Haha. That was almost exactly how the original "Adventure" game was implemented, in FORTRAN. And I saw many, many BASIC programs that worked the same way back then.
For the unenlightened, Adventure was the first of the 'cave' games that I know of (although "Hunt the Wumpus", written in Dartmouth BASIC and also running on many timesharing systems, might have had an independent birth). Output was to a text terminal, much like the original Star Trek game.
Adventure was written as one very large linear program with GOTOs that literally moved you from one 'room' to another, with a global data structure that maintained your state. Every room was just a code segment in the loop including all of the data about the room, with various GOTOs to take you elsewhere. There were no subroutines. A coworker of mine at the time spent a while reimplementing it to use subroutines for rooms and travel, and a simple database to define the rooms, which allowed a lot more flexibility to create new rooms etc. He got it working but I don't know if any instances of that version survived or propagated elsewhere.
Technically, having an elected board is a characteristic of most types of corporations. Generally the board is elected by a 'one share = one vote" election, although there are other arrangements, such as one class of shares having more votes - common in family-run corporations. In some countries (Germany for one), the unions and the local governments even have representatives on the board.
In recent decades there has been an unfortunate dearth of investors (largely institutions and funds these days) not actually using their voting power to significantly influence management, but that seems to be changing in the last few years. There are even funds that sell to 'green' or other single-issue investors, that vote according to their principals.
If you mean, "unelected by my local fellow citizens", then true. The number and scope of unintended consequences of doing that would be huge. In fact this French thing is actually a fairly good example by analogy.
Scientists have been doing stem cell (mostly plant stem cells, but also some mammalian etc.) growth experiments on the ISS for some years (IIRC six flights so far). Results are interesting. Among other things, perhaps the two most interesting results have been as follows.
In microgravity, cell growth is not limited to 2D. For example, that $250,000 hamburger was made by growing hundreds or thousands of one-cell-thick strips on petri dishes. In space, that is no longer the case. So stem cells can be grown one or two orders of magnitude faster, limited only by the need to get nutrients delivered to each cell and wastes removed.
Some mammalian cells that are very difficult or so far impossible to grow down here on Earth have been shown to grow pretty well up there in microgravity, including some human tissue types.
While some form of life on Earth has encountered and adapted to almost every other environmental condition (temperature, light, pH, etc.), so far as we know no living systems have ever had to deal with microgravity. So when grown in space, the cells basically 'freak out', not knowing what to do, and apparently try turning all of their genes to see what works. This seems to make them more amenable to influence by the environment, such as by adjusting temperature outside the norm for the species. Zero Gravity Solutions, a biotech company, is preparing further experiments on the ISS to explore this and related questions. (disclosure: I have a small investment in ZeroGSI.)
Strong. Cosmic rays are just very high speed particles of different types, masses and speeds. Some come from extragalactic sources but the majority come from new stars and novas in the local vicinity. This data actually matches observations by Henrik Svensmark some years ago. He also observed correlation with the solar system's position relative to the galactic plane. The solar system moves up and down through the plane. Times when we are closer to lots of stars such as when we are in an arm or in the plane, correlates strongly with ice ages.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. - - The first shipment of inventory from Building 3019 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory arrived at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site (NNSS) on December 22, marking the beginning of the end for the 50-year old Uranium-233 national storage facility....[snip]... The U-233 Disposition Project is responsible for preparing 450 kilograms of fissile material stored in approximately 1,100 canisters for disposition. The transfer of the ZPR plates, and a future direct disposition campaign of a second inventory component, constitutes the first phase of the disposition program, which addresses approximately half of the inventory. A Phase 2 analysis is being finalized, and will set a path forward for eliminating the remaining inventory from Building 3019.
Also google "destroy U-233" you'll see dozens of articles at various thorium promotion sites, mostly from 2010. Again, this is not my area of expertise but it does indeed appear to be the case. My first response is to think this is the result of persuasion by the 'old' nuke industry (and/or maybe the old guard in the US nuke agencies, who were trained during the period when MSR reactors were on the verboten list - the politics in 1970 were pretty extreme), whose entire business model is based on fabrication of expensive fuel rods. If MSR reactors go into production, Westinghouse and a couple of other biggies will lose a huge revenue stream.
I just read that the US is planning to spend 1/2 $billion to 'destroy' a few thousand tons of U-233 that were preserved for just exactly this use - in MSR reactors, to trigger the Thorium reaction. It's valued at $4600 per lb., and loss of this material will put any hopes for MSR development back many years and dollars. (From my most recent reading, once an MSR is running, the Thorium is converted (by neutron impact?) to U-233 which then fissions, so it 'breeds' its own fuel. But it needs U-233 or something equivalent to get it started. This is not my area of expertise...)
I do recall someone is working on a different trigger using a proton accelerator or something - they want to put a small MSR in automobiles. But I have no clue if that is feasible.
I did also find that NASA launched more than one fission reactor - the one called SAFE is most interesting. It is still floating around in a 3000 year orbit. It apparently lost some parts a long time ago, possibly due to a collision with something.
