Steve Jobs is no more or less of a visionary than Bill Gates (I think though they are both very clever they just got extremely lucky, for Gates everything flowed from DOS and for Jobs everything flowed from the iPod).
Lets see here - we have the very interesting historical experiment of Apple's performance with Jobs (1970s to late 1980s), without Jobs (late 1980s to late 1990s), and with Jobs again (since late 1990s). The contrast in corporate performance with and without is striking.
And we have Jobs leading the development and introduction of the Macintosh*. And leading a Lucasfilm spin-off into the world's leading animation studio Pixar. And founding NeXT and leading the creation of the ground-breaking UNIX-based Next computer. And leading the revival of the Macintosh computer platform with OS X.
Just "got lucky" with the iPod? Sheesh... gimme a break.
*Did Apple invent the graphical/mouse UI? Of course not. But creating an affordable consumer product that delivered it with the technology of the day was ground-breaking.
How about a single "desktop" computing environment accessible from anywhere on any piece of hardware and OS?
This is hardly a new idea, and the current idea of "the cloud" is an implementation of this idea dependent on a service provider and its data center to host it. But with very high speed transmission the complete current state of a computing environment running on a VM could be synced in real-time with other copies elsewhere through a peer-to-peer arrangement. No service providers (other than the Internet infrastructure) required. With VMs this could be any type of computing environment running on any other OS/hardware anywhere.
Now none of the elements of this scheme are really new, and with various restrictions schemes like this can be implemented now, but with the extremely high transmission rates in TFA essentially all of the bottlenecks and limitations would disappear and it would create the appearance of a single "local" computing resource.
Tritium. North American prices are between $30M and $100M a kilo....
Small problem. No tritium on the Moon.
Now they do have He-3 on the Moon (which is what tritium decays into with a 12. 3 year half-life), and you can make tritium from He-3 with an extra neutron, which is no different from the much less exotic and vastly cheaper lithium-6. That neutron is expensive.
And if it were to be manned it wouldn't be a return trip so to allow for a sufficient genetic variation the crew needs to be at least 1600 individuals.
Otherwise the risk of genetic degradation would be too great.
Depends on what "too great" means. The Hutterite community in North America, a closed religious community, was founded around 1700 with a founding population of about 400 that was already highly inter-related (compared to world-wide human genetic diversity) and has now increased to 50,000. Genetic studies do show a measurable penalty in fertility and fitness with this high level of inbreeding, but the community is doing quite well nevertheless.
Now the lack of diversity in the immune system of the American Indians later led to an epidemiological calamity when diseases from the Old World were imported 10 or 15 millenia later, but this is an avoidable hazard for interstellar colonists.
But the key difference with a space mission is that there is much we can do to avoid genetic
disorders and promote genetic diversity:
* Select colonists (or colonist couples) for genetic diversity,
* Use sperm/ova banks to import gentic diversity,
* Use genomic screening to screen out lethal genes (which can be applied in a
number of ways).
These techniques can make inbreeding problems go away entirely.
Looking at his campaign contributions in the 2008 cycle his largest single contribution is to the "NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE - Republican" ($7500).
On this evidence it looks like he just a typical business executive player, who buys influence on both sides. Not terribly "staunch".
Murdoch on the other hand gives far more heavily (his million dollar payoff to the RNC makes Roberts out to be a political piker) and only to the Republicans.
It doesn't matter. The only logical ways out of the trap are either break the two party lock by voting for someone else, or reject the current democratic process...
Untrue. Another route is to build an activist base that can take control over the primaries and push candidates that are not corporatists.
Pie in the sky? Since turn-out in primaries are low, it is definitely possible for a minority of politically committed people to get candidates nominated that advocate their values. We have seen the evidence multiple times in the last three years - the Tea Party candidates last year and the year before, and Obama himself (remember Clinton's "inevitability"?). Now obviously the Tea Party was on afterburner with its wall-to-wall support by the Murdoch media empire and the Koch brothers bottomless checkbook, but genuine political activism that is not astroturfed is a real thing we see around the world daily (check this weeks international headlines).
