That's a good point - about the shock resistance and repairability. Plus, steel is recyclable fairly easily, so when cars get old, the metal can be melted and used to make new cars (or other goods). I don't think ceramics are easy to recycle?
As for why we need to consider the ecological friendliness of car materials? Simple. There's 6+ billion people on this planet. Now, only a part of those can afford to buy cars, and are of an age to drive (that is, teens or adults), but I think the figures I've heard approach something on the order of 1-2 Billion potential drivers (third world countries have been developing to the point where car driving is on the rise in many of them - I heard on NPR recently that the auto industry in China is booming because with the economic development in China over the last decade, there are now a lot more people who can afford cars than ever before).
What it comes down to is, even if cars last a long time, when you are talking about anything that is on the scale of at least hundreds of millions, if not billions, then you have to consider the ecological impact over the entire lifespan of those goods (in this case, cars) - from the impact of building and operating the factories that manufacture them, the impact of the production of materials for them, on-going operation and maintenance of the goods (things like oil/brake fluid/transmission fluid, etc leaks, tailpipe emissions, replacement of parts as they wear out - and the environmental impact of creating and transporting those replacement parts, and disposal of the old 'worn-out' parts [one thing I'm worried about with electric vehicles is the long term impact of the massive battery industry that electric vehicles require - what are the environmental costs of the manufacture and disposal of those batteries?]), and then the ultimate disposal/recycling of the good.
To be honest, I'm not sure that creating plastics and other materials from vegetable derivatives is necessarily much better than creating them from waste products from oil refining. We're refining the oil anyhow, for gas/petrol, so why not use the waste to make plastics? In any case, what is the impact both in terms of the environment, and on human hunger, of using food crops for producing materials for cars? Not sure I like that idea.
I've heard of some race cars having ceramic engines. Might be able to replace quite a few of the metal parts with ceramic materials? Although, I'm not sure that's really any better for the environment than metals.
For awhile, being the Open Source geek I am, I was using Sumatra exclusively for reading PDFs. Then, and insurance agent sent me a quote for health insurance, and 2 out of the 4 pages rendered blank. At first I thought there was a problem with the pdf file, but I tried downloading Adobe Reader, and it rendered just fine.
I would love to suggest an open source, lightweight, more secure pdf reader for my friends and family, but if there are going to be docs that won't render right, I can't suggest anything other than Adobe Reader, unfortunately. My friends and family would quickly come to distrust my recommendations if I recommend things and then they have problems with them.
I think the bigger issue here is, should we be thinking about trying to offer an alternative format for device-independent "ePaper"? PDF seems to be a moving target, and more of a proprietary format than a true standard (I think Adobe submitted a version of the PDF format to ISO a couple years back, didn't they? But I guess they must keep changing the format, or something. I suppose the version they submitted as a 'standard' might have been crippled, missing a lot of the features that the full Adobe Acrobat implements).
Someone earlier suggested that we should be trying to push ODF as an alternative, but the problem with that is that word processor files are meant to fill a slightly different role than PDF. The seemingly most likely candidate to come to mind is the old.dvi (device independent file) format created for the TeX system. Can anything other than TeX/LaTeX create.dvi files? Like, could you print to dvi in OO.org the same way you can print to pdf?
Well. . . the "Are you serious?" is what threw me. Honestly, without that, I would have taken it as just funny, but the "Are you serious?" makes it seem like a jab. But, whatever. I thought you might be facetious, but I replied anyhow because I decided that other people might not realize you were being facetious (since I wasn't positive), so that they would see there was other stuff on there, stuff they might like more than KR.
One thing I find curious isn't discussed more, is the possibility to do district heat systems with Nuclear Power. It doesn't seem very popular, but. . . Any heat-engine power plant (coal, gas, Nuclear) has to generate something on the order of 2-3 times more thermal energy than what gets converted into electric power (if you're interested, you can check a physics textbook section on thermodynamics and heat engines - specifically, Carnot Efficiency).
In cold climates, the potential exists to take part of the Gigawatts of thermal energy being produced, and use it to heat buildings, and heat water for use in your showers, sinks, etc, also for use in commercial activities that require heat sources (certain types of chemical reactions, distillation processses, etc).
