Corporations don't make choices about who they do business with? And you want to encode, in law, that they're not responsible for choosing who they do business with?
One, it's a common interest. Lots of people don't read. Many aren't into painting or cars or gaming or photography or other hobbies. But it's rare to find a person so uninterested in music that they can't converse on the topic at even a superficial level, even if all they hear is what's playing on the radio at work.
Second, it's a safe topic of discussion. It's not religion or politics, and it's even unlikely to segue into those topics.
So "when you first meet people," it makes sense that it's a popular topic of conversation. You have a high likelihood of actually being able to converse, and a low likelihood of pissing people off.
Wait. So now, if *I* use Google Earth, here an America, the information Google's providing me is censored to please India?
Jesus. Even their censorship in China wasn't that evil. This is far, far worse. When can we expect Google search results here in American to be censored to please foreign governments?
It can't prove string theory. It can *support* it, or it can disprove it, falsify it, contradict it. But it can't confirm it. All the experimental data in the universe can't do that.
Tell me, what kind of leverage does Microsoft have to negotiate terms here?
Why on earth should Microsoft even negotiate terms? It's not like all those 80-gig iPods out there are filled with songs purchased through iTMS; most of what they're playing are mp3s, not AACs.
If Microsoft wants to sell a *music player*, they don't need to negotiate terms at all. They don't even need to fucking *talk* to the likes of Sony. This is *Microsoft*. If they want to capture a significant percentage of the music player market, and maybe even take some of that market away from Apple, then they shouldn't negotiate terms. They should worry about making a music player that people are going to *want to buy*. Like, maybe something that plays every damned format of audio you can stick on it, including Vorbis. Maybe something that features improvements over the iPod interface (and there are quite a few interface improvements that should be readily apparent to anyone who has used one).
You know, give the customer something he's willing to buy, at a price he's willing to pay for it. Why should MS talk to Sony and BMG and Universal? Shouldn't they be talking to their target customers, instead?
Secondly, it opens up an arms race in space, with money thrown into space weapons research, testing, and bigger and heavier weaponry.
Why do people keep thinking this is new? It's not. The only new thing is that it's China doing it.
The USA successfully tested an anti-satellite missile over twenty years ago. And when I mean "successfully tested," I mean we did just what the Chinese did here: destroyed an actual satellite in actual orbit around the actual earth. And it wasn't something like NMD, where we had to test it a dozen times to get a single kill. There was one test, and it just worked.
The Soviets had a working anti-satellite program even earlier than that, basically big fragmentation warheads that they'd launch into a matching orbit and then maneuver into kill range of the target satellite. Seven interceptions. Hell, the Soviets even launched (unsuccessfully) an armed orbital battle station.
All of this was decades ago. So why the fears of opening up an arms race?
But I was thinking, is this a possible way to launch orbiting vehicles?
No, because when you shoot a projectile, you're putting it into a orbit that intersects the earth. You need some other impulse source to circularize the orbit.
Here in the US we don't reprocess our spent fuel, because it costs more to reprocess that to just make new.
That's wrong. Not just a little bit wrong. It's dead-solid totally wrong.
Proliferation concerns led President Carter to issue an executive order banning all non-military fuel reprocessing. This happened in 1977. We haven't reprocessed fuel since.
Yes, Reagan issued a new executive order canceling Carter's. But now that the writing was on the wall, nobody was going to spend a lot money setting up reprocessing operations that could end up having their capital investment reduced to a thing grey paste by the stroke of a presidential pen. The government knew how to reprocess fuel effectively, they'd been doing it for decades, but without their assistance the private sector wasn't going to do that. And sure enough, Clinton came along and reinstituted the Carter policy.
It's not that it's cheaper to reprocess than just make new. If you don't reprocess, you're pulling fuel rods out of the reactor when barely 1-1.5% of the actual fuel has undergone fission. It's that all the experience and expertise in *how to do it* isn't in the private sector, and the government won't help the private sector learn how to do it.
At a whopping 10 fissions per kilo per second, I doubt that much of the radiation is even escaping the material.
Where do you get that figure? Specific activity of Pu-239 is.063 curies per gram, so 63 curies per kilo. That's 233E10 decays per second per kilo, not 10. So you're off by a bit.
"People have seen stellar-sized black holes that form from [an exploded] star, and then there are the super-massive black holes at the centres of galaxies that are millions of times the mass of our Sun - but there's nothing in between.
