Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to cryogenically liquefy hydrogen? Do you appreciate the inherent problems in using a cryogenic fuel? Just look up the fuel tank bleed rates for cryogenic fuel rockets.
We don't even use LNG in vehicles, only CNG because dealing with any cryogenic fuel is counter-productive if you have to store it for any length of time. Add to that the fact that there is more hydrogen in a litre of anhydrous ammonia than there is in a litre of liquid hydrogen. Unless you need a really high Isp engine, LH is a terrible fuel.
Nothing put on a computer is ever secure. Nothing put on a computer is ever anonymous. Considering democracy requires secret ballots and secret ballots require both anonymity and security, the best place for computers in a voting system is as far away from it as possible. Even air-gapping doesn't work. How many articles are on/. about researchers devising new and exciting ways to hack air-gapped computers? At least one a month, it seems.
#1 is stupid. Why even have districts if you don't have to vote in them? #2 is a fool's description of how Parliamentary elections work. Basically Parliamentary style elections solve the problems #1 & #2 seek to solve but better. Plus we have centuries of practice with Parliamentary elections. #3 is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Negative voting is a surefire way to destroy any possibility of government. Your vote shouldn't get to cancel out someone else's. It's unworkable even in theory.
Civilization predates agriculture. There were permanent settlements 15,000 years ago. I don't know where you pulled that 5,000 year number out of; perhaps a supervolcano?
Those private companies are financed by NASA contracts. NASA has literally always used private sub-contractors. The only difference in the new contracts is they are fixed price as opposed to cost-plus contracts. NASA is working on all those things you listed (except the Orion drive b/c it would kill 1% of humanity if you launched one from the ground and there is no reason to build one if you're just going to use conventional chemical rockets to reach space) and the only reason you've heard of them is because NASA is working on them. You can take your libertarian pipe dreams somewhere else.
Those two caveats are doing a lot of work there. Multiple launches raises the cost, complexity, and likelihood of failure significantly. Which is why no one does it.
That's not true. The third stage of the ill fated Minuteman IV was both solid and throttle-able. It used valves on the sides to control the chamber pressure and thus burn rate. It was an overly complicated advancement of the shaped charge ports used to cutoff the third stage on the Minuteman I, II, & III. They couldn't get it to work right before the whole project was scrapped, but it works in theory.
There were also several plans to use a variable width nozzle choke to control chamber pressure and allow for thrust vectoring solids. Basically all those projects ended whenever someone asked "Why not just use a liquid engine?"
So you can do it, it's just difficult and expensive and why bother?
Venture Capitalists make money on less then one out of ever twenty investments they make. So obviously they're not that good at predicting outcomes. They don't have any special insight into technology or science. They aren't smarter than everyone else. So feel free to ignore everything this person says. They are no more likely to be right than anyone else.
You know they've done studies where they take identical resumes and send them out, some with male names and some with female names. The male names get more responses. They've done similar studies with race. You can't make choices based on merit if merit is being determined by bigots.
An object lesson is what happened with symphonies. You'd think it was based solely on merit, how good a musician sounds. And this is what was claimed for years. It just so happened that all the best orchestra members were white men. This went on right up until blind auditions became the norm. During auditions, musicians would sit behind a screen so all the hiring committee would know about the candidate was how well they played. Suddenly rates of women and minorities skyrocketed. So did women and PoCs just suddenly get better around the time blind auditions became popular? No, blind auditions just made it harder for the hiring committees to discriminate based race, gender, and age.
But no, I'm sure tech work is so different and white men really are better than everyone else.
It's a truism that every post about any form of bigotry will have a comments section filled with examples of said bigotry. So it comes as no surprise that a thread about racism and sexism will be filled with racist and sexist comments. That so many of said comments have gotten upvoted shows how and why the modderation on this site is broken.
Or you could pay your workers more. If you can't get theworkers you need at a given wage then obviously you need to offer higher wages. It's not like people have a hard time understanding supply and demand except when it comes to labor.
The rights of the child cannot supersede or override those of the woman. A woman at no point loses the ability to chose what she wants to do with her body.