It is hard to see how a third party challenge could affect American politics other than acting as a spoiler that takes down the party closest to its views - again recent evidence is beyond doubt. This may yet occur for the Republicans with the Tea party - to the benefit of Democrats - but then it will be essential to have replaced the corporatists in that party. A progressive third party challenge only opens the door to a President Palin.
Problem is there is no insurgent movement in the Democratic Party yet. One needs to be built. Are enough people angry enough yet?
A Scanner Darkly gave me a headache... I mean seriously, that whole fucking movie was a gimmick...
To each his own. I found the use of the rotoscope-like effects in A Scanner Darkly, and the somewhat similar (but more embroidered) set of techniques in Waking Life to be brilliant uses of graphics technology that perfectly complemented the subject material. Both movies deal with problems of perception and reality as their theme and plot and the artificial-yet-nearly-true-to-life images are beautiful evocations of that.
Perhaps you should be a bit more open to things that are a bit different from your ordinary fare.
What do the drones do that is different that police helicopters? Aside from being cheaper?
I am not a lawyer - but I do know that the law frequently uses common-sense tests to balance competing considerations such as privacy vs law enforcement. When considering any intrusion on privacy the concept of "reasonableness" is central, though vague. In making these balancing decisions the expected frequency of occurrence and general intrusiveness is a significant factor. When you dramatically alter one of these factors it is no longer "no different".
With a cheap tiny drone it is possible to continually overfly the backyards of homes, which may have tall privacy fences/hedges specifically to render it "non-public" space. This is not done with helicopters due to the expense and noise, if for no other reason. Spotting illegal activity in backyards today often depends on "accidental" observation while performing other duties. It is a definite change if this becomes the primary reason for a flight. I doubt current law envisions helicopters continually hovering over your property, which is a possible use-case with a drone.
Consider this - the police have the right to view the front of you house, which is public, and take pictures. But can they, without a warrant, set up 24/7 video monitoring - basically an electronic stake-out? The case with an area where there is an expectation of privacy would require a much higher standard for the police to surmount.
That is a very useful quote. Because today - thanks to the Ditch Witch and other similar mechanical contraptions we mostly don't need ditch diggers anymore. The bottom-tier unskilled labor pool is the most vulnerable, not the ones with the most reliable supply of labor (as the quote implies).
The downfall of the Persian empire may have enabled it somewhat, but in no way can you disagree that there was a period of superiority by the Arab Muslim civilization, nor does the fact of Arab Muslims' conquest of the Persian empire in any way diminish the Arab empire's superiority in science and engineering later on.
Yes it does. If the act of invading and acculturating the Persian empire, the Arab culture may have picked up a few techniques and smart groups for a time -...
Are you asserting this as an actual fact or are you just spinning a random scenario? The accomplishments of Arab scientists through the Western Middle Ages is very lengthy and very well know. Any hypothesis that they were all really Persians in Arab-drag is a foolish one. Not knowing of this lengthy list makes the hypothesis fatally uninformed.
AOL has claimed in the past that its subscriber base hit 30 million, this was probably somewhat exaggerated (rounding up a couple of million) but taking them at their word their subscriber base is now something like 3.3 million. Not quite 90% yet, but they have been losing at least half a million per quarter so we are only a couple of months out from that mark.
Any mass auto-billing subscription service that is going to have some fraction of subscribers who are inappropriately signed up through ignorance or error. On your way down to zero again it is inevitable that you will reach the point where these are essentially your only remaining customers. Approaching the 90% decline point, AOL clearly reached that stage some time back.
I await to see how AOL will arrange to screw their last few customers when the service is finally shut down.
It doesn't say what the concentration is so I don't know what the options are for obtaining feed CO2.
Well, we do have these fixed coal-fired generating plants that produce 2.8 billion tons of CO2 annually, with the Scherer plant in Juliet, GA producing 25.3 million tons by itself. Building a pipeline from a fixed CO2 production site to a bio-oil farm seems a straightforward proposition.
