Why not use the heat output to run a gas turbine? The traditional 'combustor' doesn't need need to burn anything, it just needs to provide a heat source. The nuclear aircraft turbines back in the 60's operate in this manner. There is at least one concentrated solar plant that operates in this manner.
Thorium decays as an alpha emitter. The worst it can do is cause something akin to a sunburn. Even were those eight grams released, they would be of negligible risk unless ingested.
What's more, you could lug around a small nuclear reactor, and save the need to use giant batteries filled with caustic chemicals manufactured by toxic processes. They're talking about something small and light enough you personally could pick it up and put it in your trunk.
400000 tons of thorium, where one gram is equivalent to some 7500 gallons of gasoline. We use 20 million barrels a day, at 42 gallons per barrel, so that means some 3.6 million days of fuel at current consumption. That's close to 10000 years. Where did you come up with 100?
The term "rare earth" is a bit of a misnomer. The materials themselves are not that rare. The issue is that they are not commonly found in a rich deposit. Rather, they are dispersed throughout an area, requiring expensive mining and refining techniques.
At those kinds of speeds, you start talking about a system that goes from completely off to completely on in a second. When you want to hibernate, you dump everything in memory over to the disk. When you turn back on, you take a moment to find the disk, and pull the entire memory image back over. There is no boot, there is no shutdown. You only need enough memory to handle the actual in-use programs, and anything else could be painlessly paged out, meaning you never have to close programs.
It's an order of magnitude slower than RAM, but an order of magnitude faster than hard disks. Right smack in the middle in order to offer all sorts of cool little tricks.
It's fun precisely because it doesn't take itself seriously. TF2 was originally supposed to be some hyperrealistic combat simulator, however with all the Call of Duty and Battlefield games coming out every year, Valve realized the market was already saturated, and decided to instead do something quirky and different.
The issue is that the traditional PC only makes sense for something that needs extremely high power, or otherwise needs to stay positioned in one location (like an HTPC). For standard computer use, you can get a laptop with every bit as much power as a standard desktop for a modestly higher price, so why even bother with the big, bulky, static machine? Of course depending on your definition of PC, a laptop is one as well.
What I would love to see is the boom in the home server market. With the move to mobile devices, this is just getting all that much more useful. All these companies are talking about moving data and services to "the cloud". Services are offering file storage on "the cloud". Google is offering a laptop that only operates through "the cloud". Screw "the cloud", build your own. Build a system with a mandatory requirement for RAID, and a whole array of servers. You no longer store bulk data on your desktop. Give your desktop a small SSD, and put that bulk data on the opposite end of a gigabit link. Have it run a domain server, so you desktop stores all of its profile information there. Have it operate as your UPnP/MediaCenter/MythTV base, storing all your content and streaming it to extenders. Don't store your music on Google or Amazon or Apple or Ubuntu storage for streaming, be your own storage. Don't rely on external mail services, run your own IMAP server that automatically pulls and sorts from your other accounts. The cloud should only exist as a redundant backup service to these devices. We keep clamoring for internet providers to offer more and more bandwidth, why not use it?
Doing all of this is easy. Doing all of this with a UI intuitive enough for the average person to figure it out is hard. Microsoft tried and failed with Home Server, but that was more likely due to lack of advertising on the part of OEMs.
You are making the mistake that orbital plane changes have any relevance outside the current gravity well. Once you add in a third body, those limitations are gone. Remember that even a polar orbit is pointed in the direction of the lunar orbit twice each time around. You just need to wait until everything lines up. The Cassini has made substantial changes in its orbital plane with just a pittance of fuel, slowly taking advantage of gravitational assist from Saturn's moons.
Don't forget that energy is proportional to velocity squared. Half the velocity of low Earth orbit means only a quarter the energy. Even at Mach 20, there's still a long way to go.
The basic concepts of rocket science are fairly simple. Cold gas and low efficiency rockets are even simple in practice, but that is where it ends. There is a great deal of design that goes into solid rockets. You don't just run from one end of the cylinder to the other. The outer casing can't handle the pressure and temperature. You have to burn from the inside out to allow the propellent itself act as an insulator. If you just have a single hole through the center, you will have low thrust at the beginning of the burn, and high thrust at the end. There is a good deal of research into the initial patterns cut into the fuel to maximize the used volume, minimize the unburnt fuel, and fine tune the burn rate over time to control thrust against the decreasing mass and drag.
