Actually, per unit of energy produced, fusion generates far more neutrons than fission, and they're generally at higher energies. (Think about how many more atoms there are to react in one gram of hydrogen vs. one gram of uranium.) Finding materials that can handle this higher neutron flux is one of the biggest unsolved problems in fusion research.
For D-T fusion, they do need as many of those neutrons as possible to try to breed enough tritium from a lithium blanket to fuel the reactor. It's not clear that the breeding will be efficient enough to generate the required amount of tritium.
I know we all here hate the patent system, but doesn't every patent becomes "obvious" once someone invented it?
No. For example, the Rubik's cube does not seem obvious at all, even after you've taken one apart.
The obviousness bar needs to be set much higher for patents, so that the number of issued patents is cut to a couple of percent of the current rate, which is choking innovation and progress in many fields. I say if it's obvious in hindsight, then chances are that it's just plain obvious in general.
In particular, the following scenario needs to be completely eliminated from the patent landscape: (1) 3rd party puts a new technology on the market. (2) some tinkerer takes that new technology and creates an obvious new application with it (3) tinkerer gets a patent on the application and argues that it's actually non-obvious because "nobody did it before". (Notwithstanding the fact that nobody did it before because the 3rd party technology didn't exist, and some other tinkerer would probably have come up with this same obvious application within weeks of getting the same new technology.)
Can anyone do the math as to how long it will take the probe to reach it's next solar system? I realize the amount of time will be insane and the probe will be most likely (read definitely) dead by then but still it's interesting.
At its current speed, it would take tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest star. But since it's not aimed at any particular star, it would probably take many millions of years before it actually enters another solar system by chance.
I assume that the probe will gradually be eroded away over millions of years by interstellar dust, gas and radiation. I've never seen an estimate of how long it will remain recognizable, though. I wonder if it will actually ever reach another star system while it still exists.
I accidentally left an extra "not" in the rule while I was editing it. The logical conflict probably means that the robot is going go insane, take over the world's computer systems, and launch a global nuclear war. My bad.
A few tomatoes and stalks of celery aren't going to keep you alive. You'd need a whole hydroponic wheat field for each person. Not going to happen.
Look at it another way: currently the US has more than 1 acre of cultivated cropland per person. If you assume an average of about 150 W/m^2 insolation nationwide, each person's food supply is consuming about 600 kilowatts of solar energy (averaged over the whole year, night and day). Given that we currently only use about 10 kilowatts of fossil fuels per person averaged over the day, you're never going to generate enough light to feed people from fossil fuels and/or nuclear, even if everyone went strictly vegan.
Don't be obtuse. I specifically mentioned the free version upgrades that you don't get with Windows.
That way, you don't have to do silly things like backport your software for 10 years. With Linux, you get to run non-stale software at no additional cost.
And which FOSS vendor gives 11 years of free support like 100s of millions have gotten from Microsoft on XP? To get the "self-support" option for a single desktop user from Red Hat you pay $49 a year.
You did not get free "support" for XP. You got free bug fixes. There's a big difference.
Almost all Linux distros give you unlimited free bugfixes, and free version upgrades, forever.
For those who don't trust themselves enough to run their own computers, paid support can be obtained for *all* OSes - proprietary or not.
In other words, converting to IPV6 is more expensive than keeping IPV4.
He didn't say that. He said that ISPs can extract more revenue from customers by exploiting the artificial scarcity if IPV4. Even if IPV4 was more expensive than IPV6, ISPs would prefer to keep the former because they can ration the addresses and charging premiums for each one.
The word "if" means that your analogy doesn't work unless this this contrived fuel situation is added to account for software compatibility network effects. IOW, your original claim that there was no monopoly in the desktop OS market (based on arbitrarily narrowing the definition of a monopoly to suit your argument) was incorrect. HTH.
Windows monopoly? Is that something like Ford motor company having a monopoly on Fords?
No, but it might be if there were technical issues that forced each brand of car to use different and incompatible kinds of gasoline, and all the gas stations in the country only sold Ford-compatible fuel.
iRobot has been building robots for years with no problems with the name.
It is substantially different from crApple
That's good to hear. At first I thought that these were some kind of wafer-thin robots with lustrous white plastic shells. I was afraid that they would get ruined with scratches from all the debris in the reactor buildings.
You phrase the question differently than I would. I would ask why is perl not the default shell language.
For one reason, you wouldn't want to have to type in something like
system("ls -l");
instead of
ls -l
for everything you do.