The RIAA wants special considerations for rights holders that no other business or perons on the Internet has today and wants to limit criticisms under the guise of morality...
17 USC 1008, Section 1004 imposes a 3% tax on blank music CDs since 1998, even though making copies of music for your own use is legal, and the music industry did just fine with no tax on analog media supporting them. Once they got a taste of having a special tax in which the proceeds flow directly to private for-profit businesses they have been eager to extend this "business model."
You may have seen proposals being floated by the RIAA for some sort of Internet tax to replace their "lost" revenues (compared to their all-time high banner year of 1999). This idea does not seem to have gotten traction yet, but the more Congress resembles the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the more likely they are to dust this one off again.
Yessiree - protecting private intellectual property is best done through tax-supported corporate welfare.
per ton its i think always going to be cheaper to just launch the stuff into outer space. Sometimes its the simple solution that works out best.
The cheapest, easiest solution is what we are doing right now - putting the spent fuel in massive (~10 ton) concrete casks that are stored on the plant site. There is no technical reason why they can't be left there forever, or be moved later to some central storage facility where they sit in long rows on an empty, fenced-in plain.
The notion that we need to "do something else" is driven by politics not by any identifiable technical deficiency with the current default solution.
Believe it or not, there is no reason to suppose civilization if going to collapse be unable to provide the modest security these things require. I drink beer from a German brewery that is 700 years old (and there others that are nearly a thousand years old). Keeping an enterprise operating for millenia is already a solved problem.
Buy yourself a Thermaltake BlacX external hard drive dock for $44. Now you can get a 2 TB hard drive for $80 (with rebate) and store all your data for 4 cents per gigabyte.
... By the way, all the pundits saying it would take the resources of a government to create that worm know very little about what it actually takes to make one. It did however take very intimate knowledge of the code running on those systems, so the creator probably has a copy of the source code on those machines, or the equivalent. (I'm pretty sure it's too large to be memorized by a single person.)
How about the part where they actually test it to see if it works on real controllers hooked up to gas centrifuges?
This isn't a botnet or credit card info swiping program - you have to have access to hardware that only people with 9 digit budgets and up can acquire.
So I'd say you know very little about it actually takes to make one that does its job successfully.
Maybe they could use a gallium eutectic - you would preserve the ambience of a room-temperature liquid metal device* with more similar characteristics than water/alcohol (better acoustic impedance, non-corrosive, etc.). Although you see it for sale at prices of $15/g its current metal market price for high purity gallium is only $0.70/g. An alternative is Cerrolow 117, a reasonably inexpensive commercial alloy used for making mold prototypes, melts at 117 degrees F. Adding a small heating element would keep it liquid.
We just don't yet know who it was. Some day some memoir of an ex astronaut down on their luck will reveal all.
Given the numbers of the two sexes represented in space I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that the first sex in space was gay sex too.
Yes, but we can make some very good guesses.
Number one on my list would be N. Jan Davis and Mark C. Lee who were married in secret not long before they both served as mission specialists aboard Endeavour on STS-47 in September 1992. If you were an astronaut on a space shuttle mission and two of your fellow astronauts were newlyweds honeymooning in space, wouldn't you make sure they got a little time alone?
There have been rumors and speculation about Elena Kondakova and Valery Polyakov who spent 130 days or so alone (out of 169 days) on Mir, and who appear quite friendly on some videos shot in orbit.
There is no possibility of a Mars colony with foreseeable technology in the next 50 years being self-sufficient.
In principle no, but in practice give them a nuclear reactor and they're most of the way there. There's plenty of raw material on Mars if you have the energy to refine it with.
And the vast industrial complex of factories employing millions of people required to actually turn energy+raw materials into the industrial products they require?
Have you any idea how much effort just mining the raw materials requires (to say nothing of refining them)?
A Mars colony will have a total of a few dozen people in it at the most. NASAs astronaut return mission ideas have a total crew of 8-12.
