Anything that can cover the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant (e.g. provide a Gigawatt electrical power within minutes without advance notice) can cope with the variations in wind power output.
These solutions exist and are part of the grid. It does not really matter how often you have to turn them on once you built them.
A few years ago the summer in europe was so hot, that they almost had to shut down all nuclear power plants along the river rhine at once because there wasn't enough water for cooling. Again: Situations like these are less frequent with nuclear or coal compared to wind, but that does not make it any easier to provide technology to deal with them.
It's just the same as with UPS for servers: Mine has not been needed since I purchased it. In a devlopment country I might have need for it once a week. Still the one I installed in my home is not less expensive or simpler.
Right you are! And I might add that existing power grids already have to handle large short term power supply-demand mismatches due to the unpredictable nature of the... wait for it... WEATHER! Sulimma cites hot weather shutting down nukes in Europe, but very commonly everywhere hot or cold weather (over huge areas) cause huge power demand fluctuations. That this occurs on the demand side rather than the supply side makes not a whot of difference in managing it.
Managing a nation power grid with lots of wind and solar power is exactly like managing one without it.
And when the wind stops, make sure you have candles handy...
This may just be a wry comment, and not an attempt at serious criticism, but this point is often brought up to criticize both solar and wind power. And certainly it sounds like a serious problem since, after all, existing power systems are on-line all the time, and having a major aspect of the power system dependent on something as fickle as weather introduces serious unresolved problems into power grid management.
Doesn't it??
No, it doesn't.
The reality is that even "base load" (constant output) plants get shut down for extended periods for maintenance of various kinds, not infrequently unpredictably due to equipment problems. And, due to large fluctuations in power demand across the daily cycle (which can be unpredictable due to weather) there must be special expensive peaking power plants anyway.
It turns out that managing a diverse national power grid has a substantial component of solar and wind power is exactly like managing one that doesn't. A lot of solar and wind power necessarily means many plants spread over a vast geographical area, and while the wind may die (or the sky may cloud over) down in one place, it will be blowing hard (or shining brightly) in others. The power fluctuations are no worse than fluctuation in demand, and both are addressed in the same way - by having peaking capacity in with costly peaking plants, or some energy storage method, and by having redundancy in base load plant capacity.
There was no technical flaw in Iridium. It was stated what it would do. It did it. Someone screwed up the business plan, but there was no technical mistake. They knew it took 77 satellites for what they wanted. And they launched them all and they worked flawlessly. Now, if only they had sales to match the business plan, they'd be billionaires. But again, unrelated to any technical issue.
They launched 66 satellites, not 77 (which was the original plan), as they came up with a cheaper orbital configuration. The cool-sounding name "Iridium" was taken from element 77, since the 77 satellites reminded people of its 77 electrons. When they reconfigured the constellation to 66 I was disappointed that they did not rename it "Dysprosium".
[T]he final 'reference trajectory'... now includes 56 passes over Titan, 155 orbits of Saturn in different inclinations, 12 flybys of Enceladus, 5 flybys of other large moons — and final destruction."
So the CD with 616,420 signatures on it is not going to out last us all after all.
When the signature drive began in 1996 an implied promise was made that Cassini, and the disk would remain in orbit around Saturn forever. See, for example this remark: "Indeed, some of us may even experience a small taste of immortality as we envision our signatures outliving our bodies."
http://web.archive.org/web/19990428132214/www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/MoreInfo/dvd.html.
Objectively, gaining additional science by crashing it into Saturn is a more worthwhile endeavor than using it as an eternal postcard to the planets, but to those of us with our signatures on it (and who remember people who signed but have passed on, and cannot now add their signature to a outer solar system probe) it is a disappointment. Maybe they could launch a copy on a new deep space probe.
Why in the world would someone publish a death notice in the first place? Is it some sort of legal requirement? If not, I don't understand the thought processes that would lead someone to want to do such a thing.
It may be required for estate or other legal purposes. And, as another poster noted, it's traditional and some people expect it. Didn't realize they were so expensive, but dammnit, dying ain't cheap these days. Nothing is.
For a few centuries now newspapers were also a crucial part of the historical record. Conducting genealogical research (which is simply history at the family level) has depended on looking up death notices in newspaper archives as an essential means of researching family relationships (and virtually all newspapers get permanently preserved somewhere).
And, as of yet, there is no substitute for this role just as there is no general substitute for notifying local communities of the passing.
One can easily imagine some organization with substantial financial resources setting up a permanent on-line repository of death notices to be preserved for all future generations (representatives of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, are you reading this?). But such a thing does not yet exist. Posting it on a website with the expectation of it getting archived by Archive.org is something that may work, but it is a very inadequate stop gap.
...My grandfather who was rather well known in the community died 2 years ago. To run his obituary in 3 of the local/nearby community papers ran around $800.
When my mother died last year, I found that running a 2-day notice in the local community paper in the South was $1000. This was a low cost area with a total population less than 5% the size of San Francisco. Shocked by the astonishing price, I estimated what they were taking in annually from death notices, and found that it was probably enough to cover most of their operating expenses.
