He is not making that up. But the amount of heat generated by irreversibility of the computation in a 3 GHz CPU executing a 64 bit instruction(+data) per cycle, using 20 internal steps per bit per instruction is 3E-21*3E9*64*20 watts. That is about 5 billionth of the said CPU's power budget. Draw your own conclusions.
Well you are right to be surprised, since this has nothing to with religion. The culprit is the new cyber law. Until a few years ago, Turkey had no laws regarding to content on internet. Unless the server is on Turkish soil, the state had no way to stop a publication...which is, of course, how it should be. However Turkish state is not comfortable with a medium it cannot control, and they had their excuse for censorship: widespread misinformation, slender attacks and publication of private videos on internet. This led to a very ill conceived cyber-censoring law. The law makes whole sites inaccessible after a court order, even if the court order is about only one offending page among thousands of unrelated pages on the site. To make your site accessible for Turkish users, the someone must contact the court, prove the offending content is now removed and the site is harmless. Obviously, this does not happen often.
The censorship law is not strongly enforced, and AFAIK there are no consequences of accessing a banned site for individual users whatsoever. Therefore, in practice, the law had only one real consequence: widespread adoption of proxy usage among Turkish net users. Even those who have no idea what a proxy is, nowadays knows how to use one.
I get your point but I don't agree. You could build a simulation model by using any physics we might care to simulate, and ask a question to the model. The answer may be what you expect or it may be something unexpected. The former case is not terribly useful, it just says your assumptions about the universe is consistent with your expectations about the universe. That is nice to know. In the latter case, the physics of the model or your expectation is wrong. You wouldn't know which by just looking at the model, but knowing that at least one of them is wrong is *very* valuable information. So the experiment is worth doing.
That is just wrong. You are talking about fusion boosted fission bombs but the biggest nuclear bombs are thermonuclear bombs. The biggest of all (Tsaz bomba) got 98% of its energy from fusion reactions. Tsaz bomba is a bit unusual but most thermonuclear weapons have 60%-75% of their yield from fusion reactions.
You are either uninformed or a troll. If it is the former, you should realize that you don't have to comment on matters on which you have no information. If it is the latter, conguratulations, you win, here is a lengthy response:
Saddam had had WMDs, nobody ever denied that, including Saddam himself. However, after the first gulf war, Iraq was forced to dismantle her WMD production capability and destroy weapons in her arsenal. Which she did. There are records of destruction, and those reports were audited by UN officials.
Bush claimed there were unaccounted for WMDs. But there wasn't ever any proof of that. Nothing concrete had been shown to public, before of after the war. The "proof" Powell had presented was ridiculous, vague and misrepresented. At that time no one outside US was convinced, and even half of the Americans had sense to see through the misdirection.
But no matter. Bush went to war anyway, claiming that Saddam was a threat because he had WMDs. NONE WERE EVER FOUND. NONE. Old ruling class of Iraq has been totally destroyed. Even though there is still a powerful resistance against invaders, they are relatively new or foreign or both. They found their way into Iraq through power vacuum and discontent. Nobody in power today has anything to do with Baathist regime of Iraq. The most important figures are captured, interrogated and sentenced. So your implication that Iraq is still hiding WMDs is ridiculous in the extreme. Who will do that, how will they be able to do that and why would they?
I think the main reason people are trying to blame USA for Georgian affair is that, Georgia attacked first. (You sound like you don't know this, however even Georgian PM does not dispute that their army moved into southern Ossetia before the conflict.) This makes no rational sense. A small country without any real army provoking a war against Russia. Either the PM is very stupid, or something else is going on. I think it is the former but I can see why people are trying to find an alternative explanation.
If the decay rate is dependent distance from sun, there already is a mechanism for asymmetric momentum transfer to speed pioneer up.
