The woman was burned very badly, because McDonald's refused to lower the temperature of their coffee even after several concerned groups asked them too.
Refused to lower the temperature?! COFFEE IS BOILING HOT! You pour boiling water over ground coffee, drain the result into a cup, and hand the cup to the customer! That's the way it's been for at least a century: coffee is boiling hot. Complaing about coffee being really hot is like complaining about ice cream being freezing cold. "Oh, no! The ice cream was freezing cold and caused damage to my cheap dentures!"
Having your skin burned off isn't exactly something you expect from coffee at normal temperature.
It *is* something *I* expect, but then I'm at least slightly smarter than a brain-damaged monkey, and I have something called a 'sense of self-preservation'.
... then some jets or copters from a different base come and strafe them. Let's get real: No mob can long stand up to a modern army.
If the Dallas-Ft. Worth area decided to revolt, they could field an army stronger, smarter, more cohesive, with better communications, and with vastly better weapons than the Viet Cong. Short of an absolute scorched earth war, the US would have to unconditionally surrender the territory.
But then it isn't your guns that's doing the convincing or the defending.
Horseshit. The person at the sharp end of the sword fights, surrenders, or dies, and it's the sword that makes them do it.
It's the fact that the US military is not made of mindless automatons and malicious brutes... in other words, that we can trust the people in the military because they are us.
Horseshit. US soldiers will not hesitate to fire on Americans if ordered to do so, especially not if those Americans are armed and resolute. I suppose you think the Battle of Gettysburg is just another right-wing fantasy.
You can have your Second Amendment fantasies if you want, but please don't pretend they're relevant to the modern world.
The human race has not changed significantly since the Sack of Rome. The people and their governments have not become any less dangerous nor any more trustworthy. Anyone who thinks their town cannot be turned into a smoking ruin overnight is living in a fantasy world, a delusion that has recently become rather less common in NYC.
Actually its going to be a LONG time before anything usefull comes from this research. Gene's have nothing to do with diesese, it's the folding protiens derived from those genes that can make you sick, or cure a diesese.
Not entirely true. You can still remove genes, or swap them from related species, and see how lethal the new organism is in an animal host. This lets you create inert organisms for immunization, and focuses the protein structure work on the most important proteins.
If you are interested there is a spectacular book entitled _The_Big_Bang_Never_Happened_ that describes an alternate (and far more rational) cosmology...it posits that the universe is ruled by elecromagnetically active plasmas...
I read that book, and in my opinion it is completely full of shit. This is also the opinion of other actual scientists who have reviewed the book.
The author is intellectually dishonest: at one point he is discussing some electromagnetics simulations that have a spiral galaxy-like appearance, and saying how those support his cosmological electromagnetism theory. What he doesn't tell you is that the images are *cross sections* of tubular structures, and that the field strengths needed to create those structures are *enormous*.
If that BOOK were posted to USENET it would be UTTERLY INDISTINGUISHABLE from the other PHYSICS CRANKS.
Please tell me more about the "big fines" which await the unwary public. My research did not uncover any such problems.
If you transmit radiation in violation of goverment regulations, you can be fined, and if the radiation interferes with other equipment you can be liable for all losses suffered as well as punitive damages. If you interfere with something like a telephone microwave link or a radar, the losses can easily run into the millions of dollars *per hour*. If the interference is willful or reckless, you can even be sent to prison. If the interference is to medical equipment, you stand a good chance of being charged with murder (a lot of medical equipment is RF sensitive, and hospitals use a lot of wireless telemetry which might not be life critical but you won't be able to convince a jury of that).