But there really is no other effective way to get the word out on someone's passing to the community in a timely manner, so the local newspaper has become part of the high-cost for-profit funeral industry, something I had not even suspected.
That is the point. If you accept the settlement, and the $16, you let them off the hook...
That is the way it is in America today. Corporate malfeasance against the individual: penalty is paying A SINGLE PENNY on the dollar. Corporations claiming malfeasance by the individual (Capitol/RIAA vs Thomas) penalty is ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS on the penny!
[citation needed]. what other than nicotine is addictive in, say, a regular Camel?
There are at least two types of additives used to heighten addiction.
The first is something to make nicotine more bio-available - e.g. ammonia - which ensures that all of the nicotine is in free-base form. The second is something that reduces the unpleasant acute effects of smoking, so that it is easier to inhale - e.g. menthol - which is an anesthetic that prevents coughing and feeling lung irritation (the irritation is still there, you just can't feel it). Other anesthetic oils have been used, clove oil for example.
Manned space flight isn't about being "cost effective", "high priority", or "a good return on investment" (yes, I've heard all of these terms used in regards to spaceflight). It's about exploration, curiosity, and wonder. I challenge you to tell someone who was around on July 20, 1969 that manned spaceflight is pointless.
Challenge accepted! I was born just days after Sputnik was launched, and grew up as a space junkie, following every step of the space race, and watching the Moon landing live.
It was many things: a stunning technical achievement (we went to the Moon just as soon as it was technically possible to do so), a stunning geo-political achievement (showing - as it was intended to - the advantage U.S. society had over Soviet society, in a non-destructive manner), and one of the most important symbolic events in the history of the human race.
But it was a colossal scientific failure. Nothing was learned that would not have been learned at a fraction of the cost using unmanned vehicles. Even the "spin off" argument fails to recognize that a focused technology development program could have accomplished similar things far more cheaply.
And today, "return to the moon" lacks all of the favorable features of the Apollo program - it won't be a stunning technical achievement, or an impressive geo-political or symbolic one. It will just be another colossally expensive scientific failure, compared to what could be achieved with similar money on space probes.
It's about doing something simply to show that it can be done, like the explorers of centuries past. I suppose some people find that concept unimportant or even boring.
I would say that those people are unimportant and boring.
But is has already been done. An actual viable plan to get to Mars would be a new exploration, but no one has ever been willing to put up the cash for that.
Did space exploration, and discovery end with Apollo? Hardly! Essentially all exploration and discovery has been due to unmanned probes and observatories, manned flight has returned essentially nothing along these lines. The one contribution it has made - fixing the Hubble - could have been finessed more cheaply and effectively simply by building and launching more Hubbles.
So yes, the symbolic value of manned space flight is past (unless genuine new goals are set and adequately funded) and the Shuttle and ISS operations have been a pointless waste of money. Expendable unmanned launchers and vehicles would have gotten us farther, faster and cheaper.
So the true ruling is that the FCC really DOES have this authority, they just have to put the rules in black and white before they run off enforcing them. Nothing new here, just that they didn't follow procedures ( DOH ! ).
Correct, it is only the DEA it seems that can ignore its own rules, administrative law rulings, and science and set regulations that contradict all of these at once.
The scheduling of marijuana as Schedule I when pure THC is Schedule III directly violates its rules on scheduling, and was actually ruled in violation by an administrative law judge. The DEA simply ignored the ruling. Laws don't apply to the lawmen apparently.
... The interstate commerce clause has been interpreted so expansively that there is very little economic regulation that Congress can't enact or delegate to an agency (the only examples that come to mind are gun restrictions in/around schools (US v. Lopez) and enabling women to seek civil remedies under the violence against women act (US v. Morrison)
Indeed. In Gonzales v. Raich (previously Ashcroft v. Raich), 545 U.S. 1 (2005), it was held that the Federal government had the right to ban growing medical marijuana by the patient herself, with no money or cannabis changing hands, because it involved interstate commerce. How you say? Well, the decision NOT to buy or sell marijuana affects the interstate trade in said product, according to the court!
It seems with interstate trade anything goes today, unless it is some specific policy that the right wing of the court dislikes.
The article suggests the battery can put out 4 megawatts for 8 hours. So that's 32,000 kilowatt-hours. My electricity here costs about 7 cents a kWh, so that BOB can hold almost $225 worth of electricity. At a cost of many millions, that does not sound like very economical power per kWh!
For example, your basic Honda generator can run for two thousand hours, putting out 1,500 watts, before the little putt-putt engine needs an overhaul. So that's about 3,000 kilowatt-hours for $400. Let's assume the power fails ten times a year, so you'd wear out 10 Honda generators per failure (avg), at a cost of $4000 per, or $40,000 per year. By comparison BOB's cost of financing in itself is going to be at least $3 million a year, not to mention maintenance.
So these poor sods are paying about 75 times as much as they should.