That's what we've seen because that's where we've gone looking. You'd expect holes to form from supernovas, so you look at the center of planetary nebulae, where stars used to live before they exploded. You'd expect them to form at galactic centers, so you look there to find them. There's nothing in between because we haven't gone looking for the in-betweens yet.
. Right now it is illegal to possess any form of 'child' pornography (rightfully so) - and there have been some defense attempts to show that the images aren't real- they're photoshopped.
Well, no, that's not true, at least not in the US.
There *was* a law passed which made possession of the mere depiction of child porn illegal. Even if it was a completely computer generated image, or line drawing, or even a young-looking adult dressed up in, say, a Girl Scout uniform, it would be every bit as illegal as actual photographs of the rape of a 5-year-old. All that was required was for the image to "appear" to be a minor engaged in sexual conduct. And, too, it wasn't just pictures, but any kind of depiction, like a written story.
The Supreme Court rightly determined that that law was unconstitutional. Several years ago. The case was Free Speech Coalition v. Ashcroft.
A tool you can't afford to learn how to use or maintain is functionally equivalent to no tool at all. If $100/laptop really just gets these countries a bunch of $100 bricks, it's better that they spend the money on things more useful to them.
How long before we see these things being used to enforce compliance with police requests, as tasers are, or in interrogation rooms?
The easier it becomes to inflict pain without evidence, the more that will happen. In the old days, they'd just beat you with a garden hose. Now they have something that will be agonizing, but won't even leave a bruise.
The energy release if one of the SC magnets quenches is an entirely different matter from what would happen from the beam hitting the wall. Your post conveyed the image of a near-solid beam of ions crashing into the wall of the collider at close-to-c and making a big boom. That doesn't happen, and LHC@home isn't trying to simulate the beam for that reason.
The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion.
Huh? You're making that up. Completely making that up. Compute particle energy x number of particles in the loop, it's nothing in macroscopic terms. LHC will be capable of heavy ion collisions at energy levels of 1150 teraelectron volts, which sounds really impressive (and it is, on the quantum scale), but here in the big world that's only one ten-thousandth of a joule.
while something like Pirates (the porn film; don't worry, the link is to the wiki article about it) would not? Both are set in pseudo-historical or pseudo-mythological settings, and both are primarily interesting for their violent and sexual content, respectively, with the setting being just that - an interesting setting for the violence or sexuality to take place in. Yet the latter is very clearly considered (my those whose opinion matters in court) "obscene"
Well, no, it's not. That's why it's legal and considered protected speech, and why you're allowed to rent and buy and sell it: it's *not* considered obscene, and doesn't meet the Miller test.
When recycling makes economic sense, it happens without such laws. Some incredibly high percentage of aluminum cans, for example, are recycled, because the production of aluminum involves a lot of expensive electricity. It's far less expensive to just melt down already-produced aluminum and recast it, which is why even before 1991's Earth Day got a lot of hippies convinced that they could save the planet you could take your empty aluminum cans down to a recycling center and get *paid* for them. They had value, because they were worth recycling.
And when recycling doesn't make economic sense, why would you worry about it? Nobody's going to pay you for your old scraps of paper, because paper is produced from trees that are grown as a crop for that specific purpose. Recycling the old paper is pretty much as expensive and resource-hungry as the production of new paper in the first place, and telling people to recycle paper to save trees is like telling people to recycle popcorn to save corn.
According to Justin Raimondo's analysis of the case, Litivenko is a raving lunatic whose accusations in general have been ridiculously unsubstantiated.
Justin Raimondo calling someone a raving lunatic is a bit like Barry Goldwater calling someone a staunch conservative.
It is for a death from radiological causes. To kill someone in mere days requires obscenely high doses of radiation, we're talking prompt-criticality accidents. Slotin took 2100 rems in an instant, enough to noticeably heat the air in the room, and he still lasted for 9 days.
Shades of Georgi Markov, a Soviet expatriate/dissident who was also assassinated in London. He was stabbed in the leg with a special spring-loaded umbrella that subcutaneously injected a metal pellet contaminated with ricin. They didn't even find the pellet until he was already dead, and it took some work to find out just what had killed him.
I wonder how they got the polonium into him. For a death this rapid, he'd pretty much have had to ingest it.
Read the paper. It's (to me) surprisingly accessible for an MIT doctoral thesis.
You're putting the cart before the horse; first you get a self-sustaining reaction then you work out the bugs in the reactor design.
