I haven't played EVE, but in most MMOs, the in-game political structure is *very* authoritarian, with all leaders able to act on their own.
This makes administration a lot easier: it's a pain to have your entire group shut down because your leadership can't get quorum for a vote. But in most games, you're utterly doomed if you're betrayed by a leader. I'm guessing EVE is no exception.
it's not unlike a RL CFO running with some company funds.
No, it's not unlike a RL CFO running with some company funds, firing everyone, and dynamiting the corporate headquarters along with every factory, warehouse, and substation owned by the company.
You can argue about whether this game mechanic is fun or not, but you can't argue that it has anything to do with the real world.
I don't play EVE. But without commenting on its politics, it seems to me as an outsider that this sort of coup shouldn't be possible in any game designed to have interesting and engaging politics.
The game mechanics (sovereignty allowing construction of major infrastructure) is a proxy for a large government/business bureaucracy who maintains and runs the infrastructure. These guys are abstracted out of the game because they're boring.
In any real human political/business organization, if a leader turned traitor and demanded the immediate destruction of all infrastructure in his control, the people behind the scenes who actually *run* the stuff would say "hell no!"
Imagine if Joe Biden sold out to the Russians and demanded that every U.S. embassy and military base be demolished. Imagine that Steve Ballmer demanded that Microsoft's entire Redmond campus be put to the torch. Not gonna happen. But in EVE, it's done in a microsecond.
Virtual world politics doesn't have to work the same way as the real world, but it does have to be A) fun, and B) functional. The ability for a single leader to nuke his entire nation with a mouseclick is neither.
I just downloaded Flashblock add-on for Firefox while reading this thread. 0 sec: Download Flashblock. 5 sec: Reboot Firefox. 15 sec: Visit Youtube. Yep, it blocks Flash. Hmm, that'd be annoying for Youtube specifically... 25 sec: Find "White List" in Flashblock preferences. 30 sec: Youtube works fine.
Unlike Javascript, whitelists work great for Flash, because Flash is rarely used except for pure goodness or pure evil.
Phonons travel at the speed of sound in their medium, which is 100,000 times slower than the speed of electrical signals or light. If you've got a phononic circuit running at a Ghz clock rate, signals can only travel a few microns. This size limit severely restricts the number of individual components you can have in your circuit.
A model of the outer shell and maybe "something that looks good" for the interior workings isn't really comparable with what the person in the article is doing.
the gap is too big for them to have sufficient energy to split an atom on the other side of the gap.
This can't be right. The area inside the ring is filled with air, right? Neutrons go through a few cm of air like it's not even there.
Besides, to prevent a chain reaction, you need to reduce the odds that an average fission neutron will collide with and split another U nucleus. Reducing the energy of those neutrons doesn't help -- in fact, it generally *increases* the odds of causing fission, which is the point of moderators in nuclear power plants.
Your point about conical geometry reducing the total possible fissile mass is a good one, but I wonder if there's some intermediate shape, like a hyperboloid, that might give a better trade-off between collision time and fissile mass.
That's not presenting an opposing idea and letting people come to their own conclusion, but rather intentionally presenting well-known facts in extremely misleading and overcomplicated ways in an attempt to trick them
Congratulations, you've just summarized creation science, intelligent design, or whatever they're calling it at the moment.
"Creationism" is as simple an idea as "water". To fool people into thinking it's science, its proponents rely on the unfair DMHO trick you object to.
You're absolutely right in principle, but in practice, the specific "weaknesses" that are used by opponents to evolution have been shown to be absolutely wrong. Usually 150 years ago.
If there are significant weaknesses in Darwin's theory, they should be presented through peer-reviewed mainstream science, not shoved down students' throats by official decree.
(And before one argues that scientists aren't willing to hear objections to their beloved theory, it's worth pointing out that there *are* some well-accepted biological oddities that add wrinkles to Darwin's theory, such as horizontal gene transfer. But nobody outside the sciences talks about them, because they don't require a supreme being.)
If you think being able to sign a piece of paper and declare yourself "married" will solve these problems than you are sorely mistaken.
The "unsafe sex, rampant drug use and the like" stems from an ideology that a person should be free to do whatever they want,
But where does that ideology come from? I believe the "hedonism in the gay community" is most common among closeted and newly-out gay people, and is a response to the massive oppression and constriction they face. When people are locked in a closet for a long time, they tend to overreact when they're able to step outside their cell.
Concrete steps by society to show acceptance, such as legalizing gay marriage, will reduce that tendency to dangerously overreact.
Hell, we could move into outright Communism and state property with the current interpretation. It's outrageous.
Communism is not the opposite of democracy: one is an economic system, one is a political system. In principle, one could have a fully democratic communist state, though in practice such a thing is not common.