However, the exact same syntax features that make sh good for interactive prompts make it a horrible programming language. IMO, it's tied with COBOL for the worst language still in general use. I'm familiar with a couple of dozen languages, and sh is the one I find hardest to use without constantly referring back to the documentation. I can never remember its crazy variable expansion rules and escapes, its weird logic and test operators, or its cryptic built-in variable names.
Lately, if a script looks like it's going to be longer than a single line, I use Python and import the "subprocess" module. This greatly helps my sanity.
Fortunately that problem has been "solved" by turning the company producing them into "Government Motors"
GM was going to be "Government Motors", no matter what. The only question is whether the owner was going to be the US government or the Chinese government. The prospect of having Corvettes and Cadillacs produced by an obscure Chinese industrial conglomerate would be too humiliating for the US public to stomach.
then demanding they use 10% of our tax money on fantasy projects, which they'll never ever recuperate.
That's better than them spending it on figuring out how to pack 50 more horsepower into already ridiculously overpowered 13 MPG luxury SUVs, then having them go out of business again the next time oil prices spike.
The first time some cosmic ray flips some bit that the drive queries to determine which host its attached to you lose all of your data.
Based on nosediving industry quality trends, I'd say that the odds of that particular error mode happening are minuscule compared to those of a garden variety click-of-death losing all your data.
I don't make much and I constantly have people like you say to me "But you should support taking money from people who have more so that it can be given to you" - no
You seem inexperienced. Maybe if you had a higher income, you'd realize that making your 100th $10,000 per year is far, far easier than making your first $10,000. Income does not have a linear relationship to effort. So yes, you really should support them taking money from those who make more, because they're generally working much less for each dollar they make.
because it's their fucking money. No one has the right to someone else's money
Why not? Money is a abstract concept invented by society. Whose to say what the rules are governing it? It depends on what the people generally agree the policy should be via their government.
In general, every society since the dawn of civilization has had taxation in some form, so if you somehow expect you're going to keep 100% of your stuff out of the hands of other people, you're deluded.
Always on the lookout for more places to put their server farms, Google has a deal with the National Park Service to rent out unused space in national landmarks. For example, the Washington Monument is hundreds of feet tall, but it has almost no windows. It would be a waste not to fill up the lower floors with server racks. The same goes for other buildings that have no other practical function, such as the Lincoln Memorial and Grant's Tomb.
Unfortunately however, unless a deal is reached within the next few hours, all those servers will probably have to go offline tonight at midnight.
he worked on 26 airplanes during his career, but today's aircraft designer would be lucky to work on one.
For the first time since WWII, the USAF no longer has a new fighter plane in development. If and when it becomes necessary to design one, who will know how?
The reason that they designed and then discarded so many aircraft in those days is that back then, *they* didn't know how.
If I had a choice between an experienced aircraft designer from the 1960s, or just all the written design documentation from the latest planes, I'd take the latter.
knowing how fast feces expands in volume in free fall becomes important if your moving several thousand people across interplanetary distances for colonization
As far as "putting the cart before the horse" goes, this one takes the cake.
"TFA" states that OO is "anti-parallel by its very nature," but does not explain how or why this is so, and indeed, my own experience is that this is complete hokum. A well-designed program can be parallelized regardless of implementing code; let's not forget the idea of computational equivalence.
Of course you can write any kind of code in any Turing-complete language. However, every language "encourages" people to code in particular styles. OO "encourages" the use of opaque stateful objects, which are by default not threadsafe. Making every object threadsafe is a massive undertaking and a drag on performance (for example, Java's collections libraries tried this route at first, then gave up on it later).
Functional languages "encourage" keeping all state on the execution stack, which by default *is* threadsafe, and some of these languages encourage tail recursion and map/reduce instead of loop constructs, and these can often be automatically parallelized.
So that's great for problems that fit well into a functional model. However, IMO, the object model seems to more naturally fit many real-world business problems than the functional model, which is why it's far more popular today. That may change if the only way to improve computing performance going forward continues to be adding more parallel CPU cores.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, per unit of energy produced, fusion generates far more neutrons than fission, and they're generally at higher energies. (Think about how many more atoms there are to react in one gram of hydrogen vs. one gram of uranium.) Finding materials that can handle this higher neutron flux is one of the biggest unsolved problems in fusion research.
For D-T fusion, they do need as many of those neutrons as possible to try to breed enough tritium from a lithium blanket to fuel the reactor. It's not clear that the breeding will be efficient enough to generate the required amount of tritium.
