The thing about the roads in Europe is the next city or, more often than not, country is a stone's throw away from your current location.
Their weather (if you can call it that) is just a wee bit different as well. One of those little SMART cars would be the dumbest choice you could make for winter driving here.
Oh please. If the people of Kiruna can drive standard cars from the European market you don't need a stinking SUV in because you live in the US.
The reasons wind power is not a good idea for a large fraction of the baseline power supply has nothing to do with the amount of power needed, and everything to do with other economic and technical concerns that this does nothing to address. In particular:
1)Part of the reason wind power is not even more expensive is that other power plants can adjust their output according to changes in wind pattern and demand. As the fractional wind-power output increases so does the amount of backup power or energy storage schemes you need to compensate for the variations. This problem is often misunderstood by many. It is not that 100% cannot be done. Using hydroelectric pumped storage, it would be very possible to cover an entire country's energy demand from wind, the problem is that it gets expensive. Denmark, which gets a sizable fraction of its power from wind kinda manages because they exchange power with its neighbors, effectively using Swedish and German nuclear plants as backup, but this obviously won't work if everybody did it.
2)Wwind power is still multiple times the cost of coal or nuclear. Yes, in many countries nuclear is subsidized, and there's decommissioning costs of nuclear plants and waste handling costs. There have been delays, Finland's new reactor is estimated to cost twice what originally planned. EVEN SO, the cost of wind power ends up being higher for on-shore wind farms, and higher still for off-shore ones. Don't believe me ? Go check out the UK's royal academy of engineering report on the cost of electric power production. If you've ever been to England you know it can get quite windy, and they still see more than twice the costs for wind than for nuclear. I've seen many proponents of wind power claim randomly that wind would be cheaper when you remove subsidies and include life-cycle costs and decommissioning. Turns out that even if you allow for a doubling of estimated nuclear prices ( including decommissioning ) this is simply not true. There's of course also the questionable logic in basing the decision of what energy source to use on "best case" prices for wind and "worst case" prices for nuclear, but even if you do so you have to bend the numbers a bit for wind to come out in favor.
3)Much of the speculation of improved wind turbine efficiency is downright impossible due to physical constraints. Because you need an airflow through the turbine to extract energy, a wind turbine can never extract all the energy ( as that would leave the air stationary ). It turns out that the laws of fluid dynamics puts an upper limit on the conversion efficiency (which is related to how much teh airstream expands as it moves through the turbine), and as a consequence the hoped for dramatic improvements in efficiency simply cannot happen. At the very best a wind turbine that today gets 40% conversion efficiency could get 59% ( the theoretical maximum ) , meaning a 50% improvement in energy output. This is not alone enough to put it on par with nuclear and fossils. Any other improvement would have to come from either stronger off-shore winds or reduced material costs. Unfortunately the extra cost off of-shore construction and maintenance makes off-shore wind farms more expensive than land based ones, and since capital production costs is also the main cost in nuclear energy, changes in material prices are likely to benefit or hamper nuclear as well as wind, without altering the relative price between the two.
4)Many of the claimed benefits of wind power over nuclear are dubious. As with Nuclear power stations, wind farms are only "carbon-free" if you ignore the CO2 output associated with creating the steel and concrete used in their construction, yet the emissions from producing steel for nuclear plants is often used as an argument for why wind would be better than nuclear. It is true that wind power does not produce radioactive waste, but in practice even the overly-cautious deep geological repositories planned in Sweden and Finland contribute only a fraction (less than 10% ) of the cost of the
When, exactly, is the linux community NOT pissed off about something?
There's tellings that at some point in the future there will be a holy year, with furniture, and all will be well. If and when this will occur is controversial however.
He seems to be afraid companies will try to deny free software developers source code to improved versions of their free-software code by avoiding to ever distribute the software. It is however not clear that this is at all unethical in the same way as using copyright to restrict users from modifying software they have bought is. To demand a copy of the source code and documentation of software companies use to implement a service is a bit like demanding a cab company give you driving instructions if you ever traveled with them. Ok, so the analogy is not perfect, but there is a huge difference between proprietary software vendors trying to use copyright and shrinkwrap EULAs to limit how you use your computer, and that of service providers simply not distributing the code they use to provide a service.