Your advice regarding disassembling a piece of equipment, removing its integral antenna, and soldering on an SMA connector is poor. The engineer who designs such a piece of equipment is free to choose any impedance for the antenna and RF power amplifier. (Note for Slashdot audience: When the antenna is removable, it is conventional to use the standard 50 ohm impedance. There are numerous catalogs full of 50 ohm connectors, cables, filters, pads, amplifiers, detectors, etc. There's nothing magic about 50 ohms, it's a pure convenience issue. Like using RJ45s for Ethernet.) The design process is often easier, and the resulting circuit cheaper, if the engineer uses an electrically-convenient impedance instead of being a slave to 50 ohms. Your 50 ohm cable stands a good chance of creating an unacceptable VSWR (voltage standing wave ratio, a measure of the power being reflected back into the amplifier). This can destroy the amplifier or cause distortion, and distortion will get the FCC chasing you. At the very least, I'd cut the RF section off of one and hook it up to a good RF network analyzer and make sure the impedance is 50 ohms. (Network analyzers cost on the order of $1,000/month to rent, or $20k+ to buy, so this isn't a casual thing.)
It gets worse: when integral antennas are used, the engineer may design the amplifier to only work correctly when that antenna is connected. Since the antenna is permanently soldered to the amplifier, the engineer doesn't need to make the amplifier as robust, which saves money and design time. When a load with the wrong impedance is connected, such an amplifier can oscillate wildly at pretty much any frequency. A 2.4GHz amplifier could easily oscillate at any frequency from a few megahertz to 10GHz. In fact it is eminently possible for the oscillation to occur only during key up/down and quiet down at full power, so it might seem to work while spewing all sorts of RF garbage before and after the transmission slot. This sort of thing makes the FCC *very unhappy* and will earn you a visit from some rather humorless government inspectors.
It gets even worse: you are soldering a cable to a board that was not intended to have such a cable. The board may very well (in fact, probably does for cheap commodity equipment) have an electronic noise problem. The board itself is only a few inches wide, and thus is an inefficient antenna, but several feet of extra cable can make a good dipole and cause the noise to radiate. If I was building a couple of these for my personal use I wouldn't worry too much, but if I was doing it for commercial purposes I'd definitely recertify the board + new cable combination (which costs thousands of dollars).
I would recommend a course of study in practical radio circuit design, and a thorough review of government RF regulations, before you give further advice about soldering random cables to random undocumented wideband amplifiers.
OK, so following your own instructions, you will now "shut the fuck up" like the "sack of shit" that you are, right?
That's all you have to say? You need to work on your flaming skills.;-)
Because your admitted refusal to post your real email address here puts you in the same boat with me, buddy.
It does not. I acknowledge that there is a spam problem, I take measures not to increase my exposure to that problem, and I support strong countermeasures a la MAPS. You claim that there is no problem and reject countermeasures, yet take action to avoid unwanted mail, and that is hypocrisy.
I think you fail to appreciate the fact that, were it not for the tireless work of the anti-spammers, the Internet would be saturated with spam. I mean that literally. Even if your "secret" email account didn't get any spam, you'd get no mail at all if projects like MAPS didn't exist. The spammers are relentless and oblivious to the amount of destruction they cause. History has proven that they will use all bandwidth that is made available to them.
Your email account is only useful because thousands of server administrators do hours of thankless work on your behalf. It's not always pleasant, and there is sometimes collateral damage, but the scorched earth approach is the only thing keeping the Internet usable.
What if there is the REVERSE, and instead of giving a Black Hole list, they give a Star list.... Being there something of 100 million domains registered (please correct this), and using a hash of it ti store a valid domain, it would take 400MB, adding some cpu nice sorting stuff say it takes 1GB.
Spam filtering is usually done by IP address. Using one bit per IP address would take only 512MB of storage. (For IPv4 at least. IPv6 would be harder.)
If the whitelist became popular enough, you could get people to pay for having their IPs listed. Say $1.00 for each IP address, perhaps with discounts for quantity. The fee would be dirt cheap compared to the cost of operating an email server, so I don't think anyone could complain. And since it's a real transaction, you can have an extremely strong contract that they can't sue you about. Literally can't sue: you could make their sole recourse be arbitration with an arbitrator and in a jurisdiction of your choice.
My ISP does not use MAPS and guess what? I am not flooded with spam. Not one bit. You do not need MAPS to avoid spam.
Disclaimer: this is a flame, boys and girls. Those of you with weak stomachs please avert your eyes.
Either post your non-spamproofed email address in a message here on Slashdot or shut the fuck up. Having a public email address is an absolute necessity for those of us who actually want to meet new people on the Internet. As opposed to those sacks of shit that only want to have a secret little communications club.