For simplicity assume there is a solid radioactive sphere orbiting sun. As a decay particle is created, it pushes the sphere away from direction of its movement. If it escapes the sphere, that is the end of story. The decay results in net thrust. If it hits an atom, there will be another momentum transfer event exactly in the opposite direction and magnitude of the initial event, with no net momentum transfer when two events are combined. Obviously, if the particle travels outward, it has a better chance of escaping the sphere and creating net thrust. If it is traveling inward, it has a better chance of hitting another atom on its way our, resulting in no momentum transfer. On average, the side closer to Sun pushes the hemisphere away from Sun, the hemisphere away from the Sun pushes the sphere closer to the Sun. However, the situation is not symmetrical as decay is faster closer to Sun. Therefore the net effect is pushing the sphere away from the Sun.
The case is general. No matter what the geometry of the source is, there will be an inward pressure due to escaping particles. And this pressure will be asymmetrical due to different decay rates. However, I don't think the size of Pioneer's source is big enough to push the craft measurably due to this effect. I'm mainly posting this to undo a botched mod.
All international organizations exists because governments support them. If a government decide to go to a war, manipulating its own population is necessary and sufficient condition to do so. International power structures which could stop them do not really exist.
A WW is unlikely for a simple reason: nukes. There won't be a world war simply because it won't have a winner (at least not one among fighters.)
There is absolutely NOTHING that could happen in a few hundred years to make Earth more inhabitable than Mars.
That is correct but irrelevant. We know in advance some of the challenges of colonizing Mars. We will know more about those challenges as we explore more of the planet. And finally we will work the remaining out once we are there. We have time to figure out how to survive on Mars. We have time. A planet wide catastrophe on Earth may leave Earth much more hospitable than Mars, however we might not have enough time to analyze and adjust to new conditions. Humanity may live but civilization could be destroyed. A Martian colony could be a very expensive backup for human civilization.
On a side note, I think building a Martian colony for backup is silly. It is much more important to have a separate human civilization to go on its own way. We are too homogenized on this planet after the advent of global transportation, media and communication. We need a fresh start somewhere. Mars or Moon are ideal for this. Once we figure out how to live in space and on other planets, the diversity of human cultures will increase dramatically. I think that should be the main goal.
I don't know the process parameters for thermal depolymerization but I'd guess the temperature required is on the order of 500C which is much higher than what is available than waste heat streams from electric generators. Solar ovens might be feasible, but only if they can supply energy for the whole process. Putting the factory away from low energy content raw materials, just to save energy on preheating is bound to be less energy efficient when transportation is factored in. Waste streams of industrial processes are varied, and using them just for preheating may be feasible. However in order to use scattered energy sources such as waste streams, the process must be down-scaled -which is kind of hard.
IOW, I don't think this process may be made energy efficient. Biological waste streams frequently have huge amounts of water in them, which consumes energy during removal. Thermal depolymerization needs high temperatures. A depolymerization process using biological wastes as raw materials has to be inefficient when energy that goes in is compared to energy that goes out in a useful form.
What this technology provides is an alternative to oil and that is something valuable even if it "wastes" a lot of energy in the process. The biomass will be wasted in any case, soany energy surplus is a bonus. It is double bonus if using the surplus doesn't need a new infrastructure.
Yes, that is correct. It is possible to make almost exclusively fusion bomb, it is just not efficient from a fuel consumption standpoint. As I understand it, testing it with 100 MT yield would have been trivial but would have increased the fallout significantly. BTW, I made a mistake, what I called the casing is actually called the tamper.
I'm not sure what you are saying. I read it as a denial that the modern nuke is a fusion weapon. According to the article, the modern nuclear bomb requires a fission trigger. The trigger initiates a fusion reaction, which creates another fission reaction as kind of a happy side-effect. The article states that the largest nuke ever detonated generated a 50Mt blast, which was almost all from the fusion reaction. So while there is fission is going on in the explosion, I would be comfortable saying that the fusion is the main show.