( Not to mention that generators are much more economical in larger sizes )
A more realistic comparison would be to price some cheap megawatt class diesel generators: http://www.dieselserviceandsupply.com/Used-Generators/. Slightly used units seem to run $175,000 for a 1 MW unit, if a 4 MW unit is available at the same price point (the required output) that is $700,000 (they do have a new 6 MW natural gas unit for $2 million). So a conventional peaking plant would seem to be a much cheaper alternative, but at a multiple of 10-25 (including siting costs), not 75.
The explanation for this decision seems to be available here: http://www.ettexas.com/. The utility, not the town, is picking up the cost. And I infer that the likely reason is that since "The NaS® battery will be the first in Texas and the largest in the United States..." that this is technology pilot project to field test this technology.
It's specifically a list of accidents with nuclear weapons, not just any old nuclear accidents. (Just mentioning that since there are some of those in the military as well. For example the SL-1 which is notable since it killed 3 people, including one guy who got accidently nailed to the ceiling.)
We'll never know for sure, but this incident was probably murder-suicide rather than an accident.
It appears that the fatal control rod was most likely deliberately pulled to the fatal position - a 20 inch extraction instead of the proper 4 inches. Further one of the other men on duty, who was also killed, was cheating with the wife of the technician that caused the disaster.
Although C4 is pretty safe in normal handling (the plasticizer desensitizes the RDX to some extent), RDX based explosives can be detonated accidentally. (The Wikipedia article implying that it cannot is incorrect.)
If you read the document you read of several weapons exploding in accidents. The earliest ones all involved Comp B, a TNT/RDX mixture. Later weapons often used the very dangerous and more powerful HMX.
Since the 1970s the U.S. has moved to using a very unusual high explosive, TATB, which genuinely can only be detonated by another detonation shock.
Since they never found the weapon in question, how did they even know which safety mechanisms had failed and which were still functioning?
Answer the OP is confusing the status of two different weapons in the same accident. One was recovered intact, the other broke into pieces and only one part of it is missing.
FTA: In 1961 a B-52 carrying two 24 megaton nuclear weapons (equivalent to 3,700 “Hiroshima bombs”) broke up in the air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. One bomb fell as far as 10,000 feet and sunk into the “waterlogged farmland.” The Air Force dug as deep as 50 feet trying to excavate the weapon, which contained uranium, but was unsuccessful. Finally, the Air Force purchased an easement on the land. Reportedly, a Pentagon document stated that five of the bomb’s six safety mechanisms had failed; “only a single switch” prevented the nuclear detonation of this 24 megaton device.
What are the chances of the final safety mechanism ever deteriorating or otherwise failing due to age?
Zero. The OP is confusing the status of two different weapons. The one that deployed its parachute was recovered intact (but with the safety mechanism failures mentioned). The other broke apart and it was only the thermonuclear secondary stage that was not recovered.
The discrepancy between knowing that "five of the bomb's six safety mechanisms had failed" and reportedly not having recovered said weapon should tip one off that the account for the OP was confused.
"thanks to the Manhattan project, we now have devices lying around that are designed to split atoms."
Except that it's still not that easy. Its very likely that the mechanisms surrounding the radioactive cores were damaged during the drops, so most will be unusable anyway...
A fully assembled fission bomb (especially a pure fission bomb) is actually rather dangerous - accidental detonation of the high explosives can create a nuclear explosion on the order of a few hundred tons, quite devastating by any ordinary standard. But it is for this reason that all atomic bombs after the wartime models had features that kept them from being fully assembled before combat use (removable fission cores, or internal motorized in-flight assembly). These early safety features were replaced by others in the later compact "wooden" (no field accessible component) bombs, but those took years to develop.
So the bombs were really pretty safe against any nuclear event, but only because special measures had been taken to ensure it.
The 1950s accidents were all (nearly all?, I haven't checked each one just now, and in some cases there are disputes) WITHOUT the fission core installed so not only was a nuclear explosion impossible, so was significant radioactive contamination.
Nice attitude. Doesn't matter that freon was never a problem to the environment. Coincidentally the patents were due to expire, and it was claimed that chlorine was bad for the ozone layer. Doesn't matter at all that we pour gallons of chlorine into the water cycle through laundry bleach, swimming pools, and municipal water.
...
It's a hard battle. We not only have to fight against greedy politicians and corporate monsters, we have to fight against gullible over-emotional assholes like you.
Ignorance? Check!
Rambling conspiracy theory? Check!
Abusiveness? Check!
This makes the Slashdot crank trifecta.
If you knew the slightest thing about the problem with ozone destroying chemicals, of which the chlorinated freons were prime culprits, you would know that they were a problem because they were supremely stable in the lower atmosphere (pure chlorine not so at all), and were able to transport chlorine to the ozone layer (unlike natural chlorine compounds), whereupon UV light broke them down, released the chlorine, starting a chain reaction destroying the ozone.
An ocean of pure chlorine at sea level would have zero effect on the ozone layer, because it can't get up there.
Worldwide bans on the worst ozone depleting chemicals has halted growth of ozone depletion, after years of worsening, and signs of recovery are expected to become statistically detectable in the next several years.
And, BTW, the patents on the harmful freons had expired many years before the ozone destruction discovery.
