Any hypothesis would have to make predictions which could be observed, it would have to be falsifiable. I am not suggesting any of my basically idle speculations are anything like solid theories. Nor am I one of those deluded posters you see on so many forums who somehow believe their random thoughts are amazing new groundbreaking scientific insights (which of course the "hide bound" ultra-conventional scientists simply "cannot see"), lol.
My main point was that if a theory is advanced which can explain where the antimatter is, or explain its absence away, then it starts to look like a moot point as to how many elementary particles there are in the universe.
Actually if you just go pick up a back issue of Scientific American from a few months or a year back they had it all spelled out.
Assuming the type of PV arrays likely to be deployable in 10 years or so we can supply the required electricity for the entire country by covering one small area down in the corner of Nevada.
I don't know what the environmental impact of that would be, but it certainly doesn't seem out of order with the impact we've seen already with nuclear power.
When will the nuclear power advocates actually get an adding machine and add up the cost of all these plants they want to build, plus the cost of the waste transport, storage, disposal/reprocessing, decommissioning costs of the plants, etc and realize that its just way out of line with the benefits.
I'm not making ANY of my arguments on any kind of grounds of environmentalism. I've seen the numbers added up, it DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to build more nuclear power plants. It just doesn't! Not even the electric power industry in this country wants to build more nukes, they know better. If it was such a great deal why aren't they building them now? Because its a bad deal, thats why!
There are a multitude of answers to that and none of them require nuclear power.
First of all I'm not proposing, nor is anyone else who's opinion might be marginally worth listening to, that we rely on solar power exclusively. Solar may or may not generate the majority of our power at some point. Wind and dry geothermal power CAN provide perfectly fine base load power.
The wind may not blow in every location all of the time, but there is relatively little overall variation when you have facilities scattered all over the country. Dry geothermal energy stations can be sited practically anywhere and certainly aren't subject to any more variations than any other existing standard power plant design.
As suggestions for the uses of solar energy it could be utilized directly as process heat, which in turn can be used to reformulate biomass or hydrolyze water to produce hydrogen or carbon based fuels and feedstocks. Industrial applications of electricity can easily operate at times when such power is available.
In the likely case that much of our ground transportation infrastructure is switched over to electric vehicles that entire segment would also be provided with its power during the day.
Finally energy CAN be stored. There are well tested and long used methods of doing so, like pumping water into reservoirs for example, which has been used for the last 100 years at most larger hydroelectric facilities.
Sure, all of these things require money to build, but just the sheer time frames involved is much shorter and it is not a big deal to build a storage facility and find out that particular technology isn't so great. With nuclear technology you HAVE to do decades of safety work up front before you can even plan a deployment. The risks are much higher.
Nuclear power is a dead letter. I'll predict it now, not one single nuclear power plant will be constructed in the US from now on. It just isn't going to happen and it is pointless to waste money pretending it will. The cost of 10 new standard commercial LWRs is enough money to finance ALL the remaining R&D needed to start installing solar PV on a massive scale AND subsidize a good bit of the deployment. Its just a matter of economics. Nukes aren't economical.
I mean it is true we do not OBSERVE much antimatter in this universe, but that doesn't mean it is not present in some sense:
A) It could be in some other part of the universe beyond our effective observational horizon. Granted there are some reasons to think not, but it is a possibility.
B) It could be that the antimatter simply exists in some 'other place'. Given that we haven't at all settled the actual architecture of spacetime, it could be that the antimatter is in a location which is either topologically distant/inaccessible or in dimensions not readily visible to us.
C) Antimatter could be segregated in a different part of time itself. If we imagined that the arrow of time in our universe reverses every now and then, some form of oscillating universe, then perhaps we would find that when time runs backwards, matter looks like antimatter and that may balance the books.
Not being a cosmologist or high energy physicist I don't have the wherewithal to analyze these various possibilities, maybe some of them are ridiculous on the face of them or there may be other more obvious or simple solutions, but it seems there are probably ample unknowns out of which to construct hypotheses along these lines.
