"The federal government was meant to be largely hands off and the state governments were meant to have all the power."
That all, more or less, ended in 1865. I'm sure African Americans aren't too fond of "States Rights". The problem with almost-sovereign states is that you'll inevitably end up in a situation similar to the pre-civil war period. Things done in one state affect other states. Those same slave-owning "States Rights" advocates in the pre-civil war era demanded that *other* states recognize the legality of their slave ownership.
An escaped slave couldn't just go to Ohio or Massachusetts and suddenly be free because under the laws of those states there was no slavery - because those states had to recognize the "property rights" of Southern slave-owners (although, no small number of folk in the Underground Railroad, of course, moved those former slaves off to Canada where they could be truly free. . . as long as they never tried to visit the States, because they might have been re-taken).
We are a Union of states joined together, which means that there is a strong limit to the notion of States Rights. Yes, states do still have rights, but we do need to keep some perspective on the limits of those rights.
In general, loans aren't subsidies. You might argue that, because the loans are guaranteed by the DOE, and interest rates are kept low, that qualifies as a subsidy. Well, it might be subsidizing the *loans*, but it's not subsidizing the Universities.
"The only US bids received stated that they assumed we had made an error in the RFQ, and actually required quantities in the tens of thousands. These suppliers relied on a manufacturing process which required that scale and would result in prohibitively expensive unit costs for a production run of mere hundreds."
The downside of "economies of scale". You're right, I'm sure. Sometimes, in order to make lots of stuff cheaply, you have to give up the ability to make small amounts of stuff cheaply.
Oh, I guess I see what you're saying. I'm still not convinced it's really the broken window fallacy, but I do think you have a point - that money was there, and would have been spent or invested anyhow if the government didn't do it, and quite probably, would have been spent/invested more efficiently/wisely by the private sector. I quite agree about that.
Additionally, since the government borrows a significant ratio of the money it "spends", taxpayers have to pay interest on the money, which we wouldn't have had to do if the original holders of that money had invested/spent it directly.
I wonder, in the last 100 years, has anyone done any study on Amateur Radio Operators and their families?
Most hams have antennas, on their roofs, or in the back yard, radiating hundreds or in some cases, up to 1500 Watts of power.
Seems like doing a cancer risk study on them might provide some useful insight into the question of whether RF exposure can possibly increase risk of cancer?
Wait, how is this the broken window fallacy? The broken window fallacy is the idea that replacing something which is perfectly good (e.g. breaking a window so that it must be replaced with a new window), contributes to economic growth.
I'm not sure how I see this fits the current story?
There's a lot of negativity, and not undeserved, in this thread, and there's been a lot of overly-glowing obits for Steve Jobs over the past 3 weeks, but I personally think the truth lies in between.
I think Steve Jobs did have a lot of very good, positive impact on society. I think the Apple II computer, then the Macs, helped push along adoption and innovation. I think a lot of people *did* "borrow" good ideas from Steve/Apple. I think as others point out, Steve didn't fully appreciate the extent to which he "borrowed" good ideas from others. That is in general the nature of innovation. Doing something which other people have done, but doing it slightly differently, hopefully better.
I think Steve did a great thing by pushing the music, movie, and TV industries to making legal downloads available. Without iTunes Music Store, there may well not be an Amazon MP3 store, Google Music, Ubuntu One and many others, or perhaps not as soon.
Steve Jobs did make innovations which improved the "State of the Art" in computing, and make it accessible to just about everyone, which helped drive the industry as a whole.
In the end, I can neither completely hate nor completely love Steve Jobs - there are things about the man I really do admire, and things I think were much less admirable, but on balance, I think the world is really better off for Steve Jobs's life in it.
That's a good point. The main thrust of the discussion here at Slashdot has been about retirement age, so long-term thinking is definitely more conducive to long-term retirement. There'd be a lot more pressure from longer-lived investors, to do things which will be long-term profitable, year in, year out, so that investments will support their long retirements.