"The largest nuke ever detonated" is not a typical thermonuclear weapon. Its design yield is actually 100 MT and all the surplus comes from the fission of the casing. The bomb was detonated with an inert casing, which halved its actual yield. For almost all other thermonuclear weapons, casing is not inert and the main source of yield energy is fission of the casing. That is the most efficient way to use enriched fuel: You need a certain amount of enriched fuel for primary and you have to have a casing made of a strong and heavy metal. You may as well use non-enriched uranium for the casing, which become fissle when bombarded with neutrons from fusion and doubles the yield for a given amount of enriched fuel. The main show is fusion, but only because it makes the staged thermonuclear weapon possible. The main energy source is still fission.
There are reasons to do some scanning for nuclear material, but if a few stray particles from a medical procedure is going to be enough to stop someone, there needs to be some decisions made on the sensitivity of the scanner.
That probably can't be helped. Cats and people travel openly while real radiological bombs should be transported in a closed box with a radiation shield. In order to catch the latter, the msensitivity cannot be low.
The "creep" part is when the polymer chains, loaded with some force, start to slip and rearrange themselves. This has to be taken into account in many applications, unless you're designing commodity applications such as trash bags, etc.... This material lacks these susceptible bonds creating a material that is much weaker, but also much more reliable in the long run.
I don't see why this material will not be susceptible to creep. Creep is not a consequence of existence polymer chains. Quite the contrary, creep is a restricted flow where restriction is due to existence of polymer chains keeping constituents where they are. When the constituents are easier to move around, due to weaker interactions between them, creep should be worse.
I agree, fortunately real engineering disciplines have a sense of scales. So we usually don't (over-)over-engineer. Trying to use the same design for vastly different scales if an illness of the programmer, not the engineer.
I would argue that software is different for other reasons. Most software developers/companies cannot be held accountable because changes in the industry are beyond their control.
For example, when engineers design and build, they have to contend with a variety of concerns. Most of these concerns are calculable, limiting, and realistic. As a simple example of the forces of nature, wind power is calculable and only occurs within expected limits. Things are built to withstand extreme winds. But there is a threshold -- we don't build to withstand 5,000mph winds because we know it just won't happen. Wind is wind, it increases or decreases, nothing more.
Software, on the other hand, has the problem of dealing (or not dealing) with unknown circumstances. Developers cannot know that in five years, the platform their product was built on will be obsolete and unusable. Products come and go daily, and support for these products fade just as quickly. Hardware also changes on a daily basis, making it impossible to stand behind your product, the same way an engineer does his. There is no professional obligation for software developers because there are so many unknown variables that come into play.
Give me a break! There is no engineering environment better specified than a computer platform. The material world never does what you tell it to and you never get to dictate how it should work. You have to go at length to make its own working to suit your needs. We have means of predicting its behavior but it always has a lot of uncertainty. The raw materials are ill-specified, initial state of the system is imprecise and the models are incomplete. Worse, future environment is usually unknowable. IOW, you never get to know the operating environment of a RW engineered system.
In software engineering, you always have a precisely defined system and if that environment isn't working to your specifications, you know that some other software or computer engineer messed up. It doesn't matter if the other guy of your own messed up backward compatibility or initial design; it is still some software engineer failing to write bug-free code to specification. The hardware changes are a lame excuse. Why does
it matter if they changed the physical realization of a specification? If they did their job, your software shouldn't fail (but sometimes it still does) or they failed their job and you are not supposed to be responsible anyway. Software engineering is hard, but that is due to very complex interaction of very well specified components. Taken as a whole software environments are best specified and controlled engineering environments possible.
That is incorrect, Mercury is not tidally locked with Sun. It is in 3:2 spin resonance with Sun, therefore the forces vary slowly (change direction twice for every three orbits) but they are not constant.
Disclaimer: I'm an employer in a different country (Turkey), operating in a different sector so what I'm saying may not have anything to do your case. FWIW, here is my perspective:
We are doing R&D in a few specialized sub fields of chemicals production. Kids that have just graduated have NO skills whatsoever to do the job we are expecting them to do. As we have very few domestic competitors (and none doing R&D as much as us) experienced engineers also aren't much better than fresh graduates. The only reason we employ young chemical engineers and chemists is that they have the time and the appropriate background training to learn the job. For about six months, they are pure money sinks. For another year, whether they cost more than they contribute is a lottery, because their one-off mistakes often cost more than their past contribution. We know this and we tell them as much from get go. No body ever questions if that really is the case, they just accept that in our very specialized sub-field, they have to learn a lot before contributing anything useful.
