Plutonium dioxide is already oxidized. It's chemically impossible for it to catch fire, and again, dense and heavy with a high melting point.
Never underestimate the power of chemistry to make unintentionally broad statements concerning lack of ability to catch fire look silly. You assume burning in air. Chemists merely look for a stronger oxidizer. Muahahaha....
Are rockets launched with thousands of kilos of fluorine-based oxidizer?
I'm assuming we're talking about a rocket launch failure of a plutonium-dioxide based RTG. These devices have a long history of safe operation by now, with the most extreme test being the lunar lander splashdown after Apollo 13 where the RTG survived the crash intact. Prior to that there have been several instances of rupture, but provided they remain rare, the risks posed these uncommon events are still low.
Given that my plan for my next smartphone (which will probably be an S4) has been to install a full version of Linux on it to replace using a laptop when travelling, I'm pretty happy about the 8 core processor. It's too bad it doesn't have another 2gb of RAM.
People with a degenerative disease are losing their mental faculties. It's happening slowly enough that people around them don't notice it immediately, but with time they become more confused and unaware of their surroundings. They become less and less capable of the basic things that get other people through life on a day by day basis. They might not be able to go to the toilet hygenically, they might forget how to cook, they forget where things are - but worse - they forget and become unaware that they even have a condition.
The joke of old people always thinking nurses are stealing their things is a joke about dementia and shouldn't be a joke at all. From their perspective they put something down, or threw it out, and then later couldn't remember doing that and think it must've been stolen. You have people all around you all the time constantly managing you, but you don't remember who they are or why they're there at times.
Research the cure? Really? Even if the person was an expert in neurological disease, in that state they would have no chance of remotely helping. You lose your agency and become a burden on your relatives yet are simultaneously likely to drive them away and their last memories of you are not going to be of the person you once were.
The saddest thing, about Alzheimers and dementia and other conditions of their kind is that by the time you would definitely euthanize yourself, you're incapable of really giving informed consent about it at all. If I could have 6 years of warning that I would have Alzheimer's symptoms later, then the biggest problem would be that I couldn't take a time-delay poison that would kill me after 8 if I forgot to delay it.
The wiki article on that fire notes that it released large amounts of iodine-131. The fire was caused by attempting to produce plutonium, not by burning plutonium and the reports on its cause seem to be either uranium and magnesium/lithium cartridges.
Plutonium dioxide is already oxidized. It's chemically impossible for it to catch fire, and again, dense and heavy with a high melting point.
[The solution, IMO, is to treat Ubuntu as being a OS/UI "based on Linux", not as a Linux distro. So it's not something you offer someone to "introduce them to Linux", it's a stand-alone free/free n00bs-friendly Windows replacement.]
I posted something like this on a blog comment recently. In the past I've handed people Ubuntu CDs as a way to introduce them to linux. Now it is a way to introduce them to Ubuntu, and about as useful otherwise as handing them an Android phone or Tivo for introducing them to Linux (well, they're not quite that far along, but they're going in that direction). Whatever, if they want to do their own thing they can. I might still install it on Aunt Tilly's desktop, but I wouldn't give it to a young aspiring computer scientist.
Sure, Ubuntu might result in lots of people using Linux (though many of them already use Linux in that sense - on their phones/etc), but it will probably lose most of the people who already use Linux in the process.
I really don't understand this perspective. I've been using Ubuntu as my primary Linux for a long time, but I don't really get how any other distro would change things in the slightest. Between distros you just have different ways of distributing packages - or, if you don't have packages then you just have compiling from source.
Outside of that it's all just which daemon is being used by what for where. What is so fundamentally different about Ubuntu/Debian that breaks some supposed natural order of progression in learning? Especially seeing as how even technical people will be focused on a few aspects of Linux and not the entire OS platform.
If you can cut X% of your budget easily, it means you were running inefficiently in the first place. Any idiot who proclaims they experience no losses from cutting say, 20% of their budget, as has been out there since the sequestration hit, should be fired because it means they were straight up wasting 20% of their budget since it was apparently unnecessary.
Not to mention, if spaceflight were much cheaper we would definitely launch more satellites. Currently you build an expensive satellite, because pretty much no matter how much you spend on it, it's still going to have a large part of it's expense dominated by the launch costs.