In some ways Stallman is essentially making the same mistake proprietary software vendors do when they try to control what you do with software. He seeks to limit what people can and cannot do with software they run on their own computers. His demands even contradicts part of the GPL, which explicitly grant you the right to use the software "FOR ANY PURPOSE". The FSF's FAQ even explains that you're not allowed to ban using the software for things like pornography, because that would violate users right to use software for any purpose they see fit. It would appear that according to Stallman all purposes are equal, it's just that some purposes are more equal than others.
Free will has no empirically testable definition, and hence is not a scientific concept. To determine scientifically if somebody has it or not is more a matter of agreeing upon a set of testable conditions for "free will" than anything else. As it happens the only physical concepts that seem to be even remotely related to people's idea about what "free will" is would be randomness and causality. The standard model assumes that some interactions are inherently random and unpredictable, and that is about as close to an answer as you will get.
Usually when software goes wrong I can see that it may be hard. Internet Explorer may be shit when compared to the competition, but then I guess writing a browser may be difficult, I could see how you could mess that up. Similarly having the implementation of an encryption scheme fail, I can see how you coudl mess that up. That stuff is hard.
However, how the fuck do you mess up counting votes? I can see it fail on the hardware end, optic sensors giving wrongr eadings, inkjet printers not working... but failing to write a program that count votes? This is beyond pathetic. From what I've read about Diebold it sounds as if they were too lazy to actually write and audit the software and simply did the equivalent of sticking the results in some generic spreadsheet program.
ZFS is not under strict licensing or hampered in any way. The CDDL is not restricting it at all, it is the GPL that is not allowing it into the Linux kernel.
Nonsense! It is the same thing every time zfs is mentioned, and every time somebody who has no clue what he's talking about wants to claim it's not the CDDL that is the problem, that the GPL is at fault, typically with some reference to how this is not a problem with BSD.
Reality is that the CDDL has restrictions on derivative works that are very similar to the GPL restrictions, and the incompatibility arises because those restrictions, while similar, are not equivalent. Thus blaming the GPL for it's copyleft provisions while claiming that the CDDL is just fine is simply hypocritical. Seriously, have you even read the CDDL ? It sure as hell seems as if you have not since the very thing you're blaming the GPL for ( i.e copyleft restrictions on derivative works ) is ever as much present in the CDDL as it is in the GPL.
Furthermore, the incompatibility was likely deliberate. Quoting wikipedia:
"In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. "Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that"."
Simply put, Sun deliberately hampered zfs' licensing because they wanted to push Solaris. This is not a problem with the GPL, it was Sun's idiotic business strategy, and it is shit like this which has got them into the their current problems.
Oh please, I live in Sweden. We have a population of a few million spread over a country that ranges from north of the arctic circle all the way down to Denmark and our connections are decent. Heck, my uncle lives in a tiny town with maybe 10.000 people in it, far enough north that some days during the winter the sun will never rise, and yet he has fiber running into his living room.
Population density is the most rubbish excuse I've heard for why US internet is crap. Reality is that your ISPs are ripping you off because your government has failed at addressing abusive cartels and monopolies, even promoting them in some cases.
Most of us bathe in kilowatts of infra red radiation at shorter wavelengths (and higher photon energy) than microwaves. I don't see how photons of lower energy could be causing us problems.
It is all about how people perceive risks and fail to consider them rationally. A bit of a similar example is how a number of people are up in arms about the rates of violent crime, and are willing to sacrifice their liberties and privacy if the government merely suggests it might perhaps help, yet consider the prospect of biking to work unthinkable, despite the benefits it would grant them in terms of reduced risks of heart diseases and stroke. From a rational point of view the latter is a much greater risk to people's quality of life and wellbeing, but the former sells more newspapers and hence receives a results in a disproportionate amount of concern.