However, after just two months or so, they expect us treat them as the best engineer ever born. For them, just having a diploma or a few months of in-house training gives them a powerful bargaining position. The real bargaining position they hold is that they are still worse than useless and will be so for many months to come. This fact somehow eludes them. So we tell them to quit if they don't like what we offer. They do. Back to square one for all parties concerned.
The professional life is a non-zero sum game. All parties can gain if employers learn the job and perform it well, or all parties can lose if they waste their time and our time and money if they quit after a few months. Of course, we could offer them better pay and better conditions every time they demand it but what will we do when they actually become proficient? Pay even more? And what about our older employees who have been and still are contributing to our company? Do we raise their wages too just because new kid thinks he is more worthy or do we just tell them to quit if they don't like being paid as much as the new money sink? This is unworkable. OTOH, new employers bargaining after they have a real bargaining position is workable. Quitting only when your employer is unwilling to give what you really worth are is workable. Employers know that, most employees know that and as a new graduate, the sooner you learn it, the better for you and your employer.
Well, the whole point of jet fuel is that it burns. When a plane crashes, some of its fuel is rapidly mixed with air in presence of heat. Naturally the mixed fuel burns. That creates the spectacular fireballs (which is an explosion) but almost all of the fuel survives the crash and burns slowly afterwards. Accidental explosion of liquid jet fuel isn't a concern under normal circumstances, and even under very unusual circumstances involving high energy and rapid mixing with oxidants such as during a plane crash, it doesn't create a major explosion. Hydrogen, OTOH, explodes readily if it is mixed with some air.
No it isn't. That is movie physics. One can make an explosive out of anything combustible, by mixing it with a suitable amount of oxidizer, so it is true that jet fuel is explosive in a sense. However it is not nearly as explosive as hydrogen. Hydrogen has a very wide explosive range. Therefore hydrogen can explode when it is mixed with some air, even if the amount air in the mixture is very low or very high. Hydrogen is also very flammable. So once mixed with air, any spark can initiate explosion. Hydrogen-oxygen reaction is also very fast, so its blast is powerful. And finally hydrogen oxygen reaction releases a lot of energy, on a mass or molar basis, so its blast carries more energy and is hotter than hydrocarbons of a similar mass or molar amount. OTOH to explode jet fuel, you have to mix it very carefully with the just right amount of air and initiate burning with a sufficient energy source. Exploding jet fuel is almost impossible in context of accidents, exploding hydrogen gas is the major mode of hydrogen related accidents. And even if you manage to explode jet fuel, it doesn't react as fast nor with as high exotherm, therefore explosions are milder. So, no, jet fuel isn't just as explosive as hydrogen, not by a stretch.
Heck, why can't they even use a non-flammable helium/hydrogen mixture?
IIRC, Arthur C. Clarke asked the exact same question and the answer he got was that such a mixture has so little hydrogen in it that you may as well use pure helium.
in addition to that, we know the general composition of the sun which shouldn't deviate too much from the composition of soalr wind so if we find something statistically off about the oxygen/nitrogen composition then we know that it is likely that the samples were contaminated. In other words, if they find only what they expect (or want) to find, they can conclude that the samples are valid? Or, conversely, if they find something that is different than their theories predict, they can conclude that the samples must be contaminated? Obviously, we also know the composition of the atmosphere. If the isotope ratios are different from solar wind and they are actually more similar to terrestrial sources, the scientists might conclude the samples are contaminated while they are not. In all other cases, the analysis will produce correct results.
IIRC you could select one of two maps for the second mission - which was identical no matter which map you play it on- and that was that. I hope SC2 offers more than that.
