SpaceX has been working on this since 2015 and already launched two successful prototype satellites. It's called "Starlink" and production is already underway. Good luck competing with a company that builds their own satellites and has their own low cost launch platform.
This is actually the point of LFTR. They operate at low pressure and are inherently unable to "meltdown". It's a design that has lots of promise if not for the fact that we no longer really need it.
We have 6 fission reactors under construction or licensed to begin construction. These are proven reactors designs and there is no shortage of fuel for them to burn. Thorium is more plentiful, but at present consumption levels we already have a worldwide supply of uranium to last another 230 years.
So who is going to invest in a new fission technology at this late stage? Sure, it's cleaner and safer, but it's not economically viable to develop it anymore.
Here is a guy who declined the scan and then tested positive for explosives during the routine pat down. He has no identification showing a fixed residence. He has no identification showing his work place. He can't provide a phone number they can call to verify his work. The two people he says he's meeting can't be reached by phone either.
These are all legitimate red flags for security to follow up on.
I don't see what the problem is here. This is actually the TSA doing what they should be doing.
I can see a time when a disease is cured thru gene therapy at which time our own ability to donate blood is banned in the same way Monsanto bans the distribution of their genetically modified crops.
I can no longer sit back and allow Corporate infiltration, Corporate indoctrination, Corporate subversion and the international Corporate conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Swine flu may have been caught early enough to prevent a serious U.S. epidemic, according to computer models developed by Virginia Tech's Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL).
So why is this Slashdot story claiming:
"Supercomputer software models predict that swine flu will likely go pandemic sometime next week"
So is the author just panicking unnecessarily or is this another case of using fear tactics to push an agenda, in this case boosting sales of a flu detection chip?
This is essentially a low/no cpu load heat test. There is no indication as to how active the core is at all. An idle processor can last a long time with minimal air cooling.
I'd be more impressed if that mp4 video were being software rendered rather than the decoding being offloaded to the graphics chip while that cpu sat virtually idle.
California Penal Code section 653w states (in part)
(1) If the offense involves the advertisement, offer for sale or resale, sale, rental, manufacture, or possession for these purposes, of at least 100 articles of audio recordings or 100 articles of audiovisual works described in subdivision (a), the person shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three, or five years, or by a fine not to exceed two hundred fifty thousand dollars ($250,000), or by both.
(2) Any other violation of subdivision (a) not described in paragraph (1), shall, upon a first offense, be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by a fine not to exceed twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000), or by both.
So the law, as written, seems to say that even a SINGLE instance of "manufacturing" (ie: burning to cd?) can be considered a viloation and is subject to up to $25,000 fine and a year in jail.
The new city ordanance expands that to include:
A judgment awarding a permanent injunction pursuant to this chapter may also include an abatement order directing the sheriff to seize and remove from the property all material, equipment, and instrumentalities used in the creation and/or maintenance of the public nuisance and shall direct the sale by the sheriff of such personal property in the manner provided for the sale of chattels under execution
Pretty harsh.
Now I can't imagine any states attorney going out of his way to do this, but the fact that they CAN is chilling...
Seems to me this is a logical next step to the Microsoft Live! platform. This allows MS to get OS level targeting and verification of advertising campaigns every time someone uses a portion of MS Live, bypassing any browser based adblockers.
This will no doubt be billed as a "feature" allows Microsoft to examine your behavior not only on the net but in how you use the OS as well to get detailed user info that can be used to increase the value of their advertising services.
Well, the idea is to make the removal process as energy efficient as possible. Breaking the CO2 chemical bond requires more energy than was gained in its creation (the burning of fossil fuels). That means any power source behind a technology for reverting CO2 to C + O2 would be better used "replacing" existing fossil fuel plants, preventing its creation in the first place.
Simply condensing the CO2 out of the atmosphere removes it without the need for re breaking the bond.
There's always the problem of asphyxiating ourselves since we're permanently removing oxygen as well, but we can leave that to future generations to solve:)
Dry ice production is not difficult - a simple compressor and heat exchanger would suffice. The colder the environment, the easier it will be to remove enough heat from the atmosphere to cause the co2 to precipitate out as dry ice. It certainly requires far less energy to extract and solidify CO2 than is needed to actually re break the molecular bond.
