I've driven all over Ireland and the best way to know how far and how long it's going to take to get from point A to point B is to use experience.
And why cannot software do this? Don't use time/distance/speed. Use experience: the average of the last 100 journeys from to here was Y minutes, so when bus reaches , advertise it in Y minutes time. Don't average over too large a window, so that it automatically adjust itself when busses travel slower in winter or there are roadworks nearby. Requires modest amount of storage - easily within the capacity of a flash memory.
In most cases, RAID is slower than single-disk access,
True for write at raid 4/5, not true for read under any raid. If two pieces of data are on different drives, you can get the differfent heads seeking independently. Raid 0, 1, 3 have the seek efficiency of a single drive and the data transfer efficiency of a multiple drive. Dince data processinjg accesses are dominated by seek, 4 and 4, which allow multiple seeks, will beed single drives.
Tanks are already using reactive armour which has the same properties. You may see it on TV footage of takns, particularly Soviet ones. It lookes like a bunch of fuel cans stapped on outside the armour. It is actually cans of a relatively "soft" esplosive, which will go off when hit by an imcoming missile, and will reach the armour before the missile (becaise explosians travel very fast). Firstly, it disrupts the missile. Secondly, it pre-prepares the armour, so that it is "bouncing back" when the missile arrives, so is in a much better state to repel it.
Of course, multiple hits in the same spot will take out the vehicle. But in a battle situation, the enemy probably doesn't get more than one chance of a shot, let alone two shots which hit within the same limited area. Basically, if shots are random, the chance of two shots hitting the same area is the square of the chance of one shot. If the chance of a shot hitting a single spot is 1/100, the chance of two shots hitting the same spot is 1/10000. If the enemy fires 100 shots, they are almost certain to get you in the one case, but have only a 1% chance of getting you in the second. Basically, it makes you much, much safer. Not totally safe, but no-one said the battlefield was a safe place.
This is very dodgy stiatistics. The fact that 830,000 jobs havce been sourced overseas doies not mean that 830,000 jobs have disappeared: that would be to assume no growth at all.
I don't have figures for softw3are developers, but The Economist reckons that the number employed in the US in call centers (one of the other major outsourcing scapegoats) has been essentially constant for about 5 years. Which suggests that one of the major drivers for outsorurcing is not so much cheapness as availability: the US has used up all the people able and willing to do that sort of work. Outsourcers have already found the hard way that the savings are way smaller than expected - even negative. But if you cannot get the people at home, overseas looks good.
Which is not to say that nobody has ever lost their job to overseas outsourcing - of course they have. But it is to suggest that there are still jobs somewhere in the onshore US for all those displaced - though maybe not where they currently live. But this is the US way - make firing easy so peopel will hire easy. The alternative is the European way: make it so difficult to fire someone that you don't dare set up a risky venture because the downsizing costs will double your losses.
Historically, the upside of the US attitude to jobs has worked very well. Why is Silicon valley in Californai, not England? Because the US has a risk-friendly, failure tolerant attitude. Losing out to outsources is the downside of the same coin.
At this point, you have got to stop thinking of a computer as a single defined device. Even if you ignore mainframes and restrict yourself to the PC-compatible market, people use computers for many things. Cellphoneas are never going to be web-servers. They are never going to be full-blown geek machines - you are not going to program on them. But probably 90% of users never do anything like that.
The fact of interest is that CPU power is no longer a restriction - a cellphone has enough oomph to run most applciations that mist users run. Where it lacks, as you point out, is input devices, output devices, and to some extent storage.
Input on most cellphones is frankly awful for anything other than dialling numbers or very simple menu driven systems. Output on that tiny screen is poor, but not that bad. In fact, if the possibility of it beaing read on a cellphone screen stops people sending HTML email, I'll count that a win. Likewise, storage is enough for most peoples text needs, but will be rapidly drained by images, even still.
So the "killer feature" to make these work is better input. Of course, one day one day true voice recognition will arrive, delivered by a flight of pigs. Until that porcine dawn, people will keep trying to find other input mechanisms that work. Until they do, I think the proposal by the OP is, so some extent, wishful thinking.
In the UK, we are going to have broadcast TV indefinitely, but they are going to turn off the analog broadcast in about 2008 and have digital only. Digital broadcast - not satellite - is already up and running.
I would imagind that the same is likely to be true in the US in due course, because there are some places which it will never by appropriate to run cable, and cutting someone off fram access to TV is downright un-American.
