The NIF has been inching closer and closer to ignition for a long time; it really is right around the corner from a scientific standpoint. And it would be an accomplishment, don't get me wrong, but the engineering to actually produce power with such a system would be another $10billion effort on top of what the NIF has spent. Those big lasers? They take a long time to recharge. The fuel doesn't enter the chamber automatically or quickly. And there's no way to actually harvest the energy produced by the fusion reaction.
Reloading fuel is probably relatively trivial. Harvesting is a bit harder because to harvest efficiently you have to have high temperatures which your equipment needs to be able to tolerate in turn. But I've yet to hear any talk about how the heck your going to pulse those lasers at the rates that would be required to produce commercially viable amounts of power.
Except there's no way to reload the fuel after each shot (which lasts for a tiny fraction of a second), there's no way to recharge the lasers fast enough even if you could get the fuel in place, and there's no guarantee that the equipment can safely operate at temperatures that make extraction practical. So no, it's not that simple.
Well, in a small way we have considered this endeavor already and in a very, very small way we've already begun. See, Dyson spheres aren't giant shells of rigid matter, that would be virtually impossible (not to mention gravitationally unstable), they're swarms of solar arrays all in different orbits carefully calculated so that all the output from the sun is always being collected. So, every time you hear about space based solar, that's step 1 of building a Dyson sphere. And you can look at every solar powered device we put in space, especially those in solar orbits, as step.5 if you really wanted to.
Those people brought in don't buy things? Everything from houses to clothes to food? More people employed in an area means more economic activity, regardless of where the new employees come from. Your other points about violence, drug use, and other forms of crime are perfectly valid of course.
The core is pretty big and pretty dense, they should doubtless be reduced in weight, but not weightless since they never go deep into the core. As to the cars being on gimbals that's fine, they can walk around each car just fine inside one compartment, doesn't change the fact that the other compartments should be above and below them, not forward and back.
It's not the ridiculous science, really it's not. I can forgive "put the reactor fuel next to the bomb to make it go bigger boom!". I can forgive "the material magically makes electricity from heat, enough to keep the entire ship cool even!". I can even forgive "here's a huge geode hundreds of miles under the crust".
What can't I forgive?
The ship 'flies' straight down, the back of the ship is straight up from the front. Yet whenever they move from one section to the other, they walk through. They should have to climb a ladder dammit! I know it's a pointless nitpick that has no bearing on anything, but it's like they didn't even try! They even show the ship from the outside many, many times and always show it vertical. Switch the the interior and there's the crew wandering from one compartment to the next. It just bugs me. It's like they didn't even try.
On the other hand, if someone steps forward and says "Our team falsified data, everyone on the team knew about it, and the emails would prove it" there needs to be a way legally get access to those emails. Access shouldn't be about the email at 4AM that someone didn't think hard enough before sending, but access should be granted for the email sent at 2 in the afternoon, detailing how/what/which data should be changed.
I agree that it should stay hidden, but it should be noted that there should also be exceptions. If there is probably cause to suspect fraud there does need to be a process that a warrant can be issued. Maybe it's assumed by everyone in the "it should be kept secret" side of things that a warrant would override those protections, but I still think it should be mentioned. The question is, what would the crime be? Is it illegal in and of itself to falsify data for scientific publishing? Even if they aren't receiving public funds? I doubt it. I think those questions need to be cleared up, because while there is an expectation of privacy, there should also be some way for the legal system to force the release if there is legitimate evidence of tampering.
The position can be attacked without attacking the person.
I disagree, some positions are indefensible and holding them shows a great deal about the person's attitude in general. Racism exposes much more about a person than merely the fact that they hate a certain race.
The post was presumably documented by the court and prosecutors. By your logic, washing the blood off the walls after the crime scene guys have been there and done their job and a judge told you to go ahead and get it cleaned up would be destruction of evidence.
And fuck the US Governent condemning it like it did with those cartoons.
Why? I can say "That's a really stupid, immature, bigoted, hate mongering thing to do. You did it specifically to stir up anger and violence and it servers no other purpose. Doesn't mean I don't think you should have the right to say it, just means I think you're incredibly stupid and hateful for saying it".
It's not their fault if you don't look around their site for a link as obvious as Power Production
We at Windside belive that the energy production should be informed in kWh/year basis and this production figure should be based on measurements done in real life circumstances.