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He is not making that up. But the amount of heat generated by irreversibility of the computation in a 3 GHz CPU executing a 64 bit instruction(+data) per cycle, using 20 internal steps per bit per instruction is 3E-21*3E9*64*20 watts. That is about 5 billionth of the said CPU's power budget. Draw your own conclusions.
The censorship law is not strongly enforced, and AFAIK there are no consequences of accessing a banned site for individual users whatsoever. Therefore, in practice, the law had only one real consequence: widespread adoption of proxy usage among Turkish net users. Even those who have no idea what a proxy is, nowadays knows how to use one.
I get your point but I don't agree. You could build a simulation model by using any physics we might care to simulate, and ask a question to the model. The answer may be what you expect or it may be something unexpected. The former case is not terribly useful, it just says your assumptions about the universe is consistent with your expectations about the universe. That is nice to know. In the latter case, the physics of the model or your expectation is wrong. You wouldn't know which by just looking at the model, but knowing that at least one of them is wrong is *very* valuable information. So the experiment is worth doing.
That is just wrong. You are talking about fusion boosted fission bombs but the biggest nuclear bombs are thermonuclear bombs. The biggest of all (Tsaz bomba) got 98% of its energy from fusion reactions. Tsaz bomba is a bit unusual but most thermonuclear weapons have 60%-75% of their yield from fusion reactions.
Saddam had had WMDs, nobody ever denied that, including Saddam himself. However, after the first gulf war, Iraq was forced to dismantle her WMD production capability and destroy weapons in her arsenal. Which she did. There are records of destruction, and those reports were audited by UN officials.
Bush claimed there were unaccounted for WMDs. But there wasn't ever any proof of that. Nothing concrete had been shown to public, before of after the war. The "proof" Powell had presented was ridiculous, vague and misrepresented. At that time no one outside US was convinced, and even half of the Americans had sense to see through the misdirection.
But no matter. Bush went to war anyway, claiming that Saddam was a threat because he had WMDs. NONE WERE EVER FOUND. NONE. Old ruling class of Iraq has been totally destroyed. Even though there is still a powerful resistance against invaders, they are relatively new or foreign or both. They found their way into Iraq through power vacuum and discontent. Nobody in power today has anything to do with Baathist regime of Iraq. The most important figures are captured, interrogated and sentenced. So your implication that Iraq is still hiding WMDs is ridiculous in the extreme. Who will do that, how will they be able to do that and why would they?
I think the main reason people are trying to blame USA for Georgian affair is that, Georgia attacked first. (You sound like you don't know this, however even Georgian PM does not dispute that their army moved into southern Ossetia before the conflict.) This makes no rational sense. A small country without any real army provoking a war against Russia. Either the PM is very stupid, or something else is going on. I think it is the former but I can see why people are trying to find an alternative explanation.
Obviously, gp is about initial conviction. There was neither a confession nor a body back then.
For simplicity assume there is a solid radioactive sphere orbiting sun. As a decay particle is created, it pushes the sphere away from direction of its movement. If it escapes the sphere, that is the end of story. The decay results in net thrust. If it hits an atom, there will be another momentum transfer event exactly in the opposite direction and magnitude of the initial event, with no net momentum transfer when two events are combined. Obviously, if the particle travels outward, it has a better chance of escaping the sphere and creating net thrust. If it is traveling inward, it has a better chance of hitting another atom on its way our, resulting in no momentum transfer. On average, the side closer to Sun pushes the hemisphere away from Sun, the hemisphere away from the Sun pushes the sphere closer to the Sun. However, the situation is not symmetrical as decay is faster closer to Sun. Therefore the net effect is pushing the sphere away from the Sun.
The case is general. No matter what the geometry of the source is, there will be an inward pressure due to escaping particles. And this pressure will be asymmetrical due to different decay rates. However, I don't think the size of Pioneer's source is big enough to push the craft measurably due to this effect. I'm mainly posting this to undo a botched mod.
A WW is unlikely for a simple reason: nukes. There won't be a world war simply because it won't have a winner (at least not one among fighters.)
