- also, apart from tasting good, is there a compelling reason that we need ice cream? Will business be better, more efficient,... than what we have now? I can't see it myself; it might be delicious, but that's about it. I guess ice cream is doomed to fail in the marketplace rather than become -- hypothetically -- a $14.5 billion per year industry in the USA alone.
Seriously now. . . I don't understand the hand-wringing that I've seen in the blogosphere, repeatedly, over whether VR can "grow beyond the gaming niche to find a mass market". Last I checked, games are a mass market, bigger than the movie industry and bigger than the music industry. I'm sure VR will find some uses beyond games too, and it will find more and more productivity uses as time goes by. However, VR games will pave the way, and VR games will be huge, and there's nothing wrong with that.
And I suspect the exact opposite. . . That VR headsets will be awesome for games and simulations, but that watching movies on them is a novelty experience that will get old very quickly.
You can't interact freely with a movie. You can't move around freely. The only thing it offers is 3D and the ability to look in different directions. 3D is something we already have with big-screen TVs, and it hasn't set the world on fire. Being able to look in different directions is nothing but a distraction and an opportunity to miss seeing whatever is important at any given moment.
I reject the arguments in that article. First, his economic analysis is simplistic and naive, and if followed to its logical conclusion would imply that coal-fired power plants can never -- ever -- be viable either. (Taken even further, it also seems to imply that there can never be more than one economically viable energy source at a time. Whichever source has the most favorable financial numbers is the only thing that gets built! But it has never worked that way, and it isn't going to start working that way any time soon.) He *also* puts all the blame for the decline of fission plants squarely on economic factors and airily brushes aside all other explanations.
Second, all his descriptions of nuclear fusion reactors are based on tokamaks and ITER, except for one paragraph where he airily brushed aside all other options, based on arguments that have already been addressed by many others.
The author of that piece has his viewpoint, and it's a considered viewpoint, and obviously a self-confident one, but it's far from definitive.
One of the most frustrating things about this is the extent to which *hot* fusion has also been tarred by cold fusion's reputation -- not among scientists, but among businesses, investors and government agencies -- the people who fund research. Scientists know perfectly well the difference between hot fusion research and cold fusion (or LENR), but a lot of people who control funding just hear "fusion" and think it's bogus.
Hot fusion also has its own semi-justified reputation for not working. We've all heard the old semi-joke: "Fusion power is 40 years away -- and always will be!" Well, for 40 years we've funded very little fusion research, which has resulted in very little progress, which has resulted in a belief that fusion research isn't worthy of funding. The whole cold fusion flap only aggravated this situation.
"However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab." How to go beyond that when you can't even get your simple papers published, that's the problem.
That's an extremely gradual process. However, we've just recently learned about the collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica, which appear likely to cause the much more rapid rise in sea level over the next few decades. Nobody had planned on that, and it will cause headaches, hazards and costs far beyond this example of nuclear power plants.
When Star Wars was new, I was 11 years old, and I thought it was the greatest movie of all times. And it may still be the greatest movie of all time -- for 11 year olds. Now I'd rather watch 2001 or The Right Stuff -- or The Martian. Now I can actually appreciate Blade Runner, too. And as for Star Wars. . . eh. . . yeah, it's still fun, once in a while, and so are all those legions of superhero movies these days, but it's all kid stuff. I don't want to live on a steady diet of kid stuff, and it's a little disheartening that there's so much of it, and that the kiddie shows get the huge budgets and production values these days. Star Wars (plus a nod to Raiders of the Lost Ark) did that. It led us to this infantile place.
The intense focus on sequels and franchises irritates me too. How much did Disney pay for the Star Wars franchise? Billions? There's absolutely nothing in there that they couldn't have created their own counterpart to -- and it would have been fresher. Why can't we get that Ringworld movie that's been rumored for decades? Why not bring some of the other classic worlds from SF literature to the big screen, or just do something all new? It seems we've reached the point where originality is not merely devalued, but is actually feared and loathed.