Commonly used maximum rated power has very little to do with real life results and therefore it is important to find out how many kWh the turbine is like to produce on annual basis at different wind speeds.
Followed by a chart of KwH mapped against turbine size and average wind speed.
You can get superconductivity at room temperature by varying other parameters too (generally to levels that are even harder to create/maintain than low temperature). I seem to remember an article on slashdot a couple years ago discussing room temperature superconductivity, only problem it required the material to be under several hundred thousand atmospheres of pressure.
Maybe something similar is happening here... the evaporating water causing suction at nanoscopic scales that nevertheless applies enormous amounts of force to a tiny, tiny area.
The law will punish who it likes and however much it likes. It doesn't matter out tortuously or illogically the law needs to be interpreted, it only matters who the defendant managed to piss off.
Your buckyball still isn't superconducting, just the regions where the two buckyballs are interfacing. So the route has to go through a research phase where we figure out what is so special about the interface between the two, then another research phase to determine if it's physically possible to string those regions together in a way that produces superconductivity over a usable distance. Then another phase where we try to figure out how actually construct the design we came up with in the last time.
Yes, very interesting potentially earth changing in fact. But highly, highly speculative.
The cool thing about this is, if true, you could verify it in your kitchen.
Not really, the superconductive spots are tiny, far too tiny to actually measure resistance across. The researchers are claiming superconductivity based on magnetic effects, which while very interesting, isn't exactly something you'd do in your kitchen.
Well, the high temp super conductor research is extremely speculative and not at all practical. Thats not to say it isn't interesting and doesn't raise interesting questions, it is and it does.
The first problem is the practicality. The superconductivity they are reporting happens where two tiny grains of graphite meet (the soaking and baking part is, essentially, just to get them to meet in the right way, though I suppose trapped water molecules could also play a roll). Disturbing that interface destroys the superconductivity. There's no way to wire two points together using this effect, which makes it essentially useless from a practicality standpoint.
Which leads directly to the research's speculative nature. They can't wire two points together (not even tiny, tiny lengths) so there's no way to actually measure the resistance. They are claiming superconductivity based on an observed phase transition in magnetic properties when a field is applied. The transition they see is consistent with superconductivity, but most people wouldn't call it a silver bullet, "yes we are absolutely sure" kind of evidence. It could be some other effect we don't know about, in which case - NEATO! something new to study, or it could be superconductivity, in which case - NEATO! we've proved room temperature superconductors are empirically possible, we have an example to study which might pave the way.
But they leave off the ones that have actually been realized. Communicators the size of a lapel pin were wild conjecture at the time of the original series. Automatic doors were a new idea. I'm sure there are other examples of 'Star Trek Tech' that we completely and utterly take for granted today.
If someone invented a device that seamlessly granted me 360 degree vision of my surroundings I'd be all over it. That's not to say there's anything wrong with regular old 180 degree vision (ok, before the pedants come out, probably more like 240, but I digress). Just that having the extra perception would almost always be and advantage (and not the 'seamlessly' part, that means no more distracting than my regular peripheral vision, just covering a wider range).
To be fair, the GS3 was released only 3 months ago. I don't know if it would be possible for them to adjust their design in the time between the specs for GS3 being released and their production needing to start. Now not competing with the display on the Galaxy Nexus (also a full 720p display and released 9 months ago)... that's a bit harder to understand.
No, we've known for a long time that some of the 'junk' DNA has instructions for gene activation and deactivation, pretty much since the discovery of 'junk' DNA in the first place. The problem is that ENCODE's 80% figure assumes that any piece of DNA that produces RNA performs a biological function which is extremely misleading. A lot of that RNA will never be used for anything. A lot of it will be immediately destroyed after it's created.
That seems like a pretty poor definition to me. In fact, it seems like something could be or not be a supercomputer depending on what job you have running on it.
You dropped a few zeros there. 200,000 tons * 2000 lbs / ton = 400,000,000 lbs. 400,000,000 lbs / 306 lbs / barrel = 1.3 million barrels. Still not close to the 5 million mark, but quite a bit better than your 1324 barrel figure.
You leave out the part where the 'scenery' they were taking pictures of happened to be a military installation. No granted, I think espionage charges for such a thing are more than a little ridiculous (and I doubt that is what they'll actually be charged for) but just about every nation on the planet has laws against photographing their military bases.
