Slashdot Mirror

Those stupid Hyperloops that he's been pushing, are completely by other people now, he doesn't have any involvement.

So what you're saying is that he catalyzed next-generation transportation? Thanks for agreeing with me.

The 'hyperloop' is never going to happen. It would have happened a long time ago if it was. It's not a new idea and they figured out it was a non starter 100+ years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Nah, they haven't.

Yeah, they have - renewables have surpassed coal or nuclear in Germany in generating capacity. So what if they haven't completely transitioned - everyone isn't going to tear down their coal and nuclear plants to replace them with wind turbines for the same reason everyone didn't run out and shoot their horse the moment the Model T went on sale. The important factoid isn't what percentage of the grid is from renewables, it's where new generating capacity comes from. And the world is losing interest in new coal and nuclear power plants.

By 2030 I expect battery technology to be good/cheap enough to buffer solar on the grid.

For the price of a new nuclear power plant you could buy 300 Tesla Powerpacks like the one they built in Australia or 1.3 million Powerwalls. Right now, not 2030. Kinda takes the baseload FUD and nukes it from orbit.

The 2011 tsunami was one of the deadliest and most expensive disaster in human history, but only two deaths

Try two thousand.

25% of the cost was from the nuclear accident.

Which is still over $600 biiiiiiilion dollars.

And the nuclear accident was caused by straight up incompetency and criminally lax oversight.

And a once-in-a-thousand-years disaster. Just how many nuclear plants in the United States do you think would weather a once-in-a-thousand years tornado, earthquake, flood etc etc without issue?

Still not a single radiation-related death in Fake-ashima 8 years later.

Don't know how cancer works, do you? It can take decades for a person to develop mesothelioma after exposure to Asbestos. Do you think that smoking cigarettes doesn't cause lung cancer because people don't develop lung cancer in their early 20's?

"Wind and solar passed coal in cost effectiveness" Why do I hear this being said all the time, all those studies showing current wind/solar $/kWh as being the cheapest form available

Probably because it's old news? So what else are you skeptical of, because reasons....Obama being born in Hawaii? Vaccines not causing autism?

We do not live in a dictatorship, if it was possible to build a solar farm and erect a bunch of windmills and undercut the local electric utility, you'd see this wholesale and fast across North America.

And run all their own utility lines? Here's another link for you. Coal has a full hundred year head start on solar, and nuclear power has had trillions thrown at it around the planet. Of course it's going to take wind and solar some time to catch up in generating capacity. France isn't going to tear down their network of nuclear power plants that they spent a few hundred billion building and replace them with wind turbines and solar panels while the plants can still operate. People didn't all run out and shoot their hoses when Ford put the Model T on sale, for the same reason people haven't all sold their ICE cars to monster truck rallies to be crushed the moment the Model S was available for purchase.

Can you even point to one place in the world where solar has replaced baseload? That is the question that matters.

In the world where coal has been around for a full century before the advent of solar power? Sounds like dismissing cars because they hadn't yet replaced horses as the primary mode of transportation in 1905. You could also have a whole lotta wind and solar if the trillions spent around the world on nuclear power had been used for that instead - but a wind turbine wont produce the materials you need for a nuclear bomb.

So any transition is going to be a work in progress - but you could always visit Germany, which has made significant investments in wind, solar and biomass energy.

Walls dont work. Thats why we already built a bunch at major border entry points, rich people like Nancy and Obama have walls around their mansions, jails have them, the military uses them in various forms for defense, golf courses for the rich use them, dog parks use them, the federal government uses them at high security facilities and so on.

Walls work IF you have people guarding against attackers using ladders, tunnels, write cutters, or other tools/techniques to bypass, damage, or destroy the walls. In all the examples you gave except perhaps for the dog parks, there are people whose job it is to monitor the wall and act if they see someone climbing or breaking the wall.

People have climbed over the wall around the White House. They were stopped by Secret Service agents. If the agents weren't present, the wall wouldn't prevent someone from trespassing. At best it stopped the lazy from trying to enter and slowed the determined attackers enough for the Secret Service agents to get into position.

That's not altogether fair. Andrew Carnegie built a sizable portion of the free public libraries in the United States. I certainly wouldn't consider this "sabotaging education" -- quite the opposite, actually.

