What surprises me is not the arrogance of the Banks in making this demand, but the fact they actually think they can intimidate one of the worlds oldest universities.
This is nearly precisely my point. It's not a "notice" unless someone is being notified of a legal infraction. This is just pure arrogant bumbling. They may be evil, but it's more important that they're hilariously inept.
Is there no difference between the interrogative ("..we would ask...") and the imperative (for example, "...we demand that you remove...")?
If we're going to call this a "take-down notice," what will we call it when Cards actually notifies Cambridge that they are demanding that Cambridge remove some other content and that Cards believes they have the legal force of law to require it? Will that be a "take-down sexual assault?"
Simply put, there can be letters that are not take-down notices. This is one of them.
But, to answer your question: I'm reasonably certain that we did read the same document. However, I'm also reasonably certain that my interpretation of it is informed by the meanings of the words on the page and a verifiable reconstruction of the authors' understanding of the scope of actions available to them. In contrast, you quoted back to me the supplication, "...we would ask that this research be removed...," and called the document that contained that phrase a "notice," with apparent sincerity. I allege that this characterization is not supported by the text of the letter.
Furthermore, in your brief missive, you managed to impugn my motives in a very silly way, accusing me either of being on the bankers' dole or of being so prostrate before moneyed interests on principle (Heh. "Moneyed interest on princip[le|al]." Get it?) that I'm unable to properly read the letter. Is this a serious way to think or argue? Specifically, is this a way to think or argue that is even capable either of engaging the facts of the matter or of fostering any kind of intellectual progress?
Also, if I don't get modded up for "moneyed interests on principle," then you people have hearts of stone.
Having read the letter in the supplied link, "take-down notice" is an inappropriate and inflammatory term to use to describe the communication in question.
IANAL, but I am a speaker of the English language. A "take-down notice" would, in common usage, refer to a DMCA (most common) or other style notification that a publisher of some (often allegedly plagiarized) content is legally obligated to remove it, or will enjoy a legal safe harbor if one does so. None of these criteria are met by the letter in question. Also spurious is the use of the word "demand." The letter makes no demands. It expresses (IMO poorly founded) concerns. What we have, instead, is a letter that basically says, "Hey, this bothers us. Would you stop it?"
This may be inappropriate. (It is.) It might be silly. (It is.) It is not, however, a David-and-Goliath story of epic proportion. It is regrettable both that./ has descended to this kind of pandering in order to attract readership and that, judging by most comments in here, they have consequently succeeded in attracting an audience that doesn't take the minimal time necessary to examine the source material provided and come to a conclusion on the actual merits.
I believe it is customary to shout, "THINK SHEEPLE!," at this time.
I remember, as a kid, being very excited about reports that the reusable 'Space Shuttle' was going to be like a 'space pickup truck' and reduce launch costs to $50/lb. It was still expensive, but I remember calculating the price for a kid my size. ($4500. Wow!) Then the cost went up to $100/lb. Not great, but still cheaper than what we had. Then $500/lb. Tolerable, I guess. Then they quit talking about it at all.
NASA has done a lot of amazing things in the last 30 years, no doubt. But their manned program is a complete fuck-story. Just once, I'd like to see senior NASA management acknowledge a problem in the manned program, own up to causing it, and taking the action necessary to fix it. I like it that they've split cargo and humans (after 30 years of agonizingly expensive lessons that have greatly diminished American space capability) and are going back to mostly disposable systems (again, after 30 years of expensive lessons). But, why--Oh, why!?--can't they get this right?
It looks like they're going to drive this thing into the ground, just like the shuttle. The public secret is that the NASA manned program shows all the signs of a dysfunctional organization, and has for 30 years. The next president, senate, and congress need to seriously look at scrapping NASA's manned program and building a new one from scratch, possibly outside of the auspices of NASA. For the good of the country and of humankind, I hope that they do.
Also, big [solid rockets] have to be manufactured in segments.
For clarification, I believe the shuttle SRBs are manufactured in segments so that they can be transported over the road from Thiokol's manufacturing plant to Florida. I don't think that there is a technical limitation to the size of a monolithic fuel-grain for practical size rockets. In fact, fuel grain cast in one piece would have fewer places for cracks to develop. For those not in the know, many if not most solid rocket failures are due to cracks in the fuel grain, which expose more surface area to be burned. This drives up the combustion pressure, which increases the rate of combustion, which perpetuates a self-sustaining cycle that ends in the destruction of the engine.
