"Once both sides of a conflict start playing with nukes, even if it starts out with small, tactical, targeted nukes, the other side will too, and whichever side is losing will be tempted to scale up, "
Even if the conflict is with a non-nuclear country, or one with no long-distance delivery technology, there is a fear that a contained strike, say the US blasting an ISIS underground redoubt, would 'normalize' nuclear warfare in the future.
Not to mention that if the fallout is encountered by even one citizen of another nuclear state, let alone an embassy or crosses a border into a nuclear armed country, they may well consider that an attack and retaliate. Nuking Daesh should be safe-ish in that one regard, but even there you have Israel (still denying they have nukes), would they show restraint if, say, fallout from a Russian nuke contaminated their northern territories? How would Turkey, a member of NATO, respond if their country was irradiated? If a Chinese embassy was rendered uninhabitable by fallout, what would they do?
Best to leave that can of radioactive worms unopened.
I work for a large hosting/datacenter ISP, and most of the work on the equipment in the datacenters is done remotely. All we really need on-site is some semi-competent remote hands to unbox, rack, and plug in the various pieces of gear into the racks, some security guards to keep the riff-raff out and escort customers into/out of their cages, cleaning staff to keep the dust and debris down, and maybe an onsite engineer who knows all the power, network, and cooling setups enough to fix them when they break, though usually even that last position is remote. The remote-hands folk do all the physical work. Everything else is done by contractors or people working in an office somewhere -- I'd say about 90% of the engineering/admin work is done this way. So a massive datacenter, once it's operational and filled with customers, doesn't usually have more than a dozen or two local employees. There are some exceptions, of course -- a high-churn center will need more people for escort and remote hands, and some centers are completely unmanned, just a locked room or building that's only visited when things go really wrong. If you want jobs, insist they buy office space for their techs and engineers locally, forget about the datacenter.
Calling this Bainite is confusing, as the time/temperature charts show that you only really get bainite when you hold at above 400C after quenching from above critical temperatures -- which does not match the described process. I suspect it's not really bainite, but some sort of martensite/ferrite/pearlite mix. When making knives with a bainite structure, the resulting blades, usually from a high carbon tool steel such as L6, are very springy, and do not exhibit plastic deformation before breaking (i.e. they do not take a set when bent, and tend to break before taking a set unless taken to an extreme or heavily tempered). That said, it sounds like a great step forward for sheet metal working.
50 kilometers above the surface the temperature and pressure are earth-normal. Huge dirigibles using oxygen and nitrogen would float in the denser co2 atmosphere.
Sure, but what are you going to make your drigibles out of? There's only two sources of nonvolatile raw materials on Venus, and if it's not to be found in Venus's atmosphere, you're either going to have to import from Earth (or elsewhere in the System) or go down to the surface and mine it. The first is prohibitively expensive just in terms of energy costs, and the second is undoable using current technology.
The idea of a colony is to be self-sufficient enough to be able to establish an settlement and expand according to your needs. We'll need some significant technological development before that's even possible on Venus, but Mars and/or the Moon seem doable with just extending current engineering capabilities.
Still no support for hd satellite feeds. When the new high speed internet connection arrives in a few weeks, I think I'll just switch to downloads-only for tv watching, and scuttle the dish.
I wonder if this sort of thing is getting more common. We've been seeing a lot of fiber breaks, attributed variously to "rodent chew," "car striking utility pole," and "wind damage," but all in a relatively small area for one set of connections, and I've heard of similar coincidental clusters of breaks in other areas. Nobody wants the bad press of admitting to sabotage, and unless its something obvious like a cut armored cable, its easy to attribute it to some random accident. Or I could just be paranoid, but that is what they pay me for.
" For instance, I am not a Texas taxpayer. I pay no taxes to Texas. "
Actually, Texas gets more in Federal spending money than they contribute via taxes, about $1.40 for each tax dollar paid. So even if you're not a Texas, you pay taxes that are spent there.