Apart from anything else, what \re you going to wathc in your RV. And will they cable all the trailer parks? I know satellite is an option, but Digital Terrestrial is likely to be in there.
Which means that the watch will have to pack in a full digital decoder. Hmm - another couple of years, I would say.
Of course, things like this can affect the process. If there are a load of people going around with gadgets like this, advertisers will pay to get to them. If good enough, these can make their own supply.
It's an IBM 360/370 class mainframe: not sure what model. Somebody up the line said that the software was written in Jovial, which strikes me as very likely. Jovial was an Algol variant popular in defence/high reliability circles at about the time this lot was written.
I think the system which crashed was only responsible for admitting new flight plans to the whole complex. Any flightplan already filed could carry on; it is just that no-one could file a new plan for the next flight.
As I understand it, yes. The GPL requires release of the code only to the customer who pays you for it. You must transfer to the customer full rights to the GPL original code and to your updates to that code. The customer then has the right to release that code under the GPL - or not, which is probably what they will choose. The GPL does not say that you must release back to the developer community, only that you must release full GPL sources to anyone to whom you sell the code. If your customer then sells your code on, they are equally bound by the GPL to give the code, with full GPL rights, to their customers.
I.e. A business can add their business idea to GPL code (including implemented by you) for their own, essentially in-house, purposes. However, they cannot take a lot of GPL code, sprinkle a few neat ideas onto it, and market the result as a closed source package.
I don't think you are correct. He doesn't liek nuclear energy, but he likes global warming even less. He is saying that GW is a serious danger that, unless we do something now is going to hit is hard. It is too late to fiddle avout with renewables, the only solution which can be built in time to avert disater is nuclear. OK, nuclear may have its long term problems - he doesn't deny it - but they are, in his opinion, smaller than Global Warming. Nuclear is the lesser evil, not a good.
More significant, I think, is the impact on the jobs market. On one side, people looking to get jobs in these big, relatively secure (yes, I know, nowhere is secure) companies will ensure that they have Linux skills on their resume. And at the other end, people looking to move on from these companies will be trained up in Linus, ready to act as advocates in their new employers or startups, and pressuring hirers to use Linux because the skills are available.
This is not a major event, but it is a good straw in the wind. At the moment everybody uses Microsoft because everybody uses Microsoft. When it is obvious that not everybody uses Microsoft, people will put more thought into what they should uses - giving Linux a level playing field.
And yes, I have read that Oracle is dumping Solaris, not M$. But it is not the jumping off that matters, it is the jumping on. They are still giving more credibility, both as an employer and as a software manufacturer, to Linux).
How about reducing power consumption instead of increasing battery life. Yes, I know that people are working on lower and lower power CPUs etc, but these are just low powered versions of our conventional, tied-to-the-wall desktop machines.
For truly low powered processors, we need asynchronous logic. Current CPUs, when nothing is happening, close down bits that they think are not being used and slow their clock rate. This reduces, but does not eliminate, power consumption. Asynchronous logig, on the other hand, whenit is not doing anything - does nothing. Nothing clocks, nothing changes state.
Then the displays. We need ambient light displays, as opposed to self-illumiated ones. We don't usually sit in the dark, to why have a dispalay that assumes we do? Some of these are being sold as "digital paper" or similar. Unlike CRT, LCD or Plasma, when the display is not changing, they consume no power. Only B/W so far, I believe - but I would rather a B/W display I can read than a ulesless lump with a flat battery.
Which means that we need to rethink the OS. The steady state of the screen must be still. We are fattening ourselves up on animated this and that. We need to rethink this. We need to research hoe to make the pointer flip the minimum number of pixels as it moves. A flashing cursor is a waste of energy: find better ways of indicating the current position. Maybe WYSIWIG is too expensive: go back to type-and-preview: only a single character changes for each keystroke, so only about 30x20 pixels need redrawing. And scroll by a few lines at a time, so that you don't have to scroll often.
I'm just thinking of a blimp on the edge of space suddenly getting hit with a small projectile traveling 1000+ miles per hour. That could do some serious damage. Aside from making a hole, the force of impact might well deform the ballon, rapidly forcing gas from it
Unlikely, IMO, because the material the blimps are made from is so flimsy that there would be very little energy transfer from the incoming projectile to the blimp. I think most things would simply punch two holes, one each side of the blimp, and continue on their way. Over time the envelope would develop a collection of slow leaks, so it would have a limited lifetime in quasi-orbit. But this lifetime could well be measured in years.