Say what you like, but downloading music and movies for free is still theft, no matter how you look at it
Pfffft... silly naive person. You are so entrenched in your narrow world view that the mere idea that some things need not be treated like commodities is outside your realm of imagination is it? Did it even occur to you that some of us view music and other forms of expression as abstract information on the same level as mathematics, philosophical and religious ideas, physical theories and cultural tradition? Those of us who view things this way consider the idea that you own a piece of music to be as bizarre as the idea that you can own the Fourier transform, that you could own Spinoza's world view, that you could own Christianity , that you could own the theory of evolution through natural selection, or that you could own the idea of giving your children gifts at the end of December, charging license fees from people who do so. I'm not a socialist, not by a long shot. I firmly believe you should be allowed to set up a factory and keep the main share of whatever profit you make running it. However, to not adopt the socialist extreme does in no way imply you have to accept that it is sane to treat everything like someone's belonging and stick a price tag on it. The moment your thoughts leave your mouth and enter the ears of others they are no longer yours exclusively, and all the laws in the world can't change that. It is a simple matter of how information and human minds work, and trying to fight it is as insane as trying to fight the fact that beating your head against the wall will hurt. You can try to disbelieve it all your like but reality will brutally and painfully refuse to agree with you.
I did my BSc thesis on the laser plasma interaction in NIF and my impression was that while inertial confinement fusion is extremely unlikely to be practical as a power plant, it may be used as an exceptionally intense neutron source for various experiments. Spallation sources can generally achieve high neutron fluxes and neutron energies, but an inertial confinement fusion device would generate orders of magnitude higher neutron intensities still. Moreover the fusion neutrons are virtually mono energetic, and this is impossible to achieve with most present spallation designs without drastically reducing the number of available neutrons. Essentially the only way to do it is to use some criteria like time-of-flight or neutron diffraction to select for only neutrons of a given energy, thus wasting all other neutrons, and this is only practical at low energies. At higher energies you would likely need to exploit the kinematics of some form of knockout reaction, like Li(D,n)Be, and since the large yield requirement would likely cause you to ionize your target, such a scheme would have challenges similar to those faced by inertial confinement devices. It also seems to me that it would be tricky to generate such a powerful deuterium pulse, if it is at all possible.
I don't expect 7 to be a good operating system, but the time between releases is a very poor indicator of OS quality and performance. Some distributions, like Ubuntu, release small increments often, while Debian release less often but each update usually marks a bigger change. In addition they both cower the other release cycles separately. Ubuntu has LTS releases for those that need stability. Debian has the testing and unstable versions for those that want more up to date stuff. Apple seems to have found a decent compromise where they release semi-often and have a reasonably stable system, giving their users a reasonably up to date system with acceptable stability.
Windows, on the other hand, tends to release rarely, and still have moderate improvements, and then change the system with service packs. You basically get the worst of both worlds. You don't get the latest and greatest features that you may have got with something like Ubuntu, when released Windows tends to be even more outdated than Debian stable , but it has nowhere near the stability since each service packs tends to fundamentally alter many critical aspects of the system ( WGA, UAC, new IE version etc... ).
I think a lot of Microsoft's problems is that they try to target both the curious power users, office users and business with the same releases. You can't realistically have a OS release that is going to be cutting edge over its life cycle, while simultaneously being stable and well tested. You will either have to compromise or do separate releases. Ubuntu, Debian and RedHat seem to be doing well having separate releases for different users, Apple seems to be managing the compromise rather well, Microsoft just fails horribly at doing either.
Otherwise, accept that, there's going to be people who will make the argument that we should not blow too much medical money on sufferers of illnesses resulting from lifelong self indulgence or excessive risk taking.
And people who know what they are talking about will point out that the availability of antivirals drastically reduces the rate at which the disease spreads in the population, encourages people to get tested ( which again reduces the rate at which it spreads ), and that the costs to society associated with having a diseased population rather than a reasonably healthy workforce makes it patently retarded to not fund the treatment even if you're a completely selfish individual. Seriously, have a look at South Africa and then compare it to Uganda and you will see the difference between what happens when health policy is run in accordance to expert recommendations and when self righteous moralizers set policy based on their judgmental attitudes. Now before you start, yes I know Uganda also introduced a lot of changes in social policies and awareness campaigns, but there is no reason you can't do both and without doubt their situation would be much worse had they gone with the prejudiced bullshit that caused the tragedy that has hit South Africa.
