You're right, if made legal, the regular pharmacies like CVS would undercompete me in price in no time. But the demand would not subside, in fact there'd be more addicts, kinda like during the Opium Wars in China, where the Chinese gov't fought the foreign private business companies for their right to sell drugs legally in China. Legalized opium created a massive devastation and misery of the population, but mostly amongst the poor and dumb people, the wealthy and smart ones stayed healthy and well and prospered. It's like legalized alcohol and legalized guns, most of the devastated alcoholics who end up in the hands of social workers have similar problems to drug abusers, same with crime and probation officers, and it's not really the availability of alcohol or guns that's at fault, but people's behavior in using them.

Liquefied ammonia is not high cost, the platinum cost needed for low temp fuel cells is moderate. An issue is that liquid ammonia is only half the energy density of gasoline, so you need 2 gals of it to go as far as 1 gal on gasoline, but liquid hydrogen is like 1/8th the energy density by volume, so you need like 5 gals of liq H2 vs 1 gal of gasoline, even if that 5 gallon of liquid H2 is really light, like 2 milligrams total for the fuel (and 50 lbs of steel and insulation for the cryogenic containment), so it makes sense as a rocket fuel if it's light, but not as a car fuel, it if it takes up so much friggin room. Also fuel celling ammonia does not emit any carbon, just H2O, N2, and NOx. I said fuel celling not combusting, because it does not burn in air, it burns in pure oxygen, but not burning in air can be good too, for things like 9/11 airplanes smashing into buildings, the toxicity of getting drenched in liquid ammonia vapors kills all the people on the floor of airplane impact, but as it snuffs out all fires, it does not structurally weaken the steel and lead to a total building collapse, and keeps the other people downstairs alive. There are pluses and minuses to everything in the world, kinda like the Ways of Tao: Yin ~ Yang.

Your tax money through bailouts and subsidies goes directly into 80 some year old pervert's country club membership to get his dick sucked by an 18 yr old teenage mother who needs money and does not like busting her ass getting dead tired on some 3rd shift factory production line for minimum wage.. that's life, that's the world we live in, just get over it. The gov't takes it from one guy and gives it to another, and not all another's are military people, but a whole lot of them are private business owners. We're living in the age of pork barrel politics and welfare for corporations, and it gets complicated, because it is often correct to bail out companies, and if you are not willing to do pork barrel politics, you don't exist as a politician cuz you would not have ended up in the post you're in in the first place.

I think we should mine these lunar craters and the center of the Moon for gold, platinum, iridium, and heck, even nickel. You know, meteorite stuff. Leave the iron there, unless building space stations.

I see a definite correlation between low slashdot id number and smarts in you.

Yeah, ammonia is not that bad. It's used in the liquid form and injected directly into the ground as fertilizer, by farmers from a tractor with a syringe. If they can stand the smell and not die from the toxic effects of releasing it directly into the soil, the general population should be able to handle leak tight cars with smoke alarm detectors, and even without detectors, the odor threshold of 5 ppm is safe, well under the 50 ppm 8-hr TWA OSHA PEL.

That's a great idea, stainless steel clad high thermal conductivity aluminum or copper. I'm guessing the expense of the cladding process, good adhesion issues, and uneven thermal expansion coefficients may make it unideal.

I have a gas furnace inside the apartment for winter heating. It's the top floor of a house split into three, not a dorm, but city fire codes don't allow cooking on the top floor, or something like that. Sometimes the city is hostile in the way they modify tax calculations codes, not picking up all the garbage unless it's packaged a certain way, but they pick up unpackaged old crap like furniture, so they are not uniform in their rules, same with parking on the street overnight, sometimes I had to do it, and got ticketed instantly, other times no, and every night the street is full of cars that are still there at 5 am or 9 am, without tickets, so they are picking on me when they can without picking on others the same, sometimes they don't really know what they want, etc. The furnaces for the other two floors are in the basement, but I like mine in here, because in the very previous place I lived, I constantly got sick from the forced air heating air, like it carried a disease and toxic dust, and I had no way to turn it off, the upstairs neighbor controlled the thermostat, and he was away for like 3 months in the winter after a car crash, and he came back with crutches. By the way you can burn down a house if you're an idiot by cooking on the first floor too, or you can safely cook in a house made of all wood and combustible tapestry, upholstery and furniture,(like most places in the world) if you're careful. Most cities in the US have a fire dept, because housing is made of wood. Were it made of straw earth, or ytong (aka. autoclaved cellular concrete), without wood and carpet inside, you would almost not need a fire dept.

