Agreed. Honestly, I'm surprised there's anyone who's not of the view that Google has been going backwards in terms of their map interface and quality of what's presented for a long time. Heck, Google Search too.. "Yes, Google, I did want you to actually find pages with all of my search terms in it, rather than you randomly deciding that I was just kidding about half of them...."
Did you follow my link? The most modern reactor under construction (a "Generation 3+") has gone almost humorously over budget and behind schedule. It'd be comical if it wasn't ultimately ordinary people who are going to end up footing the bill.
$35 billion for 3,2GW of power generation, even with a high capacity factor and (hopefully) low operating costs, and assuming no accidents, is still an utter absurdity. More than $10 per Wh installed? That's patently absurd. Approving that sort of thing is a mustachioed-gentleman-tying-damels-to-railroad-tracks level of criminality against the public.
What a load of rubbish. Slashdot posters repeatedly inform me that nuclear is cheap and widely scalable while renewables are way too expensive.
They've also kindly let me know that the reason that nuclear power plants go so ridiculously over budget is because of NIMBYs, nothing to do with the cost of engineering, construction difficulties, etc.
The thing that's silly is that Slashdot already allows multibyte characters - öæáéíóúýð etc. So there's no technical reason standing in their way. But it's like someone just handpicked a list of which characters to allow, and made it way too small.
Just enable unicode, disable the controversial blocks (Miscellaneous_Symbols_And_Pictographs, Emoticons, etc, and add a blacklist for individual characters as needed. Job done.
Hmm, I can't seem to find an hour long TED talk describing how much I agree with you... so this "comment" will have to do. ((insert emoji of a sad chicken crying with its head in its wings here))
Most salts in the "west" (what the person wrote - assuming they mean the US) are indeed iodized. Sea salt however has no added iodine (though it has its normal iodine levels). Pickling/canning salt isn't iodized either.
Except that the large drug companies spend only a small fraction of their budgets on R&D, and spend more on marketing. It's small companies and universities that develop half of all new drugs in the US, despite raking in far lower profits.
As for the military, has it ever occurred to you that most of us actually don't want there to be a giant hegemonic power (you) throwing around your military weight in the world?
A couple week old embryo is a "child" in the same way that a pair of skyscraper-blueprints sitting on a half-poured foundation is the same thing as a fully built, fully occupied skyscraper. As a consequence, just as terminating an early-stage pregnancy is the exact same thing as murdering a child, blowing up a pair of blueprints on a newly cleared build site is the same as blowing up a skyscraper full of people.
Yeah, one. Were you trying to write "cocks" or "kooks"? I'm trying to figure out what sort of insult you were trying to direct to those stupid "Millenials";)
It's not "waffling", Slashdot's lack of understanding of cosmology notwithstanding.
What Hawking said in 2014 was that black holes - in the context of disjoint regions of space irrevocably disconnected from our spacetime - do not exist. What Hawking is said now is... the same thing.
Hawking did waffle on black holes, once; he was once of the view that information was lost irretrievably beyond the event horizon, but he conceded based on a large scientific debate that arose that this view was mistaken. While he's certainly refined the details of the mechanism and consequences since then (as have the many other cosmologists working on the problem), his overall view has not changed.
A big area of debate which caused the "refining" was the so-called "firewall" paradox, which pointed out a variety of fundamental problems that come when you try to reconcile an effectively disjoint region of spacetime with the concept of information leaking out. The resolutions have been increasingly that black holes aren't nearly as disjoint as they first appeared to be.
Honestly, with the way things are headed, I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up with is nothing more than a dilationary inflation gravity near the event horizon that leads to infalling matter being bent into a flat spacetime at the event horizon - not just a case of "no event horizon", but no singularity either. I've seen some work on this in the past, and it really would make a lot of the "weirdness" of the universe (from black holes to the Big Bang) become a lot less weird. The unification of black holes, inflation and the Big Bang leads to what I find to be a very satisfying "fate of the universe" scenario... the universe "bangs", black holes ultimately form, they drift unthinkably far apart over unfathomably long timespans, then they in turn bang in the exact same manner, creating new universes of their own. And contrary to how it may at first seem (that each new universe would be a small fraction the size of its parent), this wouldn't inherently be the case, as we also have dark energy in the picture.
