It's not like the science you fund with that 80 billion is useless. Reality isn't like civilization - you don't fillup the bar for "fusion" with beakers till you get the breakthrough.
It's an experimental particle accelerator, not the server you keep under your desk. It's shutdown at the moment because it's the only opportunity CERN get to actually upgrade the accelerator and it's components - you can't very well go in and expect it when it's running, because it's cryo-contained, somewhat radioactive and highly magnetized.
The shutdown is multi-purpose - there's components at CERN which haven't been replaced since the 1970s partly because they were state-of-the-art then and no one had any idea if a new one would be better or worse, because nothing on earth needed - for example - triacs - with the performance they did. And they've been in continuous service since then since CERN has expanded by turning each previous accelerator into a boost stage for the next accelerator. Before the jump to 14 TeV is the last opportunity to replace them, and so a decent amount of them is coming out.
There's also the fact that you can't just ignore those giant detectors once they're installed - nothing like that has ever been built before, and no one knows how they'll perform. ATLAS and CMS both look for the same data, but have different electrical and physical designs for sensing - both teams are currently inspecting the components of the detectors to catalog and study the performance, damage and degradation of the components. One of the interesting things is ATLAS uses liquid argon , while CMS uses a special type lead tungstate crystals for calorimetry - both new technology in their own ways, the CMS people are studying the bleaching of the lead tungstate which has been happening faster then models predict.
You know what all this has in common? All of it is science, all of it is useful (arguably the much more useful and transferrable bits of CERN as well) and all of it is just what happens when you build experimental devices. The helium explosion was unfortunate but a 1 year delay in a machine which has been planned since the 1980s is not some type of massive failure.
It's a particle accelerator, not a commercial building and has been very efficiently built to boot.
You don't need to extend them 62,000 miles. You just need to get the tensile strength of each strand such that 80% of it is above the tensile strength that would support an elevator cable. Beyond that it's unnecessary to have more, since you can weave fibres in various ways which achieve - you guessed it - about 80% of the tensile strength of the underlying fibre (this is how Kevlar is made, for example).
This probably would be possible but not worth doing. With direct space access, the cost of space-solar power goes down to practically nothing, and it would be easier to beam a steady stream of energy via microwaves then try and capture surges from decelerating payloads (i.e. trains do this, but the energy is just loaded through resistors elsewhere - its a way to keep subway tunnels cool).
The real benefit is just access to space-borne resources. We'd have such a large new playground to take whatever we wanted from, without affecting the Earth's biosphere one bit. The drive for space industrial development would be huge the second it was demonstrated even barely break even.
I know I like to base my decisions of fundamental science on how flashy a website looks.
The issue with all the alternatives to ITER is that they are even less well understood, and less proven, then Tokamak reactors. Tokamak's have achieved Q > 1 - the plasma has generated more energy then was needed to heat it, and drive the machine. This is reality today in a reactor like JET, its just not practically sustainable on their sort of scale.
Things like the Polywell on the other hand? 13 neutrons in some iterations. Total. That's 13 known fusion events inside the entire machine. That's incredibly low (counts were higher in later models as I understand it). It's a promising but poorly understood device.
The problem is we have bad funding for fusion and plasma science all over. The issue isn't we need to redirect funding from ITER - we probably need to give it more. But we could also afford to toss $100 million at Polywell's to build a machine which is predicted to actually do Q > 1 and see what happens - then we'd know (slowly, we are getting there - it's a staged DARPA project which is being very cautious with their progress and whether the physics actually works).
Well the saying is more a rule of thumb for how one should be aggressive in avoiding creating too many subdivisions in an organization, or trying to implement management and oversight where you should be trusting your existing delegates and granting them some organizational flexibility to achieve their goals.
That MIT survey concluded we're about 80 billion USD away from practical fusion, since if you follow the progress of funding cuts it's more less or less kept being cut every few years, ensuring that the project is always about 20 years away.
It's research who's budget has gone down continuously since the 70s.
There's a niche in there somewhere for making a chat-style app which IDLE's on a folder of your IMAP account (call it "Chats") and sends messages using regular SMTP (which these days is easily fast enough).
That gives you - for no effort - P2P picture sharing, compatibility with *every* device and platform in some capacity, and message storage which follows the user.
He has been accused of nothing. He has been charged with nothing. A friendly right-wing judge helped the US publicize allegations made by two women - one of whom has bowed out in disgust and wants nothing more to do with the US's little Paula Jones games.
Or you know, bowed out because an ongoing campaign of death threats and public humiliation and abuse just wasn't worth it?
