npts2020

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.

1)OK. Fair enough, instead, point out a single case where information extracted by torture has ever resulted in termination of an imminent threat (and I will even leave the definition of imminent up to you) by American forces. In order to do this, you will have to get better information than the National Intelligence College and all of the experts working on the treatise I referred to previously could find. In those 372 pages the NIC lists a host of reasons why torture should not be used and not one reason in favor (they also talk about the "Hollywood effect" of why people continue to believe that torture ever works). 2) It is not what I do but what society as a whole does that is important for discussion. While it is true that other methods are tried first (for the most part), the might makes right attitude seems to permeate a significant cross section of American society (from street thugs shooting each other, to military interventionism, to the death penalty etc).

The problems with doing this that I see are as follows; 1) Expense, reactors are very expensive to design, license, build, maintain, and decommision. The more reactors that are built, the more expensive they will become (at least this has held true in the past and I see no reason for it to change). 2) Political opposition, proposing a new nuclear power plant is guaranteed to bring out more NIMBY's than almost anything else someone could come up with. 3) Security and proliferation, the more use you have of a technology, the more people who have access and knowledge the easier it is for some malcontent to concieve of a way to use it for harm. Also materials are more difficult to secure if kept in different places as would be required for even moderately widespread use. 4) Waste, every nuclear power plant will produce some of the most toxic and radioactive waste ever produced by humans. Furthermore, that waste will be around for many times longer than human civilization has even been in existence and nobody has come up with a politically acceptable solution for their disposal. 5) Better alternatives, unlike the case of reactors, alternatives like wind, solar, tides, or geothermal are likely to decrease in cost as more are built. These methods also require less regulation and have more fixed costs for their power sources (basically free). Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged IIRC the reactor and power generation systems on a submarine use about 1/3 of the total space on board. The rest is completely dependent on the output of the heat source, efficiency of use of the energy, temperature gradient to your heat sink, etc.

I see what you are saying for theoretical purposes but I think for practical purposes that it will be extremely difficult to get something (even with the strangth of carbon nanotube) to get that much differential between any parts of a rotor. That is why I say that things like cohesion and crystal bonding will overrule quantum effects like frame of reference paradoxes (kind of like not being able to overcome friction without enough force).

I would like for anyone to point out a single case where torture was useful in extracting information that could not be gotten in any other manner. IMO, killing is standard practice, why do you think the ultimate arbiter of disputes is war? Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged See above, give me an example of when torture was ever the most effective means of eliciting reliable information. I would say that neither you nor anyone else can say when torture would be more effective than other means. We can argue about the definition of what torture is but two facts seem clear to me; 1) methods that have been prosecuted in the past as torture have been used by Americans 2) those at the highest levels of our government are ultimately responsible for the actions of those down the chain of command, even if they were kept in the dark (they weren't). There is a vast library of hollywood movies showing the efficacy of torturing someone, unfortunately, the experts whom I have read universally state there is no scietifically valid reason to believe torture is useful in any case. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedThe first link in post #58 from iNow is the most recent study done on interrogation by the National Intelligence College. It is very long (372 pages) and pretty much backs up what I have said.

There was a classic "Star Trek" episode (IIRC "The Librarian) where the beings living on a planet with a dying star did exactly what you are describing. If something like that is even possible, it will require better science than we currently have access to.