Obviously, some top-up supplies of lifting gas would be needed to prevernt the accelerating descent you describe, and the blimp would ahve to descend when these supplies fell too low. But if it is being visited, they could be topped up.
Language doesn't work like that. Language is, in some ways, the most communistic thing in the world: the common property of everybody and changes in response to everybody's usage. If you try and unwind it, you will not succeed, and only look foolish, like King Canute.
I don't think it is a good thing that the meaning of Communist has changed. On balance, to my taste, it is a bad thing. As you point out, it leaves us without a word for Marx's vision. But it has happened - live with it. I am not ignoring any facts - I am living with the language as it is, not as I would wish it to be.
There are lots of other words to which the same has happened. "Ultimate" means the last, not the best. The ultimate experience is death, not a theme park ride. The ultimate book means that no others on that subject will ever be written. It annoys me that I cannot use "gay" in its original sense of looking cheerful and happy. "Exclusive" meant excluding the wrong kind of people (usually blacks and/or jews) and was a bad thing, not an expensive one. "Prestigious" originally applied to counjoring tricks, and was a very dodgy epithet. "Nice" originally meant ignorant, not likeable. Are we to unwind all these changes?
Communism is defined as a classless (and stateless) society.
That is in the world of might-have-been. Yes, the early definition of Communism was as you describe - and a very beautiful, though unatainable, idea it was. But it has not manat that since about 1920. Since then, it has meant a highly centralised goverment controlled by a party, calling itself the Communist Party, which claims the right to control everything because it does so on behalf of The People - without giving The People a chance to say whethr or not they want it to.
To inisist on the pristine meaning of the word Communism it to take the attitude of Humpty Dumpty - words mean what I want them to mean. Unfortunately, the world has changed the meaning of the word Communism, as many other words.
Would you insist that we cannot say "Politician X is dumb" because actually he talks far too much? Dumb has taken the meaning of stupid, as well as mute. Similarly for thousands of words in the English language.
A quick Google reveals a current price of about $300/kg for heavy water, which must include the energy costs of separating it. Deuterium is 4/20 of this, so about $1500/kg for pure deuterium. Prices will probably fall with real mass production.
I remember in the 80's people were afraid too many nuclear warheads going off would burn off the atmosphere
I think you are confusing different things. In the 80s, people worried that an all-out nuclear war would blast the atmosphere off. In the 40's, when designing the first bomb, somebody suggested they should check that tbe bomb could not start a chain reaction in the atmosphere. They chacked, and it wouldn't.
The amount of energy in the reactor at any time is going to be small. If it gets out of control, it may make a mess of the plant, but it shouldn't do any harm to even local housing. It is at a very high temperature, but it is very thin. Not much total energy - probably only a few seconds worth of the output of the power station.
thought this was hydrogen, so I wonder: how long will it take before we are running out of water?
The sun will go out first, or we will be producing so much heat we have to move the Earth out to a cooler orbit. Current designs use only the deuterium - 1/20000 of the water - and there is still plenty. If it looks like running low, mine Jupiter.
I also think we should be able to store the surplus of released energy from fusion if we don't want to spoil it.
Why generate it when you don't want it? This is not a bang like an explosion. This is like your car - press the accelerator to release energy faster, release to slow production.
Wouldn't happen that way. The power stations, when they come along, are going to be very, very expensive. You won't build them very fast, so there will be a phased changeover. You will need companies with deep pockets used to spending a lot of money developing a resource which they can then tap relatively cheaply. That is exactly the model of the big oil companies. When it becomes technocally and commercially feasible, they will redirect their oil prospecting development into building power stations and, over 30 years, change themselves from resource companies to generating companies. Of course, there will be a lot of turbulence - some companies will fail and some new companies appear. But I would expect to se recognaisable remnants of todays Big Oil in tomorrows Big Fusion.
And electricity won't suddenly be cheap. The peopel who build trhe first stations will price to undercut fossil fuels by just enough to sell 100% of their output, in order to pay back their colossal investment as soon as possible. Prices will fall slowly as more and more plants come on stream. But as prices fall, demand will increase, slowing (but not stopping) the fall. Over decades, the shape of society will change in response to cheaper energy - but it will take time.