The entire aviation fleet is on the chopping block, realistically. Drones are here to stay, and its only a matter of time before they start consistently being able to win dogfights against real pilots as well
Well the engines which hit the ocean I doubt are ever going to fly again - once seawater gets into anything mechanical and high performance, the best decision you can make is to scrap it. This sounds more like it's a test of whether the soft touchdown will work, in a way which will not explode so much if it doesn't (like as would happen with a hard impact on land).
Its not entirely clear that that situation is going to play out yet. The Tasmanian phone pole fibre trials would seem to point to anyone they hire looking at the books and saying "look, at worst you'll pay the same money for doing absolutely nothing over the next 5 years, only people will notice".
I'm still half-expecting it to be "discovered" how to do FTTH cheaply by them.
And then we get to focus on digging in to save Medicare...
Involving the Moon when shipping materials from Earth makes me think this is a nothing proposition. There's been some work by NASA on the idea of using sunlight to fuse lunar regolith into the base substrate for PV cells, with the idea being that a base there would be pre-empted by a rover which manufactured the power generation from dust.
If you're just launching from Earth, then putting everything in an environment where nothing really has to support its own weight makes way more sense. Interesting note though: with a sufficient body of sunlight collection, I wonder if you'd get enough of a solar sail that you could use the sun for station keeping.
but that means there's still actually a body, and once discovered that is admissable evidence.
Then why is one of the key tenets of parallel reconstruction the total denial of any link to NSA-sourced information? Why don't they openly admit that the investigation started with inadmissible evidence, but that evidence will not be used at trial?
If there's a dead body, and tire tracks matching your car, then you have to explain that away. If at the end of the day you can, then it doesn't matter what the NSA has because it's inadmissable in court and can't be used to prosecute.
You can't be prosecuted from inadmissable evidence, but hohoho, you're also not as good at crime as you think. The alternative to completely eliminating parallel construction and surveillance exchange is a situation where NSA analysts happen across evidence of a crime (like the above example) and then can notify no one at all. Is that really an improvement?
That is a huge improvement. The reason you're allowed to see the prosecutors evidence, and the reason you are given the right to face your accusers is to prevent the justice system from being abused. If you have no idea how they obtained evidence, you have no way of trying to discredit the evidence to begin with. The NSA could drop a tip to the DEA that you're smuggling drugs. Only if the NSA planted the drugs in your vehicle before the DEA got that tip and they used a "routine traffic stop" to suggest that they found the drugs by chance then you're screwed. At least if you KNOW that the NSA told the DEA to stop you, then perhaps you have some chance to determine whether someone at the NSA is behaving inappropriately, or may have some sort of grudge or bias that would cause them to seek to harm you through the criminal justice system.
And I don't think you know what "inadmissable" means.
It is evidence which cannot be used to prosecute you. If the only evidence of a crime is inadmissable in court, then you can't be prosecuted much less convicted. The only evidence you have to defend against is the evidence admitted in court.
What are you even saying? The whole thing about parallel construction is not that evidence is invented. It's that if you actually committed a crime, then a lot of other evidence which can be reasonably discovered probably exists and its easy to find it - i.e. "this guy probably killed someone and buried him in the woods along the highway, we know from an inadmissable wiretap" - but that means there's still actually a body, and once discovered that is admissable evidence.
You can't be prosecuted from inadmissable evidence, but hohoho, you're also not as good at crime as you think. The alternative to completely eliminating parallel construction and surveillance exchange is a situation where NSA analysts happen across evidence of a crime (like the above example) and then can notify no one at all. Is that really an improvement?
Also that the resources required to build batteries are hardly fully developed. You can build a new mine and plan for the price of the commodity to drop if you expect to make it up in volume - to date though, that hasn't really been true of the battery market.
I'm seeing no mention of latency here. Running expensive computations to reconstruct the signal is going to add a considerable amount latency, which more or less eliminates video-chat applications. And this is a computation which gets more complex the mode devices you have in an area too.
I just do a bunch of DIY around the house. Being able to record things as I take them apart or assemble them would be a huge timesaver and make it a lot easier to seek advice/share experiences.
The benefits of doing this in a chemical lab would be even greater.
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No idea. I just took the number quoted and ran with it.
It's not like the science you fund with that 80 billion is useless. Reality isn't like civilization - you don't fillup the bar for "fusion" with beakers till you get the breakthrough.