This is sort of like claiming that in practice you could single-handedly rewrite the code base for Oracle - is just typing code after all. How hard is that?
Medical Marijuana is a scam. "Medicine" doesn't come in "joints".
By "joints" you mean of course drug "cigarettes".
Oddly enough belladonna cigarettes are an effective treatment for acute asthma - and although they are largely superseded by longer lasting drugs in inhalers, belladonna cigarettes are still in use.
So, yes, drugs do come in cigarettes if that is an effective means of administration. Most medical marijuana users prefer to use vaporizers that, and inhalers, produce a nearly pure aerosol of the medication.
... If it's to be treated as a medical treatment, it should be moved to Schedule II or III, prescribed by doctors, and distributed through pharmacies....
Funny thing - the DEA already lists Marinol - which is pure THC at only Schedule III!
And if you check out the drugs listed in Schedule V - the lowest and least restrictive category - it consists almost entirely of Schedule III or higher drugs in lower potency preparations. If normal scheduling procedures were followed cannabis would be listed no higher than Schedule V.
It is interesting to observe the procedures for acquiring Schedule V drugs ordained by the DEA. For the Schedule V drug Robitussin AC (it contains codeine) up to four ounces can be purchased within a 48 hour period without prescription, provided the purchaser is at least 18 years of age, sign a log book, and provide identification if not known to the pharmacist. So basically you can buy some Schedule V drugs simply by showing up to your friendly neighborhood pharmacist, siging a book, paying your money and walking away.
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Steve Jobs is no more or less of a visionary than Bill Gates (I think though they are both very clever they just got extremely lucky, for Gates everything flowed from DOS and for Jobs everything flowed from the iPod).
Lets see here - we have the very interesting historical experiment of Apple's performance with Jobs (1970s to late 1980s), without Jobs (late 1980s to late 1990s), and with Jobs again (since late 1990s). The contrast in corporate performance with and without is striking.
And we have Jobs leading the development and introduction of the Macintosh*. And leading a Lucasfilm spin-off into the world's leading animation studio Pixar. And founding NeXT and leading the creation of the ground-breaking UNIX-based Next computer. And leading the revival of the Macintosh computer platform with OS X.
Just "got lucky" with the iPod? Sheesh... gimme a break.
*Did Apple invent the graphical/mouse UI? Of course not. But creating an affordable consumer product that delivered it with the technology of the day was ground-breaking.
How about a single "desktop" computing environment accessible from anywhere on any piece of hardware and OS?
This is hardly a new idea, and the current idea of "the cloud" is an implementation of this idea dependent on a service provider and its data center to host it. But with very high speed transmission the complete current state of a computing environment running on a VM could be synced in real-time with other copies elsewhere through a peer-to-peer arrangement. No service providers (other than the Internet infrastructure) required. With VMs this could be any type of computing environment running on any other OS/hardware anywhere.
Now none of the elements of this scheme are really new, and with various restrictions schemes like this can be implemented now, but with the extremely high transmission rates in TFA essentially all of the bottlenecks and limitations would disappear and it would create the appearance of a single "local" computing resource.
Tritium. North American prices are between $30M and $100M a kilo....
Small problem. No tritium on the Moon.
Now they do have He-3 on the Moon (which is what tritium decays into with a 12. 3 year half-life), and you can make tritium from He-3 with an extra neutron, which is no different from the much less exotic and vastly cheaper lithium-6. That neutron is expensive.
And if it were to be manned it wouldn't be a return trip so to allow for a sufficient genetic variation the crew needs to be at least 1600 individuals.
Otherwise the risk of genetic degradation would be too great.
Depends on what "too great" means. The Hutterite community in North America, a closed religious community, was founded around 1700 with a founding population of about 400 that was already highly inter-related (compared to world-wide human genetic diversity) and has now increased to 50,000. Genetic studies do show a measurable penalty in fertility and fitness with this high level of inbreeding, but the community is doing quite well nevertheless.