Now, of course, that only is really practical within a certain distance from the nuclear power plant (even with well insulated underground pipes, eventually the water, steam, or other medium that you pump through the pipes to carry the heat to where it's needed), but even with that limitation, you could maybe provide many megawatts or even Gigawatts of heat to industry and residences, which is basically 'free' energy - so that you are no longer using oil, gas, propane, or electricity to heat those buildings, or heat water for those buildings.
If you could shift enough people away from other heat sources, to nuclear district heat, you could free up those other energy sources for other uses.
In the short term, pebble beds sound good. The problem, if I understand correctly, is that those pebbles are next to impossible to recycle later in things like Fast Reactors. I'm not sure how many decades it will take to convince people, but the future of nuclear fission has to be technologies which reuse/breed the 'spent' Uranium. The joke about calling Uranium 'spent' or 'waste' is that we currently get like 1 percent or less of the potential energy out of Uranium. In this PBS Frontline interview, the former director of the IFR project explains some of the concepts of the now-cancelled Integral Fast Reactor project.
According to Dr. Till, the possibility exists to get approximately 100 times more energy out of Uranium, by recycling it, than any 'conventional' reactor technology (including pebble beds) currently extracts. I'm no engineer, but I believe that it is very hard, once you've put the Uranium into those graphite balls, then run them through a pebble bed reactor, to get the uranium back out of the pebbles for recycling.
Any reactor design which inherently makes it *more difficult* to recycle the 'waste' Uranium is, in my book, a dead-end technology and we should run far and fast away from it.
Yeah, way to go - pick the crappiest franchise on there and act like that's the sum total of what Hulu is.
How about Heroes, Chuck, Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, Naruto Shippuden, The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, Babylon 5, The Highlander, SNL clips, Family Guy, the Simpsons, dozens of other shows, plus a few movies every month.
Again, for the slow people: If you are a public office holder, you have no right to ask me to stop sending you correspondence. Harassment is a completely LEGAL CONCEPT defined BY LAWS, not your opinion of what you feel is harassment. As stated in the first amendment, Congress shall make no laws which restrict the right of the people to petition the government.
Therefore, if (hypothetically speaking) there is a law which says that if you continue to send mail or email to someone after they have asked you not to, that constitutes harassment, such law could not apply to the specific case of people sending mail or emails to public office holders, because of the First Amendment.
No matter how much you repeat harassment != speech, it doesn't mean anything, since harassment is defined by law, and the Constitution trumps laws, and says that you have the right to petition the government. I would agree that there is such a thing as speech which is not protected, and constitutes harassment, *but* simply petitioning an officeholder after they have asked you not to cannot ever be harassment - that is explicitely why the Bill of Rights says that Congress can't restrict the right of the people to petition the government. I mean, that is the whole purpose of that last clause of the first amendment. By your logic, that part of the 1st Amend would have no meaning at all.
Yeah, but what Jack Thompson is described as doing is sending an email, then a day or two later, sending some more emails. I'm sorry, but I don't see any harassment there. Maybe if he were sending 10+ emails a day, every day, flooding the Senator's mailbox. Where are you getting harassment from? Simply because the Senator asked him to stop sending emails? A senator can ask me to stop sending him emails, but I have no legal requirement to stop sending emails to him - if I did *have* to or else face legal sanctions, that would violate the 1st Amend.
Yes, the state senator is claiming harassment, but there is a particular legal standard for harassment, and I don't think that in this case, it applies - I am not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure, but getting an email every few days from a lobbyist hardly seems like harassment. The Senator appears to be claiming that because he asked Thompson not to send him any more emails, that constitutes legal harassment. If he were a private individual, that might be the case, but because he is an office holder, Thompson should be free to ignore the request, and keep sending emails (granted, in this case, he's defeating his own cause by making his allies P.O.).
Yeah, I guess you're right - common sense is hard. After all, wouldn't it make more sense to FILTER the emails, instead of getting all prissy about it and threatening legal action?
Well, there might exist a valid harassment claim, but I don't think you could use CAN-SPAM for this. Ultimately, it's up to the courts to decide, but I just can't see it being valid that an Anti-Spam law could be used to punish people for sending emails to legislators seeking those legislators' support in regards to a matter of governance.
As for harassment, I'd personally have to be seeing multiple emails per day before I'd be inclined to find someone guilty of harassment in a situation like this. Jack sending an email every few days, or even every day, petitioning a state senator, is harassment? I just don't see it.
