Next time someone bitches that "Fusion power is perpetually 10 year away from now", remember that instead of developing lasers for that kind of application, money has steered research in the fields of lasers toward building DeathStar lookalikes.
I don't know how much funding has gone into DeathStar lasers, but I know of at least one facility where we've spent more than $4 billion on fusion-friendly lasers. I suspect the fact that it's 5 years behind (on a project that was supposed to run less than a decade) and almost 4x over budget has soured potential funding for similar efforts.
Q, not queue. Although not known primarily for his sense of humor, who would be better qualified to mount a friggin laser on a shark and joke about it afterward than Q?
Your post reinforces the polite-but-wrong genre of responses.
-- gnick
Disclaimer: A/C replies get ignored.
If this post helped you to understand why you missed the point, the best way to thank me is to not send an "it worked, thanks" response. If you must respond, please put "It worked, thanks" in the "Subject" and post as A/C so I can ignore them without inconvenience.
A space elevator would be a cool thing to have, and I don't have anything against throwing large amounts of $$ at it in hopes that it will succeed or at least teach us something useful.
But it has nothing to do with the bailouts. Nor the war (you didn't mention the war, but it's often brought up to justify unrelated spending, so I thought I'd jump ahead.) Is the elevator worth $10B? Sure. $100B, $700B? Maybe, I dunno. But the fact that we're throwing away huge amounts of $$ on killing potential terrorists or bailing out failing business should have no bearing on that decision. The fact that we've made some dumb decisions should not encourage us to lessen our evaluation of decisions that, although clearly less dumb, may still not make sense. It should just encourage us to stop making dumb decisions.
[Note to reader: I'm anticipating flames about why the elevator's a good idea dragging me down for bashing it. Please note that nowhere in my post did I suggest that it isn't a fine direction to pursue.]
I can personally testify that having a wife and kids does not make you rich. Although it has darkened my skin some by encouraging me to get off my ass and go play outside.
I do agree with the rest tho, he's not your typical presidential candidate.
No, but voting party-line 96% of the time does make him a typical Democratic senator. (Sorry if that sounds like Dem-bashing, but 29/30 of the top party-line voters are Dems. The other is an 'Independant'.) For comparison, Hillary's at 97.2% and Biden's at 96.6%. Even McCain, who 5-6 years ago actually looked kind of like a vote-the-issues-not-the-party senator, is standing at 88.3%.
Change my ass - Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Whether you stereotype him for being a rich lawyer from the 'burbs or somebody that can dance and jump is meaningless. The only thing that matters is that he could beat me at basketball, but I could out-bowl him. That makes him blacker than me.
The jury's still out on Palin - She could definitely take me on a basketball court, I have no idea how well she bowls, but she's not black because she's from Alaska. The only issue remaining there is that her fishing/whaling skills could make her an Eskimo.
AI, human-indistinguishable androids, and world peace, on the other hand, are not things that people have any idea how to achieve.
It depends on your definition of AI. My Roomba may not be able to pass the Turing test, but it's a lot smarter than my Hoover. And your average Furby can talk circles around the teddy bear that my parents would toss in my crib to shut me up. Don't knock incredible advances just because they lack perfection.
And my GF, Inflatable Ingrid, may not fully qualify as a "human-indistinguishable android", but in low lighting after a couple of glasses of wine, she passes just fine.
And as a sub-subnote, this is approximately the cost of developing a complete conventional man-rated rocket launch system. I'm skeptical of the quoted price tag, but it would be extremely cheap if it could be achieved.
That's not the actual price-tag, it's NIF economics. You propose the project with a $9.5B price tag and spend your money providing whatever results you can. You then apologize for failing to complete, but assure the backers that you're nearly done, but need an additional $5B. When that's spent, you've hit a snag so complex that not even the top minds in the world could have seen it coming, but you can finish the project for only $8B more. After all, who wants to abandon a project that you've already spent several years and nearly $15B on when you're so close. Repeat until retirement.