Well, the ISS is actually doing science, which is normally quite boring. Hundreds of science projects are being done all the time. Effects of microgravity on humans, plants, insects, small mammals, bacteria. How do make mundane gizmos work in microgravity and vacuum. How to build and maintain things in orbit. Growing crystals in microgravity. Nothing earth shaking, but this is the foundation work on which we will build the future "headline worthy results." We got to the moon using technology now nearly 50 years old, but we couldn't stay. The same technology launched the first space station, but again we couldn't stay. Some day, despite the nay-sayers and budget-obliterators, we'll get to space, if not via government funding, then through private funding -- with over 1,500 billionaires and the number growing every yesr, sooner or later one of them will fund a headline worthy result. But they can't until the basics of how to survive and prosper in space are known, so now we're in the boring part where we figure it all out.
We haven't: if you drive around Amish/Mennonite areas, you have to share the road with horse driven buggies and carts on a regular basis.
Most big cities also have horse-driven buggies for the tourists and romantics; New York, Philly, Chicago I've seen myself; I'm pretty sure most major cities do nowadays.
So we didn't get them off the road, we just relegated them to an ever-decreasing role in transportation.
Should it happen, I'd donate all but what I need to live off the interest with a life of luxury (say ~$10million, probably less) -- in exchange for the usual board positions if that's what I'm interested in at the time. It's what several billionaires have promised to do upon their deaths -- instead of passing the massive wealth and all its negatives to their heirs, donate it except for a few million for them to live off of if needed.
If you don't want the hassle, get it over to someone who needs it; if you want to maintain control, insist on a board position as part of the deal.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bill Suttons "The Terriffic Centrifrugal Still" which addresses your microgravity distillation questions and soothes your fears about the availability of booze in space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Crucible 422 steel is a high alloy steel, which while expensive, looks like it should sell for about the same as some of the high-end knife steels, which go for about $.06/gm retail. Even if the price didn't go up with demand, which is practically an axiom of economics, that's a pretty significant difference. We'd probably switch to titanium or zirconium alloys first, or even tungsten, they all have very high melting points, plus have known reserves and stockpiles, and are relatively common, and while more expensive than stainless would be much less so than a hafnium based one.
I belive his statement may well have continued "...or they'll shoot you." Or, at the very least, arrest, harass, and/or make your life difficult for daring to oppose them in any way.
Oh, that. All that red dust? That's iron oxide. Virtually every bit of surface rock is an oxide of some sort on Mars, mostly silicates (sillicon and oxygen). Its common knowledge, I thought. I misunderstood your comment, that's all.
As I understand it, while there's oxygen aplenty bound up in the soil, and some carbon dioxide just lying there frozen on the ground, and even water if you look under the surface, there's a serious nitrogen deficiency. 78% of our atmosphere is nitrogen, and it's one of the building blocks of life, not to mention it's what makes it thick enough to breathe, but Mars's atmosphere only has about 2% nitrogen, and that's pretty much a vacuum by earth standards anyway. There's some fossilized fixed nitrogen in the soil, but most of it blew away in the solar wind long ago, and its not coming back unless someone finds a comet of frozen N2 and crashes it into the red planet. WIthout it, you're just not getting a viable biosphere.
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
on
Recycling Is Dying
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· Score: 1
Mine's free, and cleaner, but if you're trying to recycle, get there early in the morning on Tuesday. After that, the recycling containers are overflowing. According to at least one dump worker I talked to when I had a load of cardboard to recycle, everything but the metals and ewaste, which they can sell, just gets put in the landfill anyway, nobody is buying unsorted glass, unsorted and contaminated paper, or unsorted plastic.
Well, yes, this is a "Hollywood Terrorist Plot" after all. If something like this happened IRL, said terrorist's organization would be unable to provide the electoral college members (I'm assuming "no campaign effort" includes no affiliated political party that would have such electors pre-selected.) The state governments would select and instruct the electors, local laws to the contrary be damned, to vote for one of the main candidates, and in the end the gathered electors would decide amongst themselves who should be president instead. There is no federal law requiring the elector to vote as "pledged," so there is no Constitutional or even Federal barrier to this, and given the scenario, most likely even the local laws would be suspended to allow the electors to vote accordingly. Of course, the scenario is ridiculous, even if we did get a thoroughly-hacked election somehow, I suspect all that would happen is the results thrown out, and a new election held using traditional tools held a few weeks later.