The Nordic model is highly capitalistic and privatized in terms of the economy. Socialism is pretty much the exact opposite. The USSR, Mao's China, Chavez's/Maduro's Venezuela are all perfect examples of socialist economic policy.

The Nordic model is highly capitalistic and privatized in terms of the economy. Socialism is pretty much the exact opposite. The USSR, Mao's China, Chavez's/Maduro's Venezuela are all perfect examples of socialist economic policy.

Alaska. They pay you to be there actually. But that's another thing entirely and I agree with your post, just wanted to point out that such a place actually exists and really does pay you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Hold up, you are confusing correlation with causation here. There is yet any scientific proof yet that this is the case

Yeah, this is one is well supported by experiment. See this for a demonstration. There are equations and references here. Some scientists doubt that there will be a crisis because of AGW, but none doubt that adding CO2 to the atmosphere produces a warming effect. I responded to you, but I admit I think you are ignorant and will not read the things I linked to.

It's not ignorance, so much as an unshakable belief set. There are many very intelligent folks on both sides of the Climate Change argument.

Sadly, political beliefs skewer scientific evidence, because it is one of the pillars in the us vs. them political landscape our democracy has devolved into.

Things like massless virtual particles that are used as mathematical bridges to balance equations, even though they cannot actually exist in reality (due to E=MC^2).

There have been many past examples where the mathematics and predictions were extremely accurate despite the fundamental assumptions being wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But no, you won't, because you can't do the math. It bothers you that others understand something that you can't, so you sneer at their conclusions as being obviously wrong.

I'd be glad to discuss the subject as deeply as you wish. Be careful not to fall into your own fallacy.

Hold up, you are confusing correlation with causation here. There is yet any scientific proof yet that this is the case

Yeah, this is one is well supported by experiment. See this for a demonstration. There are equations and references here.

Some scientists doubt that there will be a crisis because of AGW, but none doubt that adding CO2 to the atmosphere produces a warming effect.

I responded to you, but I admit I think you are ignorant and will not read the things I linked to.

You're right about that. I don't think most physicists even stop to understand the concepts behind the math and terms they are using. They indeed appear valid and accurate, but I think many may be relying on false assumptions about the nature of reality.

As a semi-recent example, the Ptolemaic model of astronomy was extremely accurate and made many valid predictions, despite it operating from a completely false set of assumptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Anyway, from my understanding, a virtual particle is one that possesses zero mass that is used as a bridge to convey energy (dielectric and magnetic) across space. And since E=MC^2, a particle that contains energy without possessing mass should not be possible.

Now there are other eloquent models that eliminate the need for these contradictory particles while still being compatible with modern science, but they are generally less complete than the current system, so they are still shrugged away.

Since this is a Tesla thread, I thought he would be able to weigh in on this: "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

I hope this not all come across as rude, I am thoroughly enjoying our chat. Very stimulating. :-)

But why build in the US then? Is Musk afraid of building the launch site further south?

ITAR. Doing anything in space is a pain due to ITAR. Doing it outside the US, just makes it 10x worse.

Their projections show that they will recoup the cost. Past experience shows these projections are usually wildly optimistic.

Tax incentives and subsidies are a Prisoner's Dilemma. Each locale feels obligated to offer incentives because other locales are offering them. But they would be collectively better off if no one offered them. Amazon would still expand, but do so on the basis of business efficiency rather than subsidies. If NYC wants to attract more businesses, they should improve their overall friendliness to commerce, rather than lavishing subsidies on one corporation.

These subsides are a race to the bottom. This is what the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution was designed to prevent. The CC has often been abused, but a federal ban on these subsidies would be a legitimate use, and would be an overall benefit to the country's economy, and a relief to the taxpayers.

Their projections show that they will recoup the cost. Past experience shows these projections are usually wildly optimistic.

Tax incentives and subsidies are a Prisoner's Dilemma. Each locale feels obligated to offer incentives because other locales are offering them. But they would be collectively better off if no one offered them. Amazon would still expand, but do so on the basis of business efficiency rather than subsidies. If NYC wants to attract more businesses, they should improve their overall friendliness to commerce, rather than lavishing subsidies on one corporation.

These subsides are a race to the bottom. This is what the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution was designed to prevent. The CC has often been abused, but a federal ban on these subsidies would be a legitimate use, and would be an overall benefit to the country's economy, and a relief to the taxpayers.