It's amazing how well this seems to work in practice.
It depends on how you browse. I typically have 1000 tabs open that I force onto the same row (I leave a few pixels for the frame) and I mouse-wheel through them at ~60 pages per second. Since my tabs are each 1 pixel wide, they're no more discreet than my horizontal resolution.
> So does anyone know what 3d shape he used to achieve a 500x efficiency gain?
Since solar cells passed.5% with the first one, unless this kid attends Hogwarts this story is just this week's solar snake oil.
That's.5% of the light they absorb. I'm just doing rough math here, but let's give it a shot: 1) This absorbs both visible and UV light. Let's assume that's a factor of 2 improvement. 2) Although TFA fails to mention it, his cell is very large with ~250x the surface area of a traditional cell.
So, 2 x 250 = 500x more power. See? It's that easy.
At the federal level (especially the supreme court) they are supposed to be a check against the elected officials...
That's always bugged me. Why in the hell are the judges that are "supposed to be a check against the elected officials" appointed by the same elected officials?
If someone breaks the law while acting as a law-enforcement officer, they should not only be given the normal punishment for the offense, but an additional punishment for the damage they caused to the public opinion of their fellow officers.
Agree entirely. I realize that 'Johns' are not normally prosecuted, but Spitzer should damned well be facing charges. Prosecuting prostitution rings while taking advantage of them? That seriously tarnishes our entire legal system.
Of course, it is not always entirely clear where the torrent advert money ends up, but it is reasonable to suggest that it is less likely to be used to support a drug empire.
If your drug empire needs external support, it's not a very good empire is it? Unless of course you're implying that they're propping up a drug empire by acting as enthusiastic consumers.
I'd suspect more likely that the torrent advert money is used for hookers and blackjack - Isn't that what you'd use it for?
Slashdot attracts a lot of outliers - And they're even more prominent because the outliers (and occasional outliars) are the ones motivated enough to post to disprove stereotypes. I believe that there are a lot of gamers out there that are athletic and happy. But, in spite of FP's accurate assessment that gamers may game the system, I tend to believe the researchers results. Many gamers are obsessive (I know I was). And sitting down to game immediately after finishing school often took me well into the night until I realized that I needed to crash into bed. Making food would have taken me away from what I was doing, but I could pack a bowl right there and just forget about it (munchies were never an issue if I was engaged enough).
People who disbelieve all stereotypes are not unbiased - Quite the opposite. They're either paying remarkably bad attention to the world around them or heavily biased toward an artificial neutrality.
I just got back from Lubbock, TX on Monday - Those people are damned proud of being ultra-conservative religious right-wing rednecks. But the image you just gave me of a TX family portrait with everyone wearing Lederhosn was absolutely priceless.
Yes, yes. I fully realize that Bavaria is just a German state - It's actually very nice and the only part of Germany that I've been able to visit. But it's funnier to pick on the whole country even if it's inaccurate. (Although if this had gone on for some time, yielded results, and was not noticed, do you really think that it would have been contained to Bavaria?)
Crap... Reading comprehension failure on TF title. Please mod my post into oblivion...
Still, my license is on me all the time. My passport lives in a locked filing cabinet and only sees light when I go overseas. I may actually opt for this if I were frequently traveling to/from Canada/Mexico.
Meaningless to anyone but DHS until some nitwit with an unencrypted drive on their laptop leaves it in an airport lounge.
So you information is on one more hard drive for somebody to lose. There are already plenty - It doesn't seem like this makes the likelihood of your information being mishandled much greater.
Slashdot Mirror
You beat me to it and did a better job than I would have. I doubt that my effecting a similar jab would have had nearly as humorous an effect.
Well done.
If this was truly written by a ninja, it would be mistaken for a house plant and we'd never know it was there.
Next time someone bitches that "Fusion power is perpetually 10 year away from now", remember that instead of developing lasers for that kind of application, money has steered research in the fields of lasers toward building DeathStar lookalikes.