This is very thoroughly established science.
The parallel between the science-bashing with the "ozone controversy" (and the "acid rain controversy") and what we are seeing today with an industry-supported noise machine is really quite striking. Not only was the science thoroughly vindicated, but the solutions imposed - bans on the most destructive chemicals - and "cap and trade" (very much favored by "free marketers" at the time as harnessing the power of markets) for acid emissions, proved quite effective.
I see this modded "5" for "Funny". I wish I could laugh.
p>Exxon-Mobil is going down the same path as Philip-Morris, spending big bucks do deny danger of fossil fuel use.
They have paid millions to the Heartland Institute alone to set up astroturf websites, and pay shills (oops -- "unacknowledged spokespeople") to deny climate change. The Heartland Institute earlier performed these same services for... Philip-Morris!
Check the Committee report - they were only looking into compliance with Freedom of Information compliance regarding the climate data. They "commented" on other issues. But their conclusion is that - and I laugh:
"Conclusion 2 In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”— we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity”.184 It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid. "
So in other words - he didn't commit any egregious FOI violation by not releasing data, thus, his scientific reputation is intact...
Huh?
The reason for your laughter and confusion are puzzling, since the conclusion you quoted is quite clear at explaining, and justifying, itself. Is it a reading comprehension problem perhaps?
After the theft and painstaking dissection of the internal emails for attack talking points, and sound and text bites, by some evidently well-funded interests, a plethora of accusations have been leveled. Not every review committee addresses every aspect of every attack.
This committee specifically examines claims of illegitimately "hiding" data. Conclusion - the claim is completely bogus (it.e. "there is no case to answer").
Another panel equipped to address scientific issues (the "Scientific Appraisal Panel") will report on a range of other charges.
This, of course, is why you can displace indigenous people from "their" land, right? No government ever issued them a proper title, so it isn't really their land...
That is exactly correct. The "title" the homesteaders acquired was granted only by English (and later American) law, completely ignoring Indian claims and rights (even "proper title", issued by English or American government to various Indians and tribes often did not protect their ownership in the end). And the English/Americans could do it only because of superior force of arms. It was the imposition of an outside government that created those "rights" of ownership.
The notion that property rights exist outside of a system of national or international law is a philosopher's game, not reality.
Well, not a political fantasy since the US did originate in the traditional fashion, which is homesteading, which in turn owes its pre-eminent exposition to Locke. So in point of fact, the superseding legal principle is controlling and advancing the value of the land in question, whether here or on Mars or the Moon.
Political fantasy - whether authored by Locke or anyone else. You do realize that Locke is not the basis of property law anywhere I hope? Homesteaders obtained title from the United States Government (or earlier from the King of the United Kingdom). Special acts of Congress (Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, The Homestead Act of 1862, etc.) were necessary to allow homesteading in new areas.
The treaty only applies to nations, not individuals who purchase something from a nation so I suspect that angle is pretty useless.
All ownership rights arise within a system of laws - international law or national law (which assumes also an international legal structure that preserves national rights) . No national law can give him ownership, so you are asserting there is an international statute or legal principle that gives a private individual property rights possessed by no sovereign nation, and is in fact specifically denied them? Please provide information about this novel legal principle.
I note that you appear to be attempting to appeal to Earth-bound laws of salvage as providing authority that not only applies to space (I doubt any salvage treaty addresses this) but is superior to the Outer Space Treaty, which is the basic legal framework of all international space law.
I think you are being led astray by Libertarian philosophy that holds property ownership to be an intrinsic natural ("God-given" to the religious) not derived from legal frameworks, but superior to them. This is a political fantasy however.
The ridiculous nature of Garriott's claim, that owning an object landing on the Moon gives one ownership of its landing site, would mean that any rocket-building corporation could start staking claims to the moon by launching small artifacts on to its surface.
Garriott may or may not own a legal title to Lunokhod (it is by no means a given that the auction sale was a legitimate title), but there is no way buying Lunokhod gives him any ownership rights to any piece of the Moon, however small.
Validity of ownership?
Enter space lawyer, Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz. She is Director of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law and Research Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi.
"The soundness of a property right depends in large part on the integrity of the documents that memorialize the right," Gabrynowicz told SPACE.com via email. "This is why property buyers conduct title searches before buying property. They want to be sure that the title is good."
Gabrynowicz said that without reading the papers or knowing how they were processed and by whom, she can't speak to the validity of the ownership of a space object purchased at auction.
"However, a contention that buying a space object that landed on the lunar surface from a sovereign nation gives rise to a property right to the territory under it is wrong," Gabrynowicz said.
Gabrynowicz said that States-Parties to the Outer Space Treaty of 1966 cannot acquire lunar territory by landing an object on the moon.
"The USSR was and Russia is a party to the Outer Space Treaty," she added. "It did not acquire the territory under the object when it landed. One cannot sell what one does not own. Since USSR/Russia did not have a property right to the territory under the landed object, there was nothing to sell."
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even bother to read my post?
Anything that can cover the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant (e.g. provide a Gigawatt electrical power within minutes without advance notice) can cope with the variations in wind power output.