I'd say that the ability of the Constitution to function under a wide variety of economic systems -- and to maintain the right of the people to *choose* the economic system they prefer -- is a strength, not a weakness.
(in other words, yup, the government probably should allow polygamous civil unions, apart from religious objections there's really no reason the contractual engagements such a thing implies should be limited to one pairing per person).
I agree with pretty much everything you say, but I need to quibble with the point quoted above. Most of the legal privileges granted to a spouse (inheritance, health care decisionmaking, etc) aren't written to handle the case of *multiple* spouses who may disagree with each other, and who may or may not be married to each other.
In principle, you're right. But practically, expanding marriage rights and privileges to handle polygamy would be a gigantic pain in the butt.
We have, but thrust is currently too low for manned missions, For example:
I wouldn't call any of your examples "solid state", in the electronics sense the parent jokingly suggested. They're all basically very large vacuum tubes without the tube.
Nuclear fuel doesn't become small enough to be harmless until we're talking about a handful of atoms. Also, when it comes to safeguarding the public, the *number* of threats is far more important than their individual severity. A couple hundred kilos of nuclear fuel, which is what we're talking about, is a massive regional security, safety, and environmental threat. And the article wants to build thousands.
you've already got isotopes all over your hospitals.
Yeah, good thing nothing ever goes wrong with them...
You may say "but these incidents happened in Mexico and Brazil; here in the US we got the knowhow to do it right." But that's the point. There's only so much knowhow. The more different nuclear sites you have, the more highly skilled people you need to keep each site safe. Inevitably, you increase the odds that a moron or bad guy will interact with nuclear material.
To make the elevator car climb along the cable, we must accelerate the cable downward with an acceleration exceeding g=9.8 m/s2, so that it descends faster than the car falls.
So the article's answer to the problem of providing a force of mass-of-car * gravity to the elevator car is to provide a force of mass-of-cable * gravity to the cable.
Congratulations, you just made the problem a million times harder.
Let's set aside the environmental issues, the social issues, the security issues.
From a pure engineering perspective, this is a dumb idea. Electrical transmission losses in the U.S. amount to 7.2% of production (link below).
Absolute best-case scenario, by putting nuke plants at everyone's doorstep, we gain 7.2% efficiency. To do that we have to totally lose the economy of scale. Small plants are more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain, and intrinsically less efficient.
Tesla and Westinghouse beat Edison in the power generation game because they were able to make long-distance transmission costs tiny by using AC power. This allowed them to use larger power plants than Edison's DC power system, and the economy of scale of power generation meant Edison was doomed.
Westinghouse wasn't using nukes, but the same rule applies today: bigger is cheaper and more efficient.
I originally got excited about SpaceX because I thought reusability would be the breakthrough in space launch we need.
You're about 20 years behind, there. The big lesson of the Space Shuttle is that reusability isn't the holy grail we thought it would be.
In some cases, recycling makes sense. But sometimes, a reuseable spacecraft is as bad an idea as a reuseable condom -- and for pretty much the same reasons.
Like I said, "depending on how you count": counting engines on shared-turbopump engines like Soyuz is a little tricky.
Still, any way you count, Soyuz has a ridiculously large number of "parts with fire in them that could explode", which is the key parameter here, and it seems to do just fine.
In fact, since Falcon 9 heavy can lose one or more turbopumps and keep going, a failure mode that would doom a Soyuz, you could claim that Falcon might be *more* reliable.
Yes, it's ridiculous to compare the reliability of vehicles which haven't even been built yet with historical hardware, but that's my whole point here. When it comes to launch failure, the devil's in the details, and IMO the reliability of Falcon 9 heavy will depend a lot more on getting the details right than on how many engines it has.
Also even if a engine itself fails, you have to remember that the failure is not necessarily a clean shutdown, but likely a large explosion, taking out adjacent engines.
Falcon 9's design includes armored enclosures for the engines, to keep them from taking out their neighbors if they blow up.
I agree that 27 is a whole lot of engines, but if you're going to cite the N1, you'd better also mention Soyuz, which has 32ish engines firing at launch, depending on how you count, and is one of the most reliable man-rated vehicles out there.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't played EVE, but in most MMOs, the in-game political structure is *very* authoritarian, with all leaders able to act on their own.
This makes administration a lot easier: it's a pain to have your entire group shut down because your leadership can't get quorum for a vote. But in most games, you're utterly doomed if you're betrayed by a leader. I'm guessing EVE is no exception.
it's not unlike a RL CFO running with some company funds.
No, it's not unlike a RL CFO running with some company funds, firing everyone, and dynamiting the corporate headquarters along with every factory, warehouse, and substation owned by the company.
You can argue about whether this game mechanic is fun or not, but you can't argue that it has anything to do with the real world.
