CGI will become commoditised, rather than modelling every back drop by hand you will have preexisting models which just need tweaking for individual films.
This has already happened to quite an extent. It will keep going to. Already contracting out CGI elements is getting much cheaper and easier for better quality than just a few years ago.
I liked Firefly but would never put it in the hard sci-fi category ever. Its about as hard as star trek. However I love I, Robot the movie. Its a great movie... as you just said "As far as the science fiction fan boys go. Get over it." Sticking to the books would have made a movie just as boring as AI.
However I don't think movies work well from books. Short stories yes, but not books. I think its best to just team up with a good sci-fi writer and a screen play writer and see what falls out. But you know, folks don't put up 30+ million dollars because they like you, they want to make some money.
Pushing Ice was AR worse book. Talk about a highschool girl bitch fight. It was just silly how far he took that bitch fight. I was surprised i finished that book. Yet I really like almost everything else he has written (haven't bothered with century rain). I think out of AR books, Chasm City or The Prefect would be good picks. However Consider Phlebas would be my first pick from IB in his culture series otherwise the Algebraist was great.
But you know what. Since sci-fi "fans" are such a bunch of toss pots that would say exactly as the first poster said no matter how they did the movie.... They are not going to care about fans.
You made the fundamentally flawed assumption that parents want to raise their kids. They don't*, they want the government to do it and they want to bitch about what a bad job the government does too.
* OK so there are plenty of parents that do raise their own kids, but this article not really about them.
We most certainly can blame US citizens. You are free to think for yourself, choosing not too is not a defense. In a representative democracy there is much more you can do than just vote. But you know what, US citizens don't care as long as they still get cable.
For some people it is. The irony is that all the graphics was probably don't in a 3d program that used opengl. I know that most CAD only use opengl and I know at least one major 3d graphics program does too.
I could not agree more. The game forum web sites went ape over GL3. But it seems the only folks blowing chunks were people that clearly didn't work with OpenGL or didn't work with it much. Most of my friends that are working on CAD tools were relived with the opengl3 spec, and a totally stoked with how fast opengl is moving now.
Not quite. They pick engines that are good and *run* on the target platform/s, and that target platform is *popular*. Good platforms are useless if no one owns it. Once a platform is chosen, for the most part so is the interface.
Also these days piracy concerns and perceptions does drive platform choice.
While i do a bit of 3d, and i don't just use a Xbox or windows, the choice of interface is pretty small. Basically OpenGL is my only choice. But i am happy with it, last time i used DX (9.3a IIRC) it was very similar. In both cases most of your work is driver bug workarounds.
This is possible. Its called star tracking and was how the U2 spyplane navigated. However most camera/operator combinations won't be able to take a photo of the night sky well enough. It too little light that would need 1sec camera exposure times and the camera pointing direction will need to be know well.
WTF? I have navigated planes with a compass and dead reckoning a bit. I have to be able to or you don't get a PPL in my country. Every small plane I have ever flown has both a magnetic compass and a set of corrections for the airframe, and a gyro compass which you set on the ground. Quite a lot of us at the aeroclub still don't use GPS sets.
You do realize that in most places there are *not* salt deposits lying around that are suitable and that transmission costs *do* matter. Current compressed air systems are loosing 50% or more of there heat of compression. However adiabatic compression efficiency is higher than i recall. Its more like 70%-80% one way at a fixed pressure ratio while expander tend to be a little less, more like 60-70%. So both ways in a ideal system, *if* you have a salt deposit lying around and you have a use for the millions of tons of salt water or don't mind it in your water table, is still about 50%. Heat losses come out of that and they are substantial, you can't arm wave it away. Current "adiabatic" systems that are planed (none have been built yet) store the heat is a separate heat sink. Isothermal compresses are small and have very bad efficiency.
Either way, its still expensive (100MW compressors+motor are not cheap) and adds significantly to the cost of a wind/solar instillation and there is little hope of scaling this up to city power storage levels (current systems are for peak load only and are no good for cloudy days or night capacity).
