Yes, it will occur (just look at mass extinction events like at the K-Pg boundary). This reality doesn't change the problems of funding. Until this becomes a culturally important thing to strive for (probably on a global scale) it won't happen. We can't even convince the general population that global warming is happening (let alone caused by humans and a real threat). Also, I still think Robots first is the way to go. They can figure out most of the stuff that needs to be known about Mars before we start dropping the big bucks.
Exactly. The costs aren't even close. You could probably send over 100 robot missions for the cost of sending one manned trip. The payback is basically bragging rights. The humans would just push the start button for the equipment the robots have. There are some drawbacks too, we already have difficulty distinguishing between earth contaminants and potential signs of life on mars, imagine how much harder it would be with people actually there. People suffer fatigue, robots don't (some of the early rovers were thought to have effective life spans of a few months, and they are still operating years later. You don't get that out of people). Everyone gets bent out of shape when a human dies, but basically when you crash a robot people say better luck next time. It would be totally cool, but until we have tons of money and have completed all possible robotic research, the cost benefit will always be with robots.
A good example of this is Nissan the car company. They wanted nissan.com, but didn't get it because someone else with the name nissan already had it. This case may be different unless one of the owners happens to be named Ron Paul.
This is like having options on a stock except when the Ron Paul expires the value of the domain will quickly approach 0 (it may have been different if he would have been elected president, but I doubt his name will live on as a beacon of freedom for decades or centuries). Each day that goes by they are closer to a zero value option. I don't see much value in their mailing list because most of those people probably already gave their information directly to Paul by making campaign donations. If I were the owners I would start drastically reducing the price to make a sale.
I think you need to go through the WTO to do this above board. The islands in the Caribbean did this over on-line gambling the US unilaterally imposed and got permission to distribute US music without paying royalties as compensation.
I was just trying to point out that the set of valid reasons for higher prices outside the country of origin isn't null. Doesn't mean that all reasons are good or that there is a reason other than they can.
You could stop buying the products. If enough people find the offenses of these companies egregious enough and stop purchasing the products they will change their behavior. You have to be willing to do without it though, not just pirate it, or they will blame the piracy as the reason they are losing business instead of their crappy model.
One reason why some things cost more in different countries has nothing to do with monopolies. TAXES levied by the country where the foreign product is sold. This is especially common for cars. In China, for example, there are serious taxes on any car imported into the county.
I think you are right. I would also mention a couple of other reasons: 1) the difference could stem from the need to have extra personnel that work just on regulatory compliance for that country (depending on the business, there may even be ITAR export compliance issues). 2) There is also the currency conversion RISK. You have to price your product high enough above the normal fluctuations to ensure that you don't lose out on currency conversion (this is more than on a daily basis, think like quarterly or yearly). Setting the price sufficiently high prevents having staff to continually evaluate and re-price all your products. This idea affects the United States Mint selling bullion coins directly to the public. They set their prices much higher than the premium on spot gold/silver for bullion to ensure that they don't have to continually re-price and to ensure that they don't get burned.
International waters don't start until 12 nautical miles off shore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_waters). So maybe the constitution free zone only extends 86 statute miles inland from the shore. I wonder if the constitution-free zone is based on nautical miles or statute miles. Not that this matters because this is pure BS.
Do you operate purely on cash? If not then they know exactly what you buy and who you are. There was an article a couple years ago where they were sending targeted adds to people based on previous purchases. They even started sending adds for baby stuff to women before other people knew they were pregnant.
Correct, but one idea that gets tossed around is to have a nuclear reactor (different than a nuclear rocket) to power the ion engines. Last decade there was a project in the works (it got canceled) to use a reactor to power the Jupiter Icy Moons mission.
This could reduce some of the risks, but at a cost. You would have to protect the fuel from burn-up on re-entry. Even if you accomplish that, you still have a container falling to earth at critical velocity that has to be able to impact anywhere on earth and maintain a nuclear safe configuration (i.e., landing in the ocean and potentially flooding with water, on fire). Plus any systems that you use to mitigate the problems would have to survive the event that cause the launch failure. Building a container that meets the current Government (US) requirements for nuclear fuel that travels on trains IS a long and difficult process. You don't get to stop at the design stage with these kinds of things you have to to actual accident tests for the container and show it meets the requirements. Do I think this could be done? Yes, but it isn't easy.