As for payload, I stand corrected. though at one time we could do almost that with Saturn V (ah, the good old days). From my reading since your reply, I see the Delta IV heavy is rated at almost 23,000 kg to LEO (and only about 9300 kg to lunar or escape velocity). The Apollo Command Module, lifted on a Saturn, was 33 tons by itself, and Saturn shipped the entire Apollo system to the Moon. It sez here on Wikipedia that Saturn's launch capacity to LEO was 260,000 lbs., 130 tons or 120,000 kg). So apparently the old Saturn V is still the big boy on the block. I think I got the 150 ton figure when I was out at SpaceTech Expo and they were talking about future launch systems. The Falcon Heavy, which has not launched yet, is projected to lift 53,000 kg or 120,000 lb to LEO.
For perspective on all this, it's interesting to consider that over-the-road trucks often have a GVW of over 50,000 lbs., a typical limit (set by the railroad) on gross weight of a single rail car is over 250,000 lbs, and the Costa Concordia - a large but not the hugest ocean liner, weighs over 100,000 tons - building a ship in space of that mass would take on the order of 2000 flights of the Falcon Heavy.
Consider it costs from $2000 (Falcon 9) to $30,000 (Pegasus) per lb. to launch a payload from Earth. And the present maximum launch capability is, IIRC, about 150 tons. Anything bigger has to be launched in pieces. For probes going anywhere besides Earth orbit, that 150 tons has to include the additional rocket stage to push the probe out of the Earth's gravitational influence. So the probe itself is likely to be under 1/2 ton. Now, make a reactor that fits.
Having said that, I've been casually wondering if a small MSR (Thorium) reactor could be used. It provides both heat and power, and its characteristics make it plausible that an under-10-ton reactor could be made. Such a reactor could provide the heat for propulsion of the probe, plus lots of electricity, and it can be turned on and off at will, or throttled. So this might work in a large vehicle. Of course nobody has even started on the engineering required to make a liquid reactor work in microgravity (no convection, no heat conduction to dump waste heat).
Saying that someone "tested positive" is far too strong for such a test.
This is true especially for cases where the 'true positives' are a very small percentage of the total population. For example, if the test has a 5% false positive rate, and 1% of the population is actually positive, then for every true positive there will.05*.99 = 4.95 false positives. IOW, if you test positive you are still just slightly more than 20% likely to be true positive.
This is a well know problem in medical testing and drug testing (though it's often forgotten in the drug testing business). There is a name for this rule but I forget what it is. Here's a better explanation (Bayes' FTW).
Suppose that you are worried that you might have a rare disease. You decide to get tested, and suppose that the testing methods for this disease are accurate 99 percent of the time (regardless of whether the results come back positive or negative). Suppose this disease is actually quite rare, occurring randomly in the general population in only one of every 10,000 people.
If your test results come back positive, what are your chances that you actually have the disease?
Do you think it is approximately: (a).99, (b).90, (c).10, or (d).01?
Surprisingly, the answer is (d), less than 1 percent chance that you have the disease!
IIRC the energy equation for corn is about 1.1:1 - you get 1.1 ergs out for every 1 erg you put in. Traditional oil is about 18:1, more recently down around 12:1, shale oil is about 5:1. Sugar cane is about 5:1 (see the chart here: Energy_returned_on_energy_invested). Interestingly coal is about 80:1, the second best after hydro and better than nuclear.
I do have some dealings with an interesting company, Zero Gravity Solutions, Inc. (ZGSI). If their plan works, then we may have another biofuel candidate that can be grown in places where food crops don't grow, like West Texas where it's too dry so it won't take away from the food sources, and has an energy equation more on the order of 5:1 or 10:1.
Back in 2007 I drove across the US for a new job, and was amazed at how much corn I saw - miles, and miles, and miles of corn from (IIRC eastern Wyoming all the way through even northern New York state. So I did a little research. For background, all of New England is about 70,000 miles^2 (180,000 km^2). Oregon is about 100,000 miles^2, Texas is 268,000 miles^2 and Germany is about 137,000 miles^2.
In 2007, the US grew 150,000 miles^2 of corn - more than twice the area of New England, and IIRC about 100,000 miles^2 of soybeans. In other words, the state of Corn is the fourth largest state, after Alaska, Texas, and California and bigger than Montana, New Mexico and Arizona. It's also larger than the smallest 11 states combined.
The present Exchange vendor is Apptix (or the parent of, or the parent of that - there's been a lot of changes in this market), which is supposedly one of the largest out there and _should_ know what they are doing. right now I think that the largest limit we have set on most of our accounts is 2GB. Thunderbird has been much less of a problem than Outlook.
We can't reject megabyte emails - that's part of what we do within the company, and with clients. There are a _lot_ of zipped spreadsheets and other such docs. The fact is that email is a convenient way to distribute content to the desired recipients, relatively quickly and securely.
Most of your response is about how to tweak Exchange so it doesn't suck quite as badly. This is a digression - Exchange should not have to be coddled. Since Exchange is, first and foremost, an email server, it's reasonable IMHO for it to take any amount and size of email that meets the relevant RFCs without _any_ issues, subject of course to policies like mailbox size (in which case it should still queue the mail for a while, and inform the user that they need to do something before they can receive it. In this day and age of sending videos and large documents (perhaps a million row spreadsheet, sent by a client), there's no reason for the mail server to have these issues.
I might note that, if it weren't for the fact that the folks in Sales are addicted to their Outlook features, the entire rest of the company would be delighted to be rid of both Outlook and Exchange.