Let's talk about marrow donation. It is painful but relatively safe (much safer than pregnancy) procedure that saves lives. A child is dying and needs a marrow transplant to live. Does the child have any right to anyone's marrow, including the parents', without their consent? The obvious answer is no. Forcible human organ transplanting is rightly regarded as a human rights violation. So if the child has no right to one type of easily harvested tissue from anyone else, what gives them rights over the entire organ system of a woman that pregnancy entails?
A fetus cannot develop outside a human womb. The process of development requires an interplay between teh mother and teh fetus or it will not proceed. As even the experiment in the parent post shows, before the third trimester, even with massive medical intervention, death is assured. Greater than 90% of abortions happen within the first 90 days of pregnancy. Half happen within 6-8 weeks. Almost all the rest happen as a result of some defect that will prove lethal to the fetus. So how can a fetus have a right to life if they can't live on their own?
The facts of pregnancy are against anti-choicers. The only reason left to them are inherently misogynistic.
Sheep gestate for ~21 weeks. This incubator only worked for 4 weeks. That's 20% of the gestation period. Sheep also develop far more in the womb than humans do. The human equivalent would be an mid-third trimester fetus; basically a month or two premature. Sounds far less impressive now, doesn't it. This is why you read the paper and not the press release.
10m of silicate ceramic; 30cm of iron. A hull, in that order from exterior to interior, is all you need to get radiation shielding comparable to what you get on Earth's surface. If you build a torus or cylinder more than ~1km in diameter, you can spin it for Earth-normal gravity, something you can't get on a planet. You could even make parts of the hull clear; just use 10m of fused quartz, 1m of either water or poly-carbonate, and 30cm of aluminum oxide instead. All the bulk materials could conceivably be mined on the Moon and launched into orbit electrically with mass drivers. You could power it with large solar arrays. If you use multiple levels inside, you get rather huge surface areas to populate. Just beware of colony drops.
All space stations to date have been regularly resupplied from Earth. The ISS can only go six months without being resupplied before it has to be abandoned. Because of fun things like mass fraction, you can't send something the size of the ISS to Mars.
Interestingly enough, you can send something much bigger. But there's no way in hell we'll build one. For one thing, it would technically be illegal to put nukes in space.
Every discussion on the internet about racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other form of bigotry is filled with posts denying the existence of said bigotry in the most bigoted fashion possible.
First, "Hindu" is a religion, not an ethnicity. The term you're looking for is either desi or South Asian.
Second, you don't understand what the term "minority" means within a sociological context. It's not a measure of population; it's a measure of power. The opposite of a minority group isn't a majority group. The opposite of a minority group is a dominant group.
Third, there is a well studied effect where men see a group that is 17% women as being half women. And groups that are 30% women as being majority women. I'm betting that's what was going on with you.
If you're aware enough to preface your statement with "No troll intended" then you know your comment is offensive. If you post a comment you know is offensive, especially one that is only one line, you are trolling.
The average gasoline internal combustion engine is only 20% efficient. That is to say, only 20% of the energy present in the fuel-air mix at ignition is reclaimed as mechanical energy by the engine; the rest is lost as heat. A further 90% of the energy harnessed by the engine is used to keep the engine itself running; pumps, belts, fans, and transmissions all take energy to run. That means only 2% of the energy present in the gas tank makes it to spinning the wheels. And that's with the air off! So you can see, there's a lot of room for improvement.
Turbo Diesel engines are half again as efficient than a gasoline engine of the same weight. If every gas engine were swapped for a Deisel engine, the US could stop oil imports from all other countries except Canada. And that's just going from 2% efficiency to ~3%. If you were to add gas turbines in the exhaust system to capture some of the waste heat, essentially making a multiple-expansion engine, you could easily tripple or quadruple current mileages. Combine such an engine system with and electric powertrain, like the Chevy Volt, and regenerative braking and you could have a 100MPG car within the decade. All using existant technology. So don't tell me a 54MPG fleet average is unattainable. If it was, the car makers themselves wouldn't have agreed to it.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't even use LNG in vehicles, only CNG because dealing with any cryogenic fuel is counter-productive if you have to store it for any length of time. Add to that the fact that there is more hydrogen in a litre of anhydrous ammonia than there is in a litre of liquid hydrogen. Unless you need a really high Isp engine, LH is a terrible fuel.