I don't know how much funding has gone into DeathStar lasers, but I know of at least one facility where we've spent more than $4 billion on fusion-friendly lasers. I suspect the fact that it's 5 years behind (on a project that was supposed to run less than a decade) and almost 4x over budget has soured potential funding for similar efforts.
Queue not cue.
Q, not queue. Although not known primarily for his sense of humor, who would be better qualified to mount a friggin laser on a shark and joke about it afterward than Q?
Your post reinforces the polite-but-wrong genre of responses.
--
gnick
Disclaimer: A/C replies get ignored.
If this post helped you to understand why you missed the point, the best way to thank me is to not send an "it worked, thanks" response. If you must respond, please put "It worked, thanks" in the "Subject" and post as A/C so I can ignore them without inconvenience.
Sorry, but you just hit a peeve of mine...
A space elevator would be a cool thing to have, and I don't have anything against throwing large amounts of $$ at it in hopes that it will succeed or at least teach us something useful.
But it has nothing to do with the bailouts. Nor the war (you didn't mention the war, but it's often brought up to justify unrelated spending, so I thought I'd jump ahead.) Is the elevator worth $10B? Sure. $100B, $700B? Maybe, I dunno. But the fact that we're throwing away huge amounts of $$ on killing potential terrorists or bailing out failing business should have no bearing on that decision. The fact that we've made some dumb decisions should not encourage us to lessen our evaluation of decisions that, although clearly less dumb, may still not make sense. It should just encourage us to stop making dumb decisions.
[Note to reader: I'm anticipating flames about why the elevator's a good idea dragging me down for bashing it. Please note that nowhere in my post did I suggest that it isn't a fine direction to pursue.]
I can personally testify that having a wife and kids does not make you rich. Although it has darkened my skin some by encouraging me to get off my ass and go play outside.
I do agree with the rest tho, he's not your typical presidential candidate.
No, but voting party-line 96% of the time does make him a typical Democratic senator. (Sorry if that sounds like Dem-bashing, but 29/30 of the top party-line voters are Dems. The other is an 'Independant'.) For comparison, Hillary's at 97.2% and Biden's at 96.6%. Even McCain, who 5-6 years ago actually looked kind of like a vote-the-issues-not-the-party senator, is standing at 88.3%.
Change my ass - Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Whether you stereotype him for being a rich lawyer from the 'burbs or somebody that can dance and jump is meaningless. The only thing that matters is that he could beat me at basketball, but I could out-bowl him. That makes him blacker than me.
The jury's still out on Palin - She could definitely take me on a basketball court, I have no idea how well she bowls, but she's not black because she's from Alaska. The only issue remaining there is that her fishing/whaling skills could make her an Eskimo.
AI, human-indistinguishable androids, and world peace, on the other hand, are not things that people have any idea how to achieve.
It depends on your definition of AI. My Roomba may not be able to pass the Turing test, but it's a lot smarter than my Hoover. And your average Furby can talk circles around the teddy bear that my parents would toss in my crib to shut me up. Don't knock incredible advances just because they lack perfection.
And my GF, Inflatable Ingrid, may not fully qualify as a "human-indistinguishable android", but in low lighting after a couple of glasses of wine, she passes just fine.
And as a sub-subnote, this is approximately the cost of developing a complete conventional man-rated rocket launch system. I'm skeptical of the quoted price tag, but it would be extremely cheap if it could be achieved.
That's not the actual price-tag, it's NIF economics. You propose the project with a $9.5B price tag and spend your money providing whatever results you can. You then apologize for failing to complete, but assure the backers that you're nearly done, but need an additional $5B. When that's spent, you've hit a snag so complex that not even the top minds in the world could have seen it coming, but you can finish the project for only $8B more. After all, who wants to abandon a project that you've already spent several years and nearly $15B on when you're so close. Repeat until retirement.
It's amazing how well this seems to work in practice.
Methinks thou hast confused making stupid jokes with arguing. It's OK. That happens here sometimes.
