To be fair - you should be sure you're comparing apples to apples. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the stuff in the proprietary cylinders is lab grade or better (fuel cells are notoriously sensitive to contaminants), while the stuff down at the tobacco shop is technical grade or worse (since it's a cheap consumer product designed for relatively crude and insensitive devices). Yes, "proprietary" is usually a danger sign - but not always.
I'm quite aware of what SpaceX and Bigelow are planning - and the huge gap between planning and reality.
Most of what they're going to be delivering is structural materials... but those being cheap is mostly pointless because cheap materials on orbit are more than offset by the costs of assembly and checkout of all the non structural bits on orbit. The same goes for the water they're planning on selling as reaction mass - along with the water, you need a heavy power supply to provide a fairly low performance propulsion system. Again, not very attractive.
So no, it's almost certainly *not* opening up sooner than you think. (What *I* think is based on reality, not pie-in-the-sky.)
I think what the author is missing is that Vader may have wanted to take the base intact, probably to recover information on remaining resistance cells elsewhere. Nuking the base from orbit was never his plan.
Not to mention that scattering the Rebels complicates their operations, logistics, communications, etc... (In a real war, that's a non trivial win.) If the goal is to deny the Rebels the use of the base as the author claims - it doesn't matter if the base is turned into a smoking crater or the Emperor's personal bordello. The Rebels are gone, mission accomplished.
The author knows a hell of a lot less about military affairs than he thinks he does.
And in the end, the Rebel forces that escape are irrelevant anyhow - because they had little role in winning the war. *That* was accomplished by Luke taking out Darth Vader and the Emperor.
I didn't say it wouldn't work - I said nobody is likely to do it, a different matter entirely.
The problem is, the currently planned manufacturing industry can only manufacture the crudest, simplest, and *already* cheap parts... the expensive and heavy bits still have to come from Earth, *and* the most complex and expensive parts of assembly and checkout will have to be done on orbit. (Where there is no infrastructure to do so.)
Considering that Little Boy and Fat Man were rated at 16 kt and 21 kt, respectively, 10 kt is not something to just ignore.
Had I said it was something to ignore, you'd have a point. Instead, I did what you failed to do - I placed the yield in context rather than simply pronouncing it 'scary'.
Regardless of that, what rhetoric did I spout
Did you even read my reply?
Simply stating facts and opining on possible future outcomes isn't panic, it's commenting on a Slashdot article.
Spinning facts and phrasing them as something new, unusual and unexpected is sensationalism. Duh.
Sorry, I forget the audience I'm writing for sometimes...:)
"Stemming" is the process of filling in the borehole used to reach the test location/chamber and emplace the test device. This prevents the release of radiation from the test, this both protects the environment (of concern to the Atmospheric Test Ban signatories) and denies exterior observers access to the bomb's waste products (which can be examined to determine the bombs yield, composition, and design).
As far as I know, there's not a 1:1 relationship between the power in the bomb and the power of the earthquake it creates.
There isn't. It depends on the type of rock, the local seismic conditions, and how well the weapons energy couples to the local rock (which depends on test chamber geometry, the presence or absence of stemming, etc...). Predicting yield from earthquake strength is a very inexact science. (Heck, even determining the exact Richter measurement involves a certain amount of assumptions and black art.)
The scariest part about this whole test scenario is that while the induced earthquake was only a 4.9 on the Richter Scale (the previous was 4.5), that means the new bomb has released four times the energy of the last bomb.
Cargo cult commenting at it's finest... while "four times the energy" certainly sounds scary - looking at the actual numbers means they've likely developed a 10kt bomb. Dangerous, but pretty puny so far as strategic weapons go. 10k is pretty useless for anything but holding un-reinforced area targets at risk, and even then requires a fairly accurate delivery mechanism as the radius of significant damage (anything more than breaking windows) is barely a mile across.
Further, they're focusing on miniaturization of the physics package, which allows them to mount the warhead on a missile.
More self-panicking courtesy of Captain Obvious of the Cargo Cult. Who here thinks that any nuclear weapons state wouldn't focus on miniaturization? (If you answer "but bombs on [container ships|trucks|some other far fetched Hollywood inspired delivery mechanism], you're so far off base you're not even in the same city.) Pretty much every nuclear power goes for missiles - they're the most effective deterrent system available.* And in a dictatorship, they're really desirable because you can keep them close to home under the control of trusted troops (with the warheads under the control of a different set of trusted troops).
Did you learn your rhetoric at a DHS sponsored school, or just soak it up naturally? (The latter is quite prevalent as the 'net lends itself to sensationalism.)