I dunno. I thought about that, but the thing is, the First Ammendment only states that Congress cannot enact any laws restricting those rights, or punishing people for exercising those rights. An individual Senator deleting your emails is not congress passing a law. You have a right to petition the government, but people in Government, I think, have a certain right to ignore you if they choose.
I mean, is there anything that stops a senator from throwing your mail in the trashcan when he sees it's from you? Filters are sort of the equivalent of looking at who a physical letter is from and tossing it in the trash.
Well, if you want to play the Jurisdiction game, one could ask what Jurisdiction the Utah AG has over a case involving interstate communications? Anything related to interstate comm automatically becomes Federal jurisdiction, I thought? IANAL.
Ok, well, I really hate to be on the side of Jack Thompson, but. . .
U.S. Constitution - 1st Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Simply put, if you are a legislator, you have no right to ask people to not petition you. Jack Thompson was exercising his contitutionally protected right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. There is nothing CAN-SPAM can do about that. Such an application would be clearly unconstitutional.
Now, that said. . . there's such a thing as an email filter that automatically deletes email from certain senders. . .
I don't know, for sure, I'm not a physicist. All I was saying is that the statement made seemed to be that the light was somehow modifying the air (turning it into a plasma) - not creating something that wasn't there before.
"I guess plasma channels are kind of like that, so it would appear we've come full circle (Light creates its own medium to travel through, no it doesn't, it kind of does.)"
Kind of stretching the point, do you think? I mean, light traveling through a vacuum wouldn't create a plasma channel. It happens it's passing through air, and the energy of the light modifies the properties of the air it's passing through. When a boat passes through the water and creates a wake in the water, is it 'kind of creating its own medium to travel through'? When I'm hiking in the woods and leave a footprint, am I somehow creating a medium to travel through?
I think the more immediate concern would be the potential impact on wildlife from having massive wind farms. Would large arrays of wind turbines potentially have any adverse affects on bird migrations, or even just birds in general? Or bats? What sort of injury/death risk do wind turbines pose for birds and bats?
It seems like nothing man can do can have zero impact on the environment, ultimately.
"Having the government give out contracts for infrastructure improvements that provide employment are the best option. The society as a whole benefits from infrastructure improvement and employment, and it keeps money circulating so the bottom doesn't fall out."
But, what does that have to do with Chrysler, GM, or Tesla?
I sort of resent having tax money taken from me to support car companies whose cars I didn't decide to buy and drive. It's feels sort of like forced patronage. I've bought the car I wanted, but now I have to contribute my $500 or whatever towards bailing out GM and Chrysler.
As for Tesla, since they are marketing their cars to the rich anyhow, why not let them raise the price from $109k to whatever would be necessary to be profitable - $150k or whatever. I mean, to someone who is rich enough to drop $110k on a car, why not $150k? Does it really make a difference at that point?
"You have to have government spending to soften the natural cycles of the market, or else you end up in a boom and bust period that will end in catastrophe."
Why must you have government spending? Government doesn't have money. It doesn't make money. People and businesses make money and have money. The government takes that money (taxation), then spends it. If the government weren't taking it, then people and businesses would have that much more money to spend. Seems like the same amount of money would ultimately get spent either way.
It seems your argument boils down to a belief that the government knows how to spend the money more intelligently than the people and businesses who would otherwise have been spending it?
Now, granted, there are certain types of things (roads, bridges, military, etc) which it makes a lot of sense to have the government be in charge of (the thought of all the roads in the country being privately owned, and the absolute mess that would make of different fees you would have to pay to the owners of the roads, and constantly being stopped at toll gates, would probably make transportation almost collapse; the thought of private militaries would be truly terrifying and a constant threat to the security of our nation), and since we need to spend money on those things anyhow, increasing the spending a bit during a recession is not a bad idea.
Still, in general, I don't buy the argument that the government can spend my money better than I can for economic recovery.
While I get your point, and don't completely disagree with it, I would like to point out that those other carmakers' cars would still be more affordable today, if they were more affordable yesterday. All this really does is prop up a company that is losing money, delaying its collapse, but if it doesn't have a sound business model, then it won't survive anyhow.
