Here is the only thing that everybody is missing - Gene Testing only says that a person is likely to have a disorder based on genes. Having a genetic disposition for say, heart disease, only means you have an increased risk for heart disease. If you eat right, exercise, and all that good stuff then your odds of dying from heart disease are drastically reduced.
That's true for some diseases, but others can be predicted with a much higher accuracy and there's absolutely nothing the person in question can do about it. "All that good stuff" won't save you from _all_ the bad stuff that can happen to you if you lose the genetic lottery.
I often wonder how they imagine themselves squaring accepting money from lobbyists, etc with God. "it was a lot of money" seems like a terrible excuse.
Not to mention that Jesus himself supposedly said that you can only serve one lord - money, or God. But then again, they probably read the Bible like they read a novel - read the first couple of chapters with great interest, and then skip to the last to see how the story ends.
3) We don't torture, as long as we define torture to lead to organ failure or death, or, at least hurt on that scale.
I wonder if the attorney general has actually experienced any of the above, so that he can give a somewhat qualified comparison.
Death doesn't hurt. The process of dying may hurt a lot or not at all. Major organ failure may or may not hurt (if your heart suddenly stops beating or goes into fibrillation, you won't feel a thing. If your brain suddenly stops working, same thing). However, waterboarding would qualify as torture, because it'll feel like your lungs experiencing failure.
That was never the case. Better acceleration, top speed and climb rate beats better turn rate any day, since the former allow you to pick your fights as long as you're not the victim of a surprise attack (of course, if you deliberately enter a turning duel against a plane that's better at that than yours, you're a moron).
But then again, the ages-old (WWI I think) number one rule for aerial combat beats almost everything else: "See the enemy first." (which also translates to "Don't get seen first.").
oh, so they strip off an electron instead of adding one?
Yes.
I thought ion drives negatively charged the particles before expelling them
That would be problematic since it would lead to the spacecraft becoming positively charged over time. If positively charged ions are used, the engine can be designed so that the ions pick up electrons on their way out, so that a neutral plasma is expelled and the charge of the space craft does not change.
... which would also mean that you could extract infinite amounts of energy from an alpha particle (which is an ionized helium nucleus... and energy required to remove an electron from a noble gas is infinite (i.e. a hard "cannot be ionized ever"), then adding an electron to the alpha would release infinite amounts of energy.
I thought I learned in HS that no noble gasses could be ionized because all their electron shells were already perfectly full.
They may be harder to ionize than other substances, but it's not impossible to do so. Heck, if they could not be ionized, it would mean that they hang on to their electrons with infinite force...
You seem to have something of a reading comprehension problem, so I'll go real slow for you in the hopes that it'll actually sink in this time:
Oh, don't bother. You don't need to go real slow, but maybe you should read more slowly, and you might actually comprehend some of those words.
I've never once stated that solar technology "isn't available."
But you're trying teally hard to make that argument that because its not competitive now, it will never be.
It cannot produce power at a cost competitive with other sources of energy, specifically nuclear and fossil fuels.
Right now. Again, how much are you going to bet that it will stay this way in the medium to long term (5+ years) ?
During those 40 years, solar efficiency for typical mass-produced cells hasn't even doubled. It's gone from about 8% to about 12%.
Prices have dropped quite a bit, though. Right ?
If you assume a linear progression of increases in efficiency and decreases in cost commensurate with the progress we've seen in the last 5-10 years, solar will still be at least 50% more expensive than nuclear or fossil fuels.
And what about price increases for fossil fuels and uranium ? What's going to happen to the price for nuclear fuels if a couple of large nations on this planet decide that plopping down a dozen nuclear plants is going to be part of the solution of their energy problems ?
You make it sound like "improv[ing] cell efficiency" is just a trivial exercise, something to be done over a lunch break by two guys with a calculator.
Right. And this is exactly why I didn't give two more (and probably more promising) options to bring the price down.
If improving efficiency is the key to keeping costs down, you've (once again) made my point for me: the lack of efficiency is why solar has not made any meaningful impact on the energy grid.
You're quite single-mindedly focusing on one of three options I gave. And you're wrong: The lack of efficiency is not why solar has not any meaningful impact on the energy grid. The cost for the cells is (still) the problem, even though it has dropped quite a bit. If we find a way to make PV cells with a really lousy efficiency (say, 5%), but at a tenth of the price, this would give solar a bigger boost than producing 20% efficiency cells at the same price as todays 10% efficiency cells.
