Fluoride salt used in the LFTR is not caustic. It is in fact chemically very inert. Fission products dissolved in the salt are not water soluble either.
If it cools off and solidifies, you just heat up the salt again (e.g. using electric heaters) and continue operating the reactor. Oh, and if the solidified salt comes into contact with water, nothing will happen (as it is not water soluble).
Flibe Energy is working with the U.S. military on making a small reactor that can be deployed at Forward Operating Bases during war. You don't think they would be doing that unless the reactor design is fairly resilient?
Regarding your point 1), you must be an aeronautical engineer (and a clairvoyant one, too) to claim that "the intakes required to decelerate incoming air to subsonic will either be too heavy, or impossible, or not distribute airflow evenly enough, etc etc."
You know that real experts (and not "experts" like you) once claimed that breaking the sound barrier is impossible in principle?
I've read the patent and from what little I know of Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive from Wikipedia it does seem related.
Regenerative braking is a red herring. What's special about Toyota's HSD on Prius is the drivetrain, and that's exactly what they're talking about in the patent.
The caveat - the patent was filed in 1991, don't patents expire after 14 years?
You can run Idokorro's Mobile SSH on a Nokia 6820. Don't know how much the phone will cost you, but in my part of the world it's 140 EUR without a plan.
Only drawback is the small screen resolution of a Nokia 6820.
Funny, for the two years I've been working with J2ME, I've found Nokia's MIDP implementations to be the most compliant. Their phones are split into Series 30, 40, 60 and 80 devices (and a few editions), and each group has clearly defined capabilities.
Have you worked with other manufacturers' phones? Don't tell me that Nokia has worse standards compliance than e.g. SonyEricsson P910i, which looks like its "Java support" was written by a stoned teenager over a weekend...
Can't speak about other areas, but with regards to Java Micro Edition, Nokia has the best tools/support out there. You should just see the kind of crap some other mobile phone manufacturers pass as "development tools". From my experience, SonyEricsson seems to be the worst...
Back to the topic, I'm surprised Nokia didn't go with NetBeans, it has much better support for J2ME to start with. Note that I really don't know which IDE is better for general application development, but for J2ME NetBeans is (currently) much better.
From TFA: CommWarrior periodically sends MMS messages to randomly selected contacts, including a copy of itself and one of several predefined text messages designed to encourage the recipient to install the application.
Doesn't really seem this is Symbian's fault, CommWarrior just behaves like a malicious application. The user obviously has to install it and then run it to get 0wned.
Of course, some sort of sandbox environment like in Microedition Java would have been a better design, but I guess Symbian simply wasn't built with something like this in mind. I know Nokia is pushing a model where only certified developers will be allowed to write applications that access sensitive functionality (dialing numbers, sending messages, etc.), but this is not a great solution. It will drive the cost of applications way up, and shaft all the small app developers, because only the big guys will have their apps signed by Nokia.
In theory, it can be done. That's how combined-cycle gas turbine power plants work. Gas is burned in a gas turbine (essentially a jet engine), and the exhaust heat is used to boil water for a classic steam turbine. Both turbines generate electricity leading to a higher efficiency.
In practice, probably would be too heavy/complicated to be worthwile in a car. Now, thermoelectric generators that recuperate car exhaust heat converting it to electricity, that is cool!
If I understood the article correctly, it runs an embedded version of.Net, whatever that means. So I guess it would make it just the opposite of JavaCard - a.NetCard.
Microsoft is actually the only customer they have so far, according to the article.
since there will now be enough IPv6 addresses available for each person on the planet to have 10 of their very own.
Heh, only if there is an "unexpected explosive expansion" of the human race. Last I checked, IPv6 address space is more than enough for a loooooooooot of addresses per capita.
Oh, and I almost skipped the obligatory bashing - his first reference at the bottom of the article is Understanding IPv6 by Microsoft Press.
And not because of Microsoft (yet). The article states that they are hoping to halve their operating losses to 500 million euros this year. Which means their loss in 2003 was (gasp!) 1 billion euros.
Which I guess is why Microsoft was able to 'partner' with them. Fiat gets the technology for free, and Microsoft gains an entry into the market.
And the technology is nothing revolutionary. It's basically a Bluetooth connection to "integrate cell phones and PDAs with the onboard system" (??) and an USB connection so you can play your iPod music on the car's audio system.
Well, it seems that an anti-tank rocket filled with non-conductive charge would be able to defeat this armor, but is such warhead feasible to make?
One would need material that is as dense as metal, can be vaporized easily but is still a poor conductor. Any slahdotters aware of something like this?
having discovered very strong indications of a wet Martian past
I thought the mission(s) were concieved because we already had very strong indications of a wet Martian past. Is this just marketspeak for not finding anything, ie. mission failure? Every press release from NASA that I read talks about indications and strong indications, there is nothing substantial so far.