However, to play devil's advocate, I'll add this - sometimes significant money has to be spent on R&D before you can get the necessary economies of scale to make a business like an auto-maker become self-sustaining. Whether we should be using government money to fund such R&D is a valid point of debate, but the possibility does exist that what Tesla is doing right now in terms of R&D may very well lead to a long term business that is more self-sustaining than there competitors (although, if you are going to provide taxpayer money for R&D to one company, why not to the other companies too? Where does it stop?).
Oh, I'm sure there must have been a contract. . . a very one-sided contract that gave Microsoft all the power, and left the guy who invested in the pub screwed. All I can really say though, is to spend that much money, without putting terms in the contract that allow you to recover some kind of damages from Microsoft if they decide to shut you down, is just foolish.
Well, sometimes the game engine tech people are not the right people to create impressive artwork and levels to show off the capabilities. By 'hyping' what they've done, mmaybe they'll attract the interest of artists and level designers who will create something more impressive with it, so that they can *further* hype it. At some point, you just put it out there and see what other people do with it. It sounds like they are at that point.
Ok, I have a question about this - does the 'unused' power that got transported get looped back to be used again later?
I know real electric systems are very complex, but let me use a simple example to illustrate my question. So, I've got a small AC generator with two terminals, to which I connect a circuit which consists of a conductor to take the current from the generator, to one of these CFL bulbs, and another conductor to take the current back to the second terminal on the generator.
So, now, once this system is up and running at normal 'operating' current levels (that is, the generator has spun up, the lightbulb has lit up, and everything is in a sort of static state):
I assume what your statement means is that even though the equivalent of 28 Watts of power is moving through the light bulb, the amount of mechanical power I have to transfer into the generator to keep the system running is only the 13 watts that the bulb is actually consuming (plus any losses due to innefficiencies in the generator and conductors, but that should be relatively small in this simple scenario). That is because that power 'returns' to the generator, and because it does, not as much mechanical power is needed to keep the generator spinning at the proper speed.
"Gee gosh, I guess it's time to shut it all down and start from scratch. This would certainly be the end or very close to it. Internet v2 (or v3, or v4, whatever)."
Oh, wow, so the Internet powers that be have finally decided on an IP v4 to v6 migration strategy. Fantastic. It's about time someone did something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good point - about the shock resistance and repairability. Plus, steel is recyclable fairly easily, so when cars get old, the metal can be melted and used to make new cars (or other goods). I don't think ceramics are easy to recycle?
As for why we need to consider the ecological friendliness of car materials? Simple. There's 6+ billion people on this planet. Now, only a part of those can afford to buy cars, and are of an age to drive (that is, teens or adults), but I think the figures I've heard approach something on the order of 1-2 Billion potential drivers (third world countries have been developing to the point where car driving is on the rise in many of them - I heard on NPR recently that the auto industry in China is booming because with the economic development in China over the last decade, there are now a lot more people who can afford cars than ever before).
What it comes down to is, even if cars last a long time, when you are talking about anything that is on the scale of at least hundreds of millions, if not billions, then you have to consider the ecological impact over the entire lifespan of those goods (in this case, cars) - from the impact of building and operating the factories that manufacture them, the impact of the production of materials for them, on-going operation and maintenance of the goods (things like oil/brake fluid/transmission fluid, etc leaks, tailpipe emissions, replacement of parts as they wear out - and the environmental impact of creating and transporting those replacement parts, and disposal of the old 'worn-out' parts [one thing I'm worried about with electric vehicles is the long term impact of the massive battery industry that electric vehicles require - what are the environmental costs of the manufacture and disposal of those batteries?]), and then the ultimate disposal/recycling of the good.
To be honest, I'm not sure that creating plastics and other materials from vegetable derivatives is necessarily much better than creating them from waste products from oil refining. We're refining the oil anyhow, for gas/petrol, so why not use the waste to make plastics? In any case, what is the impact both in terms of the environment, and on human hunger, of using food crops for producing materials for cars? Not sure I like that idea.
I've heard of some race cars having ceramic engines. Might be able to replace quite a few of the metal parts with ceramic materials? Although, I'm not sure that's really any better for the environment than metals.
For awhile, being the Open Source geek I am, I was using Sumatra exclusively for reading PDFs. Then, and insurance agent sent me a quote for health insurance, and 2 out of the 4 pages rendered blank. At first I thought there was a problem with the pdf file, but I tried downloading Adobe Reader, and it rendered just fine.