Presumably, you could site the hypothetical manufacturing facility on Mars reasonably close to the hypothetical launch site.
Having taken classes from Prof. Breidenthal, I can tell you that, more than likely, his quotes are absurdly dry understatements. Also, I can tell you that he's right.
It should be a rule of the internet: When Professor Breidenthal and a random internet commenter disagree, Professor Breidenthal is correct.
Corollary 1: A belligerent noob will have no idea how badly he has been owned by Professor Breidenthal's absurdly dry understatements.
Corollary 2: If Professor Breidenthal refrains from ownage, then the noob is open-minded and shows potential.
That guy is smart, and his classes were hard. He always tried to craft tests so that the average score was 50%, to "maximize the dynamic range." (Separate the wheat from the chaff, I gathered.)
What would be interesting would be if this device could demonstrate a high triple-product. I.e if it can achieve a high plasma density, high temperature, AND high confinement time simultaneously
High triple product is interesting and difficult to achieve for neutral plasmas because the have a Maxwellian temperature distribution. At pressures and temps we can achieve, only a small fraction of the ions in the plasma are available to fuse, because only that small fraction are in the small high-energy range where fusion occurs. The polywell design overcomes this by dropping the ions into a potential well at exactly the right energy. Everyone who gets into the party has sufficient energy to fuse. This is huge, as the the population of particles available in a neutral plasma are wayyy out on the long tail of the energy distribution curve.
n practice THAT is really difficult to do, mainly because for any feasible pressure the temperature required will be in the range of hundreds of millions of degrees,
The triple time is difficult to achieve in a toroidal field because the field is almost everywhere convex outwards. Every plasma instability there is drives the plasma away from the dense inner portion of the magnetic field to the less dense outer portion. This is why you need huge tokomaks. The Larmour radius of an ion is huge because of the mass of the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleii. For every collision that happens, whether or not it results in fusion, the colliding particles wander, on average, two Larmour radii outward. Polywell differs from this in two fundamentally important ways. First, the quasi-spherical field is convex inward everywhere except at the point cusps that serve as the injection points. This "spherical field" accomplishes this by being composed of smaller fields at it's periphery. An analogy: Imagine you're a ping-pong ball in a close packing of ping-pong balls. Everywhere you look you see your neighbors, and they are convex toward you. But the sphere that their centers lie upon is convex away from you. It's the same thing in the polywell. The plasma core is inside a sphere, but the geometry of the boundary is composed of smaller fields that are convex toward it. Second, the fields are containing electrons, not ions. The Larmor radius of electrons is much smaller than that of protons (and ions) because of their much smaller mass (on the order of 3000x smaller IIRC). Basically, this means that electrons stay confined for all practical purposes, subject to the constraint that they don't impinge on a conductor.
the sun gets away with "only" ten million centigrades because of the intense pressure in the core ).
Simply incorrect at a factual level. The corona of the sun reaches ten-million or more degrees, but the core of the sun, where fusion happens, is only ~ten-thousand. It's the extreme pressure and density of the hydrogen in the core that allows fusion at this relatively low temperature. (Imagine a place where a hot proton-electron soup had the density of seawater, if you can.)
The only way this could possibly work would be if he has actually reduced bremsstrahlung losses A LOT.
Irrelevant because of the above.
If I understand it correctly he claims to have done that by separating nuclei and electrons, which quite frankly is bullshit. 1 gram of hydrogen contains [roughly] 10^23 nuclei, giving 10000 coulomb's of charge if not kept neutral by electrons.
You do not understand correctly. The plasma at the center of this device is nearly neutral, with a charge sufficient to attract the ions at high velocity to the core. This is accomplished by recirculating the electrons in the magnetic field with the special geometry described above. Basically, the electrons stay confined in the magnetic field as they circulate toward the center, and the inverse-square function that their density follows as they approach the core creates a negative well there. Then ions are dropped into this well, almost entirely neutralizing it, and bumping into each other (with a probability that is a function of the ion density, which again follows and inverse square law).
