You're confusing magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. The tiny gold capsules are inertial confinement -- you zap the capsule with a short and very intense burst of energy, compressing it and getting fusion until it flies apart. Essentially a very very tiny H-bomb.
In magnetic confinement you hold the a much less compressed but very very hot gas in place with magnetic fields while it fuses relatively slowly. Current experimental designs tend to run in pulses of a few seconds or minutes, but engineering refinements should lead to ones that burn continuously, with more fuel being added and "ash" (helium) removed.
As you make tokamaks bigger they get more efficient, because there is less surface for the energy to leak out of, compared to the volume of plasma. ITER is designed to achieve scientific break-even -- more power out of the reaction than is used to run the magnets etc. The next stage will be a reactor that achieves actual power generation -- more electricity out the whole plant than goes in. This is harder because or turbine inefficiency etc. Because of the scaling up thing, if these do produce useful power it will be gigawatts.
What UW have is a variation of the magnetic confinement setup, generating the magnetic fields in a different way. Their calculations suggest that it will scale up cheaper and efficient than the current favourite design (a tokamak), but this remains to be demonstrated.
Depends where you look. The atmosphere hasn't warmed, but the oceans have. All the models and evidence suggest that this shift is cyclical and will reverse.
Interesting. The last sentence on the Wikipedia page for helium:
"Helium is a finite resource and is one of the few elements with escape velocity, meaning that once released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space."
So how does that work?
At a given temperature the typical velocity of a gas molecule depends on its mass. The lighter, the faster. Helium is the only gas molecule that is stable in the atmosphere and has a typical velocity near the top of the atmosphere that is faster than Earth's escape velocity, so it slowly diffuses up to the top and then is gradually lost to space.
Basically the conditions (temperature, density, amount of ionizing radiation around) thought to apply, the gas would be made up of atoms that tend to simply bounce off one another when they collide. This doesn't change the total energy in random motion of the cloud, ie the temperature.
More complex atoms or molecules can interact in more complicated ways when they collide, so that part of the energy ends up as vibration in a molecule, or extra energy of an electron in an excited state. These vibrating molecules or excited atoms then relax back to their ground state releasing a photon and so actually cooling the cloud.
There's no 4G outside Edinburgh & Glasgow at the moment I believe, but there is good 3G covering pretty much all the Universities and their surroundings and good wifi in the university buildings. If she's coming to St Andrews (statistically likely) there is definitely no 4G.
I wonder if the engines could be useful even without the plane?
Strap a bunch of them, some disposable LH2 tanks and a parachute onto the side of a Falcon and drop them when you hit Mach 5. Should improve the mass ration no end.
Assuming the astronomers are right, the way it happened is this:
About 420 million years after the Big Bang, this clump of gas formed into a small galaxy and emited a lot of light. At that time, about 1 billion light years away, and moving away at close to the speed of light was another clump of gas.
13 billion years later according to clocks on that other clump of gas, the light "overhauls" the other clump of gas, and is seen by Hubble.
There are other points of view that assign different numbers to some bits of this, but they all agree on the actual facts.
James Blish had the solution in his "Cities in Flight" books fifty years ago. Fit a suitable number of spindizzies and fly New York off into the galaxy to look for work.
You tube however is in your country. Can you get seek an injunction on them to takedown the video based on the fact you can prove the other side is perjuring itself.
PR works well where this is a substantial centre party (eg Germany) and badly where there isn't (eg Israel). Most systems also have a lower cutoff, so you have to get 5 or 10% of the vote before you get any seats, which excludes the real loonies.
It is EASY to create the world's shortest laser pulse: emit a single photon. It is monochromatic, coherent (so it meets the laser defninition), and has the shortest possible pulse..
No, by cleverly combining multiple photons of different frequencies you can produce a pulse that concentrates its energy in a shorter timespan. Calling it a laser pulse is actually stretching a point a bit, it is triggered by laser light, but the pulse itself is not monochromatic.
It's true, of course, that there are many more apparent imminent catastrophes (AICs) than actual catastrophes, especially as we are still here to argue about it. Some AICs arise from incomplete understanding, some from politically motivated woolly thinking and will go away if ignored. Some are real risks and we just get lucky. Others are partially mitigated by actions taken in response to the apparent threat (Y2K for instance). Some may be fully genuine threats averted by prompt action. Nuclear war between NATO and Warsaw pact in the 60s or 70s might be argued to fall into this category. CND and others successfully undermined the notion of "winnable nuclear war" and made sure that no Western politicians would risk nuclear war.