Given that we could answer the 'where's the antimatter' question, then how would it even be meaningful to say there is 'more than one electron' in the universe vs 'there is one electron/antielectron with a very convolved history'? It would likely be a case of 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.
That oddly enough the author made a whole LOT of claims FOR Windows 7 that AFAIK are not at all justified.
Windows 7 for netbooks? There are 2 major issues with that. First of all it is an unproven assertion that Windows 7 can be 'slimmed down' to run well on a netbook. Frankly I would imagine it CAN, but would the result still be an appealing OS? Finally how is this now stripped version of Windows 7 going to compete on a licensing cost basis with free?
A similar argument is made that Windows 7 will be the upgrade path to heaven for Vista users. Why exactly? No business is going to pay for the new licenses and additional training and deployment costs. There is NO evidence that 7 is any faster or more efficient or even more stable than Vista is now. Home users might not care about training costs, but they have similar concerns and again there will be no compelling reason for them to upgrade and no reason to anticipate they will do so in any great numbers.
So the conclusion I come to is that Windows 7 has no real market except new desktop PCs and maybe laptops. Given that netbooks are cannibalizing both of these markets in the retail sector and this is also where Apple competes best with OS X one begins to wonder if Windows 7 will simply be relegated to a shrinking niche market segment.
Certainly MS is going to continue to try to tie its new web services to its new OS, but web services are a LOT easier market to break into than the desktop OS market of yore was. Not only that, but even if everyone uses these MS web services like crazy it will still always be possible to access them from non-MS OSes, even if 3rd parties have to build the tools to do so.
I seriously doubt MS is going to be knocked out of the desktop OS market any time soon, or even loose its majority market share, but it just isn't going to matter much.
It is an interesting technology, but lets be realistic here.
Building an existing 'off the shelf' LWR design requires roughly 10 years. Turning this technology into a standardized design which can be used by industry will require some amount of time, probably 10-20 years by the time all the safety engineering is complete and a prototype reactor is built, run for several years, and the bugs are worked out of it.
So, we're talking about OPTIMISTICALLY 2028 and possibly 2038-2048 before the first one of these reactors would come on line. By every indication solar PV and solar thermal power systems will be highly mature and widely deployed by that time. Why at that point is there a need for more nuclear reactors?
Nuclear power's time has come and gone. Regardless of any debate about its safety and efficacy as a power generation technology the time frames are just wrong. Had we made these advances 20 or 30 years ago it would maybe be a different story, but at this point nuclear power is irrelevant. The only thing nuclear power can do now is suck up investments which would be better made perfecting solar, wind, and dry geothermal power solutions, as well as the build out of the power grid which they will require.
So, with all due respect to nuclear power enthusiasts, please stop wasting our time and money on a dead technology which has relegated itself to irrelevance long ago.
Frankly most small professional services type companies are virtually worthless on an asset value basis. The only concrete assets they generally own are nothing more than office equipment, some IT infrastructure, and possibly some licenses and distribution agreements.
With a small company the intangible assets amount to basically customer good will and name recognition. Customers often are more attached to the partners than they are to the business itself. If it is a business that has been a going concern for many years then the intangible value MAY be substantial, but it is difficult to measure.
Thus the REAL value of your 10% ownership is on paper at least very close to zero in most cases. It is even worse if you are a really key player in the business because it is likely to collapse if one of the really key people leaves. Maybe in your case that isn't the situation, but you never know when the VP of marketing will decide to take off with all the customers either.
Technically an equity stake entitles you to dividends, but that may not amount to anything at all. The principals in the company can just as easily take their profits in salary and you'd really have little or nothing to say about that, being a minority owner. You can also be pretty easily diluted, the board can issue more shares, etc.
Thus owning 10% may be worth exactly zip.
On the other hand, not all business owners are that cutthroat, you have to judge how much you trust them. If they are really making an offer to have you onboard as a co-owner and thats what they really want and they are honest people, then maybe its worth something. You could make some (or a lot perhaps) of extra money.
Consider though. If they are offering you equity, then that probably means the equity is cheaper than what they think they might have to pay you to convince you to stay otherwise. Even if the offer is in good faith and all it either means you're worth a LOT to them, or they are just broke and can't pay more but need you enough to give up some (possibly worthless) equity.