The 'net email system was designed to let anyone communicate with anyone else. The problem is that spammers abuse that facility to drown out real communications with their pustulent dreck.
If you actually had more than half a handful of guts in your worthless hide, you'd post your email address here and personally experience being bombarded with crapola by the spammers. If you really have nothing to fear from spam, post your email address. Failure to do so will be considered conclusive proof that you are a repulsive crock of festering goat entrails whose sole accomplishment in their worthless life is shilling for spammers.
Either walk the walk or get the hell off my Internet.
P.S. You'll notice I no longer list an email address for this account. The resulting spam was, and still is, overwhelming. Thank $deity for throw-away Hotmail accounts...
We now conclude your flame. If this had been a polite comment, you would not have felt an overwhelming urge to select -1, Troll.
I find that sad, because it means that all sorts of really interesting thoughts and ideas just get ignored, simply because the people who have come up with them aren't very good at PR.
Pick any criterion, and many people will be poor at it. Some people can't promote their ideas. Some people catch colds easily. Some people are ugly. Et cetera.
As I said in my original comment, I have resigned myself to not being able to change this, because society has developed another less-than-wonderful trait: people do not like to think for themselves.
More to the point, too many people have lost their curiosity. They're perfectly able and willing to do the thinking they need to survive, but they tend not to stick their noses into new subjects.
It is perfectly possible to publicly-fund science in a free-market economy without forcing scientists to resort to PR shenanigans such as this.
Shenanigan? The article was a fairly accurate overview of the state of the art.
In many ways, it was a reward for the people that were funding it: the legislators and their constituents got to see what their money had bought. Sure, there needs to be a 500 page technical report for the program reviewers, but it's good for the public who funded it to see something they could understand.
I should point out that your trolling here becomes painfully obvious, as you have used an unrelated argument (free-market vs command economies) to attempt to justify your first position (the requirement for good PR in modern society).
I don't troll. The conclusion is sound: if the project requires funding that only a nation as a whole can provide, and public promotion is not allowed, then the only way to fund it is by unilateral centralized planning. Public promotion and discussion is the heart of free markets and democracies. By definition, the removal of PR produces either anarchy or centralized control (or something in between).
There is indeed little commercial incentive to invest in fusion research, because there is no expectation of return on investment within a reasonable timeframe, and yes, publicly-funded research takes up the slack. But this is a good thing, and precisely why we need publicly-funded science in the first place: to fund things that may be vitally important in the future, but which corporate R&D departments won't touch with a bargepole.
You have to be careful about publicly funded projects. Doing them in secret -- or so poorly publicized that they might as well be secret -- is a very bad thing. If you look at the money that large government contractors get, they tend to direct most of it away from the actual work. E.g., 20% might be taken right off the top for lobbying, 50% for overhead, 10% for administration, etc. I've personally seen US $10M R&D contracts on which most of the money was directed away from the technical effort, and the technical people were not particularly competent. The latter is actually preferred, because if the project cannot be completed, a follow-on contract can be bid in the future for another $10M. Lather, rinse, repeat. High public visibility is a good thing.
Actually, the total stored energy of large reactors like JET (or the proposed ITER) is quite large.
Sort of. I haven't looked at the actual numbers, but I guesstimate that a fusion plant and a coal-fired power plant of the same power output have similar prompt stored energy (magnetics/plasma vs. rotating mass/steam). So a fusion incident isn't an evacuate-the-city type problem. On the other hand, a fission plant incident can easily release enough energy to blast the reactor to smithereens, orders of magnitude more energy than a fusion incident, and the resulting smithereens are dangerous for thousands of years.
It's just that I've worked in the fission industry and know how much non-worst-case designing and plain old finger crossing goes on. Fission reactors are very safe, but it's impossible to build a completely safe one. I was just wondering what the worst case was for fusion.
They're completely different. Fission is a bitch because there are *tons* of material involved, and the material gets activated and keeps producing power for *days* after shutdown. Even if you scram a fission core, you still have to supply cooling for a long time. And, as a few reactor operators have learned to their lasting horror, dropping all the control rods in at once can momentarily raise the chain reaction rate enough to slag the core.