The original AK-47 was only produced for a few years because it was quite heavy and the milled receivers sometimes cracked. An improved version, the AKM with a stamped receiver, is what's been produced in vast quantities around the world. The great majority of AKs that you see are AKMs or some kind of variant of it. The AK-74 that you mentioned introduced the smaller caliber ammo (over Kalashnikov's objections, by the way!) and was intended to fully replace the AKM, but in practice it hasn't worked out that way. I'm not not aware of the AK-74 being widely adopted outside of Russia, and maybe some other former Soviet countries.
The term AK-47, though, has become a generic term for the entire AK family of weapons, in much the same way that AR-15 has become the common term for the whole family of guns derived from it. It's not wrong to speak of it that way. You can usually tell from the context what is meant.
The Tesla Roadster was largely built by Lotus, and Tesla apparently poached all their "handling" expertise from Lotus. So. . . I don't really see Porsche (or anybody else) holding much advantage over that. They just need to build another sports car to really demonstrate it.
quote: "They then gave naloxone to a 39-year-old woman with the rare mutation and she felt pain for the first time in her life."
What a heartwarming story!
Woman breaks her toe on a table leg. "AAAAH! Ngh. . . It's so. . . wonderful! Gaaah!" Cries tears of joy(?).
OK, I understand that this is a serious medical condition, not to mention a breakthrough in our understanding of the subject. No disrespect. . . But I couldn't help noticing the irony and dark humor implicit in that one sentence.
The projected performance specs of the Mission E sports car are less than those of the current Tesla sedan. Tesla got their start making sports cars. Tesla have plans to produce sports cars again in the near-ish future.
So, even though you are correct to point out that these vehicles are in two different categories, it's not necessarily STUPID (in capital letters!) to compare them.
Tesla have shown what's possible in terms of building out a fast-charge network quickly. No other car make seems interested. When you ask them, they all say the same thing: "We don't want to get into the fueling business."
Even Nissan. . . Nissan's "charging network" consists of Nissan dealerships, which is not exactly convenient for travel. And just to make your trip even more of an adventure, each dealership has its own charging policies -- including, in some cases, only allowing charging by cars sold from that dealer! If you ask Nissan about building more charging stations, they repeat the same mantra: "We don't want to get into the fueling business."
Even Toyota. . . They're pushing hydrogen cars, and they admit that fueling infrastructure will be crucial. They're lobbying governments to fund it. Are they going to build any hydrogen fuel stations themselves? Nope. "We don't want to get into the fueling business."
Toyota. . . Nissan. . . Porsche. . . Prepare to have your lunch eaten by a car maker that wants to get into the fueling business.
It's a pretty car. Unfortunately, the projected specifications of the Mission E indicate lower performance than the cars Tesla are making today. The only real advantage promised is faster charging -- from a network of high-voltage charging stations that don't exist yet.
Scientists are eager to work on this stuff. They do need to be paid, though. It's very easy to look back and see how technologies have advanced when money was spent to research them and stagnated when funding dried up. Nuclear fusion research has limped along on a shoestring for decades -- with the exception of ITER, which is horribly mismanaged. (As I've noted before. . . If we managed the Apollo program like ITER, people today would be semi-joking that "A moon landing is 40 years away -- and always will be!")
I personally suspect that we could have had commercial, power-generating, fusion power plants running by 2000 if the whole field had been funded and supported at an appropriate level.
The summary (not TFA) did not, in fact, say that renewable energy sources are "just pie-in-the-sky hippie fantasies". That's something you dreamed up, I guess. What it did say is "get out of the solar and wind box that many green energy enthusiasts find themselves in". Which I think is very true. Many of them actively oppose nuclear fission and never give a passing thought to nuclear fusion or even geothermal power, or anything really aside from their beloved wind and sun.
Wind and solar energy are indeed growing nicely now. However, both wind and solar are intermittent energy sources, and wind power is geographically limited. To expect them to carry everything is a stretch, and unnecessary.