I would love to suggest an open source, lightweight, more secure pdf reader for my friends and family, but if there are going to be docs that won't render right, I can't suggest anything other than Adobe Reader, unfortunately. My friends and family would quickly come to distrust my recommendations if I recommend things and then they have problems with them.
I think the bigger issue here is, should we be thinking about trying to offer an alternative format for device-independent "ePaper"? PDF seems to be a moving target, and more of a proprietary format than a true standard (I think Adobe submitted a version of the PDF format to ISO a couple years back, didn't they? But I guess they must keep changing the format, or something. I suppose the version they submitted as a 'standard' might have been crippled, missing a lot of the features that the full Adobe Acrobat implements).
Someone earlier suggested that we should be trying to push ODF as an alternative, but the problem with that is that word processor files are meant to fill a slightly different role than PDF. The seemingly most likely candidate to come to mind is the old .dvi (device independent file) format created for the TeX system. Can anything other than TeX/LaTeX create .dvi files? Like, could you print to dvi in OO.org the same way you can print to pdf?
Well. . . the "Are you serious?" is what threw me. Honestly, without that, I would have taken it as just funny, but the "Are you serious?" makes it seem like a jab. But, whatever. I thought you might be facetious, but I replied anyhow because I decided that other people might not realize you were being facetious (since I wasn't positive), so that they would see there was other stuff on there, stuff they might like more than KR.
One thing I find curious isn't discussed more, is the possibility to do district heat systems with Nuclear Power. It doesn't seem very popular, but. . . Any heat-engine power plant (coal, gas, Nuclear) has to generate something on the order of 2-3 times more thermal energy than what gets converted into electric power (if you're interested, you can check a physics textbook section on thermodynamics and heat engines - specifically, Carnot Efficiency).
In cold climates, the potential exists to take part of the Gigawatts of thermal energy being produced, and use it to heat buildings, and heat water for use in your showers, sinks, etc, also for use in commercial activities that require heat sources (certain types of chemical reactions, distillation processses, etc).
Now, of course, that only is really practical within a certain distance from the nuclear power plant (even with well insulated underground pipes, eventually the water, steam, or other medium that you pump through the pipes to carry the heat to where it's needed), but even with that limitation, you could maybe provide many megawatts or even Gigawatts of heat to industry and residences, which is basically 'free' energy - so that you are no longer using oil, gas, propane, or electricity to heat those buildings, or heat water for those buildings.
If you could shift enough people away from other heat sources, to nuclear district heat, you could free up those other energy sources for other uses.
Wait, wait. . . why does *China* need the revolution if the US is the country with bad policy?
In the short term, pebble beds sound good. The problem, if I understand correctly, is that those pebbles are next to impossible to recycle later in things like Fast Reactors. I'm not sure how many decades it will take to convince people, but the future of nuclear fission has to be technologies which reuse/breed the 'spent' Uranium. The joke about calling Uranium 'spent' or 'waste' is that we currently get like 1 percent or less of the potential energy out of Uranium. In this PBS Frontline interview, the former director of the IFR project explains some of the concepts of the now-cancelled Integral Fast Reactor project.
According to Dr. Till, the possibility exists to get approximately 100 times more energy out of Uranium, by recycling it, than any 'conventional' reactor technology (including pebble beds) currently extracts. I'm no engineer, but I believe that it is very hard, once you've put the Uranium into those graphite balls, then run them through a pebble bed reactor, to get the uranium back out of the pebbles for recycling.
Any reactor design which inherently makes it *more difficult* to recycle the 'waste' Uranium is, in my book, a dead-end technology and we should run far and fast away from it.
Yeah, way to go - pick the crappiest franchise on there and act like that's the sum total of what Hulu is.
How about Heroes, Chuck, Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, Naruto Shippuden, The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, Babylon 5, The Highlander, SNL clips, Family Guy, the Simpsons, dozens of other shows, plus a few movies every month.
Again, for the slow people: If you are a public office holder, you have no right to ask me to stop sending you correspondence. Harassment is a completely LEGAL CONCEPT defined BY LAWS, not your opinion of what you feel is harassment. As stated in the first amendment, Congress shall make no laws which restrict the right of the people to petition the government.
Therefore, if (hypothetically speaking) there is a law which says that if you continue to send mail or email to someone after they have asked you not to, that constitutes harassment, such law could not apply to the specific case of people sending mail or emails to public office holders, because of the First Amendment.