Seriously, you can blame the victims of the disease all you like, at the end of the day the virus will spread if measures are not taken, and we are all better of by offering infected individuals treatment, no matter how stupid they were when they got infected.
While strides have been made in HIV treatment, it's still a death sentence. Doctors can keep the patient alive longer, but they can't prevent the inevitable.
Life itself is a death sentence. We all die sooner or latter, it's merely a matter of how long it takes and many HIV positive patients die from unrelated causes ( such as car accidents ). If you catch HIV when you're 70 there's a good chance you will die from some completely unrelated condition, such as stroke, heart failure, or lung cancer from a lifetime of tobacco abuse. Not saying an HIV infection is to be taken lightly, but believe it or not, it is far from the worst diagnosis you can get.
Don't mod that insightful you ignorant clods. With modern antiretroviral drugs HIV positive patients can live for decades. As a consequence complications from a gone-wrong tinkering with the immunity system could very well decrease the patient's quality of life and/or life expectancy. Not saying it is not worth trying under trials with the usual checks and safeguards, but suggesting that somebody HIV positive "is dead anyway" is just nonsense. We are all going to die sooner or latter, but I presume that doesn't mean you want to volunteer for every type of medical testing there is?
If I had the cash...I'd do it for my dog. She's starting to get a bit older now, and I would definitely like to have another one of "her" when she goes...
Sorry, won't happen. Clones are not copies of each other any more than identical twins are the same people. Cloning a dog or cat will not give you a replica of the cloned animal because in addition to genetics the traits of an animal are very dependent on environment and even pure chance. As a rather extreme example there's not always correlation between the gender identity of mono zygotic twins. That is, it is perfectly possible, and has happened, for one twin to feel transsexual and desire a sex-change, while his or her sibling does not. It is only in movies that clones are identical copies. In reality there's a lot more to "who we are" than our genetic makeup.
Awwww, come on. Judge Dredd was hilarious. As a sci-fi, sure it was shit, but consider it a comedy and it's not that bad. Then again, that holds for most of Stallone's acting...
only the parents can really judge whether or not their kid is mature enough to view "mature content."
Are you joking? Parents are HORRIBLE at judging when their kids are mature. If it was down to parents a whole lot of kids should not even know sex exists until they are 30. Now start to consider what happens to gay children born in a religious families, parents that refuse to have their kid vaccinated... etc... Yes, governments are bad at this, but there's A LOT of crap parents around as well (have a guess who it was that pressured government into creating all these laws in the first place ).
There's two ways that are practical for aviation. One is using pressure, with the problems you mentioned. The other is to cool it to cryogenic temperatures, meaning you will need insulation. Fortunately insulation can be made comparatively light, the problem is that cooling the hydrogen to cryogenic temperatures requires a lot of energy, adding to the already expensive production of it.
Basically there's no technical obstacles to using hydrogen. Heck it's low weight makes it the fuel of choice for many space based applications. The problem is cost ( as usual ).
In many ways liquid hydrogen would be an ideal aviation fuel. It is clean, has a high energy/weight ratio, it has already been demonstrated ( The Russians developed a Hydrogen passenger Jet during the first Oil crisis ), it scales and because airlines have much more predictable traffic patterns than does your home car, you don't need to store it for days or weeks, meaning the cooling and insulation systems can be much simpler.
The catch is the cost of producing hydrogen in an environmentally friendly manner. Renewable and nuclear energy sources can produce it from electrolysis of water, but even the most advanced and experimental schemes only achieve an efficiency of about 50% using already expensive electricity, and that does not include the energy needed to compress and liquefy it.
And: There is no economic recession. The money just got redestributed to a small group, who tells you that it is "gone".
Uhm, not quite. What happens is that as moronic government policies and corruption causes miss allocation of resources, stuff that is necessary to make important stuff was instead wasted on making crap that nobody has any real use for. I.e when people build swiming pools for the rich rather than repairing roads and bridges, then that labor is indeed gone. The money may still be around but due to the wonders of inflation that money will no longer buy you the same amount of resources that it did before. Essentially a bunch of corrupt crooks wasted labor and resources for their own short-term benefit and the result is that now we're all fucked in the long run.
