1. Fission is dirty. We're all familiar with this one. You get radioactive products and energy. Open and shut case
It does have toxic byproducts, but they are in relatively small amounts (all nuclear waste ever produced would fit in a high school gym) and can be contained without too much difficulty.
2. Fusion can be done. We could do it all the time, and I'm talking about break-even fusion with power production. Why don't we? Because this kind of fusion is dirty. When you use Tritium as a reactant, you get radioactive products kicking around after everything is said and done.
D-T fusion isn't so bad. In most conceptual reactor designs, the radioactive tritium is produced by bombarding the lithium walls of the reactor with neutrons from the fusion reaction. This produces tritium. So the tritium never leaves the reactor. (Of course the byproduct is harmless helium)
The reason why we don't have fusion reactors like this is not the radiation, but because we still can't reach ignition, the point where the heat from the fusion reaction keeps itself going, and you don't have to add any auxiliary heating. We just reached the break even point, but ignition is about 10 years away, and fusion power reactors are probably around 40 years away.
3. Deuterium/Deuterium fusion is not "dirty". Deuterium is a non-radioactive isotope. This, however, is the kind of break-even fusion we're having a bit of trouble with. The problem here is that the energy required to get the Deuterium/Deuterium reaction going is a lot more than the comparatively simple Deuterium/Tritium one.
D-D fusion is hard to do, but it is even safer. BTW, the fusion reactor will become mildly radioactive after years of use. But the low radiation isn't very hazardous. Even less hazardous than the lysol under your sink. So it isn't really a problem.
For all but one successful (meaningful) fusion reactor you do need uranium. Of course all (but one) of are fusion reactors are hydrogen bombs, which are basically an atom bomb with (heavy) water inside.
This way you describe to make a fusion bomb is completely wrong. Not even close.
->get 2x7,5 kg of U-238 (weapons grade, obviously) (somewhat toxic, but don't swallow it and you'll live to see the end of the experiment) (not the end of your natural life though;-) ) (btw, you have about 2 hours from the start of the exposure before... well let's just say you want the experiment to be finished by then)
It's U-235 that's used for bombs! U-238 is not fissionable at all.
->make a hole in the uranium (in the middle) and put in the water balloon ->smash the two pieces together as hard as you can (doesn't need to be all that hard actually, but it might require two tries)
You can't induce fission by banging uranium together! Where the hell did you come up with that! It's hard to induce fission. You need immense pressures. The fissionable material in Little Boy wasn't surrounded by high explosives just for the hell of it.
this will create a thermonuclear explosion which will blow around the water balloon, heating a tiny bit of water over the threshold of the "strong force" (sorry I don't know the correct translation) and compress it. It will convert a few micrograms of water into energy. This will blow up something between 10 and 100 square kilometers around you.
Thermonuclear explosion is fusion, not fission. You got that one wrong. Also, you can't just fuse water. Doesn't work that way. Unless you have the temperatures and pressures akin to the core of the sun. You need deuterium and tritium, typically, although other things can fuse.
Actually Fusion is very dirty as well. The deuterium and tritium (heavy water) by-products from fusion are pretty damn radioactive.
But what do I know, this is slashdot...
Pretty clearly a troll. Or a dumbass. Deuterium is completely safe. It occurs naturally. Deuterium and small quantities of the mildly radioactive tritium (which is made from bombarding lithium in the walls of a fusion reactor with neutrons from the reaction itself) fuse to form, ta da, nonradioactive, ordinary helium.
Stop packing your stuff and forget about the 17 bucks T1 line. 1,5 megabit / 8 = 0,1875 megabyte per second or about 192 kb/sec. In other words, below common cable internet speeds.
You are so completely and utterly wrong. Internet speeds are ALWAYS in bit per second. Like my Charter cable is capped at 768 kiloBITS per second. DSL is often 1.5 megaBITS per second. Dialup is 56 kiloBITS per second.
CD-ROMs hold 650M? Your home drive array is going to be 180G.