No matter how much you repeat harassment != speech, it doesn't mean anything, since harassment is defined by law, and the Constitution trumps laws, and says that you have the right to petition the government. I would agree that there is such a thing as speech which is not protected, and constitutes harassment, *but* simply petitioning an officeholder after they have asked you not to cannot ever be harassment - that is explicitely why the Bill of Rights says that Congress can't restrict the right of the people to petition the government. I mean, that is the whole purpose of that last clause of the first amendment. By your logic, that part of the 1st Amend would have no meaning at all.
Yeah, but what Jack Thompson is described as doing is sending an email, then a day or two later, sending some more emails. I'm sorry, but I don't see any harassment there. Maybe if he were sending 10+ emails a day, every day, flooding the Senator's mailbox. Where are you getting harassment from? Simply because the Senator asked him to stop sending emails? A senator can ask me to stop sending him emails, but I have no legal requirement to stop sending emails to him - if I did *have* to or else face legal sanctions, that would violate the 1st Amend.
Yes, the state senator is claiming harassment, but there is a particular legal standard for harassment, and I don't think that in this case, it applies - I am not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure, but getting an email every few days from a lobbyist hardly seems like harassment. The Senator appears to be claiming that because he asked Thompson not to send him any more emails, that constitutes legal harassment. If he were a private individual, that might be the case, but because he is an office holder, Thompson should be free to ignore the request, and keep sending emails (granted, in this case, he's defeating his own cause by making his allies P.O.).
Yeah, I guess you're right - common sense is hard. After all, wouldn't it make more sense to FILTER the emails, instead of getting all prissy about it and threatening legal action?
Well, there might exist a valid harassment claim, but I don't think you could use CAN-SPAM for this. Ultimately, it's up to the courts to decide, but I just can't see it being valid that an Anti-Spam law could be used to punish people for sending emails to legislators seeking those legislators' support in regards to a matter of governance.
As for harassment, I'd personally have to be seeing multiple emails per day before I'd be inclined to find someone guilty of harassment in a situation like this. Jack sending an email every few days, or even every day, petitioning a state senator, is harassment? I just don't see it.
I dunno. I thought about that, but the thing is, the First Ammendment only states that Congress cannot enact any laws restricting those rights, or punishing people for exercising those rights. An individual Senator deleting your emails is not congress passing a law. You have a right to petition the government, but people in Government, I think, have a certain right to ignore you if they choose.
I mean, is there anything that stops a senator from throwing your mail in the trashcan when he sees it's from you? Filters are sort of the equivalent of looking at who a physical letter is from and tossing it in the trash.
Well, if you want to play the Jurisdiction game, one could ask what Jurisdiction the Utah AG has over a case involving interstate communications? Anything related to interstate comm automatically becomes Federal jurisdiction, I thought? IANAL.
Ok, well, I really hate to be on the side of Jack Thompson, but. . .
U.S. Constitution - 1st Amendment:
Simply put, if you are a legislator, you have no right to ask people to not petition you. Jack Thompson was exercising his contitutionally protected right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. There is nothing CAN-SPAM can do about that. Such an application would be clearly unconstitutional.
Now, that said. . . there's such a thing as an email filter that automatically deletes email from certain senders. . .
I don't know, for sure, I'm not a physicist. All I was saying is that the statement made seemed to be that the light was somehow modifying the air (turning it into a plasma) - not creating something that wasn't there before.
"I guess plasma channels are kind of like that, so it would appear we've come full circle (Light creates its own medium to travel through, no it doesn't, it kind of does.)"
Kind of stretching the point, do you think? I mean, light traveling through a vacuum wouldn't create a plasma channel. It happens it's passing through air, and the energy of the light modifies the properties of the air it's passing through. When a boat passes through the water and creates a wake in the water, is it 'kind of creating its own medium to travel through'? When I'm hiking in the woods and leave a footprint, am I somehow creating a medium to travel through?
I think the more immediate concern would be the potential impact on wildlife from having massive wind farms. Would large arrays of wind turbines potentially have any adverse affects on bird migrations, or even just birds in general? Or bats? What sort of injury/death risk do wind turbines pose for birds and bats?
It seems like nothing man can do can have zero impact on the environment, ultimately.