Slashdot Mirror
What surprises me is not the arrogance of the Banks in making this demand, but the fact they actually think they can intimidate one of the worlds oldest universities.
This is nearly precisely my point. It's not a "notice" unless someone is being notified of a legal infraction. This is just pure arrogant bumbling. They may be evil, but it's more important that they're hilariously inept.
Is there no difference between the interrogative ("..we would ask...") and the imperative (for example, "...we demand that you remove...")?
If we're going to call this a "take-down notice," what will we call it when Cards actually notifies Cambridge that they are demanding that Cambridge remove some other content and that Cards believes they have the legal force of law to require it? Will that be a "take-down sexual assault?"
Simply put, there can be letters that are not take-down notices. This is one of them.
But, to answer your question: I'm reasonably certain that we did read the same document. However, I'm also reasonably certain that my interpretation of it is informed by the meanings of the words on the page and a verifiable reconstruction of the authors' understanding of the scope of actions available to them. In contrast, you quoted back to me the supplication, "...we would ask that this research be removed...," and called the document that contained that phrase a "notice," with apparent sincerity. I allege that this characterization is not supported by the text of the letter.
Furthermore, in your brief missive, you managed to impugn my motives in a very silly way, accusing me either of being on the bankers' dole or of being so prostrate before moneyed interests on principle (Heh. "Moneyed interest on princip[le|al]." Get it?) that I'm unable to properly read the letter. Is this a serious way to think or argue? Specifically, is this a way to think or argue that is even capable either of engaging the facts of the matter or of fostering any kind of intellectual progress?
Also, if I don't get modded up for "moneyed interests on principle," then you people have hearts of stone.
Having read the letter in the supplied link, "take-down notice" is an inappropriate and inflammatory term to use to describe the communication in question.
IANAL, but I am a speaker of the English language. A "take-down notice" would, in common usage, refer to a DMCA (most common) or other style notification that a publisher of some (often allegedly plagiarized) content is legally obligated to remove it, or will enjoy a legal safe harbor if one does so. None of these criteria are met by the letter in question. Also spurious is the use of the word "demand." The letter makes no demands. It expresses (IMO poorly founded) concerns. What we have, instead, is a letter that basically says, "Hey, this bothers us. Would you stop it?"
This may be inappropriate. (It is.) It might be silly. (It is.) It is not, however, a David-and-Goliath story of epic proportion. It is regrettable both that ./ has descended to this kind of pandering in order to attract readership and that, judging by most comments in here, they have consequently succeeded in attracting an audience that doesn't take the minimal time necessary to examine the source material provided and come to a conclusion on the actual merits.
I believe it is customary to shout, "THINK SHEEPLE!," at this time.
I remember, as a kid, being very excited about reports that the reusable 'Space Shuttle' was going to be like a 'space pickup truck' and reduce launch costs to $50/lb. It was still expensive, but I remember calculating the price for a kid my size. ($4500. Wow!) Then the cost went up to $100/lb. Not great, but still cheaper than what we had. Then $500/lb. Tolerable, I guess. Then they quit talking about it at all.
NASA has done a lot of amazing things in the last 30 years, no doubt. But their manned program is a complete fuck-story. Just once, I'd like to see senior NASA management acknowledge a problem in the manned program, own up to causing it, and taking the action necessary to fix it. I like it that they've split cargo and humans (after 30 years of agonizingly expensive lessons that have greatly diminished American space capability) and are going back to mostly disposable systems (again, after 30 years of expensive lessons). But, why--Oh, why!?--can't they get this right?
It looks like they're going to drive this thing into the ground, just like the shuttle. The public secret is that the NASA manned program shows all the signs of a dysfunctional organization, and has for 30 years. The next president, senate, and congress need to seriously look at scrapping NASA's manned program and building a new one from scratch, possibly outside of the auspices of NASA. For the good of the country and of humankind, I hope that they do.
Also, big [solid rockets] have to be manufactured in segments.
For clarification, I believe the shuttle SRBs are manufactured in segments so that they can be transported over the road from Thiokol's manufacturing plant to Florida. I don't think that there is a technical limitation to the size of a monolithic fuel-grain for practical size rockets. In fact, fuel grain cast in one piece would have fewer places for cracks to develop. For those not in the know, many if not most solid rocket failures are due to cracks in the fuel grain, which expose more surface area to be burned. This drives up the combustion pressure, which increases the rate of combustion, which perpetuates a self-sustaining cycle that ends in the destruction of the engine.