I don't play EVE. But without commenting on its politics, it seems to me as an outsider that this sort of coup shouldn't be possible in any game designed to have interesting and engaging politics.
The game mechanics (sovereignty allowing construction of major infrastructure) is a proxy for a large government/business bureaucracy who maintains and runs the infrastructure. These guys are abstracted out of the game because they're boring.
In any real human political/business organization, if a leader turned traitor and demanded the immediate destruction of all infrastructure in his control, the people behind the scenes who actually *run* the stuff would say "hell no!"
Imagine if Joe Biden sold out to the Russians and demanded that every U.S. embassy and military base be demolished. Imagine that Steve Ballmer demanded that Microsoft's entire Redmond campus be put to the torch. Not gonna happen. But in EVE, it's done in a microsecond.
Virtual world politics doesn't have to work the same way as the real world, but it does have to be A) fun, and B) functional. The ability for a single leader to nuke his entire nation with a mouseclick is neither.
I just downloaded Flashblock add-on for Firefox while reading this thread.
0 sec: Download Flashblock.
5 sec: Reboot Firefox.
15 sec: Visit Youtube. Yep, it blocks Flash. Hmm, that'd be annoying for Youtube specifically...
25 sec: Find "White List" in Flashblock preferences.
30 sec: Youtube works fine.
Unlike Javascript, whitelists work great for Flash, because Flash is rarely used except for pure goodness or pure evil.
In the case of your house, the hassle of locking up every day is small compared to the hassle of having everything you own stolen.
In the case of ads vs Noscript, many people feel the cure is almost as much of a hassle as the disease.
Aunt E&M! Aunt E&M! There's no place like Ohm!
So I'm guessing the strength of these magnetic gales would be measured in Henries? ... I could go on...
Phonons travel at the speed of sound in their medium, which is 100,000 times slower than the speed of electrical signals or light. If you've got a phononic circuit running at a Ghz clock rate, signals can only travel a few microns. This size limit severely restricts the number of individual components you can have in your circuit.
Go light, or go home.
There is already a to-scale model of Little Boy
A model of the outer shell and maybe "something that looks good" for the interior workings isn't really comparable with what the person in the article is doing.
the gap is too big for them to have sufficient energy to split an atom on the other side of the gap.
This can't be right. The area inside the ring is filled with air, right? Neutrons go through a few cm of air like it's not even there.
Besides, to prevent a chain reaction, you need to reduce the odds that an average fission neutron will collide with and split another U nucleus. Reducing the energy of those neutrons doesn't help -- in fact, it generally *increases* the odds of causing fission, which is the point of moderators in nuclear power plants.
Your point about conical geometry reducing the total possible fissile mass is a good one, but I wonder if there's some intermediate shape, like a hyperboloid, that might give a better trade-off between collision time and fissile mass.
That's not presenting an opposing idea and letting people come to their own conclusion, but rather intentionally presenting well-known facts in extremely misleading and overcomplicated ways in an attempt to trick them
Congratulations, you've just summarized creation science, intelligent design, or whatever they're calling it at the moment.
"Creationism" is as simple an idea as "water". To fool people into thinking it's science, its proponents rely on the unfair DMHO trick you object to.
You're absolutely right in principle, but in practice, the specific "weaknesses" that are used by opponents to evolution have been shown to be absolutely wrong. Usually 150 years ago.
If there are significant weaknesses in Darwin's theory, they should be presented through peer-reviewed mainstream science, not shoved down students' throats by official decree.
(And before one argues that scientists aren't willing to hear objections to their beloved theory, it's worth pointing out that there *are* some well-accepted biological oddities that add wrinkles to Darwin's theory, such as horizontal gene transfer. But nobody outside the sciences talks about them, because they don't require a supreme being.)
My only concern is for the overall turbine design and aging repair costs associated with a salt water environment.
The Dutch and other European countries seem to have solved this problem (though I guess only time will tell, none of these farms is very old...)
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL3192557920070903
If you think being able to sign a piece of paper and declare yourself "married" will solve these problems than you are sorely mistaken.
The "unsafe sex, rampant drug use and the like" stems from an ideology that a person should be free to do whatever they want,
But where does that ideology come from? I believe the "hedonism in the gay community" is most common among closeted and newly-out gay people, and is a response to the massive oppression and constriction they face. When people are locked in a closet for a long time, they tend to overreact when they're able to step outside their cell.
Concrete steps by society to show acceptance, such as legalizing gay marriage, will reduce that tendency to dangerously overreact.
Hell, we could move into outright Communism and state property with the current interpretation. It's outrageous.
Communism is not the opposite of democracy: one is an economic system, one is a political system. In principle, one could have a fully democratic communist state, though in practice such a thing is not common.
I'd say that the ability of the Constitution to function under a wide variety of economic systems -- and to maintain the right of the people to *choose* the economic system they prefer -- is a strength, not a weakness.