Liquid rockets are deceptively simple too. A basic rocket simply uses pressure to force fluid into the combustion chamber. You still have to concern yourself with the temperature and pressure sustained in the combustion chamber and nozzle. High performance rockets use ablative materials to protect the structures. Higher performance rockets run fuel and oxidizer through channels beneath those structures to cool them. More still bleed unburned fuel as a protective film. Then you have the fuel pumps. At the flow rates we're talking about, you need tremendous amounts of power. Often times, you have a small combustor run a turbine to run a pump. On larger rockets, you're talking about tens to hundreds of thousands of horsepower in something small enough you could carry around. There are variable geometry nozzles, attitude control, gimbaled engines....
You do realize that all of our current launch systems are multi-stage, right? Each successive stage drops off and jettisons to allow a lighter later stage to achieve higher performance.
You misunderstand. There is nothing here to bypass, as there is nothing blocking access to the site. The website was found to be promoting illegal activities, so their US controlled domain name was revoked. There is nothing preventing you from accessing it by the IP address directly. There is nothing preventing you from accessing it from an alternate domain name. Should they, for instance, re-register using a.co.uk TLD, it would now be up to the British government to decide whether or not they wanted to revoke this new domain name.
There is nothing that says these web sites are "illegal for a US citizen to view". The websites were operating using a US controlled TLD, and were found to be promoting and facilitating actions voted illegal in the US. There is nothing illegal about going to these websites, only partaking in the actions that got their domain name rescinded. Similarly, there will be nothing illegal about going to these websites when they re-register against a foreign TLD.
Anti-protons are not considered a form of matter? Do you have some prejudice against ions? Maybe you're just pissed off because anti-protons are always so negative.
The C.R.M. 114 was a radio transmission discriminator in the movie Dr. Strangelove. The spam filter was named as a reference to that movie. The discriminator would only allow radio transmission prefixed by a three character code phrase dialed into the unit. It was intended to prevent unauthorized messages from being received by nuclear bombers on their terminal attack. In the movie, the passcode used was 'POE', standing for Purity Of Essence, a phrase repeated by a base commander who drank only rainwater and grain alcohol, afraid the Russians were attacking by poisoning the drinking water and contaminating our natural bodily fluids.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use the heat output to run a gas turbine? The traditional 'combustor' doesn't need need to burn anything, it just needs to provide a heat source. The nuclear aircraft turbines back in the 60's operate in this manner. There is at least one concentrated solar plant that operates in this manner.
Thorium decays as an alpha emitter. The worst it can do is cause something akin to a sunburn. Even were those eight grams released, they would be of negligible risk unless ingested.
What's more, you could lug around a small nuclear reactor, and save the need to use giant batteries filled with caustic chemicals manufactured by toxic processes. They're talking about something small and light enough you personally could pick it up and put it in your trunk.
20-50kW per hour? With nonsensical units like that, it's a damn good through you're an anonymous coward.
...so that it never leaves the ground.
That's fine. We want it for cars. Airplanes can continue to use kerosene.
400000 tons of thorium, where one gram is equivalent to some 7500 gallons of gasoline. We use 20 million barrels a day, at 42 gallons per barrel, so that means some 3.6 million days of fuel at current consumption. That's close to 10000 years. Where did you come up with 100?
The term "rare earth" is a bit of a misnomer. The materials themselves are not that rare. The issue is that they are not commonly found in a rich deposit. Rather, they are dispersed throughout an area, requiring expensive mining and refining techniques.
You sound like a Windows 98 user.
At those kinds of speeds, you start talking about a system that goes from completely off to completely on in a second. When you want to hibernate, you dump everything in memory over to the disk. When you turn back on, you take a moment to find the disk, and pull the entire memory image back over. There is no boot, there is no shutdown. You only need enough memory to handle the actual in-use programs, and anything else could be painlessly paged out, meaning you never have to close programs.
It's an order of magnitude slower than RAM, but an order of magnitude faster than hard disks. Right smack in the middle in order to offer all sorts of cool little tricks.
It's fun precisely because it doesn't take itself seriously. TF2 was originally supposed to be some hyperrealistic combat simulator, however with all the Call of Duty and Battlefield games coming out every year, Valve realized the market was already saturated, and decided to instead do something quirky and different.
Last I heard, all their flight control computers were analog and tube driven, as a cheap way to protect against EMP.
If it's not Scottish, it's crap!
The issue is that the traditional PC only makes sense for something that needs extremely high power, or otherwise needs to stay positioned in one location (like an HTPC). For standard computer use, you can get a laptop with every bit as much power as a standard desktop for a modestly higher price, so why even bother with the big, bulky, static machine? Of course depending on your definition of PC, a laptop is one as well.