On the other hand, fusion reactors require elaborate computer-controlled magnets to sustain the reaction. The computer can turn the magnets off in a controlled fashion within milliseconds, after which power output goes to zero. If the computer fails to respond, you can always do an uncontrolled shutdown by tripping the circuit breakers that power the magnets. Uncontrolled shutdowns damage the reactor, though, which is expensive and they'll try to avoid it.
I'm not sure how much mass is heated to 100 million degrees C in a fusion reactor, but it can't be more than a few kilograms, so the actual thermal energy is rather low and easily dissipated (compared to the many tons of hot material in a fission reactor).
What is the worst-case failure? The computer failing to do a controlled shutdown, the operators failing to do an uncontrolled shutdown, and total cooling failure. In this case, either the reactor will heat up until something breaks and lets in air which quenches the reaction, or materials in the reactor will vaporise and quench the reaction. Either way it's bad for the reactor, but the safety hazard is minimal.
Some designs call for 'waterfalls' of molten lithium or sodium down the walls of the reactor. The molten metal will serve as a coolant, and will be transmuted into tritium to fuel the reactor. An incident that released large amounts of molten metal -- especially in the presence of water -- would make one hell of a fire or explosion, and might also create a cloud of caustic smoke. These types will therefore need a containment vessel similar to a fission reactor.
Overall, fusion is much safer, simply because you can flip and switch and turn off the reaction.
If the energy produced by fusion exceeds the cost of producing it (collection and production of fuel, maintenance of energy plant, cleanup and pollution) then we will essentially have a scenario where energy production can accelerate to the point where we can theoretically have all the energy we want, dirt cheap.
Dream on. Fusion plants will be giagantic, complex, expensive pieces of equipment, and will require constant expensive maintenance and tending. The conversion and trasmission systems will remain as expensive as they are today. Take it from an engineer: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The important question is a strategic one: "What is the constrained resource?"
The answer for petrofuels is "limited subterranean reserves of petrogunk". The answer for fusion is "human effort". Petrofuels can only supply the energy needs of the human race for a few hundred years, tops, but fusion will last for at least tens of thousands of years. That's the real gift of fusion: it replaces the hard problem of how to find scarce petrogunk with the easy problem of how to devote a tiny fraction of your population to tending the fusion plants.
There are political ramifications: a considerable amount of suffering comes from the fact that a few tyrannical governments control large reserves of petrofuels. With fusion, OPEC becomes irrelevant, the Saudi oil billionaires turn back into tin pot tyrants, and the rest of the world can tell them to go straight to hell. Nations and even cities will be able to provide their own energy locally. Energy would be a local issue, and not a global military adventure. (No doubt some would manage to screw it up. A fusion-powered California would have just as many rolling blackouts.)
Call me a cynic but we see these stories appearing in the news media every time fusion researchers get a little concerned about their funding.
Give me a break. Designing fusion reactors is a business just like any other: turn off the PR and the venture dies. It's just like tampons and beer, you have to keep it in view or people will forget about it. The only way it could be any different is to have total centralized economic control, which has historically proven inferior.
It's sad that public-funded science has to do this, but this is just how it is in modern Western society.
Give me a break! Developing and productizing commercial fusion reactors takes an *enormous* amount of resources, comparable to the development of modern semiconductors. At the same time, petrofuels are so cheap that the incentive to perfect fusion is negative for even the largest corporations. The private money that's going into fusion right now is pretty much a gift, since there is no expectation of meaningful return on investment. Thus much of the effort is carried out by international programs and academic researchers.
my dad once told me about a particular type of watch....not sure what is was anymore, but anyways, it had tritium gas in it
You can still buy watches, compasses, and small lamps illuminated by tritium. One of my colleagues at work has a cute little tritium lamp that he uses as a 'standard candle' for optics experiments. (Built-in power, and very stable brightness as long as the temperature doesn't change too much. Very convenient compared to electric lamps.)
It seems unlikely that @Home, Qwest, Above.net, Exodus, Sprint, or Verio is routing my traffic through sniff.sniff.bin_laden.org.