Most of the great scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers, and businessmen (the *actually* good businessmen who built long-lived companies to last, and which didn't run their companies and the economy into the ground on high-risk short-term gains) from the 20th would still be alive and practicing. Unfortunately, so would the lawyers and the horrible business execs.
Do we know for sure that any of the elements are being transmuted? I certainly agree that if transmutation is occuring, that means some sort of nuclear reaction is happening. If copper really is being produced, then there's some kind of nuclear reaction happening.
I think the big question on everyone's mind is if this actually *is* a nuclear reaction. There could be some sort of chemical reaction going on with the hydrogen, causing it to give off heat. If so, this 'reactor' is just another hydrogen fuel cell (possibly more efficient, maybe not). Not that a fuel cell which can be made using a "cheap catalyst" would be a bad thing - Slashdot has had a number of stories of people working towards such. But, fuel cells are not an energy "source", in the same way as an alkaline battery is not an energy source - but it could be a very convenient storage mechanism.
My answer for video is slightly different than pictures, somewhat, but basically, the best guarantee that the files will still be around is to have lots of copies, and they should never all be bad at the same time (at least, with some maintenance).
Got a home video (or collection) you want to save? Make a DVD or BluRay of the video (or collection of shorter videos). Give a couple copies to mom and dad. Give a couple copies to any sisters/brothers/aunts/uncles/cousins you may have. Give a copy to your best friends (you were gonna anyhow, right?). Of course, those burned copies might only be good for 5 to 10 years. Keep copies on a giant external HDD (USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt, or eSATA). You can fit quite a few movies on a 1 or 2 TB drive.
Of course, none of those will last forever. Plan on copying the HDD once every 2 or 3 years to a new drive. On your kids 8th or 10th birthday, re-copy all the movies to new DVDs, BluRays, or whatever media is current by then (10 years from now, optical drives might be as common as floppy drives [that is to say, almost impossible to find], so of course, move the copies to whatever's current before it's too late . . . this is also why I laugh at the idea of a 100 year DVD disc - great, you've got a perfectly good DVD, now try to find a drive or player to read it in 20 or 30 years).
There's a reason the bible, and many other texts, which have at one time or another have been tried to be suppressed, still exist - not because of the durability of parchment or paper, so much, as copies, copies, copies.
That's true of pictures of course, too, but pictures are more practical for saving with online backup systems (good luck backing up a 4GB DVD home movie online - it can be done, but might take 3 days per movie).
Along with orientation, one pet peeve of mine with USB has been that the very 'squared off' edges mean that even if you have the orientation right, you have to get the parts exactly lined up before they'll insert. I wish there was a slight 'funnel' at the opening of the female port to make it easier to "start" the connector getting inserted.
"The car gets quieter and more efficient at the same time."
But is it worth the added expense to make the car.0001 percent more efficient? Ok, Ok, I made the number up, but the point is, the sound energy of the exhaust from an IC Engine is a pretty small fraction of the overall energy losses. Most of the energy loss is due to normal thermal losses which are unavoidable with a heat engine.
I believe for an internal combustion engine, the "Hot Reservoir" is the gas/air mixture as it is combusting (so T_H is the temperature of combustion), and the "Cold Reservoir" is the temperature of the outside air (so, your car is probably slightly more efficient in the winter than during the summer; in Canada/Alaska/Syberia, a car might be noticeably more efficient in the winter, not sure; any extreme northerners here at Slashdot who've ever tried to measure this?)
You seem to probably be making an elementary mistake. If you *sell* the food for $1, you are almost surely not *making* a dollar.
The food costs something to grow, harvest, ship to the processing center to be turned into 'space food', the processing costs money, then it has to be packaged, shipped, then there needs to be some sort of retail or wholesale seller who actually distributes the product. So, there's a lot of hands in the cookie jar.