These aren't "bugs" in the reactor design. They are fundamental materials problems; like I said, it is entirely possible that suitable materials simply do not exist. Throwing billions and billions of dollars at mere engineering problems when a materials problem might be a complete game-breaker, rendering all those billions wasted, is not good science.
then it's still too early to say that fixing them "may never be possible".
No. It's too early to say that fixing them will never be possible. But materials problems are of a level beyond that of simple engineering. If they weren't, we'd all be driving around in cars with solid-state lubricants bonded inexorably to all engine surfaces and getting to space in a big elevator to geostationary orbit.
Finally, wasn't the whole idea of using a replaceable lithium blanket supposed to alleviate this?
No. You wouldn't place the lithium *in* the reactor vessel, it would contaminate the plasma and destroy the reaction. The idea is to use lithium to blanket the reactor vessel. Neutrons escaping the vessel would be captured by the lithium blanket. The lithium would heat up, allowing you to extract energy from the reactor and convert it into electricity. Some of the lithium would transmute to tritium. But this says nothing about what you build the reactor vessel out of, except that you want it to let neutrons out. It says nothing about what you build the plasma-facing components out of. It says nothing about how to avoid contaminating the plasma with sputtering from the PFCs.
I disagree with the notion that we should give up fusion R&D
I didn't mean to suggest we should. I just wanted to bring to light an issue that gets very little attention relative to igniting the plasma in the first place. Even if ITER hits Q=10, that won't bring us much closer to commercial fusion (for which you really need Q=20, anyway) than we are right now. For another sticking point, they're still not going to be breeding tritium, and I don't think they're actually going to be turning any of the reactor's power output into electricity. But those are comparatively minor problems.
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Corporations don't make choices about who they do business with? And you want to encode, in law, that they're not responsible for choosing who they do business with?
Are you insane?
Two things.
One, it's a common interest. Lots of people don't read. Many aren't into painting or cars or gaming or photography or other hobbies. But it's rare to find a person so uninterested in music that they can't converse on the topic at even a superficial level, even if all they hear is what's playing on the radio at work.
Second, it's a safe topic of discussion. It's not religion or politics, and it's even unlikely to segue into those topics.
So "when you first meet people," it makes sense that it's a popular topic of conversation. You have a high likelihood of actually being able to converse, and a low likelihood of pissing people off.
Wait. So now, if *I* use Google Earth, here an America, the information Google's providing me is censored to please India?
Jesus. Even their censorship in China wasn't that evil. This is far, far worse. When can we expect Google search results here in American to be censored to please foreign governments?
is it toxic waste and dog shit?
They said the University of East Anglia, not the University of Newark.
It can't prove string theory. It can *support* it, or it can disprove it, falsify it, contradict it. But it can't confirm it. All the experimental data in the universe can't do that.
Tell me, what kind of leverage does Microsoft have to negotiate terms here?
Why on earth should Microsoft even negotiate terms? It's not like all those 80-gig iPods out there are filled with songs purchased through iTMS; most of what they're playing are mp3s, not AACs.
If Microsoft wants to sell a *music player*, they don't need to negotiate terms at all. They don't even need to fucking *talk* to the likes of Sony. This is *Microsoft*. If they want to capture a significant percentage of the music player market, and maybe even take some of that market away from Apple, then they shouldn't negotiate terms. They should worry about making a music player that people are going to *want to buy*. Like, maybe something that plays every damned format of audio you can stick on it, including Vorbis. Maybe something that features improvements over the iPod interface (and there are quite a few interface improvements that should be readily apparent to anyone who has used one).
You know, give the customer something he's willing to buy, at a price he's willing to pay for it. Why should MS talk to Sony and BMG and Universal? Shouldn't they be talking to their target customers, instead?
Secondly, it opens up an arms race in space, with money thrown into space weapons research, testing, and bigger and heavier weaponry.
Why do people keep thinking this is new? It's not. The only new thing is that it's China doing it.
The USA successfully tested an anti-satellite missile over twenty years ago. And when I mean "successfully tested," I mean we did just what the Chinese did here: destroyed an actual satellite in actual orbit around the actual earth. And it wasn't something like NMD, where we had to test it a dozen times to get a single kill. There was one test, and it just worked.
The Soviets had a working anti-satellite program even earlier than that, basically big fragmentation warheads that they'd launch into a matching orbit and then maneuver into kill range of the target satellite. Seven interceptions. Hell, the Soviets even launched (unsuccessfully) an armed orbital battle station.
All of this was decades ago. So why the fears of opening up an arms race?
But I was thinking, is this a possible way to launch orbiting vehicles?