> Modern science can be just as silly. Physicists use 'virtual particles' to balance many of their equations.
> They also believe that 'free energy' into our universe is possible exactly one time (Big Bang).

It's quite possible the net energy of the universe is zero:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe

Likewise, virtual particles cancel out. No extra energy is required for them to exist.

Maybe. Fahrenheit is for humans and since this is published for normal people to understand then that makes sense.

Celsius is for machines. It's not granular enough for humans which means you have to go to fractional values (decimal) which makes it look even more obfuscated to humans.

Lol. So short-sighted! Fahrenheits mean nothing to 90% of the world's population. Are you saying that 90% of the people on the planet are machines?

Not machines, just not humans, obviously.

Your comment starts at assumptuous and arrogant and then moves to being just plain wrong.

Assumption:

EM radiation

You are just assuming he meant by EM radiation. Given his actual patents this is likely not the intended medium of transmission. Tesla's patent 645,576drops off according to the inverse square law

Tesla, as much of a "mad genius" as he may have been, was still a genius. I credit his intelligence more, I think, than yours. Even if the inverse square property wasn't known (more later) already, this would have been pretty obvious to him anyway. He had been electric field Geissler tube light induction for at least a decade prior to his tower proposal. I'm pretty sure that he figured out that the light dimmed and went out as per the square of the distance involved.

Just plain wrong:

This has been figured out in the time since Tesla.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell's_equations

Now, that being said, what about the actual question asked in the article. Could the towers have worked? Once electricity ionizes the channel, the air resistance is really quite low. If he could have figured out a way to ionize a channel high enough from multiple towers, it's actually conceivable it could work. No one, and I really mean no one at all, has done as much experimentation with the conduction of ultra-high voltage electricity as Tesla did. He knew what it took to create a path between two points. He knew the effect of distance. And he thought he could do it. I credit his knowledge and experience then more than any armchair (read Slashdot) critic today. Also remember this is before powered flight of any sort, so no one cared about what was going on in the sky. Using a tower to open an electrical path into the upper atmosphere wouldn't have been a hazard to anything. I suspect what he was going for was a sort of huge scale porcupine effect. Each tower creating a channel up into the sky up to an altitude where there is already sufficient ionization that the electricity could then be conducted laterally. The whole reason why the post I responded to wasn't alone in just assuming that Tesla must have been (errantly) trying for radio or electric field transfer is that the sheer scale of using "lightning" towers to transmit power directly up into the sky on that kind of scale is, well, at the mad genius level of unprecedented scale. The effects it would have on the RF spectrum, air navigation, electronic devices... renders it into a modern catastrophe more than a workable power transmission system. But back then none of that existed. The sky was just a huge open opportunity for him. He certainly thought big.

Since we were discussing a religious exemption to dying, and the above poster suggested that heaven might qualify, I assumed he was referring to the afterlife one, since that is the only one that appeared remotely relevant to me (since you supposedly don't die there). The caveat, as I pointed out, is that one ordinarily has to already have died to get there to get there in the first place.

I'm not sure how the London nightclub you referred to, or places like Swede Heaven or Little Heaven, for example, would be relevant to something like not dying..

Since we were discussing a religious exemption to dying, and the above poster suggested that heaven might qualify, I assumed he was referring to the afterlife one, since that is the only one that appeared remotely relevant to me (since you supposedly don't die there). The caveat, as I pointed out, is that one ordinarily has to already have died to get there to get there in the first place.

I'm not sure how the London nightclub you referred to, or places like Swede Heaven or Little Heaven, for example, would be relevant to something like not dying..

Maybe. Fahrenheit is for humans and since this is published for normal people to understand then that makes sense.

Celsius is for machines. It's not granular enough for humans which means you have to go to fractional values (decimal) which makes it look even more obfuscated to humans.

Lol. So short-sighted! Fahrenheits mean nothing to 90% of the world's population. Are you saying that 90% of the people on the planet are machines?

"Lawmakers said they were concerned about the effect on the company's 50-acre facility after seeing a Department of Homeland Security map showing a barrier running through what they described as a launchpad..."
Does it? Let's check this out: As you can see on the wiki about the South Texas site ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and a map of the site from SpaceX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... show that the launch sites (ostensibly the "pads") are just south of Brazos Island State Park pretty much right on the coast, with the control center buildings almost directly west of them. The launch area is about 2.8 miles north of the Rio Grande, which is actually the border (but the Trump wall wouldn't of course be precisely in the river, it would logically be set back somewhat).