You are confused about the physics. The nuclear fuel in a nuclear rocket is intended to sustain a fission chain reaction. That chain reaction is what replaces the burning process in chemical rockets and provides the energy to accelerate the exhaust gases. Just like chemical rockets, there are high temperature/ high pressure chambers that the propulsion fluid passes through (in the case of a nuclear rocket, it is also where the fuel is and where the fission chain reaction takes place). Any time you have high temperature and pressure you have the ingredients for an explosion. You can reduce the risk of the explosion by using stringent quality control and inspection techniques along with increasing the design margin, but the risk will never be 0. As for the radioactivity, since the critical time of the fuel will be very short it will reduce the total fission product inventory but won't eliminate it (It is possible to run very low power reactors without really making the fuel radioactive, but those power level are orders of magnitude less than what is required to put a rocket into orbit).
Nuclear rockets have a much higher specific impulse than chemical rockets, which is what makes them attractive for space exploration (this is not the only thing to consider though). However launching them from earth would poses some risks. A failure on launch could result in releasing radioactive fission products over large areas. The US and USSR did a good bit of research on these decades ago. Some interesting info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket.
Mod up and the earlier post by same person. Very interesting and definitely different than what I was talking about. Thanks for the informative read. Well, that removes the need for a reactor. I couldn't tell if there was any induced radioactivity of the substrate materials involved, so that may still be an issue. It also seems like enrichment and volume production could be issues. It kind of sucks that they are making the substrates using palladium and platinum as main ingredients. It does seem that they have some insight into how determine what isotopes may be feasible to transmute in this manner. That would be worth some research money. Even if this isn't a solution for large scale production it is cool and worth some funding. I stand corrected.
It has never been a question of whether it CAN be done. The question is whether it is practical or not and cost effective. The problems are: 1) reactor capacity (output of material), 2) radioactivity, 3) enrichment of the resulting material. Running reactors, enrichment facilities, and chemical processing plants for radioactive materials is not cheap. This is done by the INL (listed in the article as a partner) at the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). They are the US's only source of cobalt 60 and used to make some other medical isotopes (not sure if they still do, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Test_Reactor). The material/sources they make are used as is with none of the other processing and are wanted specifically because of the radioactivity. The INL regularly addresses this question from the DOE. This isn't for anything you need in large industrial volumes. I don't think they should spend and of the $120M for this type of research at this point., but I won't be surprised if they spend some on it.
The other idea that gets thrown around a lot is to make them in a reactor. I used to work at a DOE facility where every year or so we would be asked about this specific problem and if we couldn't just make X isotope. Sure you can make all kinds of elements through transmutation, but the volume of production is just not very high unless you have massive amounts of infrastructure to create them (lots of reactors specifically for the task) and for most things special chemical facilities to separate all of the various radioactive stuff out (if you put in a specimen X you don't just get 100% of Y after a certain amount of time, and because of special DOE moratoriums it would be nearly impossible to "free release" any of this material for commercial/industrial use). That is why generally speaking it only makes sense to produce a limited number of elements in this manner, usually ones you don't need a lot of and ones you specifically want to be radioactive (there are some medical isotopes and cobalt sources for imaging where this does make sense and is done).
I am in the third class you describe (I can afford it but I look for value). I find that my Apple products (iphones, ipads, iMac, macbooks both air and regular) are a good value. Just a difference in opinion of the value equation. I value not having to do the kind of "maintenance" on my iMac that I did for years on PCs just to keep them running kind of smooth.
I have completed 4 courses with Coursera. I took them because I watched a TED talk and wanted to see what it was like. I was skeptical before the classes started that it could be that good. However, after completing the courses I have to say I was quite surprised at the quality. The 4 courses I took were offered from 3 different universities. I was very satisfied with the experience, and not just in the "it was free so you can't expect much" kind of way. I learned the things that they were trying to teach and was able to put some of it to use in my job to complete a task that I previously couldn't have done.
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Yes, it will occur (just look at mass extinction events like at the K-Pg boundary). This reality doesn't change the problems of funding. Until this becomes a culturally important thing to strive for (probably on a global scale) it won't happen. We can't even convince the general population that global warming is happening (let alone caused by humans and a real threat). Also, I still think Robots first is the way to go. They can figure out most of the stuff that needs to be known about Mars before we start dropping the big bucks.