The perhaps most depressing thing is that it's not much better in socialist or even communist countries. The problem is corruption, and as much as fanatic reaganomics is a bad idea, it does not have a monopoly on corruption.
If attempted this will likely turn out to be as stupid a decision as it was to introduce western predators to Australia in the hope that they would help fix the problem caused by introducing rats and rabbits. When it comes to nature and our ecosystem the rule of thumb ought to be "leave it the fuck alone".
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Oh please. If the people of Kiruna can drive standard cars from the European market you don't need a stinking SUV in because you live in the US.
The reasons wind power is not a good idea for a large fraction of the baseline power supply has nothing to do with the amount of power needed, and everything to do with other economic and technical concerns that this does nothing to address. In particular:
1)Part of the reason wind power is not even more expensive is that other power plants can adjust their output according to changes in wind pattern and demand. As the fractional wind-power output increases so does the amount of backup power or energy storage schemes you need to compensate for the variations. This problem is often misunderstood by many. It is not that 100% cannot be done. Using hydroelectric pumped storage, it would be very possible to cover an entire country's energy demand from wind, the problem is that it gets expensive. Denmark, which gets a sizable fraction of its power from wind kinda manages because they exchange power with its neighbors, effectively using Swedish and German nuclear plants as backup, but this obviously won't work if everybody did it.
2)Wwind power is still multiple times the cost of coal or nuclear. Yes, in many countries nuclear is subsidized, and there's decommissioning costs of nuclear plants and waste handling costs. There have been delays, Finland's new reactor is estimated to cost twice what originally planned. EVEN SO, the cost of wind power ends up being higher for on-shore wind farms, and higher still for off-shore ones. Don't believe me ? Go check out the UK's royal academy of engineering report on the cost of electric power production. If you've ever been to England you know it can get quite windy, and they still see more than twice the costs for wind than for nuclear. I've seen many proponents of wind power claim randomly that wind would be cheaper when you remove subsidies and include life-cycle costs and decommissioning. Turns out that even if you allow for a doubling of estimated nuclear prices ( including decommissioning ) this is simply not true. There's of course also the questionable logic in basing the decision of what energy source to use on "best case" prices for wind and "worst case" prices for nuclear, but even if you do so you have to bend the numbers a bit for wind to come out in favor.
3)Much of the speculation of improved wind turbine efficiency is downright impossible due to physical constraints. Because you need an airflow through the turbine to extract energy, a wind turbine can never extract all the energy ( as that would leave the air stationary ). It turns out that the laws of fluid dynamics puts an upper limit on the conversion efficiency (which is related to how much teh airstream expands as it moves through the turbine), and as a consequence the hoped for dramatic improvements in efficiency simply cannot happen. At the very best a wind turbine that today gets 40% conversion efficiency could get 59% ( the theoretical maximum ) , meaning a 50% improvement in energy output. This is not alone enough to put it on par with nuclear and fossils. Any other improvement would have to come from either stronger off-shore winds or reduced material costs. Unfortunately the extra cost off of-shore construction and maintenance makes off-shore wind farms more expensive than land based ones, and since capital production costs is also the main cost in nuclear energy, changes in material prices are likely to benefit or hamper nuclear as well as wind, without altering the relative price between the two.
4)Many of the claimed benefits of wind power over nuclear are dubious. As with Nuclear power stations, wind farms are only "carbon-free" if you ignore the CO2 output associated with creating the steel and concrete used in their construction, yet the emissions from producing steel for nuclear plants is often used as an argument for why wind would be better than nuclear. It is true that wind power does not produce radioactive waste, but in practice even the overly-cautious deep geological repositories planned in Sweden and Finland contribute only a fraction (less than 10% ) of the cost of the
This is not april fools people. Was reported in Swedish media some time ago.
There's tellings that at some point in the future there will be a holy year, with furniture, and all will be well. If and when this will occur is controversial however.