But that's just my take:)
(Flat spacetime isn't really that weird... we live in spacetime that is, on the large scale, flat)
The frame of reference that he launched from and that we live on (the surface of the Earth directly below where we stand) is probably a pretty good one, I would think.
You don't have cops pulling people over and saying, "Do you realize how fast you were driving relative to Sagittarius A*?"
"And in Future News, in response to the hack of Wikipedia's servers and the discovery that their offsite backup service was a scam, the Wikimedia foundation has launched the new Wikimedia Lunar X-Prize, for the first team who can travel to the moon, retrieve a data disc and return it safely to Earth...."
You're not going to launch a microSD card if you want something to last for millenia. You're going to launch something like M-DISC. Which from the links is what it sounds like they're launching.
Furthermore, we're not talking about getting something into "space", or even LEO (FYI typical costs are $10k/kg to LEO, not per pound, although Russian/Chinese launchers and SpaceX are cheaper). We're talking about to the lunar surface. That's significantly more delta-V. The disc is about 16 grams. Cost to lunar surface would optimistically be ballpark $30k/kg. So about $500USD. Given that this is a volunteer team competing for a prize, it's not insignificant.
Xenon isn't used because it's a fundamental requirement - it's used because the cost of the fuel is basically irrelevant compared to the costs to launch it to orbit, and xenon provides (by a rather small margin) the best performance. But you can use all sorts of gases. You could use argon if you wanted and it wouldn't have much of an impact on performance. Even hydrogen is sometimes used.
For a long time it was assumed that nuclear was going to be the only realistic option for providing power to large ion engines. But the power / mass ratio on space solar has really been rising fast in recent years - look at ATK ultraflex / megaflex for examples. More and more, instead of rigid arrays, they're using unfoldable flexible arrays. They still have high cell efficiencies, but the masses are a tiny fraction of what they used to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Honestly, I'm surprised there's anyone who's not of the view that Google has been going backwards in terms of their map interface and quality of what's presented for a long time. Heck, Google Search too.. "Yes, Google, I did want you to actually find pages with all of my search terms in it, rather than you randomly deciding that I was just kidding about half of them...."
You call can stop arguing over this, it was a simple typo :P
Did you follow my link? The most modern reactor under construction (a "Generation 3+") has gone almost humorously over budget and behind schedule. It'd be comical if it wasn't ultimately ordinary people who are going to end up footing the bill.
$35 billion for 3,2GW of power generation, even with a high capacity factor and (hopefully) low operating costs, and assuming no accidents, is still an utter absurdity. More than $10 per Wh installed? That's patently absurd. Approving that sort of thing is a mustachioed-gentleman-tying-damels-to-railroad-tracks level of criminality against the public.
What a load of rubbish. Slashdot posters repeatedly inform me that nuclear is cheap and widely scalable while renewables are way too expensive.
They've also kindly let me know that the reason that nuclear power plants go so ridiculously over budget is because of NIMBYs, nothing to do with the cost of engineering, construction difficulties, etc.
Ah, kamikaze bunnies.... ;)
I wonder how many job applications they'll be getting from snarky programmers now describing themselves as "deweaselers" ;)
The thing that's silly is that Slashdot already allows multibyte characters - öæáéíóúýð etc. So there's no technical reason standing in their way. But it's like someone just handpicked a list of which characters to allow, and made it way too small.
Just enable unicode, disable the controversial blocks (Miscellaneous_Symbols_And_Pictographs, Emoticons, etc, and add a blacklist for individual characters as needed. Job done.
Hmm, I can't seem to find an hour long TED talk describing how much I agree with you... so this "comment" will have to do. ((insert emoji of a sad chicken crying with its head in its wings here))
Most salts in the "west" (what the person wrote - assuming they mean the US) are indeed iodized. Sea salt however has no added iodine (though it has its normal iodine levels). Pickling/canning salt isn't iodized either.
or is the site down? It is sci-hub.io right?
It'll be a bit tough to hear Cruz's victory speech over the singing fat lady and the wingbeat of the pigs flying past the sun as it sets in the east.
It says to me you're confused about what "your region" is.
It's pretty peaceful where I'm at. Now, since when is "your region" the Middle East?
"Millenials" are (archaic short form of) adulterous wives? That's an... odd accusation to make.