This is how you do it except the car does not have to be 60 grand in cost, and most importantly hydrogen as fuel, liquid or compressed, is bullshit, you need something to carry it on a molecular scale, as a hydride compound. The simplest of these that is carbon free, i.e. nonhydrocarbon, is ammonia, or nitrogen trihydride, but there is also toxic hydrazine, or dinitrogen tetrahydride, and even the magnesium-titanium metal hydrides might stand a chance, or borohydrides like lithium borohydride (which is above in energy density in volume and mass to gasoline, the top chemical material(everything else higher in mass energy density is lower in volume energy density, or vice versa, gasoline has that magic balance, plus all gaseous effluents, unlike borohydrides, that have solid or solution effluents, but recyclable.)) Liquid ammonia stores at room temperature under mild pressure, compared to liquid hydrogen requiring constant venting, or constant cryogenic refrigeration, which is very retarded and senseless to do. Or huge compression containers (or cryogenic refrigerator malfunction or boil off hole plugging accident) ready for a classic steam boiler explosion scenario. Hydrogen stored by itself is not safe nor economical. It has to be combined with something, and if you don't like carbon, there is nitrogen (awesome), metals (maybe), boron (big maybe, and then even silicon or aluminum instead of boron might be better.)

I think they should dump porn instead of drugs into a real war zone.

And by the same token, chemical engineers needs jobs as small business drug makers, so that doesn't fly very far. I'd be a millionaire if they legalized drugs, because then I could be making them as a chemist in my own small business startup or basement, and the social workers could still keep their jobs just like they do with legalized alcohol abusers. It's not the alcohol being legal that's the problem, but people not being able to maintain balance in consumption.

But even if legalized, I'd have mental and ethical objections to addictive recreational drugs (btw it is always the person that's addictive, never the substance, be it sex, alcohol, nicotine, heroin, it is the feeling and urge that's addictive, and if you're weak to resist its addictive effects, then don't mess with it in the first place, except sex of course, and even with sex there is this thing called "balance"), and I would be reluctant to poison the minds of thousands, but it'd be like eating meat while you're a half ass vegetarian - if it's legal, everybody is doing it, then why not? Meat does indeed taste very good, at some ethical cost, but we shrug it off easily. Ethics gets complicated, dealing with ethics is a great way to get a headache, and I don't envy supreme court judges stuck with deciding ethical dilemmas because there are often no good answers, so we get mile long opinions written by the judges, and haphazard court decisions, but they always split on the 3 vs 4 or 5 vs 6 or 42 vs 43, always very close to half and half, to illustrate that it's an ethical dilemma that made it to the supreme court, and both sides were right but one side was just a bit more right than the other, in a haphazard way. Ethical issues can come up with things such as driving 65 mph on a road and smacking mosquitoes and flies dead on the windshield requiring special "bugwash", vs. driving 35 or 25 mph where they get a chance to escape or bounce off the windshield, but even 10 mph on a bicycle you sometimes end up swallowing flies that get into your mouth and they taste crappy, and all these beings have eyeballs (or more like compound eyes), they collect data through light sensors, form a picture/image and model the world in a mind, they want to live, so they have conscience and sentience, just like meat substance animals with eyeballs looking at you, the eyeballs staring back in the symbol of sentience sensing you back. Not even talking about walking and stepping on bugs. So not only feeding, but simply transportation, moving around can make you hurt other living beings in the world, and in that living beings with minds, feelings and emotions. This is unlike grass and trees without minds that have natural reactions such as exuding defensive resins when cut, just like the live skin cells I shed when cut tough skin near the toes do not belong to me in the sense of organism, they still have natural reactions or cellular function, and defense, but I don't feel bad stepping on my ex-cells that used to be part of this organism called me, because these cells don't have a mind, feelings, emotions just like vegetables and grass and trees don't have minds, even if they do have a lot of sensory equipment, or it's more like I'm not aware that they'd have a mind, which they may still do anyway, such as fungi penetrating the forest floor for miles, lacking eyeballs, but having other kinds of sensors, might have some highly distributed decision making apparatus akin to a mind, like the octopus, which has an eyeball very similar to a human eyeball, yet its nervous system is much more distributed than the human nervous system, and individual octopus arms can "think", as opposed to human limbs don't move around and think if severed from the brain and spine, and even chickens move around without the head and just with a spine, and spider legs when separated from the body (when I was 4 yrs old a friend of mine got off on catching spiders and pulling their legs off and watch them spin on the ground, how entertaining, I was sick to the gut), so a central nervous system may be replaced by a distributed nervous system and still function as a mind. So I'm not aware of trees and grass having a mind for now, and I'm not reluctant to walk on grass or cut a tree down, but treehuggers think differently. such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . So not only transportation, but one can argue that if you just stand in one place, with your mouth shut, a bug can still get stuck in your nostril and die like that, while you're sleeping. But you can sleep with a CPAP device that has an intake filter - every ethical problem has a technical solution, at a cost, at a sacrifice, and when a solution lowers the technical/economical cost and the ethical cost too, it's awesome. Some hardcore vegetarians think their solution is like that. I'm half ass vegetarian, because I like to indulge in eating meat sometimes, heck, even fishing, or hunting, killing live things for recreational purposes and whatnot. In sport fishing you take a picture then throw the fish back. You throw it back after you poke a hole and an infection entry route in the fish's mouth with your hook, sometimes hitting the eyeball nerves, so when you try to wiggle the hook out one of the eyeballs rotates with it, it's creepy. But the fish is very happy to be thrown back and get away alive, that's pretty much the epitome of happiness in the universe, you never see anything as happy as a fish that just got away. I wish they invented sport-hunting, where you shoot a deer, it falls over, you run over to it, step on its shoulders with your boots in a really dominating pose, and lift the head up, take a picture, or if you really wanna feel manly, masturbate and spray jizz all over it, bukakke style, as in, I got you bitch (in the forest you're alone, nobody sees you), then wait til it wakes up and runs away free. (Btw Teddy Roosevelt was a big Safari fan, going to Africa to shoot big game of rhinos, elephants, or the king of the animal kingdom, lions. You need very big guns for thick skinned rhinos and elephants. http://cdn.motinetwork.net/pol... ) They'd have to do "sport hunting" with tranquilizer bullets or arrows, kinda like wild animal researchers do it. Sport hunting sport fishing style, the humane way. So in theory you could live a life completely devoid of hurting other life, but living in a desert in a completely sterile environment, and eating completely artificial compounds, sugars, fats, proteins and vitamins made in a chemical lab reactor from atmospheric extracted moisture and carbon dioxide and nitrogen, but compared to that there is something good about living in the jungle, immersed in the middle of other life, even if you end up hurting other live beings in it, you're part of the ecosystem, and the definition of living in harmony with the ecosystem can include living in harmony while killing parts of it. It gets really complicated. Ethics is a great source of headaches, but the supreme court does not take on issues of vegetarianism and banning eating flesh, at least nowhere in the near future, even though Jewish law does tackle the issues, and settles on "kosher meat" as some happy middle way. Btw practically all meat in the US is kosher, most animals are killed in a very efficient and therefore humane way without any torture, though some news stories do get out once in a while that workers had "fun" while killing some cows, and I will not get into the details, because they are very gory.