Nothing has changed. The Obama administration is continuing to advance the same legal arguments the Bush administration used.
In all fairness we might consider withholding final judgment for a while, but so far all indications are that the 4th Amendment will continue to be ignored and the executive will continue to assert that it has limitless unbounded inherent powers which are subject to no review or check of any kind.
I just found 68k to be a really elegant design. All orthogonal registers, no real special cases, etc. No need to worry about the fact that your value needed to be in register A and not B, etc. That really did help a lot.
Never did make sense to me that people couldn't just pick up the documentation for the processor and SEE that instruction X took 25 clock cycles and Y took 3. Ah well, the bad programmers are what lets the good ones stand out!;)
On the compiler, the architecture, and what the code does and how its written.
It has been a few years since I had the job of writing device drivers, but we did quite a bit of experimentation around this point. This was on 68k processors back in the 80's, but what I learned was that in MANY cases the compiler is pretty good. Interrupt Service Handlers, the really speed critical part of your driver, are also usually quite simple linear code. Maybe you have a simple loop, a lookup table, index a data structure or two, move some bytes around. If you're doing more than that its probably a bad design.
Given that the entry to the ISR is already a context switch, so you're starting out with an empty pipeline what we discovered was that in actual practice the C compiler was reasonably close. Its almost 20 years later, compilers have improved. I'm sure you or I could look at gcc output and tweak away some cycles here and there, but the difference is not usually much. The other issue was of course that case where the compiler just missed something entirely, but those cases are almost always ones where you can tweak the source a bit and fix the problem or use a different flag.
Of course the 68k architecture was easily 50 times better than x86, so that helped too! lol. I still think its a tragedy that x86 went anywhere, the whole design is $*}#...
Hemp has HUGE advantages over cotton. Fiber is fiber to a large extent. Cotton is one of the most difficult crops to grow and has some of the highest water, pesticide, and fertilizer needs. Hemp will grow on almost any land, requires minimal water, no/little fertilizer, and has few pests.
In fact the beauty of the whole thing is that the only type of engine which is efficient enough to do the trick would be an ion drive anyway, which only produce on the order of maybe.05 N of thrust anyway, so even if you pushed the asteroid you still wouldn't be able to do so with large amounts of force. In theory you could gang up a whole bunch of those drives, but interestingly the thrust of ion engines is in the same range as the strength of the attraction of the tractor mass to the asteroid.
It really is a beautiful idea..02 m/s x 86,400 sec/day means you can do quite a bit of deflection in a year's time, roughly 20,000 km. I'd think that would be enough to turn a collision into a miss in most cases. Now, if the asteroid were Apophis, which is over 100 m in length, then either the tractor would have to be a LOT bigger or the time frame is longer. There is a 1/5000 chance of a 2039 Apophis impact. We will know if this is going to happen after the 2017 close approach, thus we would have 22 years in which to apply the tractor. Say it was a 10 metric ton tractor, which is probably doable. I think we'd manage.
A really big asteroid, something in the range of 1000 m would be a lot bigger problem.
There are an infinite number of dimensions to the whole argument, and basically there are few, if any, good reasons for MJ being illegal. I'm sure someone will trot out each one.
Hemp would pretty well wipe out cotton as a fiber crop, and might well wipe out many of the oil seed crops as well.
Technically I believe that in most states with the proper permits and using approved commercial seed you CAN grow hemp as a crop legally. The problem then is that the market for it is a lot more limited than that for cotton and there are various hoops you have to jump through.
Back in the early 80's the stuff was everywhere and people were growing it in fields, then Ronnie Ray Gun decided he needed another reason to make people afraid and the cops came down all over that.
So nowadays I don't know what the going rate is exactly, but it is quite a bit north of $200 an ounce.
There may be SOME architecture specific code, even a lot of that can probably be written in C. 99% of the Linux kernel is C and that has to interact with hardware too.
