The real question is could you do an Earth launch with this? Because the "heavy" equation changes a lot if we could actually use something like this to get into space in the first place.
High-speed ions would actually be easier and more efficient to use for generating electricity than conventional thermal energy. You set up an opposing electric field with a voltage that corresponds to the ions' energy in MeV, and capture them once they've slowed down. This creates a direct electric current at that high voltage, without the need for Carnot cycles, steam equipment, heat exchangers, etc.
One of the attractions of aneutronic fusion is that most of the energy is released in the form of charged ions that can be harnessed in this way.
Still depends on achieving efficient fusion. This doesn't have to be efficient - it's just a way of boosting the specific impulse you get from rocket fuel, using some other energy source (probably a fission reactor in a spacecraft) while also having a large enough impulse that it can get you around quickly. Ion engines are efficient - but you get up to speed slowly.
Worth noting, is that this concept is essentially the Orion engine without the heavy radioactives - the idea is essentially what we do in the hydrogen bomb.
You could probably run it off solar power, but I believe NASA has been looking to get approval to launch nuclear reactors into space again. NERVA-type engines still have inferior Isp compared to most of the fusion concepts out there - and whatever else it may be, using a fusion-based combustion chamber is going to be easier to make safe then a nuclear lightbulb type design. No need to shotgun blast a bunch of uranium into space/orbit/the atmosphere.
This. It's all about specific impulse in space travel - which is a very separate concept to net energy production. There's no problem spending a lot of energy making rocket fuels on Earth, when the big cost multiplier is launch mass.
Well, the Culture do mess around with themselves as well. Excession had the Interesting Times Gang doing exactly that, with fairly disasterous results for everyone.
The energy grid wasn't for power. It was so Culture-ships could "drive" across spacetime, rather then needing to be constrained by the rocket equation. Note they interact with it with traction fields.
His contemporary and science fiction novels have been an important part of my life for many, many years, and I shall miss knowing that his twisted and brilliant imagination is beavering away at new works.
But if nothing else, looking for a silver lining to this dark, dark cloud, I'm at least happy to have the chance to thank him publicly, before he's gone, for the great pleasure I've had in reading his books.
I'm sure he's greatly loved by many and I hope that that knowledge can go at least some small way to helping him and his wife through the months to come.
I think we should be joyous that he's still alive, so many people seem to already comment like he's dead. I'm sure he wants people to treat him like he's still alive.
It's the end of his writing output after his next book is out. It would be a sad end of an era regardless of how it came about, but I also think that we'd like to imagine that were he on the net vanity searching, he might want to know he'll be missed and remembered.
By the measure used in your Walton statistic, someone with $1 and no credit card debt or car loan is wealthier than 25% of country. There's a lesson there. A large portion of the country has negative wealth, meaning they owe more than they have. Virtually all get there the same way. To have negative net worth - buy stuff you can't pay for. The wealthy, by your definition, are simply those who spend lesss than they make, people who save. You can whine, or you can learn something from that fact.
So I suppose you're never going to take out a loan to buy a house? Or I suppose you think those running the megacorps didn't take out debt to finance their startup, or that those very corporations don't issue billions in bonds total to raise capital for expansion or to cover operating costs during temporary shortfalls?
Sure, I guess you could go homeless for the first 40 years of your life, or rent and still be in the hole because 40 years later you have no equity and are still paying out the ass for basic shelter...
If you really want to track someone, it's usually way easier to steal and modify their phone, or modify a replica phone and download their phone to that one.
There are a lot of high-tech surveillance techniques, but they're just really kind of hard to do compared to the simple stuff.
I just received 10 BTC for $50. What's my next move? I go to MtGox and cash it out into USD immediately.
BTC may not be devalued through arbitrary printing of it, but it can be rapidly devalued through people dumping it (which has happened a few times). The liquidity preference for BTC is either zero or infinite - either you want BTC (say for trade), or you have BTC and want to turn it into another currency (to buy something real with).