That is correct but irrelevant. We know in advance some of the challenges of colonizing Mars. We will know more about those challenges as we explore more of the planet. And finally we will work the remaining out once we are there. We have time to figure out how to survive on Mars. We have time. A planet wide catastrophe on Earth may leave Earth much more hospitable than Mars, however we might not have enough time to analyze and adjust to new conditions. Humanity may live but civilization could be destroyed. A Martian colony could be a very expensive backup for human civilization.
On a side note, I think building a Martian colony for backup is silly. It is much more important to have a separate human civilization to go on its own way. We are too homogenized on this planet after the advent of global transportation, media and communication. We need a fresh start somewhere. Mars or Moon are ideal for this. Once we figure out how to live in space and on other planets, the diversity of human cultures will increase dramatically. I think that should be the main goal.
IOW, I don't think this process may be made energy efficient. Biological waste streams frequently have huge amounts of water in them, which consumes energy during removal. Thermal depolymerization needs high temperatures. A depolymerization process using biological wastes as raw materials has to be inefficient when energy that goes in is compared to energy that goes out in a useful form.
What this technology provides is an alternative to oil and that is something valuable even if it "wastes" a lot of energy in the process. The biomass will be wasted in any case, soany energy surplus is a bonus. It is double bonus if using the surplus doesn't need a new infrastructure.
Yes, that is correct. It is possible to make almost exclusively fusion bomb, it is just not efficient from a fuel consumption standpoint. As I understand it, testing it with 100 MT yield would have been trivial but would have increased the fallout significantly. BTW, I made a mistake, what I called the casing is actually called the tamper.
"The largest nuke ever detonated" is not a typical thermonuclear weapon. Its design yield is actually 100 MT and all the surplus comes from the fission of the casing. The bomb was detonated with an inert casing, which halved its actual yield. For almost all other thermonuclear weapons, casing is not inert and the main source of yield energy is fission of the casing. That is the most efficient way to use enriched fuel: You need a certain amount of enriched fuel for primary and you have to have a casing made of a strong and heavy metal. You may as well use non-enriched uranium for the casing, which become fissle when bombarded with neutrons from fusion and doubles the yield for a given amount of enriched fuel. The main show is fusion, but only because it makes the staged thermonuclear weapon possible. The main energy source is still fission.
There are reasons to do some scanning for nuclear material, but if a few stray particles from a medical procedure is going to be enough to stop someone, there needs to be some decisions made on the sensitivity of the scanner.
That probably can't be helped. Cats and people travel openly while real radiological bombs should be transported in a closed box with a radiation shield. In order to catch the latter, the msensitivity cannot be low.
I don't see why this material will not be susceptible to creep. Creep is not a consequence of existence polymer chains. Quite the contrary, creep is a restricted flow where restriction is due to existence of polymer chains keeping constituents where they are. When the constituents are easier to move around, due to weaker interactions between them, creep should be worse.
I agree, fortunately real engineering disciplines have a sense of scales. So we usually don't (over-)over-engineer. Trying to use the same design for vastly different scales if an illness of the programmer, not the engineer.
Give me a break! There is no engineering environment better specified than a computer platform. The material world never does what you tell it to and you never get to dictate how it should work. You have to go at length to make its own working to suit your needs. We have means of predicting its behavior but it always has a lot of uncertainty. The raw materials are ill-specified, initial state of the system is imprecise and the models are incomplete. Worse, future environment is usually unknowable. IOW, you never get to know the operating environment of a RW engineered system.
In software engineering, you always have a precisely defined system and if that environment isn't working to your specifications, you know that some other software or computer engineer messed up. It doesn't matter if the other guy of your own messed up backward compatibility or initial design; it is still some software engineer failing to write bug-free code to specification. The hardware changes are a lame excuse. Why does it matter if they changed the physical realization of a specification? If they did their job, your software shouldn't fail (but sometimes it still does) or they failed their job and you are not supposed to be responsible anyway. Software engineering is hard, but that is due to very complex interaction of very well specified components. Taken as a whole software environments are best specified and controlled engineering environments possible.