Not necessarily. When CD drives first became commonplace, they were much larger than HDs. However, this is still going to be much smaller than hard disks in ten years. HDs should be around 50 terabytes by then.
I would much rather have a better hard drive than a better optical drive. I HATE hard drives. They are slow, unreliable, and get corrupted all of the time. We need a better solution than this. Perhaps mram (very fast and non volatile, but somehow I doubt it will have the storage capacities to be used for anything more than ram) or holographic storage. (Very fast, large capacity)
As for chips, I hope that by '10 or '15 we'll have multi-core spintronic processors to speed up Quake 5.
And I gotta get down to 7-11 before they outlaw pringles cans!
Pringles can antennas are already illegal. They are unapproved by the FCC. I still can't believe that the FCC is unwilling to free up some space in the spectrum. If they could make just one 1-gigahertz wide band in the 10-50 ghz range unlicensed, that would really expand the opportunities for wifi. (That frequency would make it hard to transmit between rooms in houses. The 2.4 ghz is better for that. But it would have no problem going a mile or two over the air with enough power, provided there isn't any fog or anything.)
Nope, my filters take care of the flash and banner ads just fine. I don't need to subscribe.
Don't be an asshole. Slashdot's banners are not annoying at all. The sad fact is that you need ads to support this site! Do you think the bandwidth and server costs magically come from fairy-land!?
I can understand blocking popups and animated ads, but sites like slashdot do need revenue.
The problem with games like Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2003 is the hardware requirements... unbelievably high demands for hardware, which translates to high costs.
Um, UT2K3 runs fine on a 750 mhz processor. Doom 3 has some pretty off the wall requirements, but it has very good graphics. Nothing close to Doom 3 graphics could ever be released for consoles, anyway.
Why would I buy a high end gaming PC when a $200 console has as much power and I can sit on my couch and play on my big screen?
You don't need a high end gaming machine! Even a cheap PC you could build for $400 with a Athlon XP 1500+, 40 gig hd, geforce 3 ti500, and 512 megs of ddr would be able to very nicely play any game in existence right now, and under much higher rez than a console.
Consoles also are better for multiplayer. (But they stink for posting to/....)
The xbox is great. Hook up up to four with cat5 and you have an instant lan party. But, you've got four people on each tv screen, which sucks.
Consoles suck for internet play. Yes, with the xbox you can play online, but you have to pay to do so. On a PC, I can fire up UT and browse thousands of servers, or set up my own server with any damn mods I want. (You can't mod console games, of course)
There's no doubt that console gaming is cheaper. But my computer can pump out UT2K3 at 1600x1200, which is significantly better than the NTSC rez of consoles. I know, yeah, you sit farther away from the tv, so it doesn't look all pixelly. But that means the picture is smaller and harder to see.
But I sit a foot or two away from my monitor. That makes it the equivalent of a huge bigscreen tv, since it covers a huge field of my vision. Consoles just can't compete with the great picture of a computer game. Also, many computer games have much better graphics than consoles. Consoles simply cannot pump out the graphics of computers.
One more thing, everyone (at least everyone reading/.) already has a computer. In all likelihood, it is very capable of playing such games as UT2K3 or Q3A. If you already have the necessary hardware, what's the point of buying a special console just for gaming?
The tree-huggers whine about the precious trees, and tie up legal logging in the courts, and then stand idly by when the forests burn down because they haven't been thinned out.
You are completely correct. Selective cutting reduces fire danger. If a selectively-cut forest burns, it is just a healthy burn, taking out the underbrush and leaving the old growth trees intact. Fires are not supposed to take out large trees. That's enviro-crap. A century of fire suppression has made today's fires very intense, killing large trees and often sterilizing soil.
Actually, just looking at the monitor and reading the words off it probably takes far more than 300,000 calculations per second. Consider that OCR still doesn't work well with computers 1000 times faster than that.
I doubt it. Digital computers and neural nets (brain) are just good at different things. Digital computers are good with things such as math, exact things. Brains are excellent at fuzzy logic. That's why it's so easy for you to read this comment. Your brain would say "That looks pretty close to a "T" so it's a T." A digital computer actually needs to run a neural net simulation for OCR, which takes quite a bit of power.