Get that price low enough though, and suddenly the whole "microsat" concept starts to make more sense and we can consider doing all sorts of interesting stuff (satellites which use point-to-point lasers for ground communications?)
No, readers block ads because they're capable of researching what they want on their own and don't want more crap foisted on them.
There is no such thing as a good advert to me. Adverts are inherently daft.
No the problem is advertisers will never not show you an ad. Anyone talking about demographic targeting never talks about this: they have no thresholds. They won't not show you an ad if they don't think you're interested, they'll instead move to the lowest common (usually seediest) denominator.
It's why everyone talking about Facebook ad-targeting has ultimately seemed laughable to me: the question as always has been "will Facebook not show you an ad if you don't match closely enough to an advertiser?"
I don't know - I am somewhat of the opinion that we're barking up the wrong tree with the FHS and DEB/RPM style packaging these days. Keeping everything and it's dependencies in nice discrete bundles seems somewhat more like what we should be aiming for, and then using copy-on-write semantics to keep space usage down.
Much easier for a user to conceptualize, and easier to virtualize and isolate as well - add some magic in an interface layer to let you upgrade groups of dependent libraries individually and we'd be there....
You know I should get on and implement this really.
It is reactionless. It does not use reaction mass (i.e. momentum) to produce thrust. This is a problem, because it violates conservation of momentum.
That is what a reactionless drive is - for example, technically a car is a kind of reactionless drive, in the sense that it does not expel reaction mass to produce forward momentum. But a car conserves momentum because it pushes on the ground behind it.
Textbook physics is textbook physics for a reason and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The people pushing the Emdrive have more then enough resources to produce this evidence, but have consistently failed to do so. The explanation for the Emdrive is not supported by current physics as is claimed. It is also not supported by anything you've said.
Part of science is carefully considering our hypotheses so we don't waste resources. In a number of cases, the Emdrive has now been built (since it's just a microwave waveguide) but no experiment which does suitable controls for it has ever been produced.
While I'm not of the crowd who believes the Emdrive's pushes are trying to scam anyone, they're not doing good science at the moment and I've not heard a suitable justification as to why we've never seen reduced pressure or no pressure results for operating the apparatus if they've been able to put one in a hermetically sealed box. I suspect, it's because you see exactly what you'd expect when you do - thrust decreases as you drop the pressure because the waveguide runs out of air to heat up.
The photon emission of that device can't possibly produce enough momentum to create the observed thrust. The device has not been tested in a vacuum chamber, and no, a hermetically sealed box full of air doesn't mean it wouldn't move (you can swim around in a closed box full of water, for example).
You might also ask why it's got such off-kilter marketing. It's a bad thruster, but implied it would be great at levitating something that didn't accelerate? Why is that not the headline element - reactionlessly applying a force to something with just energy (i.e. pretty much an antigravity device).
And again, you might to review the laws on this matter because it has always been legal to do this. If an American is about to fly a jetliner into a building, well guess what, it's actually legal to blow it out of the sky with military forces.
The correct question - not being addressed, and notably, which Rand Paul - in his capacity as a senator - is not introducing any legislation to deal with - is what Due Process should be for the use of this power.
Instead he's filibustering that White House won't say they can't do this - which is the right thing for them to say, because the answer is, yes they can. If they say they won't then next up on Fox News we get "Obama won't stop a dirty bomb by domestic muslims using any means! Are you at risk?"
It seems apparent that Rand Paul, and many other Americans, don't actually understand what the drones actually are or how they work. The drones are no different to when the US uses cruise missiles launched from warships, or manned warplanes, or CIA wetwork teams to kill people in foreign countries. They're still controlled by the military, flown by actual operators.
There isn't some secret army of robots that Obama unilaterally controls which no one can stop. The only different thing which has happened is that the drones make doing something which tends to annoy other nations way easier since you don't run the risk of political blowback from a downed pilot in a foreign country.
More importantly, the real issue for people is trying to get some long-term corporate/government buy-in to space exploration. If there were strategic or material interests in space, then the cost of doing anything there would plummet. It's why people are so excited by the asteroid mining enterprises - resources aside, if we can make space actively profitable then science and exploration there is going to get very well-funded.