Yes - but only just and only in small volumes and for a short time - the glow in the balls is the plasma recombining. Those plasmas are created in small volumes at room temperature by stripping the odd electron of a heavy molecule using electric fields. The plasmas for fusion are at millions of degrees, well above the point where thermal effects knock the electrons off. Comparing these with a fusion reactor is like comparing the forost on your car on a cold morning with the Antarctic Ice cap. Sure, they are bot ice - but that is about all they have in common.
The danger is actually far likely to be greater elsewhere in the plant. Reactor produces heat - OK. You probably have primary then secondary heat exchangers, boilers and turbines etc. These will, at any instant, probably contain far more energy that that being produced in the reactor, and hence do far more damage if they break. Of course, these are all pretty well understood technologies, so they are less likely to break. But they do sometimes break incurrent power plants, and we know that the damage is not that severe.
The sun? We've been harnesting the sun for thousands of years for our energy, why not keep going?
Lovelock's answer to this is that there isn't time. Yes, the long term solution is solar power, directly or indirecly. But he says that Global Warming is so large and so imminent a problem that we mhave to reactivate nuclear as a stop-gap until we can ramp up solar.
There is a basic fallacy in this sort of research - that evolution will necesarily develop some kind of intelligence to solve problems. Evolution will do "what it takes" to solve a problem - and no more. If you attempt to use evolutionary techniques to, for example, solve mazes, you will end up with a system very good for solving mazes - and nothing else.
This happened in computing in the 70s. Intel found it convenient to solve the problem of calculator design by buoilding the 4040 - the first microprocessor, But this was in no way *necessary* - Intel could have continued down the old line of discrete logic.
Humans are not beyond the DNA evolution. Yes, we use tools - whether flint axes or Quad Xeon 3GHx. But it still come sdoen to the old DNA: if your chromosomes can beat mine, they will go on to the next generation.
They chose wood, not to impress the ignorant, but because it was the best material for the job in the circumstances - that is largly what engineering is about.
And also because there were a large number of skilled wood workers not yet contributing to the war effort, while all the metal workers were at full stretch. Another good engineering decision - material supply matters (from someone whose hardware needs some redesign as chips go obsolete).
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I've driven all over Ireland and the best way to know how far and how long it's going to take to get from point A to point B is to use experience.
And why cannot software do this? Don't use time/distance/speed. Use experience: the average of the last 100 journeys from to here was Y minutes, so when bus reaches , advertise it in Y minutes time. Don't average over too large a window, so that it automatically adjust itself when busses travel slower in winter or there are roadworks nearby. Requires modest amount of storage - easily within the capacity of a flash memory.
In most cases, RAID is slower than single-disk access,
True for write at raid 4/5, not true for read under any raid. If two pieces of data are on different drives, you can get the differfent heads seeking independently. Raid 0, 1, 3 have the seek efficiency of a single drive and the data transfer efficiency of a multiple drive. Dince data processinjg accesses are dominated by seek, 4 and 4, which allow multiple seeks, will beed single drives.
Tanks are already using reactive armour which has the same properties. You may see it on TV footage of takns, particularly Soviet ones. It lookes like a bunch of fuel cans stapped on outside the armour. It is actually cans of a relatively "soft" esplosive, which will go off when hit by an imcoming missile, and will reach the armour before the missile (becaise explosians travel very fast). Firstly, it disrupts the missile. Secondly, it pre-prepares the armour, so that it is "bouncing back" when the missile arrives, so is in a much better state to repel it.
Of course, multiple hits in the same spot will take out the vehicle. But in a battle situation, the enemy probably doesn't get more than one chance of a shot, let alone two shots which hit within the same limited area. Basically, if shots are random, the chance of two shots hitting the same area is the square of the chance of one shot. If the chance of a shot hitting a single spot is 1/100, the chance of two shots hitting the same spot is 1/10000. If the enemy fires 100 shots, they are almost certain to get you in the one case, but have only a 1% chance of getting you in the second. Basically, it makes you much, much safer. Not totally safe, but no-one said the battlefield was a safe place.
Your job and 830,000 others are gone.
This is very dodgy stiatistics. The fact that 830,000 jobs havce been sourced overseas doies not mean that 830,000 jobs have disappeared: that would be to assume no growth at all.
I don't have figures for softw3are developers, but The Economist reckons that the number employed in the US in call centers (one of the other major outsourcing scapegoats) has been essentially constant for about 5 years. Which suggests that one of the major drivers for outsorurcing is not so much cheapness as availability: the US has used up all the people able and willing to do that sort of work. Outsourcers have already found the hard way that the savings are way smaller than expected - even negative. But if you cannot get the people at home, overseas looks good.
