"In that case, why doesn't all air rise all the time, leaving a vacuum on the ground?"
I believe the answer is "convection loops". Basically, at least during the day, air near the ground *is getting warmed* and raising all over the place (some places it warms much more than others - air over blacktop will heat up quite quickly, I would think; over trees, not so much), but the reason we don't end up with a vaccuum is that there's always a supply of cooler/denser air available higher in the atmosphere, which falls down into the vaccuum created by the rising air.
Which as another poster in this thread pointed out, is probably why my idea wouldn't work too well - because in reality, the energy being extracted from the turbines is already coming from the falling air outside the thermal dome.
You're right. Now I think about it more, you're right. The reason the air goes up the tower instead out the bottom/side of the greenhouse/dome is that the surrounding cooler air is heavier/denser, and so as the internal pressure of the air increases as it warms, it's easier for it to go up the tower than to squeeze out against that dense air.
So, in a way, a portion of the energy being captured by the tower *is* the gravitational potential energy of the surrounding atmosphere 'falling' towards the ground outside the dome.
I'm kind of picturing something like the St. Louis arch, maybe? The 'hot' side has the air rise, the top acts as a heat exchanger to cool the air, then it falls down the other side of the arch (which also is a heat exchanger and continues to cool the air further as it falls).
I dunno, maybe it wouldn't work for some reason, but it just seems like that air has weight, and you should be able to capture some additional energy that is invested in it from its increase in elevation.
The idea is interesting, but it seems to me that a substantial portion of the solar energy is going towards gravitational potential energy - that is, lifting tons of air mass hundreds of feet in the air.
At some point, that air mass cools off, the air will want to drop back down towards the earth because of gravity. Seems like, in addition to generating 200MW on the 'exhaust' stack, they could build a second "cool air return" stack that generated power from the force of gravity pulling the cooled air back down to ground level?
It seems quite probable the courts will find that application of wiretapping laws as in violation of the first amendment. It does not seem reasonable that any legal interpretation which would make recording IN PUBLIC a crime, would not be in direct conflict with the first amendment.
Essentially, it's not the law at fault, it's the cops and the prosecutors who are *extending* the intent of the law to cover making recordings in public.
I do agree with you, however, that two-party consent should be overturned, but not on Constitutional grounds. Simply because I agree with you that it's bad law.
What do you mean "hidden"? Nobody has ever denied that nuclear reactors eventually have to be dismantled, and, at least in the U.S., afaik, the operators of nuclear plants, BY LAW, are required to set aside funds starting the first day of operation, to decommission the plant when the time comes.
I don't believe decommissioning costs are some secret government subsidy. . .
Maybe Massachusetts - right now, they are trying another case of someone recording police in public as "wiretapping" and "aiding a prisoner escape".
BTW, before you write these states off, might let the cases work their way through the courts. I suspect the courts will say this is utterly absurd, unconsitutional BS, and throw them out.
However, I suppose you might *still* write those States off because who really wants to have to go to court to prove your innocence when the state shouldn't have arrested you for doing something plainly constitutional. I know I'd rather live in a state where the public officers fight to uphold the constitution, instead of fight to work around it.
What this guy needs to do is put out a call for a flash mob to show up - hundreds of people all videotaping at the same time. Let the police try to confiscate every single camera lol. Make sure to videotape the guy videotaping the police, and the police confiscating the camera.
When the police try to turn out in force, scatter to the four winds, then upload the videos to several different places, make offline backups, etc.
If the TSA sets up a website for public comments about this screening policy, it'll be the only safe place in the world to put kiddie porn, messages between terrorists or between organized crime groups, etc.
Because you can pretty much guarantee that the government will NEVER READ IT.
I thought one of the quotes from one of the "guards" in the linked article, was very interesting. ..
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona.
So, this guy was given a task, by an authority figure (a science professor), and he did the task. To that extent, this wasn't a 'fake' prison, it was a real prison, if only for a few days.
Every participant came into this with their own motivations. One of the prisoners said they were trying to use this as "practice" for resisting The Draft. Because that was his motivation, he decided to lead the other prisoners in a 'resistance movement'. So, they decided not to just sit around and play cards either.
I have to wonder to what extent the prisoners playing their part, and the guards playing theirs, created a feedback loop of escalation - sounds like, from the article, it did.
When you were a kid, were you ever playing with other kids - play fighting, for example - which escalated to very real fighting? It starts out a game, but then somone hits a little bit harder. That hurts, you get angry, so you hit back just a little bit harder, and pretty soon it's full punches and kicks.