(in other words, yup, the government probably should allow polygamous civil unions, apart from religious objections there's really no reason the contractual engagements such a thing implies should be limited to one pairing per person).
I agree with pretty much everything you say, but I need to quibble with the point quoted above. Most of the legal privileges granted to a spouse (inheritance, health care decisionmaking, etc) aren't written to handle the case of *multiple* spouses who may disagree with each other, and who may or may not be married to each other.
In principle, you're right. But practically, expanding marriage rights and privileges to handle polygamy would be a gigantic pain in the butt.
Jobs is the Elvis of the computing business.
Yes. And when Jobs passes away, Apple will die too, just like rock 'n' roll died with Elvis.
Oh wait.
We have, but thrust is currently too low for manned missions, For example:
I wouldn't call any of your examples "solid state", in the electronics sense the parent jokingly suggested. They're all basically very large vacuum tubes without the tube.
I think the point is that "small is harmless" -
Nuclear fuel doesn't become small enough to be harmless until we're talking about a handful of atoms. Also, when it comes to safeguarding the public, the *number* of threats is far more important than their individual severity. A couple hundred kilos of nuclear fuel, which is what we're talking about, is a massive regional security, safety, and environmental threat. And the article wants to build thousands.
you've already got isotopes all over your hospitals.
Yeah, good thing nothing ever goes wrong with them...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9501E7D71338F932A35756C0A962948260
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
You may say "but these incidents happened in Mexico and Brazil; here in the US we got the knowhow to do it right." But that's the point. There's only so much knowhow. The more different nuclear sites you have, the more highly skilled people you need to keep each site safe. Inevitably, you increase the odds that a moron or bad guy will interact with nuclear material.
Where that force is being applied is a big deal, because mass-of-power-source-and-its-fuel
Electric motors have impressive power-to-weight ratios, and don't need to carry their fuel along for the ride. Problem solved.
That's probably why commercial elevator companies are interested in this,
For a commercial elevator, sure. But a commercial elevator doesn't have a cable that weighs a gazillion times as much as the elevator car.
It's a totally different problem.
...and I find this bit of idiocy.
To make the elevator car climb along the cable, we must accelerate the cable downward with an acceleration exceeding g=9.8 m/s2, so that it descends faster than the car falls.
So the article's answer to the problem of providing a force of mass-of-car * gravity to the elevator car is to provide a force of mass-of-cable * gravity to the cable.
Congratulations, you just made the problem a million times harder.
Let's set aside the environmental issues, the social issues, the security issues.
From a pure engineering perspective, this is a dumb idea. Electrical transmission losses in the U.S. amount to 7.2% of production (link below).
Absolute best-case scenario, by putting nuke plants at everyone's doorstep, we gain 7.2% efficiency. To do that we have to totally lose the economy of scale. Small plants are more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain, and intrinsically less efficient.
Tesla and Westinghouse beat Edison in the power generation game because they were able to make long-distance transmission costs tiny by using AC power. This allowed them to use larger power plants than Edison's DC power system, and the economy of scale of power generation meant Edison was doomed.
Westinghouse wasn't using nukes, but the same rule applies today: bigger is cheaper and more efficient.
Source: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/pdfs/primer.pdf
This isn't an RTG. It's a real mini reactor.
I originally got excited about SpaceX because I thought reusability would be the breakthrough in space launch we need.
You're about 20 years behind, there. The big lesson of the Space Shuttle is that reusability isn't the holy grail we thought it would be.
In some cases, recycling makes sense. But sometimes, a reuseable spacecraft is as bad an idea as a reuseable condom -- and for pretty much the same reasons.
Like I said, "depending on how you count": counting engines on shared-turbopump engines like Soyuz is a little tricky.
Still, any way you count, Soyuz has a ridiculously large number of "parts with fire in them that could explode", which is the key parameter here, and it seems to do just fine.
In fact, since Falcon 9 heavy can lose one or more turbopumps and keep going, a failure mode that would doom a Soyuz, you could claim that Falcon might be *more* reliable.
Yes, it's ridiculous to compare the reliability of vehicles which haven't even been built yet with historical hardware, but that's my whole point here. When it comes to launch failure, the devil's in the details, and IMO the reliability of Falcon 9 heavy will depend a lot more on getting the details right than on how many engines it has.
Also even if a engine itself fails, you have to remember that the failure is not necessarily a clean shutdown, but likely a large explosion, taking out adjacent engines.
Falcon 9's design includes armored enclosures for the engines, to keep them from taking out their neighbors if they blow up.
I agree that 27 is a whole lot of engines, but if you're going to cite the N1, you'd better also mention Soyuz, which has 32ish engines firing at launch, depending on how you count, and is one of the most reliable man-rated vehicles out there.