It's an experimental particle accelerator, not the server you keep under your desk. It's shutdown at the moment because it's the only opportunity CERN get to actually upgrade the accelerator and it's components - you can't very well go in and expect it when it's running, because it's cryo-contained, somewhat radioactive and highly magnetized.
The shutdown is multi-purpose - there's components at CERN which haven't been replaced since the 1970s partly because they were state-of-the-art then and no one had any idea if a new one would be better or worse, because nothing on earth needed - for example - triacs - with the performance they did. And they've been in continuous service since then since CERN has expanded by turning each previous accelerator into a boost stage for the next accelerator. Before the jump to 14 TeV is the last opportunity to replace them, and so a decent amount of them is coming out.
There's also the fact that you can't just ignore those giant detectors once they're installed - nothing like that has ever been built before, and no one knows how they'll perform. ATLAS and CMS both look for the same data, but have different electrical and physical designs for sensing - both teams are currently inspecting the components of the detectors to catalog and study the performance, damage and degradation of the components. One of the interesting things is ATLAS uses liquid argon , while CMS uses a special type lead tungstate crystals for calorimetry - both new technology in their own ways, the CMS people are studying the bleaching of the lead tungstate which has been happening faster then models predict.
You know what all this has in common? All of it is science, all of it is useful (arguably the much more useful and transferrable bits of CERN as well) and all of it is just what happens when you build experimental devices. The helium explosion was unfortunate but a 1 year delay in a machine which has been planned since the 1980s is not some type of massive failure.
It's a particle accelerator, not a commercial building and has been very efficiently built to boot.
You don't need to extend them 62,000 miles. You just need to get the tensile strength of each strand such that 80% of it is above the tensile strength that would support an elevator cable. Beyond that it's unnecessary to have more, since you can weave fibres in various ways which achieve - you guessed it - about 80% of the tensile strength of the underlying fibre (this is how Kevlar is made, for example).
This probably would be possible but not worth doing. With direct space access, the cost of space-solar power goes down to practically nothing, and it would be easier to beam a steady stream of energy via microwaves then try and capture surges from decelerating payloads (i.e. trains do this, but the energy is just loaded through resistors elsewhere - its a way to keep subway tunnels cool).
The real benefit is just access to space-borne resources. We'd have such a large new playground to take whatever we wanted from, without affecting the Earth's biosphere one bit. The drive for space industrial development would be huge the second it was demonstrated even barely break even.
Well for one thing it's a low intensity infrared beam which is eye-safe and invisible.
You mean the LHC which was doing cutting edge science for the past year, and discovered the Higgs boson? That LHC?
I know I like to base my decisions of fundamental science on how flashy a website looks.
The issue with all the alternatives to ITER is that they are even less well understood, and less proven, then Tokamak reactors. Tokamak's have achieved Q > 1 - the plasma has generated more energy then was needed to heat it, and drive the machine. This is reality today in a reactor like JET, its just not practically sustainable on their sort of scale.
Things like the Polywell on the other hand? 13 neutrons in some iterations. Total. That's 13 known fusion events inside the entire machine. That's incredibly low (counts were higher in later models as I understand it). It's a promising but poorly understood device.
The problem is we have bad funding for fusion and plasma science all over. The issue isn't we need to redirect funding from ITER - we probably need to give it more. But we could also afford to toss $100 million at Polywell's to build a machine which is predicted to actually do Q > 1 and see what happens - then we'd know (slowly, we are getting there - it's a staged DARPA project which is being very cautious with their progress and whether the physics actually works).
Well the saying is more a rule of thumb for how one should be aggressive in avoiding creating too many subdivisions in an organization, or trying to implement management and oversight where you should be trusting your existing delegates and granting them some organizational flexibility to achieve their goals.
That MIT survey concluded we're about 80 billion USD away from practical fusion, since if you follow the progress of funding cuts it's more less or less kept being cut every few years, ensuring that the project is always about 20 years away.
It's research who's budget has gone down continuously since the 70s.
Why not just use email for it?
There's a niche in there somewhere for making a chat-style app which IDLE's on a folder of your IMAP account (call it "Chats") and sends messages using regular SMTP (which these days is easily fast enough).
That gives you - for no effort - P2P picture sharing, compatibility with *every* device and platform in some capacity, and message storage which follows the user.
Cut the headphone cord, splice to microphone input on a walkman and hit record?
It was really not very secure at all, and an auto-destruct is a poor system compared to having an agent verify the message was securely destroyed.
He has been accused of nothing. He has been charged with nothing. A friendly right-wing judge helped the US publicize allegations made by two women - one of whom has bowed out in disgust and wants nothing more to do with the US's little Paula Jones games.