Or maybe this is just hedging for another mission, to finally determine if these indications are true?
While Nokia does own the largest market share of mobile phones (around 50%, while the best next competitor has 15% or something), they have never so far engaged in anything similar to strong-arm, no-prisoners tactics of a Redmond corporation we all know and love. In fact, they have pushed for adoptions of open (as in "not Nokia's") standards; Java Mobile Edition being the latest example. With 50% of the market they could have pushed for some custom, lock-in solution but they didn't.
I think Nokia's track record has been OK so far. In my book it stands among the "likeable" corporations, like Toyota and Canon. It'll be interesting to see if they will be able to resist the temptation with Symbian though.
It'll be interesting to see what they mean by circumnavigating. For example, circumnavigating in the baloon doesn't mean you have to fly 40.000 km around the world, but rather travel all 360 degrees below/above a ceratin lattitude. So if you're flying at 45 degrees lat., you need to cross almost 50% less distance, and you'd still be 'going around the world'.
In other words, if they fly during the summer and just keep at a certain lattitude, days will be much longer than nights and the feat would be easier to accomplish.
Also, why use batteries at all when plane's potential energy can be used as a form of storage? Just climb during the day when there is sunlight and glide without power at night. No need for heavy batteries!
Focus it to a point a few feet in front of the car. As the air at that point heats up and expands explosively, aerodynamical resistance on the car decreases. Of course, this would be safe to do only on highways, but air resistance when driving in the city is smaller anyway (on the highway more than 50% of energy lost is due to drag).
There still isn't a satisfactory explanation of this phenomena. The Russian air force has been experimenting with this for years, and the U.S. is catching up now. There are ides for using a setup like this for the proposed U.S. Quiet Supersonic Bomber program.
I think they're using 386s because radiation hardened Pentium & Athlons are hard to come by.
And you have to remember that the whole thing was designed, what, 15 years ago.
BTW, I think I read somewhere that cosmic radiation causes astronauts' laptops to freeze up every couple of hours, and they're used to reseting them every now and then. Anybody knows if this is true?
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He, and I thought I was crazy. When typing fast, every time I try to write "serve", my hands automatically type "server". Every single time.
Fluoride salt used in the LFTR is not caustic. It is in fact chemically very inert. Fission products dissolved in the salt are not water soluble either.
If it cools off and solidifies, you just heat up the salt again (e.g. using electric heaters) and continue operating the reactor. Oh, and if the solidified salt comes into contact with water, nothing will happen (as it is not water soluble).
Flibe Energy is working with the U.S. military on making a small reactor that can be deployed at Forward Operating Bases during war. You don't think they would be doing that unless the reactor design is fairly resilient?
Haha, you know there's no such year as 0 BCE, right? Right?
I wholeheartedly agree.
It's still controversial.
Regarding your point 1), you must be an aeronautical engineer (and a clairvoyant one, too) to claim that "the intakes required to decelerate incoming air to subsonic will either be too heavy, or impossible, or not distribute airflow evenly enough, etc etc."
You know that real experts (and not "experts" like you) once claimed that breaking the sound barrier is impossible in principle?
I've read the patent and from what little I know of Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive from Wikipedia it does seem related.
Regenerative braking is a red herring. What's special about Toyota's HSD on Prius is the drivetrain, and that's exactly what they're talking about in the patent.
The caveat - the patent was filed in 1991, don't patents expire after 14 years?
You can run Idokorro's Mobile SSH on a Nokia 6820. Don't know how much the phone will cost you, but in my part of the world it's 140 EUR without a plan. Only drawback is the small screen resolution of a Nokia 6820.
Funny, for the two years I've been working with J2ME, I've found Nokia's MIDP implementations to be the most compliant. Their phones are split into Series 30, 40, 60 and 80 devices (and a few editions), and each group has clearly defined capabilities.
Have you worked with other manufacturers' phones? Don't tell me that Nokia has worse standards compliance than e.g. SonyEricsson P910i, which looks like its "Java support" was written by a stoned teenager over a weekend...
Can't speak about other areas, but with regards to Java Micro Edition, Nokia has the best tools/support out there. You should just see the kind of crap some other mobile phone manufacturers pass as "development tools". From my experience, SonyEricsson seems to be the worst...
Back to the topic, I'm surprised Nokia didn't go with NetBeans, it has much better support for J2ME to start with. Note that I really don't know which IDE is better for general application development, but for J2ME NetBeans is (currently) much better.
From TFA:
CommWarrior periodically sends MMS messages to randomly selected contacts, including a copy of itself and one of several predefined text messages designed to encourage the recipient to install the application.
