in our energy needs using ethanol from corn.
There are claims that ethanol from cellulose (switchgrass is the example that gets most attention, but wood, bamboo and the like are also good cellulose sources) is more likely to work. Here's an article on the topic, if you're interested. But corn ethanol, like wind power, is a stunt and an excuse to shovel subsidies to the undeserving.
Slashdot Mirror
Third, Carmack is rally, trooly, rooly building his rocket himself in his backyard, just like Commander Keen. It's more a hobby (albeit a very expensive one) than a business.
Less powerful organizations can simply refuse to pass on any more embargoed stories to the individual who breaks the embargo; it's a judgement call as to whether that's going to be worthwhile.
...is that mostly, federal funding runs from the rich states that vote solidly Democrat, to the poorer states that vote Republican. Republicans hate government except when it delivers pork to their own districts.
:)
If the Randoids program were ever seriously considered for implementation I'd love to see how lonely they'd get politically
I've paid attention to Carmack's Armadillo site for years, and it's very entertaining stuff. But to characterise Armadillo Aerospace as a business seems to be a bit of a mischaracterisation; it seems more like a hobby to keep Carmack and his buddies amused on their days off rather than a serious business at this stage. If it was, he'd make progress a lot faster (because he wouldn't have to wait to the weekend to test, for instance). They have built some very cool stuff, and it's great that they're prepared to share it with the rest of us. But they don't seem to be in it to make money any time soon.
So you can't directly compare that maximum 10 year sentence with criminal penalties in the United States.
To be fair, the guy came over here when he was 15 years old (he's now 21).
In any case, lots of elite athletes are not particularly nice people. Doesn't alter the fact the guy is a damn good mogul skiier.
For those of you who are skeptical about the necessary nanotube unobtanium for the full space elevator becoming available any time soon, here's a link to a proposal that requires more feasible properties out of a tether, but still helps to lower launch costs a lot: Hypersonic Airplane Space Tether Orbital Launch (HASTOL) Study - Phase II.
Rather than waste time I'll just point to what I said last time about this: security fears are overblown.
Have you ever heard of the story of the cane toad? We in Australia introduced it in the 1930s in the belief that it would eat the cane beetle damaging Queensland sugarcane crops. Not only did it not eat the crops, it spread across the countryside, outcompeting native amphibians and killing predators that attacked it with poison secreted from glands. Stories like this, which are extremely common in Australian history, tend to make one skeptical of suggestions that "oh, we can fix this problem by just fiddling with ecosystems a bit". Look, I'm not saying "don't do it". What I am saying is that such a widescale alteration of ocean ecosystems might have consequences as bad or worse than global warming itself, and you'd want pretty damned convincing evidence that a) it was going to work, and b) the negative consequences were not too bad, and c) it was the cheapest solution.
The scientific endgame is quite simple, as far as I'm concerned. The answer to the question "is, or was, there life on Mars?" is one of the most interesting scientific questions of our time. To explore this topic properly, either conducting a sufficient search to rule out life, or investigating its nature if it is or was there, can't really be done remotely.
This kind of large-scale
And on solar radiation increases:
Oh, and as far as "solar forcing" goes, you may wish to have a look at what RealClimate have to say. To sum up, there's very little good historical data on the topic, which makes it an easy copout for people seeking alternative explanations for warming.
Maybe. As this article says, it's not clear that small quantities of iron will do the trick. And what happens to the carbon once the algae die? Will it sink to the bottom and stay there as a solid, or will it be released into the atmosphere again (in which case as soon as we stop adding iron the problem comes back just as bad). And how badly are we going to stuff up marine ecosystems in the process?
For completeness, let's note that the RBMK design needs neither heavy water, nor enriched uranium. It is, however, the design whose flaws led to the Chernobyl accident, so I wouldn't be expecting any more of them to be built any time soon...
Unless you're going to go all economic nationalist and argue that the US should control its own corporate destiny the national security implications are pretty much nonexistent.
A further point to consider is that the levels of risk that the Apollo program ran would be unacceptable today.
Yeah, this whole occupation thing is working so well in Iraq, why not try it somewhere else? ;)
I wouldn't go quite that far. Some dogs are pretty damn smart. This page suggests that they learn faster than a rat, but ultimately can't learn a skill as well. Additionally, one of the things that makes us treat dogs as "intelligent" is their ability to understand instructions from us. Octopuses are solitary animals, so they wouldn't have that ability. They're the geeks of the animal world. Wikipedia claims that they are "Suppposedly as smart as the average housecat", but doesn't source the claim.
I'm sure propaganda put together by a group with the deep understanding of other cultures exhibited by the US military, under the direction of a political leadership that has shown an equally deep understanding of other cultures, as the natural outgrowth of a nation whose deep understanding and affinity for other other cultures is reknowned, will be particularly effective.
Oh, whoops, we're talking about the USA here...
I can't find the reference I read this in, but apparently the Pentagon only maintains a few detailed, official battle plans at any given time. At the moment, that would probably be restricted to the obvious ones- Iran, North Korea, Syria, defending Taiwan, the nuclear plans for Russia and China, and maybe a couple of others. So, no, it's pretty unlikely they maintain a battle plan for invading Canada.
Another strong giveaway is breaches of the "neutral point of view" policy - such as a wildly enthusiastic biography of somebody in the arts. 99 times out of 100, these are ripped straight from the artist's own site.
I could be horribly wrong, but my gut feeling is that the vast majority of articles I've examined are original.
As for stability, there's nothing stopping you citing a specific version of an article; however, I can't wait for the efforts for a "stable version" to get off the ground so that articles that are in a good state are more resistant to drifting into mediocrity or worse.
Yes, there is undoubtedly some plagiarism and copyright violation, the levels of undetected plagiarism are quite low, particularly in the more prominent articles. Sure, the Wikipedia's "possible copyright violations" page is kept busy, but when you consider the hundreds of thousands of articles it makes up a tiny fraction of the content. I believe that undetected plagiarism on Wikipedia will actually become a less serious rather than more serious problem as time goes by. Google Book Search will help track down plagarism from printed sources, as well as online ones.
The beauty of fossil fuels is that the end product of thousands of years of solar radiation and natural biological and geological processes have concentrated that solar energy in a convenient product. Is it any surprise that it's harder to replicate the whole process ourselves?
It's not impossible, but with present or near-term technologies it's very, very expensive. See grid energy storage for a quick survey of the current state of play. Note that aside from pumped-storage and compressed air, none of these technologies are out of the small-scale trial stage.
I think we are discussing apples and oranges. My point is that we don't have time to implement "perfect" technologies; we need to implement the best we have right now.
- It's way, way more expensive than anything we're currently using, including wind power. That's why wind farms have been going up all over the place, not solar arrays.
- We can't store energy cheaply enough, and on a large enough scale, to run an electricity grid.
- Neither of these problems are going to be solved quick enough to prevent China and India, particularly, building the biggest set of coal-fired power stations, belching lethal pollutants (which will kill millions of their own citizens) and greenhouse gases (which might just send the US and Europe into an Ice Age, flood much of Bangladesh, send Australia into perpetual drought, and so on...), the world has ever seen.
Nuclear energy is the only thing that's available now that can replace coal and gas at anything like a comparable cost and without releasing greenhouse gases.There are claims that ethanol from cellulose (switchgrass is the example that gets most attention, but wood, bamboo and the like are also good cellulose sources) is more likely to work. Here's an article on the topic, if you're interested. But corn ethanol, like wind power, is a stunt and an excuse to shovel subsidies to the undeserving.