No, because when you shoot a projectile, you're putting it into a orbit that intersects the earth. You need some other impulse source to circularize the orbit.
Isn't it the job of the OS to ride herd on ill-behaved apps and prevent them from rendering the system insecure and unstable?
Here in the US we don't reprocess our spent fuel, because it costs more to reprocess that to just make new.
That's wrong. Not just a little bit wrong. It's dead-solid totally wrong.
Proliferation concerns led President Carter to issue an executive order banning all non-military fuel reprocessing. This happened in 1977. We haven't reprocessed fuel since.
Yes, Reagan issued a new executive order canceling Carter's. But now that the writing was on the wall, nobody was going to spend a lot money setting up reprocessing operations that could end up having their capital investment reduced to a thing grey paste by the stroke of a presidential pen. The government knew how to reprocess fuel effectively, they'd been doing it for decades, but without their assistance the private sector wasn't going to do that. And sure enough, Clinton came along and reinstituted the Carter policy.
It's not that it's cheaper to reprocess than just make new. If you don't reprocess, you're pulling fuel rods out of the reactor when barely 1-1.5% of the actual fuel has undergone fission. It's that all the experience and expertise in *how to do it* isn't in the private sector, and the government won't help the private sector learn how to do it.
At a whopping 10 fissions per kilo per second, I doubt that much of the radiation is even escaping the material.
.063 curies per gram, so 63 curies per kilo. That's 233E10 decays per second per kilo, not 10. So you're off by a bit.
Where do you get that figure? Specific activity of Pu-239 is
Your general point is dead-on; this isn't stuff that we should be calling 'waste' and trying to wall off from the universe until it runs to lead, it's good fissile fuel that we should be burning in an Integral Fast Reactor or similar advanced design. Hell, burn it in a PWR, and let fuel reprocessing take place. Nuclear waste is a concern, yes, but there's no point whatsoever in making it more of a concern by calling all sorts of useful, fissile or fertile isotopes "waste."
You mean like STTNG: A Final Unity, which came out 12 years ago?
"People have seen stellar-sized black holes that form from [an exploded] star, and then there are the super-massive black holes at the centres of galaxies that are millions of times the mass of our Sun - but there's nothing in between.
That's what we've seen because that's where we've gone looking. You'd expect holes to form from supernovas, so you look at the center of planetary nebulae, where stars used to live before they exploded. You'd expect them to form at galactic centers, so you look there to find them. There's nothing in between because we haven't gone looking for the in-betweens yet.
. Right now it is illegal to possess any form of 'child' pornography (rightfully so) - and there have been some defense attempts to show that the images aren't real- they're photoshopped.
Well, no, that's not true, at least not in the US.
There *was* a law passed which made possession of the mere depiction of child porn illegal. Even if it was a completely computer generated image, or line drawing, or even a young-looking adult dressed up in, say, a Girl Scout uniform, it would be every bit as illegal as actual photographs of the rape of a 5-year-old. All that was required was for the image to "appear" to be a minor engaged in sexual conduct. And, too, it wasn't just pictures, but any kind of depiction, like a written story.
The Supreme Court rightly determined that that law was unconstitutional. Several years ago. The case was Free Speech Coalition v. Ashcroft.
A tool you can't afford to learn how to use or maintain is functionally equivalent to no tool at all. If $100/laptop really just gets these countries a bunch of $100 bricks, it's better that they spend the money on things more useful to them.
Screw domestic crowd control.
How long before we see these things being used to enforce compliance with police requests, as tasers are, or in interrogation rooms?
The easier it becomes to inflict pain without evidence, the more that will happen. In the old days, they'd just beat you with a garden hose. Now they have something that will be agonizing, but won't even leave a bruise.
The energy release if one of the SC magnets quenches is an entirely different matter from what would happen from the beam hitting the wall. Your post conveyed the image of a near-solid beam of ions crashing into the wall of the collider at close-to-c and making a big boom. That doesn't happen, and LHC@home isn't trying to simulate the beam for that reason.
The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion.
Huh? You're making that up. Completely making that up. Compute particle energy x number of particles in the loop, it's nothing in macroscopic terms. LHC will be capable of heavy ion collisions at energy levels of 1150 teraelectron volts, which sounds really impressive (and it is, on the quantum scale), but here in the big world that's only one ten-thousandth of a joule.
while something like Pirates (the porn film; don't worry, the link is to the wiki article about it) would not? Both are set in pseudo-historical or pseudo-mythological settings, and both are primarily interesting for their violent and sexual content, respectively, with the setting being just that - an interesting setting for the violence or sexuality to take place in. Yet the latter is very clearly considered (my those whose opinion matters in court) "obscene"
Well, no, it's not. That's why it's legal and considered protected speech, and why you're allowed to rent and buy and sell it: it's *not* considered obscene, and doesn't meet the Miller test.