Ah, but the issue was whether the organizations were controlled by unfriendlies. Given the extremely poor financial position of many of these companies, it wouldn't take much to induce a little moral flexibility in their sniffing policies. Not to mention the moral flexibility of their employees...
As far as your call for uniform encryption (which I'm not opposed to), you might want to consider how this will protect me (and you, and any "investigational focus") from overzealous Federal agents collecting header information without a warrant for 48 hours.
Encrypted HTTP headers are meaningless, and the remaining headers in a properly encrypted SMTP message are basically the source and destination IP addresses + reverse DNS lookup. Nothing they couldn't already get just from sniffing the wire. And given dynamic dialups, not terribly useful.
What is scaring you guys with these proposals??? The FBI may scan your emails? Log your web-traffic? What about every curious sys. admin. in every ISP that your traffic goes throu? They all already have the power to do this.
Hear hear. *Anybody* can set up an ISP or backbone and do *whatever they want* with the traffic. That packet you send across town to your friend who uses a different ISP could easily travel through *twenty* intermediate nodes in a variety of countries. Shit, people, how do you know Osama bin Laden isn't monitoring everything you send in the clear? I mean, he's go the money, resources, and will to do it, and to ruthlessly use the information he gathers to bring down the Western economy. And you simpering weak-ankled fucktards are bitching about the *FBI*?!?!!!!
THIS IS A CLEAR CALL TO BEGIN THE UNIFORM USE OF ENCRYPTION *FOR ALL 'NET COMMUNICATIONS*. Or you dipshits can just stick your worthless hollow heads back in the sand and pretend that if the FBI isn't allowed to snoop your traffic that neither is the Enemy.
Entanglement and Measurement (as defined in Quantum) are mutually exclusive propositions.
I suspect, though, that it can be proven that a minimum amount of energy must be used to entangle a pair of particles, analogous to Heisenberg's principle. Figure out whatever that energy amount is and multiply by the number of particles in the object. For the human body, the number of particles is on the order of 10^26. Let's be generous and assume that the amount of energy is a mere 0.1eV per particle. Multiplying 10^26 by 0.1eV, and using the conversion factor of 1.6*10^-19eV/J, we get 1.6megajoules. 1.6MJ is a considerable amount of energy, equal to the kinetic energy of 300.50-caliber rifle bullets, or enough energy to run a toaster for 20 minutes. If the energy is evenly applied, you're toast. If it's uneven, you're gravy. Regardless, you are no longer among the living.
Even if you reduce the energy by many orders of magnitude, it is still a lot. Thus I don't think large-scale teleportation will ever be practical without tremendous advances in basic physics. However there are intriguing possibilities. An ensemble of a trillion or so particles may be small, but it's not worthless. E.g., you could deposit a small array of nanodots using atomic-force microscope lithography (at great cost), then replicate them across an entire wafer using teleportation. Or you could use it to grow a nanowire along a chosen axis: the coherence length would only need to be tens of Angstroms, and the coherence time would only need to be nanoseconds. Teleportation lithography would be low temperature, which would vastly expand the materials available to the designer (conventional semiconductor lithography materials have to survive temperatures of 500 deg. C or worse, which rules out all sorts of otherwise useful substances).
D) Yes, you would have to entangle your whole body in order to teleport, but there are plenty of nondestructive ways to measure the body (think X-Rays),
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Do you have any idea of the power density of a one X-ray photon per nucleon beam? Hint: it'd probably make a supernova look dim. Nondestructive? <snort>
Your billiard ball example is equivalent to Einstein's "hidden variables" attempt to explain away quantum entanglement. Bell's theorem demonstrated that the predictions of quantum mechanics were actually inconsistent with such a theory - and subsequent experiments proved him right.
Bell's theorem only disproves *local* hidden variable theories, of which the billard balls are an example. (On the other hand, the billiard balls are a good example for the nonspecialist who wants to comprehend the effects without breaking their mind against quantum nonlocality.) Nonlocal hidden variables are perfectly allowable by the Bell inequality (and indeed I think they have considerable merit).
