I don't know. Surely at this point, given our robotic technology and the distance to the moon, we really should be arranging for more sample return missions (seeing as how there's also huge interest in doing the same thing from Mars and other bodies around the sol system).
Happens with Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney. People bought cheap houses in the adjacent suburb, didn't know the reactor was there and are now opposing it's existence (it's a big supplier of radioisotopes for medicine in Oceania and South East Asia).
The principle reason they couldn't use an actual 747 to test the "car being blown over by a jet engine" they said was because of the insurance companies - they weren't going to be allowed anywhere near a real a plane since *any* damage could be billed up to the replacement cost of a whole plane.
Fortunately for that one, the "myth" actually happened a few months after they'd shot it in Thailand I think.
Except - and I'd be willing to bet there's a decent chance this happened - if you aim a cannonball wrong, it's possible to initially skip it off the ground before the target, and then miss entirely as the ball goes sailing over from the deflection. What looks like a shot level with the ground ends up going over a much higher target because you've deflected it.
Could be any number of reasons - equipment failure or whatever. I'd wager it's much more problematic that the bomb range backstop couldn't stop the projectile and was aimed such that a stray headed into a populated area.
Actually that's pretty much what you can expect to happen if it's viable. You'll still end up owning a hybrid of some sort, since being able to warm up the fuel-cell will still be necessary, and chances are a reserve battery of some sort would be needed to deal with the lag of the fuel cell in ramping it's output up and down to match demand (Toyota has a lot of literature on this, it's pretty much the real reason they developed the technology for the Prius at all - they realized they needed the electric motors and batteries no matter what happened).
The big difference is you just build series hybrid, can use a much smaller battery, and the whole vehicle becomes staggeringly more efficient.
This is still significant technology. Solid-oxide fuel cells are on the order of 80%+ efficient. Combined with an electric motor they handily beat any internal combustion engine you might fit in a car. They have less moving parts, they're basically silent to operate. It's all the benefits of hydrocarbon fuel without the downsides (sans CO2, but even that uses less).
Since we're also talking a purely electrical connection, it means we can also think about modularizing the powertrain - i.e. power source and motive force can be effectively isolated, and the power source interchanged. For a move away from fossil fuels that's huge - if people can own vehicles which mean they can switch between short-haul batteries and long-haul hydrocarbon, that's almost a solved problem - since once the economics of batteries become favorable, market-forces will end up with people using them most of the time.
Not to mention, it would mean biofuels go back on the table - the power source of choice for long-haul travel, if short-haul only needs batteries.
This. Even though I don't want go to war with aliens (and it currently seems illogical to do so) I have no problem with funding dual-purpose research just in case.
We've only been a radio using civilization for about 150 years.
In that time, we've been steadily reducing our radio output, and haven't made really dedicated efforts to send messages. Up until just this moment, we haven't even really known where we should be looking or sending messages.
And for all we know, the "radio age" for a typical civilization may not last much beyond the time we currently have: maybe in 50 years time we discover a better technology, or start using hyperspace or any number of things - and all our attention turns to the new wireless medium for listening to the stars.
Or maybe we discover a new medium, and suddenly find all the chatter of all species of the universe. Who knows.
There's a scaling effect. Your supporting structures expands as a square while your mass expands as a cube. Somewhere, these two values have an optimum based on what your building materials are - but there's no reason you wouldn't get fairly large things, if they has put all their mass into big flat feet. Maybe they get so large because being big means you're *much* more lethal to smaller things with all that extra mass.
It's not exactly a question of "would we want to live there" - it's a question of "could something?"
None of the circulation problems for example would really be an issue if an organism had evolved to cope with them - no reason a system couldn't exist which prevented over-pressure to the head if it fell over.
We do it in synchotrons all the time - accelerate electrons around the ring, generating pretty much the full spectrum of EM up to X-Rays / Gamma Rays.
The space around the deflecting magnets can be considered as a "wire" since electrons are moving through it, and the bending process supplies the oscillation - i.e. AC current.
The "current" in a synchotron is essentially AC with a very strong DC bias (since you're pushing a ton of electrons in one-way through that wire).
However with broadcast TV I might stumble onto the big bang theory and leave it on a few minutes and find I enjoy it. Then I can go download the rest and watch it marathon style without commercials if I so choose.
Watch the first season then turn it off. It turned into the Sheldon Cooper show and is starting to ooze more and more estrogen that it needs to move to OWN channel. I always believed when a show starts introducing new characters it is time to end it.