Or, given its the government we're talking about, and a classified project to boot, they're lying about the rocket motor and/or fuel. If it seems anachronistic and unlikely that they'd use it, Occam's Razor suggests that perhaps they aren't.
And it's important to note that Peter's Church has sold all the real estate and treasures it owns, so that the revenue can be used to help the poor, and support all the Christians who have also sold all their possessions and so have nowhere to live. Oh, wait, in the real world the Catholic church has, to this day, vast real estate and other assets. Perhaps they should lead by example.
If a church wants non-profit status, they should need to separate the religious elements from the charity. Oh, your small-town church with a pastor who has four different congregations he moves between has nothing to worry about, but if a megachurch can afford a huge all-glass cathedral, $ multi-million salaries for the charismatic preacher begging for more donations, and toys like private jets and limos, nope, that's a for-profit enterprise, even if you cook the books so there's no money left over at the end of the day.
Yeah, I mean seriously, if you're going to cheat, at least be creative about it, like that shoe-based roulette cheaters they found using a camera, computer analysis, and a vibrator in a couple of guys' shoes. Use one foot to show the move, receive the next move on the other. Or have an accomplice in the audience, and some sort of signal code. But hiding a cell in the men's room? That shows both lack of integrity and lack of imagination, as well as lack of talent and intelligence.
Speaking as a colorblind man, both red-green and, to a lesser extent, blue-yellow, even with a shot to the eyeball (presumably there'd be anesthesia involved) I'd be interested. I've always wondered what the world looked like to others, when I can only really see three colors in a rainbow.
Slashdot Mirror
"Once both sides of a conflict start playing with nukes, even if it starts out with small, tactical, targeted nukes, the other side will too, and whichever side is losing will be tempted to scale up, "
Even if the conflict is with a non-nuclear country, or one with no long-distance delivery technology, there is a fear that a contained strike, say the US blasting an ISIS underground redoubt, would 'normalize' nuclear warfare in the future.
Not to mention that if the fallout is encountered by even one citizen of another nuclear state, let alone an embassy or crosses a border into a nuclear armed country, they may well consider that an attack and retaliate. Nuking Daesh should be safe-ish in that one regard, but even there you have Israel (still denying they have nukes), would they show restraint if, say, fallout from a Russian nuke contaminated their northern territories? How would Turkey, a member of NATO, respond if their country was irradiated? If a Chinese embassy was rendered uninhabitable by fallout, what would they do? Best to leave that can of radioactive worms unopened.
I work for a large hosting/datacenter ISP, and most of the work on the equipment in the datacenters is done remotely. All we really need on-site is some semi-competent remote hands to unbox, rack, and plug in the various pieces of gear into the racks, some security guards to keep the riff-raff out and escort customers into/out of their cages, cleaning staff to keep the dust and debris down, and maybe an onsite engineer who knows all the power, network, and cooling setups enough to fix them when they break, though usually even that last position is remote. The remote-hands folk do all the physical work. Everything else is done by contractors or people working in an office somewhere -- I'd say about 90% of the engineering/admin work is done this way. So a massive datacenter, once it's operational and filled with customers, doesn't usually have more than a dozen or two local employees. There are some exceptions, of course -- a high-churn center will need more people for escort and remote hands, and some centers are completely unmanned, just a locked room or building that's only visited when things go really wrong. If you want jobs, insist they buy office space for their techs and engineers locally, forget about the datacenter.
Calling this Bainite is confusing, as the time/temperature charts show that you only really get bainite when you hold at above 400C after quenching from above critical temperatures -- which does not match the described process. I suspect it's not really bainite, but some sort of martensite/ferrite/pearlite mix. When making knives with a bainite structure, the resulting blades, usually from a high carbon tool steel such as L6, are very springy, and do not exhibit plastic deformation before breaking (i.e. they do not take a set when bent, and tend to break before taking a set unless taken to an extreme or heavily tempered). That said, it sounds like a great step forward for sheet metal working.