In fact the reproduction of a quantum state - in all its particulars - is as perfect a teleportation as we might ever expect to achieve...
In my opinion it doesn't count as teleportation. The systems were too homogenous and contrived. When they can do it for condensed matter containing multiple elements, I'll be willing to consider it teleportation.
You've never been in the military I take it? Let me fill you in. It don't mean squat what you know when you go in. Yes you could get lucky and they make use of your computer skills, but I've seen plenty of people with technical skills get plopped right in the infantry.
Which is why you don't enlist in the Marines unless you really don't mind a personal visit to the front line. Instead you get a job at a national laboratory, defense contractor, intelligence agency, military base, university with a military research contract, or whatever. I think that's what the original comment meant. An extended campaign creates numerous non-rifle-totin' jobs.
Mountains usually have snow and ice on them, so you'd get a million reflections.
I doubt snow would be a problem, but shiny ice might be.
Not to mention this would kill off all animal and civilian life.
True, but if you're going for scorched earth that's not really a problem.
Or that this laser would signal very clearly where you are to anyone with hostile intentions.
Well, when you're trying to kill everything, not being able to find enough opponents is a bad thing. Besides, you could always use an infrared or ultraviolet laser if you didn't want to attract attention.
Let's not forget, also, that a minor revolutionary in Israel caused a ripple effect that eventually brought down the Roman Empire, bringing about the Dark Ages.
Let's also not forget that it was the transformation of the great Republic of Rome into an Empire that made it weak enough to be utterly destroyed by minor forces.
There are many that argue that the United States is presently making those same mistakes and transforming itself into an Empire. In fact, as the present trouble comes directly from the US's ill-conceived meddling in nearly every other weaker nation there is, it may already be too late. As Jerry Pournelle has been saying lately, mourn the Republic.
Sure, you can march in, maim and kill some folks, prop up a "U.S. approved leader" of some kind and smile for the media back in the States as peace is restored. Won't solve a damn thing.
The previous poster wasn't talking about a puppet tyrant, but a real government, a republic, with a constitution, a legislature, taxes, schools, poverty relief, road building projects, elected officials, freedom of the press, arrest and conviction of rapists and robbers, parking tickets, licenses for street vendors, the whole nine yards. Kind of like what the US forced upon Japan after WWII. I cannot speak for Muslims, but I'll bet most of them would think that a secular gov't. that brings prosperity and leaves religions alone would be about as good as an Islam-based gov't that kills and pillages. What serves Allah best? Prosperous Muslims who go forth and multiply, or starving Muslims engaged in eternal destruction?
It's totally doable, but it would be *very expensive*. At this point I don't think most
Americans would be willing to pay the price, but who knows what they'll think in a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
The author is intellectually dishonest: at one point he is discussing some electromagnetics simulations that have a spiral galaxy-like appearance, and saying how those support his cosmological electromagnetism theory. What he doesn't tell you is that the images are *cross sections* of tubular structures, and that the field strengths needed to create those structures are *enormous*.
If that BOOK were posted to USENET it would be UTTERLY INDISTINGUISHABLE from the other PHYSICS CRANKS.
Your advice regarding disassembling a piece of equipment, removing its integral antenna, and soldering on an SMA connector is poor. The engineer who designs such a piece of equipment is free to choose any impedance for the antenna and RF power amplifier. (Note for Slashdot audience: When the antenna is removable, it is conventional to use the standard 50 ohm impedance. There are numerous catalogs full of 50 ohm connectors, cables, filters, pads, amplifiers, detectors, etc. There's nothing magic about 50 ohms, it's a pure convenience issue. Like using RJ45s for Ethernet.) The design process is often easier, and the resulting circuit cheaper, if the engineer uses an electrically-convenient impedance instead of being a slave to 50 ohms. Your 50 ohm cable stands a good chance of creating an unacceptable VSWR (voltage standing wave ratio, a measure of the power being reflected back into the amplifier). This can destroy the amplifier or cause distortion, and distortion will get the FCC chasing you. At the very least, I'd cut the RF section off of one and hook it up to a good RF network analyzer and make sure the impedance is 50 ohms. (Network analyzers cost on the order of $1,000/month to rent, or $20k+ to buy, so this isn't a casual thing.)