BTC, in not being able to pay taxes or be legally enforceable to extinguish debt, has no guarantee of being valuable in the future once it loses momentum. And if it can't do those two things, then there's no reason for anyone to want it.
Except of course, for the ability to buy illegal things with it "anonymously". But a currency with the sole value backing of being a good way to trade in illicit goods doesn't even work, since no one will be able to run legal money-changing services.
All of which depend on being able to exchange Bitcoin into another currency first in order to realize it's value. None of them can pay taxes or rent in Bitcoin.
The car and the computer both have use without support infrastructure. Less use, but they're valuable. In fact both represent a large pile of repurposable spare parts as well.
What is BitCoin if not exchangeable? BitCoin's don't do anything. That string of bits doesn't do anything unique - its not externally valuable to anyone. You can't break it down and get those processing cycles back.
Spam mail, phishing attacks and DDOS are hard to regulate because they don't involve a physical vector.
Money does - it has to be used to purchase physical goods. And for that matter, most phishing attacks are stopped by targeting the point of profit - the difficulty is always converting all those credit card numbers into cash. Ever see a "work from home" banner on a telegraph pole? The exact purpose of those is to get a bunch of mules to deposit money from defrauded credit cards into overseas bank accounts.
By your (lack of) logic, all countries other than the U.S. should be put in jail.
(Hint: The internet isn't a U.S. territory. That's why I'm free to pay for Mexican purchases in Pesos, and German purchases in Deutschmarks.)
You don't pay for any of those things in that currency. Your credit card company converts your USD to Pesos, then pays your debt for you in it.
The US simply says that it'll regulate BTC to USD exchangers, and BTC is then done - since you either register as an official exchanger, or get shut down as an unregistered one for not complying with the law on the matter.
Re:value drops to zero. This straw man is beaten more than 10 dead horses at a slaughter-house for horse meat. If everyone suddenly stopped using the dollar and ignored it, then the value of the dollar drops to zero; doesn't everything else also?
Except they can't do that, because they have to pay taxes and fees to the government in US dollars. If they accept large sums of some other currency, then the IRS audits them, works out the exchange rate, and says "you owe us taxes of X USD on this transaction". Then you get to fight it out in court if you disagree on the valuation, but you still end up paying taxes.
BitCoin has no government backing it, and is deflationary. There's no reason for anyone to buy BitCoin, since everyone using it needs to turn it into other currency as fast as possible.
This is almost exactly not true. One of the big advantages of bitcoin even now is that you can convert it to local currency almost anywhere. Which is also what you'd have to do with dollars (with hefty exchange fees). I'll grant you that there are fewer bitcoin currency converters at the moment, but since literally anyone could be a converter and bitcoin is on a growth cuve (in terms of proliferation, not value) this should improve quite a bit over time.
You donutholes have no value because no one would be wiling to trade with you for them. Bitcoin does have value, people do trade them.
Please if people are going to argue against bitcoin can we at least stick to things that bitcoin is actually bad at?
Firstly, in reference to the USD, you frequently don't. The USD is the de facto currency of many places (i.e. Argentina) because the local currency is so distrusted.
More importantly: the USD has value as long as the United States exists, because it represents the ability to purchase some amount of US GDP output. If you want to interact with the US government, you have to do it in USD. If you do business with US companies, then you do it in the USD (while you could negotiate for a contract denominated in Euros or whatever, a court challenge would allow the contract to be revalued into USD and they would be forced to accept payment in it).
BitCoin does not represent any of these things. No large organization considers BitCoin a real currency, so there's no implicit demand or backing store of wealth. BitCoins have no value or practical use, and aren't legally enforced as a representation of the wealth of another party (i.e. the USD is legally enforced as representing the value of the US economy).
Which belies the bubble-like nature of BitCoin. There is no reason to hold it. It's predicated on the greater fool theory - you don't want to hold BitCoin (because you can't spend it) - so you sell it on to someone for whom the same will be true, but who is either a fool, or convinced they'll sell it on to yet a greater fool.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not kill "millions" of people. Hiroshima killed about 80,000 people on impact, and probably a few hundred thousand more afterward from reduced life-span due to radiation exposure. The population of the city was 340,000 - 350,000 at the time of bombing. Nagasaki was slightly less killed, and better stats on injured. Population 263,000.