We navigate through the asteroid belt every time we go to Mars. The asteroid belt is a not a dense field of rock. The chances of a probe running into an asteroid are estimated at being 1 in a billion.
Even double-parity RAID isn't worth it with consumer drives. You'll find out you lose multiple disks due to point failures too easily. RAID-Z2 or bust IMO.
Unlikely. Russia's ideal that it would be Europe's energy provider was rapidly overshadowed by it cutting off gas supply to the Ukraine in winter when they wanted to put the squeeze on them for contract re-negotiation - that *was* strictly business. People who hold no particular ill-will to Japan aren't the problem - they're apathetic. The people with strong opinions - who do remember these things (or simply studied history and pay attention to Japanese politics) - are the ones who'll end up shaping what policy looks like.
And in a situation where you're creating a very serious, fundamental dependency, that's going to turn nasty easily.
From the most practical point of view the SSL "patch" one of their maintainers did was pretty damaging, years of trivially breakable certificates because some idiot doesn't like compiler warnings wasn't great for the reputation of Linux as secure, it didn't do much for the many eyes idea either.
That was a bug in Debian and Debian derived versions. It didn't harm upstream. It was a silly bug, but it wasn't due to arrogance unlike OP was asserting.
Also wasn't that bug a good educational exercise in why code commenting is important? It was perfectly fine practice in the specific implementation, but nothing described what it actually did in the code so someone naively removed it.
Alternatively, decommissioning that reactor and replacing it with a more modern intrinsically safe design. The fundamental issue remained that the reactor needed active cooling to be safely shutdown.
Of course there's also other things: for example, designing the generators so they were hermetically sealed against water, and could have air intakes deployed to an arbitrary height for example. There wouldn't have been a problem then, since the water inundation wouldn't have stopped them from being powered up.
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Never underestimate the power of chemistry to make unintentionally broad statements concerning lack of ability to catch fire look silly. You assume burning in air. Chemists merely look for a stronger oxidizer. Muahahaha....
Are rockets launched with thousands of kilos of fluorine-based oxidizer?
I'm assuming we're talking about a rocket launch failure of a plutonium-dioxide based RTG. These devices have a long history of safe operation by now, with the most extreme test being the lunar lander splashdown after Apollo 13 where the RTG survived the crash intact. Prior to that there have been several instances of rupture, but provided they remain rare, the risks posed these uncommon events are still low.
Given that my plan for my next smartphone (which will probably be an S4) has been to install a full version of Linux on it to replace using a laptop when travelling, I'm pretty happy about the 8 core processor. It's too bad it doesn't have another 2gb of RAM.
People with a degenerative disease are losing their mental faculties. It's happening slowly enough that people around them don't notice it immediately, but with time they become more confused and unaware of their surroundings. They become less and less capable of the basic things that get other people through life on a day by day basis. They might not be able to go to the toilet hygenically, they might forget how to cook, they forget where things are - but worse - they forget and become unaware that they even have a condition.
The joke of old people always thinking nurses are stealing their things is a joke about dementia and shouldn't be a joke at all. From their perspective they put something down, or threw it out, and then later couldn't remember doing that and think it must've been stolen. You have people all around you all the time constantly managing you, but you don't remember who they are or why they're there at times.
Research the cure? Really? Even if the person was an expert in neurological disease, in that state they would have no chance of remotely helping. You lose your agency and become a burden on your relatives yet are simultaneously likely to drive them away and their last memories of you are not going to be of the person you once were.
The saddest thing, about Alzheimers and dementia and other conditions of their kind is that by the time you would definitely euthanize yourself, you're incapable of really giving informed consent about it at all. If I could have 6 years of warning that I would have Alzheimer's symptoms later, then the biggest problem would be that I couldn't take a time-delay poison that would kill me after 8 if I forgot to delay it.
The wiki article on that fire notes that it released large amounts of iodine-131. The fire was caused by attempting to produce plutonium, not by burning plutonium and the reports on its cause seem to be either uranium and magnesium/lithium cartridges.
Plutonium dioxide is already oxidized. It's chemically impossible for it to catch fire, and again, dense and heavy with a high melting point.