Lets assume some magical 100% efficient full cycle compressor/expander using air. Lets assume a smaller city that uses 100MW average per day. So that is 8.6 x 10^12 J. If we compress to a pressure of 10 atm (very high compared to current and planed systems), then we get about 5.6kJ per mol of gas of energy storage and the temperature will be about 300 C (293 more accurately). So 1.55x10^9 moles of gas (more 44 000 metric tons of air) is required and a chamber volume of 7.2x10^6 cubic meters (the volume of over 15 million tons of dry salt) . If the chamber is a average of 5 meters high (unlikely due to geological reasons) then you need a chamber area of over 1.4 million square meters .
This will store just *one* days worth of a smaller city and assumes perfect performance. In practice getting compresses and expander to have high efficiency across the full 10:1 pressure ratio is hard at this power level, and in fact has not been done, real efficiencies across the chamber pressure range is poor . Also keeping that air at 600C is not easy either, the rock will absorb heat and if wet can absorb a *lot* (1kg water evaporating is 2.2MJ of energy). Last but not least, there is a very real issue of repeated loading and unloading the chamber and the chambers geological stability--it is not a given, and can be a real concern to the locals who generally don't like earthquakes, or collapsing ground.
Can it be done? Yes. Its it cheap. No. Is it efficient, current systems, no. Future systems planed are better but still worse than fuel cells. This storage is a tax on unreliable energy source and all current methods are both not high in efficiency requiring 2x or more the generating capacity (expensive), and are expensive no matter how you slice it.
I have run some numbers on this. Yes it can work. But again it adds a factor of 2-3 to any wind/solar/wave etc energy system. Which is already still 3x more expensive that anything else (at least).
Where the hell are you getting your numbers? Compressed air can't get close to that unless you can keep the heat of compression, which you can't if its bigger than a plastic toy. 50% *one* way may be feasible if you try hard. That is 25% both ways. Again you need to keep the heat of compression (ie a reversible thermodynamic process).
Oh and a factor of 2 or 3 is nothing...Look at your power bill and x3 and see how "good" that is. You also ignored the fact that you still need to find this cavern.
Unfortunately none of these are cheap. They often have location requirements which means they can be a long way from where the power is produced. Finally, only a very small percentage of the total daily energy is stored. If you want to use solar/wind for everything, its a totally different scale of problem, and far from proven. How many reversible Hoover Dams can you build and where....etc
And is very inefficient (25%). Compressed air is even worse. Figures as low as 10%. So you need 10x more solar or wind. Also you need a salt cavern somewhere around. It is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.
It is very inefficient (25%) so you now need 4x the capacity. Also you need somewhere to put the 5000+ hectare lake. Its not as easy as it sounds when you really run the numbers. Think Hoover dam running backwards, plus the issue that its not where you are generating the power...
Direct conversion is saddled with quantum physics. Only one colour of light can be converted with ~100% efficiency. Even in theory it is much less. Trippe junctions can do better etc, but is not in fact better than the theoretical performance of a heat engine. Don't forget to first or even second order you have a black body spectrum. In practice both work well in different situations and both get no where near there theoretical efficiency.
Using a rare isotope of Uranium in a thermal reactor while wasting 99% of the energy, and leaving behind a huge mess was the rubbish choice.
U235 is at 0.7% and you can make natural U critical, it not that rare. Th is *NOT* a fuel, its fertile, you need neutrons to turn Th232 into Pa233 which then turn into U233 which is far *rarer* than U235. Also you can make a bomb from U233, in fact they *did*. Pa233 has a high neutron cross section and if not separated will form Pa234. Pa234 decays into U234 which is a horrible gamma emitter. The waste from *both* cycles is roughly the *same* for all practical planing purposes. Stable fast reactors reactors are "easy" if you go molten salt. You don't need Th to do it. In fact the "advantages are many fold" is often not from choosing Th but from using a molten salt reactor.