What is more there is evidence of major human populations developing from even smaller founder groups PLoS Biology, June 2005, On the Number of New World Founders: A Population Genetic Portrait of the Peopling of the Americas asserts that "Taken together, the analyses in this study suggest a recent founding of the New World Amerind-speaking peoples by a small population of effective size near 70"
Now the lack of diversity in the immune system of the American Indians later led to an epidemiological calamity when diseases from the Old World were imported 10 or 15 millenia later, but this is an avoidable hazard for interstellar colonists.
But the key difference with a space mission is that there is much we can do to avoid genetic disorders and promote genetic diversity:
* Select colonists (or colonist couples) for genetic diversity,
* Use sperm/ova banks to import gentic diversity,
* Use genomic screening to screen out lethal genes (which can be applied in a number of ways).
These techniques can make inbreeding problems go away entirely.
Looking at his campaign contributions in the 2008 cycle his largest single contribution is to the "NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE - Republican" ($7500).
On this evidence it looks like he just a typical business executive player, who buys influence on both sides. Not terribly "staunch".
Murdoch on the other hand gives far more heavily (his million dollar payoff to the RNC makes Roberts out to be a political piker) and only to the Republicans.
It doesn't matter. The only logical ways out of the trap are either break the two party lock by voting for someone else, or reject the current democratic process...
Untrue. Another route is to build an activist base that can take control over the primaries and push candidates that are not corporatists.
Pie in the sky? Since turn-out in primaries are low, it is definitely possible for a minority of politically committed people to get candidates nominated that advocate their values. We have seen the evidence multiple times in the last three years - the Tea Party candidates last year and the year before, and Obama himself (remember Clinton's "inevitability"?). Now obviously the Tea Party was on afterburner with its wall-to-wall support by the Murdoch media empire and the Koch brothers bottomless checkbook, but genuine political activism that is not astroturfed is a real thing we see around the world daily (check this weeks international headlines).
It is hard to see how a third party challenge could affect American politics other than acting as a spoiler that takes down the party closest to its views - again recent evidence is beyond doubt. This may yet occur for the Republicans with the Tea party - to the benefit of Democrats - but then it will be essential to have replaced the corporatists in that party. A progressive third party challenge only opens the door to a President Palin.
Problem is there is no insurgent movement in the Democratic Party yet. One needs to be built. Are enough people angry enough yet?
A Scanner Darkly gave me a headache... I mean seriously, that whole fucking movie was a gimmick...
To each his own. I found the use of the rotoscope-like effects in A Scanner Darkly, and the somewhat similar (but more embroidered) set of techniques in Waking Life to be brilliant uses of graphics technology that perfectly complemented the subject material. Both movies deal with problems of perception and reality as their theme and plot and the artificial-yet-nearly-true-to-life images are beautiful evocations of that.
Perhaps you should be a bit more open to things that are a bit different from your ordinary fare.
What do the drones do that is different that police helicopters? Aside from being cheaper?
I am not a lawyer - but I do know that the law frequently uses common-sense tests to balance competing considerations such as privacy vs law enforcement. When considering any intrusion on privacy the concept of "reasonableness" is central, though vague. In making these balancing decisions the expected frequency of occurrence and general intrusiveness is a significant factor. When you dramatically alter one of these factors it is no longer "no different".
With a cheap tiny drone it is possible to continually overfly the backyards of homes, which may have tall privacy fences/hedges specifically to render it "non-public" space. This is not done with helicopters due to the expense and noise, if for no other reason. Spotting illegal activity in backyards today often depends on "accidental" observation while performing other duties. It is a definite change if this becomes the primary reason for a flight. I doubt current law envisions helicopters continually hovering over your property, which is a possible use-case with a drone.
Consider this - the police have the right to view the front of you house, which is public, and take pictures. But can they, without a warrant, set up 24/7 video monitoring - basically an electronic stake-out? The case with an area where there is an expectation of privacy would require a much higher standard for the police to surmount.
