One of the things I actually like about the EU is that the courts here actually bit you if you violate competition law. Instead of the slap on the wrist you often see in US rulings, when a company is convicted of unfair business practices over here their options are basically to comply, cease doing business or face a fine so harsh it will eat up their profit margin.

When it comes to cellphones I expect they telcos will be in trouble if they try to pull a quick one here. Most EU politicians have to deal with many different telcos, and they are affected by unfair pricing structures more than most of us, since they tend to make a lot of international calls. Thus this nonsense is something that actually affects them personally, and they have been in a ruffle with the telcos before over unreasonable rates for international calls.

I can't imagine 100T. Hell, we stuck a dumpster to a brick wall with a 5T magnet.

Now have a guess what my reaction was when our astrophysics lecturer started talking about gigatesla field strengths. Granted, neutron stars have a few other impressive features, such as a spoonful of their surface material having a mass that exceeds that of the pyramids, but the mere mention of gigatesla field strengths was enough to drop my jaw.

At least polywell is complete bull. You often see these kind of things pop up. They make a bunch of claims on webpages, blogs, conferences and so on, but when it comes to peer reviewed journals they're very lacking. Sometimes they claim their results have been reproduced, but it's again almost impossible to get any details.

How can I be so sure? Well, basically the polywell crowd is claiming they can arrange a magnetic field in such a way as to maintain a non-maxwellian velocity distribution without using energy to do so. This violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. In addition the polywell concept was heavily debunked some years ago, by a scientists who showed that the energy needed to maintain a mono-energetic distribution was more than what fusion would produce. Instead of addressing these concerns the polywell supporters basically just accuse their critics of not understanding polywell, without giving any real explanation of how it works beyond vague descriptions of the general concept.

I've seen enough of it to call it for what it is. It's a fraud intended to attract investors, and it will never produce anything useful.

Nobody here is planning to do anything. People just use cash less and less because it's more convenient to use a debit card. With time solutions to small transactions and power failures will develop, but don't worry. We're not just about to drop our paper money and coins before those things are reliable.

You know, it might be a completely alien thought to some (most?) Americans but some countries have citizens / subjects that trust their government to represent and protect their interests.

I can assure you Sweden is not among them. People here are fairly sceptical to politicians, and one of the massive headaches for our government right now is that people don't like the data-retention laws that EU directives require member states to implement. Basically most people here pretty much just wants government to do its job and not fuck it up. The American crusade-like political rallying you have before every US elections would just not work in Sweden, since such candidates would be perceived as crazy and unelectable. The current right wing government likely got to power precisely because their leader, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has a fairly calm and down to earth image. That doesn't mean we don't have people screaming at the top of their lungs about immigration and whatnot. They just don't get enough votes to define policy.

>And here I was, thinking it was a two party dictatorship...

While the US two party system is less than ideal, it is partially made up for by the nominations of the candidates. Both the republicans and the democrats have a nomination process that is heavily based on popular support among the people. In contrast a dictatorship would simply declare Rick Perry the supreme leader and have him in office for 40 years or so.

only problem - enrichment is for uranium, and high-explosive lenses are for plutonium.

They are used for both. It is POSSIBLE to use different methods for uranium, but they are generally inefficient. Explosive lenses are the most efficient for both uranium and plutonium. The reason for this is mostly that it gives the fissile material an inwards momentum that keeps it together slightly longer before it blows apart, allowing more fissions to occur.

All modern uranium weapons use explosive lenses of some form.

Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries have almost the same energy density as traditional Li-Ion, but in addition thy can recharge in minutes, they tolerate temperatures between -40 C and 60C , and unlike traditional Li-ion cells they last about as long as your typical vehicle.

Tesla's Model S can reach a range above 400km with Li-ion, so LiFeP should manage almost the same.

The catch is the cost. They are presently too expensive to use in an EV car. Rising Oil prices and improved manufacturing tech will likely alter that balance in the coming years however.

You are correct that batteries need to improve, but you are mistaken to think it needs a magic breakthrough. If the more high tech battery chemistries come down even a little in price, and oil prices rise more, we will hit a breaking point fairly soon. I say it will happen before 2020.

I call bullshit on the parent. The complete failure to mention that water is saturated in the atmosphere, that any excess condenses out as rain, as well as pretending climate scientists ignore water vapour contribution, when every climate model in existence includes it as a positive feedback dependent on temperature, tells me that he either pretends to have higher qualifications in the field than he does, or he knows full and well that he is being deliberately misleading or lying through his teeth. In particular his "joke" absolutely stinks of the usual "lol climate scientists are so stupid" nonsense we hear all the time.

Water is the main greenhouse gas in the earth's atmosphere, but it does not mean that the CHANGE in climate can be explained by water vapour, nor does it imply that carbon dioxide is irrelevant. The amount of water held by the air is largely dependent on temperature. If it gets hotter, more evaporates from the oceans, if it gets colder more will fall out as rain. Carbon dioxide on the other hand tends to stay in the atmosphere for a very long time, and is not absorbed by the oceans, plants or reactions with the earth's minerals at a rate quick enough to compensate for the vast quantities we put into the atmosphere.