As far as efficiency goes, in the old days it was true that a coder with an intimate knowledge of the architecture could usually hand code more efficient assembly. Modern C compilers however can do a LOT of optimization and generally the resulting code is faster than anything that could be coded by hand, or at least AS fast. Even if it is microscopically slower it is still a LOT easier to use C. Plus if hardware abstraction is done properly even a low level driver back end should be portable for the most part.
Manufacturer BIOS may be written in Assembly since they are A) targeting a specific board which is going to obviously only run that one family of chip and B) probably have a lot of legacy assembly code they would rather not bother to port to C. Neither of those would apply to Coreboot.
Chances are there are a few good sized chunks in a big asteroid, BUT maybe it would make sense to get rid of the rest.
Now if we're talking far enough up the tech curve one might contemplate using the gravel for reaction mass to move the big chunks around. But that would be a LOT more technically complex.
In any case I'm not real sure why people worry about it at all. We wouldn't even be able to move this new asteroid as it stands, and it probably wouldn't do much damage anyway unless it smacked down in a fairly populated area. The BIG asteroids only hit once in millions of years, hardly much of a worry.
Sure, and for THAT we may well be able to do it. There are only meters per second of delta v on those things, and it is a relatively small asteroid.
But there is going to have to be quite a few years of work done to determine the exact nature of these things and how to safely handle them. An emergency to deflect a strike is one thing, but just for sheer science or money it is going to have to be proven low risk first.
And we do know actually a good bit about the general character of asteroids. The profile of rotation velocities in the population tells us that very few are solid pieces of material. Some may be a few large pieces, but that could be worse than a bunch of small gravel.
It just makes more sense to use a pulling force, and some sort of net is going to be heavy and awkward and difficult to deploy. A tractor is just a big lump of whatever. Mostly fuel probably.
The total delta v required to get from Earth to Mars is somewhat under 5 km/s. In order to impart that kind of velocity to an asteroid you would need something like 10 huge nuclear rockets or something (and a small asteroid).
This is why it is important to detect these things well in advance. The delta v required to deflect something that is a year from crashing into Earth is going to be on the order of half the diameter of the Earth in a year. In other words VERY low. A year is really close. Realistically a few mm/s really IS all you need. That's the beauty of it all. If you can arrange it so that you're course correction is initiated at a favorable point in the asteroid's orbit, then the energy required is pretty trivial.
If you're talking about doing it very close, then we're WAY beyond any rocket technology we've even thought about inventing. The highest velocities ever achieved via direct power (not gravity assist) are on the order of 7 km/s and that is for a space probe massing a few 100 kilos. A 10 meter diameter asteroid masses on the order of millions of kilos. Practically speaking even with a gravity tractor and a required delta v in the mm/s range we aren't even close yet to deploying a system with the required capabilities.
And how many 1000's of tons would a 'net' of some sort weigh? On top of the reaction mass and engines, etc. Hard to say what will make sense at some point in the future, but gravity tractors at least would be simple and are far closer to being possible than anything else I've ever heard suggested.
Most asteroids are most likely actually just big piles of smaller material. They have very little structural integrity. If you tried to apply a force to one 'spot' on the asteroid the results would be at best unpredictable. Material would shift around, you might even just sort of push through it.
Another related problem is that you need to push against the asteroid THROUGH its center of mass. If that center of mass is not fixed, then you can't really do that.
Beyond that, even if the asteroid is a solid chunk of rock, you still have to despin it before you can push it, thus the whole operation becomes a lot harder, plus if it IS a rubble pile, then you may not even be able to despin it or it would be pretty hard to do so.
A gravity tractor on the other hand suffers none of these disadvantages. All parts of the asteroid are going to be attracted to the tractor. It may STILL be somewhat complicated, but probably less so. In any event we won't really know until we try.
Finally, what difference does it really make how fast you accelerate the asteroid? The point would be to put it on the desired course. Doesn't really matter if the mission is 1 hour long or 10 years as long as you get the results you want.
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Any hypothesis would have to make predictions which could be observed, it would have to be falsifiable. I am not suggesting any of my basically idle speculations are anything like solid theories. Nor am I one of those deluded posters you see on so many forums who somehow believe their random thoughts are amazing new groundbreaking scientific insights (which of course the "hide bound" ultra-conventional scientists simply "cannot see"), lol.