[The solution, IMO, is to treat Ubuntu as being a OS/UI "based on Linux", not as a Linux distro. So it's not something you offer someone to "introduce them to Linux", it's a stand-alone free/free n00bs-friendly Windows replacement.]
I posted something like this on a blog comment recently. In the past I've handed people Ubuntu CDs as a way to introduce them to linux. Now it is a way to introduce them to Ubuntu, and about as useful otherwise as handing them an Android phone or Tivo for introducing them to Linux (well, they're not quite that far along, but they're going in that direction). Whatever, if they want to do their own thing they can. I might still install it on Aunt Tilly's desktop, but I wouldn't give it to a young aspiring computer scientist.
Sure, Ubuntu might result in lots of people using Linux (though many of them already use Linux in that sense - on their phones/etc), but it will probably lose most of the people who already use Linux in the process.
I really don't understand this perspective. I've been using Ubuntu as my primary Linux for a long time, but I don't really get how any other distro would change things in the slightest. Between distros you just have different ways of distributing packages - or, if you don't have packages then you just have compiling from source.
Outside of that it's all just which daemon is being used by what for where. What is so fundamentally different about Ubuntu/Debian that breaks some supposed natural order of progression in learning? Especially seeing as how even technical people will be focused on a few aspects of Linux and not the entire OS platform.
RTGs are designed to survive both the explosion and an uncontrolled impact with the ground.
Even if ruptured by the impact, plutonium is an immensely dense material - it's not easily scattered.
I'm not sure how you managed to write the first thought down and not see the obvious problem conflict with your second.
If you can cut X% of your budget easily, it means you were running inefficiently in the first place. Any idiot who proclaims they experience no losses from cutting say, 20% of their budget, as has been out there since the sequestration hit, should be fired because it means they were straight up wasting 20% of their budget since it was apparently unnecessary.
Not to mention, if spaceflight were much cheaper we would definitely launch more satellites. Currently you build an expensive satellite, because pretty much no matter how much you spend on it, it's still going to have a large part of it's expense dominated by the launch costs.
Get that price low enough though, and suddenly the whole "microsat" concept starts to make more sense and we can consider doing all sorts of interesting stuff (satellites which use point-to-point lasers for ground communications?)
No, readers block ads because they're capable of researching what they want on their own and don't want more crap foisted on them.
There is no such thing as a good advert to me. Adverts are inherently daft.
No the problem is advertisers will never not show you an ad. Anyone talking about demographic targeting never talks about this: they have no thresholds. They won't not show you an ad if they don't think you're interested, they'll instead move to the lowest common (usually seediest) denominator.
It's why everyone talking about Facebook ad-targeting has ultimately seemed laughable to me: the question as always has been "will Facebook not show you an ad if you don't match closely enough to an advertiser?"
Also known as the "micro-transactions aren't micro" problem.
I don't know - I am somewhat of the opinion that we're barking up the wrong tree with the FHS and DEB/RPM style packaging these days. Keeping everything and it's dependencies in nice discrete bundles seems somewhat more like what we should be aiming for, and then using copy-on-write semantics to keep space usage down.
Much easier for a user to conceptualize, and easier to virtualize and isolate as well - add some magic in an interface layer to let you upgrade groups of dependent libraries individually and we'd be there. ...
You know I should get on and implement this really.
It is reactionless. It does not use reaction mass (i.e. momentum) to produce thrust. This is a problem, because it violates conservation of momentum.
That is what a reactionless drive is - for example, technically a car is a kind of reactionless drive, in the sense that it does not expel reaction mass to produce forward momentum. But a car conserves momentum because it pushes on the ground behind it.
Textbook physics is textbook physics for a reason and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The people pushing the Emdrive have more then enough resources to produce this evidence, but have consistently failed to do so. The explanation for the Emdrive is not supported by current physics as is claimed. It is also not supported by anything you've said.
Part of science is carefully considering our hypotheses so we don't waste resources. In a number of cases, the Emdrive has now been built (since it's just a microwave waveguide) but no experiment which does suitable controls for it has ever been produced.