He seems to be afraid companies will try to deny free software developers source code to improved versions of their free-software code by avoiding to ever distribute the software. It is however not clear that this is at all unethical in the same way as using copyright to restrict users from modifying software they have bought is. To demand a copy of the source code and documentation of software companies use to implement a service is a bit like demanding a cab company give you driving instructions if you ever traveled with them. Ok, so the analogy is not perfect, but there is a huge difference between proprietary software vendors trying to use copyright and shrinkwrap EULAs to limit how you use your computer, and that of service providers simply not distributing the code they use to provide a service.
In some ways Stallman is essentially making the same mistake proprietary software vendors do when they try to control what you do with software. He seeks to limit what people can and cannot do with software they run on their own computers. His demands even contradicts part of the GPL, which explicitly grant you the right to use the software "FOR ANY PURPOSE". The FSF's FAQ even explains that you're not allowed to ban using the software for things like pornography, because that would violate users right to use software for any purpose they see fit. It would appear that according to Stallman all purposes are equal, it's just that some purposes are more equal than others.
Free will has no empirically testable definition, and hence is not a scientific concept. To determine scientifically if somebody has it or not is more a matter of agreeing upon a set of testable conditions for "free will" than anything else. As it happens the only physical concepts that seem to be even remotely related to people's idea about what "free will" is would be randomness and causality. The standard model assumes that some interactions are inherently random and unpredictable, and that is about as close to an answer as you will get.
Usually when software goes wrong I can see that it may be hard. Internet Explorer may be shit when compared to the competition, but then I guess writing a browser may be difficult, I could see how you could mess that up. Similarly having the implementation of an encryption scheme fail, I can see how you coudl mess that up. That stuff is hard.
However, how the fuck do you mess up counting votes? I can see it fail on the hardware end, optic sensors giving wrongr eadings, inkjet printers not working... but failing to write a program that count votes? This is beyond pathetic. From what I've read about Diebold it sounds as if they were too lazy to actually write and audit the software and simply did the equivalent of sticking the results in some generic spreadsheet program.
Nonsense! It is the same thing every time zfs is mentioned, and every time somebody who has no clue what he's talking about wants to claim it's not the CDDL that is the problem, that the GPL is at fault, typically with some reference to how this is not a problem with BSD.
Reality is that the CDDL has restrictions on derivative works that are very similar to the GPL restrictions, and the incompatibility arises because those restrictions, while similar, are not equivalent. Thus blaming the GPL for it's copyleft provisions while claiming that the CDDL is just fine is simply hypocritical. Seriously, have you even read the CDDL ? It sure as hell seems as if you have not since the very thing you're blaming the GPL for ( i.e copyleft restrictions on derivative works ) is ever as much present in the CDDL as it is in the GPL.
Furthermore, the incompatibility was likely deliberate. Quoting wikipedia:
Simply put, Sun deliberately hampered zfs' licensing because they wanted to push Solaris. This is not a problem with the GPL, it was Sun's idiotic business strategy, and it is shit like this which has got them into the their current problems.
Oh please, I live in Sweden. We have a population of a few million spread over a country that ranges from north of the arctic circle all the way down to Denmark and our connections are decent. Heck, my uncle lives in a tiny town with maybe 10.000 people in it, far enough north that some days during the winter the sun will never rise, and yet he has fiber running into his living room.
Population density is the most rubbish excuse I've heard for why US internet is crap. Reality is that your ISPs are ripping you off because your government has failed at addressing abusive cartels and monopolies, even promoting them in some cases.
It is all about how people perceive risks and fail to consider them rationally. A bit of a similar example is how a number of people are up in arms about the rates of violent crime, and are willing to sacrifice their liberties and privacy if the government merely suggests it might perhaps help, yet consider the prospect of biking to work unthinkable, despite the benefits it would grant them in terms of reduced risks of heart diseases and stroke. From a rational point of view the latter is a much greater risk to people's quality of life and wellbeing, but the former sells more newspapers and hence receives a results in a disproportionate amount of concern.