Yet https://www.usatoday.com/borde... USA today says:

The Texas fencing is full of gaps.
The border fence begins in Texas, but it's miles inland from the border's edge at the Gulf of Mexico. Elsewhere, fences start and stop with huge gaps in between. This is all pedestrian fencing, pictured in red on the map, designed to stop people from crossing

...with the diagrammed fence just east of Brownsville, complaining that the proposed fence starts "miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico"...ie 10-12 miles from the SpaceX site, and nearly 15 miles from the pads themselves.

So the USA today map and overflight show that the proposed border wall starts at least a dozen miles from the plotted site of the SpaceX facility.

Someone's astonishingly wrong or lying deliberately.

"Lawmakers said they were concerned about the effect on the company's 50-acre facility after seeing a Department of Homeland Security map showing a barrier running through what they described as a launchpad..."
Does it? Let's check this out: As you can see on the wiki about the South Texas site ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and a map of the site from SpaceX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... show that the launch sites (ostensibly the "pads") are just south of Brazos Island State Park pretty much right on the coast, with the control center buildings almost directly west of them. The launch area is about 2.8 miles north of the Rio Grande, which is actually the border (but the Trump wall wouldn't of course be precisely in the river, it would logically be set back somewhat).

Yet https://www.usatoday.com/borde... USA today says:

The Texas fencing is full of gaps.
The border fence begins in Texas, but it's miles inland from the border's edge at the Gulf of Mexico. Elsewhere, fences start and stop with huge gaps in between. This is all pedestrian fencing, pictured in red on the map, designed to stop people from crossing

...with the diagrammed fence just east of Brownsville, complaining that the proposed fence starts "miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico"...ie 10-12 miles from the SpaceX site, and nearly 15 miles from the pads themselves.

So the USA today map and overflight show that the proposed border wall starts at least a dozen miles from the plotted site of the SpaceX facility.

Someone's astonishingly wrong or lying deliberately.

This phenomenon has been studied and is called the Just-world hypothesis. Basically, people believe that if they are living a honest live and work hard, eventually they will be rewarded. Unfortunately, bad things can and WILL happen to you regardless of your lifestyle. It's perfectly possible to be a honest and hard working person for all of your life and still end up poor and miserable, probably dying in ditch somewhere, with nobody giving a fuck.

This is also the reason people are opposed to paying into social security systems, because they believe they would never need any assistance in their lives. The awakening can be a bitter experience.

This was a 90's style page, but not for a professional site, it looks like a armature built geocities page.

Armature is different from amateur.

This was a 90's style page, but not for a professional site, it looks like a armature built geocities page.

Armature is different from amateur.

pure 'brand recognition' ads, like coca-cola's iconic 'hilltop' tv commercial from the early 1970s are none of those things.

I'm barely old enough to remember the original version of Captain Marvel, with Billy Batson who would say "Shazam!" and turn in to Captain Marvel. As an adult I did eventually read one of the stories in the Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, and thought it was the best story in the collection. It was "Captain Marvel Battles The Plot Against The Universe" from Captain Marvel Adventures No 100, September 1949. Also, there was a movie serial made of Captain Marvel that is considered among the best movie serials ever made.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Captain_Marvel/

One?

Oncovirus is a class of viruses.

For example, the human papilloma virus. The HPV vaccine immunises against 9 different strains of HPV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Actually, I'd say that there are advertisements that aren't morally wrong. A company that advertises its product by simply stating what it is and how it compares to its competition is doing nothing wrong -- and, in fact, that's how advertisements basically worked before the 1920's. People writing advertisements assumed that other people were rational actors, and that if you wanted somebody to buy your product, you simply had to demonstrate that you made the best product.

That is, until Edward Bernays, arguably the second most evil man of the 20th century, discovered the concept of exploiting peoples' emotions in order to convince them to buy things they didn't need. That turned out to be shockingly effective, and it's all been downhill since then.

How did Project 100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... work out AC?
Really want that level of smarts and fitness for elite units?
Moving the needed pass or fail on fitness to an exercise that's not counted?

This sounds like a new type of syntactic foam.

An obvious application is in aviation and aerospace.

