Prosperity is the wrong goal, the correct goal is making sure everybody has clean air to breath, healthy food to eat, clean water to drink
That's pretty much the fundamental definition of prosperity... plus a roof to keep the rain off.
Why is your ridiculous alarmism being modded up, not once but twice? Especially when it's completely self-contradictory. Reality on the ground is, the more prosperous a country is, the lower its population growth. The most prosperous countries are experiencing a population decline, not growth. Nobody is certain why this is (but the education of women and the availability of prophylactics seems to be the leading guesses), but regardless, it's true.
So for people who believe that humans are the scariest things in the ecosystem, prosperity should be the goal. It's the one and only thing, in all of recorded history, that has caused birth rates to drop below the replacement rate. Not even world wars could do that. If you truly believe there are too many people, the only thing that can fix that is prosperity. (Or a glacial period in an Ice Age. Those work too.)
Naively scale it to do 270x the work, that's eating 3.2 cubic meters of probe volume in order to keep the inside down to a blazing 100*C. Our 2-meter-diameter probe, with 250mm of aerogel shell, only has 1.7 cubic meters of internal volume.
Uh, the radiator is bolted to the outside of the sphere. The components on the inside are considerably smaller than the radiator on the outside. Think CPU water cooling rig. The water block is quite small in volume compared to the radiator.
You neglected the really useful calculation: the Carnot efficiency. Let's see if there's a little more room on the back of the envelope.
Carnot efficiency is given by: (TH-TC)/TH*100% so for Venus at 470K and room temperature at 298K, we get an efficiency of 36%. So in order to reject, say, 600 watts of heat from the interior of the probe (your 500W of ambient leakage plus 100W of equipment), our refrigerator is going to suck up somewhere north of 1.7kW of power. (It will be more, because Carnot efficiency is the theoretical perfect efficiency, which can't actually be built.) How close we can get to the ideal depends quite heavily on the properties of the working fluid and the pressures inside the system. Outrageous by space probe standards, but not actually completely bonkers.
Using the same General Purpose Heat Source modules used in the Curiosity rover, we'll need 111 modules, totaling 67kg of plutonium-238. NASA has 35kg left for civil use (and an unspecified amount earmarked for military use (classified)). Houston, we have a problem...
Running the numbers in a reverse Rankine Cycle to calculate a more practical efficiency is left as an exercise for the reader.
There WASN'T any MOON surface to evaporate from - it was the multi-quadrillion PIECES that got thermally blasted, and lost all of their volatiles.
Wouldn't there necessarily have to have been some larger chunks that didn't get pulled into Earth? Fragments of Earth or the impactor itself?
There had to have been something fairly substantial around which Luna could coalesce. Otherwise Earth would have (a) ring(s), and not a moon. This seems to follow because Luna really is too big for its planet in the first place. Everywhere else in the solar system where moons coalesced out of a cloud of relatively small particles, those moons are considerably smaller relative to the parent body than Luna is to Earth. Luna is very likely a fair-sized chunk of Theia, mixed in with smaller chunks of Earth, and coated in both Earth dust and Theia dust.
Really, we're not going to know until we drill and take cores, plus do seismic imaging. Solving the n-body problem on that scale requires simplifying assumptions (in either your explanation or mine) so vast that it just reduces the whole thing to guesswork. If we really want to know, we're going to have to go and look.
The 215MB csv file in the GitHub repo is in fact stored with Git LFS. If you don't have the Git LFS extension installed, a git clone pulls only the 134 byte metadata file.
Metadata of metadata... it's meta all the way down!
I think you're meant to go through the website, and download the images from there. The photography looks to be high quality, and fairly high resolution-- though not spectacularly so.
Better than nothing, I suppose. So who's going to run the botnet to harvest all the images from the site and put together a proper torrent? Because this nickel and dime image-at-a-time thing is bullshit.
One of his companies (SpaceX) depends a lot on government money. Trump could deeply damage it with a penstroke by excluding it from ISS resupply missions, or forbidding it to compete for national security launches.
Both true, and it goes further than that. SpaceX requires a great deal of participation from the Air Force to do anything. The Air Force owns the launch sites. The Air Force provides range control, which isn't optional. And Trump is the Commander in Chief of the Air Force. If he said, "Stop cooperating with SpaceX," SpaceX couldn't even launch commercial launches.
Add to that, SpaceX is largely immune to the whole immigration kerfluffle. Due to ITAR, SpaceX has zero H1Bs or any other category of temporary work visa. Only citizens and permanent residents are allowed to work on orbital rockets, because the other name for the Falcon 9 first stage is "ICBM". (You remove the second stage to deliver a suborbital payload.) Slashdot is largely unaware of ITAR ever since calling encryption a munition went away, but it is still a thing, and in the case of "giant controlled explosion that can drop 20 tons of your choice anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes or less", it's a very sensible restriction.