Amy Farrah Fowler has easily been a huge improvement to the show, despite her somewhat rocky introduction.
Where they go to was the outside of the reactor structure.
So there is no cover. Standing in the open shooting works for exactly as long as they have ammo, and assumes they can suppress - a 180 degree or more arc of potential fire. They're at a fixed point, defending a fixed point. In the open.
And of note, you don't need to stop the shooters - just the cutters.
There's also an important psychological aspect here: terrorists generally don't suicide bomb infrastructure. They try to suicide bomb people. The 9/11 hijackers, the London subway bombers, Heathrow airport - all suicide attacks targeted at large groups of people.
We could speculate about a potential phased suicide attack with shaped charges, but that would be close to outright fantasy - trying to organize and move that many people around a nuclear power plant would fail when it hit any security response (and shaped charges are bad at being normal explosives) - and would depend on finding a large number of people willing to die without killing any "infidels".
And all this - it's worth noting - is just to breach the outer steel containment vessel. Inside that is a pile of robotics and the inner vessel and core elements. All of which is heavy duty, heavy metals. Fukushima blew up multiple times from hydrogen without breaching those cores.
Except for the small problem of sitting in plain view of security, making huge amounts of light while you actually try and cut through a steel reactor structure...of which penetrating it doesn't actually cause any damage to the reactor. Meanwhile, anyone with "soft" lead bullets is free to liberally apply them to relevant area.
Some higher up got the bright idea of merging the duplicate documents to save storage space. That was fine. Then they decided to expand it to eliminate entries that hadn't been accessed in 6 months or longer.
What the hell did they think was going to be the benefit of this? Saving tens of megabytes?
The average current necessary for external pacing ranges from about 50 to 100 milliamperes (mA); 100 mAs applied to an average chest with 50-ohm () resistance for 20 msec delivers 0.1 Joules (J). This is well below the 1-2 J required to cause an uncomfortable tingling sensation in the skin.
See how they account energy transfer(J), and not current by itself? And see how far away are the values of current, from the 1mA you're talking about?
Note also, how all the examples you're talking about, are discussing the medical uses for electrical stimulation, wherein they're highly concerned with not killing the patient?
The point was never "1 mA *will* kill you" the point was that even 1 mA, if it finds a current path through the heart muscle, can induce fibrillation.
Which you've been saying clearly can't happen because, there are medical uses for this in defibrillators?
Moreover, again, why limit the shock time to such a low number? 1 mA is not a lot of current. Amongst other things there's a serious danger someone would be shocked for considerably longer time then 20 milliseconds.
No, again, hydrogen bonding is not driven by magnetism.
You know why we don't talk about it being driven by gravity? Even though the particles have mass, exert gravitational attraction etc? Because it's a tiny, inconsequential aspect of the bonding. It would be incorrect to talk about the gravitational attraction when it plays a close to negligent role in day to day interactions of such a system.
This is the same reason, we don't talk about magnetism. It has as much relevance as gravity.
But it's good to see you finally started using a vaguely correct term to describe the situation.
The resistance of the human body can drop as low as a few tens of ohms if your skin is wet. 1 mA of current through the heart muscle does not take tens of thousands of volts. It depends on the resistance.
Pre-supposing that 300W/s is clearly the needed voltage is pulling a number out of your ass. If "clearly the voltage would be so high as to be dangerous itself" then what do you think is happening in the more common case of someone touching 240V live and getting a 60 mA shock?
The whole point here is that if one guy who's not planning to commit crimes can get at financial information, then anyone who is can too. The difference being, if they find it first, then they sure aren't going to tell anyone.
This isn't "defacing a web site" pain-in-the-ass stuff. This is real people's real finances being left, it would seem, trivially exposed for the world to take.
I can't help thinking how a real criminal would have proxied, and sold the code rather than published it, but to the FBI it's all the same.
The real issue most of the time in cases like this seems to be that someone is just trying something which "no way it works" and then all of sudden you're in and oh shit I'm not running Tor or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know. Surely at this point, given our robotic technology and the distance to the moon, we really should be arranging for more sample return missions (seeing as how there's also huge interest in doing the same thing from Mars and other bodies around the sol system).
Silicon tetrachloride isn't silicon.
This is like trying to say water is dangerous because it contains the same things as hydrogen peroxide.
Happens with Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney. People bought cheap houses in the adjacent suburb, didn't know the reactor was there and are now opposing it's existence (it's a big supplier of radioisotopes for medicine in Oceania and South East Asia).