I didn't get it right either, 3:2 spin resonance means three days in two years, not two days in three years.
That is incorrect, Mercury is not tidally locked with Sun. It is in 3:2 spin resonance with Sun, therefore the forces vary slowly (change direction twice for every three orbits) but they are not constant.
We are doing R&D in a few specialized sub fields of chemicals production. Kids that have just graduated have NO skills whatsoever to do the job we are expecting them to do. As we have very few domestic competitors (and none doing R&D as much as us) experienced engineers also aren't much better than fresh graduates. The only reason we employ young chemical engineers and chemists is that they have the time and the appropriate background training to learn the job. For about six months, they are pure money sinks. For another year, whether they cost more than they contribute is a lottery, because their one-off mistakes often cost more than their past contribution. We know this and we tell them as much from get go. No body ever questions if that really is the case, they just accept that in our very specialized sub-field, they have to learn a lot before contributing anything useful.
However, after just two months or so, they expect us treat them as the best engineer ever born. For them, just having a diploma or a few months of in-house training gives them a powerful bargaining position. The real bargaining position they hold is that they are still worse than useless and will be so for many months to come. This fact somehow eludes them. So we tell them to quit if they don't like what we offer. They do. Back to square one for all parties concerned.
The professional life is a non-zero sum game. All parties can gain if employers learn the job and perform it well, or all parties can lose if they waste their time and our time and money if they quit after a few months. Of course, we could offer them better pay and better conditions every time they demand it but what will we do when they actually become proficient? Pay even more? And what about our older employees who have been and still are contributing to our company? Do we raise their wages too just because new kid thinks he is more worthy or do we just tell them to quit if they don't like being paid as much as the new money sink? This is unworkable. OTOH, new employers bargaining after they have a real bargaining position is workable. Quitting only when your employer is unwilling to give what you really worth are is workable. Employers know that, most employees know that and as a new graduate, the sooner you learn it, the better for you and your employer.
Well, the whole point of jet fuel is that it burns. When a plane crashes, some of its fuel is rapidly mixed with air in presence of heat. Naturally the mixed fuel burns. That creates the spectacular fireballs (which is an explosion) but almost all of the fuel survives the crash and burns slowly afterwards. Accidental explosion of liquid jet fuel isn't a concern under normal circumstances, and even under very unusual circumstances involving high energy and rapid mixing with oxidants such as during a plane crash, it doesn't create a major explosion. Hydrogen, OTOH, explodes readily if it is mixed with some air.
No it isn't. That is movie physics. One can make an explosive out of anything combustible, by mixing it with a suitable amount of oxidizer, so it is true that jet fuel is explosive in a sense. However it is not nearly as explosive as hydrogen. Hydrogen has a very wide explosive range. Therefore hydrogen can explode when it is mixed with some air, even if the amount air in the mixture is very low or very high. Hydrogen is also very flammable. So once mixed with air, any spark can initiate explosion. Hydrogen-oxygen reaction is also very fast, so its blast is powerful. And finally hydrogen oxygen reaction releases a lot of energy, on a mass or molar basis, so its blast carries more energy and is hotter than hydrocarbons of a similar mass or molar amount. OTOH to explode jet fuel, you have to mix it very carefully with the just right amount of air and initiate burning with a sufficient energy source. Exploding jet fuel is almost impossible in context of accidents, exploding hydrogen gas is the major mode of hydrogen related accidents. And even if you manage to explode jet fuel, it doesn't react as fast nor with as high exotherm, therefore explosions are milder. So, no, jet fuel isn't just as explosive as hydrogen, not by a stretch.
IIRC, Arthur C. Clarke asked the exact same question and the answer he got was that such a mixture has so little hydrogen in it that you may as well use pure helium.
IIRC you could select one of two maps for the second mission - which was identical no matter which map you play it on- and that was that. I hope SC2 offers more than that.