I will add that, 10 years ago, the Global 1000 company I worked for then banned Outlook from the company after they spent $5 million in one year dealing with viruses and other stuff related to Outlook. Since then they've run the entire 60,000 person company (and several Fortune 500 companies who use their global network facilities) on IMAP and LDAP. But that's a different, though somewhat related, story.
As I mentioned, with anything short of what we would consider 'millionaire' class wealth, they could not buy or fix up the dwellings, nor could they move to a 'nice' neighborhood. The houses were not available. In some places there was a de facto inability to even record the deed for a house as yours if you were not 'white' - the lawyers wouldn't do the paperwork, the clerk would not enter it into the register. It was not a matter of money.
This can happen even if you're not a minority. Back in my early days I lived in the third floor of an old rundown house - the landlord refused to fix the leaky roof or bad plumbing, because if he did his property taxes would go up. He owned several houses in a row. He tore them all down to put in a new business office a few years later, he was just waiting for the right time and collecting free money in the meantime.
For some ideas about the roots of this social insanity, I suggest reading "Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940" (Grace Elizabeth Hale). The book is a bit controversial, but I felt the primary idea made sense. When the South lost the Civil War, this violated the heroic culture of honor that permeated the South's psyche. So in order to preserve some semblance of self-respect, a demon had to be found, which was the Negro (and what was really the beginnings of the Northern corporate state).
So the Southern view of blacks/negroes and of History changed after the war. For 60+ years the South was stuck in a kind of psychological fugue state, adopting a fantasy about the "Old South" where everything was perfect and everyone, blacks and whites, loved each other and their proper roles. Because at that time the South constituted about 1/2 of the Nation, the national political scene had to accommodate this Southern insanity. Part of this insanity involved a belief that blacks were less capable. It's instructive to discover that the lynchings and other violence was most often perpetrated on 'uppity blacks' who managed, despite the disadvantages, to develop a middle class income and lifestyle, because the appearance of a successful black person violated the sacred belief system and proved them wrong. Being wealthy was accepted in some places and not others - there are many cases of rich blacks being accepted in one town, but getting off the train in another town and being beaten and/or lynched. (It's worth noting that the railroads resisted segregated facilities for a long time, because it was more expensive.) The idea of the book is that these blacks were violating the most sacred Southern belief of all, which was that blacks could not succeed without whites to guide and help them. (This is my take on the book, which I read about six years ago, so if it's not a good reflection of the book, it's my fault.)
I DK if it's still true, but a while back Warren Buffett drove a 10 year old Oldsmobile, driving himself to and from work every day. Of course he also uses corporate jets quite regularly, so it's apparently a matter of cost/benefit and practicality.
Long ago, folks who lived in 'black' neighborhoods were redlined - it was pretty much impossible to buy a house in those areas because the banks wouldn't lend the money, even if you were a doctor or lawyer; and often the entire neighborhood was owned by a single landlord who wasn't selling anyway. It was commonly also impossible to buy a house outside the neighborhood because the realtors wouldn't show them to you, or would say "sorry, it's already sold", or (again) the banks wouldn't loan the money. (I observed a recent incident of this type in my own town, so it's not completely gone even today. Racist idiots are less common but still around.)
So it got to be a thing back in the 1950s or 1960s for blacks to buy big fancy cars, as that was the only big-ticket outlet for their desire to move up to a nicer lifestyle. So big fancy cars got to be a tradition back then. As a result it was relatively common to see a brand new Cadillac sitting outside a run-down slum apartment. (an interesting subtext - the Detroit automakers were pretty good at hiring minorities as well & brought many blacks into the middle class, so buying a Cadillac was helping 'brothers' out.)... or so I'm told. Traditions die hard, and slowly. So for lots of folks today, having a nice car is more meaningful than having a nice house. And it's their choice, don't knock it - different strokes, so to speak.
I haven't sat in a Tesla, but apparently it's a nicer, arguably cooler, and now apparently safer car than a 320i. BMWs also have a pretty atrocious cost of maintenance & repair by all accounts (Google is your friend). Of course, a BMW or Mercedes doesn't pencil out vs. a Camry on cost either - will a $60,000 BMW or Mercedes drive down I95 (legally) twice as fast as a Camry? Will it get twice the mileage? Nope. No high-end car pencils out on cost. However the driver's side automatic ball scratcher is probably worth quite a bit to some folks.
Just require that all of the wiring be made of conductive thermite. Then, if a wire gets too hot, WHOOSH!! Perfectly adequate fireball, with the added bonus of being impossible to extinguish. Magnesium wiring would do, but it's possible to put a magnesium fire out. One might also make the body out of rocket fuel.
Gee, I wonder if that's the problem with the three different Exchange providers we've had over the last few years. They're all apparently incompetent. It's a rare month when the Exchange systems are down or failing partially or completely at least for a few hours.
And the note about inboxes - in our business we deal with a LOT of email that is several megabytes per message. It's part of what we, and our clients do. Back in the day when I ran a bog-standard unix-based mail system that was not a problem, heck I had over 10,000 emails in my personal email back in the late 1980s, and a lot of that was NeXTMail, which could easily be several megabytes. I never, once, had a problem with the mail system. Why should a 20GB inbox be an issue now? It's been 20+ years, you'd think Microsoft would have figured out how to write code by now. (I'll accept that a 20GB remote inbox might have indexing & searching lags, if there isn't a fulltext index at the other end, but that's a different issue.)