Red Mercury is totally bogus. If they were smart, they'd go to Ethiopia and swipe the Tabota Seyen -- the Ark of the Covenant. There's your super-weapon. I mean, all you have to do is carry it in front of your army, and it just wipes out your enemies in masse! The Ethiopians themselves have used it multiple times in battle.
Did you guys *see* what it did in Raiders of the Lost Ark? That movie was totally fact-based!;)
I see much evidence that major governments -- and major environmental groups -- don't really take global warming seriously and don't really want the problem solved. You can judge them by their actions.
If they really took it seriously, the environmental groups would all be backing nuclear power instead of fighting it.
If the US government took global warming seriously, they'd allow new reactor designs instead of forcing companies to go build in China because they have given up on ever getting anything approved in the USA.
If the world took global warming seriously, we'd have massive programs to develop nuclear fusion reactors. It would be like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program. I have to grit my teeth when the UN announces ten billion dollars in financial aid to sinking island nations, but nobody can cough up 1/50th of that for a new research reactor.
Natural gas is a stopgap -- and a highly useful one. I would compare natural gas to a hybrid car, like a Prius. It still burns petroleum fuel, but not as much, and it still pollutes, but not as much, and it can help fill the gap until pure battery electric cars are perfected and take off.
In the case of natural gas power plants. . . For now, they're much better than coal. For the future, solar power and nuclear fusion will eventually kill them off.
Slashdot Mirror
- also, apart from tasting good, is there a compelling reason that we need ice cream? Will business be better, more efficient, ... than what we have now? I can't see it myself; it might be delicious, but that's about it. I guess ice cream is doomed to fail in the marketplace rather than become -- hypothetically -- a $14.5 billion per year industry in the USA alone.
Seriously now. . . I don't understand the hand-wringing that I've seen in the blogosphere, repeatedly, over whether VR can "grow beyond the gaming niche to find a mass market". Last I checked, games are a mass market, bigger than the movie industry and bigger than the music industry. I'm sure VR will find some uses beyond games too, and it will find more and more productivity uses as time goes by. However, VR games will pave the way, and VR games will be huge, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Your attitude won't stop headsets from shipping in a few months, and your attitude won't stop people like me from buying one.
And I suspect the exact opposite. . . That VR headsets will be awesome for games and simulations, but that watching movies on them is a novelty experience that will get old very quickly.
You can't interact freely with a movie. You can't move around freely. The only thing it offers is 3D and the ability to look in different directions. 3D is something we already have with big-screen TVs, and it hasn't set the world on fire. Being able to look in different directions is nothing but a distraction and an opportunity to miss seeing whatever is important at any given moment.
I reject the arguments in that article. First, his economic analysis is simplistic and naive, and if followed to its logical conclusion would imply that coal-fired power plants can never -- ever -- be viable either. (Taken even further, it also seems to imply that there can never be more than one economically viable energy source at a time. Whichever source has the most favorable financial numbers is the only thing that gets built! But it has never worked that way, and it isn't going to start working that way any time soon.) He *also* puts all the blame for the decline of fission plants squarely on economic factors and airily brushes aside all other explanations.
Second, all his descriptions of nuclear fusion reactors are based on tokamaks and ITER, except for one paragraph where he airily brushed aside all other options, based on arguments that have already been addressed by many others.
The author of that piece has his viewpoint, and it's a considered viewpoint, and obviously a self-confident one, but it's far from definitive.
One of the most frustrating things about this is the extent to which *hot* fusion has also been tarred by cold fusion's reputation -- not among scientists, but among businesses, investors and government agencies -- the people who fund research. Scientists know perfectly well the difference between hot fusion research and cold fusion (or LENR), but a lot of people who control funding just hear "fusion" and think it's bogus.
Hot fusion also has its own semi-justified reputation for not working. We've all heard the old semi-joke: "Fusion power is 40 years away -- and always will be!" Well, for 40 years we've funded very little fusion research, which has resulted in very little progress, which has resulted in a belief that fusion research isn't worthy of funding. The whole cold fusion flap only aggravated this situation.