"Having the government give out contracts for infrastructure improvements that provide employment are the best option. The society as a whole benefits from infrastructure improvement and employment, and it keeps money circulating so the bottom doesn't fall out."
But, what does that have to do with Chrysler, GM, or Tesla?
I sort of resent having tax money taken from me to support car companies whose cars I didn't decide to buy and drive. It's feels sort of like forced patronage. I've bought the car I wanted, but now I have to contribute my $500 or whatever towards bailing out GM and Chrysler.
As for Tesla, since they are marketing their cars to the rich anyhow, why not let them raise the price from $109k to whatever would be necessary to be profitable - $150k or whatever. I mean, to someone who is rich enough to drop $110k on a car, why not $150k? Does it really make a difference at that point?
"You have to have government spending to soften the natural cycles of the market, or else you end up in a boom and bust period that will end in catastrophe."
Why must you have government spending? Government doesn't have money. It doesn't make money. People and businesses make money and have money. The government takes that money (taxation), then spends it. If the government weren't taking it, then people and businesses would have that much more money to spend. Seems like the same amount of money would ultimately get spent either way.
It seems your argument boils down to a belief that the government knows how to spend the money more intelligently than the people and businesses who would otherwise have been spending it?
Now, granted, there are certain types of things (roads, bridges, military, etc) which it makes a lot of sense to have the government be in charge of (the thought of all the roads in the country being privately owned, and the absolute mess that would make of different fees you would have to pay to the owners of the roads, and constantly being stopped at toll gates, would probably make transportation almost collapse; the thought of private militaries would be truly terrifying and a constant threat to the security of our nation), and since we need to spend money on those things anyhow, increasing the spending a bit during a recession is not a bad idea.
Still, in general, I don't buy the argument that the government can spend my money better than I can for economic recovery.
While I get your point, and don't completely disagree with it, I would like to point out that those other carmakers' cars would still be more affordable today, if they were more affordable yesterday. All this really does is prop up a company that is losing money, delaying its collapse, but if it doesn't have a sound business model, then it won't survive anyhow.
However, to play devil's advocate, I'll add this - sometimes significant money has to be spent on R&D before you can get the necessary economies of scale to make a business like an auto-maker become self-sustaining. Whether we should be using government money to fund such R&D is a valid point of debate, but the possibility does exist that what Tesla is doing right now in terms of R&D may very well lead to a long term business that is more self-sustaining than there competitors (although, if you are going to provide taxpayer money for R&D to one company, why not to the other companies too? Where does it stop?).
Oh, I'm sure there must have been a contract. . . a very one-sided contract that gave Microsoft all the power, and left the guy who invested in the pub screwed. All I can really say though, is to spend that much money, without putting terms in the contract that allow you to recover some kind of damages from Microsoft if they decide to shut you down, is just foolish.
Hi. Just wanted to say thanks for the followup.
Well, sometimes the game engine tech people are not the right people to create impressive artwork and levels to show off the capabilities. By 'hyping' what they've done, mmaybe they'll attract the interest of artists and level designers who will create something more impressive with it, so that they can *further* hype it. At some point, you just put it out there and see what other people do with it. It sounds like they are at that point.
Ok, I have a question about this - does the 'unused' power that got transported get looped back to be used again later?
I know real electric systems are very complex, but let me use a simple example to illustrate my question. So, I've got a small AC generator with two terminals, to which I connect a circuit which consists of a conductor to take the current from the generator, to one of these CFL bulbs, and another conductor to take the current back to the second terminal on the generator.
So, now, once this system is up and running at normal 'operating' current levels (that is, the generator has spun up, the lightbulb has lit up, and everything is in a sort of static state):
I assume what your statement means is that even though the equivalent of 28 Watts of power is moving through the light bulb, the amount of mechanical power I have to transfer into the generator to keep the system running is only the 13 watts that the bulb is actually consuming (plus any losses due to innefficiencies in the generator and conductors, but that should be relatively small in this simple scenario). That is because that power 'returns' to the generator, and because it does, not as much mechanical power is needed to keep the generator spinning at the proper speed.
Do I have that right?
"Gee gosh, I guess it's time to shut it all down and start from scratch. This would certainly be the end or very close to it. Internet v2 (or v3, or v4, whatever)."
Oh, wow, so the Internet powers that be have finally decided on an IP v4 to v6 migration strategy. Fantastic. It's about time someone did something about it.