Nothing put on a computer is ever secure. Nothing put on a computer is ever anonymous. Considering democracy requires secret ballots and secret ballots require both anonymity and security, the best place for computers in a voting system is as far away from it as possible. Even air-gapping doesn't work. How many articles are on /. about researchers devising new and exciting ways to hack air-gapped computers? At least one a month, it seems.
#1 is stupid. Why even have districts if you don't have to vote in them? #2 is a fool's description of how Parliamentary elections work. Basically Parliamentary style elections solve the problems #1 & #2 seek to solve but better. Plus we have centuries of practice with Parliamentary elections. #3 is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Negative voting is a surefire way to destroy any possibility of government. Your vote shouldn't get to cancel out someone else's. It's unworkable even in theory.
Civilization predates agriculture. There were permanent settlements 15,000 years ago. I don't know where you pulled that 5,000 year number out of; perhaps a supervolcano?
Those private companies are financed by NASA contracts. NASA has literally always used private sub-contractors. The only difference in the new contracts is they are fixed price as opposed to cost-plus contracts. NASA is working on all those things you listed (except the Orion drive b/c it would kill 1% of humanity if you launched one from the ground and there is no reason to build one if you're just going to use conventional chemical rockets to reach space) and the only reason you've heard of them is because NASA is working on them. You can take your libertarian pipe dreams somewhere else.
That is so laughably false.
multiple launches with in-orbit assembly.
Those two caveats are doing a lot of work there. Multiple launches raises the cost, complexity, and likelihood of failure significantly. Which is why no one does it.
That's not true. The third stage of the ill fated Minuteman IV was both solid and throttle-able. It used valves on the sides to control the chamber pressure and thus burn rate. It was an overly complicated advancement of the shaped charge ports used to cutoff the third stage on the Minuteman I, II, & III. They couldn't get it to work right before the whole project was scrapped, but it works in theory.
There were also several plans to use a variable width nozzle choke to control chamber pressure and allow for thrust vectoring solids. Basically all those projects ended whenever someone asked "Why not just use a liquid engine?"
So you can do it, it's just difficult and expensive and why bother?
Venture Capitalists make money on less then one out of ever twenty investments they make. So obviously they're not that good at predicting outcomes. They don't have any special insight into technology or science. They aren't smarter than everyone else. So feel free to ignore everything this person says. They are no more likely to be right than anyone else.
An object lesson is what happened with symphonies. You'd think it was based solely on merit, how good a musician sounds. And this is what was claimed for years. It just so happened that all the best orchestra members were white men. This went on right up until blind auditions became the norm. During auditions, musicians would sit behind a screen so all the hiring committee would know about the candidate was how well they played. Suddenly rates of women and minorities skyrocketed. So did women and PoCs just suddenly get better around the time blind auditions became popular? No, blind auditions just made it harder for the hiring committees to discriminate based race, gender, and age.
But no, I'm sure tech work is so different and white men really are better than everyone else.
It's a truism that every post about any form of bigotry will have a comments section filled with examples of said bigotry. So it comes as no surprise that a thread about racism and sexism will be filled with racist and sexist comments. That so many of said comments have gotten upvoted shows how and why the modderation on this site is broken.
Do you really not realize how racist what you just wrote was?
Or you could pay your workers more. If you can't get theworkers you need at a given wage then obviously you need to offer higher wages. It's not like people have a hard time understanding supply and demand except when it comes to labor.