As far as substance abuse goes, we're talking about hurting other people by allowing them hurt themselves. Tackling somebody and forcefully injecting them with a substance they don't agree to take into their body is a whole different topic. (Or even peer pressuring them is a topic, but it's much closer. A lot of people start smoking because of peer pressure.) Substance abuse does feel good, for the moment, but also at a cost. There are different costs and benefits in balance with substance "abuse", and it's not considered abuse if the "balance" is maintained. Balance in the benefits vs. costs ratio. Every single pharmaceutical drug in the world has a "therapeutic index" (aka. therapeutic ratio, or toxic to therapeutic ratio) and the prime symbols of pharmacy are the Staff of Asclepius and the Bowl of Hygieia, the snake on both, with venom, and Paracelsus said "It is the dose that makes the poison." In a sense you could argue that almost any toxic substance can be considered a useful drug at the proper dose levels (unless you're fighting, say, a fungus, whose toxic dose is higher than you toxic dose, so the reverse argument that anything toxic is a useful drug at a certain dose does not work, compared to any useful drug is toxic, at a certain dose, but there is an element of truth to it in the sense of banning many toxic substances such as arsenic and mercury, which at the proper dose could be beneficial, especially when you're out of options and it's a life and death situation, like morphine at toxic doses for terminal patients), and if you look through 19th century pharmacopeia, mercury, the substance of "mad as a hatter" and "minamata disease" was administered at dental amalgam mercury levels. Dentist are to this day the 2nd biggest user of mercury in the world, and there are raging debates such as http://thedentalstudent.co.uk/... or do a google image search on mercury exposure. Also http://naturalcommunitiesmag.c... .Mercury can save your teeth and cure gum disease when amalgamed with silver and both its and silver's activity reduced that way (and the combo is cheaper than gold), and the mercury emissions/exposure into your body from dental amalgam is just above the intake you get from eating seafood from the oceans. In a sense intentionally treating yourself with mercury by eating seafood can be therapeutic, but some cases can end up becoming poisonings, as some mother feeding a can of tuna to her son for years, the son developped neurological problems due to mercury poisoning, because it bioaccumulated. Also, a trace nutrient called iodine has one of the worst therapeutic indices, as the toxic dose is not very much higher than the necessary dose. Iodized salt provides nowhere near the necessary dose, but at least it's safe from overdose, and even minute quantities of iodine are much better than absolute zero.