About half of the folks in my group use Thunderbird with the Exchange server, and the crashes and other problems hit randomly - sometimes it's 1/2 Outlook and 1/2 Thunderbird users whose mail is not working because the remote server is having a bad hair day. I'll also note that my GMail account probably has 30,000 emails in it right now.
Having lived in a number of states in the US (and never been to Europe, but...), I'd say that the differences between states in the US is rather more than the media or most people are aware of. It's unfortunate in my mind that there has been this extreme desire on the part of the Establishment to 'unify' everything in the US. That was never the intent of those who formed the nation, and there's really no good reason for it. Texas is culturally far from Massachusetts, and California is at least two, probably three separate nations within itself. I find that folks in Mass where I now live are barely aware of towns 30 miles away, much less of the cultural divide between Massachusetts and Oregon (itself divided between urban and rural populations.)
Just as a set of cases in point - many commercial laws have been 'unified' across all states, often by means of abuse of the Commerce clause. As often as not, this unification, while appearing to be, and promoted by the media to be, in the public interest, are actually in the service of a large national or international conglomerate. The ethanol-in-fuel law is probably the best recent example - the law was lobbied into existence by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill to sell more corn products, but was promoted falsely as an ecological measure. As a result, food prices worldwide are higher than before, and the US has diverted ever more crop land to growing corn, which is a huge water and fertilizer sink. And the ethanol has deleterious effects on fuel systems, requiring different fuel lines for example. (It's also seriously bad for boats, where the ethanol can dissolve fiberglass fuel tanks as well as hoses.)
I have not RTFA, but I think the actual speed in the proposal is 800 MPH. The 4000 MPH figure came from some earlier docs? I'll read TFA eventually!:D My mention of perishable cargo was in mind of things like lobsters, fresh fish and flowers, which are presently all shipped via air freight. I was thinking that shipping these via hyperloop might be cheaper, as well as faster - to destinations on the route of course!
One thing folks may not realize is that modern airports are very big - IIRC DFW takes as much total space as a four-lane freeway from Dallas to New York. The advantage is that the cost and benefit of taking that land is almost entirely 'local' - the region that dedicates the land also receives the benefit. Although a specific suburban locality may not be all that thrilled about jumbo jets flying over, at least they get an economic boost from the new gas stations, hotels, etc. Building a highway or rail system is more complicated as it crosses so many jurisdictions and the benefits are not nearly so obvious to the localities in between. If the system is entirely on pylons, that makes it easier - they could use not only highway and rail rights of way but perhaps power line rights of way. Eminent domain will be critical to the process in any case.
Also, if my rough calculations are correct, at 1G acceleration it will take 42 km to accelerate to 1287 km/h (800 MPH), so it would be rather pointless to have too many stops on the way. Having not RTFA, I don't know if there is any kind of 'track switching' system to allow local and express scheduling, for instance.
Possibly. Those cities became what they were/are because of the original freeways, which were both a blessing and a curse. It was the cities themselves, not the property owners within them, that lined up to sue. Amtrak did not have the eminent domain power but the State of California does. So once the 10-20 years of environmental challenges finally waddle through the courts, the present $5 billion state plan _might_ actually get started.
One thing that has changed is materials - a lot of things are possible now, that were not then. Also, back then the economics weren't there. Folks just weren't used to the idea of being in another city in a few hours. Now we want to go to the other side of the planet for lunch, and be back in time for dinner.
This is pretty much not the way Musk operates. SpaceX developed and built almost every part of their rockets, because the existing vendors were too expensive and too slow. And their launch prices are listed on their website - no cost-plus BS. If you plunk down your $180 million or so, SpaceX will build it and launch it. Musk likes efficiency and economic solutions to tough problems.
Flori-duh is special. Like the special Olympics. I would have 'trimmed it for safety' rather aggressively. Gotten rid of the 'live' issue, then dealt with what was left.
... and gone to jail or paid a find comparable to the cost of your car. In many parts of Oregon, many cities in California, and (IDK about Florida). Probably other places as well. I think the parent noted how long it took even with the safety issue. Having said that, at a small town on the Oregon Coast, when we found that a tree *mostly* on city property was dangerous, we told the city about it and they actually came and took it down within about two years.
For some high-value perishable cargo, maybe. That speed just isn't necessary for much cargo. It might put a dent in FedEx and UPS Blue. Fresh fish maybe?
We missed the opportunity to fix this back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the railroads were pretty much all bankrupt. The fix would have been to buy the mainline trackage (everything except the maintenance yards) from the railroads and give them a 20 year free ride to help pay for the deal; then run the railroads as part of the National Highway System. Then the railroads could have become the customers rather than the vendors, and the government, which generally does infrastructure pretty well, could have made the rails a viable solution while the railroad companies, which could then compete on an equal basis, could do the business things, which they do pretty well. And new companies could enter the market to provide passenger train service on an entrpreneurial basis.
Alas, instead we had a huge bailout of railroad companies, and the creation of the bastard stepchild Amtrak, which was designed and intended to fail, but has continued to survive despite the best efforts of the government and the railroads to kill it.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha. That was almost exactly how the original "Adventure" game was implemented, in FORTRAN. And I saw many, many BASIC programs that worked the same way back then.
