Danger from the generated electricity? As I understand it, these panels only have one active side - rotate the sucker 180, point the passive side towards the sun, and away you go?
You are making a false assumption: that "intelligent people" are only attracted to money or the guarantee of economic stability. That may be true for some, but not all (or I would suggest most) of the top "intelligence" percentile. Interest in your work matters.
Well, from my time in Copenhagen I would say that you're getting shafted by the overall costs of goods more than anything else. When you compare it against the price of staple goods, does it come out more even? For example, when I lived in Denmark a pint of beer cost me (on average) more than twice as it does for me now in Canada. By that metric your price of $930 might even be ahead!
Seriously, they probably do factor in cost of living when determining their prices. XX% of the average target demographic's monthly pay or some such...
What do you want to bet this is really aimed at the Chinese? A much more plausible (and imho serious) threat is that of the PRC - the 'terrorist' threat is so overblown it's laughable. Should Taiwan ever flare up, without this type of system the US is screwed. I just read about the Chinese having developed a tactical ballistic missile to take out a capital ships at sea. US carrier in other words. This also happens to be a threat the US currently has no real defense against. If you're interested in a better description, see a story from Janes a while back http://www.janes.com/defence/news/jni/jni061219_1_ n.shtml...
No terrorist entity has anywhere near the capability to launch a ICBM at the US or US interests. And any nation (North Korea?), or quasi-nation (such as Hezbollah) that you might wish to label a 'terrorist state' knows full well that if they got their hands on a nuclear armed ICBM and launch it at the US then they, and their population base, will be obliterated by the US nuclear response. (On a side note, the missiles that Hezbollah was launching into Israel attain nowhere near the altitude that THAAD is talking about. They're far too low range to require this type of system. Now 'Dear Leader Kim's' on the other hand...)
Peer review is really the only thing that Wikipedia has to do to be accepted as an academic source. As has been rightly noted, if there is an archive of the state of the article for any given time that you may cite it, it's all good.
However, an academic quality peer review requires that everything be reviewed and accepted/commented/rejected by the world's leading experts in the field - something that is not trivial and we will never see adopted by Wikipedia. Just to be able to identify the relevant experts requires a level of knowledge that just can't be expected for a publication spanning such broad subject matter. This is precisely why the academic journal exists (think Nature, Journal of Applied Physics, etc.)
And so wikipedia will always remain a "mere" encyclopedia. And surely everyone should know that citing an encyclopediqa article just doesn't fly...
What drugs can certainly do is to make you think you are smarter and temporarily relieve the pain of learning. The problem is that anything that makes you different, smarter or otherwise, is painful in some way. - Nonsense.
The fact of the matter is, these drugs do provide a significant and beneficial effect when trying to cram for that next exam, or finish that scientific paper for submission to the journal of your choice. While I can't say anything about the long term effects on memory, it's the near-term deadlines that these drugs are getting used for. Several class-mates and friends of mine have resorted to taking ADHD and narcolepsy drugs during crunch time in grad school and I have seen them produce, in 24-48 hours, high quality work that would have otherwise easily taken a week or more. When you don't need to sleep but 4 hours a day, and you can be at full concentration for 16 hours straight without getting distracted or losing your train of thought, you can certainly get a lot more work done. As one friend described it during an all nighter before a grad-level physics exam, you feel "sharper" and abstract concepts that are otherwise difficult to wrap your head around just make sense. I'd wager that at least 40% of graduate students have used these drugs at some point in their academic careers...
How can we believe a single thing said by a company that is involved with national security?
You can't. If that doesn't worry you or the majority of American citizens it's a sad day indeed. Besides, who's to say the department issuing the retraction order would even be aware of the alleged co-operation (if true) in the first place?
Actually, fusion is also easy to create. It's doing it in a way that you can sustain a reaction where you get out more energy than you put in. As noted elsewhere, that's the truely hard part.
See the wikipedia article on the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor for an example of one way to create desk-top fusion. It is certainly something that could easily be built by a group of physics or engineering undergrads anyway. Only dangerous aspect is that there is usually a fair amount of Brehmsstrahlung radiation produced (which can be safely attenuated without much difficulty.)
While spectacularly useless as a power source, there have been some commercial successes using them as neutron sources... The wikipedia article linked above is really rather good for anyone interested. My take on fusion for power is that it is now largely an engineering problem, albeit one of the toughest engineering problems I can think of!