Those are the only two uses of nuclear weapons for aggression in human history. The firebombing - with conventional warheads and napalm - of Tokyo killed more people.
Perhaps more importantly: ethical compared to what? Not suggesting it to Truman, letting another nation get there first and risking the use of it against the United States before a deterrent could be developed? How about in prolonging the war, and the estimated 1 million US servicemen who would've been killed in the land invasion of Japan, not to mention the Japanese soldiers and civilians who would've gone down.
Or the fact the atomic bomb did finally make Alfred Nobel's ideas about TNT as a weapon a reality: we finally created a weapon that makes large-scale conflict between superpowers irrelevant. Proxy wars may happen, but the atomic bomb almost certainly directly prevented a third war in Europe between the Soviets and NATO, the former of which would've had no reason not to try expanding in that direction as opposed to stuffing around in Afgahnistan.
Or tablets and phones will take on more and more desktop-like features.
When I envisage the future, its having my phone scale up to run something like my current desktop now when connected to bigger monitors/keyboard/mouse. This is not "phone interface on the desktop" as its being interpreted by MS with Metro (and other notable offenders) - it's a device presenting the appropriate UI for the appropriate context. Not mashing one idea until it vaguely suits another.
No I'm pretty sure it was shot down. But the issue was that the planes were on enormously fixed courses through Serbian airspace, so a commander simply did the logical thing and put his missiles right along the flight path, and lit off as many as he could. They're stealthy, not radar invisible.
I imagine that using them with randomized flight paths and the like would make them near impossible to spot - your AA can't shoot everywhere at once.
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The real question is could you do an Earth launch with this? Because the "heavy" equation changes a lot if we could actually use something like this to get into space in the first place.
High-speed ions would actually be easier and more efficient to use for generating electricity than conventional thermal energy. You set up an opposing electric field with a voltage that corresponds to the ions' energy in MeV, and capture them once they've slowed down. This creates a direct electric current at that high voltage, without the need for Carnot cycles, steam equipment, heat exchangers, etc.
One of the attractions of aneutronic fusion is that most of the energy is released in the form of charged ions that can be harnessed in this way.
Still depends on achieving efficient fusion. This doesn't have to be efficient - it's just a way of boosting the specific impulse you get from rocket fuel, using some other energy source (probably a fission reactor in a spacecraft) while also having a large enough impulse that it can get you around quickly. Ion engines are efficient - but you get up to speed slowly.
Worth noting, is that this concept is essentially the Orion engine without the heavy radioactives - the idea is essentially what we do in the hydrogen bomb.
You could probably run it off solar power, but I believe NASA has been looking to get approval to launch nuclear reactors into space again. NERVA-type engines still have inferior Isp compared to most of the fusion concepts out there - and whatever else it may be, using a fusion-based combustion chamber is going to be easier to make safe then a nuclear lightbulb type design. No need to shotgun blast a bunch of uranium into space/orbit/the atmosphere.
This. It's all about specific impulse in space travel - which is a very separate concept to net energy production. There's no problem spending a lot of energy making rocket fuels on Earth, when the big cost multiplier is launch mass.
Well, the Culture do mess around with themselves as well. Excession had the Interesting Times Gang doing exactly that, with fairly disasterous results for everyone.
The energy grid wasn't for power. It was so Culture-ships could "drive" across spacetime, rather then needing to be constrained by the rocket equation. Note they interact with it with traction fields.
As I posted a little earlier on The Guardian:
Desperately sad news.
His contemporary and science fiction novels have been an important part of my life for many, many years, and I shall miss knowing that his twisted and brilliant imagination is beavering away at new works.
But if nothing else, looking for a silver lining to this dark, dark cloud, I'm at least happy to have the chance to thank him publicly, before he's gone, for the great pleasure I've had in reading his books.