It occurs to me however that regions with exceedingly cold air temps are also regions which generally have very little sunlight - so the whole idea of a solar powered heat exchange is not very practical.
Setup a solar array in Northern Siberia (where temps drop as low as -70F), and use the energy to sublime the carbon dioxide out of the atmopshere for underground storage. The low ambient temp reduces the energy needed to freeze and store the dry ice.
And a billion tons of CO2 would form a cube only about 2700ft on a side:)
Ok, so it's insane - but it still requires far less energy than trying to break the CO2 bond.
That's all well and good, but even if power is 28% cheaper at night you've only hit a break even point. Now try and recoup your $10k investment.
Honestly, it's hard to say which way this falls. I don't know what the numbers are on losses charging a gel battery and further losses during the inverter cycle drawing that power back. Even assuming large enough night time power discounts and high enough battery efficiencies to let you get an ROI over 4 years, the odds are against you that the batteries will last that long with daily fully cycling, and gel type batteries are not cheap to replace.
Doesn't this assume that the device can store power with 100% efficiency? Seems like a 15% cost savings would be lost upfront unless the charging efficiency is at least 85%. And this doesn't even take into account the capital investment in the device itself.
Whoever moderated this as -1 Troll is an idiot. Everything in my comment is backed up by Steve Gibsons own words as documented in the link I supplied. That moderator needs to get his head out of his *ss and get a clue as to what TROLL means.
Despite all the speculation that this was a poorly coded Escape/SETABORTPROC routine, it seems there is potential that something far more sinister was afoot! Namely that this was a deliberately coded backdoor and that Microsoft has known about it for years.
"Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday."
Yet blamanj quotes it as:
"Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting from North America at such a clip that it could end up in Siberia in the next 50 years."
These are VASTLY different statements - nowhere in the article does it give an indication that the north pole will swing that far out of alignment - only that the aurora may relocate over the horizon from Alaska. An actual shift of the magenetic pole to Siberia would be catastrophic, but a circular wobble around the north is merely interesting.
I understand the need to make spectacular headlines but quotes are suppose to be LITERAL by definition.
If the purpose of this system is to tax the public based on miles of highway driving then why does the system need to report the vehicles position back at all? It would seem a simpler system would be to simply have the installed device use GPS to see if the vehicle is on the highway and keep a count of the miles driven. You could then report the annual mileage total when the vehicle gets a smog check or is due for registration renewal. The highway tax could even be added to the registration renewal fee.
No need to keep detailed records of time and position at all. The state gets its tax dollars and no one needs fear being "watched" from above. Not to mention the enormous reduction in complexity involved in actually monitoring every vehicle all the time.
We started seeing a number of strange security failures during boot on older IBM 300PL machines:
The RF-ID Tag has changed. System-security - Keyboard is locked.
After which the system was dead - it would never boot further.
Turns out it had nothing at all to do with the RFID device inside (an inventory control tag). Instead, after trying everything under heaven and earth to revive the systems we finally noticed that the three 560uf caps in the processor VR had bulged.
We pulled the three old caps and replaced them with a pair of 1000uf units and viola! the machines were restored to their former glory.
I couldn't agree more. A couple years back I was running dual Viewsonic 21" CRTs and found it infuriating to to have a border in the center of my viewing area. I moved to a Sony W900 24" 16:10 CRT (at 1920x1200) with a 17" LCD (1280x1024) to my left. The CRT sits straight ahead and runs my core apps while the LCD is dedicated to the distracting things like IMs, Email, etc.
A large primary and a smaller secondary off to one side is absolutely the way to go IMO. Makes it much easier to concentrate on a central task while still being able to quickly glance to the side to check on less important things.
It could very well be that Microsoft knows that its OS and Office based platforms are reaching their EOL. As they try and turn their corporate leviathan around to a new business model (online only services?) they are making one final stab at generating the revenue needed to make the changeover.
They don't mind seeing a large mass of folks move away from XP since in the years to come their revenue source will be from providing connected services that are OS independant.
Granted, we're talking 3-5 years down the line, but I doubt microsoft limits its business plans to just next year...
Oh yes, very safe, and don't worry when it does THIS in the upper atmosphere during launch. Everyone knows plutonium dust is perfectly healthy in really small quantities right?
This is the fundemental problem with launching such engines into space - you're placing extremely toxic materials on top of a potential bomb. And what's the upside? This new engine only doubles the efficiency of a chemical reactor. I doubt that the result justifies the risk.