What you aren't well aware of is that solar-thermal is even less efficient than PV. Spain just finished a 50MW solar-thermal plant, and it's conversion efficiency is only 2.6%.
Wow, nice one. I mean it. You just pulled a number from wikipedia without understanding a thing. The 2.6% is "electric power output" per "total amount of solar power that hits the area of the power plant, regardless of whether it's actually collected by the mirrors or just hits the ground". If you'd actually use a meaningful number (like, "electric power output" per "solar power that actually hits the collectors"), you'd find that this number is comparable or even higher than todays mass-produced PV cells. Maybe you should actually try to read the whole paragraph of the wikipedia article you're quoting next time ?
Show me a working, power-producing solar-thermal power plant selling power at 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour without any Federal subsidies and I'll retract my prior statement. You missed my point entirely, bub.
Did you RTFA ? I would guess you didn't. It talked about possible improvements in the next five to ten years. Who's missing the point ?
It's not that the technology isn't available,
And it's much, much easier to improve (better design, cheaper production, etc) already existing technology than suddenly make something work that has been in the "we'll have a working plant in 30 years" for decades now.
And I'll again direct you to the prior established point: efficient, economical solar power -- ones that can compete directly with nuclear and fossil fuel power sources -- are just as fanciful (for now) as fusion and antimatter.
And you'll bet how much that this will still be the case in, say, five years from now? Ten years from now?
And yet another one misses the point entirely, all while making my point for me.
Oh boy.
You'd have to make it at a minimum twice as efficient as it is now in order to hit (or slightly exceed) the 8cents/kW/hr figure.
If we were talking about photovoltaics (which we're not, see below), you'd have a number of options of getting the price down. You could try to improve cell efficiency (while trying to keep cell price in check - this is mainly a function of how expensive land is where you want to build your plan), cell longevity, or cell price (again, how effective this approach is depends on the cost of land).
Untold sums have been spent getting solar cell efficiency out of the single-digit percentages, and that was considered a fantasmically amazing feat at the time. Typical modern panels have a 12% efficiency, and the best available panels -- you know, those that cost several times that of the "typical" panels -- gets you to 20% efficiency.
Weren't we talking about solarthermal power generation, and not photovoltaics ? Talk about missing the point.
Typical modern panels have a 12% efficiency, and the best available panels -- you know, those that cost several times that of the "typical" panels -- gets you to 20% efficiency.
See above.
Radical breakthroughs in cell efficiency are needed to make solar a viable contender against nuclear and fossil fuels. I'd wager that we're more likely to make a breakthrough in fusion power than we are to double the efficiency of mass-produced, affordable solar cells in the next several decades. In the meantime, we're ignoring a practical, affordable, well-known power source that's abundant, clean, and reliable: nuclear fission.
Engineers do cost-benefit analysis also, but not with monetary cost. Every design decision in a piece of software is a balance of how much cpu time does this save me vs. how much memory does this eat up vs. how much complexity does it add to my system, etc.
How is that not a monetary decision ? CPU time costs money. Memory costs money. Unnecessary complexity costs money (more time necessary to make changes/bugfixes/etc to the system). The real challenge is putting the right numbers on all of these costs.
And improvements in magnetic confinement could easily bring fusion power down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour...and advances in the production of antimatter could yield power too cheap to meter...assuming it's even possible to do any of the above at all.
Show me some working, power-producing fusion and/or antimatter power plants.
I'll show you some working, power-producing solar-thermal power plants.
Geez. Heating water with solar power really isn't rocket science. The improvements proposed for these power plants are mainly in engineering. On the other hand, we're still working on the science for fusion and antimatter.
I always thought it was hitting an ICEBERG that sunk the Titanic..
No, no, no. The Titanic disaster clearly demonstrates the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. In solid or liquid form, this dreadful substance has claimed innumerable ships, which is just one more reason why it should be banned immediately.
As far as I'm aware in the UK, France, and Germany the consumer has the liability for domestic credit card fraud,
The liability of the cardholder is about 50 Euro, until he reports his card as stolen/lost - then it's zero. I've had 600 Euro fraudulently charged to my credit card (probably my CC info got "lost" during a 1.5 year stay in the US, because that was the only time when I regularly used it), and got it charged back without having to pay a thing.