50 kilometers above the surface the temperature and pressure are earth-normal. Huge dirigibles using oxygen and nitrogen would float in the denser co2 atmosphere.
Sure, but what are you going to make your drigibles out of? There's only two sources of nonvolatile raw materials on Venus, and if it's not to be found in Venus's atmosphere, you're either going to have to import from Earth (or elsewhere in the System) or go down to the surface and mine it. The first is prohibitively expensive just in terms of energy costs, and the second is undoable using current technology. The idea of a colony is to be self-sufficient enough to be able to establish an settlement and expand according to your needs. We'll need some significant technological development before that's even possible on Venus, but Mars and/or the Moon seem doable with just extending current engineering capabilities.
Still no support for hd satellite feeds. When the new high speed internet connection arrives in a few weeks, I think I'll just switch to downloads-only for tv watching, and scuttle the dish.
I wonder if this sort of thing is getting more common. We've been seeing a lot of fiber breaks, attributed variously to "rodent chew," "car striking utility pole," and "wind damage," but all in a relatively small area for one set of connections, and I've heard of similar coincidental clusters of breaks in other areas. Nobody wants the bad press of admitting to sabotage, and unless its something obvious like a cut armored cable, its easy to attribute it to some random accident. Or I could just be paranoid, but that is what they pay me for.
" For instance, I am not a Texas taxpayer. I pay no taxes to Texas. " Actually, Texas gets more in Federal spending money than they contribute via taxes, about $1.40 for each tax dollar paid. So even if you're not a Texas, you pay taxes that are spent there.
Well, the ISS is actually doing science, which is normally quite boring. Hundreds of science projects are being done all the time. Effects of microgravity on humans, plants, insects, small mammals, bacteria. How do make mundane gizmos work in microgravity and vacuum. How to build and maintain things in orbit. Growing crystals in microgravity. Nothing earth shaking, but this is the foundation work on which we will build the future "headline worthy results." We got to the moon using technology now nearly 50 years old, but we couldn't stay. The same technology launched the first space station, but again we couldn't stay. Some day, despite the nay-sayers and budget-obliterators, we'll get to space, if not via government funding, then through private funding -- with over 1,500 billionaires and the number growing every yesr, sooner or later one of them will fund a headline worthy result. But they can't until the basics of how to survive and prosper in space are known, so now we're in the boring part where we figure it all out.
We haven't: if you drive around Amish/Mennonite areas, you have to share the road with horse driven buggies and carts on a regular basis. Most big cities also have horse-driven buggies for the tourists and romantics; New York, Philly, Chicago I've seen myself; I'm pretty sure most major cities do nowadays. So we didn't get them off the road, we just relegated them to an ever-decreasing role in transportation.
Should it happen, I'd donate all but what I need to live off the interest with a life of luxury (say ~$10million, probably less) -- in exchange for the usual board positions if that's what I'm interested in at the time. It's what several billionaires have promised to do upon their deaths -- instead of passing the massive wealth and all its negatives to their heirs, donate it except for a few million for them to live off of if needed. If you don't want the hassle, get it over to someone who needs it; if you want to maintain control, insist on a board position as part of the deal.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bill Suttons "The Terriffic Centrifrugal Still" which addresses your microgravity distillation questions and soothes your fears about the availability of booze in space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Crucible 422 steel is a high alloy steel, which while expensive, looks like it should sell for about the same as some of the high-end knife steels, which go for about $.06/gm retail. Even if the price didn't go up with demand, which is practically an axiom of economics, that's a pretty significant difference. We'd probably switch to titanium or zirconium alloys first, or even tungsten, they all have very high melting points, plus have known reserves and stockpiles, and are relatively common, and while more expensive than stainless would be much less so than a hafnium based one.