Pfffft... silly naive person. You are so entrenched in your narrow world view that the mere idea that some things need not be treated like commodities is outside your realm of imagination is it? Did it even occur to you that some of us view music and other forms of expression as abstract information on the same level as mathematics, philosophical and religious ideas, physical theories and cultural tradition? Those of us who view things this way consider the idea that you own a piece of music to be as bizarre as the idea that you can own the Fourier transform, that you could own Spinoza's world view, that you could own Christianity , that you could own the theory of evolution through natural selection, or that you could own the idea of giving your children gifts at the end of December, charging license fees from people who do so. I'm not a socialist, not by a long shot. I firmly believe you should be allowed to set up a factory and keep the main share of whatever profit you make running it. However, to not adopt the socialist extreme does in no way imply you have to accept that it is sane to treat everything like someone's belonging and stick a price tag on it. The moment your thoughts leave your mouth and enter the ears of others they are no longer yours exclusively, and all the laws in the world can't change that. It is a simple matter of how information and human minds work, and trying to fight it is as insane as trying to fight the fact that beating your head against the wall will hurt. You can try to disbelieve it all your like but reality will brutally and painfully refuse to agree with you.
I did my BSc thesis on the laser plasma interaction in NIF and my impression was that while inertial confinement fusion is extremely unlikely to be practical as a power plant, it may be used as an exceptionally intense neutron source for various experiments. Spallation sources can generally achieve high neutron fluxes and neutron energies, but an inertial confinement fusion device would generate orders of magnitude higher neutron intensities still. Moreover the fusion neutrons are virtually mono energetic, and this is impossible to achieve with most present spallation designs without drastically reducing the number of available neutrons. Essentially the only way to do it is to use some criteria like time-of-flight or neutron diffraction to select for only neutrons of a given energy, thus wasting all other neutrons, and this is only practical at low energies. At higher energies you would likely need to exploit the kinematics of some form of knockout reaction, like Li(D,n)Be, and since the large yield requirement would likely cause you to ionize your target, such a scheme would have challenges similar to those faced by inertial confinement devices. It also seems to me that it would be tricky to generate such a powerful deuterium pulse, if it is at all possible.
I don't expect 7 to be a good operating system, but the time between releases is a very poor indicator of OS quality and performance. Some distributions, like Ubuntu, release small increments often, while Debian release less often but each update usually marks a bigger change. In addition they both cower the other release cycles separately. Ubuntu has LTS releases for those that need stability. Debian has the testing and unstable versions for those that want more up to date stuff. Apple seems to have found a decent compromise where they release semi-often and have a reasonably stable system, giving their users a reasonably up to date system with acceptable stability.
Windows, on the other hand, tends to release rarely, and still have moderate improvements, and then change the system with service packs. You basically get the worst of both worlds. You don't get the latest and greatest features that you may have got with something like Ubuntu, when released Windows tends to be even more outdated than Debian stable , but it has nowhere near the stability since each service packs tends to fundamentally alter many critical aspects of the system ( WGA, UAC, new IE version etc... ).
I think a lot of Microsoft's problems is that they try to target both the curious power users, office users and business with the same releases. You can't realistically have a OS release that is going to be cutting edge over its life cycle, while simultaneously being stable and well tested. You will either have to compromise or do separate releases. Ubuntu, Debian and RedHat seem to be doing well having separate releases for different users, Apple seems to be managing the compromise rather well, Microsoft just fails horribly at doing either.
Do I sense a new meme in the making?
And people who know what they are talking about will point out that the availability of antivirals drastically reduces the rate at which the disease spreads in the population, encourages people to get tested ( which again reduces the rate at which it spreads ), and that the costs to society associated with having a diseased population rather than a reasonably healthy workforce makes it patently retarded to not fund the treatment even if you're a completely selfish individual. Seriously, have a look at South Africa and then compare it to Uganda and you will see the difference between what happens when health policy is run in accordance to expert recommendations and when self righteous moralizers set policy based on their judgmental attitudes. Now before you start, yes I know Uganda also introduced a lot of changes in social policies and awareness campaigns, but there is no reason you can't do both and without doubt their situation would be much worse had they gone with the prejudiced bullshit that caused the tragedy that has hit South Africa.
Seriously, you can blame the victims of the disease all you like, at the end of the day the virus will spread if measures are not taken, and we are all better of by offering infected individuals treatment, no matter how stupid they were when they got infected.