It's hard to say if the costs would be less than $1 or not, but it's definitely not zero, so selling these packages for a $1 each would not generate $1 which could be put towards NASA's budget (I'm guessing NASA would be lucky to get 25 cents).
Sally Struthers: "It doesn't take much to make a difference in these childrens lives. Just a few grams of plutonium could provide all the power that Benny, or millions of children like him, needs for his entire life."
With physical goods, like a book, I suspect they could legally demand the book be returned (although, who's going to hire a lawyer and go to court over a $10 book).
If it were something sufficiently valuable for it to be "worth it", though, they could probably demand it be returned. I mean, mailing something to you doesn't make you the 'owner' - netflix mails me DVDs, but I don't "own them", and must return them. I suppose the courts could look at a mis-sent item as never actually having ownership transferred, if there's a lack of clear indication that ownership *has* been transferred (e.g. when you buy a book from Amazon, you have a receipt which clearly shows you purchased the item, and that ownership would transfer to you; if someone sends you something by mistake, there's no such basis for anyone to believe that the sender intended to transfer ownership).
The problem with your question is that to answer it, one must assume a particular technology to analyze. You could look at our current wind turbines, and say that, well we use C amount of concrete and S amount of steel, X amount of some other substance, and the production of C concrete produces C_c carbon, while the production of S amount of steel produces S_c carbon, and so forth.
But, the possibility exists that someone in the future will come up with a different approach to converting wind power into a more useful form, which may require much less carbon.
It's also possible that using the same technology, we can engineer different manufacturing/refining processes for making the various raw materials, which use wind power as the source of energy, to produce low-carbon materials, which might significantly reduce the carbon footprint of making wind turbines.
As for natural gas backing, that's the current approach. It needn't be the only approach. There's a lot of very smart people working on trying to create practical "utility scale" energy storage systems (some of the ideas include flywheel-based systems, compressed gas systems, and other approaches). In the relatively near future, we might have much better storage options, which might obviate the need for 'backing' for wind and solar.
However, I will admit that for that reason (that is, the current need for gas backing for wind/solar), as well as a number of other pragmatic issues, I currently favor nuclear power (especially Gen IV systems which would 'recycle' our current nuclear waste - like the Integral Fast Reactor and Molten Salt Fast Reactor).
Seems to me that a governmental policy which disallows pollution *in* America, but allows imports of products from companies which have no such restrictions, played a big roll too.
I'm not against importing products from other nations, per se, but it seems to me that it would be altogether *reasonable* and *sane* to require imported products manufacturer's to adhere to the same rules as domestic suppliers.
What has happened was entirely predictable when domestic companies are forced to compete on an asymmetric legal standard with regards to worker safety, labor treatment, and environmental protection laws compared to their foreign competition.
1) Stop deforestation, try to re-forest lands previously cleared. This will help remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
2) Try to determine and limit the damage we are/may be doing to the ocean, to help preserve and maybe increase the ocean's natural ability to sequester CO2.
3) Voluntarily control our own birthrates, so that population gradually declines, so that less land is required to be used by mankind, and can thus be returned to natural growth patterns.
4) Exploit carbon-neutral or low-carbon energy generation technologies - you know the list. . . biofuels, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, hydro, nuclear fission and/or fusion.
5) Continue the trend which has been ongoing since the 1970's to increase energy efficiency, so that we consume less energy to achieve the same levels of benefit (if we can successfully decarbonize our energy supply, this may not be too critical, but may still have an effect on how much land needs to be dedicated to use for growing biofuel precursor plants, wind turbines, solar collectors, etc; and thus unavailable for use by natural forest growth).
Slashdot Mirror
"The federal government was meant to be largely hands off and the state governments were meant to have all the power."