I belive his statement may well have continued "...or they'll shoot you." Or, at the very least, arrest, harass, and/or make your life difficult for daring to oppose them in any way.
Oh, that. All that red dust? That's iron oxide. Virtually every bit of surface rock is an oxide of some sort on Mars, mostly silicates (sillicon and oxygen). Its common knowledge, I thought. I misunderstood your comment, that's all.
No, not oxygen, but nitrogen. There's some, but not enough to be useful: https://www.nasa.gov/content/g...
I'm just amused because this "current" increase in energy output actually happened about 7,800 years ago, and we're just now getting the news.
As I understand it, while there's oxygen aplenty bound up in the soil, and some carbon dioxide just lying there frozen on the ground, and even water if you look under the surface, there's a serious nitrogen deficiency. 78% of our atmosphere is nitrogen, and it's one of the building blocks of life, not to mention it's what makes it thick enough to breathe, but Mars's atmosphere only has about 2% nitrogen, and that's pretty much a vacuum by earth standards anyway. There's some fossilized fixed nitrogen in the soil, but most of it blew away in the solar wind long ago, and its not coming back unless someone finds a comet of frozen N2 and crashes it into the red planet. WIthout it, you're just not getting a viable biosphere.
Mine's free, and cleaner, but if you're trying to recycle, get there early in the morning on Tuesday. After that, the recycling containers are overflowing. According to at least one dump worker I talked to when I had a load of cardboard to recycle, everything but the metals and ewaste, which they can sell, just gets put in the landfill anyway, nobody is buying unsorted glass, unsorted and contaminated paper, or unsorted plastic.
Well, yes, this is a "Hollywood Terrorist Plot" after all. If something like this happened IRL, said terrorist's organization would be unable to provide the electoral college members (I'm assuming "no campaign effort" includes no affiliated political party that would have such electors pre-selected.) The state governments would select and instruct the electors, local laws to the contrary be damned, to vote for one of the main candidates, and in the end the gathered electors would decide amongst themselves who should be president instead. There is no federal law requiring the elector to vote as "pledged," so there is no Constitutional or even Federal barrier to this, and given the scenario, most likely even the local laws would be suspended to allow the electors to vote accordingly. Of course, the scenario is ridiculous, even if we did get a thoroughly-hacked election somehow, I suspect all that would happen is the results thrown out, and a new election held using traditional tools held a few weeks later.
Or, given its the government we're talking about, and a classified project to boot, they're lying about the rocket motor and/or fuel. If it seems anachronistic and unlikely that they'd use it, Occam's Razor suggests that perhaps they aren't.
And it's important to note that Peter's Church has sold all the real estate and treasures it owns, so that the revenue can be used to help the poor, and support all the Christians who have also sold all their possessions and so have nowhere to live. Oh, wait, in the real world the Catholic church has, to this day, vast real estate and other assets. Perhaps they should lead by example.
What's good about the chains? Solid gold, man, solid gold chains. Just like Plato wanted.
If a church wants non-profit status, they should need to separate the religious elements from the charity. Oh, your small-town church with a pastor who has four different congregations he moves between has nothing to worry about, but if a megachurch can afford a huge all-glass cathedral, $ multi-million salaries for the charismatic preacher begging for more donations, and toys like private jets and limos, nope, that's a for-profit enterprise, even if you cook the books so there's no money left over at the end of the day.
Yeah, I mean seriously, if you're going to cheat, at least be creative about it, like that shoe-based roulette cheaters they found using a camera, computer analysis, and a vibrator in a couple of guys' shoes. Use one foot to show the move, receive the next move on the other. Or have an accomplice in the audience, and some sort of signal code. But hiding a cell in the men's room? That shows both lack of integrity and lack of imagination, as well as lack of talent and intelligence.
Speaking as a colorblind man, both red-green and, to a lesser extent, blue-yellow, even with a shot to the eyeball (presumably there'd be anesthesia involved) I'd be interested. I've always wondered what the world looked like to others, when I can only really see three colors in a rainbow.