I apparently think better of Europeans than you do because I believe they saw unfavorable terms and then rejected them.
Well, there are more reasons for credit cards being not as common over here. One is that checking accounts usually come with a line of credit (if you have a regular income, with conditions comparable to that of a CC except for the grace period), so you don't need credit cards for "consumer" credit. Others might be that direct deposit, direct debit (very convenient since it also allows chargeback within 6 weeks) and paying with your ATM card are more common, pretty much negating the need for a CC for most things.
What I don't understand is how does that mechanisim rule out amplification by resonance, what makes you so sure?
The natural frequency (the one at which it is in resonance) can be determined, and it was different from the frequency the bridge actually oscillated at before is collapsed. The brigde may not have had enough damping at the latter frequency, but it wasn't the frequency at which it would have been in resonance.
and also that bad areodynamics could easily induce a twisting of the deck in the right conditions.
The point is that the problems don't end here - the twisting of the deck gives the wind a larger angle of attack, which leads to more twisting... it's a positive feedback cycle which has nothing to do with the actual natural frequency of the bridge.
Everything has resonant frequencies. Most phenomena do not input enough energy at those frequencies to cause damage to arbitrary man-made devices, but when they do - Watch out Tacoma Narrows.
Tacoma narrows had very little to do with resonance. The problem there was that a small amount of torsion changed the aerodynamic profile of the bridge so that it would pick up more energy from the wind, which increased the amount of torsion, which changed the aerodynamic profile even more, which caused the bridge to pick up even more energy (repeat ad bridge collapse). It's a bit similar to what happens when you try to burn paper with a lens - at first, not much happens (since paper is white an reflects much of the light), but as soon as the temperature increase causes the paper to darken just a little, it rapidly starts to smoke/burn.
The bridge was not oscillating at its actual natural frequency when it collapsed.
That's right, in the USA (thankfully) MERCHANTS carry most of the burden for credit card fraud,
And you seriously don't think they make the consumer pay to this burden through higher prices ? Excuse me while I laugh.
unlike in Europe where the CONSUMER has all the liability.
Bunch of BS.
Americans face only $50 of fraud liability while Europeans face liability up to the credit limit of the card!
Did the person who told you that also offer you some Kool-Aid ?
Credit cards are less common in Europe for exactly this reason.
Credit cards are less common over here because people are being taught in school that consuming on credit is bad fiscal behavior. People don't like to get in debt for anything but major purchases (house, car).
But how do you fight against (the large number of) serial fraudsters who claim they never got the goods,
In my jurisdiction, the buyer carries any risks from the point on when the seller ships the item. The seller only needs to prove he shipped the item, if the buyer never receives it he needs to take it up with the shipping company. If the buyer is concerned about losing the package, he should feel free to take out some sort of insurance (at his own expense).
The buyer could still claim that the package didn't contain the item in question, but that would mean he's openly accusing the seller of fraud and there are significant punishments for doing so unfounded.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true for some diseases, but others can be predicted with a much higher accuracy and there's
absolutely nothing the person in question can do about it. "All that good stuff" won't save you
from _all_ the bad stuff that can happen to you if you lose the genetic lottery.
Not to mention that Jesus himself supposedly said that you can only serve one lord - money, or God. But then again, they probably read the Bible like they read a novel - read the first couple
of chapters with great interest, and then skip to the last to see how the story ends.
I wonder if the attorney general has actually experienced any of the above, so that he can
give a somewhat qualified comparison.
Death doesn't hurt. The process of dying may hurt a lot or not at all. Major organ failure may or
may not hurt (if your heart suddenly stops beating or goes into fibrillation, you won't feel a
thing. If your brain suddenly stops working, same thing). However, waterboarding would qualify
as torture, because it'll feel like your lungs experiencing failure.
"Look what I just found on eBay ..."
That was never the case. Better acceleration, top speed and climb rate beats better turn rate any day, since the former allow you to pick your fights as long as you're not the victim of a surprise attack (of course, if you deliberately enter a turning duel against a plane that's better at that than yours, you're a moron).
