Serious mining can move serious amounts of material in a short time, and if the moon became Earth's primary source of material for power, I suspect we'd make a measurable impact within decades.
We're talking about fusion fuel here. Worldwide energy needs can be provided by a few thousand tons of fusion fuel per year. So with the moon's total mass of almost 1e20 tons, it would take hundreds of times the age of the universe to make any significant impact on tides.
But don't worry, it's not going to happen anyway. To harvest usable amounts of the trace quantities of He3 on the moon, we'd have to remotely mine and process countless gigatons of lunar dust. This would be an operation that dwarfs coal mining on earth, but be thousands of times more expensive to carry out. It would almost be certainly easier and cheaper to develop boron/hydrogen fusion technology here on earth, or deal with the drawbacks of simpler deuterium/lithium fusion technology, than to undertake this
outer space pipe dream.
Instead of using absolute dollar figures for your analysis, you should use lifestyle impact.
1.75e8:1 odds are about the same as the risk of being killed per mile in a car even for low-risk drivers. So if you drive just one extra mile to pick up your lotto tickets, it's more likely that your new lifestyle will be 6 feet under than suddenly affluent.
The last I heard of Everex was in the mid 1980s when it was a player in the niche market of souped-up 80386 PCs. I assume that it was one of the countless companies that eventually went out of business and whose brand name was bought up by some Far East electronics OEM.
If the sun were made of a mixture of lithium and deuterium like an H-bomb instead of the normal hydrogen it actually contains, and its internal temperature were greatly increased to those of an H-bomb reaction, then your comparison based purely on mass might be valid. In that scenario, the sun would also blow itself apart in nanoseconds and have a power output proportional to the mass difference.
In this case it means low-level format into blocks and sectors. The higher level file system format is layered on top of this, and this overhead reduces user data capacity to less than 1440 KiB by an amount depending on which FS is used.
If I'm not mistaken, the signaling delay of conventional circuits is dominated by the reactance of the electromagnetic fields, not by the momentum of the electrons. Therefore, there's not much basis to conclude that the momentum of copper atoms moving over a couple of nanometers distance will cause a significant delay reletave to an electronic circuit saddled by its capacitance and inductance.
For the record, it was the first 1,509,949 digits of pi and I was quite proud of it.
You worked a little too hard. 3.5 inch floppy disks were measured in a bizarre combination of 10-based and 2-based multiples. A "1.44 MB" disk actually had a formatted capacity of 1.44 * 1024 * 1000, or 1,474,560 bytes.
That is a lot of energy for one proton, but not compared to the highest energy cosmic rays that have been observed. Those pack almost 10^21 eV (about the energy of a pitched baseball) into a single particle.
If it's that rare, wouldn't it have been overkill to use twenty-mule teams to haul borax out of the desert?
Without bothering to look it up, it seems like global consumption of a fusion fuel wouldn't be more than a couple of thousand tons per year. Boron compounds are a commodity that's currently consumed on the scale of a million tons per year.
Hmmm... with your thinking process that goes: "I've never seen this. It's probably patentable!", you could have a good future working at the USPTO. Have you thought about applying for a position there?
Source code would be sufficient for the purposes of addressing this monopoly protocol problem. It's not as easy to use as documentation, but it's more accurate. And it's 100 times easier than the current situation of reverse engineering an ever-changing black box.
If it's unreasonable to impose such a condition on the OSS people, because by your argument such documentation isn't necessary to the project's own contributors, then why is it reasonable to impose it on Microsoft just because they're the villain of the piece here?
As I said, if Microsoft finds it unreasonable to write this documentation because their internal developers don't have documentation, well then they could always just release the source code. That would take next to no effort on their part.
Look, a common complaint about open source is crappy documentation. Yet somehow every day, new people join projects, fork projects, fix bugs or add features they need. They often do this little or no documentation and manage to figure it out mainly by reading the source code. It can be done, and it gets done every day.
Personally, if I were implementing a 3rd party de facto protocol, I'd prefer access to the source over even the best documentation plus a black box. I've done projects both ways, and even if the first has a steeper learning curve, by the time the project is complete it will save huge amounts of wasted effort in reverse engineering and workarounds for mysterious behaviors. The documentation only specifies how the developers think that their project should work. Nothing *ever* works exactly as it should. The source code can tell you exactly how it actually works.
How would you feel if distribution were prohibited for every open source application that didn't provide and maintain comprehensive, correct documentation on all their interfaces and protocols?
It's called the source code.
If Microsoft were to simply post their source code up on their website, nobody would be asking them to write this "burdensome" documentation.
As I said, a duopoly is no better. The DSL provider (who BTW are no longer required to sublet their access at viable rates for competition) will most likely pull the same crap, knowing that the only alternative is to go back to cable, which is already pulling this crap.
There IS NO FREE MARKET in broadband internet access, so your free market religion is irrelevant to this issue.
Also, their cable, their rules, don't like it, ditch Comcast.