Exactly. The costs aren't even close. You could probably send over 100 robot missions for the cost of sending one manned trip. The payback is basically bragging rights. The humans would just push the start button for the equipment the robots have. There are some drawbacks too, we already have difficulty distinguishing between earth contaminants and potential signs of life on mars, imagine how much harder it would be with people actually there. People suffer fatigue, robots don't (some of the early rovers were thought to have effective life spans of a few months, and they are still operating years later. You don't get that out of people). Everyone gets bent out of shape when a human dies, but basically when you crash a robot people say better luck next time. It would be totally cool, but until we have tons of money and have completed all possible robotic research, the cost benefit will always be with robots.
A good example of this is Nissan the car company. They wanted nissan.com, but didn't get it because someone else with the name nissan already had it. This case may be different unless one of the owners happens to be named Ron Paul.
I hear www.ronpaulstoleourdomain.com is available for their new website after RP gets the domain.
Is there a difference?
This is like having options on a stock except when the Ron Paul expires the value of the domain will quickly approach 0 (it may have been different if he would have been elected president, but I doubt his name will live on as a beacon of freedom for decades or centuries). Each day that goes by they are closer to a zero value option. I don't see much value in their mailing list because most of those people probably already gave their information directly to Paul by making campaign donations. If I were the owners I would start drastically reducing the price to make a sale.
I think you need to go through the WTO to do this above board. The islands in the Caribbean did this over on-line gambling the US unilaterally imposed and got permission to distribute US music without paying royalties as compensation.
I was just trying to point out that the set of valid reasons for higher prices outside the country of origin isn't null. Doesn't mean that all reasons are good or that there is a reason other than they can.
You could stop buying the products. If enough people find the offenses of these companies egregious enough and stop purchasing the products they will change their behavior. You have to be willing to do without it though, not just pirate it, or they will blame the piracy as the reason they are losing business instead of their crappy model.
One reason why some things cost more in different countries has nothing to do with monopolies. TAXES levied by the country where the foreign product is sold. This is especially common for cars. In China, for example, there are serious taxes on any car imported into the county.
I think you are right. I would also mention a couple of other reasons: 1) the difference could stem from the need to have extra personnel that work just on regulatory compliance for that country (depending on the business, there may even be ITAR export compliance issues). 2) There is also the currency conversion RISK. You have to price your product high enough above the normal fluctuations to ensure that you don't lose out on currency conversion (this is more than on a daily basis, think like quarterly or yearly). Setting the price sufficiently high prevents having staff to continually evaluate and re-price all your products. This idea affects the United States Mint selling bullion coins directly to the public. They set their prices much higher than the premium on spot gold/silver for bullion to ensure that they don't have to continually re-price and to ensure that they don't get burned.
International waters don't start until 12 nautical miles off shore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_waters). So maybe the constitution free zone only extends 86 statute miles inland from the shore. I wonder if the constitution-free zone is based on nautical miles or statute miles. Not that this matters because this is pure BS.
I was going to make some comment about sacrificing freedom for security, but your comment will do.
Do you operate purely on cash? If not then they know exactly what you buy and who you are. There was an article a couple years ago where they were sending targeted adds to people based on previous purchases. They even started sending adds for baby stuff to women before other people knew they were pregnant.
The store gives me free internet access. I don't turn my wifi off in the parking lot.
Correct, but one idea that gets tossed around is to have a nuclear reactor (different than a nuclear rocket) to power the ion engines. Last decade there was a project in the works (it got canceled) to use a reactor to power the Jupiter Icy Moons mission.
This could reduce some of the risks, but at a cost. You would have to protect the fuel from burn-up on re-entry. Even if you accomplish that, you still have a container falling to earth at critical velocity that has to be able to impact anywhere on earth and maintain a nuclear safe configuration (i.e., landing in the ocean and potentially flooding with water, on fire). Plus any systems that you use to mitigate the problems would have to survive the event that cause the launch failure. Building a container that meets the current Government (US) requirements for nuclear fuel that travels on trains IS a long and difficult process. You don't get to stop at the design stage with these kinds of things you have to to actual accident tests for the container and show it meets the requirements. Do I think this could be done? Yes, but it isn't easy.