These solutions exist and are part of the grid. It does not really matter how often you have to turn them on once you built them.
A few years ago the summer in europe was so hot, that they almost had to shut down all nuclear power plants along the river rhine at once because there wasn't enough water for cooling. Again: Situations like these are less frequent with nuclear or coal compared to wind, but that does not make it any easier to provide technology to deal with them.
It's just the same as with UPS for servers: Mine has not been needed since I purchased it. In a devlopment country I might have need for it once a week. Still the one I installed in my home is not less expensive or simpler.
Right you are! And I might add that existing power grids already have to handle large short term power supply-demand mismatches due to the unpredictable nature of the... wait for it ... WEATHER! Sulimma cites hot weather shutting down nukes in Europe, but very commonly everywhere hot or cold weather (over huge areas) cause huge power demand fluctuations. That this occurs on the demand side rather than the supply side makes not a whot of difference in managing it.
Managing a nation power grid with lots of wind and solar power is exactly like managing one without it.
And when the wind stops, make sure you have candles handy...
This may just be a wry comment, and not an attempt at serious criticism, but this point is often brought up to criticize both solar and wind power. And certainly it sounds like a serious problem since, after all, existing power systems are on-line all the time, and having a major aspect of the power system dependent on something as fickle as weather introduces serious unresolved problems into power grid management.
Doesn't it??
No, it doesn't.
The reality is that even "base load" (constant output) plants get shut down for extended periods for maintenance of various kinds, not infrequently unpredictably due to equipment problems. And, due to large fluctuations in power demand across the daily cycle (which can be unpredictable due to weather) there must be special expensive peaking power plants anyway.
It turns out that managing a diverse national power grid has a substantial component of solar and wind power is exactly like managing one that doesn't. A lot of solar and wind power necessarily means many plants spread over a vast geographical area, and while the wind may die (or the sky may cloud over) down in one place, it will be blowing hard (or shining brightly) in others. The power fluctuations are no worse than fluctuation in demand, and both are addressed in the same way - by having peaking capacity in with costly peaking plants, or some energy storage method, and by having redundancy in base load plant capacity.
There was no technical flaw in Iridium. It was stated what it would do. It did it. Someone screwed up the business plan, but there was no technical mistake. They knew it took 77 satellites for what they wanted. And they launched them all and they worked flawlessly. Now, if only they had sales to match the business plan, they'd be billionaires. But again, unrelated to any technical issue.
They launched 66 satellites, not 77 (which was the original plan), as they came up with a cheaper orbital configuration. The cool-sounding name "Iridium" was taken from element 77, since the 77 satellites reminded people of its 77 electrons. When they reconfigured the constellation to 66 I was disappointed that they did not rename it "Dysprosium".
[T]he final 'reference trajectory' ... now includes 56 passes over Titan, 155 orbits of Saturn in different inclinations, 12 flybys of Enceladus, 5 flybys of other large moons — and final destruction."
So the CD with 616,420 signatures on it is not going to out last us all after all.
When the signature drive began in 1996 an implied promise was made that Cassini, and the disk would remain in orbit around Saturn forever. See, for example this remark: "Indeed, some of us may even experience a small taste of immortality as we envision our signatures outliving our bodies." http://web.archive.org/web/19990428132214/www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/MoreInfo/dvd.html.
Objectively, gaining additional science by crashing it into Saturn is a more worthwhile endeavor than using it as an eternal postcard to the planets, but to those of us with our signatures on it (and who remember people who signed but have passed on, and cannot now add their signature to a outer solar system probe) it is a disappointment. Maybe they could launch a copy on a new deep space probe.
It may be required for estate or other legal purposes. And, as another poster noted, it's traditional and some people expect it. Didn't realize they were so expensive, but dammnit, dying ain't cheap these days. Nothing is.
For a few centuries now newspapers were also a crucial part of the historical record. Conducting genealogical research (which is simply history at the family level) has depended on looking up death notices in newspaper archives as an essential means of researching family relationships (and virtually all newspapers get permanently preserved somewhere).
And, as of yet, there is no substitute for this role just as there is no general substitute for notifying local communities of the passing.
One can easily imagine some organization with substantial financial resources setting up a permanent on-line repository of death notices to be preserved for all future generations (representatives of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, are you reading this?). But such a thing does not yet exist. Posting it on a website with the expectation of it getting archived by Archive.org is something that may work, but it is a very inadequate stop gap.
...My grandfather who was rather well known in the community died 2 years ago. To run his obituary in 3 of the local/nearby community papers ran around $800.
When my mother died last year, I found that running a 2-day notice in the local community paper in the South was $1000. This was a low cost area with a total population less than 5% the size of San Francisco. Shocked by the astonishing price, I estimated what they were taking in annually from death notices, and found that it was probably enough to cover most of their operating expenses.
But there really is no other effective way to get the word out on someone's passing to the community in a timely manner, so the local newspaper has become part of the high-cost for-profit funeral industry, something I had not even suspected.
That is the point. If you accept the settlement, and the $16, you let them off the hook...
