Wait, that's your big example of how it could go wrong? Some terrorists finding out that most Americans aren't vaccinated for smallpox? Everybody knows that. The real determining factors in a smallpox outbreak are things like "can we quarantine affected areas effectively?" and "how fast can we administer vaccines?".
My point? A lot of work can go into making a game the *best*, whether it be the prettiest or most technical, if it fails to run on hardware even a few generations later, then something is wrong.
Crysis ran just fine on the hardware that was current when it came out. It just happens to have a lot of fancy features that kicked every GPU's ass, so they're disabled by default until the hardware catches up. It's future proofing.
California's market is big enough that this will make energy efficiency a more important R&D goal for TV manufacturers, and in a few years the costs will come down to the point where all the new TVs meet the standard. It's just like what happened with refrigerators. Hopefully.
Uranium still isn't scarce enough to make recycling spent fuel economical. And fast breeder reactors will probably be coming one of these days, though I'm not counting on it anytime soon. And the Hyperion reactors burn up about 50% of the fuel. And they can be easily modified to run on thorium instead of uranium.
The article says they are like TRIGA reactors, in that they use a uranium hydride fuel which gives them a large negative thermal coefficient of reactivity with very little time delay, thus making them inherently pretty damn safe. The similarities end there. The Hyperion reactor is a tub of UH3 with heat pipes to carry heat off to do useful work. There's no pool of water. It's just supposed to reach a high temperature and stay there.
That's neat, but the Hyperion reactor also has a very cute design: there are no moving parts except for the SCRAM mechanism. The reaction itself is inherently self-limiting.
The reactor just gives heat through heat pipes. You can use that as process heat for various industrial purposes (as the oil sands guys want to do) or you can use it to make steam for a turbine. Hyperion doesn't try to offer an integrated solution, although they have some partners who are designing turbines to be easily compatible.
That would be a ridiculously impractical place to build it. You would still need steam turbines and power distribution equipment. The ideal use, as far as I'm concerned, would be to stick these in old coal plants to replace the coal as a source of steam. Barring that, there would definitely be some kind of dedicated power plant with one or more Hyperion reactors, albeit smaller than most plants.
He also means that the spent fuel is so radioactive that enriching it to get HEU for a uranium-based bomb would be more dangerous and more difficult than just enriching yellowcake.
You mean it would be like exploding a 30 million dollar hydrogen tank, but with a little dirty bomb action thrown in to scare anybody who may happen to be nearby? I admit, that's a lot of property damage, and you might injure or kill a few of the people maintaining the turbines. Still, wouldn't bombing large, expensive office buildings be more harmful? Especially if you manage to get some uranium ore and phone the cops saying it was a dirty bomb with uranium in it; the fear alone would make people reluctant to go near the undestroyed parts of the office building.
China and India are both attempting a massive nuclear power buildup, as fast as they can manage, because apparently their government leaders have to breathe the same coal-sullied air as everybody else. Americans respond very easily to fear, and this is something to be afraid of: being left in the dust.
You didn't read the article, did you? Also, even making your bizarre assumption that the thing is above ground and made out of thin plastic or something, how are you going to "contaminate the neighborhood" by running a car into a radioactive chunk of metal? Nuclear fuel isn't a green glowing liquid. Hell, even with dirty bombs the risk of irradiation is negligible unless you're standing right next to the blast, in which case you should probably worry more about the conventional explosive that just exploded you. What I'm saying is that you should read the article.
Idiocy is not evenly distributed. There are some people who just don't seem to know anything about anything, or be capable of anything. I still have trouble grasping this fact, but reality occasionally rubs my nose in it.
What thermonuclear war would that be? If you're talking about the potential of nuclear war between India and Pakistan, then bear in mind some important facts:
1. India and Pakistan have fission bombs, not fusion bombs. "Thermonuclear" means fusion (set off by fission.)
2. The nuclear arsenals of both countries are relatively small -- about enough to completely destroy the city of Bangalore, on each side. Assuming that all the bombs work and can be efficiently delivered to their targets.
This guy mentions the way that the Internet democratizes content, but he doesn't really understand it. If anybody can post on a web site, then there's naturally going to be a lot of material that would offend him. You could maybe partially filter the Internet in 1997, back when there were fewer web sites and they changed less often, but now it's just implausible. How can you ever call a blog PG-rated when it could have a new post talking in detail about the author's BDSM fetish at any moment? How can you decide that a discussion forum is child-friendly when it may suddenly get a thread about eugenics or penis bisection? Hell, even Wikipedia has a lot of stuff that would make Family Values wankers blanch, and it's one of the most useful web sites out there. Censorship is incompatible with the modern Internet.
Yay, anecdotal "evidence"! When they have a well-controlled scientific study with similar results, then fire cupping and herbal tea might get some credibility for treating back pain.
Real men are idiots. Wernher von Braun would be smart enough to know that a dude riding a cannonball would need to do a burn around the time he reaches apogee in order to move into a stable orbit. Your cannonball still needs to have rockets on it.
Taiwan is not governed by the PRC in any way.
That depends on whether you are asking a Chinese or a Taiwanese.
How about we look at reality instead? Taiwan is de facto a country, and functions in a much more country-like manner than a UN-recognized countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. If Taiwan were governed by China, then they probably wouldn't have public protests against Chinese human rights abuses or Falun Gong guys handing out pamphlets.
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Wait, that's your big example of how it could go wrong? Some terrorists finding out that most Americans aren't vaccinated for smallpox? Everybody knows that. The real determining factors in a smallpox outbreak are things like "can we quarantine affected areas effectively?" and "how fast can we administer vaccines?".
My point? A lot of work can go into making a game the *best*, whether it be the prettiest or most technical, if it fails to run on hardware even a few generations later, then something is wrong.