That all, more or less, ended in 1865. I'm sure African Americans aren't too fond of "States Rights". The problem with almost-sovereign states is that you'll inevitably end up in a situation similar to the pre-civil war period. Things done in one state affect other states. Those same slave-owning "States Rights" advocates in the pre-civil war era demanded that *other* states recognize the legality of their slave ownership.
An escaped slave couldn't just go to Ohio or Massachusetts and suddenly be free because under the laws of those states there was no slavery - because those states had to recognize the "property rights" of Southern slave-owners (although, no small number of folk in the Underground Railroad, of course, moved those former slaves off to Canada where they could be truly free. . . as long as they never tried to visit the States, because they might have been re-taken).
We are a Union of states joined together, which means that there is a strong limit to the notion of States Rights. Yes, states do still have rights, but we do need to keep some perspective on the limits of those rights.
In general, loans aren't subsidies. You might argue that, because the loans are guaranteed by the DOE, and interest rates are kept low, that qualifies as a subsidy. Well, it might be subsidizing the *loans*, but it's not subsidizing the Universities.
"The only US bids received stated that they assumed we had made an error in the RFQ, and actually required quantities in the tens of thousands. These suppliers relied on a manufacturing process which required that scale and would result in prohibitively expensive unit costs for a production run of mere hundreds."
The downside of "economies of scale". You're right, I'm sure. Sometimes, in order to make lots of stuff cheaply, you have to give up the ability to make small amounts of stuff cheaply.
Oh, I guess I see what you're saying. I'm still not convinced it's really the broken window fallacy, but I do think you have a point - that money was there, and would have been spent or invested anyhow if the government didn't do it, and quite probably, would have been spent/invested more efficiently/wisely by the private sector. I quite agree about that.
Additionally, since the government borrows a significant ratio of the money it "spends", taxpayers have to pay interest on the money, which we wouldn't have had to do if the original holders of that money had invested/spent it directly.
I wonder, in the last 100 years, has anyone done any study on Amateur Radio Operators and their families?
Most hams have antennas, on their roofs, or in the back yard, radiating hundreds or in some cases, up to 1500 Watts of power.
Seems like doing a cancer risk study on them might provide some useful insight into the question of whether RF exposure can possibly increase risk of cancer?
Wait, how is this the broken window fallacy? The broken window fallacy is the idea that replacing something which is perfectly good (e.g. breaking a window so that it must be replaced with a new window), contributes to economic growth.
I'm not sure how I see this fits the current story?
There's a lot of negativity, and not undeserved, in this thread, and there's been a lot of overly-glowing obits for Steve Jobs over the past 3 weeks, but I personally think the truth lies in between.
I think Steve Jobs did have a lot of very good, positive impact on society. I think the Apple II computer, then the Macs, helped push along adoption and innovation. I think a lot of people *did* "borrow" good ideas from Steve/Apple. I think as others point out, Steve didn't fully appreciate the extent to which he "borrowed" good ideas from others. That is in general the nature of innovation. Doing something which other people have done, but doing it slightly differently, hopefully better.
I think Steve did a great thing by pushing the music, movie, and TV industries to making legal downloads available. Without iTunes Music Store, there may well not be an Amazon MP3 store, Google Music, Ubuntu One and many others, or perhaps not as soon.
Steve Jobs did make innovations which improved the "State of the Art" in computing, and make it accessible to just about everyone, which helped drive the industry as a whole.
In the end, I can neither completely hate nor completely love Steve Jobs - there are things about the man I really do admire, and things I think were much less admirable, but on balance, I think the world is really better off for Steve Jobs's life in it.
"While it is not impossible that an extinction level event almost happened, I'd like to see a bit more evidence before panicking."
Why would anybody panic about something which didn't happen in the past? Little bit late for panicking now, wouldn't you say?
That's a good point. The main thrust of the discussion here at Slashdot has been about retirement age, so long-term thinking is definitely more conducive to long-term retirement. There'd be a lot more pressure from longer-lived investors, to do things which will be long-term profitable, year in, year out, so that investments will support their long retirements.