My main point was that if a theory is advanced which can explain where the antimatter is, or explain its absence away, then it starts to look like a moot point as to how many elementary particles there are in the universe.
Yeah...
Actually if you just go pick up a back issue of Scientific American from a few months or a year back they had it all spelled out.
Assuming the type of PV arrays likely to be deployable in 10 years or so we can supply the required electricity for the entire country by covering one small area down in the corner of Nevada.
I don't know what the environmental impact of that would be, but it certainly doesn't seem out of order with the impact we've seen already with nuclear power.
When will the nuclear power advocates actually get an adding machine and add up the cost of all these plants they want to build, plus the cost of the waste transport, storage, disposal/reprocessing, decommissioning costs of the plants, etc and realize that its just way out of line with the benefits.
I'm not making ANY of my arguments on any kind of grounds of environmentalism. I've seen the numbers added up, it DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to build more nuclear power plants. It just doesn't! Not even the electric power industry in this country wants to build more nukes, they know better. If it was such a great deal why aren't they building them now? Because its a bad deal, thats why!
There are a multitude of answers to that and none of them require nuclear power.
First of all I'm not proposing, nor is anyone else who's opinion might be marginally worth listening to, that we rely on solar power exclusively. Solar may or may not generate the majority of our power at some point. Wind and dry geothermal power CAN provide perfectly fine base load power.
The wind may not blow in every location all of the time, but there is relatively little overall variation when you have facilities scattered all over the country. Dry geothermal energy stations can be sited practically anywhere and certainly aren't subject to any more variations than any other existing standard power plant design.
As suggestions for the uses of solar energy it could be utilized directly as process heat, which in turn can be used to reformulate biomass or hydrolyze water to produce hydrogen or carbon based fuels and feedstocks. Industrial applications of electricity can easily operate at times when such power is available.
In the likely case that much of our ground transportation infrastructure is switched over to electric vehicles that entire segment would also be provided with its power during the day.
Finally energy CAN be stored. There are well tested and long used methods of doing so, like pumping water into reservoirs for example, which has been used for the last 100 years at most larger hydroelectric facilities.
Sure, all of these things require money to build, but just the sheer time frames involved is much shorter and it is not a big deal to build a storage facility and find out that particular technology isn't so great. With nuclear technology you HAVE to do decades of safety work up front before you can even plan a deployment. The risks are much higher.
Nuclear power is a dead letter. I'll predict it now, not one single nuclear power plant will be constructed in the US from now on. It just isn't going to happen and it is pointless to waste money pretending it will. The cost of 10 new standard commercial LWRs is enough money to finance ALL the remaining R&D needed to start installing solar PV on a massive scale AND subsidize a good bit of the deployment. Its just a matter of economics. Nukes aren't economical.
I mean it is true we do not OBSERVE much antimatter in this universe, but that doesn't mean it is not present in some sense:
A) It could be in some other part of the universe beyond our effective observational horizon. Granted there are some reasons to think not, but it is a possibility.
B) It could be that the antimatter simply exists in some 'other place'. Given that we haven't at all settled the actual architecture of spacetime, it could be that the antimatter is in a location which is either topologically distant/inaccessible or in dimensions not readily visible to us.
C) Antimatter could be segregated in a different part of time itself. If we imagined that the arrow of time in our universe reverses every now and then, some form of oscillating universe, then perhaps we would find that when time runs backwards, matter looks like antimatter and that may balance the books.
Not being a cosmologist or high energy physicist I don't have the wherewithal to analyze these various possibilities, maybe some of them are ridiculous on the face of them or there may be other more obvious or simple solutions, but it seems there are probably ample unknowns out of which to construct hypotheses along these lines.
Given that we could answer the 'where's the antimatter' question, then how would it even be meaningful to say there is 'more than one electron' in the universe vs 'there is one electron/antielectron with a very convolved history'? It would likely be a case of 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.
That oddly enough the author made a whole LOT of claims FOR Windows 7 that AFAIK are not at all justified.