The rights of the child cannot supersede or override those of the woman. A woman at no point loses the ability to chose what she wants to do with her body. Let's talk about marrow donation. It is painful but relatively safe (much safer than pregnancy) procedure that saves lives. A child is dying and needs a marrow transplant to live. Does the child have any right to anyone's marrow, including the parents', without their consent? The obvious answer is no. Forcible human organ transplanting is rightly regarded as a human rights violation. So if the child has no right to one type of easily harvested tissue from anyone else, what gives them rights over the entire organ system of a woman that pregnancy entails? A fetus cannot develop outside a human womb. The process of development requires an interplay between teh mother and teh fetus or it will not proceed. As even the experiment in the parent post shows, before the third trimester, even with massive medical intervention, death is assured. Greater than 90% of abortions happen within the first 90 days of pregnancy. Half happen within 6-8 weeks. Almost all the rest happen as a result of some defect that will prove lethal to the fetus. So how can a fetus have a right to life if they can't live on their own? The facts of pregnancy are against anti-choicers. The only reason left to them are inherently misogynistic.
Sheep gestate for ~21 weeks. This incubator only worked for 4 weeks. That's 20% of the gestation period. Sheep also develop far more in the womb than humans do. The human equivalent would be an mid-third trimester fetus; basically a month or two premature. Sounds far less impressive now, doesn't it. This is why you read the paper and not the press release.
10m of silicate ceramic; 30cm of iron. A hull, in that order from exterior to interior, is all you need to get radiation shielding comparable to what you get on Earth's surface. If you build a torus or cylinder more than ~1km in diameter, you can spin it for Earth-normal gravity, something you can't get on a planet. You could even make parts of the hull clear; just use 10m of fused quartz, 1m of either water or poly-carbonate, and 30cm of aluminum oxide instead. All the bulk materials could conceivably be mined on the Moon and launched into orbit electrically with mass drivers. You could power it with large solar arrays. If you use multiple levels inside, you get rather huge surface areas to populate. Just beware of colony drops.
No.
All space stations to date have been regularly resupplied from Earth. The ISS can only go six months without being resupplied before it has to be abandoned. Because of fun things like mass fraction, you can't send something the size of the ISS to Mars. Interestingly enough, you can send something much bigger. But there's no way in hell we'll build one. For one thing, it would technically be illegal to put nukes in space.
Every discussion on the internet about racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other form of bigotry is filled with posts denying the existence of said bigotry in the most bigoted fashion possible.
Yes, you White people are so put upon.
First, "Hindu" is a religion, not an ethnicity. The term you're looking for is either desi or South Asian. Second, you don't understand what the term "minority" means within a sociological context. It's not a measure of population; it's a measure of power. The opposite of a minority group isn't a majority group. The opposite of a minority group is a dominant group. Third, there is a well studied effect where men see a group that is 17% women as being half women. And groups that are 30% women as being majority women. I'm betting that's what was going on with you.
Trilobite! Trilobites! Betcha can't eat the heads!
Do what I do; be a community mod and help filter out the stupid. It takes a village to fight out the invading trolls.
If you're aware enough to preface your statement with "No troll intended" then you know your comment is offensive. If you post a comment you know is offensive, especially one that is only one line, you are trolling.
The average gasoline internal combustion engine is only 20% efficient. That is to say, only 20% of the energy present in the fuel-air mix at ignition is reclaimed as mechanical energy by the engine; the rest is lost as heat. A further 90% of the energy harnessed by the engine is used to keep the engine itself running; pumps, belts, fans, and transmissions all take energy to run. That means only 2% of the energy present in the gas tank makes it to spinning the wheels. And that's with the air off! So you can see, there's a lot of room for improvement. Turbo Diesel engines are half again as efficient than a gasoline engine of the same weight. If every gas engine were swapped for a Deisel engine, the US could stop oil imports from all other countries except Canada. And that's just going from 2% efficiency to ~3%. If you were to add gas turbines in the exhaust system to capture some of the waste heat, essentially making a multiple-expansion engine, you could easily tripple or quadruple current mileages. Combine such an engine system with and electric powertrain, like the Chevy Volt, and regenerative braking and you could have a 100MPG car within the decade. All using existant technology. So don't tell me a 54MPG fleet average is unattainable. If it was, the car makers themselves wouldn't have agreed to it.