Alcohol, nicotine, etc, they all have age old traditions of use, and even marijuana or similar drugs, and sometimes the benefit they provide is simply euphoria, feeling of well being, sense of happiness, which is of great value, as long as practiced in balance. By the way my father was an alcoholic, drunk a lot, and I've never been drunk, been a bit close, and I'll be a happy man dying like that, never been drunk, I don't have to live life to the fullest. I'll also die happy never having been in jail, but I am very willing to go to jail over this mandatory insurance getting out of control bullshit, and go on record over it like that. I've never been high on drugs, euphoric, and don't need to be, don't want to be. A plain old orgasm is entertaining enough, thank you. Also, I don't understand all these people consuming all that alcohol in the world. I mean the French drinking wine in moderation, yeah, that's healthy, but the ones who overdo it. Drugs really put your self control to the test, and if they legalized drugs, the people that proliferate out of control on welfare money, those who can't resist sex, would also be the ones who can't resist drugs, and drugs would kill them, or at least make their life expectancy much shorter. That's probably at the core of this World Health Organization decision.

See I did use paragraphs this time, except not 55 of them like most people think it'd be normal for this amount of text. I think short paragraphs mean short attention span.

Give up? Get used to it. The future is organic, the voices tell me, not silicon. There is so much friggin silicon around that you'd wonder if intelligent design put it there to be turned into one supermassive superparallel 25 nm feature size gigantio chip. I mean all the silicon as far as the eye can see, all the silicon on Earth, all the silicon on the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, all the asteroids, converted into a bigger and bigger silicon chip. That's what you'd call the megabrain. However the future is not silicon based life, for one of two reasons: 1. organic life will be smart enough not to fuck with it. 2. organic life will be dumb enough not to be able to create it. Only in the present do we have these smart enough naive idiots who can make a chip, yet they don't recognize the dangers of artificial intelligence, and they think it's a great idea, artificial intelligence can help us think, artificial intelligent weapons can win wars, more power more power, til you get the latest and greatest wonder of technology: an artificial intelligent robot weapon that eats humans for breakfast, or in fact, all organic life for breakfast. Aren''t the wonders of technology amazing?

The future is organic life, not silicon life, at least in the solar system, and probably in 99.99% of galaxies out there (there may be some galaxies where silicon based life was created by organic life and then it survives on its own.) But this organic future is nowhere near as fun as things are today. Expect never before seen diseases, Predators you've never met, smarter than you, eating you. I mean what do you expect in another 3 billion years? It took about that long to go from a single celled bacterium to a tiger, polar bear and an ape (like humans are apes), and all these lifeforms do one thing: they eat each other, and kill each other. What do you think silicon based lifeforms would do? Not consume the carbon and what not in you to build their own structure (be it carbon for plastic parts or even additive for metallurgical carbides like tungsten carbide/cobalt matrix tools), and convert all matter they can find into enlarging themselves? So anyway, saying we're fucked, oh no, get used to it, it's gonna be we're fucked squared, and everyone will be taking it as a matter of fact, and life will still go on. With half your face chewed off by some new parasite. With one of your arm and your little sister lost to some predator that has higher tech weapons than you, but it's not stupid to use nukes and pollute his environment with it, nor big bombs, but smart weapons that disable you, maybe cook you or fry you just right, ready to eat. Kind of like in the movie Predator. That kind of stuff. In another 3 billion years. For skull collectin, if nothing else, sense of art, sense of beauty. Your skull gonna be on display at some Predator's home entrance like some hunters have stuffed animals and dear skulls on display in their homes. Cuz these face chewing gangrene diseases are nothing compared to smarter predators than you, organized, multicellular, thinking diseases out to get you, so to speak, called predators.

He says: "When I was working with your mother, her ass meant a lot to me."

Yeah, that's a good point, steam sauna, sterilization, I hadn't thought of that.

Yes, but compared to most other metals like steel, aluminum and copper, it's a bitch to mold/form/machine titanium. All high temperature processing steps have to be done in an argon atmosphere, because it's very sensitive to oxygen, and it can also react with nitrogen. Usually it's melted via an electric arc in an argon atmosphere. This makes welding/melting/processing very expensive, besides the metal itself, which is expensive, because of the slow speed Kroll process (carbochlorination and magnesium reduction) by which it's obtained.