It seems to me that the court shouldn't use some negotiation against them. We live in a day and age where it's often cheaper to pay off an invalid patent claim than to try to fight it, so every company has to figure out what it's going to cost them to make a deal up front.
It seems to me, that's not an admission by the defendant that they thought the patent would be infringed, or was valid - simply that they were trying to decide if it was worth fighting or not.
It doesn't matter. He was in possession of, and *distributed* child pornography. It is against the law to be in possession of, and to distribute, child pornography, and if you break that law, you are a sexual offender.
This person sexually exploited children (indirectly) by obtaining child pornography. Everyone who seeks out child pornography is participating in the exploitation of children. It doesn't matter what his reason for exploiting them is - he still exploited them.
Plus, by making possession of child pornography illegal, with the threat of lifetime sex offender status, it gives police and prosecutors an additional tool, potentially, to help bust child pornography rings: by having the ability to charge those who possess child porn, they may be able to get them to give them information about where/who they got the child porn from, which may lead the police back, link by link, to the original person(s) who exploited those children.
If he's truly guilty (I always do give anyone the presumption of innocence - it's quite possible the police are wrong about this - that's what juries are for, and hopefully they get it right), then I feel no sympathy for this guy - in that case, he *chose* to seek out child pornography *knowing* it was illegal, and if he had been successful, his *neighbors* would have been registered as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.
Well, with *traditional* (Plutonium-based)recycle, here's the proliferation concern, as far as I understand it:
"Spent Fuel" from thermal-spectrum uranium fueled reactors (like light water and heavy water reactors which comprise essentially 100% of currently operating reactors) has some plutonium, and some U-235 (the type of uranium which can fission) in it. That Uranium-235 and plutonium (mostly the plutonium - there's not a whole lot of U-235 left after running through a reactor once).
The plutonium (and U-235) must be extracted out of the waste, and enriched to a certain level, before it can be useful as a fuel.
I think people are worried that nations like Iran, Libya, Syria and N. Korea will build such reprocessing facilities, using the excuse that they are simply pursuing civilian nuclear power programs, but that they will use these facilities (which are, at the end of the day, plutonium extraction and enrichment facilities) to enrich plutonium to a much, much higher level than you would for normal fuel use, and make bombs from 99% purified plutonium.
Even LFTRs, I believe, need you to extract the plutonium from the waste before they can burn that off for you.
I think the simple answer is just to not allow nations like Iran and N. Korea to build reprocessing centers. I don't know how a reprocessing center in the U.S., Canada, France, or U.K. poses a proliferation concern.
You're looking at growth *rates*. The GP is looking at absolute production:
Nuclear increased by about 2 Exajoules, W+S increased by about 1 Exajoule. 2 exajoules = 2 * 1 Exajoule.
Get it?
However, if wind and solar can keep increasing at their current rates, and if Nuclear is continued to be hamstrung by the likes of Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and Gregory Jazcko, then yes, "renewables" will outperform nuclear.
Of course if the NRC is not allowed to certify designs and provide construction/operation licenses to utilities, if the NRC *Chairman* is blocking scientific study of whether or not a waste repository should be licensed (not based on the MERITS - because the NRC review should be about determining the merits; but simply because he got his appointment to the NRC by being hand-picked by Harry Reid with a simple mission: stop the licensing process for Yucca, no matter what it takes), and if anti-nuclear groups can constantly harass licensees (who've done years of preparatory work with NRC, EPA, etc to properly site a plant) with lawsuits that each add 6 months or a year of delay to the construction, nobody is going to build nuclear.
We've made it way too easy for a very small, but well funded minority of people in the country to block the business of companies who have done everything right - gone through all the regulatory hoops, done everything asked of them to comply with Federal law, and who have committed billions of dollars to the projects, to have those multi-billion dollar projects derailed.
Aren't some of TomTom's newer GPS units Android powered?
Microsoft sued TomTom over patents a few years back (I don't think at the time that TomTom was using Android, specifically, but they were using Linux in their devices). TomTom ended up settling with Microsoft, so I would expect that same settlement would cover any use of Android or any other flavor of Linux.
To what extent could some of those "aches and pains" be caused by something other than Electromagnetic Fields? E.g. talking on the phone with someone who is making you angry or stressed (e.g. afraid your boss is unhappy and you'll get fired; or your girlfriend/wife is chewing you a new one; etc)?
Stress can certainly add 'aches and pains' to people, and I would not at all be surprised if the increase in people carrying cellphones has resulted in more stress due to the increased frequency which you might engage in such communications, because you can easily be reached 24 hours/day.
Your hypothetical situation doesn't seem to prove what you want it to, in my opinion.