* The South Africans didn't, but they weren't designing a deterrent system in the conventional sense.
Actually, by retiring before he dies, he gets a strong voice in selecting his successor.
Um, no. He might be able to politic beforehand, but once the Conclave begins - the cardinals are sequestered and all ballots are confidential.
That, along with the fact that he's been carefully selecting like-minded cardinals the last several years, ensures the next pope will by very similar to Benedict.
In the same way that Pope John Paul II selected the vast majority of the Cardinals that elected his replacement... and they selected one much like him. Except they didn't.
No, despite all it's other faults, in modern times political dynasty building seems to be absent from the Papacy.
On a rounding basis, the masses have historically never done anything terribly exciting, important, or relevant. So paying intense attention to them is a waste of resources.
Welcome to 2013 - where the resources (to collect and process the data) may seem massive, but they're dirt cheap. The waste is far less than you seem to think.
Its always the 10% or less who actually influence history.
True. And if you have a better way of finding the 10% than sifting through everyone looking for pointers to the 10% or for the 10% themselves... A life of wealth (or on the run) awaits you, because 'they' have been looking for an easy way to do that for centuries. If you don't have a better way (as I suspect), you're just blowing smoke because you neither understand the problem *or* the solution.
Though all this is a waste of time if people use non-standard app stores and/or download warez, then what do they really expect?
It's funny.... when Apple or Microsoft comes up, all the highly rated comments are about how Android lets you escape the walled garden and get your apps wherever you want from whomever you want. But let the story be about malware and security problems with Android - and all of the sudden it's the users fault for going outside the walled garden.
From TFA: Propellant can account for as much as half the launch weight of a geostationary satellite. This means that, in principle, fitting one with an EmDrive rather than a conventional drive, could halve launch costs.
That depends entirely on the power system needed to operate the drive. That's the real Achilles heel of various non chemical propulsion systems - they eat a lot of juice and the resulting power supplies negate most (if not all and then some) of the savings of not carrying conventional fuel.
All true, but orthogonal to the OP's point, which is that the demand for people having these degrees is going to be pretty slim for the foreseeable future. This job market may be new, but it's small and not exactly growing by leaps and bounds. *And* you're competing with a lot of folks who already have those types of practical and marketable skills...
What you really want is to be able to flag/score things according to some specific dimension, like "truth", "humor", "spam", "creationism", "logic", "propaganda", etc.
If those dimensions were chosen by all of us, and consistently scored/flagged/applied,/. would be a lot more powerful.
If by powerful you mean "works to ensure I see stuff I agree with and shields me from stuff I don't", then sure. Otherwise not so much. One persons "truth" it another persons "propaganda". And that's not to mention the number of urban legends and things "everyone knows", or the false belief that one understands a topic because one has seen a Discovery Channel program on it...
I suspect that conspiracy theories are a way to find/create a simplified version of the world which is more digesteable to those of limited mental skill (and yeah, I know I sound elitistic here). In that sense, it's similar to religion (the world and life is so much easier to cope with if one can invoke the "Will of God" to explain the vagaries of life).
You're not being elitist, you're being stupid and ignorant and using that as a springboard to justify your anti-religious bias. Belief in conspiracy theories in no way correlates to intelligence, education, or anything else - it seems to be something much deeper.
So rather than do the sane thing to reduce attacks (which saves money both in the short and long run!) which is to fix our foreign policy to one of free trade and friendship rather than secret assassinations, embargoes, invasions and occupation that we currently have.
The My Little Pony world you live in bears very little resemblance to the real one - because as deplorable as parts of our current foreign policies are, you're a fool if you believe you can never offend anyone and that being friendly will fix all problems. The real world is a rather more dangerous place that the kindergarten you seem to think it is, even doing the right thing (like unseating a murderous dictator or being friends with people that other folks don't like) can piss people off.
They state as fact the blimps will be deployed, but they're still "trying to determine" how they can be integrated into the air defense system? Isn't that kinda backwards?
No, it's not backwards at all. "Trying to determine" can also mean "it works on paper and in simulations, time for the next iteration". Sometimes you can only go so far on paper, and it's time to send the hardware out in the real world and actually work with it.
I'm reminded of a (still classified AFAIK) piece of kit they installed on my boat* back in the 1980's. It worked on paper, it worked in simulations, it worked in testing pierside... It was an abysmal failure (mumble) feet under the North Atlantic. There were unexpected interference problems, unexpected interface problems, and unacceptable impacts on certain evolutions and operations. Two weeks out (and contrary to orders) my CO had it shut off and tagged out. (FWIW, ultimately it ended up being cancelled for other reasons.)