It gets worse: when integral antennas are used, the engineer may design the amplifier to only work correctly when that antenna is connected. Since the antenna is permanently soldered to the amplifier, the engineer doesn't need to make the amplifier as robust, which saves money and design time. When a load with the wrong impedance is connected, such an amplifier can oscillate wildly at pretty much any frequency. A 2.4GHz amplifier could easily oscillate at any frequency from a few megahertz to 10GHz. In fact it is eminently possible for the oscillation to occur only during key up/down and quiet down at full power, so it might seem to work while spewing all sorts of RF garbage before and after the transmission slot. This sort of thing makes the FCC *very unhappy* and will earn you a visit from some rather humorless government inspectors.
It gets even worse: you are soldering a cable to a board that was not intended to have such a cable. The board may very well (in fact, probably does for cheap commodity equipment) have an electronic noise problem. The board itself is only a few inches wide, and thus is an inefficient antenna, but several feet of extra cable can make a good dipole and cause the noise to radiate. If I was building a couple of these for my personal use I wouldn't worry too much, but if I was doing it for commercial purposes I'd definitely recertify the board + new cable combination (which costs thousands of dollars).
I would recommend a course of study in practical radio circuit design, and a thorough review of government RF regulations, before you give further advice about soldering random cables to random undocumented wideband amplifiers.
I think you fail to appreciate the fact that, were it not for the tireless work of the anti-spammers, the Internet would be saturated with spam. I mean that literally. Even if your "secret" email account didn't get any spam, you'd get no mail at all if projects like MAPS didn't exist. The spammers are relentless and oblivious to the amount of destruction they cause. History has proven that they will use all bandwidth that is made available to them.
Your email account is only useful because thousands of server administrators do hours of thankless work on your behalf. It's not always pleasant, and there is sometimes collateral damage, but the scorched earth approach is the only thing keeping the Internet usable.
If the whitelist became popular enough, you could get people to pay for having their IPs listed. Say $1.00 for each IP address, perhaps with discounts for quantity. The fee would be dirt cheap compared to the cost of operating an email server, so I don't think anyone could complain. And since it's a real transaction, you can have an extremely strong contract that they can't sue you about. Literally can't sue: you could make their sole recourse be arbitration with an arbitrator and in a jurisdiction of your choice.
Either post your non-spamproofed email address in a message here on Slashdot or shut the fuck up. Having a public email address is an absolute necessity for those of us who actually want to meet new people on the Internet. As opposed to those sacks of shit that only want to have a secret little communications club.
The 'net email system was designed to let anyone communicate with anyone else. The problem is that spammers abuse that facility to drown out real communications with their pustulent dreck.
If you actually had more than half a handful of guts in your worthless hide, you'd post your email address here and personally experience being bombarded with crapola by the spammers. If you really have nothing to fear from spam, post your email address. Failure to do so will be considered conclusive proof that you are a repulsive crock of festering goat entrails whose sole accomplishment in their worthless life is shilling for spammers.
Either walk the walk or get the hell off my Internet.
P.S. You'll notice I no longer list an email address for this account. The resulting spam was, and still is, overwhelming. Thank $deity for throw-away Hotmail accounts...
We now conclude your flame. If this had been a polite comment, you would not have felt an overwhelming urge to select -1, Troll.
In many ways, it was a reward for the people that were funding it: the legislators and their constituents got to see what their money had bought. Sure, there needs to be a 500 page technical report for the program reviewers, but it's good for the public who funded it to see something they could understand.
I don't troll. The conclusion is sound: if the project requires funding that only a nation as a whole can provide, and public promotion is not allowed, then the only way to fund it is by unilateral centralized planning. Public promotion and discussion is the heart of free markets and democracies. By definition, the removal of PR produces either anarchy or centralized control (or something in between).