Which is not to say that nobody has ever lost their job to overseas outsourcing - of course they have. But it is to suggest that there are still jobs somewhere in the onshore US for all those displaced - though maybe not where they currently live. But this is the US way - make firing easy so peopel will hire easy. The alternative is the European way: make it so difficult to fire someone that you don't dare set up a risky venture because the downsizing costs will double your losses.
Historically, the upside of the US attitude to jobs has worked very well. Why is Silicon valley in Californai, not England? Because the US has a risk-friendly, failure tolerant attitude. Losing out to outsources is the downside of the same coin.
At this point, you have got to stop thinking of a computer as a single defined device. Even if you ignore mainframes and restrict yourself to the PC-compatible market, people use computers for many things. Cellphoneas are never going to be web-servers. They are never going to be full-blown geek machines - you are not going to program on them. But probably 90% of users never do anything like that.
The fact of interest is that CPU power is no longer a restriction - a cellphone has enough oomph to run most applciations that mist users run. Where it lacks, as you point out, is input devices, output devices, and to some extent storage.
Input on most cellphones is frankly awful for anything other than dialling numbers or very simple menu driven systems. Output on that tiny screen is poor, but not that bad. In fact, if the possibility of it beaing read on a cellphone screen stops people sending HTML email, I'll count that a win. Likewise, storage is enough for most peoples text needs, but will be rapidly drained by images, even still.
So the "killer feature" to make these work is better input. Of course, one day one day true voice recognition will arrive, delivered by a flight of pigs. Until that porcine dawn, people will keep trying to find other input mechanisms that work. Until they do, I think the proposal by the OP is, so some extent, wishful thinking.
In the UK, we are going to have broadcast TV indefinitely, but they are going to turn off the analog broadcast in about 2008 and have digital only. Digital broadcast - not satellite - is already up and running.
I would imagind that the same is likely to be true in the US in due course, because there are some places which it will never by appropriate to run cable, and cutting someone off fram access to TV is downright un-American.
Apart from anything else, what \re you going to wathc in your RV. And will they cable all the trailer parks? I know satellite is an option, but Digital Terrestrial is likely to be in there.
Which means that the watch will have to pack in a full digital decoder. Hmm - another couple of years, I would say.
Of course, things like this can affect the process. If there are a load of people going around with gadgets like this, advertisers will pay to get to them. If good enough, these can make their own supply.
It's an IBM 360/370 class mainframe: not sure what model. Somebody up the line said that the software was written in Jovial, which strikes me as very likely. Jovial was an Algol variant popular in defence/high reliability circles at about the time this lot was written.
I think the system which crashed was only responsible for admitting new flight plans to the whole complex. Any flightplan already filed could carry on; it is just that no-one could file a new plan for the next flight.
As I understand it, yes. The GPL requires release of the code only to the customer who pays you for it. You must transfer to the customer full rights to the GPL original code and to your updates to that code. The customer then has the right to release that code under the GPL - or not, which is probably what they will choose. The GPL does not say that you must release back to the developer community, only that you must release full GPL sources to anyone to whom you sell the code. If your customer then sells your code on, they are equally bound by the GPL to give the code, with full GPL rights, to their customers.
I.e. A business can add their business idea to GPL code (including implemented by you) for their own, essentially in-house, purposes. However, they cannot take a lot of GPL code, sprinkle a few neat ideas onto it, and market the result as a closed source package.
nobody likes nuclear energy
James Lovelock does.
I don't think you are correct. He doesn't liek nuclear energy, but he likes global warming even less. He is saying that GW is a serious danger that, unless we do something now is going to hit is hard. It is too late to fiddle avout with renewables, the only solution which can be built in time to avert disater is nuclear. OK, nuclear may have its long term problems - he doesn't deny it - but they are, in his opinion, smaller than Global Warming. Nuclear is the lesser evil, not a good.
An arguable point, but I am not yet convinced.
More significant, I think, is the impact on the jobs market. On one side, people looking to get jobs in these big, relatively secure (yes, I know, nowhere is secure) companies will ensure that they have Linux skills on their resume. And at the other end, people looking to move on from these companies will be trained up in Linus, ready to act as advocates in their new employers or startups, and pressuring hirers to use Linux because the skills are available.