Doesn't really seem this is Symbian's fault, CommWarrior just behaves like a malicious application. The user obviously has to install it and then run it to get 0wned.
Of course, some sort of sandbox environment like in Microedition Java would have been a better design, but I guess Symbian simply wasn't built with something like this in mind. I know Nokia is pushing a model where only certified developers will be allowed to write applications that access sensitive functionality (dialing numbers, sending messages, etc.), but this is not a great solution. It will drive the cost of applications way up, and shaft all the small app developers, because only the big guys will have their apps signed by Nokia.
In theory, it can be done. That's how combined-cycle gas turbine power plants work. Gas is burned in a gas turbine (essentially a jet engine), and the exhaust heat is used to boil water for a classic steam turbine. Both turbines generate electricity leading to a higher efficiency.
In practice, probably would be too heavy/complicated to be worthwile in a car. Now, thermoelectric generators that recuperate car exhaust heat converting it to electricity, that is cool!
You now have to personally bury your foot deeep into Chuck Moore's ass:
A dialect of Forth that uses color to replace punctuation:
http://www.colorforth.com/
If I understood the article correctly, it runs an embedded version of .Net, whatever that means. So I guess it would make it just the opposite of JavaCard - a .NetCard.
Microsoft is actually the only customer they have so far, according to the article.
"A business is only worth the profit it will generate from now until doomsday, discounted back to the present, adjusted for inflation."
So there.
Doesn't work with my Opera 7.54 either. And Opera is set to identify as itself.
Oh, and I almost skipped the obligatory bashing - his first reference at the bottom of the article is Understanding IPv6 by Microsoft Press.
And not because of Microsoft (yet). The article states that they are hoping to halve their operating losses to 500 million euros this year. Which means their loss in 2003 was (gasp!) 1 billion euros. Which I guess is why Microsoft was able to 'partner' with them. Fiat gets the technology for free, and Microsoft gains an entry into the market.
And the technology is nothing revolutionary. It's basically a Bluetooth connection to "integrate cell phones and PDAs with the onboard system" (??) and an USB connection so you can play your iPod music on the car's audio system.
Well, it seems that an anti-tank rocket filled with non-conductive charge would be able to defeat this armor, but is such warhead feasible to make?
One would need material that is as dense as metal, can be vaporized easily but is still a poor conductor. Any slahdotters aware of something like this?
having discovered very strong indications of a wet Martian past
I thought the mission(s) were concieved because we already had very strong indications of a wet Martian past. Is this just marketspeak for not finding anything, ie. mission failure? Every press release from NASA that I read talks about indications and strong indications, there is nothing substantial so far.
Or maybe this is just hedging for another mission, to finally determine if these indications are true?
While Nokia does own the largest market share of mobile phones (around 50%, while the best next competitor has 15% or something), they have never so far engaged in anything similar to strong-arm, no-prisoners tactics of a Redmond corporation we all know and love. In fact, they have pushed for adoptions of open (as in "not Nokia's") standards; Java Mobile Edition being the latest example. With 50% of the market they could have pushed for some custom, lock-in solution but they didn't.
I think Nokia's track record has been OK so far. In my book it stands among the "likeable" corporations, like Toyota and Canon. It'll be interesting to see if they will be able to resist the temptation with Symbian though.
It'll be interesting to see what they mean by circumnavigating. For example, circumnavigating in the baloon doesn't mean you have to fly 40.000 km around the world, but rather travel all 360 degrees below/above a ceratin lattitude. So if you're flying at 45 degrees lat., you need to cross almost 50% less distance, and you'd still be 'going around the world'.
In other words, if they fly during the summer and just keep at a certain lattitude, days will be much longer than nights and the feat would be easier to accomplish.
Also, why use batteries at all when plane's potential energy can be used as a form of storage? Just climb during the day when there is sunlight and glide without power at night. No need for heavy batteries!
Um, didn't they already make a zero-G porn movie? I think it's The Uranus Experiment.
Focus it to a point a few feet in front of the car. As the air at that point heats up and expands explosively, aerodynamical resistance on the car decreases. Of course, this would be safe to do only on highways, but air resistance when driving in the city is smaller anyway (on the highway more than 50% of energy lost is due to drag).
There still isn't a satisfactory explanation of this phenomena. The Russian air force has been experimenting with this for years, and the U.S. is catching up now. There are ides for using a setup like this for the proposed U.S. Quiet Supersonic Bomber program.
I think they're using 386s because radiation hardened Pentium & Athlons are hard to come by. And you have to remember that the whole thing was designed, what, 15 years ago. BTW, I think I read somewhere that cosmic radiation causes astronauts' laptops to freeze up every couple of hours, and they're used to reseting them every now and then. Anybody knows if this is true?