Slashdot Mirror
Danger from the generated electricity? As I understand it, these panels only have one active side - rotate the sucker 180, point the passive side towards the sun, and away you go?
You are making a false assumption: that "intelligent people" are only attracted to money or the guarantee of economic stability. That may be true for some, but not all (or I would suggest most) of the top "intelligence" percentile. Interest in your work matters.
Well, from my time in Copenhagen I would say that you're getting shafted by the overall costs of goods more than anything else. When you compare it against the price of staple goods, does it come out more even? For example, when I lived in Denmark a pint of beer cost me (on average) more than twice as it does for me now in Canada. By that metric your price of $930 might even be ahead!
/srw
Seriously, they probably do factor in cost of living when determining their prices. XX% of the average target demographic's monthly pay or some such...
What do you want to bet this is really aimed at the Chinese? A much more plausible (and imho serious) threat is that of the PRC - the 'terrorist' threat is so overblown it's laughable. Should Taiwan ever flare up, without this type of system the US is screwed. I just read about the Chinese having developed a tactical ballistic missile to take out a capital ships at sea. US carrier in other words. This also happens to be a threat the US currently has no real defense against. If you're interested in a better description, see a story from Janes a while back http://www.janes.com/defence/news/jni/jni061219_1_ n.shtml...
No terrorist entity has anywhere near the capability to launch a ICBM at the US or US interests. And any nation (North Korea?), or quasi-nation (such as Hezbollah) that you might wish to label a 'terrorist state' knows full well that if they got their hands on a nuclear armed ICBM and launch it at the US then they, and their population base, will be obliterated by the US nuclear response. (On a side note, the missiles that Hezbollah was launching into Israel attain nowhere near the altitude that THAAD is talking about. They're far too low range to require this type of system. Now 'Dear Leader Kim's' on the other hand...)
Peer review is really the only thing that Wikipedia has to do to be accepted as an academic source. As has been rightly noted, if there is an archive of the state of the article for any given time that you may cite it, it's all good.
However, an academic quality peer review requires that everything be reviewed and accepted/commented/rejected by the world's leading experts in the field - something that is not trivial and we will never see adopted by Wikipedia. Just to be able to identify the relevant experts requires a level of knowledge that just can't be expected for a publication spanning such broad subject matter. This is precisely why the academic journal exists (think Nature, Journal of Applied Physics, etc.)
And so wikipedia will always remain a "mere" encyclopedia. And surely everyone should know that citing an encyclopediqa article just doesn't fly...
What drugs can certainly do is to make you think you are smarter and temporarily relieve the pain of learning. The problem is that anything that makes you different, smarter or otherwise, is painful in some way. - Nonsense.
The fact of the matter is, these drugs do provide a significant and beneficial effect when trying to cram for that next exam, or finish that scientific paper for submission to the journal of your choice. While I can't say anything about the long term effects on memory, it's the near-term deadlines that these drugs are getting used for. Several class-mates and friends of mine have resorted to taking ADHD and narcolepsy drugs during crunch time in grad school and I have seen them produce, in 24-48 hours, high quality work that would have otherwise easily taken a week or more. When you don't need to sleep but 4 hours a day, and you can be at full concentration for 16 hours straight without getting distracted or losing your train of thought, you can certainly get a lot more work done. As one friend described it during an all nighter before a grad-level physics exam, you feel "sharper" and abstract concepts that are otherwise difficult to wrap your head around just make sense. I'd wager that at least 40% of graduate students have used these drugs at some point in their academic careers...
How can we believe a single thing said by a company that is involved with national security?
You can't. If that doesn't worry you or the majority of American citizens it's a sad day indeed. Besides, who's to say the department issuing the retraction order would even be aware of the alleged co-operation (if true) in the first place?
Actually, fusion is also easy to create. It's doing it in a way that you can sustain a reaction where you get out more energy than you put in. As noted elsewhere, that's the truely hard part. See the wikipedia article on the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor for an example of one way to create desk-top fusion. It is certainly something that could easily be built by a group of physics or engineering undergrads anyway. Only dangerous aspect is that there is usually a fair amount of Brehmsstrahlung radiation produced (which can be safely attenuated without much difficulty.) While spectacularly useless as a power source, there have been some commercial successes using them as neutron sources... The wikipedia article linked above is really rather good for anyone interested. My take on fusion for power is that it is now largely an engineering problem, albeit one of the toughest engineering problems I can think of!