As for "wasting 99% of the energy", WTF are you talking about. What you do with the heat afterward has no bearing on the fuel cycle. Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
And it is BS that U was chosen over Th to make bombs. Th was tried once there was enough U around to make the neutrons needed, without U as a neutron source you can't use Th for anything. Its has some problems as a base fuel cycle which is why molten salt is often suggested despite is long development time, it should solve the problems. Th is no silver bullet and does not change the basic issue with nuclear energy.
I personally like the promise of Thorium nuclear power but I'm skeptical of its lofty promises.
One problem is the huge amount of total BS about them. You only need read a few posts above to see the Thorium proponents have no idea about a Th fuel cycle at all. They pull figures out of a place where the sun don't shine.
First of all Th232 is not fissile, it is fertile. It needs to be transmutated into Pa233, which then needs to be separated from the neutron source so that it can decay into U233. You can't really leave the Pa233 in the pile, as it has a high neutron cross section and will then end up as Pa234 which decays to U234 which is not fissile (even numbers of nucleons are not good fuels) and the absorption destroys neutron economy (ie needing more than one neutron for every atom of produced fuel).
Since you really need to do a lot of in situ separation of Pa233 to make it work, generally it is suggested that molten salt reactors would be a good choice. A lot of benefits of the Th fuel cycle claimed by proponents come from this choice. Note this also applies to using U in a molten salt reactor. In fact the only molten salt reactors built only used U. Molten salt rectors are from a larger class of reactors call homogeneous reactors. This is where the coolant and the fuel are the same fluid or gas. They have many advantages compared to traditional solid core reactors, such as being able to burn fissile material that is too unstable to burn in solid core reactors --aka "burn waste". Again its not limited to just the Th fuel cycle.
However they don't really burn true waste(ie unfissile fissile fragments) and don't really compare that favorably to the U cycle per say. They are slightly better with the true waste breakup, having less bad gamma emitters, but if you compare both U fuel cycle, and a Th fuel cycle both with the same degree of reprocessing, both look about the same. In fact both look pretty good. That is both would produce on the order of a few tonns of high grade waste per 1GW year, which would be low grade waste after about 100 years (or so). Note that a power plant could have a small on site storage facility to store over a 100 years of waste. ie once the facility is full, the first stuff you put in is now pretty safe. 100 years is not really that long. My apartment block is ~130 years old. My favorite wine cellar is 1300 years old.
Also often it is claimed that a Th is more proliferation resistant. This is really not true at all. It may be a little harder than with U, but at best only a little. Remember you need to separate out the Pa233 to decay into U233. If this is done in situ then it will be very pure (ie very little Pa234). This would decay into very pure U233 with very little U234 (bad gamma ray emitter). Not only can you make a bomb with U233, it was done and worked just fine.
It should be noted that nuclear waste is not really any worse that a lot of other industrial wastes. For example DDT is bad no matter how long you wait. Same with tailings from a lot of mining operations. Which brings up the point that both Th and U are mined from dilute sources, and the environmental cost of mining U and Th should not be excluded when considering the nuclear option. For example U mines typically have 100ppm of U ore contained in them, which has about 8.2GJ of nuclear energy per kg of raw ore processed (assuming reprocessing). While coal has only 35MJ per kg. So you mine less for more, but there are a *lot* of tailings.
However developing the reactor and verifying the waste profiles etc. is a 20 year project at least.
Unfortunately orbital mechanics precludes just "unhooking" from the cable in LEO or other orbits without a really big rocket. For LEO its needs to be about the same size as one from the ground. LEO and indeed other orbits are a issue of speed, not height. Its unintuitive, but true.
Slashdot Mirror
You are permitted to *not* watch something if it is eventually made.
CGI will become commoditised, rather than modelling every back drop by hand you will have preexisting models which just need tweaking for individual films.