It seems very likely that Elon Musk's other companies are not H1B abusers either, so when you get right down to it, he has nothing to gain by opposing Trump on immigration and a great deal to lose.
A few of the booth babes are arrogant and resentful of the fact that men find them physically attractive.
s/men/nerds/g
They like it when men find them attractive. They resent attention from nerds, who are beneath them.
The ones who let it show are how you identify the actual employees of the company who bought the booth. The contractors are professional enough not to let it show (and were hired solely because of their attractiveness, often local hires just for the duration).
Stereotypical farmers are supposed to be a conservative lot but seeing them embrace new technologies with such enthusiasm leads me to doubt that.
Farmers are conservative. They have to be. Farming is a boom and bust operation. One good year can be followed by 2 or 3 bad years. A successful farmer has learned how to manage money on a decade by decade basis. The ones who couldn't went broke and sold to the ones who could years ago.
So being a farmer is about managing your costs over the long term, and managing them very tightly in order to minimize every possible controllable risk. Because farming is subject to one giant uncontrollable risk: the weather. Every year, a farmer is gambling on good weather. That's such a big gamble that every other risk must be minimized, and that means sticking with what's known to work while keeping an eye out for any developments that can reduce risk and control expenses. And farmers necessarily have to have a lot of capital on hand to invest in both of those activities. So when solar panels and wind turbines dropped far enough in price to reduce a farmer's energy expenses, and even to pay for themselves, every farmer who wasn't coming off some bad years was going to jump on them.
A successful farmer by definition is willing and able to invest large amounts of capital into something with a long term payoff. It's the nature of the business. So farmers adopting wind and solar power generation was inevitable. They have the capital, they have the land space, they have an expensive grid connection, and they have time. You couldn't ask for a situation more suitable for adoption of wind and solar power.
What's funny is that I can't tell if you're mocking stupidity or North Korea's Dear Leader with that.
You don't watch much TV, do you. The subject of mockery was America's Dear Leader, President Donald Trump. You may know him from such hits as Home Alone 2 and The Apprentice.
Finally Sony has been putting out a lot of just stinkers lately:
The two worst movies I saw in 2016 were Sony releases. The latest Fantastic 4, and Looper, which has Bruce Willis in the title credits playing a bit part who's barely ever on screen. It was a 2012 release I saw on a plane, a time travel movie. Hollywood in general and Sony in particular need to just stop with the time travel movies. They all have a permanent case of Terminator 2 envy, but none of them have access to James Cameron, or another writer/director of his caliber.
Fantastic Four has a metacritic score of 4.3/10. Looper is similar to Ghostbusters, with a score in the 70% range but lost money at the box office.
I get the distinct impression that Sony's unending greed is responsible for all these bombs. Competent executive producers, writers, and directors know they can get a better deal somewhere else, so Sony is left with, if not the bottom of the barrel in talent, at least pretty far down the barrel.
It's crap like this that's why we can't have nice things. Specifically, Google Fiber is not a loss. Accountants put it on the books as a loss, but it's not. It's just an expensive investment in physical plant with a long payoff period. It may takes years, even decades, but it's not like people are going to stop using this new-fangled thing called the Internet.
Wall Street has been the death of American innovation. If money spent doesn't earn a profit in the next quarter, Wall Street doesn't like, it, doesn't want it, and doesn't understand it. The stock price of Tesla Motors is a fine example. Here we have a company investing hugely in physical plant, and Wall Street has no idea what to do with it, so the value of TSLA fluctuates by 50% of its value, all the time. So-called "financial analysts" don't even know how to talk about it. It doesn't fit into their neat little boxes.
(And there's a job that's just ripe for automation. It wouldn't even take a sophisticated neural net. 90% of the financial "analysts" in the world could be replaced by some templates and a bucket of Markov chains, driven by a small shell script.)
So Google will shut down Fiber, having utterly failed to modify the behavior of the incumbent ISPs. And we will all pay for it. And pay and pay and pay and pay... It's Comcastic!
We are just a battery technology away from killing it altogether.
Well no. Not even the wildest projections of eventual battery capacity meet or exceed what a nuclear power plant can do, so they'll never die. Specifically, US military reactors will always be with us, in submarines and aircraft carriers.
For that matter, the existing civilian reactor fleet worldwide will be with us for many decades. Together with their fuel loads, they represent a tremendous sunk cost. They will be kept operational for as long as their fuel lasts, at the very least. I suspect many of them will be reloaded with new fuel in the coming decades, just because there is so much money tied up in those plants. How else can the owners pay off the construction bonds?
If nothing else, if the cost of electricity drops so low that nuclear plant bond issuers can no longer make the payments, somebody will buy them up at firesale prices and keep them running. Operational, they represent revenue streams. Shut down, they're a dead loss. Possibly a hugely expensive dead loss, depending on demands for refurbishing the site.