This is not a major event, but it is a good straw in the wind. At the moment everybody uses Microsoft because everybody uses Microsoft. When it is obvious that not everybody uses Microsoft, people will put more thought into what they should uses - giving Linux a level playing field.
And yes, I have read that Oracle is dumping Solaris, not M$. But it is not the jumping off that matters, it is the jumping on. They are still giving more credibility, both as an employer and as a software manufacturer, to Linux).
How about reducing power consumption instead of increasing battery life. Yes, I know that people are working on lower and lower power CPUs etc, but these are just low powered versions of our conventional, tied-to-the-wall desktop machines.
For truly low powered processors, we need asynchronous logic. Current CPUs, when nothing is happening, close down bits that they think are not being used and slow their clock rate. This reduces, but does not eliminate, power consumption. Asynchronous logig, on the other hand, whenit is not doing anything - does nothing. Nothing clocks, nothing changes state.
Then the displays. We need ambient light displays, as opposed to self-illumiated ones. We don't usually sit in the dark, to why have a dispalay that assumes we do? Some of these are being sold as "digital paper" or similar. Unlike CRT, LCD or Plasma, when the display is not changing, they consume no power. Only B/W so far, I believe - but I would rather a B/W display I can read than a ulesless lump with a flat battery.
Which means that we need to rethink the OS. The steady state of the screen must be still. We are fattening ourselves up on animated this and that. We need to rethink this. We need to research hoe to make the pointer flip the minimum number of pixels as it moves. A flashing cursor is a waste of energy: find better ways of indicating the current position. Maybe WYSIWIG is too expensive: go back to type-and-preview: only a single character changes for each keystroke, so only about 30x20 pixels need redrawing. And scroll by a few lines at a time, so that you don't have to scroll often.
I'm just thinking of a blimp on the edge of space suddenly getting hit with a small projectile traveling 1000+ miles per hour. That could do some serious damage. Aside from making a hole, the force of impact might well deform the ballon, rapidly forcing gas from it
Unlikely, IMO, because the material the blimps are made from is so flimsy that there would be very little energy transfer from the incoming projectile to the blimp. I think most things would simply punch two holes, one each side of the blimp, and continue on their way. Over time the envelope would develop a collection of slow leaks, so it would have a limited lifetime in quasi-orbit. But this lifetime could well be measured in years.
Obviously, some top-up supplies of lifting gas would be needed to prevernt the accelerating descent you describe, and the blimp would ahve to descend when these supplies fell too low. But if it is being visited, they could be topped up.
Language doesn't work like that. Language is, in some ways, the most communistic thing in the world: the common property of everybody and changes in response to everybody's usage. If you try and unwind it, you will not succeed, and only look foolish, like King Canute.
I don't think it is a good thing that the meaning of Communist has changed. On balance, to my taste, it is a bad thing. As you point out, it leaves us without a word for Marx's vision. But it has happened - live with it. I am not ignoring any facts - I am living with the language as it is, not as I would wish it to be.
There are lots of other words to which the same has happened. "Ultimate" means the last, not the best. The ultimate experience is death, not a theme park ride. The ultimate book means that no others on that subject will ever be written. It annoys me that I cannot use "gay" in its original sense of looking cheerful and happy. "Exclusive" meant excluding the wrong kind of people (usually blacks and/or jews) and was a bad thing, not an expensive one. "Prestigious" originally applied to counjoring tricks, and was a very dodgy epithet. "Nice" originally meant ignorant, not likeable. Are we to unwind all these changes?
Communism is defined as a classless (and stateless) society.
That is in the world of might-have-been. Yes, the early definition of Communism was as you describe - and a very beautiful, though unatainable, idea it was. But it has not manat that since about 1920. Since then, it has meant a highly centralised goverment controlled by a party, calling itself the Communist Party, which claims the right to control everything because it does so on behalf of The People - without giving The People a chance to say whethr or not they want it to.
To inisist on the pristine meaning of the word Communism it to take the attitude of Humpty Dumpty - words mean what I want them to mean. Unfortunately, the world has changed the meaning of the word Communism, as many other words.
Would you insist that we cannot say "Politician X is dumb" because actually he talks far too much? Dumb has taken the meaning of stupid, as well as mute. Similarly for thousands of words in the English language.
Hotmail now works in Opera, which it didn't before. Surprise, surprise.