That is a very useful quote. Because today - thanks to the Ditch Witch and other similar mechanical contraptions we mostly don't need ditch diggers anymore. The bottom-tier unskilled labor pool is the most vulnerable, not the ones with the most reliable supply of labor (as the quote implies).
The downfall of the Persian empire may have enabled it somewhat, but in no way can you disagree that there was a period of superiority by the Arab Muslim civilization, nor does the fact of Arab Muslims' conquest of the Persian empire in any way diminish the Arab empire's superiority in science and engineering later on.
Yes it does. If the act of invading and acculturating the Persian empire, the Arab culture may have picked up a few techniques and smart groups for a time - ...
Are you asserting this as an actual fact or are you just spinning a random scenario? The accomplishments of Arab scientists through the Western Middle Ages is very lengthy and very well know. Any hypothesis that they were all really Persians in Arab-drag is a foolish one. Not knowing of this lengthy list makes the hypothesis fatally uninformed.
AOL has claimed in the past that its subscriber base hit 30 million, this was probably somewhat exaggerated (rounding up a couple of million) but taking them at their word their subscriber base is now something like 3.3 million. Not quite 90% yet, but they have been losing at least half a million per quarter so we are only a couple of months out from that mark.
Any mass auto-billing subscription service that is going to have some fraction of subscribers who are inappropriately signed up through ignorance or error. On your way down to zero again it is inevitable that you will reach the point where these are essentially your only remaining customers. Approaching the 90% decline point, AOL clearly reached that stage some time back.
I await to see how AOL will arrange to screw their last few customers when the service is finally shut down.
Yes, that sounds about right.
It doesn't say what the concentration is so I don't know what the options are for obtaining feed CO2.
Well, we do have these fixed coal-fired generating plants that produce 2.8 billion tons of CO2 annually, with the Scherer plant in Juliet, GA producing 25.3 million tons by itself. Building a pipeline from a fixed CO2 production site to a bio-oil farm seems a straightforward proposition.
The RIAA wants special considerations for rights holders that no other business or perons on the Internet has today and wants to limit criticisms under the guise of morality...
17 USC 1008, Section 1004 imposes a 3% tax on blank music CDs since 1998, even though making copies of music for your own use is legal, and the music industry did just fine with no tax on analog media supporting them. Once they got a taste of having a special tax in which the proceeds flow directly to private for-profit businesses they have been eager to extend this "business model."
You may have seen proposals being floated by the RIAA for some sort of Internet tax to replace their "lost" revenues (compared to their all-time high banner year of 1999). This idea does not seem to have gotten traction yet, but the more Congress resembles the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the more likely they are to dust this one off again.
Yessiree - protecting private intellectual property is best done through tax-supported corporate welfare.
per ton its i think always going to be cheaper to just launch the stuff into outer space. Sometimes its the simple solution that works out best.
The cheapest, easiest solution is what we are doing right now - putting the spent fuel in massive (~10 ton) concrete casks that are stored on the plant site. There is no technical reason why they can't be left there forever, or be moved later to some central storage facility where they sit in long rows on an empty, fenced-in plain.
The notion that we need to "do something else" is driven by politics not by any identifiable technical deficiency with the current default solution.
Believe it or not, there is no reason to suppose civilization if going to collapse be unable to provide the modest security these things require. I drink beer from a German brewery that is 700 years old (and there others that are nearly a thousand years old). Keeping an enterprise operating for millenia is already a solved problem.
Buy yourself a Thermaltake BlacX external hard drive dock for $44. Now you can get a 2 TB hard drive for $80 (with rebate) and store all your data for 4 cents per gigabyte.
... By the way, all the pundits saying it would take the resources of a government to create that worm know very little about what it actually takes to make one. It did however take very intimate knowledge of the code running on those systems, so the creator probably has a copy of the source code on those machines, or the equivalent. (I'm pretty sure it's too large to be memorized by a single person.)
How about the part where they actually test it to see if it works on real controllers hooked up to gas centrifuges?