What I would love to see is the boom in the home server market. With the move to mobile devices, this is just getting all that much more useful. All these companies are talking about moving data and services to "the cloud". Services are offering file storage on "the cloud". Google is offering a laptop that only operates through "the cloud". Screw "the cloud", build your own. Build a system with a mandatory requirement for RAID, and a whole array of servers. You no longer store bulk data on your desktop. Give your desktop a small SSD, and put that bulk data on the opposite end of a gigabit link. Have it run a domain server, so you desktop stores all of its profile information there. Have it operate as your UPnP/MediaCenter/MythTV base, storing all your content and streaming it to extenders. Don't store your music on Google or Amazon or Apple or Ubuntu storage for streaming, be your own storage. Don't rely on external mail services, run your own IMAP server that automatically pulls and sorts from your other accounts. The cloud should only exist as a redundant backup service to these devices. We keep clamoring for internet providers to offer more and more bandwidth, why not use it?
Doing all of this is easy. Doing all of this with a UI intuitive enough for the average person to figure it out is hard. Microsoft tried and failed with Home Server, but that was more likely due to lack of advertising on the part of OEMs.
Don't forget that the electricity->laser->electricity conversion rate is all of a couple percent.
You are making the mistake that orbital plane changes have any relevance outside the current gravity well. Once you add in a third body, those limitations are gone. Remember that even a polar orbit is pointed in the direction of the lunar orbit twice each time around. You just need to wait until everything lines up. The Cassini has made substantial changes in its orbital plane with just a pittance of fuel, slowly taking advantage of gravitational assist from Saturn's moons.
Don't forget that energy is proportional to velocity squared. Half the velocity of low Earth orbit means only a quarter the energy. Even at Mach 20, there's still a long way to go.
The basic concepts of rocket science are fairly simple. Cold gas and low efficiency rockets are even simple in practice, but that is where it ends. There is a great deal of design that goes into solid rockets. You don't just run from one end of the cylinder to the other. The outer casing can't handle the pressure and temperature. You have to burn from the inside out to allow the propellent itself act as an insulator. If you just have a single hole through the center, you will have low thrust at the beginning of the burn, and high thrust at the end. There is a good deal of research into the initial patterns cut into the fuel to maximize the used volume, minimize the unburnt fuel, and fine tune the burn rate over time to control thrust against the decreasing mass and drag.
Liquid rockets are deceptively simple too. A basic rocket simply uses pressure to force fluid into the combustion chamber. You still have to concern yourself with the temperature and pressure sustained in the combustion chamber and nozzle. High performance rockets use ablative materials to protect the structures. Higher performance rockets run fuel and oxidizer through channels beneath those structures to cool them. More still bleed unburned fuel as a protective film. Then you have the fuel pumps. At the flow rates we're talking about, you need tremendous amounts of power. Often times, you have a small combustor run a turbine to run a pump. On larger rockets, you're talking about tens to hundreds of thousands of horsepower in something small enough you could carry around. There are variable geometry nozzles, attitude control, gimbaled engines....
You do realize that all of our current launch systems are multi-stage, right? Each successive stage drops off and jettisons to allow a lighter later stage to achieve higher performance.
It's every bit as private a joke as the Wilhelm, being used in a dozen or so other movies, television shows, and games since then.
You misunderstand. There is nothing here to bypass, as there is nothing blocking access to the site. The website was found to be promoting illegal activities, so their US controlled domain name was revoked. There is nothing preventing you from accessing it by the IP address directly. There is nothing preventing you from accessing it from an alternate domain name. Should they, for instance, re-register using a .co.uk TLD, it would now be up to the British government to decide whether or not they wanted to revoke this new domain name.
There is nothing that says these web sites are "illegal for a US citizen to view". The websites were operating using a US controlled TLD, and were found to be promoting and facilitating actions voted illegal in the US. There is nothing illegal about going to these websites, only partaking in the actions that got their domain name rescinded. Similarly, there will be nothing illegal about going to these websites when they re-register against a foreign TLD.
Or you have an SSL cert keyed off the domain name.
They're all named John!
Anti-protons are not considered a form of matter? Do you have some prejudice against ions? Maybe you're just pissed off because anti-protons are always so negative.
I can only hope your comment was intended as a troll because I have a hard time accepting someone who could be that stupid.
Wow, you're just so hateful... :)
The C.R.M. 114 was a radio transmission discriminator in the movie Dr. Strangelove. The spam filter was named as a reference to that movie. The discriminator would only allow radio transmission prefixed by a three character code phrase dialed into the unit. It was intended to prevent unauthorized messages from being received by nuclear bombers on their terminal attack. In the movie, the passcode used was 'POE', standing for Purity Of Essence, a phrase repeated by a base commander who drank only rainwater and grain alcohol, afraid the Russians were attacking by poisoning the drinking water and contaminating our natural bodily fluids.