npts2020

If the aliens name was Jabba the Hutt he would become a sumo wrestler or American football player. I wonder if Akibono is related.........

Sione; I would disagree with the notion that emotional response is the opposite of rational response. Sometimes they are the same. I would say they are merely arrived at through different mechanisms ie. deliberate thought processes vs. preprogrammed response.

Just curious, does that mean I shouldn't take the drugs the doctor prescribed to me?

IMO what you are asking is possible in theory but well beyond current technology and unlikely to be very efficient. Wouldn't it be simpler just to convert the matter you already have to the form you wish?

Well, one thing I notice is they don't make the claim that it is the cheapest energy generated. I am not saying that good management of nuclear power is impossible, just that there are better alternatives that are just as competitive costwise. I would like to see how the costs of disposal and decommissioning are accounted for and what, if any, subsidies the government has for the industry.

IMO your premise is wrong. I would call you a physicist, mathematician, or any of those other labels if you exhibited some knowledge of them and believed them to explain reality. You may not be a professional or even good or accomplished in any of those fields but the label still applies. Whether one chooses to accept the label is largely dependent on what the person being labelled believes it means to the one applying it. Personally, I do not find the term "evolutionist" offensive in the least but that is mainly because i find the definition to be unambiguous.

I would point out that making an extra arm is making an extra limb and making the others is very similar. The reason humans don't spontaneously grow radios is that they are a mechanical constructs not biological ones. (I believe the flying spaghetti monster is just a made-up entity for which to attribute things that one cannot understand)

Well, this quote, followed by a lengthy description of the accident at Chernobyl and utter rejection of any arguments against nuclear power led me to believe that you think safety features on a reactor are one of those "unnecessary costs" or "self-imposed disadvantages". The dichotomy you present in the above post is a false one, since we have many alternatives to nuclear and therefore no reason to "go back to the dark ages" regardless of the one we choose. We can argue the specifics of cost until the cows come home but I have never seen the cost of a new nuclear power plant end up being less than initial projections (they are almost universally substantially over cost) whereas some of the alternatives are competitive now and likely to become cheaper in the future. Deciding our best choice depends entirely on what you hope to achieve. If the goal is to provide technical jobs and keep energy production centralized and in few hands, then nuclear would certainly be at or near the top of the list. If you wish to control costs and enable entreprenuership in the area of energy production, I would think nuclear should be near the bottom. I am well aware of the safety record of nuclear power but so long as you have profit as the underlying motive for operation you have the potential for an occurrence like Three Mile Island. In that case, the safety features worked fine, it was the human operators who overrode them (supposedly over concern about how much money would have been lost due to shutting down).

It seems from the interview that Adm. Blair knows full well that waterboarding has been prosecuted as torture by Americans for a very long time now. It is also interesting that he did not elaborate on the "success" of using torture as a method of interrogation. Nor make claims about being a necessary part of our global war on terrorism.

I would say probably not in America. Most of the cost (insurance and health care) is borne privately. Now, if you ask whether society gains or loses more (kind of the original question) that is different and IMO is very difficult to quantify adequately. I also wonder how negative effects between legality and prohibition compare?

Well, I am interested in any form of energy production that 1) is more efficient than current methods and/or 2) uses renewable sources. However, I am still unclear on the mechanism whereby all of the extra energy comes from. Why will the energy conversion you describe convert any energy from rotational to kinetic and vibrational energy? Near as I can tell from my admittedly weak knowledge of chemistry you will get the same random motions that went into the process to begin with. What am I missing?

Those scientists will just waste the money on pie in the sky research, we need to invest all of that money in engineering projects (particularly automating the highways and powering them with renewable sources).

ParanoiA; The reason you don't feel authoritive to name the scenario may be because nobody is. Our operatives are not given torture resistance training so much because anyone worries about them giving up pertinent information as to enable the operative to be able to deal with the situation. Do you think Al-Quiada operatives are not trained in the same methods? While "roughing up the bad guy" for information works great in Hollywood, there is no evidence that anyone can distinguish when it might possibly work in real life. Given this limitation, you are left with routine use of torture or not using it at all, if you wish to have any sort of consistent philosophical position to hopefully win over the hearts and minds of the world with. It has been documented to my satisfaction that methods clearly defined as torture (waterboarding, deaths of healthy individuals while in U.S. or surrogate custody, Abu Graib, etc.) have been used and that the highest levels of our government knew it was taking place and sanctioned and/or ignored it. My only real question is, what is the justification for it (it isn't scientific)?

bob000555; I would like to point out that one of the reasons Three Mile Island wasn't worse than it was is because one those "self imposed disadvantages" is having containment for a breached core. Do you think there could ever be any legitimate objections to building more nuclear power plants? Also what you describe is not what is typically meant by meltdown (although it would be an extreme case).

I have always wondered that myself, it just seems that somebody in my life always thinks I should be doing something else. (I got 32 as well....don't you feel a little disturbed, now?).

scrappy; I would say that if all of the right conditions occur, the chance of "life" spontaneously emerging is 100%. How is this notion wrong?

Victor; I am probably one of the dumbest rocks ever to successfully become an engineer so please try to bear with me. I basically agree with what CaptainPanic said but am wondering are you claiming that RTE is not measured by thermometers? Also I am failing for some reason to understand why RTE is preferentially converted to KVTE instead of more RTE. If your idea works the way you say it will there should be a great number of people interested in it, you just haven't found them yet so don't give up.

IMO the inauguration speech was fairly mediocre by Obama standards, but still pretty good. He said most of the things I think people want to hear but the actions will soon tell. (Can anyone say another $825 billion bailout?)

Not me. My goal in life is to be adequate.

One would think that after carrying the entire nation on his shoulders for the past eight years, a few boxes should be nothing.

I like the idea in theory. The problem is in how small you can make a structure that will successfully change to that many different states. The Quantum computer Transdecimal referred to is already being thought about (maybe designed, not sure of current state of the science) and has had a lot of published work, so as soon as you get to an order of magnitude larger than quantum level, you've lost any advantage over using binary code.

Fashion wings with solar panels to act like spoilers and cover the body of the car with flexible solar cells.

Well, this environmentalist has talked often about a new electric grid albeit usually in conjunction with upgrading other utilities and our national transportation system. I find the generalizations about environmentalists to be irrelevant to any merits about such ideas. It is similar to dismissing the entire anti-nuclear movement because a few uneducated individuals think that a nuclear power plant can explode like an nuclear bomb. I am sure if I wanted to take the time to do it I could come up with just as many or more ridiculous propositions believed in by those who feel no regulations of any kind are necessary. Deciding things completely by economics is all well and good providing you have the proper values attached to all the parts of the economic model.

Of course it ain't gonna happen, the intelligence college document I keep referring to had dozens (maybe hundreds) of collaborators, some of whom have as high security clearances as you can have, in every field you can think of that might be pertinent to the topic. None of those people was able to document even one case where torture helped stop an imminent threat (they do document a few wild goose chases from bad information acquired from torture though). Whether torture is effective or not is completely different from attempting to evaluate how an individual might react to it, IMO, the worries about what information they may give up are overblown. Even if torture is effective in 100% of the cases, that does not make it acceptable to use for a society who is trying to show the world its ideals are the ones the world should follow. Murder is pretty effective on some levels as well but that does not make it acceptable.

I realize that, but will believe costs decrease at all when I see it. IMO by the time safety, security, and disposal costs (which never seem to be adequately addressed in design and operation estimates) the idea of cheap energy from nuclear power will vanish. The only positive thing I can see about doing it, that you can't accomplish any other way, is having fuller employment without retraining the reactor technicians getting out of the Navy.