It couldn't have been acetylene since that's stored in foam filled tanks.
The principle reason they couldn't use an actual 747 to test the "car being blown over by a jet engine" they said was because of the insurance companies - they weren't going to be allowed anywhere near a real a plane since *any* damage could be billed up to the replacement cost of a whole plane.
Fortunately for that one, the "myth" actually happened a few months after they'd shot it in Thailand I think.
Except - and I'd be willing to bet there's a decent chance this happened - if you aim a cannonball wrong, it's possible to initially skip it off the ground before the target, and then miss entirely as the ball goes sailing over from the deflection. What looks like a shot level with the ground ends up going over a much higher target because you've deflected it.
Could be any number of reasons - equipment failure or whatever. I'd wager it's much more problematic that the bomb range backstop couldn't stop the projectile and was aimed such that a stray headed into a populated area.
Actually that's pretty much what you can expect to happen if it's viable. You'll still end up owning a hybrid of some sort, since being able to warm up the fuel-cell will still be necessary, and chances are a reserve battery of some sort would be needed to deal with the lag of the fuel cell in ramping it's output up and down to match demand (Toyota has a lot of literature on this, it's pretty much the real reason they developed the technology for the Prius at all - they realized they needed the electric motors and batteries no matter what happened).
The big difference is you just build series hybrid, can use a much smaller battery, and the whole vehicle becomes staggeringly more efficient.
This is still significant technology. Solid-oxide fuel cells are on the order of 80%+ efficient. Combined with an electric motor they handily beat any internal combustion engine you might fit in a car. They have less moving parts, they're basically silent to operate. It's all the benefits of hydrocarbon fuel without the downsides (sans CO2, but even that uses less).
Since we're also talking a purely electrical connection, it means we can also think about modularizing the powertrain - i.e. power source and motive force can be effectively isolated, and the power source interchanged. For a move away from fossil fuels that's huge - if people can own vehicles which mean they can switch between short-haul batteries and long-haul hydrocarbon, that's almost a solved problem - since once the economics of batteries become favorable, market-forces will end up with people using them most of the time.
Not to mention, it would mean biofuels go back on the table - the power source of choice for long-haul travel, if short-haul only needs batteries.
This. Even though I don't want go to war with aliens (and it currently seems illogical to do so) I have no problem with funding dual-purpose research just in case.
We've only been a radio using civilization for about 150 years.
In that time, we've been steadily reducing our radio output, and haven't made really dedicated efforts to send messages. Up until just this moment, we haven't even really known where we should be looking or sending messages.
And for all we know, the "radio age" for a typical civilization may not last much beyond the time we currently have: maybe in 50 years time we discover a better technology, or start using hyperspace or any number of things - and all our attention turns to the new wireless medium for listening to the stars.
Or maybe we discover a new medium, and suddenly find all the chatter of all species of the universe. Who knows.
There's a scaling effect. Your supporting structures expands as a square while your mass expands as a cube. Somewhere, these two values have an optimum based on what your building materials are - but there's no reason you wouldn't get fairly large things, if they has put all their mass into big flat feet. Maybe they get so large because being big means you're *much* more lethal to smaller things with all that extra mass.
It's not exactly a question of "would we want to live there" - it's a question of "could something?"
None of the circulation problems for example would really be an issue if an organism had evolved to cope with them - no reason a system couldn't exist which prevented over-pressure to the head if it fell over.
But the orientation of the orbital plane around a star most probably IS randomly distributed. That's the point.
We do it in synchotrons all the time - accelerate electrons around the ring, generating pretty much the full spectrum of EM up to X-Rays / Gamma Rays.
The space around the deflecting magnets can be considered as a "wire" since electrons are moving through it, and the bending process supplies the oscillation - i.e. AC current.
The "current" in a synchotron is essentially AC with a very strong DC bias (since you're pushing a ton of electrons in one-way through that wire).
However with broadcast TV I might stumble onto the big bang theory and leave it on a few minutes and find I enjoy it. Then I can go download the rest and watch it marathon style without commercials if I so choose.
Watch the first season then turn it off. It turned into the Sheldon Cooper show and is starting to ooze more and more estrogen that it needs to move to OWN channel.
I always believed when a show starts introducing new characters it is time to end it.
Amy Farrah Fowler has easily been a huge improvement to the show, despite her somewhat rocky introduction.