Slashdot Mirror
The NIF has been inching closer and closer to ignition for a long time; it really is right around the corner from a scientific standpoint. And it would be an accomplishment, don't get me wrong, but the engineering to actually produce power with such a system would be another $10billion effort on top of what the NIF has spent. Those big lasers? They take a long time to recharge. The fuel doesn't enter the chamber automatically or quickly. And there's no way to actually harvest the energy produced by the fusion reaction.
Reloading fuel is probably relatively trivial. Harvesting is a bit harder because to harvest efficiently you have to have high temperatures which your equipment needs to be able to tolerate in turn. But I've yet to hear any talk about how the heck your going to pulse those lasers at the rates that would be required to produce commercially viable amounts of power.
Except there's no way to reload the fuel after each shot (which lasts for a tiny fraction of a second), there's no way to recharge the lasers fast enough even if you could get the fuel in place, and there's no guarantee that the equipment can safely operate at temperatures that make extraction practical. So no, it's not that simple.
Well, in a small way we have considered this endeavor already and in a very, very small way we've already begun. See, Dyson spheres aren't giant shells of rigid matter, that would be virtually impossible (not to mention gravitationally unstable), they're swarms of solar arrays all in different orbits carefully calculated so that all the output from the sun is always being collected. So, every time you hear about space based solar, that's step 1 of building a Dyson sphere. And you can look at every solar powered device we put in space, especially those in solar orbits, as step .5 if you really wanted to.
Those people brought in don't buy things? Everything from houses to clothes to food? More people employed in an area means more economic activity, regardless of where the new employees come from. Your other points about violence, drug use, and other forms of crime are perfectly valid of course.
The core is pretty big and pretty dense, they should doubtless be reduced in weight, but not weightless since they never go deep into the core. As to the cars being on gimbals that's fine, they can walk around each car just fine inside one compartment, doesn't change the fact that the other compartments should be above and below them, not forward and back.
It's not the ridiculous science, really it's not. I can forgive "put the reactor fuel next to the bomb to make it go bigger boom!". I can forgive "the material magically makes electricity from heat, enough to keep the entire ship cool even!". I can even forgive "here's a huge geode hundreds of miles under the crust".
What can't I forgive?
The ship 'flies' straight down, the back of the ship is straight up from the front. Yet whenever they move from one section to the other, they walk through. They should have to climb a ladder dammit! I know it's a pointless nitpick that has no bearing on anything, but it's like they didn't even try! They even show the ship from the outside many, many times and always show it vertical. Switch the the interior and there's the crew wandering from one compartment to the next. It just bugs me. It's like they didn't even try.
On the other hand, if someone steps forward and says "Our team falsified data, everyone on the team knew about it, and the emails would prove it" there needs to be a way legally get access to those emails. Access shouldn't be about the email at 4AM that someone didn't think hard enough before sending, but access should be granted for the email sent at 2 in the afternoon, detailing how/what/which data should be changed.
I agree that it should stay hidden, but it should be noted that there should also be exceptions. If there is probably cause to suspect fraud there does need to be a process that a warrant can be issued. Maybe it's assumed by everyone in the "it should be kept secret" side of things that a warrant would override those protections, but I still think it should be mentioned. The question is, what would the crime be? Is it illegal in and of itself to falsify data for scientific publishing? Even if they aren't receiving public funds? I doubt it. I think those questions need to be cleared up, because while there is an expectation of privacy, there should also be some way for the legal system to force the release if there is legitimate evidence of tampering.
The position can be attacked without attacking the person.
I disagree, some positions are indefensible and holding them shows a great deal about the person's attitude in general. Racism exposes much more about a person than merely the fact that they hate a certain race.
The post was presumably documented by the court and prosecutors. By your logic, washing the blood off the walls after the crime scene guys have been there and done their job and a judge told you to go ahead and get it cleaned up would be destruction of evidence.
And fuck the US Governent condemning it like it did with those cartoons.
Why? I can say "That's a really stupid, immature, bigoted, hate mongering thing to do. You did it specifically to stir up anger and violence and it servers no other purpose. Doesn't mean I don't think you should have the right to say it, just means I think you're incredibly stupid and hateful for saying it".
It's not their fault if you don't look around their site for a link as obvious as Power Production
We at Windside belive that the energy production should be informed in kWh/year basis and this production figure should be based on measurements done in real life circumstances.