This has already happened to quite an extent. It will keep going to. Already contracting out CGI elements is getting much cheaper and easier for better quality than just a few years ago.
I liked Firefly but would never put it in the hard sci-fi category ever. Its about as hard as star trek. However I love I, Robot the movie. Its a great movie... as you just said "As far as the science fiction fan boys go. Get over it." Sticking to the books would have made a movie just as boring as AI.
However I don't think movies work well from books. Short stories yes, but not books. I think its best to just team up with a good sci-fi writer and a screen play writer and see what falls out. But you know, folks don't put up 30+ million dollars because they like you, they want to make some money.
Pushing Ice was AR worse book. Talk about a highschool girl bitch fight. It was just silly how far he took that bitch fight. I was surprised i finished that book. Yet I really like almost everything else he has written (haven't bothered with century rain). I think out of AR books, Chasm City or The Prefect would be good picks. However Consider Phlebas would be my first pick from IB in his culture series otherwise the Algebraist was great.
But you know what. Since sci-fi "fans" are such a bunch of toss pots that would say exactly as the first poster said no matter how they did the movie.... They are not going to care about fans.
You made the fundamentally flawed assumption that parents want to raise their kids. They don't*, they want the government to do it and they want to bitch about what a bad job the government does too.
* OK so there are plenty of parents that do raise their own kids, but this article not really about them.
We most certainly can blame US citizens. You are free to think for yourself, choosing not too is not a defense. In a representative democracy there is much more you can do than just vote. But you know what, US citizens don't care as long as they still get cable.
I seem to recall he swore a lot more than as you have quoted. Perhaps I recalled wrong. Nevertheless, its a very accurate quote.
For some people it is. The irony is that all the graphics was probably don't in a 3d program that used opengl. I know that most CAD only use opengl and I know at least one major 3d graphics program does too.
I could not agree more. The game forum web sites went ape over GL3. But it seems the only folks blowing chunks were people that clearly didn't work with OpenGL or didn't work with it much. Most of my friends that are working on CAD tools were relived with the opengl3 spec, and a totally stoked with how fast opengl is moving now.
The games pick the engines that are good.
Not quite. They pick engines that are good and *run* on the target platform/s, and that target platform is *popular*. Good platforms are useless if no one owns it. Once a platform is chosen, for the most part so is the interface.
Also these days piracy concerns and perceptions does drive platform choice.
While i do a bit of 3d, and i don't just use a Xbox or windows, the choice of interface is pretty small. Basically OpenGL is my only choice. But i am happy with it, last time i used DX (9.3a IIRC) it was very similar. In both cases most of your work is driver bug workarounds.
This is possible. Its called star tracking and was how the U2 spyplane navigated. However most camera/operator combinations won't be able to take a photo of the night sky well enough. It too little light that would need 1sec camera exposure times and the camera pointing direction will need to be know well.
You know that pilots have thought of that.
WTF? I have navigated planes with a compass and dead reckoning a bit. I have to be able to or you don't get a PPL in my country. Every small plane I have ever flown has both a magnetic compass and a set of corrections for the airframe, and a gyro compass which you set on the ground. Quite a lot of us at the aeroclub still don't use GPS sets.
In the country where i live. None of the things you mention are copyright violations.
You do realize that in most places there are *not* salt deposits lying around that are suitable and that transmission costs *do* matter. Current compressed air systems are loosing 50% or more of there heat of compression. However adiabatic compression efficiency is higher than i recall. Its more like 70%-80% one way at a fixed pressure ratio while expander tend to be a little less, more like 60-70%. So both ways in a ideal system, *if* you have a salt deposit lying around and you have a use for the millions of tons of salt water or don't mind it in your water table, is still about 50%. Heat losses come out of that and they are substantial, you can't arm wave it away. Current "adiabatic" systems that are planed (none have been built yet) store the heat is a separate heat sink. Isothermal compresses are small and have very bad efficiency.