"However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab." How to go beyond that when you can't even get your simple papers published, that's the problem.
I'm surprised they don't require somebody to walk ahead of the autonomous vehicle waving a red flag to warn everyone of its approach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That's an extremely gradual process. However, we've just recently learned about the collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica, which appear likely to cause the much more rapid rise in sea level over the next few decades. Nobody had planned on that, and it will cause headaches, hazards and costs far beyond this example of nuclear power plants.
When Star Wars was new, I was 11 years old, and I thought it was the greatest movie of all times. And it may still be the greatest movie of all time -- for 11 year olds. Now I'd rather watch 2001 or The Right Stuff -- or The Martian. Now I can actually appreciate Blade Runner, too. And as for Star Wars. . . eh. . . yeah, it's still fun, once in a while, and so are all those legions of superhero movies these days, but it's all kid stuff. I don't want to live on a steady diet of kid stuff, and it's a little disheartening that there's so much of it, and that the kiddie shows get the huge budgets and production values these days. Star Wars (plus a nod to Raiders of the Lost Ark) did that. It led us to this infantile place.
The intense focus on sequels and franchises irritates me too. How much did Disney pay for the Star Wars franchise? Billions? There's absolutely nothing in there that they couldn't have created their own counterpart to -- and it would have been fresher. Why can't we get that Ringworld movie that's been rumored for decades? Why not bring some of the other classic worlds from SF literature to the big screen, or just do something all new? It seems we've reached the point where originality is not merely devalued, but is actually feared and loathed.
Not quite that simple. . .
The original AK-47 was only produced for a few years because it was quite heavy and the milled receivers sometimes cracked. An improved version, the AKM with a stamped receiver, is what's been produced in vast quantities around the world. The great majority of AKs that you see are AKMs or some kind of variant of it. The AK-74 that you mentioned introduced the smaller caliber ammo (over Kalashnikov's objections, by the way!) and was intended to fully replace the AKM, but in practice it hasn't worked out that way. I'm not not aware of the AK-74 being widely adopted outside of Russia, and maybe some other former Soviet countries.
The term AK-47, though, has become a generic term for the entire AK family of weapons, in much the same way that AR-15 has become the common term for the whole family of guns derived from it. It's not wrong to speak of it that way. You can usually tell from the context what is meant.
off the top of my head. . .
Douglas DC-3
Dodge Power Wagon
Mauser 98
Colt M1911
Browning M2HB
Parker 51
Lamy 2000
Pentax K1000
Unix
LP records
The Rolling Stones
The Tesla Roadster was largely built by Lotus, and Tesla apparently poached all their "handling" expertise from Lotus. So. . . I don't really see Porsche (or anybody else) holding much advantage over that. They just need to build another sports car to really demonstrate it.
quote: "They then gave naloxone to a 39-year-old woman with the rare mutation and she felt pain for the first time in her life."
What a heartwarming story!
Woman breaks her toe on a table leg. "AAAAH! Ngh. . . It's so. . . wonderful! Gaaah!" Cries tears of joy(?).
OK, I understand that this is a serious medical condition, not to mention a breakthrough in our understanding of the subject. No disrespect. . . But I couldn't help noticing the irony and dark humor implicit in that one sentence.
OK, a few points worth making. . .
The projected performance specs of the Mission E sports car are less than those of the current Tesla sedan. Tesla got their start making sports cars. Tesla have plans to produce sports cars again in the near-ish future.
So, even though you are correct to point out that these vehicles are in two different categories, it's not necessarily STUPID (in capital letters!) to compare them.
I never get my Tesla Roadster out of first gear.
Tesla have shown what's possible in terms of building out a fast-charge network quickly. No other car make seems interested. When you ask them, they all say the same thing: "We don't want to get into the fueling business."