Regardless, and no matter what is coming, nuclear power will be with us for a long time. The money demands it. And in this brave new world of ours, the money gets what the money wants.
Speaking of which, aside from the focus of the articles, what exactly has changed? What have you fixed, whipslash?
As far as I can see, Slashdot still has the same: * ineffectual editors and moderation
They're better. They're not great, but they're better. Just a little. Unfortunately nobody learns English anymore, so this is about the best you can get. It's a problem everywhere.
* clunky old-fashioned article and comment forms * horrible nested comment layout
Don't look now, but this Ask Slashdot is about you.
It's not clunky, it's functional. And nested comments are fantastic. Single column or at most one level of nested comments is about the dumbest thing ever done to user comments. Do you know how dumb it is? It's so dumb, users desperately resort to embedding stupid codes in their text to try to recreate a properly nested comment system. The abomination that is @mention would have never existed if comments were properly threaded everywhere. You'll notice that stupidity never occurs here. Youtube is stupid. LinkedIn is stupid. Facebook is stupid. Seriously. They're stupid. Their own users prove it every minute of every day, working around their stupid by manually referring to each other's posts, when the layout should have done it for them. And you can't even see how stupid that situation is.
* crappy pseudo-AJAX comment filtering sliders * crappy support for Unicode
Got him there. Those need to be fixed. Though see below about limits because of trolls.
* crappy HTML tag support (no BBcode?)
It has limited HTML tag support. Limited because the Internet is full of trolls, and Slashdot has plenty of them, especially of the variety who will gleefully exploit a technical loophole in order to break things. You don't need BBcode though. BBcode is a ham-fisted "solution" for allowing users to use HTML tags without breaking the surrounding page HTML. Slashdot's solution was to give you access to the corresponding HTML tags, and strip everything else out. BBcode is bastardized HTML tags. Slashdot gives you all the same tags, in the original HTML.
* no edit button
Should be one, up until a comment is replied to or moderated. After that though, no editing.
* stupid lameness filter
Be less lame and you won't have a problem with it. It has had to be made considerably more heavy-handed to deal with apk's shitposting. Can't be helped. No way to make him take his meds.
* stupid posting time limits
Don't be anonymous and the time limits are much reduced. They're still present though, and it helps. Slashdot's audience are of the type who are too easily amused by their own cleverness, when they're really not very funny. Time limits, even for logged in users, helps keeps down the noise of throw-away one-liners. It directly contributes to the quality of user comments, though users perhaps aren't aware of that. When you know you have time to stop and think before hitting the Post button, you might actually do that.
Financing plus detailed hands-on management of the company that has landed the first stage of an orbital rocket intact. Repeatedly. Even if nothing else he ever does pans out, that was a truly spectacular and historical first, and his name will go into history books a few paragraphs away from Goddard for doing it.
I haven't read comic books lately but what does Tony Stark use when not as Ironman to get around town?
I haven't read comics in a while either, but in the late 2000s, Tony Stark basically never took the suit off. He went to meetings in the suit. He would have fairly long conversations (by comic book standards) without ever lifting his face mask. They even used his "wearing the mask" lettering style for the dialog. Even though it was... a meeting. No fight, before or during or after. So getting around town was never an issue. He was always suited up. Basically Robert Downey Jr. Civil War Ironman is very little like comic book Civil War Ironman.
I personally don't want the government to be able to siphon everything easier than they already can. But don't you think if they provide the service their not going to log all activity from day one?
So let 'em. All they'll do is fill up hard drives with encrypted streams they can't read. So what? Even porn sites use https nowadays.
It's a thin-walled tube. It doesn't do much constraining at the dynamic forces you're talking about.
It's 20 to 25mm of solid steel. "Thin-walled" is very much a relative thing.
You still have to constrain the tube.
That's what the $2.5 billion in steel-reinforced concrete is for. Also the stringers on the outside of the tube (omitted from all the concept art but mentioned in the text).
Land acquisition and permitting is often the most expensive.
Not solved by Hyperloop.
Solved by Hyperloop insofar as the government of the state of California can be convinced to play ball. The majority of the proposed route is on existing public land. I've said before that this is the reason why Hyperloop won't happen, and not any technical reason. The HSR project allows the Right People to get rich from land speculation. The Hyperloop does not.
But to continue...
In order for it to be a suspension, it needs to absorb the lateral deviations in the track/tube to even out the reaction forces, and it needs to do this at all the required frequencies. At higher and higher speeds, those frequencies correspond to longer and longer track/tube wavelengths over which you have to control or attenuate the deviations.