You have to be careful about publicly funded projects. Doing them in secret -- or so poorly publicized that they might as well be secret -- is a very bad thing. If you look at the money that large government contractors get, they tend to direct most of it away from the actual work. E.g., 20% might be taken right off the top for lobbying, 50% for overhead, 10% for administration, etc. I've personally seen US $10M R&D contracts on which most of the money was directed away from the technical effort, and the technical people were not particularly competent. The latter is actually preferred, because if the project cannot be completed, a follow-on contract can be bid in the future for another $10M. Lather, rinse, repeat. High public visibility is a good thing.On the other hand, fusion reactors require elaborate computer-controlled magnets to sustain the reaction. The computer can turn the magnets off in a controlled fashion within milliseconds, after which power output goes to zero. If the computer fails to respond, you can always do an uncontrolled shutdown by tripping the circuit breakers that power the magnets. Uncontrolled shutdowns damage the reactor, though, which is expensive and they'll try to avoid it.
I'm not sure how much mass is heated to 100 million degrees C in a fusion reactor, but it can't be more than a few kilograms, so the actual thermal energy is rather low and easily dissipated (compared to the many tons of hot material in a fission reactor).
What is the worst-case failure? The computer failing to do a controlled shutdown, the operators failing to do an uncontrolled shutdown, and total cooling failure. In this case, either the reactor will heat up until something breaks and lets in air which quenches the reaction, or materials in the reactor will vaporise and quench the reaction. Either way it's bad for the reactor, but the safety hazard is minimal.
Some designs call for 'waterfalls' of molten lithium or sodium down the walls of the reactor. The molten metal will serve as a coolant, and will be transmuted into tritium to fuel the reactor. An incident that released large amounts of molten metal -- especially in the presence of water -- would make one hell of a fire or explosion, and might also create a cloud of caustic smoke. These types will therefore need a containment vessel similar to a fission reactor.
Overall, fusion is much safer, simply because you can flip and switch and turn off the reaction.
The answer for petrofuels is "limited subterranean reserves of petrogunk". The answer for fusion is "human effort". Petrofuels can only supply the energy needs of the human race for a few hundred years, tops, but fusion will last for at least tens of thousands of years. That's the real gift of fusion: it replaces the hard problem of how to find scarce petrogunk with the easy problem of how to devote a tiny fraction of your population to tending the fusion plants.
There are political ramifications: a considerable amount of suffering comes from the fact that a few tyrannical governments control large reserves of petrofuels. With fusion, OPEC becomes irrelevant, the Saudi oil billionaires turn back into tin pot tyrants, and the rest of the world can tell them to go straight to hell. Nations and even cities will be able to provide their own energy locally. Energy would be a local issue, and not a global military adventure. (No doubt some would manage to screw it up. A fusion-powered California would have just as many rolling blackouts.)
Ha ha. I guess we *could* put crypto in the routers, but that would be very, very, very, very ugly.
THIS IS A CLEAR CALL TO BEGIN THE UNIFORM USE OF ENCRYPTION *FOR ALL 'NET COMMUNICATIONS*. Or you dipshits can just stick your worthless hollow heads back in the sand and pretend that if the FBI isn't allowed to snoop your traffic that neither is the Enemy.
Even if you reduce the energy by many orders of magnitude, it is still a lot. Thus I don't think large-scale teleportation will ever be practical without tremendous advances in basic physics. However there are intriguing possibilities. An ensemble of a trillion or so particles may be small, but it's not worthless. E.g., you could deposit a small array of nanodots using atomic-force microscope lithography (at great cost), then replicate them across an entire wafer using teleportation. Or you could use it to grow a nanowire along a chosen axis: the coherence length would only need to be tens of Angstroms, and the coherence time would only need to be nanoseconds. Teleportation lithography would be low temperature, which would vastly expand the materials available to the designer (conventional semiconductor lithography materials have to survive temperatures of 500 deg. C or worse, which rules out all sorts of otherwise useful substances).
There are many that argue that the United States is presently making those same mistakes and transforming itself into an Empire. In fact, as the present trouble comes directly from the US's ill-conceived meddling in nearly every other weaker nation there is, it may already be too late. As Jerry Pournelle has been saying lately, mourn the Republic.
It's totally doable, but it would be *very expensive*. At this point I don't think most Americans would be willing to pay the price, but who knows what they'll think in a few years.