This makes the assumption that you receive no advice on viewing from friends, forums, Facebook, services specific for this task etc.
Where they go to was the outside of the reactor structure.
So there is no cover. Standing in the open shooting works for exactly as long as they have ammo, and assumes they can suppress - a 180 degree or more arc of potential fire. They're at a fixed point, defending a fixed point. In the open.
And of note, you don't need to stop the shooters - just the cutters.
There's also an important psychological aspect here: terrorists generally don't suicide bomb infrastructure. They try to suicide bomb people. The 9/11 hijackers, the London subway bombers, Heathrow airport - all suicide attacks targeted at large groups of people.
We could speculate about a potential phased suicide attack with shaped charges, but that would be close to outright fantasy - trying to organize and move that many people around a nuclear power plant would fail when it hit any security response (and shaped charges are bad at being normal explosives) - and would depend on finding a large number of people willing to die without killing any "infidels".
And all this - it's worth noting - is just to breach the outer steel containment vessel. Inside that is a pile of robotics and the inner vessel and core elements. All of which is heavy duty, heavy metals. Fukushima blew up multiple times from hydrogen without breaching those cores.
Except for the small problem of sitting in plain view of security, making huge amounts of light while you actually try and cut through a steel reactor structure...of which penetrating it doesn't actually cause any damage to the reactor. Meanwhile, anyone with "soft" lead bullets is free to liberally apply them to relevant area.
Some higher up got the bright idea of merging the duplicate documents to save storage space. That was fine. Then they decided to expand it to eliminate entries that hadn't been accessed in 6 months or longer.
What the hell did they think was going to be the benefit of this? Saving tens of megabytes?
Transcribing from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/780639-overview#aw2aab6b3 , regarding an external pacemaker:
The average current necessary for external pacing ranges from about 50 to 100 milliamperes (mA); 100 mAs applied to an average chest with 50-ohm () resistance for 20 msec delivers 0.1 Joules (J). This is well below the 1-2 J required to cause an uncomfortable tingling sensation in the skin.
See how they account energy transfer(J), and not current by itself? And see how far away are the values of current, from the 1mA you're talking about?
Note also, how all the examples you're talking about, are discussing the medical uses for electrical stimulation, wherein they're highly concerned with not killing the patient?
The point was never "1 mA *will* kill you" the point was that even 1 mA, if it finds a current path through the heart muscle, can induce fibrillation.
Which you've been saying clearly can't happen because, there are medical uses for this in defibrillators?
Moreover, again, why limit the shock time to such a low number? 1 mA is not a lot of current. Amongst other things there's a serious danger someone would be shocked for considerably longer time then 20 milliseconds.
No, again, hydrogen bonding is not driven by magnetism.
You know why we don't talk about it being driven by gravity? Even though the particles have mass, exert gravitational attraction etc? Because it's a tiny, inconsequential aspect of the bonding. It would be incorrect to talk about the gravitational attraction when it plays a close to negligent role in day to day interactions of such a system.
This is the same reason, we don't talk about magnetism. It has as much relevance as gravity.
But it's good to see you finally started using a vaguely correct term to describe the situation.
No it doesn't at all.
The resistance of the human body can drop as low as a few tens of ohms if your skin is wet. 1 mA of current through the heart muscle does not take tens of thousands of volts. It depends on the resistance.
Pre-supposing that 300W/s is clearly the needed voltage is pulling a number out of your ass. If "clearly the voltage would be so high as to be dangerous itself" then what do you think is happening in the more common case of someone touching 240V live and getting a 60 mA shock?
This is stupid.
The whole point here is that if one guy who's not planning to commit crimes can get at financial information, then anyone who is can too. The difference being, if they find it first, then they sure aren't going to tell anyone.
This isn't "defacing a web site" pain-in-the-ass stuff. This is real people's real finances being left, it would seem, trivially exposed for the world to take.
I can't help thinking how a real criminal would have proxied, and sold the code rather than published it, but to the FBI it's all the same.
The real issue most of the time in cases like this seems to be that someone is just trying something which "no way it works" and then all of sudden you're in and oh shit I'm not running Tor or anything.
You could put a satellite in close orbit to the sun for the express purpose of beaming power towards the space probe, either with MASERs or LASERs.
The real question is whether there's enough gas density in outer space for a hypothetical space probe to also collect it's own reaction mass .
And of course whether all this could let us accelerate enough to do the really cool stuff like insert into Alpha Centauri orbit.