So design a suspension system. And don't forget, you have quite a lot of room to play around in. Per the document, the capsule only occupies 36% of the cross-sectional area of the tube. People have this persistent notion that the Hyperloop capsule is jammed into its tube like the carrier in a bank's pneumatic system. It's not. There's plenty of room for as sophisticated a suspension system as necessary.
Viaduct costs are minimized by a key design feature of Hyperloop - minimizing peak loadings by having frequent, small vehicle launches rather than infrequent, large vehicle launches. Viaduct costs tend to track their peak loading.
Why don't trains already do this?
Because trains haul freight, everywhere in the world. Passengers are an afterthought, and an ill-considered afterthought at that.
As for land acquisition, the costs in Hyperloop Alpha are kept down by a combination of design and cheating. As per design, it's designed to be small enough to fit elevated into highway medians, with the low peak loadings, making overhead suspension an affordable option. Such places are state land, and already permitted for far more environmentally harmful activity (road traffic).
Why don't trains already do this?
Because trains haul freight. It doesn't have to get there quickly, but when it does, there sure is a lot of it.
the Hyperloop Alpha document (at least the one I read on the Space-X website) "highly addresses" precisely nothing. It's envelope calcs and napkin sketches.
Well no, it's more than back-of-the-envelope calculations. Somebody went to the trouble of putting together a solid model of the tube and the pylons and running it through the simulator. But yes, the document is not sufficient for some guy with a hammer to go out and start slapping one up. It's a proposal. It's been sanity-checked fairly well, by people who understand just as much about static and dynamic loads as you do, and it's been mathematically demonstrated to be not insane. No, the capsule suspension system has not been worked out. Nor has the capsule door seal, which must stay air-tight in the face of dozens of unsealings and resealings a day, not to mention foot traffic. Nor has the exact nature of the system that ties the tube to a pylon been worked out.
But none of these things are physical or financial impossibilities. Analogs can be found in existing products and structures.
Yikes. OK, how about healthcare. Are 20 million people who could well be without healthcare shortly an insignificant detail?
Uuh, the 20 million people who could well be without health insurance may well be an insignificant detail. Health insurance is not healthcare. Health insurance is in fact diametrically opposed to healthcare. Health insurance is the preventer of healthcare.
When the ACA lost its public option and became Romneycare, it stopped being an enabler of healthcare and became nothing more than a giant giveaway to the insurance industry which does its very best to prevent healthcare because healthcare is an expense which eats into profits. Is that necessarily going to be a big loss to 20 million people? Probably not. They're in shit plans with shit companies that cost way too much, and way WAY too much for what they get. Doesn't sound like much of a loss, to me.
The real problem is the meters aren't really any better than the good cheapies.
How could they be? The calibrated resistors they depend on are made in the same Chinese factory as the ones in the good cheapies, and there is no US manufacturer at all.
You want to know why this matters even if "no one thinks the bill is going anywhere anyway"? Because it even exists at all !!! Legislators that waste time writing, proposing, and making others have to work and vote against it are bad legislators that should be doing actual work vice wasting theirs and everyone else's time.
They're not wasting time. They're doing as they are told. The national party uses state legislatures as test beds for potential policies, and as back chatter to set a stage. They have some state congresscritter propose some outrageous bill, and then they watch the results. Who noticed, who objected and how loudly, who supported and how loudly, and what arguments were brought to bear against it.
Then they can propose the legislation that they want, which isn't as extreme as the one the state ran up the flagpole, but is still quite extreme. The "market research" from the reaction to the state bill has been used to formulate strategy to support the bill they actually want, plus the state bill's very existence serves a function in getting something else passed. It can be pointed to both negatively ("this bill isn't nearly as bad as that one") and positively ("that bill was proposed, so there must be some demand for this sort of thing among the populace").
You're just seeing a part of the sausage-making process. This is the part where they grind up the cow anuses.
In order to be released from detention while his appeals of the Swedish extradition in U.K courts were considered, Assange gave multiple oaths given to UK justice system promising to respect their authority, oaths he broke when he fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy.
No, he didn't. No oath is required when being released on bail, let alone multiple oaths. See the section "Conditions of Bail."
I'm curious that you are able to completely ignore these well known facts.
I'm aware of the facts. They were not germane to my comment, as no oath was sworn under those circumstances either.
Is it just Assange, or do you apply this reasoning for yourself? Does the end of getting your rocks off justify to you the act of not respecting a woman's word when she says no too?
Yeah, fuck you too. That's what you meant. I return it in full measure.
3D debacle delayed work on OLED and better picture technology.
Paying off the enormous investment in all those old LCD plants delayed OLED and better picture technology. Those production lines couldn't do anything but what they've been doing since 2002, so we've been fucking stuck waiting for the amortization schedule to run out.
Slashdot Mirror
Prosperity is the wrong goal, the correct goal is making sure everybody has clean air to breath, healthy food to eat, clean water to drink
That's pretty much the fundamental definition of prosperity... plus a roof to keep the rain off.