That is the way it is in America today. Corporate malfeasance against the individual: penalty is paying A SINGLE PENNY on the dollar. Corporations claiming malfeasance by the individual (Capitol/RIAA vs Thomas) penalty is ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS on the penny!
[citation needed]. what other than nicotine is addictive in, say, a regular Camel?
There are at least two types of additives used to heighten addiction.
The first is something to make nicotine more bio-available - e.g. ammonia - which ensures that all of the nicotine is in free-base form. The second is something that reduces the unpleasant acute effects of smoking, so that it is easier to inhale - e.g. menthol - which is an anesthetic that prevents coughing and feeling lung irritation (the irritation is still there, you just can't feel it). Other anesthetic oils have been used, clove oil for example.
Manned space flight isn't about being "cost effective", "high priority", or "a good return on investment" (yes, I've heard all of these terms used in regards to spaceflight). It's about exploration, curiosity, and wonder. I challenge you to tell someone who was around on July 20, 1969 that manned spaceflight is pointless.
Challenge accepted! I was born just days after Sputnik was launched, and grew up as a space junkie, following every step of the space race, and watching the Moon landing live.
It was many things: a stunning technical achievement (we went to the Moon just as soon as it was technically possible to do so), a stunning geo-political achievement (showing - as it was intended to - the advantage U.S. society had over Soviet society, in a non-destructive manner), and one of the most important symbolic events in the history of the human race.
But it was a colossal scientific failure. Nothing was learned that would not have been learned at a fraction of the cost using unmanned vehicles. Even the "spin off" argument fails to recognize that a focused technology development program could have accomplished similar things far more cheaply.
And today, "return to the moon" lacks all of the favorable features of the Apollo program - it won't be a stunning technical achievement, or an impressive geo-political or symbolic one. It will just be another colossally expensive scientific failure, compared to what could be achieved with similar money on space probes.
It's about doing something simply to show that it can be done, like the explorers of centuries past. I suppose some people find that concept unimportant or even boring. I would say that those people are unimportant and boring.
But is has already been done. An actual viable plan to get to Mars would be a new exploration, but no one has ever been willing to put up the cash for that.
Did space exploration, and discovery end with Apollo? Hardly! Essentially all exploration and discovery has been due to unmanned probes and observatories, manned flight has returned essentially nothing along these lines. The one contribution it has made - fixing the Hubble - could have been finessed more cheaply and effectively simply by building and launching more Hubbles.
So yes, the symbolic value of manned space flight is past (unless genuine new goals are set and adequately funded) and the Shuttle and ISS operations have been a pointless waste of money. Expendable unmanned launchers and vehicles would have gotten us farther, faster and cheaper.
So the true ruling is that the FCC really DOES have this authority, they just have to put the rules in black and white before they run off enforcing them. Nothing new here, just that they didn't follow procedures ( DOH ! ).
Correct, it is only the DEA it seems that can ignore its own rules, administrative law rulings, and science and set regulations that contradict all of these at once.
The scheduling of marijuana as Schedule I when pure THC is Schedule III directly violates its rules on scheduling, and was actually ruled in violation by an administrative law judge. The DEA simply ignored the ruling. Laws don't apply to the lawmen apparently.
... The interstate commerce clause has been interpreted so expansively that there is very little economic regulation that Congress can't enact or delegate to an agency (the only examples that come to mind are gun restrictions in/around schools (US v. Lopez) and enabling women to seek civil remedies under the violence against women act (US v. Morrison)
Indeed. In Gonzales v. Raich (previously Ashcroft v. Raich), 545 U.S. 1 (2005), it was held that the Federal government had the right to ban growing medical marijuana by the patient herself, with no money or cannabis changing hands, because it involved interstate commerce. How you say? Well, the decision NOT to buy or sell marijuana affects the interstate trade in said product, according to the court!
It seems with interstate trade anything goes today, unless it is some specific policy that the right wing of the court dislikes.
Let's do the math here.
The article suggests the battery can put out 4 megawatts for 8 hours. So that's 32,000 kilowatt-hours. My electricity here costs about 7 cents a kWh, so that BOB can hold almost $225 worth of electricity. At a cost of many millions, that does not sound like very economical power per kWh!
For example, your basic Honda generator can run for two thousand hours, putting out 1,500 watts, before the little putt-putt engine needs an overhaul. So that's about 3,000 kilowatt-hours for $400. Let's assume the power fails ten times a year, so you'd wear out 10 Honda generators per failure (avg), at a cost of $4000 per, or $40,000 per year. By comparison BOB's cost of financing in itself is going to be at least $3 million a year, not to mention maintenance.
So these poor sods are paying about 75 times as much as they should.
( Not to mention that generators are much more economical in larger sizes )
A more realistic comparison would be to price some cheap megawatt class diesel generators: http://www.dieselserviceandsupply.com/Used-Generators/. Slightly used units seem to run $175,000 for a 1 MW unit, if a 4 MW unit is available at the same price point (the required output) that is $700,000 (they do have a new 6 MW natural gas unit for $2 million). So a conventional peaking plant would seem to be a much cheaper alternative, but at a multiple of 10-25 (including siting costs), not 75.