Windows 7 for netbooks? There are 2 major issues with that. First of all it is an unproven assertion that Windows 7 can be 'slimmed down' to run well on a netbook. Frankly I would imagine it CAN, but would the result still be an appealing OS? Finally how is this now stripped version of Windows 7 going to compete on a licensing cost basis with free?
A similar argument is made that Windows 7 will be the upgrade path to heaven for Vista users. Why exactly? No business is going to pay for the new licenses and additional training and deployment costs. There is NO evidence that 7 is any faster or more efficient or even more stable than Vista is now. Home users might not care about training costs, but they have similar concerns and again there will be no compelling reason for them to upgrade and no reason to anticipate they will do so in any great numbers.
So the conclusion I come to is that Windows 7 has no real market except new desktop PCs and maybe laptops. Given that netbooks are cannibalizing both of these markets in the retail sector and this is also where Apple competes best with OS X one begins to wonder if Windows 7 will simply be relegated to a shrinking niche market segment.
Certainly MS is going to continue to try to tie its new web services to its new OS, but web services are a LOT easier market to break into than the desktop OS market of yore was. Not only that, but even if everyone uses these MS web services like crazy it will still always be possible to access them from non-MS OSes, even if 3rd parties have to build the tools to do so.
I seriously doubt MS is going to be knocked out of the desktop OS market any time soon, or even loose its majority market share, but it just isn't going to matter much.
It is an interesting technology, but lets be realistic here.
Building an existing 'off the shelf' LWR design requires roughly 10 years. Turning this technology into a standardized design which can be used by industry will require some amount of time, probably 10-20 years by the time all the safety engineering is complete and a prototype reactor is built, run for several years, and the bugs are worked out of it.
So, we're talking about OPTIMISTICALLY 2028 and possibly 2038-2048 before the first one of these reactors would come on line. By every indication solar PV and solar thermal power systems will be highly mature and widely deployed by that time. Why at that point is there a need for more nuclear reactors?
Nuclear power's time has come and gone. Regardless of any debate about its safety and efficacy as a power generation technology the time frames are just wrong. Had we made these advances 20 or 30 years ago it would maybe be a different story, but at this point nuclear power is irrelevant. The only thing nuclear power can do now is suck up investments which would be better made perfecting solar, wind, and dry geothermal power solutions, as well as the build out of the power grid which they will require.
So, with all due respect to nuclear power enthusiasts, please stop wasting our time and money on a dead technology which has relegated itself to irrelevance long ago.
Frankly most small professional services type companies are virtually worthless on an asset value basis. The only concrete assets they generally own are nothing more than office equipment, some IT infrastructure, and possibly some licenses and distribution agreements.
With a small company the intangible assets amount to basically customer good will and name recognition. Customers often are more attached to the partners than they are to the business itself. If it is a business that has been a going concern for many years then the intangible value MAY be substantial, but it is difficult to measure.
Thus the REAL value of your 10% ownership is on paper at least very close to zero in most cases. It is even worse if you are a really key player in the business because it is likely to collapse if one of the really key people leaves. Maybe in your case that isn't the situation, but you never know when the VP of marketing will decide to take off with all the customers either.
Technically an equity stake entitles you to dividends, but that may not amount to anything at all. The principals in the company can just as easily take their profits in salary and you'd really have little or nothing to say about that, being a minority owner. You can also be pretty easily diluted, the board can issue more shares, etc.
Thus owning 10% may be worth exactly zip.
On the other hand, not all business owners are that cutthroat, you have to judge how much you trust them. If they are really making an offer to have you onboard as a co-owner and thats what they really want and they are honest people, then maybe its worth something. You could make some (or a lot perhaps) of extra money.
Consider though. If they are offering you equity, then that probably means the equity is cheaper than what they think they might have to pay you to convince you to stay otherwise. Even if the offer is in good faith and all it either means you're worth a LOT to them, or they are just broke and can't pay more but need you enough to give up some (possibly worthless) equity.
Nothing has changed. The Obama administration is continuing to advance the same legal arguments the Bush administration used.