For the Millennials among you, no that's not what websites looked like in the 1990s. At least not the functional ones. That Marvel site uses just about every cliched bad web site feature that was offered on GeoCities. That was a site where you could make your own web page without buying a domain, paying for hosting, or knowing how to code HTML Sort of a predecessor to Facebook and MySpace. It was designed to be easy to use, meaning that the clueless masses flocked to it and generated horrific websites which were gaudy, tasteless, and difficult to navigate. (Thankfully they've spared you blinking text, and a background which didn't scroll with the page leaving you confused if you were actually scrolling.)

Try Philip Greenspun's website for an inkling of what a functional site looked like in the 1990s. He was the original creator of photo.net, and his home site still uses the old layout and HTML coding used for the original photo.net. This was before drop-down menus, multiple column support, client-side scripting, in-line video, and (thankfully) in-line audio. Most people were on dialup so if you didn't want people to immediately leave your site, you used a small low-res version of any pictures which linked to a high-res version. You might notice the pages load a helluva lot faster than any modern site.

That's theoretically what YouTube and other collaborative filtering systems are doing. Although, I guess not the part about showing different like/dislike numbers to different groups. In practice, YouTube's algorithms are gamed and the recommended videos are often junk.

You forgot quite a lot of wars. There has never been peace since the first formal attempt.

You forgot quite a lot of wars. There has never been peace since the first formal attempt.

You forgot quite a lot of wars. There has never been peace since the first formal attempt.

You forgot quite a lot of wars. There has never been peace since the first formal attempt.

You forgot quite a lot of wars. There has never been peace since the first formal attempt.

Produces energy and gets rid of nasty byproducts.

You can't copyright facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

"Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.[1] In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed."

Metallic foam is already well understood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.tms.org/pubs/journ...

(see especially Figure 4 on that page which REALLY looks like metallic wood; the stuff in the article doesn't so much)

What makes the the linked article interesting is the novel manufacturing method.

>Increased to the point of functional immunity for all intents and purposes.

Only if the coverage is sufficient. If there is 400k cases per years (This was the number of cases of measles just before the vaccination started, US pop. at the time 180M) and you are the only one vaccinated, you will have less chance to be contaminated, in fact, 2 to 30 times less depending of the vaccine. That's still a huge chance of getting the disease. If many people are vaccinated, the disease propagates less easily and the chances of meeting are far lower. if everybody vaccinate, the 400,000 are overnight 90,000 at worst or 6000, simultaneously the chance of meeting the disease is decreased, which decrease again the number, ... In fact, for all diseases, there is a coverage a threshold at which their is virtually no cases at all and for the one that cannot survives long outside human, the disease plainly and simply is eradicated and no vaccine is necessary ever again. The decline is very very abrupt .

Indeed, three generations of imbeciles are enough!

She's a junior representative with no actual power yet you all can't stop talking about her.

She has more twitter followers than any other congressperson, ever. She can get a national audience for anything she has to say. Any talk show would LOVE to have her as a guest. Her influence goes way beyond her single vote in the HR.

The right can't afford to ignore her. They need to stop ridiculing her, and start taking her seriously. She is the champion of a large group of disaffected voters, and pointing out that she is often factually-challenged isn't going to dissuade them any more than it dissuaded Trump supporters.

The left is in even greater peril. Her influence is pulling the Democratic Party out of the Overton Window, and toward electoral suicide. She may be leading the Democratic Party off a cliff.

Fentanyl (and/or similar substances) have already been weaponized in Russia, decades ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'd also go into an analysis of how China is dumping fentanyl on the US as an act of economic war analogous to the Opium Wars in the 1800s - and taking much glee in the turnabout. But then I'd start sounding like a conspiracy theorist...

For alpha particles to be harmful you'd have to eat the material producing them. A few inches of air, our clothes, and even the thin dead layers of skin on our bodies, is enough to stop the alpha particles from doing harm. Inside the body though they can cause harm. So, don't eat the uranium.

Read a bit on it, here's a place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Due to the short range of absorption and inability to penetrate the outer layers of skin, alpha particles are not, in general, dangerous to life unless the source is ingested or inhaled.

Don't eat the uranium and you'll have nothing to worry about.

Let's see if people can get rid of demodex mites in their eyelashes using a high-powered laser pointer. Just be careful not to point the beam directly into the iris.

Stay tuned for tips on how to be more relaxed while driving! Hint: Don't use that seatbelt / shoulder harness!