I know we all here hate the patent system, but doesn't every patent becomes "obvious" once someone invented it?
No. For example, the Rubik's cube does not seem obvious at all, even after you've taken one apart.
The obviousness bar needs to be set much higher for patents, so that the number of issued patents is cut to a couple of percent of the current rate, which is choking innovation and progress in many fields. I say if it's obvious in hindsight, then chances are that it's just plain obvious in general.
In particular, the following scenario needs to be completely eliminated from the patent landscape: (1) 3rd party puts a new technology on the market. (2) some tinkerer takes that new technology and creates an obvious new application with it (3) tinkerer gets a patent on the application and argues that it's actually non-obvious because "nobody did it before". (Notwithstanding the fact that nobody did it before because the 3rd party technology didn't exist, and some other tinkerer would probably have come up with this same obvious application within weeks of getting the same new technology.)
Can anyone do the math as to how long it will take the probe to reach it's next solar system? I realize the amount of time will be insane and the probe will be most likely (read definitely) dead by then but still it's interesting.
At its current speed, it would take tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest star. But since it's not aimed at any particular star, it would probably take many millions of years before it actually enters another solar system by chance.
I assume that the probe will gradually be eroded away over millions of years by interstellar dust, gas and radiation. I've never seen an estimate of how long it will remain recognizable, though. I wonder if it will actually ever reach another star system while it still exists.
I accidentally left an extra "not" in the rule while I was editing it. The logical conflict probably means that the robot is going go insane, take over the world's computer systems, and launch a global nuclear war. My bad.
Now that robots are setting prices, must they follow the same rules as people?
No. Here are the rules for robot pricers:
A few tomatoes and stalks of celery aren't going to keep you alive. You'd need a whole hydroponic wheat field for each person. Not going to happen.
Look at it another way: currently the US has more than 1 acre of cultivated cropland per person. If you assume an average of about 150 W/m^2 insolation nationwide, each person's food supply is consuming about 600 kilowatts of solar energy (averaged over the whole year, night and day). Given that we currently only use about 10 kilowatts of fossil fuels per person averaged over the day, you're never going to generate enough light to feed people from fossil fuels and/or nuclear, even if everyone went strictly vegan.
There is significant probability a large asteroid or comet will hit us one day, and that one day a super-volcano will erupt.
If that happens, you're going to starve within a few months anyway. Energy supplies will be the least of your worries.
Don't be obtuse. I specifically mentioned the free version upgrades that you don't get with Windows.
That way, you don't have to do silly things like backport your software for 10 years. With Linux, you get to run non-stale software at no additional cost.
And which FOSS vendor gives 11 years of free support like 100s of millions have gotten from Microsoft on XP? To get the "self-support" option for a single desktop user from Red Hat you pay $49 a year.
You did not get free "support" for XP. You got free bug fixes. There's a big difference.
Almost all Linux distros give you unlimited free bugfixes, and free version upgrades, forever.
For those who don't trust themselves enough to run their own computers, paid support can be obtained for *all* OSes - proprietary or not.
In other words, converting to IPV6 is more expensive than keeping IPV4.
He didn't say that. He said that ISPs can extract more revenue from customers by exploiting the artificial scarcity if IPV4. Even if IPV4 was more expensive than IPV6, ISPs would prefer to keep the former because they can ration the addresses and charging premiums for each one.
I'm trying to understand what you mean with 1£/W/year.
There's an application for that:
So about 19 US cents per kWh. That's pretty high, but not out of the question. I'm currently paying about 2/3 that price for electricity.
The word "if" means that your analogy doesn't work unless this this contrived fuel situation is added to account for software compatibility network effects. IOW, your original claim that there was no monopoly in the desktop OS market (based on arbitrarily narrowing the definition of a monopoly to suit your argument) was incorrect. HTH.
Windows monopoly? Is that something like Ford motor company having a monopoly on Fords?
No, but it might be if there were technical issues that forced each brand of car to use different and incompatible kinds of gasoline, and all the gas stations in the country only sold Ford-compatible fuel.
iRobot has been building robots for years with no problems with the name.
It is substantially different from crApple
That's good to hear. At first I thought that these were some kind of wafer-thin robots with lustrous white plastic shells. I was afraid that they would get ruined with scratches from all the debris in the reactor buildings.
You phrase the question differently than I would. I would ask why is perl not the default shell language.
For one reason, you wouldn't want to have to type in something like
instead of
for everything you do.