For the unenlightened, Adventure was the first of the 'cave' games that I know of (although "Hunt the Wumpus", written in Dartmouth BASIC and also running on many timesharing systems, might have had an independent birth). Output was to a text terminal, much like the original Star Trek game.
Adventure was written as one very large linear program with GOTOs that literally moved you from one 'room' to another, with a global data structure that maintained your state. Every room was just a code segment in the loop including all of the data about the room, with various GOTOs to take you elsewhere. There were no subroutines. A coworker of mine at the time spent a while reimplementing it to use subroutines for rooms and travel, and a simple database to define the rooms, which allowed a lot more flexibility to create new rooms etc. He got it working but I don't know if any instances of that version survived or propagated elsewhere.
unelected boards of corporations
Technically, having an elected board is a characteristic of most types of corporations. Generally the board is elected by a 'one share = one vote" election, although there are other arrangements, such as one class of shares having more votes - common in family-run corporations. In some countries (Germany for one), the unions and the local governments even have representatives on the board.
In recent decades there has been an unfortunate dearth of investors (largely institutions and funds these days) not actually using their voting power to significantly influence management, but that seems to be changing in the last few years. There are even funds that sell to 'green' or other single-issue investors, that vote according to their principals.
If you mean, "unelected by my local fellow citizens", then true. The number and scope of unintended consequences of doing that would be huge. In fact this French thing is actually a fairly good example by analogy.
Scientists have been doing stem cell (mostly plant stem cells, but also some mammalian etc.) growth experiments on the ISS for some years (IIRC six flights so far). Results are interesting. Among other things, perhaps the two most interesting results have been as follows.
In microgravity, cell growth is not limited to 2D. For example, that $250,000 hamburger was made by growing hundreds or thousands of one-cell-thick strips on petri dishes. In space, that is no longer the case. So stem cells can be grown one or two orders of magnitude faster, limited only by the need to get nutrients delivered to each cell and wastes removed.
Some mammalian cells that are very difficult or so far impossible to grow down here on Earth have been shown to grow pretty well up there in microgravity, including some human tissue types.
While some form of life on Earth has encountered and adapted to almost every other environmental condition (temperature, light, pH, etc.), so far as we know no living systems have ever had to deal with microgravity. So when grown in space, the cells basically 'freak out', not knowing what to do, and apparently try turning all of their genes to see what works. This seems to make them more amenable to influence by the environment, such as by adjusting temperature outside the norm for the species. Zero Gravity Solutions, a biotech company, is preparing further experiments on the ISS to explore this and related questions. (disclosure: I have a small investment in ZeroGSI.)
Strong. Cosmic rays are just very high speed particles of different types, masses and speeds. Some come from extragalactic sources but the majority come from new stars and novas in the local vicinity. This data actually matches observations by Henrik Svensmark some years ago. He also observed correlation with the solar system's position relative to the galactic plane. The solar system moves up and down through the plane. Times when we are closer to lots of stars such as when we are in an arm or in the plane, correlates strongly with ice ages.
I should say, my recollection may be incorrect on the amount - I don't know where I got the 'few thousand tons' number either. :P
Uranium-233 Inventory in Oak Ridge Lightened with First Shipment of Material from Building 3019 - press release from DOE, 2012-01-05.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. - - The first shipment of inventory from Building 3019 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory arrived at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site (NNSS) on December 22, marking the beginning of the end for the 50-year old Uranium-233 national storage facility. ...[snip]...
The U-233 Disposition Project is responsible for preparing 450 kilograms of fissile material stored in approximately 1,100 canisters for disposition. The transfer of the ZPR plates, and a future direct disposition campaign of a second inventory component, constitutes the first phase of the disposition program, which addresses approximately half of the inventory. A Phase 2 analysis is being finalized, and will set a path forward for eliminating the remaining inventory from Building 3019.
Also google "destroy U-233" you'll see dozens of articles at various thorium promotion sites, mostly from 2010. Again, this is not my area of expertise but it does indeed appear to be the case. My first response is to think this is the result of persuasion by the 'old' nuke industry (and/or maybe the old guard in the US nuke agencies, who were trained during the period when MSR reactors were on the verboten list - the politics in 1970 were pretty extreme), whose entire business model is based on fabrication of expensive fuel rods. If MSR reactors go into production, Westinghouse and a couple of other biggies will lose a huge revenue stream.
I just read that the US is planning to spend 1/2 $billion to 'destroy' a few thousand tons of U-233 that were preserved for just exactly this use - in MSR reactors, to trigger the Thorium reaction. It's valued at $4600 per lb., and loss of this material will put any hopes for MSR development back many years and dollars. (From my most recent reading, once an MSR is running, the Thorium is converted (by neutron impact?) to U-233 which then fissions, so it 'breeds' its own fuel. But it needs U-233 or something equivalent to get it started. This is not my area of expertise...)
I do recall someone is working on a different trigger using a proton accelerator or something - they want to put a small MSR in automobiles. But I have no clue if that is feasible.
I did also find that NASA launched more than one fission reactor - the one called SAFE is most interesting. It is still floating around in a 3000 year orbit. It apparently lost some parts a long time ago, possibly due to a collision with something.