I'm sure he's greatly loved by many and I hope that that knowledge can go at least some small way to helping him and his wife through the months to come.
I think we should be joyous that he's still alive, so many people seem to already comment like he's dead. I'm sure he wants people to treat him like he's still alive.
It's the end of his writing output after his next book is out. It would be a sad end of an era regardless of how it came about, but I also think that we'd like to imagine that were he on the net vanity searching, he might want to know he'll be missed and remembered.
All of which would already be a complete violation of FCC rules for spectrum use.
By the measure used in your Walton statistic, someone with $1 and no credit card debt or car loan is wealthier than 25% of country. There's a lesson there. A large portion of the country has negative wealth, meaning they owe more than they have. Virtually all get there the same way. To have negative net worth - buy stuff you can't pay for. The wealthy, by your definition, are simply those who spend lesss than they make, people who save. You can whine, or you can learn something from that fact.
So I suppose you're never going to take out a loan to buy a house? Or I suppose you think those running the megacorps didn't take out debt to finance their startup, or that those very corporations don't issue billions in bonds total to raise capital for expansion or to cover operating costs during temporary shortfalls?
Sure, I guess you could go homeless for the first 40 years of your life, or rent and still be in the hole because 40 years later you have no equity and are still paying out the ass for basic shelter...
If you really want to track someone, it's usually way easier to steal and modify their phone, or modify a replica phone and download their phone to that one.
There are a lot of high-tech surveillance techniques, but they're just really kind of hard to do compared to the simple stuff.
I just received 10 BTC for $50. What's my next move? I go to MtGox and cash it out into USD immediately.
BTC may not be devalued through arbitrary printing of it, but it can be rapidly devalued through people dumping it (which has happened a few times). The liquidity preference for BTC is either zero or infinite - either you want BTC (say for trade), or you have BTC and want to turn it into another currency (to buy something real with).
BTC, in not being able to pay taxes or be legally enforceable to extinguish debt, has no guarantee of being valuable in the future once it loses momentum. And if it can't do those two things, then there's no reason for anyone to want it.
Except of course, for the ability to buy illegal things with it "anonymously". But a currency with the sole value backing of being a good way to trade in illicit goods doesn't even work, since no one will be able to run legal money-changing services.
All of which depend on being able to exchange Bitcoin into another currency first in order to realize it's value. None of them can pay taxes or rent in Bitcoin.
The car and the computer both have use without support infrastructure. Less use, but they're valuable. In fact both represent a large pile of repurposable spare parts as well.
What is BitCoin if not exchangeable? BitCoin's don't do anything. That string of bits doesn't do anything unique - its not externally valuable to anyone. You can't break it down and get those processing cycles back.
Spam mail, phishing attacks and DDOS are hard to regulate because they don't involve a physical vector.
Money does - it has to be used to purchase physical goods. And for that matter, most phishing attacks are stopped by targeting the point of profit - the difficulty is always converting all those credit card numbers into cash. Ever see a "work from home" banner on a telegraph pole? The exact purpose of those is to get a bunch of mules to deposit money from defrauded credit cards into overseas bank accounts.
By your (lack of) logic, all countries other than the U.S. should be put in jail.
(Hint: The internet isn't a U.S. territory. That's why I'm free to pay for Mexican purchases in Pesos, and German purchases in Deutschmarks.)
You don't pay for any of those things in that currency. Your credit card company converts your USD to Pesos, then pays your debt for you in it.
The US simply says that it'll regulate BTC to USD exchangers, and BTC is then done - since you either register as an official exchanger, or get shut down as an unregistered one for not complying with the law on the matter.
Re:value drops to zero. This straw man is beaten more than 10 dead horses at a slaughter-house for horse meat. If everyone suddenly stopped using the dollar and ignored it, then the value of the dollar drops to zero; doesn't everything else also?