Why is your ridiculous alarmism being modded up, not once but twice? Especially when it's completely self-contradictory. Reality on the ground is, the more prosperous a country is, the lower its population growth. The most prosperous countries are experiencing a population decline, not growth. Nobody is certain why this is (but the education of women and the availability of prophylactics seems to be the leading guesses), but regardless, it's true.
So for people who believe that humans are the scariest things in the ecosystem, prosperity should be the goal. It's the one and only thing, in all of recorded history, that has caused birth rates to drop below the replacement rate. Not even world wars could do that. If you truly believe there are too many people, the only thing that can fix that is prosperity. (Or a glacial period in an Ice Age. Those work too.)
If the former then we already know who designed them...
Smurfs? Gnomes? Fairies? Donald Trump? ('cause, you know, tiny hands...)
*ba-dum* *tshhhh*
Thank you, try the veal.
Naively scale it to do 270x the work, that's eating 3.2 cubic meters of probe volume in order to keep the inside down to a blazing 100*C. Our 2-meter-diameter probe, with 250mm of aerogel shell, only has 1.7 cubic meters of internal volume.
Uh, the radiator is bolted to the outside of the sphere. The components on the inside are considerably smaller than the radiator on the outside. Think CPU water cooling rig. The water block is quite small in volume compared to the radiator.
You neglected the really useful calculation: the Carnot efficiency. Let's see if there's a little more room on the back of the envelope.
Carnot efficiency is given by: (TH-TC)/TH*100% so for Venus at 470K and room temperature at 298K, we get an efficiency of 36%. So in order to reject, say, 600 watts of heat from the interior of the probe (your 500W of ambient leakage plus 100W of equipment), our refrigerator is going to suck up somewhere north of 1.7kW of power. (It will be more, because Carnot efficiency is the theoretical perfect efficiency, which can't actually be built.) How close we can get to the ideal depends quite heavily on the properties of the working fluid and the pressures inside the system. Outrageous by space probe standards, but not actually completely bonkers.
Using the same General Purpose Heat Source modules used in the Curiosity rover, we'll need 111 modules, totaling 67kg of plutonium-238. NASA has 35kg left for civil use (and an unspecified amount earmarked for military use (classified)). Houston, we have a problem...
Running the numbers in a reverse Rankine Cycle to calculate a more practical efficiency is left as an exercise for the reader.
There WASN'T any MOON surface to evaporate from - it was the multi-quadrillion PIECES that got thermally blasted, and lost all of their volatiles.
Wouldn't there necessarily have to have been some larger chunks that didn't get pulled into Earth? Fragments of Earth or the impactor itself?
There had to have been something fairly substantial around which Luna could coalesce. Otherwise Earth would have (a) ring(s), and not a moon. This seems to follow because Luna really is too big for its planet in the first place. Everywhere else in the solar system where moons coalesced out of a cloud of relatively small particles, those moons are considerably smaller relative to the parent body than Luna is to Earth. Luna is very likely a fair-sized chunk of Theia, mixed in with smaller chunks of Earth, and coated in both Earth dust and Theia dust.
Really, we're not going to know until we drill and take cores, plus do seismic imaging. Solving the n-body problem on that scale requires simplifying assumptions (in either your explanation or mine) so vast that it just reduces the whole thing to guesswork. If we really want to know, we're going to have to go and look.
The 215MB csv file in the GitHub repo is in fact stored with Git LFS. If you don't have the Git LFS extension installed, a git clone pulls only the 134 byte metadata file.
Metadata of metadata... it's meta all the way down!
I think you're meant to go through the website, and download the images from there. The photography looks to be high quality, and fairly high resolution-- though not spectacularly so.
Better than nothing, I suppose. So who's going to run the botnet to harvest all the images from the site and put together a proper torrent? Because this nickel and dime image-at-a-time thing is bullshit.
One of his companies (SpaceX) depends a lot on government money. Trump could deeply damage it with a penstroke by excluding it from ISS resupply missions, or forbidding it to compete for national security launches.
Both true, and it goes further than that. SpaceX requires a great deal of participation from the Air Force to do anything. The Air Force owns the launch sites. The Air Force provides range control, which isn't optional. And Trump is the Commander in Chief of the Air Force. If he said, "Stop cooperating with SpaceX," SpaceX couldn't even launch commercial launches.
Add to that, SpaceX is largely immune to the whole immigration kerfluffle. Due to ITAR, SpaceX has zero H1Bs or any other category of temporary work visa. Only citizens and permanent residents are allowed to work on orbital rockets, because the other name for the Falcon 9 first stage is "ICBM". (You remove the second stage to deliver a suborbital payload.) Slashdot is largely unaware of ITAR ever since calling encryption a munition went away, but it is still a thing, and in the case of "giant controlled explosion that can drop 20 tons of your choice anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes or less", it's a very sensible restriction.