As for payload, I stand corrected. though at one time we could do almost that with Saturn V (ah, the good old days). From my reading since your reply, I see the Delta IV heavy is rated at almost 23,000 kg to LEO (and only about 9300 kg to lunar or escape velocity). The Apollo Command Module, lifted on a Saturn, was 33 tons by itself, and Saturn shipped the entire Apollo system to the Moon. It sez here on Wikipedia that Saturn's launch capacity to LEO was 260,000 lbs., 130 tons or 120,000 kg). So apparently the old Saturn V is still the big boy on the block. I think I got the 150 ton figure when I was out at SpaceTech Expo and they were talking about future launch systems. The Falcon Heavy, which has not launched yet, is projected to lift 53,000 kg or 120,000 lb to LEO.
For perspective on all this, it's interesting to consider that over-the-road trucks often have a GVW of over 50,000 lbs., a typical limit (set by the railroad) on gross weight of a single rail car is over 250,000 lbs, and the Costa Concordia - a large but not the hugest ocean liner, weighs over 100,000 tons - building a ship in space of that mass would take on the order of 2000 flights of the Falcon Heavy.
Consider it costs from $2000 (Falcon 9) to $30,000 (Pegasus) per lb. to launch a payload from Earth. And the present maximum launch capability is, IIRC, about 150 tons. Anything bigger has to be launched in pieces. For probes going anywhere besides Earth orbit, that 150 tons has to include the additional rocket stage to push the probe out of the Earth's gravitational influence. So the probe itself is likely to be under 1/2 ton. Now, make a reactor that fits.
Having said that, I've been casually wondering if a small MSR (Thorium) reactor could be used. It provides both heat and power, and its characteristics make it plausible that an under-10-ton reactor could be made. Such a reactor could provide the heat for propulsion of the probe, plus lots of electricity, and it can be turned on and off at will, or throttled. So this might work in a large vehicle. Of course nobody has even started on the engineering required to make a liquid reactor work in microgravity (no convection, no heat conduction to dump waste heat).
Saying that someone "tested positive" is far too strong for such a test.
This is true especially for cases where the 'true positives' are a very small percentage of the total population. For example, if the test has a 5% false positive rate, and 1% of the population is actually positive, then for every true positive there will .05*.99 = 4.95 false positives. IOW, if you test positive you are still just slightly more than 20% likely to be true positive.
This is a well know problem in medical testing and drug testing (though it's often forgotten in the drug testing business). There is a name for this rule but I forget what it is. Here's a better explanation (Bayes' FTW).
Suppose that you are worried that you might have a rare disease. You decide to get tested, and suppose that the testing methods for this disease are accurate 99 percent of the time (regardless of whether the results come back positive or negative). Suppose this disease is actually quite rare, occurring randomly in the general population in only one of every 10,000 people.
If your test results come back positive, what are your chances that you actually have the disease?
Do you think it is approximately: (a) .99, (b) .90, (c) .10, or (d) .01?
Surprisingly, the answer is (d), less than 1 percent chance that you have the disease!
IIRC the energy equation for corn is about 1.1:1 - you get 1.1 ergs out for every 1 erg you put in. Traditional oil is about 18:1, more recently down around 12:1, shale oil is about 5:1. Sugar cane is about 5:1 (see the chart here: Energy_returned_on_energy_invested). Interestingly coal is about 80:1, the second best after hydro and better than nuclear.
I do have some dealings with an interesting company, Zero Gravity Solutions, Inc. (ZGSI). If their plan works, then we may have another biofuel candidate that can be grown in places where food crops don't grow, like West Texas where it's too dry so it won't take away from the food sources, and has an energy equation more on the order of 5:1 or 10:1.
Back in 2007 I drove across the US for a new job, and was amazed at how much corn I saw - miles, and miles, and miles of corn from (IIRC eastern Wyoming all the way through even northern New York state. So I did a little research. For background, all of New England is about 70,000 miles^2 (180,000 km^2). Oregon is about 100,000 miles^2, Texas is 268,000 miles^2 and Germany is about 137,000 miles^2.
In 2007, the US grew 150,000 miles^2 of corn - more than twice the area of New England, and IIRC about 100,000 miles^2 of soybeans. In other words, the state of Corn is the fourth largest state, after Alaska, Texas, and California and bigger than Montana, New Mexico and Arizona. It's also larger than the smallest 11 states combined.
The present Exchange vendor is Apptix (or the parent of, or the parent of that - there's been a lot of changes in this market), which is supposedly one of the largest out there and _should_ know what they are doing. right now I think that the largest limit we have set on most of our accounts is 2GB. Thunderbird has been much less of a problem than Outlook.
We can't reject megabyte emails - that's part of what we do within the company, and with clients. There are a _lot_ of zipped spreadsheets and other such docs. The fact is that email is a convenient way to distribute content to the desired recipients, relatively quickly and securely.
Most of your response is about how to tweak Exchange so it doesn't suck quite as badly. This is a digression - Exchange should not have to be coddled. Since Exchange is, first and foremost, an email server, it's reasonable IMHO for it to take any amount and size of email that meets the relevant RFCs without _any_ issues, subject of course to policies like mailbox size (in which case it should still queue the mail for a while, and inform the user that they need to do something before they can receive it. In this day and age of sending videos and large documents (perhaps a million row spreadsheet, sent by a client), there's no reason for the mail server to have these issues.