On the other side of things, try to compete with this 50 year old computer on algebraic formulas. You'd lose. Computers are just better at that.
So if I were to search on "goat feed" or something I might get a bunch of farm suppliers in my search, but "Lola's Palace of Live Goat Porn" in the advertisers section. I know that advertising is all about delivering eyeballs, but a more appropriate advertiser based on the context of my search would be much more likely to get my click-through.
Instead of using keywords, why don't they just display the ad of the company closest to the top of the search results. Say, a goat feed outfit who was advertising bought an ad, and their site is on the 5th page, and the Live Goatsex site is on the 50th page, then just display the goat feed ad.
I use Phoenix now. I only loop images once, and of course block popup ads. What these idiotic marketdroids don't understand is that I won't click on an ad just because it is big and animated. In fact, it will probably just piss me off and make me never go to that site again. People will only click on targeted advertising for things they like. (ie, thinkgeek ads on Slashdot or the user submitted text-based ads on Kuro5hin)
If they keep this up, I might have to completely install some ad blocking software.
Before wi-fi supports tv traffic and such, the FCC will need to pull their heads out of their asses, and maybe make some high frequency microwave wavelengths, like maybe around 10-20 ghz, unallocated. (As this band would be mostly line of sight, it would be best for direct connections to the ISP, rather than home networking. But it could carry lots of traffic.) 10 gigahertz would be more than enough bandwidth for everyone. I don't see them doing that, though.
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1. Fission is dirty. We're all familiar with this one. You get radioactive products and energy. Open and shut case
It does have toxic byproducts, but they are in relatively small amounts (all nuclear waste ever produced would fit in a high school gym) and can be contained without too much difficulty.
2. Fusion can be done. We could do it all the time, and I'm talking about break-even fusion with power production. Why don't we? Because this kind of fusion is dirty. When you use Tritium as a reactant, you get radioactive products kicking around after everything is said and done.
D-T fusion isn't so bad. In most conceptual reactor designs, the radioactive tritium is produced by bombarding the lithium walls of the reactor with neutrons from the fusion reaction. This produces tritium. So the tritium never leaves the reactor. (Of course the byproduct is harmless helium)
The reason why we don't have fusion reactors like this is not the radiation, but because we still can't reach ignition, the point where the heat from the fusion reaction keeps itself going, and you don't have to add any auxiliary heating. We just reached the break even point, but ignition is about 10 years away, and fusion power reactors are probably around 40 years away.
3. Deuterium/Deuterium fusion is not "dirty". Deuterium is a non-radioactive isotope. This, however, is the kind of break-even fusion we're having a bit of trouble with. The problem here is that the energy required to get the Deuterium/Deuterium reaction going is a lot more than the comparatively simple Deuterium/Tritium one.
D-D fusion is hard to do, but it is even safer. BTW, the fusion reactor will become mildly radioactive after years of use. But the low radiation isn't very hazardous. Even less hazardous than the lysol under your sink. So it isn't really a problem.
For all but one successful (meaningful) fusion reactor you do need uranium. Of course all (but one) of are fusion reactors are hydrogen bombs, which are basically an atom bomb with (heavy) water inside.
;-) ) (btw, you have about 2 hours from the start of the exposure before ... well let's just say you want the experiment to be finished by then)
This way you describe to make a fusion bomb is completely wrong. Not even close.
->get 2x7,5 kg of U-238 (weapons grade, obviously) (somewhat toxic, but don't swallow it and you'll live to see the end of the experiment) (not the end of your natural life though
It's U-235 that's used for bombs! U-238 is not fissionable at all.