Who shows up where in Google's Indexes is solely Google's business. The only right I might have to be on Google is whatever right Google *grants* to me.
If Google sells my competitor the right to remove me from Google's search results, then I might have a lawsuit against Google (if I had a contract with Google to be listed; of course, if I don't pay for my google listing, but just expect to show up because of the crawler giving me a free, automatic listing, then no contract would exist, and I would have no right to show up in the index), but not against the competitor, I shouldn't think (I'm no lawyer, but that's my understanding of the law).
Google DOES have the right to remove whomever they want for essentially whatever reason they want, from their search results. In particular, here in the U.S. it would be a First Amendment Constitutional Speech issue - the government cannot compel speech, and any legal requirement that Google couldn't de-list you would be compelling speech from Google, thereby denying Google's stockholders of their First Amendment rights.
I have no idea if France has anything similar to the First Amendment, however.
Doesn't Wikipedia have their own policy for challenging such an edit (e.g. maybe not re-adding your company, but petitioning the Wikipedia editors to re-add you, and lock the page so that the competitor cannot remove you, or banning edits from the competitor's IP block or something)?
The fundamental question to me is what right do you have to be in a Wikipedia article? Let's assume for a moment that WP was not a publically editable site, but that it was a closed system with designated editors. Would Wikipedia be obligated to include every possible company that might be related to a particular product or service in their encyclopedia? Should they be sued for excluding some company?
If not, then why is it illegal for an editor to remove a company from a Wikipedia page? Why does it matter that it's publically editable?
The court, apparently finds it anti-competitive, but by what right does any company have to be listed in Wikipedia? Are they paying for advertising? Do they have a contract?
Now, the governing board or whatever of Wikipedia, internally, might find it to be a violation of site policy for a company to remove a competitor from Wikipedia, but why should courts be involved in what is essentially an internal governance/editorial issue at Wikipedia?
Slashdot Mirror
It magically transforms into "expensive air conditioning"?
"In that case, why doesn't all air rise all the time, leaving a vacuum on the ground?"
I believe the answer is "convection loops". Basically, at least during the day, air near the ground *is getting warmed* and raising all over the place (some places it warms much more than others - air over blacktop will heat up quite quickly, I would think; over trees, not so much), but the reason we don't end up with a vaccuum is that there's always a supply of cooler/denser air available higher in the atmosphere, which falls down into the vaccuum created by the rising air.
Which as another poster in this thread pointed out, is probably why my idea wouldn't work too well - because in reality, the energy being extracted from the turbines is already coming from the falling air outside the thermal dome.
You're right. Now I think about it more, you're right. The reason the air goes up the tower instead out the bottom/side of the greenhouse/dome is that the surrounding cooler air is heavier/denser, and so as the internal pressure of the air increases as it warms, it's easier for it to go up the tower than to squeeze out against that dense air.
So, in a way, a portion of the energy being captured by the tower *is* the gravitational potential energy of the surrounding atmosphere 'falling' towards the ground outside the dome.
I'm kind of picturing something like the St. Louis arch, maybe? The 'hot' side has the air rise, the top acts as a heat exchanger to cool the air, then it falls down the other side of the arch (which also is a heat exchanger and continues to cool the air further as it falls).
I dunno, maybe it wouldn't work for some reason, but it just seems like that air has weight, and you should be able to capture some additional energy that is invested in it from its increase in elevation.
The idea is interesting, but it seems to me that a substantial portion of the solar energy is going towards gravitational potential energy - that is, lifting tons of air mass hundreds of feet in the air.
At some point, that air mass cools off, the air will want to drop back down towards the earth because of gravity. Seems like, in addition to generating 200MW on the 'exhaust' stack, they could build a second "cool air return" stack that generated power from the force of gravity pulling the cooled air back down to ground level?
It seems quite probable the courts will find that application of wiretapping laws as in violation of the first amendment. It does not seem reasonable that any legal interpretation which would make recording IN PUBLIC a crime, would not be in direct conflict with the first amendment.
Essentially, it's not the law at fault, it's the cops and the prosecutors who are *extending* the intent of the law to cover making recordings in public.
I do agree with you, however, that two-party consent should be overturned, but not on Constitutional grounds. Simply because I agree with you that it's bad law.
What do you mean "hidden"? Nobody has ever denied that nuclear reactors eventually have to be dismantled, and, at least in the U.S., afaik, the operators of nuclear plants, BY LAW, are required to set aside funds starting the first day of operation, to decommission the plant when the time comes.
I don't believe decommissioning costs are some secret government subsidy. . .
But where there's no crime, there is no conspiracy.