Or you know, bowed out because an ongoing campaign of death threats and public humiliation and abuse just wasn't worth it?
The entire aviation fleet is on the chopping block, realistically. Drones are here to stay, and its only a matter of time before they start consistently being able to win dogfights against real pilots as well
Well the engines which hit the ocean I doubt are ever going to fly again - once seawater gets into anything mechanical and high performance, the best decision you can make is to scrap it. This sounds more like it's a test of whether the soft touchdown will work, in a way which will not explode so much if it doesn't (like as would happen with a hard impact on land).
Its not entirely clear that that situation is going to play out yet. The Tasmanian phone pole fibre trials would seem to point to anyone they hire looking at the books and saying "look, at worst you'll pay the same money for doing absolutely nothing over the next 5 years, only people will notice".
I'm still half-expecting it to be "discovered" how to do FTTH cheaply by them.
And then we get to focus on digging in to save Medicare...
Involving the Moon when shipping materials from Earth makes me think this is a nothing proposition. There's been some work by NASA on the idea of using sunlight to fuse lunar regolith into the base substrate for PV cells, with the idea being that a base there would be pre-empted by a rover which manufactured the power generation from dust.
If you're just launching from Earth, then putting everything in an environment where nothing really has to support its own weight makes way more sense. Interesting note though: with a sufficient body of sunlight collection, I wonder if you'd get enough of a solar sail that you could use the sun for station keeping.
It's about the level of commitment appropriate for a very high stakes, difficult to prove idea that's a long shot.
but that means there's still actually a body, and once discovered that is admissable evidence.
Then why is one of the key tenets of parallel reconstruction the total denial of any link to NSA-sourced information? Why don't they openly admit that the investigation started with inadmissible evidence, but that evidence will not be used at trial?
If there's a dead body, and tire tracks matching your car, then you have to explain that away. If at the end of the day you can, then it doesn't matter what the NSA has because it's inadmissable in court and can't be used to prosecute.
You can't be prosecuted from inadmissable evidence, but hohoho, you're also not as good at crime as you think. The alternative to completely eliminating parallel construction and surveillance exchange is a situation where NSA analysts happen across evidence of a crime (like the above example) and then can notify no one at all. Is that really an improvement?
That is a huge improvement. The reason you're allowed to see the prosecutors evidence, and the reason you are given the right to face your accusers is to prevent the justice system from being abused. If you have no idea how they obtained evidence, you have no way of trying to discredit the evidence to begin with. The NSA could drop a tip to the DEA that you're smuggling drugs. Only if the NSA planted the drugs in your vehicle before the DEA got that tip and they used a "routine traffic stop" to suggest that they found the drugs by chance then you're screwed. At least if you KNOW that the NSA told the DEA to stop you, then perhaps you have some chance to determine whether someone at the NSA is behaving inappropriately, or may have some sort of grudge or bias that would cause them to seek to harm you through the criminal justice system.
And I don't think you know what "inadmissable" means.
It is evidence which cannot be used to prosecute you. If the only evidence of a crime is inadmissable in court, then you can't be prosecuted much less convicted. The only evidence you have to defend against is the evidence admitted in court.
What are you even saying? The whole thing about parallel construction is not that evidence is invented. It's that if you actually committed a crime, then a lot of other evidence which can be reasonably discovered probably exists and its easy to find it - i.e. "this guy probably killed someone and buried him in the woods along the highway, we know from an inadmissable wiretap" - but that means there's still actually a body, and once discovered that is admissable evidence.
You can't be prosecuted from inadmissable evidence, but hohoho, you're also not as good at crime as you think. The alternative to completely eliminating parallel construction and surveillance exchange is a situation where NSA analysts happen across evidence of a crime (like the above example) and then can notify no one at all. Is that really an improvement?
NASA has a department of Warp Field Mechanics already.
Also that the resources required to build batteries are hardly fully developed. You can build a new mine and plan for the price of the commodity to drop if you expect to make it up in volume - to date though, that hasn't really been true of the battery market.
I'm seeing no mention of latency here. Running expensive computations to reconstruct the signal is going to add a considerable amount latency, which more or less eliminates video-chat applications. And this is a computation which gets more complex the mode devices you have in an area too.
Here here.
I just do a bunch of DIY around the house. Being able to record things as I take them apart or assemble them would be a huge timesaver and make it a lot easier to seek advice/share experiences.
The benefits of doing this in a chemical lab would be even greater.