->make a hole in the uranium (in the middle) and put in the water balloon
->smash the two pieces together as hard as you can (doesn't need to be all that hard actually, but it might require two tries)
You can't induce fission by banging uranium together! Where the hell did you come up with that! It's hard to induce fission. You need immense pressures. The fissionable material in Little Boy wasn't surrounded by high explosives just for the hell of it.
this will create a thermonuclear explosion which will blow around the water balloon, heating a tiny bit of water over the threshold of the "strong force" (sorry I don't know the correct translation) and compress it. It will convert a few micrograms of water into energy. This will blow up something between 10 and 100 square kilometers around you.
Thermonuclear explosion is fusion, not fission. You got that one wrong. Also, you can't just fuse water. Doesn't work that way. Unless you have the temperatures and pressures akin to the core of the sun. You need deuterium and tritium, typically, although other things can fuse.
Actually Fusion is very dirty as well. The deuterium and tritium (heavy water) by-products from fusion are pretty damn radioactive.
But what do I know, this is slashdot...
Pretty clearly a troll. Or a dumbass. Deuterium is completely safe. It occurs naturally. Deuterium and small quantities of the mildly radioactive tritium (which is made from bombarding lithium in the walls of a fusion reactor with neutrons from the reaction itself) fuse to form, ta da, nonradioactive, ordinary helium.
Stop packing your stuff and forget about the 17 bucks T1 line. 1,5 megabit / 8 = 0,1875 megabyte per second or about 192 kb/sec. In other words, below common cable internet speeds.
You are so completely and utterly wrong. Internet speeds are ALWAYS in bit per second. Like my Charter cable is capped at 768 kiloBITS per second. DSL is often 1.5 megaBITS per second. Dialup is 56 kiloBITS per second.
CD-ROMs hold 650M? Your home drive array is going to be 180G.
Not necessarily. When CD drives first became commonplace, they were much larger than HDs. However, this is still going to be much smaller than hard disks in ten years. HDs should be around 50 terabytes by then.
I would much rather have a better hard drive than a better optical drive. I HATE hard drives. They are slow, unreliable, and get corrupted all of the time. We need a better solution than this. Perhaps mram (very fast and non volatile, but somehow I doubt it will have the storage capacities to be used for anything more than ram) or holographic storage. (Very fast, large capacity)
As for chips, I hope that by '10 or '15 we'll have multi-core spintronic processors to speed up Quake 5.
They should use the excess heat of the shredder to set MORE paper on fire!!!
And I gotta get down to 7-11 before they outlaw pringles cans!
Pringles can antennas are already illegal. They are unapproved by the FCC. I still can't believe that the FCC is unwilling to free up some space in the spectrum. If they could make just one 1-gigahertz wide band in the 10-50 ghz range unlicensed, that would really expand the opportunities for wifi. (That frequency would make it hard to transmit between rooms in houses. The 2.4 ghz is better for that. But it would have no problem going a mile or two over the air with enough power, provided there isn't any fog or anything.)
Nope, my filters take care of the flash and banner ads just fine. I don't need to subscribe.
Don't be an asshole. Slashdot's banners are not annoying at all. The sad fact is that you need ads to support this site! Do you think the bandwidth and server costs magically come from fairy-land!?
I can understand blocking popups and animated ads, but sites like slashdot do need revenue.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA
The sad man says you!
It's out of most weather though, which makes a difference. Not nearly as much stormy weather, as say, 1000 feet.
I strip you of your fp in the name of logged in crapflooders! AC retards.
I want to use Linux, the only thing holding me back (or making me switch back and forth every month or so) is the games.
Why not just dual boot linux with windows? It's astonishingly easy with distros like Red Hat or Mandrake.
The problem with games like Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2003 is the hardware requirements... unbelievably high demands for hardware, which translates to high costs.
Um, UT2K3 runs fine on a 750 mhz processor. Doom 3 has some pretty off the wall requirements, but it has very good graphics. Nothing close to Doom 3 graphics could ever be released for consoles, anyway.
Why would I buy a high end gaming PC when a $200 console has as much power and I can sit on my couch and play on my big screen?
You don't need a high end gaming machine! Even a cheap PC you could build for $400 with a Athlon XP 1500+, 40 gig hd, geforce 3 ti500, and 512 megs of ddr would be able to very nicely play any game in existence right now, and under much higher rez than a console.