Presumably, you could site the hypothetical manufacturing facility on Mars reasonably close to the hypothetical launch site.
Having taken classes from Prof. Breidenthal, I can tell you that, more than likely, his quotes are absurdly dry understatements. Also, I can tell you that he's right. It should be a rule of the internet: When Professor Breidenthal and a random internet commenter disagree, Professor Breidenthal is correct. Corollary 1: A belligerent noob will have no idea how badly he has been owned by Professor Breidenthal's absurdly dry understatements. Corollary 2: If Professor Breidenthal refrains from ownage, then the noob is open-minded and shows potential. That guy is smart, and his classes were hard. He always tried to craft tests so that the average score was 50%, to "maximize the dynamic range." (Separate the wheat from the chaff, I gathered.)
What would be interesting would be if this device could demonstrate a high triple-product. I.e if it can achieve a high plasma density, high temperature, AND high confinement time simultaneously
High triple product is interesting and difficult to achieve for neutral plasmas because the have a Maxwellian temperature distribution. At pressures and temps we can achieve, only a small fraction of the ions in the plasma are available to fuse, because only that small fraction are in the small high-energy range where fusion occurs. The polywell design overcomes this by dropping the ions into a potential well at exactly the right energy. Everyone who gets into the party has sufficient energy to fuse. This is huge, as the the population of particles available in a neutral plasma are wayyy out on the long tail of the energy distribution curve.
n practice THAT is really difficult to do, mainly because for any feasible pressure the temperature required will be in the range of hundreds of millions of degrees,
The triple time is difficult to achieve in a toroidal field because the field is almost everywhere convex outwards. Every plasma instability there is drives the plasma away from the dense inner portion of the magnetic field to the less dense outer portion. This is why you need huge tokomaks. The Larmour radius of an ion is huge because of the mass of the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleii. For every collision that happens, whether or not it results in fusion, the colliding particles wander, on average, two Larmour radii outward. Polywell differs from this in two fundamentally important ways. First, the quasi-spherical field is convex inward everywhere except at the point cusps that serve as the injection points. This "spherical field" accomplishes this by being composed of smaller fields at it's periphery. An analogy: Imagine you're a ping-pong ball in a close packing of ping-pong balls. Everywhere you look you see your neighbors, and they are convex toward you. But the sphere that their centers lie upon is convex away from you. It's the same thing in the polywell. The plasma core is inside a sphere, but the geometry of the boundary is composed of smaller fields that are convex toward it. Second, the fields are containing electrons, not ions. The Larmor radius of electrons is much smaller than that of protons (and ions) because of their much smaller mass (on the order of 3000x smaller IIRC). Basically, this means that electrons stay confined for all practical purposes, subject to the constraint that they don't impinge on a conductor.
the sun gets away with "only" ten million centigrades because of the intense pressure in the core ).
Simply incorrect at a factual level. The corona of the sun reaches ten-million or more degrees, but the core of the sun, where fusion happens, is only ~ten-thousand. It's the extreme pressure and density of the hydrogen in the core that allows fusion at this relatively low temperature. (Imagine a place where a hot proton-electron soup had the density of seawater, if you can.)
The only way this could possibly work would be if he has actually reduced bremsstrahlung losses A LOT.
Irrelevant because of the above.
If I understand it correctly he claims to have done that by separating nuclei and electrons, which quite frankly is bullshit. 1 gram of hydrogen contains [roughly] 10^23 nuclei, giving 10000 coulomb's of charge if not kept neutral by electrons.
You do not understand correctly. The plasma at the center of this device is nearly neutral, with a charge sufficient to attract the ions at high velocity to the core. This is accomplished by recirculating the electrons in the magnetic field with the special geometry described above. Basically, the electrons stay confined in the magnetic field as they circulate toward the center, and the inverse-square function that their density follows as they approach the core creates a negative well there. Then ions are dropped into this well, almost entirely neutralizing it, and bumping into each other (with a probability that is a function of the ion density, which again follows and inverse square law).