A quick Google reveals a current price of about $300/kg for heavy water, which must include the energy costs of separating it. Deuterium is 4/20 of this, so about $1500/kg for pure deuterium. Prices will probably fall with real mass production.
I remember in the 80's people were afraid too many nuclear warheads going off would burn off the atmosphere
I think you are confusing different things. In the 80s, people worried that an all-out nuclear war would blast the atmosphere off. In the 40's, when designing the first bomb, somebody suggested they should check that tbe bomb could not start a chain reaction in the atmosphere. They chacked, and it wouldn't.
The amount of energy in the reactor at any time is going to be small. If it gets out of control, it may make a mess of the plant, but it shouldn't do any harm to even local housing. It is at a very high temperature, but it is very thin. Not much total energy - probably only a few seconds worth of the output of the power station.
thought this was hydrogen, so I wonder: how long will it take before we are running out of water?
The sun will go out first, or we will be producing so much heat we have to move the Earth out to a cooler orbit. Current designs use only the deuterium - 1/20000 of the water - and there is still plenty. If it looks like running low, mine Jupiter.
I also think we should be able to store the surplus of released energy from fusion if we don't want to spoil it.
Why generate it when you don't want it? This is not a bang like an explosion. This is like your car - press the accelerator to release energy faster, release to slow production.
Wouldn't happen that way. The power stations, when they come along, are going to be very, very expensive. You won't build them very fast, so there will be a phased changeover. You will need companies with deep pockets used to spending a lot of money developing a resource which they can then tap relatively cheaply. That is exactly the model of the big oil companies. When it becomes technocally and commercially feasible, they will redirect their oil prospecting development into building power stations and, over 30 years, change themselves from resource companies to generating companies. Of course, there will be a lot of turbulence - some companies will fail and some new companies appear. But I would expect to se recognaisable remnants of todays Big Oil in tomorrows Big Fusion.
And electricity won't suddenly be cheap. The peopel who build trhe first stations will price to undercut fossil fuels by just enough to sell 100% of their output, in order to pay back their colossal investment as soon as possible. Prices will fall slowly as more and more plants come on stream. But as prices fall, demand will increase, slowing (but not stopping) the fall. Over decades, the shape of society will change in response to cheaper energy - but it will take time.
Yes - but only just and only in small volumes and for a short time - the glow in the balls is the plasma recombining. Those plasmas are created in small volumes at room temperature by stripping the odd electron of a heavy molecule using electric fields. The plasmas for fusion are at millions of degrees, well above the point where thermal effects knock the electrons off. Comparing these with a fusion reactor is like comparing the forost on your car on a cold morning with the Antarctic Ice cap. Sure, they are bot ice - but that is about all they have in common.
The danger is actually far likely to be greater elsewhere in the plant. Reactor produces heat - OK. You probably have primary then secondary heat exchangers, boilers and turbines etc. These will, at any instant, probably contain far more energy that that being produced in the reactor, and hence do far more damage if they break. Of course, these are all pretty well understood technologies, so they are less likely to break. But they do sometimes break incurrent power plants, and we know that the damage is not that severe.
The sun? We've been harnesting the sun for thousands of years for our energy, why not keep going?
Lovelock's answer to this is that there isn't time. Yes, the long term solution is solar power, directly or indirecly. But he says that Global Warming is so large and so imminent a problem that we mhave to reactivate nuclear as a stop-gap until we can ramp up solar.
There is a basic fallacy in this sort of research - that evolution will necesarily develop some kind of intelligence to solve problems. Evolution will do "what it takes" to solve a problem - and no more. If you attempt to use evolutionary techniques to, for example, solve mazes, you will end up with a system very good for solving mazes - and nothing else.
This happened in computing in the 70s. Intel found it convenient to solve the problem of calculator design by buoilding the 4040 - the first microprocessor, But this was in no way *necessary* - Intel could have continued down the old line of discrete logic.
Evolution is a powerful tool - but not a panacea
Humans are not beyond the DNA evolution. Yes, we use tools - whether flint axes or Quad Xeon 3GHx. But it still come sdoen to the old DNA: if your chromosomes can beat mine, they will go on to the next generation.
They chose wood, not to impress the ignorant, but because it was the best material for the job in the circumstances - that is largly what engineering is about.
And also because there were a large number of skilled wood workers not yet contributing to the war effort, while all the metal workers were at full stretch. Another good engineering decision - material supply matters (from someone whose hardware needs some redesign as chips go obsolete).