It seems very likely that Elon Musk's other companies are not H1B abusers either, so when you get right down to it, he has nothing to gain by opposing Trump on immigration and a great deal to lose.
A few of the booth babes are arrogant and resentful of the fact that men find them physically attractive.
s/men/nerds/g
They like it when men find them attractive. They resent attention from nerds, who are beneath them.
The ones who let it show are how you identify the actual employees of the company who bought the booth. The contractors are professional enough not to let it show (and were hired solely because of their attractiveness, often local hires just for the duration).
Telegram is apparently inextricably linked to a phone number. No.
Stereotypical farmers are supposed to be a conservative lot but seeing them embrace new technologies with such enthusiasm leads me to doubt that.
Farmers are conservative. They have to be. Farming is a boom and bust operation. One good year can be followed by 2 or 3 bad years. A successful farmer has learned how to manage money on a decade by decade basis. The ones who couldn't went broke and sold to the ones who could years ago.
So being a farmer is about managing your costs over the long term, and managing them very tightly in order to minimize every possible controllable risk. Because farming is subject to one giant uncontrollable risk: the weather. Every year, a farmer is gambling on good weather. That's such a big gamble that every other risk must be minimized, and that means sticking with what's known to work while keeping an eye out for any developments that can reduce risk and control expenses. And farmers necessarily have to have a lot of capital on hand to invest in both of those activities. So when solar panels and wind turbines dropped far enough in price to reduce a farmer's energy expenses, and even to pay for themselves, every farmer who wasn't coming off some bad years was going to jump on them.
A successful farmer by definition is willing and able to invest large amounts of capital into something with a long term payoff. It's the nature of the business. So farmers adopting wind and solar power generation was inevitable. They have the capital, they have the land space, they have an expensive grid connection, and they have time. You couldn't ask for a situation more suitable for adoption of wind and solar power.
Boom tomorrow.
What's funny is that I can't tell if you're mocking stupidity or North Korea's Dear Leader with that.
You don't watch much TV, do you. The subject of mockery was America's Dear Leader, President Donald Trump. You may know him from such hits as Home Alone 2 and The Apprentice.
Finally Sony has been putting out a lot of just stinkers lately:
The two worst movies I saw in 2016 were Sony releases. The latest Fantastic 4, and Looper, which has Bruce Willis in the title credits playing a bit part who's barely ever on screen. It was a 2012 release I saw on a plane, a time travel movie. Hollywood in general and Sony in particular need to just stop with the time travel movies. They all have a permanent case of Terminator 2 envy, but none of them have access to James Cameron, or another writer/director of his caliber.
Fantastic Four has a metacritic score of 4.3/10. Looper is similar to Ghostbusters, with a score in the 70% range but lost money at the box office.
I get the distinct impression that Sony's unending greed is responsible for all these bombs. Competent executive producers, writers, and directors know they can get a better deal somewhere else, so Sony is left with, if not the bottom of the barrel in talent, at least pretty far down the barrel.
It's crap like this that's why we can't have nice things. Specifically, Google Fiber is not a loss. Accountants put it on the books as a loss, but it's not. It's just an expensive investment in physical plant with a long payoff period. It may takes years, even decades, but it's not like people are going to stop using this new-fangled thing called the Internet.
Wall Street has been the death of American innovation. If money spent doesn't earn a profit in the next quarter, Wall Street doesn't like, it, doesn't want it, and doesn't understand it. The stock price of Tesla Motors is a fine example. Here we have a company investing hugely in physical plant, and Wall Street has no idea what to do with it, so the value of TSLA fluctuates by 50% of its value, all the time. So-called "financial analysts" don't even know how to talk about it. It doesn't fit into their neat little boxes.
(And there's a job that's just ripe for automation. It wouldn't even take a sophisticated neural net. 90% of the financial "analysts" in the world could be replaced by some templates and a bucket of Markov chains, driven by a small shell script.)
So Google will shut down Fiber, having utterly failed to modify the behavior of the incumbent ISPs. And we will all pay for it. And pay and pay and pay and pay... It's Comcastic!
We are just a battery technology away from killing it altogether.
Well no. Not even the wildest projections of eventual battery capacity meet or exceed what a nuclear power plant can do, so they'll never die. Specifically, US military reactors will always be with us, in submarines and aircraft carriers.
For that matter, the existing civilian reactor fleet worldwide will be with us for many decades. Together with their fuel loads, they represent a tremendous sunk cost. They will be kept operational for as long as their fuel lasts, at the very least. I suspect many of them will be reloaded with new fuel in the coming decades, just because there is so much money tied up in those plants. How else can the owners pay off the construction bonds?