However, NONE OF THIS MEANS THAT THE NEXT ONE WILL NOT BE REAL. Probably it won't, but we can't just assume it isn't a real threat because the last one wasn't. We have to study each plausible threat, do our best to estimate the risk and where the risk appears significant, do what we can to mitigate it. The universe does not owe us continued existence, let alone continued civilization.
I'm talking 10 years out, as I have said a couple of times. I doubt there will be zero bars anywhere in Europe or North America except perhaps national parks by then. Anyway, the JS could probably support most of your work locally and resync when it gets a chance.
Plugging hardware in is the equivalent of installing an app. Standardized interfaces and pre-approved standardized products. My guess is that compiling and installing software IN 5-10 YEARS will feel like installing a PCI card or DIMMs now -- not impossible, or unheard of, but a bit scary, voids your warranty and not something most people do.
Software development will form just as negligible a part of the personal computing market in 10 years as it does now.
That said, my best guess: the IDE will be running partly in Javascript on your browser and partly on a server. Installing software on the thing you hold will be about as strange as installing hardware on it is now. Not unheard of, but old-fashioned and unusual.
It's my understanding that any device for creating, as opposed to a device primarily for viewing, will require some sort of "special training or experience."
This is often true, but the handful of exceptions have been HUGE hits -- mobile phone cameras with facebook integration, for instance. The content created is mostly not very interesting to anyone except the creator and a few friends, of course, but that's hardly new.
There will always be niche markets. My personal guess is that in ten years they will basically all be presented as peripherals for your phone/tablet. They may, in fact, be many times more powerful, and essentially take over when you are using them, but the experience will be a continuation of the "smartphone" experience, in the sense that your preferences/identity/data/etc. will all be the same.
Two things. One is that I doubt many people do software development on the bus. The things I want to do on the bus work fine on the tablet -- read some papers, check my mail (as of last network connection) , play a game to while away the journey.
The other is that we are looking a few years ahead here. We're talking about companies positioning themselves for how they see the market in 2-5 years, not how they see it now.
There are two things a tablet can do that a desktop, or even a laptop won't do:
1. Weigh less than 1kg and fit in a handbag or large pocket 2. Be usable (at least for some purposes) by random members of the public with no special training or experience.
To most (not all, and probably not you) users, these trump the things a desktop PC can do that a tablet can't.
And I'm supposed to do serious work and study on a tablet? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Why not exactly? I was thinking about this now -- my iPad has more pixels of screen (albeit a bit smaller) than my MacBookPro. It can talk to a bluetooth keyboard and to an external monitor. I don't know about an external mouse, I never had occasion to try. My MBP has a lot more CPU power and a development environment, and much more storage, but I can perfectly well connect the iPad to a server for that sort of thing. Why should I carry it around with me, or even have it cluttering up my office. I have a decent SSH client on it.
There are still reasons, of course. The iPad is a much more closed environment -- there is software I want to run (with GUI so I want to run it locally) that apple might not approve of. On the other hand more and more software is running in Javascript in a browser (and/or on the server side), so this is likely to be less of a restriction. I can see the laptop and desktop effectively disappearing. You put your phone/pad down on or near your desk and the keyboard and screen(s) on your desk are now extensions of your phone/pad environment. There might well be a CPU in the back of the screen, so that things run faster at your desk, and storage in the room or building to provide a fast cache of your cloud storage, but as far as the user is concerned, it's phone/pad all the way.
True, but there are lots of ways to work. For instance send a few probes out in different directions at (say) 1% of lightspeed with decent telescopes.
After a few decades the probes (which can locate themselves using pulsars) can get a fantastic parallax baseline to pin down the 3D location of anything within a few hundred lightyears very accurately indeed. Then you can use pulsars to steer the next generation (faster) probe through the target solar system.
And if the material that comes up on a search is slanderous, that's grounds fir a defamation suit.
Unless it's true. Telling the truth is never slander, no matter how embarrassing it may be.
it is in UK.
Not true, but the burden of proof is on the teller in some circumstances. There are also offenses other than libel/slander (like official secrets violations or privacy violations) which limit what truths you can tell where and how.
Slashdot Mirror
You're confusing magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. The tiny gold capsules are inertial confinement -- you zap the capsule with a short and very intense burst of energy, compressing it and getting fusion until it flies apart. Essentially a very very tiny H-bomb.