The explanation for this decision seems to be available here: http://www.ettexas.com/. The utility, not the town, is picking up the cost. And I infer that the likely reason is that since "The NaS® battery will be the first in Texas and the largest in the United States..." that this is technology pilot project to field test this technology.
Makes sense to me.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
But you forgot to say that they did so pleonastically!
It's specifically a list of accidents with nuclear weapons, not just any old nuclear accidents. (Just mentioning that since there are some of those in the military as well. For example the SL-1 which is notable since it killed 3 people, including one guy who got accidently nailed to the ceiling.)
We'll never know for sure, but this incident was probably murder-suicide rather than an accident.
It appears that the fatal control rod was most likely deliberately pulled to the fatal position - a 20 inch extraction instead of the proper 4 inches. Further one of the other men on duty, who was also killed, was cheating with the wife of the technician that caused the disaster.
Although C4 is pretty safe in normal handling (the plasticizer desensitizes the RDX to some extent), RDX based explosives can be detonated accidentally. (The Wikipedia article implying that it cannot is incorrect.)
If you read the document you read of several weapons exploding in accidents. The earliest ones all involved Comp B, a TNT/RDX mixture. Later weapons often used the very dangerous and more powerful HMX.
Since the 1970s the U.S. has moved to using a very unusual high explosive, TATB, which genuinely can only be detonated by another detonation shock.
Since they never found the weapon in question, how did they even know which safety mechanisms had failed and which were still functioning?
Answer the OP is confusing the status of two different weapons in the same accident. One was recovered intact, the other broke into pieces and only one part of it is missing.
FTA: In 1961 a B-52 carrying two 24 megaton nuclear weapons (equivalent to 3,700 “Hiroshima bombs”) broke up in the air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. One bomb fell as far as 10,000 feet and sunk into the “waterlogged farmland.” The Air Force dug as deep as 50 feet trying to excavate the weapon, which contained uranium, but was unsuccessful. Finally, the Air Force purchased an easement on the land. Reportedly, a Pentagon document stated that five of the bomb’s six safety mechanisms had failed; “only a single switch” prevented the nuclear detonation of this 24 megaton device.
What are the chances of the final safety mechanism ever deteriorating or otherwise failing due to age?
Zero. The OP is confusing the status of two different weapons. The one that deployed its parachute was recovered intact (but with the safety mechanism failures mentioned). The other broke apart and it was only the thermonuclear secondary stage that was not recovered.
The discrepancy between knowing that "five of the bomb's six safety mechanisms had failed" and reportedly not having recovered said weapon should tip one off that the account for the OP was confused.
"thanks to the Manhattan project, we now have devices lying around that are designed to split atoms."
Except that it's still not that easy. Its very likely that the mechanisms surrounding the radioactive cores were damaged during the drops, so most will be unusable anyway...
A fully assembled fission bomb (especially a pure fission bomb) is actually rather dangerous - accidental detonation of the high explosives can create a nuclear explosion on the order of a few hundred tons, quite devastating by any ordinary standard. But it is for this reason that all atomic bombs after the wartime models had features that kept them from being fully assembled before combat use (removable fission cores, or internal motorized in-flight assembly). These early safety features were replaced by others in the later compact "wooden" (no field accessible component) bombs, but those took years to develop.
So the bombs were really pretty safe against any nuclear event, but only because special measures had been taken to ensure it.
The 1950s accidents were all (nearly all?, I haven't checked each one just now, and in some cases there are disputes) WITHOUT the fission core installed so not only was a nuclear explosion impossible, so was significant radioactive contamination.
Nice attitude. Doesn't matter that freon was never a problem to the environment. Coincidentally the patents were due to expire, and it was claimed that chlorine was bad for the ozone layer. Doesn't matter at all that we pour gallons of chlorine into the water cycle through laundry bleach, swimming pools, and municipal water.
...
It's a hard battle. We not only have to fight against greedy politicians and corporate monsters, we have to fight against gullible over-emotional assholes like you.
Ignorance? Check!
Rambling conspiracy theory? Check!
Abusiveness? Check!
This makes the Slashdot crank trifecta.
If you knew the slightest thing about the problem with ozone destroying chemicals, of which the chlorinated freons were prime culprits, you would know that they were a problem because they were supremely stable in the lower atmosphere (pure chlorine not so at all), and were able to transport chlorine to the ozone layer (unlike natural chlorine compounds), whereupon UV light broke them down, released the chlorine, starting a chain reaction destroying the ozone.
An ocean of pure chlorine at sea level would have zero effect on the ozone layer, because it can't get up there.
Worldwide bans on the worst ozone depleting chemicals has halted growth of ozone depletion, after years of worsening, and signs of recovery are expected to become statistically detectable in the next several years.
And, BTW, the patents on the harmful freons had expired many years before the ozone destruction discovery.
This is very thoroughly established science.