While I'm not of the crowd who believes the Emdrive's pushes are trying to scam anyone, they're not doing good science at the moment and I've not heard a suitable justification as to why we've never seen reduced pressure or no pressure results for operating the apparatus if they've been able to put one in a hermetically sealed box. I suspect, it's because you see exactly what you'd expect when you do - thrust decreases as you drop the pressure because the waveguide runs out of air to heat up.
The photon emission of that device can't possibly produce enough momentum to create the observed thrust. The device has not been tested in a vacuum chamber, and no, a hermetically sealed box full of air doesn't mean it wouldn't move (you can swim around in a closed box full of water, for example).
You might also ask why it's got such off-kilter marketing. It's a bad thruster, but implied it would be great at levitating something that didn't accelerate? Why is that not the headline element - reactionlessly applying a force to something with just energy (i.e. pretty much an antigravity device).
And at the ad hominem point I stop arguing with an AC.
And again, you might to review the laws on this matter because it has always been legal to do this. If an American is about to fly a jetliner into a building, well guess what, it's actually legal to blow it out of the sky with military forces.
The correct question - not being addressed, and notably, which Rand Paul - in his capacity as a senator - is not introducing any legislation to deal with - is what Due Process should be for the use of this power.
Instead he's filibustering that White House won't say they can't do this - which is the right thing for them to say, because the answer is, yes they can. If they say they won't then next up on Fox News we get "Obama won't stop a dirty bomb by domestic muslims using any means! Are you at risk?"
Replace "shouldn't" with "wouldn't" and I agree. That's exactly the thing - a drone is just a remote operated jet.
If we were discussing a device which would acquire and fire on targets completely autonomously, then there'd be something worth talking about it.
It seems apparent that Rand Paul, and many other Americans, don't actually understand what the drones actually are or how they work. The drones are no different to when the US uses cruise missiles launched from warships, or manned warplanes, or CIA wetwork teams to kill people in foreign countries. They're still controlled by the military, flown by actual operators.
There isn't some secret army of robots that Obama unilaterally controls which no one can stop. The only different thing which has happened is that the drones make doing something which tends to annoy other nations way easier since you don't run the risk of political blowback from a downed pilot in a foreign country.
More importantly, the real issue for people is trying to get some long-term corporate/government buy-in to space exploration. If there were strategic or material interests in space, then the cost of doing anything there would plummet. It's why people are so excited by the asteroid mining enterprises - resources aside, if we can make space actively profitable then science and exploration there is going to get very well-funded.
We navigate through the asteroid belt every time we go to Mars. The asteroid belt is a not a dense field of rock. The chances of a probe running into an asteroid are estimated at being 1 in a billion.
Probably not that unreasonable if we had decent surface maps - which is really why we need an orbiter.
Even double-parity RAID isn't worth it with consumer drives. You'll find out you lose multiple disks due to point failures too easily. RAID-Z2 or bust IMO.
Unlikely. Russia's ideal that it would be Europe's energy provider was rapidly overshadowed by it cutting off gas supply to the Ukraine in winter when they wanted to put the squeeze on them for contract re-negotiation - that *was* strictly business. People who hold no particular ill-will to Japan aren't the problem - they're apathetic. The people with strong opinions - who do remember these things (or simply studied history and pay attention to Japanese politics) - are the ones who'll end up shaping what policy looks like.
And in a situation where you're creating a very serious, fundamental dependency, that's going to turn nasty easily.
From the most practical point of view the SSL "patch" one of their maintainers did was pretty damaging, years of trivially breakable certificates because some idiot doesn't like compiler warnings wasn't great for the reputation of Linux as secure, it didn't do much for the many eyes idea either.
That was a bug in Debian and Debian derived versions. It didn't harm upstream. It was a silly bug, but it wasn't due to arrogance unlike OP was asserting.
Also wasn't that bug a good educational exercise in why code commenting is important? It was perfectly fine practice in the specific implementation, but nothing described what it actually did in the code so someone naively removed it.
Alternatively, decommissioning that reactor and replacing it with a more modern intrinsically safe design. The fundamental issue remained that the reactor needed active cooling to be safely shutdown.
Of course there's also other things: for example, designing the generators so they were hermetically sealed against water, and could have air intakes deployed to an arbitrary height for example. There wouldn't have been a problem then, since the water inundation wouldn't have stopped them from being powered up.