Crysis ran just fine on the hardware that was current when it came out. It just happens to have a lot of fancy features that kicked every GPU's ass, so they're disabled by default until the hardware catches up. It's future proofing.
Your keyboard milage may vary. Personally, I have trouble using any other kind of keyboard these days. It's just easier on the hands.
California's market is big enough that this will make energy efficiency a more important R&D goal for TV manufacturers, and in a few years the costs will come down to the point where all the new TVs meet the standard. It's just like what happened with refrigerators. Hopefully.
But if you have more storage capacity (and therefore can use a higher bit rate) the quality differences between AAC and MP3 are debatable.
If you have DRM-free standard AAC, then why would you want to transcode to MP3? Is there some cranky old media player that can't handle AAC?
Uranium still isn't scarce enough to make recycling spent fuel economical. And fast breeder reactors will probably be coming one of these days, though I'm not counting on it anytime soon. And the Hyperion reactors burn up about 50% of the fuel. And they can be easily modified to run on thorium instead of uranium.
The article says they are like TRIGA reactors, in that they use a uranium hydride fuel which gives them a large negative thermal coefficient of reactivity with very little time delay, thus making them inherently pretty damn safe. The similarities end there. The Hyperion reactor is a tub of UH3 with heat pipes to carry heat off to do useful work. There's no pool of water. It's just supposed to reach a high temperature and stay there.
That's neat, but the Hyperion reactor also has a very cute design: there are no moving parts except for the SCRAM mechanism. The reaction itself is inherently self-limiting.
The reactor just gives heat through heat pipes. You can use that as process heat for various industrial purposes (as the oil sands guys want to do) or you can use it to make steam for a turbine. Hyperion doesn't try to offer an integrated solution, although they have some partners who are designing turbines to be easily compatible.
That would be a ridiculously impractical place to build it. You would still need steam turbines and power distribution equipment. The ideal use, as far as I'm concerned, would be to stick these in old coal plants to replace the coal as a source of steam. Barring that, there would definitely be some kind of dedicated power plant with one or more Hyperion reactors, albeit smaller than most plants.
He also means that the spent fuel is so radioactive that enriching it to get HEU for a uranium-based bomb would be more dangerous and more difficult than just enriching yellowcake.
You mean it would be like exploding a 30 million dollar hydrogen tank, but with a little dirty bomb action thrown in to scare anybody who may happen to be nearby? I admit, that's a lot of property damage, and you might injure or kill a few of the people maintaining the turbines. Still, wouldn't bombing large, expensive office buildings be more harmful? Especially if you manage to get some uranium ore and phone the cops saying it was a dirty bomb with uranium in it; the fear alone would make people reluctant to go near the undestroyed parts of the office building.
China and India are both attempting a massive nuclear power buildup, as fast as they can manage, because apparently their government leaders have to breathe the same coal-sullied air as everybody else. Americans respond very easily to fear, and this is something to be afraid of: being left in the dust.
You didn't read the article, did you? Also, even making your bizarre assumption that the thing is above ground and made out of thin plastic or something, how are you going to "contaminate the neighborhood" by running a car into a radioactive chunk of metal? Nuclear fuel isn't a green glowing liquid. Hell, even with dirty bombs the risk of irradiation is negligible unless you're standing right next to the blast, in which case you should probably worry more about the conventional explosive that just exploded you. What I'm saying is that you should read the article.
Anecdotal "at best"? What, are you suggesting that it might not be an anecdote? Like, it might actually be an ocelot or something?
Idiocy is not evenly distributed. There are some people who just don't seem to know anything about anything, or be capable of anything. I still have trouble grasping this fact, but reality occasionally rubs my nose in it.
What thermonuclear war would that be? If you're talking about the potential of nuclear war between India and Pakistan, then bear in mind some important facts:
1. India and Pakistan have fission bombs, not fusion bombs. "Thermonuclear" means fusion (set off by fission.)
2. The nuclear arsenals of both countries are relatively small -- about enough to completely destroy the city of Bangalore, on each side. Assuming that all the bombs work and can be efficiently delivered to their targets.
Research, man!
Is there some way to make people suffer for patent trolling? Considering what a drain patent trolls are on the economy, there ought to be.
This guy mentions the way that the Internet democratizes content, but he doesn't really understand it. If anybody can post on a web site, then there's naturally going to be a lot of material that would offend him. You could maybe partially filter the Internet in 1997, back when there were fewer web sites and they changed less often, but now it's just implausible. How can you ever call a blog PG-rated when it could have a new post talking in detail about the author's BDSM fetish at any moment? How can you decide that a discussion forum is child-friendly when it may suddenly get a thread about eugenics or penis bisection? Hell, even Wikipedia has a lot of stuff that would make Family Values wankers blanch, and it's one of the most useful web sites out there. Censorship is incompatible with the modern Internet.
The abstract is incomprehensible gibberish with no common thread except "we love non sequiturs". I doubt the rest of the article is much better.
Yay, anecdotal "evidence"! When they have a well-controlled scientific study with similar results, then fire cupping and herbal tea might get some credibility for treating back pain.
Real men are idiots. Wernher von Braun would be smart enough to know that a dude riding a cannonball would need to do a burn around the time he reaches apogee in order to move into a stable orbit. Your cannonball still needs to have rockets on it.
The "moon mission" thing is a red herring. Think instead "rebuilding the void in our launch capabilities left by the shuttle".
Taiwan is not governed by the PRC in any way. That depends on whether you are asking a Chinese or a Taiwanese.
How about we look at reality instead? Taiwan is de facto a country, and functions in a much more country-like manner than a UN-recognized countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. If Taiwan were governed by China, then they probably wouldn't have public protests against Chinese human rights abuses or Falun Gong guys handing out pamphlets.