In magnetic confinement you hold the a much less compressed but very very hot gas in place with magnetic fields while it fuses relatively slowly. Current experimental designs tend to run in pulses of a few seconds or minutes, but engineering refinements should lead to ones that burn continuously, with more fuel being added and "ash" (helium) removed.
As you make tokamaks bigger they get more efficient, because there is less surface for the energy to leak out of, compared to the volume of plasma. ITER is designed to achieve scientific break-even -- more power out of the reaction than is used to run the magnets etc. The next stage will be a reactor that achieves actual power generation -- more electricity out the whole plant than goes in. This is harder because or turbine inefficiency etc. Because of the scaling up thing, if these do produce useful power it will be gigawatts.
What UW have is a variation of the magnetic confinement setup, generating the magnetic fields in a different way. Their calculations suggest that it will scale up cheaper and efficient than the current favourite design (a tokamak), but this remains to be demonstrated.
Depends where you look. The atmosphere hasn't warmed, but the oceans have. All the models and evidence suggest that this shift is cyclical and will reverse.
Interesting. The last sentence on the Wikipedia page for helium:
"Helium is a finite resource and is one of the few elements with escape velocity, meaning that once released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space."
So how does that work?
At a given temperature the typical velocity of a gas molecule depends on its mass. The lighter, the faster.
Helium is the only gas molecule that is stable in the atmosphere and has a typical velocity near the top of the atmosphere that is faster than Earth's escape velocity, so it slowly diffuses up to the top and then is gradually lost to space.
Basically the conditions (temperature, density, amount of ionizing radiation around) thought to apply, the gas would be made up of atoms that tend to simply bounce off one another when they collide. This doesn't change the total energy in random motion of the cloud, ie the temperature.
More complex atoms or molecules can interact in more complicated ways when they collide, so that part of the energy ends up as vibration in a molecule, or extra energy of an electron in an excited state. These vibrating molecules or excited atoms then relax back to their ground state releasing a photon and so actually cooling the cloud.
There's no 4G outside Edinburgh & Glasgow at the moment I believe, but there is good 3G covering pretty much all the Universities and their surroundings and good wifi in the university buildings. If she's coming to St Andrews (statistically likely) there is definitely no 4G.
. For one thing, string theory will probably need to be scrapped.
Not because of this. Supersymmetry and string theory address different problems and are more or less independent.
They're called blades
I wonder if the engines could be useful even without the plane?
Strap a bunch of them, some disposable LH2 tanks and a parachute onto the side of a Falcon and drop them when you hit Mach 5. Should improve the mass ration no end.
Assuming the astronomers are right, the way it happened is this:
About 420 million years after the Big Bang, this clump of gas formed into a small galaxy and emited a lot of light. At that time, about 1 billion light years away, and moving away at close to the speed of light was another clump of gas.
13 billion years later according to clocks on that other clump of gas, the light "overhauls" the other clump of gas, and is seen by Hubble.
There are other points of view that assign different numbers to some bits of this, but they all agree on the actual facts.
James Blish had the solution in his "Cities in Flight" books fifty years ago. Fit a suitable number of spindizzies and fly New York off into the galaxy to look for work.
You tube however is in your country. Can you get seek an injunction on them to takedown the video based on the fact you can prove the other side is perjuring itself.
PR works well where this is a substantial centre party (eg Germany) and badly where there isn't (eg Israel). Most systems also have a lower cutoff, so you have to get 5 or 10% of the vote before you get any seats, which excludes the real loonies.
It is EASY to create the world's shortest laser pulse: emit a single photon. It is monochromatic, coherent (so it meets the laser defninition), and has the shortest possible pulse. .
No, by cleverly combining multiple photons of different frequencies you can produce a pulse that concentrates its energy in a shorter timespan. Calling it a laser pulse is actually stretching a point a bit, it is triggered by laser light, but the pulse itself is not monochromatic.
It's true, of course, that there are many more apparent imminent catastrophes (AICs) than actual catastrophes, especially as we are still here to argue about it.
Some AICs arise from incomplete understanding, some from politically motivated woolly thinking and will go away if ignored. Some are real risks and we just get lucky. Others are partially mitigated by actions taken in response to the apparent threat (Y2K for instance). Some may be fully genuine threats averted by prompt action. Nuclear war between NATO and Warsaw pact in the 60s or 70s might be argued to fall into this category. CND and others successfully undermined the notion of "winnable nuclear war" and made sure that no Western politicians would risk nuclear war.