Except that the large drug companies spend only a small fraction of their budgets on R&D, and spend more on marketing. It's small companies and universities that develop half of all new drugs in the US, despite raking in far lower profits.
As for the military, has it ever occurred to you that most of us actually don't want there to be a giant hegemonic power (you) throwing around your military weight in the world?
A couple week old embryo is a "child" in the same way that a pair of skyscraper-blueprints sitting on a half-poured foundation is the same thing as a fully built, fully occupied skyscraper. As a consequence, just as terminating an early-stage pregnancy is the exact same thing as murdering a child, blowing up a pair of blueprints on a newly cleared build site is the same as blowing up a skyscraper full of people.
Yeah, one. Were you trying to write "cocks" or "kooks"? I'm trying to figure out what sort of insult you were trying to direct to those stupid "Millenials" ;)
It's not "waffling", Slashdot's lack of understanding of cosmology notwithstanding.
What Hawking said in 2014 was that black holes - in the context of disjoint regions of space irrevocably disconnected from our spacetime - do not exist.
What Hawking is said now is... the same thing.
Hawking did waffle on black holes, once; he was once of the view that information was lost irretrievably beyond the event horizon, but he conceded based on a large scientific debate that arose that this view was mistaken. While he's certainly refined the details of the mechanism and consequences since then (as have the many other cosmologists working on the problem), his overall view has not changed.
A big area of debate which caused the "refining" was the so-called "firewall" paradox, which pointed out a variety of fundamental problems that come when you try to reconcile an effectively disjoint region of spacetime with the concept of information leaking out. The resolutions have been increasingly that black holes aren't nearly as disjoint as they first appeared to be.
Honestly, with the way things are headed, I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up with is nothing more than a dilationary inflation gravity near the event horizon that leads to infalling matter being bent into a flat spacetime at the event horizon - not just a case of "no event horizon", but no singularity either. I've seen some work on this in the past, and it really would make a lot of the "weirdness" of the universe (from black holes to the Big Bang) become a lot less weird. The unification of black holes, inflation and the Big Bang leads to what I find to be a very satisfying "fate of the universe" scenario... the universe "bangs", black holes ultimately form, they drift unthinkably far apart over unfathomably long timespans, then they in turn bang in the exact same manner, creating new universes of their own. And contrary to how it may at first seem (that each new universe would be a small fraction the size of its parent), this wouldn't inherently be the case, as we also have dark energy in the picture.
But that's just my take :)
(Flat spacetime isn't really that weird... we live in spacetime that is, on the large scale, flat)
The frame of reference that he launched from and that we live on (the surface of the Earth directly below where we stand) is probably a pretty good one, I would think.
You don't have cops pulling people over and saying, "Do you realize how fast you were driving relative to Sagittarius A*?"
"And in Future News, in response to the hack of Wikipedia's servers and the discovery that their offsite backup service was a scam, the Wikimedia foundation has launched the new Wikimedia Lunar X-Prize, for the first team who can travel to the moon, retrieve a data disc and return it safely to Earth...."
You're not going to launch a microSD card if you want something to last for millenia. You're going to launch something like M-DISC. Which from the links is what it sounds like they're launching.
Furthermore, we're not talking about getting something into "space", or even LEO (FYI typical costs are $10k/kg to LEO, not per pound, although Russian/Chinese launchers and SpaceX are cheaper). We're talking about to the lunar surface. That's significantly more delta-V. The disc is about 16 grams. Cost to lunar surface would optimistically be ballpark $30k/kg. So about $500USD. Given that this is a volunteer team competing for a prize, it's not insignificant.
I don't know what "crystal disc" you're talking about, but it sounds like they're using M-DISC. It's basically engraved into a ceramic layer.
Xenon isn't used because it's a fundamental requirement - it's used because the cost of the fuel is basically irrelevant compared to the costs to launch it to orbit, and xenon provides (by a rather small margin) the best performance. But you can use all sorts of gases. You could use argon if you wanted and it wouldn't have much of an impact on performance. Even hydrogen is sometimes used.
For a long time it was assumed that nuclear was going to be the only realistic option for providing power to large ion engines. But the power / mass ratio on space solar has really been rising fast in recent years - look at ATK ultraflex / megaflex for examples. More and more, instead of rigid arrays, they're using unfoldable flexible arrays. They still have high cell efficiencies, but the masses are a tiny fraction of what they used to be.