Life itself is a death sentence. We all die sooner or latter, it's merely a matter of how long it takes and many HIV positive patients die from unrelated causes ( such as car accidents ). If you catch HIV when you're 70 there's a good chance you will die from some completely unrelated condition, such as stroke, heart failure, or lung cancer from a lifetime of tobacco abuse. Not saying an HIV infection is to be taken lightly, but believe it or not, it is far from the worst diagnosis you can get.
Don't mod that insightful you ignorant clods. With modern antiretroviral drugs HIV positive patients can live for decades. As a consequence complications from a gone-wrong tinkering with the immunity system could very well decrease the patient's quality of life and/or life expectancy. Not saying it is not worth trying under trials with the usual checks and safeguards, but suggesting that somebody HIV positive "is dead anyway" is just nonsense. We are all going to die sooner or latter, but I presume that doesn't mean you want to volunteer for every type of medical testing there is?
Sorry, won't happen. Clones are not copies of each other any more than identical twins are the same people. Cloning a dog or cat will not give you a replica of the cloned animal because in addition to genetics the traits of an animal are very dependent on environment and even pure chance. As a rather extreme example there's not always correlation between the gender identity of mono zygotic twins. That is, it is perfectly possible, and has happened, for one twin to feel transsexual and desire a sex-change, while his or her sibling does not. It is only in movies that clones are identical copies. In reality there's a lot more to "who we are" than our genetic makeup.
Awwww, come on. Judge Dredd was hilarious. As a sci-fi, sure it was shit, but consider it a comedy and it's not that bad. Then again, that holds for most of Stallone's acting...
Are you joking? Parents are HORRIBLE at judging when their kids are mature. If it was down to parents a whole lot of kids should not even know sex exists until they are 30. Now start to consider what happens to gay children born in a religious families, parents that refuse to have their kid vaccinated... etc... Yes, governments are bad at this, but there's A LOT of crap parents around as well (have a guess who it was that pressured government into creating all these laws in the first place ).
Ok now THAT makes me doubt this is real.
There's two ways that are practical for aviation. One is using pressure, with the problems you mentioned. The other is to cool it to cryogenic temperatures, meaning you will need insulation. Fortunately insulation can be made comparatively light, the problem is that cooling the hydrogen to cryogenic temperatures requires a lot of energy, adding to the already expensive production of it.
Basically there's no technical obstacles to using hydrogen. Heck it's low weight makes it the fuel of choice for many space based applications. The problem is cost ( as usual ).
In many ways liquid hydrogen would be an ideal aviation fuel. It is clean, has a high energy/weight ratio, it has already been demonstrated ( The Russians developed a Hydrogen passenger Jet during the first Oil crisis ), it scales and because airlines have much more predictable traffic patterns than does your home car, you don't need to store it for days or weeks, meaning the cooling and insulation systems can be much simpler.
The catch is the cost of producing hydrogen in an environmentally friendly manner. Renewable and nuclear energy sources can produce it from electrolysis of water, but even the most advanced and experimental schemes only achieve an efficiency of about 50% using already expensive electricity, and that does not include the energy needed to compress and liquefy it.
Uhm, not quite. What happens is that as moronic government policies and corruption causes miss allocation of resources, stuff that is necessary to make important stuff was instead wasted on making crap that nobody has any real use for. I.e when people build swiming pools for the rich rather than repairing roads and bridges, then that labor is indeed gone. The money may still be around but due to the wonders of inflation that money will no longer buy you the same amount of resources that it did before. Essentially a bunch of corrupt crooks wasted labor and resources for their own short-term benefit and the result is that now we're all fucked in the long run.
The perhaps most depressing thing is that it's not much better in socialist or even communist countries. The problem is corruption, and as much as fanatic reaganomics is a bad idea, it does not have a monopoly on corruption.
If attempted this will likely turn out to be as stupid a decision as it was to introduce western predators to Australia in the hope that they would help fix the problem caused by introducing rats and rabbits. When it comes to nature and our ecosystem the rule of thumb ought to be "leave it the fuck alone".