If nothing else, if the cost of electricity drops so low that nuclear plant bond issuers can no longer make the payments, somebody will buy them up at firesale prices and keep them running. Operational, they represent revenue streams. Shut down, they're a dead loss. Possibly a hugely expensive dead loss, depending on demands for refurbishing the site.
Regardless, and no matter what is coming, nuclear power will be with us for a long time. The money demands it. And in this brave new world of ours, the money gets what the money wants.
Speaking of which, aside from the focus of the articles, what exactly has changed? What have you fixed, whipslash?
As far as I can see, Slashdot still has the same:
* ineffectual editors and moderation
They're better. They're not great, but they're better. Just a little. Unfortunately nobody learns English anymore, so this is about the best you can get. It's a problem everywhere.
* clunky old-fashioned article and comment forms
* horrible nested comment layout
Don't look now, but this Ask Slashdot is about you.
It's not clunky, it's functional. And nested comments are fantastic. Single column or at most one level of nested comments is about the dumbest thing ever done to user comments. Do you know how dumb it is? It's so dumb, users desperately resort to embedding stupid codes in their text to try to recreate a properly nested comment system. The abomination that is @mention would have never existed if comments were properly threaded everywhere. You'll notice that stupidity never occurs here. Youtube is stupid. LinkedIn is stupid. Facebook is stupid. Seriously. They're stupid. Their own users prove it every minute of every day, working around their stupid by manually referring to each other's posts, when the layout should have done it for them. And you can't even see how stupid that situation is.
* crappy pseudo-AJAX comment filtering sliders
* crappy support for Unicode
Got him there. Those need to be fixed. Though see below about limits because of trolls.
* crappy HTML tag support (no BBcode?)
It has limited HTML tag support. Limited because the Internet is full of trolls, and Slashdot has plenty of them, especially of the variety who will gleefully exploit a technical loophole in order to break things. You don't need BBcode though. BBcode is a ham-fisted "solution" for allowing users to use HTML tags without breaking the surrounding page HTML. Slashdot's solution was to give you access to the corresponding HTML tags, and strip everything else out. BBcode is bastardized HTML tags. Slashdot gives you all the same tags, in the original HTML.
* no edit button
Should be one, up until a comment is replied to or moderated. After that though, no editing.
* stupid lameness filter
Be less lame and you won't have a problem with it. It has had to be made considerably more heavy-handed to deal with apk's shitposting. Can't be helped. No way to make him take his meds.
* stupid posting time limits
Don't be anonymous and the time limits are much reduced. They're still present though, and it helps. Slashdot's audience are of the type who are too easily amused by their own cleverness, when they're really not very funny. Time limits, even for logged in users, helps keeps down the noise of throw-away one-liners. It directly contributes to the quality of user comments, though users perhaps aren't aware of that. When you know you have time to stop and think before hitting the Post button, you might actually do that.
Legendary for what ?
Financing plus detailed hands-on management of the company that has landed the first stage of an orbital rocket intact. Repeatedly. Even if nothing else he ever does pans out, that was a truly spectacular and historical first, and his name will go into history books a few paragraphs away from Goddard for doing it.
I haven't read comic books lately but what does Tony Stark use when not as Ironman to get around town?
I haven't read comics in a while either, but in the late 2000s, Tony Stark basically never took the suit off. He went to meetings in the suit. He would have fairly long conversations (by comic book standards) without ever lifting his face mask. They even used his "wearing the mask" lettering style for the dialog. Even though it was... a meeting. No fight, before or during or after. So getting around town was never an issue. He was always suited up. Basically Robert Downey Jr. Civil War Ironman is very little like comic book Civil War Ironman.
I personally don't want the government to be able to siphon everything easier than they already can. But don't you think if they provide the service their not going to log all activity from day one?
So let 'em. All they'll do is fill up hard drives with encrypted streams they can't read. So what? Even porn sites use https nowadays.
Encryption: it's not just for banking anymore.
It's a thin-walled tube. It doesn't do much constraining at the dynamic forces you're talking about.
It's 20 to 25mm of solid steel. "Thin-walled" is very much a relative thing.
You still have to constrain the tube.
That's what the $2.5 billion in steel-reinforced concrete is for. Also the stringers on the outside of the tube (omitted from all the concept art but mentioned in the text).
Land acquisition and permitting is often the most expensive.
Not solved by Hyperloop.
Solved by Hyperloop insofar as the government of the state of California can be convinced to play ball. The majority of the proposed route is on existing public land. I've said before that this is the reason why Hyperloop won't happen, and not any technical reason. The HSR project allows the Right People to get rich from land speculation. The Hyperloop does not.
But to continue...
In order for it to be a suspension, it needs to absorb the lateral deviations in the track/tube to even out the reaction forces, and it needs to do this at all the required frequencies. At higher and higher speeds, those frequencies correspond to longer and longer track/tube wavelengths over which you have to control or attenuate the deviations.