Commonly used maximum rated power has very little to do with real life results and therefore it is important to find out how many kWh the turbine is like to produce on annual basis at different wind speeds.
Followed by a chart of KwH mapped against turbine size and average wind speed.
You can get superconductivity at room temperature by varying other parameters too (generally to levels that are even harder to create/maintain than low temperature). I seem to remember an article on slashdot a couple years ago discussing room temperature superconductivity, only problem it required the material to be under several hundred thousand atmospheres of pressure.
Maybe something similar is happening here... the evaporating water causing suction at nanoscopic scales that nevertheless applies enormous amounts of force to a tiny, tiny area.
The law will punish who it likes and however much it likes. It doesn't matter out tortuously or illogically the law needs to be interpreted, it only matters who the defendant managed to piss off.
Enjoy - 4. Possess and benefit from
[/pedantry]
Your buckyball still isn't superconducting, just the regions where the two buckyballs are interfacing. So the route has to go through a research phase where we figure out what is so special about the interface between the two, then another research phase to determine if it's physically possible to string those regions together in a way that produces superconductivity over a usable distance. Then another phase where we try to figure out how actually construct the design we came up with in the last time.
Yes, very interesting potentially earth changing in fact. But highly, highly speculative.
The cool thing about this is, if true, you could verify it in your kitchen.
Not really, the superconductive spots are tiny, far too tiny to actually measure resistance across. The researchers are claiming superconductivity based on magnetic effects, which while very interesting, isn't exactly something you'd do in your kitchen.
Well, the high temp super conductor research is extremely speculative and not at all practical. Thats not to say it isn't interesting and doesn't raise interesting questions, it is and it does.
The first problem is the practicality. The superconductivity they are reporting happens where two tiny grains of graphite meet (the soaking and baking part is, essentially, just to get them to meet in the right way, though I suppose trapped water molecules could also play a roll). Disturbing that interface destroys the superconductivity. There's no way to wire two points together using this effect, which makes it essentially useless from a practicality standpoint.
Which leads directly to the research's speculative nature. They can't wire two points together (not even tiny, tiny lengths) so there's no way to actually measure the resistance. They are claiming superconductivity based on an observed phase transition in magnetic properties when a field is applied. The transition they see is consistent with superconductivity, but most people wouldn't call it a silver bullet, "yes we are absolutely sure" kind of evidence. It could be some other effect we don't know about, in which case - NEATO! something new to study, or it could be superconductivity, in which case - NEATO! we've proved room temperature superconductors are empirically possible, we have an example to study which might pave the way.
But they leave off the ones that have actually been realized. Communicators the size of a lapel pin were wild conjecture at the time of the original series. Automatic doors were a new idea. I'm sure there are other examples of 'Star Trek Tech' that we completely and utterly take for granted today.
If someone invented a device that seamlessly granted me 360 degree vision of my surroundings I'd be all over it. That's not to say there's anything wrong with regular old 180 degree vision (ok, before the pedants come out, probably more like 240, but I digress). Just that having the extra perception would almost always be and advantage (and not the 'seamlessly' part, that means no more distracting than my regular peripheral vision, just covering a wider range).
To be fair, the GS3 was released only 3 months ago. I don't know if it would be possible for them to adjust their design in the time between the specs for GS3 being released and their production needing to start. Now not competing with the display on the Galaxy Nexus (also a full 720p display and released 9 months ago)... that's a bit harder to understand.
No, we've known for a long time that some of the 'junk' DNA has instructions for gene activation and deactivation, pretty much since the discovery of 'junk' DNA in the first place. The problem is that ENCODE's 80% figure assumes that any piece of DNA that produces RNA performs a biological function which is extremely misleading. A lot of that RNA will never be used for anything. A lot of it will be immediately destroyed after it's created.
That seems like a pretty poor definition to me. In fact, it seems like something could be or not be a supercomputer depending on what job you have running on it.
You dropped a few zeros there. 200,000 tons * 2000 lbs / ton = 400,000,000 lbs. 400,000,000 lbs / 306 lbs / barrel = 1.3 million barrels. Still not close to the 5 million mark, but quite a bit better than your 1324 barrel figure.
You leave out the part where the 'scenery' they were taking pictures of happened to be a military installation. No granted, I think espionage charges for such a thing are more than a little ridiculous (and I doubt that is what they'll actually be charged for) but just about every nation on the planet has laws against photographing their military bases.