The video evidence from all those people would prove there was no crime, and the conspiracy charge would also be thrown out.
Maybe Massachusetts - right now, they are trying another case of someone recording police in public as "wiretapping" and "aiding a prisoner escape".
BTW, before you write these states off, might let the cases work their way through the courts. I suspect the courts will say this is utterly absurd, unconsitutional BS, and throw them out.
However, I suppose you might *still* write those States off because who really wants to have to go to court to prove your innocence when the state shouldn't have arrested you for doing something plainly constitutional. I know I'd rather live in a state where the public officers fight to uphold the constitution, instead of fight to work around it.
No, because the courts will throw these cases out, and in some cases, prosecutors with a lick of sense will drop the charges.
What this guy needs to do is put out a call for a flash mob to show up - hundreds of people all videotaping at the same time. Let the police try to confiscate every single camera lol. Make sure to videotape the guy videotaping the police, and the police confiscating the camera.
When the police try to turn out in force, scatter to the four winds, then upload the videos to several different places, make offline backups, etc.
I'm rather more worried about the line immediately preceding it. . .
"We can't wait for Dawn to peel back the layers of time and reveal the early history of our solar system," said Dawn [em. added].
OMG it's become sentient and refers to itself in the third person. This cannot be good.
Seriously though, who wrote that text? I would think the IB Times would have some editors to catch blatant errors like that.
If the TSA sets up a website for public comments about this screening policy, it'll be the only safe place in the world to put kiddie porn, messages between terrorists or between organized crime groups, etc.
Because you can pretty much guarantee that the government will NEVER READ IT.
Exactly my point, though you seem to have missed it. He's using science (which is recognized as a form of authority) as an excuse for cruel behavior.
I thought one of the quotes from one of the "guards" in the linked article, was very interesting. . .
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona.
So, this guy was given a task, by an authority figure (a science professor), and he did the task. To that extent, this wasn't a 'fake' prison, it was a real prison, if only for a few days.
Every participant came into this with their own motivations. One of the prisoners said they were trying to use this as "practice" for resisting The Draft. Because that was his motivation, he decided to lead the other prisoners in a 'resistance movement'. So, they decided not to just sit around and play cards either.
I have to wonder to what extent the prisoners playing their part, and the guards playing theirs, created a feedback loop of escalation - sounds like, from the article, it did.
When you were a kid, were you ever playing with other kids - play fighting, for example - which escalated to very real fighting? It starts out a game, but then somone hits a little bit harder. That hurts, you get angry, so you hit back just a little bit harder, and pretty soon it's full punches and kicks.
I wonder if that was sort of the dynamic here?
It seems to me that the court shouldn't use some negotiation against them. We live in a day and age where it's often cheaper to pay off an invalid patent claim than to try to fight it, so every company has to figure out what it's going to cost them to make a deal up front.
It seems to me, that's not an admission by the defendant that they thought the patent would be infringed, or was valid - simply that they were trying to decide if it was worth fighting or not.
"And the people that own companies. Don't forget the people that own companies! They have the same rights as other people too!"
There, fixed that for you.
It doesn't matter. He was in possession of, and *distributed* child pornography. It is against the law to be in possession of, and to distribute, child pornography, and if you break that law, you are a sexual offender.
This person sexually exploited children (indirectly) by obtaining child pornography. Everyone who seeks out child pornography is participating in the exploitation of children. It doesn't matter what his reason for exploiting them is - he still exploited them.
Plus, by making possession of child pornography illegal, with the threat of lifetime sex offender status, it gives police and prosecutors an additional tool, potentially, to help bust child pornography rings: by having the ability to charge those who possess child porn, they may be able to get them to give them information about where/who they got the child porn from, which may lead the police back, link by link, to the original person(s) who exploited those children.
If he's truly guilty (I always do give anyone the presumption of innocence - it's quite possible the police are wrong about this - that's what juries are for, and hopefully they get it right), then I feel no sympathy for this guy - in that case, he *chose* to seek out child pornography *knowing* it was illegal, and if he had been successful, his *neighbors* would have been registered as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.
Well, with *traditional* (Plutonium-based)recycle, here's the proliferation concern, as far as I understand it:
"Spent Fuel" from thermal-spectrum uranium fueled reactors (like light water and heavy water reactors which comprise essentially 100% of currently operating reactors) has some plutonium, and some U-235 (the type of uranium which can fission) in it. That Uranium-235 and plutonium (mostly the plutonium - there's not a whole lot of U-235 left after running through a reactor once).
The plutonium (and U-235) must be extracted out of the waste, and enriched to a certain level, before it can be useful as a fuel.
