You've got to be pretty confident of the utter reliability of your legal system before you can be happy about executing somebody who has been convicted of murder.
There's a lot of evidence that the US legal system convicts an appreciable number of of innocent people, which makes you intellectually inadequate. In a perfect world, the death penalty may be morally defensible, but we don't live in a perfect world.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
I understand that you might be proud - who am I to judge a different culture with different politics - but does your son-in-law approve of this public announcement?
Cheers
-- Syd
Except that guns in the hands of the average ciotizen don't seem to be much used for defending themselves. Statistically speaking, the person most lik ely to be killed by a gun kept at home is the gun owner - who is much more likely to use it to kill his- or herself than anybody else. The owners near est and dearest come next - they may use the gun to shoot themselves or one another, or the gun-owner may shoot one of them intentionally, or when mis taking them for a burglar.
The US has a remarkably high rate of gun murder for an advanced industrial country. Take away the gun deaths and the US murder rate looks a lot more l ike that of most other advanced industrial countries.
It might be that if the guns were in the hands of a well-regulated militia
- as envisaged in the second amendment of the US constitution - they might form some kind of useful defense, but an armed rabble is essentially danger ous only to itself and incautious bystanders - militarily it is negligible.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
ABSOLUTELY! Get a clue. Learn from our history. We outlawed alcohol - which allowed, logically speaking, illegal production and trade of alcohol. That produced some of the worst Mafia groups ever as well as sprawling corruption in local,state and national law enforcement. Legalizing drugs would severely decrease the economic benefits of the present drug trading. As an aside, the transformation to taxing will have NO effect on our debt.
IDIOT! That would INCREASE murders and other crime. When a citizen cannot legally protect him/herself, the incentive for criminals to go on a rampage is materially increased. Look at what happened when alcohol was made illegal.
Probably not ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
n any
uld
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson strikes again. The Mexican cartel ty pes wouldn't bother spilling across the border if they were going to be abl e to make money out of it.
Other places where guns are banned have lots less gun murders. Some of them have more crime, but that seems to depend on population density rather tha n anything else.
Citizens can protect themselves pretty much everywhere - they just can't us e guns in most places, which does reduce the number of victims, perps and i nnocent bystanders who end up dead or crippled. It doesn't eliminate the pr oblem, but it does reduce the damage.
What's that got to do with guns? Prohibition didn't work for alcohol, and i t doesn't work for drugs. In both cases the side-effects were worse than th e the problem that the prohibition was supposed to cure. Harm reduction mak es more sense.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
You open a horrifying subject: imagine having JT as a father-in-law, and grandfart to your kids!
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Larkin, You're mentally ill and should professional help. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Thanks for sharing.
I was talking to a solar engineer a few years ago. [To piss off the tea baggers, it was at Al Franken's fund raiser in Marin. Pretty cool, got to meet Al Gore.] The engineer sets up the solar array to provide maximum power at a certain time period that coincides with PGEs maximum time variable rate, not for the maximum solar energy per day. Basically the way the story goes, the "grid needs you." PGE likes solar energy during the day because it corresponds to a peak power load.
I've been following the Rim fire on KQED. I'm really surprised at how little power they generate from Hetch Hetchy when things are going well. Anyway, with little solar reserves, San Francisco is buying power from the grid. According to the wiki, Hetch Hetchy only generates 20% of the power used by San Francisco. The city could benefit from more solar.
If you look at all the space dedicated to Hetch Hetchy, the dinky little Crescent Dunes solar project they are building in Tonopah is about 1/3 the capacity on just a small patch of land. It is the molten salt type solar power, so it can make electricity at night.
But back to Solyndra, solar cells are really a terrible way to make energy compared to thin film designs, which is what Solyndra made. A lot of energy goes into making silicon wafers, while thin film is a deposition process. The Chinese get their raw wafers from the US and other countries since their energy cost (based on their real currency) is actually pretty expensive. The Chinese vendors do the remaining low energy steps to make the cells, then dump them on the market.
It is really a shame the Solyndra deal imploded. It taints the thin film solar market unfairly.
The real problem is the criminal picks the time, the place, and the victim. The victim can't be on guard 24 and 7, so they are easily picked off. The element of surprise always wins. Fact! Why do you think the military trains snipers? It is obviously easier to whack somebody when they don't expect it.
No problem. I would just lie and say he is dead, and refuse him entry to my house.
Molten salt systems are the way to go. I posted the following three years ago...
I mentioned Solana here several years ago. When I heard of it I sent an E-mail to APS asking how it worked. Got a nice call from an engineer who works there who walked me thru its operation. Kewl!
It's for real! Shows what can be done if you keep government away and leave the profit motive to drive the direction of research.
Semiconductor-based systems are a helluva ways less efficient.
BTW: Around here APS is making solar customers pay the true grid connection costs... so they're presently going ballistic, launching cows, etc >:-}
[miso _is_ a tea bagger... in the implied sense :-] ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Depends on who is the sniper >:-} ...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
Must be terrible being miso or Larkin, without a family that loves you. But I guess that's what happens when you are mentally ill >:-] ...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
As I understand it, SF doesn't use any of the Hetch Hetchy electrons. They sell the power in eastern California and use the money to buy power from PG&E.
Solar is dicey here; we're fairly far north, and we get a lot of fog and winter gloom. Without huge subsidies, nobody sane would buy solar panels.
Just wait for the roof to start leaking, and people have to take down all those panels to fix things.
Hetch Hetchy's prime function is to supply SF with water. The power is secondary.
Lots of thinfilm solar companies have failed or are losing money. It must be difficult.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
nd
One of Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson's many delusions is the irrat ional conviction that he is sane.
Eventually he will decide that the country has fallen apart, so that he can start shooting his less right-wing neighbours. It would have been nice if one of his lesser lunacies - like reporting me to the FBI as dangerously an ti-American - had got him moved to a place of safety before he'd become arm ed and dangerous.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
If you don't back some losers, you are being too cautious.
That link doesn't work. I think he must mean this.
Not exactly true.
"In 2008, the US Department of Energy awarded Abengoa Solar two research an d development projects in the field of Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) that total over $14 million. The goal of the R&D program is to develop CSP tech nologies that are competitive with conventional energy sources (grid parity ) by 2015.
On July 3, 2010, US President Barack Obama announced that the US Department of Energy conditionally committed to offering a $1.45 billion loan guarant ee to support construction by Abengoa Solar of the Solana Generating Statio n, in Arizona."
They convert more of the solar power that hits the solar cells into useable electricity than any thermal system can. At the moment their cost per kW.h our is higher, but there's still quite a lot yet to be gained from economie s of scale, and extracting fossil carbon is never going to get cheaper - we 've already extracted all the stuff that's cheap to extract and we are work ing our way through progressively more difficult-to-extract deposits. The "true cost" of electric power at your wall-plug is a complicated questi on.
-- Bil Sloman, Sydney
Milwaukee here is "Solar City USA", or so the signposts proclaim. Could've fooled me, from what I've seen of the rooftops!
Tim
-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.