I might note that, if it weren't for the fact that the folks in Sales are addicted to their Outlook features, the entire rest of the company would be delighted to be rid of both Outlook and Exchange.
I will add that, 10 years ago, the Global 1000 company I worked for then banned Outlook from the company after they spent $5 million in one year dealing with viruses and other stuff related to Outlook. Since then they've run the entire 60,000 person company (and several Fortune 500 companies who use their global network facilities) on IMAP and LDAP. But that's a different, though somewhat related, story.
As I mentioned, with anything short of what we would consider 'millionaire' class wealth, they could not buy or fix up the dwellings, nor could they move to a 'nice' neighborhood. The houses were not available. In some places there was a de facto inability to even record the deed for a house as yours if you were not 'white' - the lawyers wouldn't do the paperwork, the clerk would not enter it into the register. It was not a matter of money.
This can happen even if you're not a minority. Back in my early days I lived in the third floor of an old rundown house - the landlord refused to fix the leaky roof or bad plumbing, because if he did his property taxes would go up. He owned several houses in a row. He tore them all down to put in a new business office a few years later, he was just waiting for the right time and collecting free money in the meantime.
For some ideas about the roots of this social insanity, I suggest reading "Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940" (Grace Elizabeth Hale). The book is a bit controversial, but I felt the primary idea made sense. When the South lost the Civil War, this violated the heroic culture of honor that permeated the South's psyche. So in order to preserve some semblance of self-respect, a demon had to be found, which was the Negro (and what was really the beginnings of the Northern corporate state).
So the Southern view of blacks/negroes and of History changed after the war. For 60+ years the South was stuck in a kind of psychological fugue state, adopting a fantasy about the "Old South" where everything was perfect and everyone, blacks and whites, loved each other and their proper roles. Because at that time the South constituted about 1/2 of the Nation, the national political scene had to accommodate this Southern insanity. Part of this insanity involved a belief that blacks were less capable. It's instructive to discover that the lynchings and other violence was most often perpetrated on 'uppity blacks' who managed, despite the disadvantages, to develop a middle class income and lifestyle, because the appearance of a successful black person violated the sacred belief system and proved them wrong. Being wealthy was accepted in some places and not others - there are many cases of rich blacks being accepted in one town, but getting off the train in another town and being beaten and/or lynched. (It's worth noting that the railroads resisted segregated facilities for a long time, because it was more expensive.) The idea of the book is that these blacks were violating the most sacred Southern belief of all, which was that blacks could not succeed without whites to guide and help them. (This is my take on the book, which I read about six years ago, so if it's not a good reflection of the book, it's my fault.)
I DK if it's still true, but a while back Warren Buffett drove a 10 year old Oldsmobile, driving himself to and from work every day. Of course he also uses corporate jets quite regularly, so it's apparently a matter of cost/benefit and practicality.
Long ago, folks who lived in 'black' neighborhoods were redlined - it was pretty much impossible to buy a house in those areas because the banks wouldn't lend the money, even if you were a doctor or lawyer; and often the entire neighborhood was owned by a single landlord who wasn't selling anyway. It was commonly also impossible to buy a house outside the neighborhood because the realtors wouldn't show them to you, or would say "sorry, it's already sold", or (again) the banks wouldn't loan the money. (I observed a recent incident of this type in my own town, so it's not completely gone even today. Racist idiots are less common but still around.)
So it got to be a thing back in the 1950s or 1960s for blacks to buy big fancy cars, as that was the only big-ticket outlet for their desire to move up to a nicer lifestyle. So big fancy cars got to be a tradition back then. As a result it was relatively common to see a brand new Cadillac sitting outside a run-down slum apartment. (an interesting subtext - the Detroit automakers were pretty good at hiring minorities as well & brought many blacks into the middle class, so buying a Cadillac was helping 'brothers' out.) ... or so I'm told. Traditions die hard, and slowly. So for lots of folks today, having a nice car is more meaningful than having a nice house. And it's their choice, don't knock it - different strokes, so to speak.
I haven't sat in a Tesla, but apparently it's a nicer, arguably cooler, and now apparently safer car than a 320i. BMWs also have a pretty atrocious cost of maintenance & repair by all accounts (Google is your friend). Of course, a BMW or Mercedes doesn't pencil out vs. a Camry on cost either - will a $60,000 BMW or Mercedes drive down I95 (legally) twice as fast as a Camry? Will it get twice the mileage? Nope. No high-end car pencils out on cost. However the driver's side automatic ball scratcher is probably worth quite a bit to some folks.
Just require that all of the wiring be made of conductive thermite. Then, if a wire gets too hot, WHOOSH!! Perfectly adequate fireball, with the added bonus of being impossible to extinguish. Magnesium wiring would do, but it's possible to put a magnesium fire out. One might also make the body out of rocket fuel.
Gee, I wonder if that's the problem with the three different Exchange providers we've had over the last few years. They're all apparently incompetent. It's a rare month when the Exchange systems are down or failing partially or completely at least for a few hours.
And the note about inboxes - in our business we deal with a LOT of email that is several megabytes per message. It's part of what we, and our clients do. Back in the day when I ran a bog-standard unix-based mail system that was not a problem, heck I had over 10,000 emails in my personal email back in the late 1980s, and a lot of that was NeXTMail, which could easily be several megabytes. I never, once, had a problem with the mail system. Why should a 20GB inbox be an issue now? It's been 20+ years, you'd think Microsoft would have figured out how to write code by now. (I'll accept that a 20GB remote inbox might have indexing & searching lags, if there isn't a fulltext index at the other end, but that's a different issue.)