But then again, the ages-old (WWI I think) number one rule for aerial combat beats almost everything else: "See the enemy first." (which also translates to "Don't get seen first.").
Yes.
I thought ion drives negatively charged the particles before expelling them
That would be problematic since it would lead to the spacecraft becoming positively charged over time. If positively charged ions are used, the engine can be designed so that the ions pick up electrons on their way out, so that a neutral plasma is expelled and the charge of the space craft does not change.
They may be harder to ionize than other substances, but it's not impossible to do so. Heck, if they could not be ionized, it would mean that they hang on to their electrons with infinite force
Oh, don't bother. You don't need to go real slow, but maybe you should read more slowly, and you might actually comprehend some of those words.
I've never once stated that solar technology "isn't available."
But you're trying teally hard to make that argument that because its not competitive now, it will never be.
It cannot produce power at a cost competitive with other sources of energy, specifically nuclear and fossil fuels.
Right now. Again, how much are you going to bet that it will stay this way in the medium to long term (5+ years) ?
During those 40 years, solar efficiency for typical mass-produced cells hasn't even doubled. It's gone from about 8% to about 12%.
Prices have dropped quite a bit, though. Right ?
If you assume a linear progression of increases in efficiency and decreases in cost commensurate with the progress we've seen in the last 5-10 years, solar will still be at least 50% more expensive than nuclear or fossil fuels.
And what about price increases for fossil fuels and uranium ? What's going to happen to the price for nuclear fuels if a couple of large nations on this planet decide that plopping down a dozen nuclear plants is going to be part of the solution of their energy problems ?
You make it sound like "improv[ing] cell efficiency" is just a trivial exercise, something to be done over a lunch break by two guys with a calculator.
Right. And this is exactly why I didn't give two more (and probably more promising) options to bring the price down.
If improving efficiency is the key to keeping costs down, you've (once again) made my point for me: the lack of efficiency is why solar has not made any meaningful impact on the energy grid.
You're quite single-mindedly focusing on one of three options I gave. And you're wrong: The lack of efficiency is not why solar has not any meaningful impact on the energy grid. The cost for the cells is (still) the problem, even though it has dropped quite a bit. If we find a way to make PV cells with a really lousy efficiency (say, 5%), but at a tenth of the price, this would give solar a bigger boost than producing 20% efficiency cells at the same price as todays 10% efficiency cells.
What you aren't well aware of is that solar-thermal is even less efficient than PV. Spain just finished a 50MW solar-thermal plant, and it's conversion efficiency is only 2.6%.
Wow, nice one. I mean it. You just pulled a number from wikipedia without understanding a thing. The 2.6% is "electric power output" per "total amount of solar power that hits the area of the power plant, regardless of whether it's actually collected by the mirrors or just hits the ground". If you'd actually use a meaningful number (like, "electric power output" per "solar power that actually hits the collectors"), you'd find that this number is comparable or even higher than todays mass-produced PV cells. Maybe you should actually try to read the whole paragraph of the wikipedia article you're quoting next time ?
Luckily, you don't need to be a good CEO to be paid a lot. Heck, if you're bad enough, you might even get paid just for leaving !
Did you RTFA ? I would guess you didn't. It talked about possible improvements in the next five to ten years. Who's missing the point ? It's not that the technology isn't available,
And it's much, much easier to improve (better design, cheaper production, etc) already existing technology than suddenly make something work that has been in the "we'll have a working plant in 30 years" for decades now.
And I'll again direct you to the prior established point: efficient, economical solar power -- ones that can compete directly with nuclear and fossil fuel power sources -- are just as fanciful (for now) as fusion and antimatter.
And you'll bet how much that this will still be the case in, say, five years from now? Ten years from now?
Oh boy.
You'd have to make it at a minimum twice as efficient as it is now in order to hit (or slightly exceed) the 8cents/kW/hr figure.
If we were talking about photovoltaics (which we're not, see below), you'd have a number of options of getting the price down. You could try to improve cell efficiency (while trying to keep cell price in check - this is mainly a function of how expensive land is where you want to build your plan), cell longevity, or cell price (again, how effective this approach is depends on the cost of land).
Untold sums have been spent getting solar cell efficiency out of the single-digit percentages, and that was considered a fantasmically amazing feat at the time. Typical modern panels have a 12% efficiency, and the best available panels -- you know, those that cost several times that of the "typical" panels -- gets you to 20% efficiency.