You are confused about the physics. The nuclear fuel in a nuclear rocket is intended to sustain a fission chain reaction. That chain reaction is what replaces the burning process in chemical rockets and provides the energy to accelerate the exhaust gases. Just like chemical rockets, there are high temperature/ high pressure chambers that the propulsion fluid passes through (in the case of a nuclear rocket, it is also where the fuel is and where the fission chain reaction takes place). Any time you have high temperature and pressure you have the ingredients for an explosion. You can reduce the risk of the explosion by using stringent quality control and inspection techniques along with increasing the design margin, but the risk will never be 0. As for the radioactivity, since the critical time of the fuel will be very short it will reduce the total fission product inventory but won't eliminate it (It is possible to run very low power reactors without really making the fuel radioactive, but those power level are orders of magnitude less than what is required to put a rocket into orbit).
Nuclear rockets have a much higher specific impulse than chemical rockets, which is what makes them attractive for space exploration (this is not the only thing to consider though). However launching them from earth would poses some risks. A failure on launch could result in releasing radioactive fission products over large areas. The US and USSR did a good bit of research on these decades ago. Some interesting info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket.
Mod up and the earlier post by same person. Very interesting and definitely different than what I was talking about. Thanks for the informative read. Well, that removes the need for a reactor. I couldn't tell if there was any induced radioactivity of the substrate materials involved, so that may still be an issue. It also seems like enrichment and volume production could be issues. It kind of sucks that they are making the substrates using palladium and platinum as main ingredients. It does seem that they have some insight into how determine what isotopes may be feasible to transmute in this manner. That would be worth some research money. Even if this isn't a solution for large scale production it is cool and worth some funding. I stand corrected.
You say this in jest, but the government actually has "strategic stockpiles" of a lot of different materials. See http://www.bis.doc.gov/defenseindustrialbaseprograms/osies/stockpikecommittee.html and https://www.dnsc.dla.mil/
It has never been a question of whether it CAN be done. The question is whether it is practical or not and cost effective. The problems are: 1) reactor capacity (output of material), 2) radioactivity, 3) enrichment of the resulting material. Running reactors, enrichment facilities, and chemical processing plants for radioactive materials is not cheap. This is done by the INL (listed in the article as a partner) at the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). They are the US's only source of cobalt 60 and used to make some other medical isotopes (not sure if they still do, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Test_Reactor). The material/sources they make are used as is with none of the other processing and are wanted specifically because of the radioactivity. The INL regularly addresses this question from the DOE. This isn't for anything you need in large industrial volumes. I don't think they should spend and of the $120M for this type of research at this point., but I won't be surprised if they spend some on it.
The other idea that gets thrown around a lot is to make them in a reactor. I used to work at a DOE facility where every year or so we would be asked about this specific problem and if we couldn't just make X isotope. Sure you can make all kinds of elements through transmutation, but the volume of production is just not very high unless you have massive amounts of infrastructure to create them (lots of reactors specifically for the task) and for most things special chemical facilities to separate all of the various radioactive stuff out (if you put in a specimen X you don't just get 100% of Y after a certain amount of time, and because of special DOE moratoriums it would be nearly impossible to "free release" any of this material for commercial/industrial use). That is why generally speaking it only makes sense to produce a limited number of elements in this manner, usually ones you don't need a lot of and ones you specifically want to be radioactive (there are some medical isotopes and cobalt sources for imaging where this does make sense and is done).
I am in the third class you describe (I can afford it but I look for value). I find that my Apple products (iphones, ipads, iMac, macbooks both air and regular) are a good value. Just a difference in opinion of the value equation. I value not having to do the kind of "maintenance" on my iMac that I did for years on PCs just to keep them running kind of smooth.
I have completed 4 courses with Coursera. I took them because I watched a TED talk and wanted to see what it was like. I was skeptical before the classes started that it could be that good. However, after completing the courses I have to say I was quite surprised at the quality. The 4 courses I took were offered from 3 different universities. I was very satisfied with the experience, and not just in the "it was free so you can't expect much" kind of way. I learned the things that they were trying to teach and was able to put some of it to use in my job to complete a task that I previously couldn't have done.