In all fairness we might consider withholding final judgment for a while, but so far all indications are that the 4th Amendment will continue to be ignored and the executive will continue to assert that it has limitless unbounded inherent powers which are subject to no review or check of any kind.
Heil Obama!
LOL, it is normal practice to make multiple infusions with green tea. Especially Japanese teas, but true for either one.
The second infusion is the best!
I mean the poor man has just had to absolutely prostitute himself to get a good project!
Come on, who can wait? lolol
I just found 68k to be a really elegant design. All orthogonal registers, no real special cases, etc. No need to worry about the fact that your value needed to be in register A and not B, etc. That really did help a lot.
Never did make sense to me that people couldn't just pick up the documentation for the processor and SEE that instruction X took 25 clock cycles and Y took 3. Ah well, the bad programmers are what lets the good ones stand out! ;)
On the compiler, the architecture, and what the code does and how its written.
It has been a few years since I had the job of writing device drivers, but we did quite a bit of experimentation around this point. This was on 68k processors back in the 80's, but what I learned was that in MANY cases the compiler is pretty good. Interrupt Service Handlers, the really speed critical part of your driver, are also usually quite simple linear code. Maybe you have a simple loop, a lookup table, index a data structure or two, move some bytes around. If you're doing more than that its probably a bad design.
Given that the entry to the ISR is already a context switch, so you're starting out with an empty pipeline what we discovered was that in actual practice the C compiler was reasonably close. Its almost 20 years later, compilers have improved. I'm sure you or I could look at gcc output and tweak away some cycles here and there, but the difference is not usually much. The other issue was of course that case where the compiler just missed something entirely, but those cases are almost always ones where you can tweak the source a bit and fix the problem or use a different flag.
Of course the 68k architecture was easily 50 times better than x86, so that helped too! lol. I still think its a tragedy that x86 went anywhere, the whole design is $*}#...
Hemp has HUGE advantages over cotton. Fiber is fiber to a large extent. Cotton is one of the most difficult crops to grow and has some of the highest water, pesticide, and fertilizer needs. Hemp will grow on almost any land, requires minimal water, no/little fertilizer, and has few pests.
In fact the beauty of the whole thing is that the only type of engine which is efficient enough to do the trick would be an ion drive anyway, which only produce on the order of maybe .05 N of thrust anyway, so even if you pushed the asteroid you still wouldn't be able to do so with large amounts of force. In theory you could gang up a whole bunch of those drives, but interestingly the thrust of ion engines is in the same range as the strength of the attraction of the tractor mass to the asteroid.
It really is a beautiful idea. .02 m/s x 86,400 sec/day means you can do quite a bit of deflection in a year's time, roughly 20,000 km. I'd think that would be enough to turn a collision into a miss in most cases. Now, if the asteroid were Apophis, which is over 100 m in length, then either the tractor would have to be a LOT bigger or the time frame is longer. There is a 1/5000 chance of a 2039 Apophis impact. We will know if this is going to happen after the 2017 close approach, thus we would have 22 years in which to apply the tractor. Say it was a 10 metric ton tractor, which is probably doable. I think we'd manage.
A really big asteroid, something in the range of 1000 m would be a lot bigger problem.
There are an infinite number of dimensions to the whole argument, and basically there are few, if any, good reasons for MJ being illegal. I'm sure someone will trot out each one.
Hemp would pretty well wipe out cotton as a fiber crop, and might well wipe out many of the oil seed crops as well.
Technically I believe that in most states with the proper permits and using approved commercial seed you CAN grow hemp as a crop legally. The problem then is that the market for it is a lot more limited than that for cotton and there are various hoops you have to jump through.
our stoned Canuck Overlords!
up here in Vermont...
Back in the early 80's the stuff was everywhere and people were growing it in fields, then Ronnie Ray Gun decided he needed another reason to make people afraid and the cops came down all over that.
So nowadays I don't know what the going rate is exactly, but it is quite a bit north of $200 an ounce.
There may be SOME architecture specific code, even a lot of that can probably be written in C. 99% of the Linux kernel is C and that has to interact with hardware too.