Either way, its still expensive (100MW compressors+motor are not cheap) and adds significantly to the cost of a wind/solar instillation and there is little hope of scaling this up to city power storage levels (current systems are for peak load only and are no good for cloudy days or night capacity).
Lets assume some magical 100% efficient full cycle compressor/expander using air. Lets assume a smaller city that uses 100MW average per day. So that is 8.6 x 10^12 J. If we compress to a pressure of 10 atm (very high compared to current and planed systems), then we get about 5.6kJ per mol of gas of energy storage and the temperature will be about 300 C (293 more accurately). So 1.55x10^9 moles of gas (more 44 000 metric tons of air) is required and a chamber volume of 7.2x10^6 cubic meters (the volume of over 15 million tons of dry salt) . If the chamber is a average of 5 meters high (unlikely due to geological reasons) then you need a chamber area of over 1.4 million square meters .
This will store just *one* days worth of a smaller city and assumes perfect performance. In practice getting compresses and expander to have high efficiency across the full 10:1 pressure ratio is hard at this power level, and in fact has not been done, real efficiencies across the chamber pressure range is poor . Also keeping that air at 600C is not easy either, the rock will absorb heat and if wet can absorb a *lot* (1kg water evaporating is 2.2MJ of energy). Last but not least, there is a very real issue of repeated loading and unloading the chamber and the chambers geological stability--it is not a given, and can be a real concern to the locals who generally don't like earthquakes, or collapsing ground.
Can it be done? Yes. Its it cheap. No. Is it efficient, current systems, no. Future systems planed are better but still worse than fuel cells. This storage is a tax on unreliable energy source and all current methods are both not high in efficiency requiring 2x or more the generating capacity (expensive), and are expensive no matter how you slice it.
I have run some numbers on this. Yes it can work. But again it adds a factor of 2-3 to any wind/solar/wave etc energy system. Which is already still 3x more expensive that anything else (at least).
Where the hell are you getting your numbers? Compressed air can't get close to that unless you can keep the heat of compression, which you can't if its bigger than a plastic toy. 50% *one* way may be feasible if you try hard. That is 25% both ways. Again you need to keep the heat of compression (ie a reversible thermodynamic process).
Oh and a factor of 2 or 3 is nothing...Look at your power bill and x3 and see how "good" that is. You also ignored the fact that you still need to find this cavern.
Unfortunately none of these are cheap. They often have location requirements which means they can be a long way from where the power is produced. Finally, only a very small percentage of the total daily energy is stored. If you want to use solar/wind for everything, its a totally different scale of problem, and far from proven. How many reversible Hoover Dams can you build and where....etc
And is very inefficient (25%). Compressed air is even worse. Figures as low as 10%. So you need 10x more solar or wind. Also you need a salt cavern somewhere around. It is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.
It is very inefficient (25%) so you now need 4x the capacity. Also you need somewhere to put the 5000+ hectare lake. Its not as easy as it sounds when you really run the numbers. Think Hoover dam running backwards, plus the issue that its not where you are generating the power...
Direct conversion is saddled with quantum physics. Only one colour of light can be converted with ~100% efficiency. Even in theory it is much less. Trippe junctions can do better etc, but is not in fact better than the theoretical performance of a heat engine. Don't forget to first or even second order you have a black body spectrum. In practice both work well in different situations and both get no where near there theoretical efficiency.
Using a rare isotope of Uranium in a thermal reactor while wasting 99% of the energy, and leaving behind a huge mess was the rubbish choice.
U235 is at 0.7% and you can make natural U critical, it not that rare. Th is *NOT* a fuel, its fertile, you need neutrons to turn Th232 into Pa233 which then turn into U233 which is far *rarer* than U235. Also you can make a bomb from U233, in fact they *did*. Pa233 has a high neutron cross section and if not separated will form Pa234. Pa234 decays into U234 which is a horrible gamma emitter. The waste from *both* cycles is roughly the *same* for all practical planing purposes. Stable fast reactors reactors are "easy" if you go molten salt. You don't need Th to do it. In fact the "advantages are many fold" is often not from choosing Th but from using a molten salt reactor.