This isn't a botnet or credit card info swiping program - you have to have access to hardware that only people with 9 digit budgets and up can acquire.
So I'd say you know very little about it actually takes to make one that does its job successfully.
Maybe they could use a gallium eutectic - you would preserve the ambience of a room-temperature liquid metal device* with more similar characteristics than water/alcohol (better acoustic impedance, non-corrosive, etc.). Although you see it for sale at prices of $15/g its current metal market price for high purity gallium is only $0.70/g. An alternative is Cerrolow 117, a reasonably inexpensive commercial alloy used for making mold prototypes, melts at 117 degrees F. Adding a small heating element would keep it liquid.
We just don't yet know who it was. Some day some memoir of an ex astronaut down on their luck will reveal all.
Given the numbers of the two sexes represented in space I wouldn't be too surprised to discover that the first sex in space was gay sex too.
Yes, but we can make some very good guesses.
Number one on my list would be N. Jan Davis and Mark C. Lee who were married in secret not long before they both served as mission specialists aboard Endeavour on STS-47 in September 1992. If you were an astronaut on a space shuttle mission and two of your fellow astronauts were newlyweds honeymooning in space, wouldn't you make sure they got a little time alone?
There have been rumors and speculation about Elena Kondakova and Valery Polyakov who spent 130 days or so alone (out of 169 days) on Mir, and who appear quite friendly on some videos shot in orbit.
... the Feds could eliminate every single program other than Social Security and defense spending and STILL be over budget...
Let's see: 2010 revenues $2,217 billion; Defense spending $663.7 billion; Social Security $677.95 billion.
$663.7 billion + $677.95 billion = $ 1341.6 billion < $2,217 billion
Is it to much to to ask to run one Google query and do one addition problem before bloviating about the federal budget so that it is not nonsense?
There is no possibility of a Mars colony with foreseeable technology in the next 50 years being self-sufficient.
In principle no, but in practice give them a nuclear reactor and they're most of the way there. There's plenty of raw material on Mars if you have the energy to refine it with.
And the vast industrial complex of factories employing millions of people required to actually turn energy+raw materials into the industrial products they require?
Have you any idea how much effort just mining the raw materials requires (to say nothing of refining them)?
A Mars colony will have a total of a few dozen people in it at the most. NASAs astronaut return mission ideas have a total crew of 8-12.
This is sort of like claiming that in practice you could single-handedly rewrite the code base for Oracle - is just typing code after all. How hard is that?
Until they can make grasshoppers moo, I'll pass.
They already of cockroaches that hiss - if they breed one that "squeals like a piggy" would that be good enough for you?
Medical Marijuana is a scam. "Medicine" doesn't come in "joints".
By "joints" you mean of course drug "cigarettes".
Oddly enough belladonna cigarettes are an effective treatment for acute asthma - and although they are largely superseded by longer lasting drugs in inhalers, belladonna cigarettes are still in use.
So, yes, drugs do come in cigarettes if that is an effective means of administration. Most medical marijuana users prefer to use vaporizers that, and inhalers, produce a nearly pure aerosol of the medication.
... If it's to be treated as a medical treatment, it should be moved to Schedule II or III, prescribed by doctors, and distributed through pharmacies. ...
Funny thing - the DEA already lists Marinol - which is pure THC at only Schedule III!
And if you check out the drugs listed in Schedule V - the lowest and least restrictive category - it consists almost entirely of Schedule III or higher drugs in lower potency preparations. If normal scheduling procedures were followed cannabis would be listed no higher than Schedule V.
It is interesting to observe the procedures for acquiring Schedule V drugs ordained by the DEA. For the Schedule V drug Robitussin AC (it contains codeine) up to four ounces can be purchased within a 48 hour period without prescription, provided the purchaser is at least 18 years of age, sign a log book, and provide identification if not known to the pharmacist. So basically you can buy some Schedule V drugs simply by showing up to your friendly neighborhood pharmacist, siging a book, paying your money and walking away.
In the Republican reading of it on the House floor today that is.