Hardware isn't software. You can't run it and tweak it in a sandbox, sometimes you have to take it out in the real world.
*We used to swear that whenever SUBLANT had a weird job for a boomer, the first words out of his mouth were "What's the Henry L's schedule?"... It was kind of an honor to be the 'go to' boat, but it was also an awful pain in the ass sometimes.
Impeachment might be seen as a serious option if it hadn't been brought up about a 100 times by partisans since 2008. "Wolf" has been cried too many times.
Since 2008? You've either been living in a cave or are wearing a seriously impervious set of bias blinders. It's been a favorite weapon of partisans since *at least* opening years (and the multiple scandals thereof) of the first Clinton Administration, and has only gotten worse since then. During the 2000-2008 Bush Administration, it was practically the only plank in the position of opposing partisans.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair - you should be sure you're comparing apples to apples. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the stuff in the proprietary cylinders is lab grade or better (fuel cells are notoriously sensitive to contaminants), while the stuff down at the tobacco shop is technical grade or worse (since it's a cheap consumer product designed for relatively crude and insensitive devices). Yes, "proprietary" is usually a danger sign - but not always.
I'm quite aware of what SpaceX and Bigelow are planning - and the huge gap between planning and reality.
Most of what they're going to be delivering is structural materials... but those being cheap is mostly pointless because cheap materials on orbit are more than offset by the costs of assembly and checkout of all the non structural bits on orbit. The same goes for the water they're planning on selling as reaction mass - along with the water, you need a heavy power supply to provide a fairly low performance propulsion system. Again, not very attractive.
So no, it's almost certainly *not* opening up sooner than you think. (What *I* think is based on reality, not pie-in-the-sky.)
Not to mention that scattering the Rebels complicates their operations, logistics, communications, etc... (In a real war, that's a non trivial win.) If the goal is to deny the Rebels the use of the base as the author claims - it doesn't matter if the base is turned into a smoking crater or the Emperor's personal bordello. The Rebels are gone, mission accomplished.
The author knows a hell of a lot less about military affairs than he thinks he does.
And in the end, the Rebel forces that escape are irrelevant anyhow - because they had little role in winning the war. *That* was accomplished by Luke taking out Darth Vader and the Emperor.
I didn't say it wouldn't work - I said nobody is likely to do it, a different matter entirely.
The problem is, the currently planned manufacturing industry can only manufacture the crudest, simplest, and *already* cheap parts... the expensive and heavy bits still have to come from Earth, *and* the most complex and expensive parts of assembly and checkout will have to be done on orbit. (Where there is no infrastructure to do so.)
Because nobody has the infrastructure to use the mined materials. (Nor are they likely to do so for reasons that should be obvious.)
Which puts them in the position of someone trying to sell real estate in Florida - in 1066.
There isn't a market in orbit - so the actual value of these materials (currently and for the foreseeable future) is zero.
Had I said it was something to ignore, you'd have a point. Instead, I did what you failed to do - I placed the yield in context rather than simply pronouncing it 'scary'.
Did you even read my reply?
Spinning facts and phrasing them as something new, unusual and unexpected is sensationalism. Duh.
Sorry, I forget the audience I'm writing for sometimes... :)
"Stemming" is the process of filling in the borehole used to reach the test location/chamber and emplace the test device. This prevents the release of radiation from the test, this both protects the environment (of concern to the Atmospheric Test Ban signatories) and denies exterior observers access to the bomb's waste products (which can be examined to determine the bombs yield, composition, and design).
There isn't. It depends on the type of rock, the local seismic conditions, and how well the weapons energy couples to the local rock (which depends on test chamber geometry, the presence or absence of stemming, etc...). Predicting yield from earthquake strength is a very inexact science. (Heck, even determining the exact Richter measurement involves a certain amount of assumptions and black art.)
Cargo cult commenting at it's finest... while "four times the energy" certainly sounds scary - looking at the actual numbers means they've likely developed a 10kt bomb. Dangerous, but pretty puny so far as strategic weapons go. 10k is pretty useless for anything but holding un-reinforced area targets at risk, and even then requires a fairly accurate delivery mechanism as the radius of significant damage (anything more than breaking windows) is barely a mile across.
More self-panicking courtesy of Captain Obvious of the Cargo Cult. Who here thinks that any nuclear weapons state wouldn't focus on miniaturization? (If you answer "but bombs on [container ships|trucks|some other far fetched Hollywood inspired delivery mechanism], you're so far off base you're not even in the same city.) Pretty much every nuclear power goes for missiles - they're the most effective deterrent system available.* And in a dictatorship, they're really desirable because you can keep them close to home under the control of trusted troops (with the warheads under the control of a different set of trusted troops).