As for "wasting 99% of the energy", WTF are you talking about. What you do with the heat afterward has no bearing on the fuel cycle. Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
And it is BS that U was chosen over Th to make bombs. Th was tried once there was enough U around to make the neutrons needed, without U as a neutron source you can't use Th for anything. Its has some problems as a base fuel cycle which is why molten salt is often suggested despite is long development time, it should solve the problems. Th is no silver bullet and does not change the basic issue with nuclear energy.
I personally like the promise of Thorium nuclear power but I'm skeptical of its lofty promises.
One problem is the huge amount of total BS about them. You only need read a few posts above to see the Thorium proponents have no idea about a Th fuel cycle at all. They pull figures out of a place where the sun don't shine.
First of all Th232 is not fissile, it is fertile. It needs to be transmutated into Pa233, which then needs to be separated from the neutron source so that it can decay into U233. You can't really leave the Pa233 in the pile, as it has a high neutron cross section and will then end up as Pa234 which decays to U234 which is not fissile (even numbers of nucleons are not good fuels) and the absorption destroys neutron economy (ie needing more than one neutron for every atom of produced fuel).
Since you really need to do a lot of in situ separation of Pa233 to make it work, generally it is suggested that molten salt reactors would be a good choice. A lot of benefits of the Th fuel cycle claimed by proponents come from this choice. Note this also applies to using U in a molten salt reactor. In fact the only molten salt reactors built only used U. Molten salt rectors are from a larger class of reactors call homogeneous reactors. This is where the coolant and the fuel are the same fluid or gas. They have many advantages compared to traditional solid core reactors, such as being able to burn fissile material that is too unstable to burn in solid core reactors --aka "burn waste". Again its not limited to just the Th fuel cycle.
However they don't really burn true waste(ie unfissile fissile fragments) and don't really compare that favorably to the U cycle per say. They are slightly better with the true waste breakup, having less bad gamma emitters, but if you compare both U fuel cycle, and a Th fuel cycle both with the same degree of reprocessing, both look about the same. In fact both look pretty good. That is both would produce on the order of a few tonns of high grade waste per 1GW year, which would be low grade waste after about 100 years (or so). Note that a power plant could have a small on site storage facility to store over a 100 years of waste. ie once the facility is full, the first stuff you put in is now pretty safe. 100 years is not really that long. My apartment block is ~130 years old. My favorite wine cellar is 1300 years old.
Also often it is claimed that a Th is more proliferation resistant. This is really not true at all. It may be a little harder than with U, but at best only a little. Remember you need to separate out the Pa233 to decay into U233. If this is done in situ then it will be very pure (ie very little Pa234). This would decay into very pure U233 with very little U234 (bad gamma ray emitter). Not only can you make a bomb with U233, it was done and worked just fine.
It should be noted that nuclear waste is not really any worse that a lot of other industrial wastes. For example DDT is bad no matter how long you wait. Same with tailings from a lot of mining operations. Which brings up the point that both Th and U are mined from dilute sources, and the environmental cost of mining U and Th should not be excluded when considering the nuclear option. For example U mines typically have 100ppm of U ore contained in them, which has about 8.2GJ of nuclear energy per kg of raw ore processed (assuming reprocessing). While coal has only 35MJ per kg. So you mine less for more, but there are a *lot* of tailings.
However developing the reactor and verifying the waste profiles etc. is a 20 year project at least.
Unfortunately orbital mechanics precludes just "unhooking" from the cable in LEO or other orbits without a really big rocket. For LEO its needs to be about the same size as one from the ground. LEO and indeed other orbits are a issue of speed, not height. Its unintuitive, but true.
Well i don't know what a iThingy is, but i am pretty sure you need to be at least 17 to look at one.