(N/T)
Most of the great scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers, and businessmen (the *actually* good businessmen who built long-lived companies to last, and which didn't run their companies and the economy into the ground on high-risk short-term gains) from the 20th would still be alive and practicing. Unfortunately, so would the lawyers and the horrible business execs.
Do we know for sure that any of the elements are being transmuted? I certainly agree that if transmutation is occuring, that means some sort of nuclear reaction is happening. If copper really is being produced, then there's some kind of nuclear reaction happening.
I think the big question on everyone's mind is if this actually *is* a nuclear reaction. There could be some sort of chemical reaction going on with the hydrogen, causing it to give off heat. If so, this 'reactor' is just another hydrogen fuel cell (possibly more efficient, maybe not). Not that a fuel cell which can be made using a "cheap catalyst" would be a bad thing - Slashdot has had a number of stories of people working towards such. But, fuel cells are not an energy "source", in the same way as an alkaline battery is not an energy source - but it could be a very convenient storage mechanism.
You know why they picket such funeral? Because they want attention. Please, please, just ignore these idiots. Please stop giving them headlines.
My answer for video is slightly different than pictures, somewhat, but basically, the best guarantee that the files will still be around is to have lots of copies, and they should never all be bad at the same time (at least, with some maintenance).
Got a home video (or collection) you want to save? Make a DVD or BluRay of the video (or collection of shorter videos). Give a couple copies to mom and dad. Give a couple copies to any sisters/brothers/aunts/uncles/cousins you may have. Give a copy to your best friends (you were gonna anyhow, right?). Of course, those burned copies might only be good for 5 to 10 years. Keep copies on a giant external HDD (USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt, or eSATA). You can fit quite a few movies on a 1 or 2 TB drive.
Of course, none of those will last forever. Plan on copying the HDD once every 2 or 3 years to a new drive. On your kids 8th or 10th birthday, re-copy all the movies to new DVDs, BluRays, or whatever media is current by then (10 years from now, optical drives might be as common as floppy drives [that is to say, almost impossible to find], so of course, move the copies to whatever's current before it's too late . . . this is also why I laugh at the idea of a 100 year DVD disc - great, you've got a perfectly good DVD, now try to find a drive or player to read it in 20 or 30 years).
There's a reason the bible, and many other texts, which have at one time or another have been tried to be suppressed, still exist - not because of the durability of parchment or paper, so much, as copies, copies, copies.
That's true of pictures of course, too, but pictures are more practical for saving with online backup systems (good luck backing up a 4GB DVD home movie online - it can be done, but might take 3 days per movie).
That's great, until you need to go up the river.
Along with orientation, one pet peeve of mine with USB has been that the very 'squared off' edges mean that even if you have the orientation right, you have to get the parts exactly lined up before they'll insert. I wish there was a slight 'funnel' at the opening of the female port to make it easier to "start" the connector getting inserted.
"The car gets quieter and more efficient at the same time."
But is it worth the added expense to make the car .0001 percent more efficient? Ok, Ok, I made the number up, but the point is, the sound energy of the exhaust from an IC Engine is a pretty small fraction of the overall energy losses. Most of the energy loss is due to normal thermal losses which are unavoidable with a heat engine.
For further info, read up on the Carnot Theorem.
I believe for an internal combustion engine, the "Hot Reservoir" is the gas/air mixture as it is combusting (so T_H is the temperature of combustion), and the "Cold Reservoir" is the temperature of the outside air (so, your car is probably slightly more efficient in the winter than during the summer; in Canada/Alaska/Syberia, a car might be noticeably more efficient in the winter, not sure; any extreme northerners here at Slashdot who've ever tried to measure this?)
You seem to probably be making an elementary mistake. If you *sell* the food for $1, you are almost surely not *making* a dollar.