I think people are worried that nations like Iran, Libya, Syria and N. Korea will build such reprocessing facilities, using the excuse that they are simply pursuing civilian nuclear power programs, but that they will use these facilities (which are, at the end of the day, plutonium extraction and enrichment facilities) to enrich plutonium to a much, much higher level than you would for normal fuel use, and make bombs from 99% purified plutonium.
Even LFTRs, I believe, need you to extract the plutonium from the waste before they can burn that off for you.
I think the simple answer is just to not allow nations like Iran and N. Korea to build reprocessing centers. I don't know how a reprocessing center in the U.S., Canada, France, or U.K. poses a proliferation concern.
You're looking at growth *rates*. The GP is looking at absolute production:
Nuclear increased by about 2 Exajoules, W+S increased by about 1 Exajoule. 2 exajoules = 2 * 1 Exajoule.
Get it?
However, if wind and solar can keep increasing at their current rates, and if Nuclear is continued to be hamstrung by the likes of Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and Gregory Jazcko, then yes, "renewables" will outperform nuclear.
Of course if the NRC is not allowed to certify designs and provide construction/operation licenses to utilities, if the NRC *Chairman* is blocking scientific study of whether or not a waste repository should be licensed (not based on the MERITS - because the NRC review should be about determining the merits; but simply because he got his appointment to the NRC by being hand-picked by Harry Reid with a simple mission: stop the licensing process for Yucca, no matter what it takes), and if anti-nuclear groups can constantly harass licensees (who've done years of preparatory work with NRC, EPA, etc to properly site a plant) with lawsuits that each add 6 months or a year of delay to the construction, nobody is going to build nuclear.
We've made it way too easy for a very small, but well funded minority of people in the country to block the business of companies who have done everything right - gone through all the regulatory hoops, done everything asked of them to comply with Federal law, and who have committed billions of dollars to the projects, to have those multi-billion dollar projects derailed.
Aren't some of TomTom's newer GPS units Android powered?
Microsoft sued TomTom over patents a few years back (I don't think at the time that TomTom was using Android, specifically, but they were using Linux in their devices). TomTom ended up settling with Microsoft, so I would expect that same settlement would cover any use of Android or any other flavor of Linux.
To what extent could some of those "aches and pains" be caused by something other than Electromagnetic Fields? E.g. talking on the phone with someone who is making you angry or stressed (e.g. afraid your boss is unhappy and you'll get fired; or your girlfriend/wife is chewing you a new one; etc)?
Stress can certainly add 'aches and pains' to people, and I would not at all be surprised if the increase in people carrying cellphones has resulted in more stress due to the increased frequency which you might engage in such communications, because you can easily be reached 24 hours/day.
Your hypothetical situation doesn't seem to prove what you want it to, in my opinion.
Who shows up where in Google's Indexes is solely Google's business. The only right I might have to be on Google is whatever right Google *grants* to me.
If Google sells my competitor the right to remove me from Google's search results, then I might have a lawsuit against Google (if I had a contract with Google to be listed; of course, if I don't pay for my google listing, but just expect to show up because of the crawler giving me a free, automatic listing, then no contract would exist, and I would have no right to show up in the index), but not against the competitor, I shouldn't think (I'm no lawyer, but that's my understanding of the law).
Google DOES have the right to remove whomever they want for essentially whatever reason they want, from their search results. In particular, here in the U.S. it would be a First Amendment Constitutional Speech issue - the government cannot compel speech, and any legal requirement that Google couldn't de-list you would be compelling speech from Google, thereby denying Google's stockholders of their First Amendment rights.
I have no idea if France has anything similar to the First Amendment, however.
Doesn't Wikipedia have their own policy for challenging such an edit (e.g. maybe not re-adding your company, but petitioning the Wikipedia editors to re-add you, and lock the page so that the competitor cannot remove you, or banning edits from the competitor's IP block or something)?
The fundamental question to me is what right do you have to be in a Wikipedia article? Let's assume for a moment that WP was not a publically editable site, but that it was a closed system with designated editors. Would Wikipedia be obligated to include every possible company that might be related to a particular product or service in their encyclopedia? Should they be sued for excluding some company?
If not, then why is it illegal for an editor to remove a company from a Wikipedia page? Why does it matter that it's publically editable?
The court, apparently finds it anti-competitive, but by what right does any company have to be listed in Wikipedia? Are they paying for advertising? Do they have a contract?
Now, the governing board or whatever of Wikipedia, internally, might find it to be a violation of site policy for a company to remove a competitor from Wikipedia, but why should courts be involved in what is essentially an internal governance/editorial issue at Wikipedia?