Even Nissan. . . Nissan's "charging network" consists of Nissan dealerships, which is not exactly convenient for travel. And just to make your trip even more of an adventure, each dealership has its own charging policies -- including, in some cases, only allowing charging by cars sold from that dealer! If you ask Nissan about building more charging stations, they repeat the same mantra: "We don't want to get into the fueling business."
Even Toyota. . . They're pushing hydrogen cars, and they admit that fueling infrastructure will be crucial. They're lobbying governments to fund it. Are they going to build any hydrogen fuel stations themselves? Nope. "We don't want to get into the fueling business."
Toyota. . . Nissan. . . Porsche. . . Prepare to have your lunch eaten by a car maker that wants to get into the fueling business.
It's a pretty car. Unfortunately, the projected specifications of the Mission E indicate lower performance than the cars Tesla are making today. The only real advantage promised is faster charging -- from a network of high-voltage charging stations that don't exist yet.
Good luck with that.
Scientists are eager to work on this stuff. They do need to be paid, though. It's very easy to look back and see how technologies have advanced when money was spent to research them and stagnated when funding dried up. Nuclear fusion research has limped along on a shoestring for decades -- with the exception of ITER, which is horribly mismanaged. (As I've noted before. . . If we managed the Apollo program like ITER, people today would be semi-joking that "A moon landing is 40 years away -- and always will be!")
I personally suspect that we could have had commercial, power-generating, fusion power plants running by 2000 if the whole field had been funded and supported at an appropriate level.
The summary (not TFA) did not, in fact, say that renewable energy sources are "just pie-in-the-sky hippie fantasies". That's something you dreamed up, I guess. What it did say is "get out of the solar and wind box that many green energy enthusiasts find themselves in". Which I think is very true. Many of them actively oppose nuclear fission and never give a passing thought to nuclear fusion or even geothermal power, or anything really aside from their beloved wind and sun.
Wind and solar energy are indeed growing nicely now. However, both wind and solar are intermittent energy sources, and wind power is geographically limited. To expect them to carry everything is a stretch, and unnecessary.
Yes. . . It's supposed to teach kids to understand computers, not make it unnecessary for them to understand computers.
Look around you!
Look around you!
Just look around you!
There. . . Now take a closer look! Have you worked out what we're looking for?
Correct! The answer is: Computer Science!
Please ensure that you have your copybook at hand, as you'll be asked to take down notes from the screen at various points through the program.
Red Mercury is totally bogus. If they were smart, they'd go to Ethiopia and swipe the Tabota Seyen -- the Ark of the Covenant. There's your super-weapon. I mean, all you have to do is carry it in front of your army, and it just wipes out your enemies in masse! The Ethiopians themselves have used it multiple times in battle.
Did you guys *see* what it did in Raiders of the Lost Ark? That movie was totally fact-based! ;)
I see much evidence that major governments -- and major environmental groups -- don't really take global warming seriously and don't really want the problem solved. You can judge them by their actions.
If they really took it seriously, the environmental groups would all be backing nuclear power instead of fighting it.
If the US government took global warming seriously, they'd allow new reactor designs instead of forcing companies to go build in China because they have given up on ever getting anything approved in the USA.
If the world took global warming seriously, we'd have massive programs to develop nuclear fusion reactors. It would be like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program. I have to grit my teeth when the UN announces ten billion dollars in financial aid to sinking island nations, but nobody can cough up 1/50th of that for a new research reactor.
Yes, coal scrubbers are a "solved problem", and that's why we don't have acid rain killing the forests anymore.
However, CO2 sequestration is not a solved problem, and we still have global warming.
Natural gas is a stopgap -- and a highly useful one. I would compare natural gas to a hybrid car, like a Prius. It still burns petroleum fuel, but not as much, and it still pollutes, but not as much, and it can help fill the gap until pure battery electric cars are perfected and take off.
In the case of natural gas power plants. . . For now, they're much better than coal. For the future, solar power and nuclear fusion will eventually kill them off.