It depends on how you browse. I typically have 1000 tabs open that I force onto the same row (I leave a few pixels for the frame) and I mouse-wheel through them at ~60 pages per second. Since my tabs are each 1 pixel wide, they're no more discreet than my horizontal resolution.
Isn't that how everyone does it?
I already have a 3d browser:
1) Vertical
2) Horizontal
3) Tabbed
> So does anyone know what 3d shape he used to achieve a 500x efficiency gain?
Since solar cells passed .5% with the first one, unless this kid attends Hogwarts this story is just this week's solar snake oil.
That's .5% of the light they absorb. I'm just doing rough math here, but let's give it a shot:
1) This absorbs both visible and UV light. Let's assume that's a factor of 2 improvement.
2) Although TFA fails to mention it, his cell is very large with ~250x the surface area of a traditional cell.
So, 2 x 250 = 500x more power. See? It's that easy.
At the federal level (especially the supreme court) they are supposed to be a check against the elected officials...
That's always bugged me. Why in the hell are the judges that are "supposed to be a check against the elected officials" appointed by the same elected officials?
If someone breaks the law while acting as a law-enforcement officer, they should not only be given the normal punishment for the offense, but an additional punishment for the damage they caused to the public opinion of their fellow officers.
Agree entirely. I realize that 'Johns' are not normally prosecuted, but Spitzer should damned well be facing charges. Prosecuting prostitution rings while taking advantage of them? That seriously tarnishes our entire legal system.
Of course, it is not always entirely clear where the torrent advert money ends up, but it is reasonable to suggest that it is less likely to be used to support a drug empire.
If your drug empire needs external support, it's not a very good empire is it? Unless of course you're implying that they're propping up a drug empire by acting as enthusiastic consumers.
I'd suspect more likely that the torrent advert money is used for hookers and blackjack - Isn't that what you'd use it for?
Slashdot attracts a lot of outliers - And they're even more prominent because the outliers (and occasional outliars) are the ones motivated enough to post to disprove stereotypes. I believe that there are a lot of gamers out there that are athletic and happy. But, in spite of FP's accurate assessment that gamers may game the system, I tend to believe the researchers results. Many gamers are obsessive (I know I was). And sitting down to game immediately after finishing school often took me well into the night until I realized that I needed to crash into bed. Making food would have taken me away from what I was doing, but I could pack a bowl right there and just forget about it (munchies were never an issue if I was engaged enough).
People who disbelieve all stereotypes are not unbiased - Quite the opposite. They're either paying remarkably bad attention to the world around them or heavily biased toward an artificial neutrality.
I just got back from Lubbock, TX on Monday - Those people are damned proud of being ultra-conservative religious right-wing rednecks. But the image you just gave me of a TX family portrait with everyone wearing Lederhosn was absolutely priceless.
Yes, yes. I fully realize that Bavaria is just a German state - It's actually very nice and the only part of Germany that I've been able to visit. But it's funnier to pick on the whole country even if it's inaccurate. (Although if this had gone on for some time, yielded results, and was not noticed, do you really think that it would have been contained to Bavaria?)
Isn't there a nit somewhere that needs picking?
Who would have thought that even a country like Germany could deteriorate into a police state?
I kid, I kid... I'm in the US...
Crap... Reading comprehension failure on TF title. Please mod my post into oblivion...
Still, my license is on me all the time. My passport lives in a locked filing cabinet and only sees light when I go overseas. I may actually opt for this if I were frequently traveling to/from Canada/Mexico.
Meaningless to anyone but DHS until some nitwit with an unencrypted drive on their laptop leaves it in an airport lounge.
So you information is on one more hard drive for somebody to lose. There are already plenty - It doesn't seem like this makes the likelihood of your information being mishandled much greater.
Why not just get a regular drivers license and a passport as two different pieces of identity.
It's a lot easier to forget or lose a passport than a license plate.
I've found that statement to be strongly dependent on the streets you frequent.