Why?
When recycling makes economic sense, it happens without such laws. Some incredibly high percentage of aluminum cans, for example, are recycled, because the production of aluminum involves a lot of expensive electricity. It's far less expensive to just melt down already-produced aluminum and recast it, which is why even before 1991's Earth Day got a lot of hippies convinced that they could save the planet you could take your empty aluminum cans down to a recycling center and get *paid* for them. They had value, because they were worth recycling.
And when recycling doesn't make economic sense, why would you worry about it? Nobody's going to pay you for your old scraps of paper, because paper is produced from trees that are grown as a crop for that specific purpose. Recycling the old paper is pretty much as expensive and resource-hungry as the production of new paper in the first place, and telling people to recycle paper to save trees is like telling people to recycle popcorn to save corn.
According to Justin Raimondo's analysis of the case, Litivenko is a raving lunatic whose accusations in general have been ridiculously unsubstantiated.
Justin Raimondo calling someone a raving lunatic is a bit like Barry Goldwater calling someone a staunch conservative.
It is for a death from radiological causes. To kill someone in mere days requires obscenely high doses of radiation, we're talking prompt-criticality accidents. Slotin took 2100 rems in an instant, enough to noticeably heat the air in the room, and he still lasted for 9 days.
Shades of Georgi Markov, a Soviet expatriate/dissident who was also assassinated in London. He was stabbed in the leg with a special spring-loaded umbrella that subcutaneously injected a metal pellet contaminated with ricin. They didn't even find the pellet until he was already dead, and it took some work to find out just what had killed him.
I wonder how they got the polonium into him. For a death this rapid, he'd pretty much have had to ingest it.
There are aneutronic fusion reactions. We aren't at the stage where we can use them, but the possibility is there.
No, it's not. Aneutronic fusion is orders of magnitude more difficult to even get going than D-T fusion, and this paper is pretty much a death knell for them. Brehmstrallung losses due to the interactions between fuel ions and free electrons which do not participate in the fusion reaction, become fatal for aneutronic schemes; tritium-tritium, proton-lithium, and proton-boron fusion will in any posited reactor scheme, lose more energy to Brehmstrallung losses than they produce from fusion.
Read the paper. It's (to me) surprisingly accessible for an MIT doctoral thesis.
You're putting the cart before the horse; first you get a self-sustaining reaction then you work out the bugs in the reactor design.
These aren't "bugs" in the reactor design. They are fundamental materials problems; like I said, it is entirely possible that suitable materials simply do not exist. Throwing billions and billions of dollars at mere engineering problems when a materials problem might be a complete game-breaker, rendering all those billions wasted, is not good science.
then it's still too early to say that fixing them "may never be possible".
No. It's too early to say that fixing them will never be possible. But materials problems are of a level beyond that of simple engineering. If they weren't, we'd all be driving around in cars with solid-state lubricants bonded inexorably to all engine surfaces and getting to space in a big elevator to geostationary orbit.
Finally, wasn't the whole idea of using a replaceable lithium blanket supposed to alleviate this?
No. You wouldn't place the lithium *in* the reactor vessel, it would contaminate the plasma and destroy the reaction. The idea is to use lithium to blanket the reactor vessel. Neutrons escaping the vessel would be captured by the lithium blanket. The lithium would heat up, allowing you to extract energy from the reactor and convert it into electricity. Some of the lithium would transmute to tritium. But this says nothing about what you build the reactor vessel out of, except that you want it to let neutrons out. It says nothing about what you build the plasma-facing components out of. It says nothing about how to avoid contaminating the plasma with sputtering from the PFCs.
I disagree with the notion that we should give up fusion R&D
I didn't mean to suggest we should. I just wanted to bring to light an issue that gets very little attention relative to igniting the plasma in the first place. Even if ITER hits Q=10, that won't bring us much closer to commercial fusion (for which you really need Q=20, anyway) than we are right now. For another sticking point, they're still not going to be breeding tritium, and I don't think they're actually going to be turning any of the reactor's power output into electricity. But those are comparatively minor problems.
That's nice. Let him demonstrate how he avoids ion thermalization and proves that the paper is wrong. Saying it's wrong isn't the same thing.