About half of the folks in my group use Thunderbird with the Exchange server, and the crashes and other problems hit randomly - sometimes it's 1/2 Outlook and 1/2 Thunderbird users whose mail is not working because the remote server is having a bad hair day. I'll also note that my GMail account probably has 30,000 emails in it right now.
Having lived in a number of states in the US (and never been to Europe, but ...), I'd say that the differences between states in the US is rather more than the media or most people are aware of. It's unfortunate in my mind that there has been this extreme desire on the part of the Establishment to 'unify' everything in the US. That was never the intent of those who formed the nation, and there's really no good reason for it. Texas is culturally far from Massachusetts, and California is at least two, probably three separate nations within itself. I find that folks in Mass where I now live are barely aware of towns 30 miles away, much less of the cultural divide between Massachusetts and Oregon (itself divided between urban and rural populations.)
Just as a set of cases in point - many commercial laws have been 'unified' across all states, often by means of abuse of the Commerce clause. As often as not, this unification, while appearing to be, and promoted by the media to be, in the public interest, are actually in the service of a large national or international conglomerate. The ethanol-in-fuel law is probably the best recent example - the law was lobbied into existence by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill to sell more corn products, but was promoted falsely as an ecological measure. As a result, food prices worldwide are higher than before, and the US has diverted ever more crop land to growing corn, which is a huge water and fertilizer sink. And the ethanol has deleterious effects on fuel systems, requiring different fuel lines for example. (It's also seriously bad for boats, where the ethanol can dissolve fiberglass fuel tanks as well as hoses.)
I have not RTFA, but I think the actual speed in the proposal is 800 MPH. The 4000 MPH figure came from some earlier docs? I'll read TFA eventually! :D My mention of perishable cargo was in mind of things like lobsters, fresh fish and flowers, which are presently all shipped via air freight. I was thinking that shipping these via hyperloop might be cheaper, as well as faster - to destinations on the route of course!
One thing folks may not realize is that modern airports are very big - IIRC DFW takes as much total space as a four-lane freeway from Dallas to New York. The advantage is that the cost and benefit of taking that land is almost entirely 'local' - the region that dedicates the land also receives the benefit. Although a specific suburban locality may not be all that thrilled about jumbo jets flying over, at least they get an economic boost from the new gas stations, hotels, etc. Building a highway or rail system is more complicated as it crosses so many jurisdictions and the benefits are not nearly so obvious to the localities in between. If the system is entirely on pylons, that makes it easier - they could use not only highway and rail rights of way but perhaps power line rights of way. Eminent domain will be critical to the process in any case.
Also, if my rough calculations are correct, at 1G acceleration it will take 42 km to accelerate to 1287 km/h (800 MPH), so it would be rather pointless to have too many stops on the way. Having not RTFA, I don't know if there is any kind of 'track switching' system to allow local and express scheduling, for instance.
Possibly. Those cities became what they were/are because of the original freeways, which were both a blessing and a curse. It was the cities themselves, not the property owners within them, that lined up to sue. Amtrak did not have the eminent domain power but the State of California does. So once the 10-20 years of environmental challenges finally waddle through the courts, the present $5 billion state plan _might_ actually get started.
One thing that has changed is materials - a lot of things are possible now, that were not then. Also, back then the economics weren't there. Folks just weren't used to the idea of being in another city in a few hours. Now we want to go to the other side of the planet for lunch, and be back in time for dinner.
This is pretty much not the way Musk operates. SpaceX developed and built almost every part of their rockets, because the existing vendors were too expensive and too slow. And their launch prices are listed on their website - no cost-plus BS. If you plunk down your $180 million or so, SpaceX will build it and launch it. Musk likes efficiency and economic solutions to tough problems.
Flori-duh is special. Like the special Olympics. I would have 'trimmed it for safety' rather aggressively. Gotten rid of the 'live' issue, then dealt with what was left.
... and gone to jail or paid a find comparable to the cost of your car. In many parts of Oregon, many cities in California, and (IDK about Florida). Probably other places as well. I think the parent noted how long it took even with the safety issue. Having said that, at a small town on the Oregon Coast, when we found that a tree *mostly* on city property was dangerous, we told the city about it and they actually came and took it down within about two years.
For some high-value perishable cargo, maybe. That speed just isn't necessary for much cargo. It might put a dent in FedEx and UPS Blue. Fresh fish maybe?
We missed the opportunity to fix this back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the railroads were pretty much all bankrupt. The fix would have been to buy the mainline trackage (everything except the maintenance yards) from the railroads and give them a 20 year free ride to help pay for the deal; then run the railroads as part of the National Highway System. Then the railroads could have become the customers rather than the vendors, and the government, which generally does infrastructure pretty well, could have made the rails a viable solution while the railroad companies, which could then compete on an equal basis, could do the business things, which they do pretty well. And new companies could enter the market to provide passenger train service on an entrpreneurial basis.
Alas, instead we had a huge bailout of railroad companies, and the creation of the bastard stepchild Amtrak, which was designed and intended to fail, but has continued to survive despite the best efforts of the government and the railroads to kill it.