The parallel between the science-bashing with the "ozone controversy" (and the "acid rain controversy") and what we are seeing today with an industry-supported noise machine is really quite striking. Not only was the science thoroughly vindicated, but the solutions imposed - bans on the most destructive chemicals - and "cap and trade" (very much favored by "free marketers" at the time as harnessing the power of markets) for acid emissions, proved quite effective.
I see this modded "5" for "Funny". I wish I could laugh.
p>Exxon-Mobil is going down the same path as Philip-Morris, spending big bucks do deny danger of fossil fuel use.
They have paid millions to the Heartland Institute alone to set up astroturf websites, and pay shills (oops -- "unacknowledged spokespeople") to deny climate change. The Heartland Institute earlier performed these same services for... Philip-Morris!
Check the Committee report - they were only looking into compliance with Freedom of Information compliance regarding the climate data. They "commented" on other issues. But their conclusion is that - and I laugh: "Conclusion 2 In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones’s alleged attempt to “hide the decline”— we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity”.184 It was not our purpose to examine, nor did we seek evidence on, the science produced by CRU. It will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel to look in detail into all the evidence to determine whether or not the consensus view remains valid. " So in other words - he didn't commit any egregious FOI violation by not releasing data, thus, his scientific reputation is intact... Huh?
The reason for your laughter and confusion are puzzling, since the conclusion you quoted is quite clear at explaining, and justifying, itself. Is it a reading comprehension problem perhaps?
After the theft and painstaking dissection of the internal emails for attack talking points, and sound and text bites, by some evidently well-funded interests, a plethora of accusations have been leveled. Not every review committee addresses every aspect of every attack.
This committee specifically examines claims of illegitimately "hiding" data. Conclusion - the claim is completely bogus (it.e. "there is no case to answer").
Another panel equipped to address scientific issues (the "Scientific Appraisal Panel") will report on a range of other charges.
This, of course, is why you can displace indigenous people from "their" land, right? No government ever issued them a proper title, so it isn't really their land...
That is exactly correct. The "title" the homesteaders acquired was granted only by English (and later American) law, completely ignoring Indian claims and rights (even "proper title", issued by English or American government to various Indians and tribes often did not protect their ownership in the end). And the English/Americans could do it only because of superior force of arms. It was the imposition of an outside government that created those "rights" of ownership.
The notion that property rights exist outside of a system of national or international law is a philosopher's game, not reality.
Well, not a political fantasy since the US did originate in the traditional fashion, which is homesteading, which in turn owes its pre-eminent exposition to Locke. So in point of fact, the superseding legal principle is controlling and advancing the value of the land in question, whether here or on Mars or the Moon.
Political fantasy - whether authored by Locke or anyone else. You do realize that Locke is not the basis of property law anywhere I hope? Homesteaders obtained title from the United States Government (or earlier from the King of the United Kingdom). Special acts of Congress (Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, The Homestead Act of 1862, etc.) were necessary to allow homesteading in new areas.
The treaty only applies to nations, not individuals who purchase something from a nation so I suspect that angle is pretty useless.
All ownership rights arise within a system of laws - international law or national law (which assumes also an international legal structure that preserves national rights) . No national law can give him ownership, so you are asserting there is an international statute or legal principle that gives a private individual property rights possessed by no sovereign nation, and is in fact specifically denied them? Please provide information about this novel legal principle.
I note that you appear to be attempting to appeal to Earth-bound laws of salvage as providing authority that not only applies to space (I doubt any salvage treaty addresses this) but is superior to the Outer Space Treaty, which is the basic legal framework of all international space law.
I think you are being led astray by Libertarian philosophy that holds property ownership to be an intrinsic natural ("God-given" to the religious) not derived from legal frameworks, but superior to them. This is a political fantasy however.
The ridiculous nature of Garriott's claim, that owning an object landing on the Moon gives one ownership of its landing site, would mean that any rocket-building corporation could start staking claims to the moon by launching small artifacts on to its surface.
Garriott may or may not own a legal title to Lunokhod (it is by no means a given that the auction sale was a legitimate title), but there is no way buying Lunokhod gives him any ownership rights to any piece of the Moon, however small.
From http://www.space.com/news/soviet-moon-rover-space-law-100322.html:
Validity of ownership?
Enter space lawyer, Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz. She is Director of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law and Research Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi.
"The soundness of a property right depends in large part on the integrity of the documents that memorialize the right," Gabrynowicz told SPACE.com via email. "This is why property buyers conduct title searches before buying property. They want to be sure that the title is good."
Gabrynowicz said that without reading the papers or knowing how they were processed and by whom, she can't speak to the validity of the ownership of a space object purchased at auction.
"However, a contention that buying a space object that landed on the lunar surface from a sovereign nation gives rise to a property right to the territory under it is wrong," Gabrynowicz said.
Gabrynowicz said that States-Parties to the Outer Space Treaty of 1966 cannot acquire lunar territory by landing an object on the moon.
"The USSR was and Russia is a party to the Outer Space Treaty," she added. "It did not acquire the territory under the object when it landed. One cannot sell what one does not own. Since USSR/Russia did not have a property right to the territory under the landed object, there was nothing to sell."