Did you learn your rhetoric at a DHS sponsored school, or just soak it up naturally? (The latter is quite prevalent as the 'net lends itself to sensationalism.)
* The South Africans didn't, but they weren't designing a deterrent system in the conventional sense.
Um, no. He might be able to politic beforehand, but once the Conclave begins - the cardinals are sequestered and all ballots are confidential.
In the same way that Pope John Paul II selected the vast majority of the Cardinals that elected his replacement... and they selected one much like him. Except they didn't.
No, despite all it's other faults, in modern times political dynasty building seems to be absent from the Papacy.
Welcome to 2013 - where the resources (to collect and process the data) may seem massive, but they're dirt cheap. The waste is far less than you seem to think.
True. And if you have a better way of finding the 10% than sifting through everyone looking for pointers to the 10% or for the 10% themselves... A life of wealth (or on the run) awaits you, because 'they' have been looking for an easy way to do that for centuries. If you don't have a better way (as I suspect), you're just blowing smoke because you neither understand the problem *or* the solution.
It's funny.... when Apple or Microsoft comes up, all the highly rated comments are about how Android lets you escape the walled garden and get your apps wherever you want from whomever you want. But let the story be about malware and security problems with Android - and all of the sudden it's the users fault for going outside the walled garden.
They also say it takes two kilowatts - which is a fair sized and fairly heavy power supply.
From TFA: Propellant can account for as much as half the launch weight of a geostationary satellite. This means that, in principle, fitting one with an EmDrive rather than a conventional drive, could halve launch costs.
That depends entirely on the power system needed to operate the drive. That's the real Achilles heel of various non chemical propulsion systems - they eat a lot of juice and the resulting power supplies negate most (if not all and then some) of the savings of not carrying conventional fuel.
All true, but orthogonal to the OP's point, which is that the demand for people having these degrees is going to be pretty slim for the foreseeable future. This job market may be new, but it's small and not exactly growing by leaps and bounds. *And* you're competing with a lot of folks who already have those types of practical and marketable skills...
Given the decades of declining demand (and declining salaries)... admitting that is like admitting the sun rises in the east each morning.
*yawn* When you've got something other than the same tired rhetoric and actually want to address the points I raised, get back to me.
Until then, you're just another blithering idiot with delusions of possessing a clue.
If by powerful you mean "works to ensure I see stuff I agree with and shields me from stuff I don't", then sure. Otherwise not so much. One persons "truth" it another persons "propaganda". And that's not to mention the number of urban legends and things "everyone knows", or the false belief that one understands a topic because one has seen a Discovery Channel program on it...
You're not being elitist, you're being stupid and ignorant and using that as a springboard to justify your anti-religious bias. Belief in conspiracy theories in no way correlates to intelligence, education, or anything else - it seems to be something much deeper.
The My Little Pony world you live in bears very little resemblance to the real one - because as deplorable as parts of our current foreign policies are, you're a fool if you believe you can never offend anyone and that being friendly will fix all problems. The real world is a rather more dangerous place that the kindergarten you seem to think it is, even doing the right thing (like unseating a murderous dictator or being friends with people that other folks don't like) can piss people off.
No, it's not backwards at all. "Trying to determine" can also mean "it works on paper and in simulations, time for the next iteration". Sometimes you can only go so far on paper, and it's time to send the hardware out in the real world and actually work with it.
I'm reminded of a (still classified AFAIK) piece of kit they installed on my boat* back in the 1980's. It worked on paper, it worked in simulations, it worked in testing pierside... It was an abysmal failure (mumble) feet under the North Atlantic. There were unexpected interference problems, unexpected interface problems, and unacceptable impacts on certain evolutions and operations. Two weeks out (and contrary to orders) my CO had it shut off and tagged out. (FWIW, ultimately it ended up being cancelled for other reasons.)
Hardware isn't software. You can't run it and tweak it in a sandbox, sometimes you have to take it out in the real world.
*We used to swear that whenever SUBLANT had a weird job for a boomer, the first words out of his mouth were "What's the Henry L's schedule?"... It was kind of an honor to be the 'go to' boat, but it was also an awful pain in the ass sometimes.
Since 2008? You've either been living in a cave or are wearing a seriously impervious set of bias blinders. It's been a favorite weapon of partisans since *at least* opening years (and the multiple scandals thereof) of the first Clinton Administration, and has only gotten worse since then. During the 2000-2008 Bush Administration, it was practically the only plank in the position of opposing partisans.
Or propaganda, which amounts to the same thing.