So design a suspension system. And don't forget, you have quite a lot of room to play around in. Per the document, the capsule only occupies 36% of the cross-sectional area of the tube. People have this persistent notion that the Hyperloop capsule is jammed into its tube like the carrier in a bank's pneumatic system. It's not. There's plenty of room for as sophisticated a suspension system as necessary.
Viaduct costs are minimized by a key design feature of Hyperloop - minimizing peak loadings by having frequent, small vehicle launches rather than infrequent, large vehicle launches. Viaduct costs tend to track their peak loading.
Why don't trains already do this?
Because trains haul freight, everywhere in the world. Passengers are an afterthought, and an ill-considered afterthought at that.
As for land acquisition, the costs in Hyperloop Alpha are kept down by a combination of design and cheating. As per design, it's designed to be small enough to fit elevated into highway medians, with the low peak loadings, making overhead suspension an affordable option. Such places are state land, and already permitted for far more environmentally harmful activity (road traffic).
Why don't trains already do this?
Because trains haul freight. It doesn't have to get there quickly, but when it does, there sure is a lot of it.
the Hyperloop Alpha document (at least the one I read on the Space-X website) "highly addresses" precisely nothing. It's envelope calcs and napkin sketches.
Well no, it's more than back-of-the-envelope calculations. Somebody went to the trouble of putting together a solid model of the tube and the pylons and running it through the simulator. But yes, the document is not sufficient for some guy with a hammer to go out and start slapping one up. It's a proposal. It's been sanity-checked fairly well, by people who understand just as much about static and dynamic loads as you do, and it's been mathematically demonstrated to be not insane. No, the capsule suspension system has not been worked out. Nor has the capsule door seal, which must stay air-tight in the face of dozens of unsealings and resealings a day, not to mention foot traffic. Nor has the exact nature of the system that ties the tube to a pylon been worked out.
But none of these things are physical or financial impossibilities. Analogs can be found in existing products and structures.
Yikes. OK, how about healthcare. Are 20 million people who could well be without healthcare shortly an insignificant detail?
Uuh, the 20 million people who could well be without health insurance may well be an insignificant detail. Health insurance is not healthcare. Health insurance is in fact diametrically opposed to healthcare. Health insurance is the preventer of healthcare.
When the ACA lost its public option and became Romneycare, it stopped being an enabler of healthcare and became nothing more than a giant giveaway to the insurance industry which does its very best to prevent healthcare because healthcare is an expense which eats into profits. Is that necessarily going to be a big loss to 20 million people? Probably not. They're in shit plans with shit companies that cost way too much, and way WAY too much for what they get. Doesn't sound like much of a loss, to me.
The real problem is the meters aren't really any better than the good cheapies.
How could they be? The calibrated resistors they depend on are made in the same Chinese factory as the ones in the good cheapies, and there is no US manufacturer at all.
You want to know why this matters even if "no one thinks the bill is going anywhere anyway"? Because it even exists at all !!! Legislators that waste time writing, proposing, and making others have to work and vote against it are bad legislators that should be doing actual work vice wasting theirs and everyone else's time.
They're not wasting time. They're doing as they are told. The national party uses state legislatures as test beds for potential policies, and as back chatter to set a stage. They have some state congresscritter propose some outrageous bill, and then they watch the results. Who noticed, who objected and how loudly, who supported and how loudly, and what arguments were brought to bear against it.
Then they can propose the legislation that they want, which isn't as extreme as the one the state ran up the flagpole, but is still quite extreme. The "market research" from the reaction to the state bill has been used to formulate strategy to support the bill they actually want, plus the state bill's very existence serves a function in getting something else passed. It can be pointed to both negatively ("this bill isn't nearly as bad as that one") and positively ("that bill was proposed, so there must be some demand for this sort of thing among the populace").
You're just seeing a part of the sausage-making process. This is the part where they grind up the cow anuses.
In order to be released from detention while his appeals of the Swedish extradition in U.K courts were considered, Assange gave multiple oaths given to UK justice system promising to respect their authority, oaths he broke when he fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy.
No, he didn't. No oath is required when being released on bail, let alone multiple oaths. See the section "Conditions of Bail."
I'm curious that you are able to completely ignore these well known facts.
I'm aware of the facts. They were not germane to my comment, as no oath was sworn under those circumstances either.
Is it just Assange, or do you apply this reasoning for yourself? Does the end of getting your rocks off justify to you the act of not respecting a woman's word when she says no too?
Yeah, fuck you too. That's what you meant. I return it in full measure.
3D debacle delayed work on OLED and better picture technology.
Paying off the enormous investment in all those old LCD plants delayed OLED and better picture technology. Those production lines couldn't do anything but what they've been doing since 2002, so we've been fucking stuck waiting for the amortization schedule to run out.