Consoles also are better for multiplayer. (But they stink for posting to /. ...)
The xbox is great. Hook up up to four with cat5 and you have an instant lan party. But, you've got four people on each tv screen, which sucks.
Consoles suck for internet play. Yes, with the xbox you can play online, but you have to pay to do so. On a PC, I can fire up UT and browse thousands of servers, or set up my own server with any damn mods I want. (You can't mod console games, of course)
Internet play is just better with PCs.
Still:
/.) already has a computer. In all likelihood, it is very capable of playing such games as UT2K3 or Q3A. If you already have the necessary hardware, what's the point of buying a special console just for gaming?
$630 > $200
There's no doubt that console gaming is cheaper. But my computer can pump out UT2K3 at 1600x1200, which is significantly better than the NTSC rez of consoles. I know, yeah, you sit farther away from the tv, so it doesn't look all pixelly. But that means the picture is smaller and harder to see.
But I sit a foot or two away from my monitor. That makes it the equivalent of a huge bigscreen tv, since it covers a huge field of my vision. Consoles just can't compete with the great picture of a computer game. Also, many computer games have much better graphics than consoles. Consoles simply cannot pump out the graphics of computers.
One more thing, everyone (at least everyone reading
Especially since most of the time they don't let the customer get past the screensaver!
The tree-huggers whine about the precious trees, and tie up legal logging in the courts, and then stand idly by when the forests burn down because they haven't been thinned out.
You are completely correct. Selective cutting reduces fire danger. If a selectively-cut forest burns, it is just a healthy burn, taking out the underbrush and leaving the old growth trees intact. Fires are not supposed to take out large trees. That's enviro-crap. A century of fire suppression has made today's fires very intense, killing large trees and often sterilizing soil.
Because all they have to do is pull the CMOS battery or whatver is powering the BIOS long enough so that the BIOS resets
Never thought of that. On my computer, it's as simple as pulling a jumper. But, what if the theif didn't know much about computers.
Better yet, why not just password-protect the bios? Once they pay you, tell them the password.
Actually, just looking at the monitor and reading the words off it probably takes far more than 300,000 calculations per second. Consider that OCR still doesn't work well with computers 1000 times faster than that.
I doubt it. Digital computers and neural nets (brain) are just good at different things. Digital computers are good with things such as math, exact things. Brains are excellent at fuzzy logic. That's why it's so easy for you to read this comment. Your brain would say "That looks pretty close to a "T" so it's a T." A digital computer actually needs to run a neural net simulation for OCR, which takes quite a bit of power.
On the other side of things, try to compete with this 50 year old computer on algebraic formulas. You'd lose. Computers are just better at that.
So if I were to search on "goat feed" or something I might get a bunch of farm suppliers in my search, but "Lola's Palace of Live Goat Porn" in the advertisers section. I know that advertising is all about delivering eyeballs, but a more appropriate advertiser based on the context of my search would be much more likely to get my click-through.
Instead of using keywords, why don't they just display the ad of the company closest to the top of the search results. Say, a goat feed outfit who was advertising bought an ad, and their site is on the 5th page, and the Live Goatsex site is on the 50th page, then just display the goat feed ad.
I use Phoenix now. I only loop images once, and of course block popup ads. What these idiotic marketdroids don't understand is that I won't click on an ad just because it is big and animated. In fact, it will probably just piss me off and make me never go to that site again. People will only click on targeted advertising for things they like. (ie, thinkgeek ads on Slashdot or the user submitted text-based ads on Kuro5hin)
If they keep this up, I might have to completely install some ad blocking software.
Before wi-fi supports tv traffic and such, the FCC will need to pull their heads out of their asses, and maybe make some high frequency microwave wavelengths, like maybe around 10-20 ghz, unallocated. (As this band would be mostly line of sight, it would be best for direct connections to the ISP, rather than home networking. But it could carry lots of traffic.) 10 gigahertz would be more than enough bandwidth for everyone. I don't see them doing that, though.