As far as efficiency goes, in the old days it was true that a coder with an intimate knowledge of the architecture could usually hand code more efficient assembly. Modern C compilers however can do a LOT of optimization and generally the resulting code is faster than anything that could be coded by hand, or at least AS fast. Even if it is microscopically slower it is still a LOT easier to use C. Plus if hardware abstraction is done properly even a low level driver back end should be portable for the most part.
Manufacturer BIOS may be written in Assembly since they are A) targeting a specific board which is going to obviously only run that one family of chip and B) probably have a lot of legacy assembly code they would rather not bother to port to C. Neither of those would apply to Coreboot.
Chances are there are a few good sized chunks in a big asteroid, BUT maybe it would make sense to get rid of the rest.
Now if we're talking far enough up the tech curve one might contemplate using the gravel for reaction mass to move the big chunks around. But that would be a LOT more technically complex.
In any case I'm not real sure why people worry about it at all. We wouldn't even be able to move this new asteroid as it stands, and it probably wouldn't do much damage anyway unless it smacked down in a fairly populated area. The BIG asteroids only hit once in millions of years, hardly much of a worry.
Sure, and for THAT we may well be able to do it. There are only meters per second of delta v on those things, and it is a relatively small asteroid.
But there is going to have to be quite a few years of work done to determine the exact nature of these things and how to safely handle them. An emergency to deflect a strike is one thing, but just for sheer science or money it is going to have to be proven low risk first.
And we do know actually a good bit about the general character of asteroids. The profile of rotation velocities in the population tells us that very few are solid pieces of material. Some may be a few large pieces, but that could be worse than a bunch of small gravel.
It just makes more sense to use a pulling force, and some sort of net is going to be heavy and awkward and difficult to deploy. A tractor is just a big lump of whatever. Mostly fuel probably.
The total delta v required to get from Earth to Mars is somewhat under 5 km/s. In order to impart that kind of velocity to an asteroid you would need something like 10 huge nuclear rockets or something (and a small asteroid).
This is why it is important to detect these things well in advance. The delta v required to deflect something that is a year from crashing into Earth is going to be on the order of half the diameter of the Earth in a year. In other words VERY low. A year is really close. Realistically a few mm/s really IS all you need. That's the beauty of it all. If you can arrange it so that you're course correction is initiated at a favorable point in the asteroid's orbit, then the energy required is pretty trivial.
If you're talking about doing it very close, then we're WAY beyond any rocket technology we've even thought about inventing. The highest velocities ever achieved via direct power (not gravity assist) are on the order of 7 km/s and that is for a space probe massing a few 100 kilos. A 10 meter diameter asteroid masses on the order of millions of kilos. Practically speaking even with a gravity tractor and a required delta v in the mm/s range we aren't even close yet to deploying a system with the required capabilities.
And how many 1000's of tons would a 'net' of some sort weigh? On top of the reaction mass and engines, etc. Hard to say what will make sense at some point in the future, but gravity tractors at least would be simple and are far closer to being possible than anything else I've ever heard suggested.
Most asteroids are most likely actually just big piles of smaller material. They have very little structural integrity. If you tried to apply a force to one 'spot' on the asteroid the results would be at best unpredictable. Material would shift around, you might even just sort of push through it.
Another related problem is that you need to push against the asteroid THROUGH its center of mass. If that center of mass is not fixed, then you can't really do that.
Beyond that, even if the asteroid is a solid chunk of rock, you still have to despin it before you can push it, thus the whole operation becomes a lot harder, plus if it IS a rubble pile, then you may not even be able to despin it or it would be pretty hard to do so.
A gravity tractor on the other hand suffers none of these disadvantages. All parts of the asteroid are going to be attracted to the tractor. It may STILL be somewhat complicated, but probably less so. In any event we won't really know until we try.
Finally, what difference does it really make how fast you accelerate the asteroid? The point would be to put it on the desired course. Doesn't really matter if the mission is 1 hour long or 10 years as long as you get the results you want.
Last I checked neither my condo nor my office has a piped in supply of cryogenic gasses...