The food costs something to grow, harvest, ship to the processing center to be turned into 'space food', the processing costs money, then it has to be packaged, shipped, then there needs to be some sort of retail or wholesale seller who actually distributes the product. So, there's a lot of hands in the cookie jar.
It's hard to say if the costs would be less than $1 or not, but it's definitely not zero, so selling these packages for a $1 each would not generate $1 which could be put towards NASA's budget (I'm guessing NASA would be lucky to get 25 cents).
Sally Struthers: "It doesn't take much to make a difference in these childrens lives. Just a few grams of plutonium could provide all the power that Benny, or millions of children like him, needs for his entire life."
With physical goods, like a book, I suspect they could legally demand the book be returned (although, who's going to hire a lawyer and go to court over a $10 book).
If it were something sufficiently valuable for it to be "worth it", though, they could probably demand it be returned. I mean, mailing something to you doesn't make you the 'owner' - netflix mails me DVDs, but I don't "own them", and must return them. I suppose the courts could look at a mis-sent item as never actually having ownership transferred, if there's a lack of clear indication that ownership *has* been transferred (e.g. when you buy a book from Amazon, you have a receipt which clearly shows you purchased the item, and that ownership would transfer to you; if someone sends you something by mistake, there's no such basis for anyone to believe that the sender intended to transfer ownership).
My comment was most just meant to be tongue-in-cheek humor, but I suppose that might not come through very well in text.
The problem with your question is that to answer it, one must assume a particular technology to analyze. You could look at our current wind turbines, and say that, well we use C amount of concrete and S amount of steel, X amount of some other substance, and the production of C concrete produces C_c carbon, while the production of S amount of steel produces S_c carbon, and so forth.
But, the possibility exists that someone in the future will come up with a different approach to converting wind power into a more useful form, which may require much less carbon.
It's also possible that using the same technology, we can engineer different manufacturing/refining processes for making the various raw materials, which use wind power as the source of energy, to produce low-carbon materials, which might significantly reduce the carbon footprint of making wind turbines.
As for natural gas backing, that's the current approach. It needn't be the only approach. There's a lot of very smart people working on trying to create practical "utility scale" energy storage systems (some of the ideas include flywheel-based systems, compressed gas systems, and other approaches). In the relatively near future, we might have much better storage options, which might obviate the need for 'backing' for wind and solar.
However, I will admit that for that reason (that is, the current need for gas backing for wind/solar), as well as a number of other pragmatic issues, I currently favor nuclear power (especially Gen IV systems which would 'recycle' our current nuclear waste - like the Integral Fast Reactor and Molten Salt Fast Reactor).
Seems to me that a governmental policy which disallows pollution *in* America, but allows imports of products from companies which have no such restrictions, played a big roll too.
I'm not against importing products from other nations, per se, but it seems to me that it would be altogether *reasonable* and *sane* to require imported products manufacturer's to adhere to the same rules as domestic suppliers.
What has happened was entirely predictable when domestic companies are forced to compete on an asymmetric legal standard with regards to worker safety, labor treatment, and environmental protection laws compared to their foreign competition.
1) Stop deforestation, try to re-forest lands previously cleared. This will help remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
2) Try to determine and limit the damage we are/may be doing to the ocean, to help preserve and maybe increase the ocean's natural ability to sequester CO2.
3) Voluntarily control our own birthrates, so that population gradually declines, so that less land is required to be used by mankind, and can thus be returned to natural growth patterns.
4) Exploit carbon-neutral or low-carbon energy generation technologies - you know the list. . . biofuels, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, hydro, nuclear fission and/or fusion.
5) Continue the trend which has been ongoing since the 1970's to increase energy efficiency, so that we consume less energy to achieve the same levels of benefit (if we can successfully decarbonize our energy supply, this may not be too critical, but may still have an effect on how much land needs to be dedicated to use for growing biofuel precursor plants, wind turbines, solar collectors, etc; and thus unavailable for use by natural forest growth).