Except they can't do that, because they have to pay taxes and fees to the government in US dollars. If they accept large sums of some other currency, then the IRS audits them, works out the exchange rate, and says "you owe us taxes of X USD on this transaction". Then you get to fight it out in court if you disagree on the valuation, but you still end up paying taxes.
BitCoin has no government backing it, and is deflationary. There's no reason for anyone to buy BitCoin, since everyone using it needs to turn it into other currency as fast as possible.
This is almost exactly not true. One of the big advantages of bitcoin even now is that you can convert it to local currency almost anywhere. Which is also what you'd have to do with dollars (with hefty exchange fees). I'll grant you that there are fewer bitcoin currency converters at the moment, but since literally anyone could be a converter and bitcoin is on a growth cuve (in terms of proliferation, not value) this should improve quite a bit over time.
You donutholes have no value because no one would be wiling to trade with you for them. Bitcoin does have value, people do trade them.
Please if people are going to argue against bitcoin can we at least stick to things that bitcoin is actually bad at?
Firstly, in reference to the USD, you frequently don't. The USD is the de facto currency of many places (i.e. Argentina) because the local currency is so distrusted.
More importantly: the USD has value as long as the United States exists, because it represents the ability to purchase some amount of US GDP output. If you want to interact with the US government, you have to do it in USD. If you do business with US companies, then you do it in the USD (while you could negotiate for a contract denominated in Euros or whatever, a court challenge would allow the contract to be revalued into USD and they would be forced to accept payment in it).
BitCoin does not represent any of these things. No large organization considers BitCoin a real currency, so there's no implicit demand or backing store of wealth. BitCoins have no value or practical use, and aren't legally enforced as a representation of the wealth of another party (i.e. the USD is legally enforced as representing the value of the US economy).
Which belies the bubble-like nature of BitCoin. There is no reason to hold it. It's predicated on the greater fool theory - you don't want to hold BitCoin (because you can't spend it) - so you sell it on to someone for whom the same will be true, but who is either a fool, or convinced they'll sell it on to yet a greater fool.
Right. It was Truman who dropped it. Doi!
How is anything you just wrote relevant to the study presented (bunk as it may be)?
Considering the history of the voluntary participation of all those civilians in bringing Hitler to power...
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not kill "millions" of people. Hiroshima killed about 80,000 people on impact, and probably a few hundred thousand more afterward from reduced life-span due to radiation exposure. The population of the city was 340,000 - 350,000 at the time of bombing. Nagasaki was slightly less killed, and better stats on injured. Population 263,000.
Those are the only two uses of nuclear weapons for aggression in human history. The firebombing - with conventional warheads and napalm - of Tokyo killed more people.
Perhaps more importantly: ethical compared to what? Not suggesting it to Truman, letting another nation get there first and risking the use of it against the United States before a deterrent could be developed? How about in prolonging the war, and the estimated 1 million US servicemen who would've been killed in the land invasion of Japan, not to mention the Japanese soldiers and civilians who would've gone down.
Or the fact the atomic bomb did finally make Alfred Nobel's ideas about TNT as a weapon a reality: we finally created a weapon that makes large-scale conflict between superpowers irrelevant. Proxy wars may happen, but the atomic bomb almost certainly directly prevented a third war in Europe between the Soviets and NATO, the former of which would've had no reason not to try expanding in that direction as opposed to stuffing around in Afgahnistan.
Or tablets and phones will take on more and more desktop-like features.
When I envisage the future, its having my phone scale up to run something like my current desktop now when connected to bigger monitors/keyboard/mouse. This is not "phone interface on the desktop" as its being interpreted by MS with Metro (and other notable offenders) - it's a device presenting the appropriate UI for the appropriate context. Not mashing one idea until it vaguely suits another.
No I'm pretty sure it was shot down. But the issue was that the planes were on enormously fixed courses through Serbian airspace, so a commander simply did the logical thing and put his missiles right along the flight path, and lit off as many as he could. They're stealthy, not radar invisible.
I imagine that using them with randomized flight paths and the like would make them near impossible to spot - your AA can't shoot everywhere at once.