Consequentially increasing CO2 concentrations will produce a warmer atmosphere, which in turn increases water concentration, which means the warming from a given amount of CO2 will be greater than you'd expect from CO2 alone.

ANY climate scientist worth his salt (or indeed anybody who even tried to learn about the topic ) would be well aware of this fact, yet the parent appears to either not know about it, or deliberately refraining to point it out in order to make a stupid joke. He's either incompetent or dishonest.

The GP actually has a point even though he fails horribly to put it forward in any constructive manner. The argument is that keeping animals for food almost inevitably results in them being more likely to contract diseases due to living in closer proximity to one another. Furthermore, because humans handle these animals frequently, the risk that a new and nasty pathogen can jump from animals to humans increases. While excluding animal products from our food chain would not completely eliminate the risk of infections ( there are bacteria that can attack both plants and animals ) , it would drastically reduce the risk of animal-human transmission, and also reduce the risk of relatively benign pathogens mutating in animal carriers and then jumping back to humans.

This is particularly beneficial for illnesses that are expensive or difficult to treat, because it would probably not be economical to try to eradicate them from farm animals, but if that infection vector was eliminated, one could almost eradicate the disease from human populations by making sure to treat or vaccinate the humans.

An illness that is of particular concern to many researchers is the flu virus. These viruses can infect many livestock animals, such as pigs and birds, and is also very contagious and difficult to treat. We also know that flue viruses have killed very many people in the past. In some cases these have been epidemic outbreaks ( like teh Spanish flu ) , but even the regular seasonal flu kills quite a lot of people every year. Unfortunately many of these outbreaks originate in poorer countries in south east Asia, where poultry is often kept in very poor conditions, and with people living close to the animals. Convincing them to go vegetarian would mildly speaking be "challenging".

The risk has been known for some time, and thus the practice is mostly banned in the EU, with the exception of two compounds used in poultry feed.

In the US it is mostly unregulated, and nearly 70% of antibiotics are used for animal feed.

Can't say I am terribly surprised.

I have never been involved in a head-on collision at any speed, nor would I like to be.

Depending on how solid the telephone pole was, your accident was actually worse than a head on collision with a comparably sized vehicle. A head on collision of two vehicles with comparable size and speed is roughly equivalent to driving into a solid wall ( to see why, consider that the point of impact doesn't move ). The energy in the impact is twice as large because you have two cars, but you also have twice as much crumble-zone to cushion the impact.

Now the problem with telephone poles and the like is that the impact is focused on a tiny part of the vehicle. The crumble zones will be designed to absorb the energy of the impact by deforming, but when only a small part of them is struck by the impact they are a lot less effective. In the same way the recoil of a rifle is generally harmless, but when a tiny bullet strikes the target's body with the same force, the impact is focused on a small area, allowing the bullet to tear through your tissue.

Of course if you assume you are in a small car, and the other vehicle is something much larger ( such as a trailer with tonnes upon tonnes of cargo ) then the impact will effectively be like driving at twice your speed into a solid wall. If you're travelling at 30mph , such an impact would be the equivalent to driving into a wall at 60mph , which has a very slim chance of survival.

How about (assuming it's safe) we forcibly administer it to anyone caught committing a crime while addicted to heroin?

Forced medical procedures is unlikely to be considered constitutional. There's also quite a few international treaties dealing with this kind of thing. You might be able to justify it as a forced treatment for addicts that are mentally ill and unable to make their own decisions, but even then it would have to be for the benefit of the patient.

"Uneconomical"

Siiiigh.

Because it is horribly economical.

With the exception of solar cells every major energy source used for electricity generation benefits greatly from economies of scale. As an example, the cost of building wind-turbines scale approximately linearly with their size (up to a point ), but the power generated increases as the square of the turbine radius, and with the third power of wind speed. As a consequence you want to build them big, you want to build them where wind conditions are the best, and you want to make them tall. The most economical wind turbines are quite large, and those little toys you see people put on their roof is a complete joke.

For nuclear power the maximum possible output of the reactor is largely dependent on the capacity of the cooling and safety systems. Since fuel costs are only a small part of the electricity cost, most of the cost is construction and operation of the plant. Since cooling capacity is related to volume ( how much coolant passes through the pipes ) it scales rapidly with reactor size, making larger reactors more economical ( the cooling capacity increases more rapidly with size than does material costs ). The limit in size is mostly determined by what can safely be built, transported and operated.

Now, there is one way distributed generation could become economical. If many small power generators could be mass produced, then one could take advantage of economies of volume. This works well for things where energy production scales at about the same rate as material costs. Solar cells would be a good example. The energy they produce is proportional to the surface area of the cells, and the cost of the cells is also proportional to the area. Thus if mass-production allows for reduced manufacturing costs per area of cell, it helps the economics.

I still think solar power would be more economical built to scale however, because the amount of electronics needed match the energy produced to the grid would then be much smaller per area of cells. Furthermore, roof-top solar cells are frequently poorly aligned and maintained. A larger facility could afford tracking devices and professional cleaning and maintenance, which increases the efficiency dramatically.