However, NONE OF THIS MEANS THAT THE NEXT ONE WILL NOT BE REAL. Probably it won't, but we can't just assume it isn't a real threat because the last one wasn't. We have to study each plausible threat, do our best to estimate the risk and where the risk appears significant, do what we can to mitigate it. The universe does not owe us continued existence, let alone continued civilization.
Quantities needed are tiny. It's a surface coating on a few square meters of first wall per gigawatt scale power plant. Not a problem.
No, Victor's machine makes a random choice of whether to entangle or not and makes it AFTER Alice & Bob make their measurements.
I'm talking 10 years out, as I have said a couple of times. I doubt there will be zero bars anywhere in Europe or North America except perhaps national parks by then. Anyway, the JS could probably support most of your work locally and resync when it gets a chance.
Plugging hardware in is the equivalent of installing an app. Standardized interfaces and pre-approved standardized products. My guess is that compiling and installing software IN 5-10 YEARS will feel like installing a PCI card or DIMMs now -- not impossible, or unheard of, but a bit scary, voids your warranty and not something most people do.
Software development will form just as negligible a part of the personal computing market in 10 years as it does now.
That said, my best guess: the IDE will be running partly in Javascript on your browser and partly on a server. Installing software on the thing you hold
will be about as strange as installing hardware on it is now. Not unheard of, but old-fashioned and unusual.
It's my understanding that any device for creating, as opposed to a device primarily for viewing, will require some sort of "special training or experience."
This is often true, but the handful of exceptions have been HUGE hits -- mobile phone cameras with facebook integration, for instance. The content created is mostly not very interesting to anyone except the creator and a few friends, of course, but that's hardly new.
There will always be niche markets. My personal guess is that in ten years they will basically all be presented as peripherals for your phone/tablet. They may, in fact, be many times more powerful, and essentially take over when you are using them, but the experience will be a continuation of the "smartphone" experience, in the sense that your preferences/identity/data/etc. will all be the same.
Two things. One is that I doubt many people do software development on the bus. The things I want to do on the bus work fine on the tablet -- read some papers, check my mail (as of last network connection) , play a game to while away the journey.
The other is that we are looking a few years ahead here. We're talking about companies positioning themselves for how they see the market in 2-5 years, not how they see it now.
There are two things a tablet can do that a desktop, or even a laptop won't do:
1. Weigh less than 1kg and fit in a handbag or large pocket
2. Be usable (at least for some purposes) by random members of the public with no special training or experience.
To most (not all, and probably not you) users, these trump the things a desktop PC can do that a tablet can't.
Me too.
And I'm supposed to do serious work and study on a tablet? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Why not exactly? I was thinking about this now -- my iPad has more pixels of screen (albeit a bit smaller) than my MacBookPro. It can talk to a bluetooth keyboard and to an external monitor. I don't know about an external mouse, I never had occasion to try. My MBP has a lot more CPU power and a development environment, and much more storage, but I can perfectly well connect the iPad to a server for that sort of thing. Why should I carry it around with me, or even have it cluttering up my office. I have a decent SSH client on it.
There are still reasons, of course. The iPad is a much more closed environment -- there is software I want to run (with GUI so I want to run it locally) that apple might not approve of. On the other hand more and more software is running in Javascript in a browser (and/or on the server side), so this is likely to be less of a restriction. I can see the laptop and desktop effectively disappearing. You put your phone/pad down on or near your desk and the keyboard and screen(s) on your desk are now extensions of your phone/pad environment. There might well be a CPU in the back of the screen, so that things run faster at your desk, and storage in the room or building to provide a fast cache of your cloud storage, but as far as the user is concerned, it's phone/pad all the way.
True, but there are lots of ways to work. For instance send a few probes out in different directions at (say) 1% of lightspeed with decent telescopes.
After a few decades the probes (which can locate themselves using pulsars) can get a fantastic parallax baseline to pin down the 3D location of anything within a few hundred lightyears very accurately indeed. Then you can use pulsars to steer the next generation (faster) probe through the target solar system.
The idea that you could get position to 5km over light years is new.
And if the material that comes up on a search is slanderous, that's grounds fir a defamation suit.
Unless it's true. Telling the truth is never slander, no matter how embarrassing it may be.
it is in UK.
Not true, but the burden of proof is on the teller in some circumstances. There are also offenses other than libel/slander (like official secrets violations or privacy violations) which limit what truths you can tell where and how.