Weren't we talking about solarthermal power generation, and not photovoltaics ? Talk about missing the point. Typical modern panels have a 12% efficiency, and the best available panels -- you know, those that cost several times that of the "typical" panels -- gets you to 20% efficiency.
See above.
Radical breakthroughs in cell efficiency are needed to make solar a viable contender against nuclear and fossil fuels. I'd wager that we're more likely to make a breakthrough in fusion power than we are to double the efficiency of mass-produced, affordable solar cells in the next several decades. In the meantime, we're ignoring a practical, affordable, well-known power source that's abundant, clean, and reliable: nuclear fission.
See above.
How is that not a monetary decision ? CPU time costs money. Memory costs money. Unnecessary complexity costs money (more time necessary to make changes/bugfixes/etc to the system). The real challenge is putting the right numbers on all of these costs.
Why would you _want_ to throttle the power output of a solar plant ? It's not like you're wasting expensive fuel by overproduction.
Only temporarily. There's only that much ice.
Show me some working, power-producing fusion and/or antimatter power plants.
I'll show you some working, power-producing solar-thermal power plants.
Geez. Heating water with solar power really isn't rocket science. The improvements proposed for these power plants are mainly in engineering. On the other hand, we're still working on the science for fusion and antimatter.
No, no, no. The Titanic disaster clearly demonstrates the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. In solid or liquid form, this dreadful substance has claimed innumerable ships, which is just one more reason why it should be banned immediately.
Weren't the first survivors picked up by another ship roughly two hours after the Titanic sank ?
The liability of the cardholder is about 50 Euro, until he reports his card as stolen/lost - then it's zero. I've had 600 Euro fraudulently charged to my credit card (probably my CC info got "lost" during a 1.5 year stay in the US, because that was the only time when I regularly used it), and got it charged back without having to pay a thing.
I apparently think better of Europeans than you do because I believe they saw unfavorable terms and then rejected them.
Well, there are more reasons for credit cards being not as common over here. One is that checking accounts usually come with a line of credit (if you have a regular income, with conditions comparable to that of a CC except for the grace period), so you don't need credit cards for "consumer" credit. Others might be that direct deposit, direct debit (very convenient since it also allows chargeback within 6 weeks) and paying with your ATM card are more common, pretty much negating the need for a CC for most things.
The natural frequency (the one at which it is in resonance) can be determined, and it was different from the frequency the bridge actually oscillated at before is collapsed. The brigde may not have had enough damping at the latter frequency, but it wasn't the frequency at which it would have been in resonance.
The point is that the problems don't end here - the twisting of the deck gives the wind a larger angle of attack, which leads to more twisting
Tacoma narrows had very little to do with resonance. The problem there was that a small amount of torsion changed the aerodynamic profile of the bridge so that it would pick up more energy from the wind, which increased the amount of torsion, which changed the aerodynamic profile even more, which caused the bridge to pick up even more energy (repeat ad bridge collapse). It's a bit similar to what happens when you try to burn paper with a lens - at first, not much happens (since paper is white an reflects much of the light), but as soon as the temperature increase causes the paper to darken just a little, it rapidly starts to smoke/burn.
The bridge was not oscillating at its actual natural frequency when it collapsed.
And you seriously don't think they make the consumer pay to this burden through higher prices ? Excuse me while I laugh.
unlike in Europe where the CONSUMER has all the liability.
Bunch of BS.
Americans face only $50 of fraud liability while Europeans face liability up to the credit limit of the card!
Did the person who told you that also offer you some Kool-Aid ?
Credit cards are less common in Europe for exactly this reason.
Credit cards are less common over here because people are being taught in school that consuming on credit is bad fiscal behavior. People don't like to get in debt for anything but major purchases (house, car).
Send more lawyers !
In my jurisdiction, the buyer carries any risks from the point on when the seller ships the item. The seller only needs to prove he shipped the item, if the buyer never receives it he needs to take it up with the shipping company. If the buyer is concerned about losing the package, he should feel free to take out some sort of insurance (at his own expense).
The buyer could still claim that the package didn't contain the item in question, but that would mean he's openly accusing the seller of fraud and there are significant punishments for doing so unfounded.