Since they usually operate under exclusive franchises dished out by local governments, it's not as simple as "ditching" them. It's not possible for anybody else to install a cable to create any kind of competition. If you're lucky, you might have DSL, but a duopoly is rarely much better than a monopoly.
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In the WKRP episode that the quote comes from, the turkeys they dropped from the helicopter were definitely domestic.
Or even worse, they'd wire the multihop nets in a daisy chain pattern.
We're talking about fusion fuel here. Worldwide energy needs can be provided by a few thousand tons of fusion fuel per year. So with the moon's total mass of almost 1e20 tons, it would take hundreds of times the age of the universe to make any significant impact on tides.
But don't worry, it's not going to happen anyway. To harvest usable amounts of the trace quantities of He3 on the moon, we'd have to remotely mine and process countless gigatons of lunar dust. This would be an operation that dwarfs coal mining on earth, but be thousands of times more expensive to carry out. It would almost be certainly easier and cheaper to develop boron/hydrogen fusion technology here on earth, or deal with the drawbacks of simpler deuterium/lithium fusion technology, than to undertake this outer space pipe dream.
1.75e8:1 odds are about the same as the risk of being killed per mile in a car even for low-risk drivers. So if you drive just one extra mile to pick up your lotto tickets, it's more likely that your new lifestyle will be 6 feet under than suddenly affluent.
The last I heard of Everex was in the mid 1980s when it was a player in the niche market of souped-up 80386 PCs. I assume that it was one of the countless companies that eventually went out of business and whose brand name was bought up by some Far East electronics OEM.
If the sun were made of a mixture of lithium and deuterium like an H-bomb instead of the normal hydrogen it actually contains, and its internal temperature were greatly increased to those of an H-bomb reaction, then your comparison based purely on mass might be valid. In that scenario, the sun would also blow itself apart in nanoseconds and have a power output proportional to the mass difference.
You mean for this branch of reality? Almost certainly no less than the Planck time of 5e-44 s.
In this case it means low-level format into blocks and sectors. The higher level file system format is layered on top of this, and this overhead reduces user data capacity to less than 1440 KiB by an amount depending on which FS is used.
If I'm not mistaken, the signaling delay of conventional circuits is dominated by the reactance of the electromagnetic fields, not by the momentum of the electrons. Therefore, there's not much basis to conclude that the momentum of copper atoms moving over a couple of nanometers distance will cause a significant delay reletave to an electronic circuit saddled by its capacitance and inductance.
You worked a little too hard. 3.5 inch floppy disks were measured in a bizarre combination of 10-based and 2-based multiples. A "1.44 MB" disk actually had a formatted capacity of 1.44 * 1024 * 1000, or 1,474,560 bytes.
That is a lot of energy for one proton, but not compared to the highest energy cosmic rays that have been observed. Those pack almost 10^21 eV (about the energy of a pitched baseball) into a single particle.
Why don't you check the EULA that came with your copy of OSX. Does it say that you can return it for a refund?
If it's that rare, wouldn't it have been overkill to use twenty-mule teams to haul borax out of the desert?
Without bothering to look it up, it seems like global consumption of a fusion fuel wouldn't be more than a couple of thousand tons per year. Boron compounds are a commodity that's currently consumed on the scale of a million tons per year.
By your logic, corporations ought to enjoy suffrage as well.
Linux doesn't have the stifling EULA restrictions and technical hobbling that make "emerging market" versions of Windows into shovelware.
Actually, it was powered with diesel fuel.
Hmmm... with your thinking process that goes: "I've never seen this. It's probably patentable!", you could have a good future working at the USPTO. Have you thought about applying for a position there?
Source code would be sufficient for the purposes of addressing this monopoly protocol problem. It's not as easy to use as documentation, but it's more accurate. And it's 100 times easier than the current situation of reverse engineering an ever-changing black box.
As I said, if Microsoft finds it unreasonable to write this documentation because their internal developers don't have documentation, well then they could always just release the source code. That would take next to no effort on their part.
Personally, if I were implementing a 3rd party de facto protocol, I'd prefer access to the source over even the best documentation plus a black box. I've done projects both ways, and even if the first has a steeper learning curve, by the time the project is complete it will save huge amounts of wasted effort in reverse engineering and workarounds for mysterious behaviors. The documentation only specifies how the developers think that their project should work. Nothing *ever* works exactly as it should. The source code can tell you exactly how it actually works.
It's called the source code.
If Microsoft were to simply post their source code up on their website, nobody would be asking them to write this "burdensome" documentation.
Of course not. It's a series of belts.
Maybe they should do something clever like encode the software to look like random noise and then hide it by mixing it into a JPEG image.
There IS NO FREE MARKET in broadband internet access, so your free market religion is irrelevant to this issue.
Since they usually operate under exclusive franchises dished out by local governments, it's not as simple as "ditching" them. It's not possible for anybody else to install a cable to create any kind of competition. If you're lucky, you might have DSL, but a duopoly is rarely much better than a monopoly.