However, the exact same syntax features that make sh good for interactive prompts make it a horrible programming language. IMO, it's tied with COBOL for the worst language still in general use. I'm familiar with a couple of dozen languages, and sh is the one I find hardest to use without constantly referring back to the documentation. I can never remember its crazy variable expansion rules and escapes, its weird logic and test operators, or its cryptic built-in variable names.
Lately, if a script looks like it's going to be longer than a single line, I use Python and import the "subprocess" module. This greatly helps my sanity.
Fortunately that problem has been "solved" by turning the company producing them into "Government Motors"
GM was going to be "Government Motors", no matter what. The only question is whether the owner was going to be the US government or the Chinese government. The prospect of having Corvettes and Cadillacs produced by an obscure Chinese industrial conglomerate would be too humiliating for the US public to stomach.
then demanding they use 10% of our tax money on fantasy projects, which they'll never ever recuperate.
That's better than them spending it on figuring out how to pack 50 more horsepower into already ridiculously overpowered 13 MPG luxury SUVs, then having them go out of business again the next time oil prices spike.
The first time some cosmic ray flips some bit that the drive queries to determine which host its attached to you lose all of your data.
Based on nosediving industry quality trends, I'd say that the odds of that particular error mode happening are minuscule compared to those of a garden variety click-of-death losing all your data.
I don't make much and I constantly have people like you say to me "But you should support taking money from people who have more so that it can be given to you" - no
You seem inexperienced. Maybe if you had a higher income, you'd realize that making your 100th $10,000 per year is far, far easier than making your first $10,000. Income does not have a linear relationship to effort. So yes, you really should support them taking money from those who make more, because they're generally working much less for each dollar they make.
because it's their fucking money. No one has the right to someone else's money
Why not? Money is a abstract concept invented by society. Whose to say what the rules are governing it? It depends on what the people generally agree the policy should be via their government.
In general, every society since the dawn of civilization has had taxation in some form, so if you somehow expect you're going to keep 100% of your stuff out of the hands of other people, you're deluded.
Well, Obama pretty much ended the Gulf of Mexico offshore drilling industry for the USA.
Good. I'd like to be able to eat shrimp again.
What is a Google Landmark Server?
Always on the lookout for more places to put their server farms, Google has a deal with the National Park Service to rent out unused space in national landmarks. For example, the Washington Monument is hundreds of feet tall, but it has almost no windows. It would be a waste not to fill up the lower floors with server racks. The same goes for other buildings that have no other practical function, such as the Lincoln Memorial and Grant's Tomb.
Unfortunately however, unless a deal is reached within the next few hours, all those servers will probably have to go offline tonight at midnight.
he worked on 26 airplanes during his career, but today's aircraft designer would be lucky to work on one.
For the first time since WWII, the USAF no longer has a new fighter plane in development. If and when it becomes necessary to design one, who will know how?
The reason that they designed and then discarded so many aircraft in those days is that back then, *they* didn't know how.
If I had a choice between an experienced aircraft designer from the 1960s, or just all the written design documentation from the latest planes, I'd take the latter.
This tsunami was by no means medium-large. It far exceeded anything they could have been reasonably prepared for.
If that's the case, then it was irresponsible to build nuclear reactors anywhere near the coastline in the first place.
knowing how fast feces expands in volume in free fall becomes important if your moving several thousand people across interplanetary distances for colonization
As far as "putting the cart before the horse" goes, this one takes the cake.
...image looks different because airbrush removed YOU.
"TFA" states that OO is "anti-parallel by its very nature," but does not explain how or why this is so, and indeed, my own experience is that this is complete hokum. A well-designed program can be parallelized regardless of implementing code; let's not forget the idea of computational equivalence.
Of course you can write any kind of code in any Turing-complete language. However, every language "encourages" people to code in particular styles. OO "encourages" the use of opaque stateful objects, which are by default not threadsafe. Making every object threadsafe is a massive undertaking and a drag on performance (for example, Java's collections libraries tried this route at first, then gave up on it later).
Functional languages "encourage" keeping all state on the execution stack, which by default *is* threadsafe, and some of these languages encourage tail recursion and map/reduce instead of loop constructs, and these can often be automatically parallelized.
So that's great for problems that fit well into a functional model. However, IMO, the object model seems to more naturally fit many real-world business problems than the functional model, which is why it's far more popular today. That may change if the only way to improve computing performance going forward continues to be adding more parallel CPU cores.