Women of the dynastic period (3000BC - 322BC) enjoyed legal, social, and sexual independence unrivaled in any other time save since the late 19th century. Herodotus was quite intrigued by it and wrote often of how Egyptian women could own and trade property, work outside the home, marry foreigners, and even live on their own without a male guardian.
So yes, gender-neutral potrayal would actually be far more consistent in a game like this. Sexist slurs are historically out of place, not to mention just bad taste.
Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX has been working on this since 2015 and already launched two successful prototype satellites. It's called "Starlink" and production is already underway. Good luck competing with a company that builds their own satellites and has their own low cost launch platform.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-internet-satellite-starlink-production-in-house/
This is actually the point of LFTR. They operate at low pressure and are inherently unable to "meltdown". It's a design that has lots of promise if not for the fact that we no longer really need it.
We have 6 fission reactors under construction or licensed to begin construction. These are proven reactors designs and there is no shortage of fuel for them to burn. Thorium is more plentiful, but at present consumption levels we already have a worldwide supply of uranium to last another 230 years.
So who is going to invest in a new fission technology at this late stage? Sure, it's cleaner and safer, but it's not economically viable to develop it anymore.
Here is a guy who declined the scan and then tested positive for explosives during the routine pat down.
He has no identification showing a fixed residence.
He has no identification showing his work place.
He can't provide a phone number they can call to verify his work.
The two people he says he's meeting can't be reached by phone either.
These are all legitimate red flags for security to follow up on.
I don't see what the problem is here. This is actually the TSA doing what they should be doing.
>> Orth has also now switched his Twitter account settings to private.
I guess his "always on" Twitter account isn't as awesome as he originally thought.
I can see a time when a disease is cured thru gene therapy at which time our own ability to donate blood is banned in the same way Monsanto bans the distribution of their genetically modified crops.
I can no longer sit back and allow Corporate infiltration, Corporate indoctrination, Corporate subversion and the international Corporate conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
If you trace back to the original EETimes article (http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217201126) you'll see this in the opening paragraph:
Swine flu may have been caught early enough to prevent a serious U.S. epidemic, according to computer models developed by Virginia Tech's Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL).
So why is this Slashdot story claiming:
"Supercomputer software models predict that swine flu will likely go pandemic sometime next week"
So is the author just panicking unnecessarily or is this another case of using fear tactics to push an agenda, in this case boosting sales of a flu detection chip?
This is essentially a low/no cpu load heat test. There is no indication as to how active the core is at all. An idle processor can last a long time with minimal air cooling.
I'd be more impressed if that mp4 video were being software rendered rather than the decoding being offloaded to the graphics chip while that cpu sat virtually idle.
Obligatory disclaimer - IANAL
California Penal Code section 653w states (in part)
(1) If the offense involves the advertisement, offer for sale or resale, sale, rental, manufacture, or possession for these purposes, of at least 100 articles of audio recordings or 100 articles of audiovisual works described in subdivision (a), the person shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by imprisonment in the state prison for two, three, or five years, or by a fine not to exceed two hundred fifty thousand dollars ($250,000), or by both.
(2) Any other violation of subdivision (a) not described in paragraph (1), shall, upon a first offense, be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by a fine not to exceed twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000), or by both.
So the law, as written, seems to say that even a SINGLE instance of "manufacturing" (ie: burning to cd?) can be considered a viloation and is subject to up to $25,000 fine and a year in jail.
The new city ordanance expands that to include:
A judgment awarding a permanent injunction pursuant to this chapter may also include an abatement order directing the sheriff to seize and remove from the property all material, equipment, and instrumentalities used in the creation and/or maintenance of the public nuisance and shall direct the sale by the sheriff of such personal property in the manner provided for the sale of chattels under execution
Pretty harsh.
Now I can't imagine any states attorney going out of his way to do this, but the fact that they CAN is chilling...
Engadget has an interesting article about this, with some good insights into why this might simply be a publicity stunt by FSJ.
Have a look:
Fake Steve Jobs gets takedown letters from Apple... or not
Seems to me this is a logical next step to the Microsoft Live! platform. This allows MS to get OS level targeting and verification of advertising campaigns every time someone uses a portion of MS Live, bypassing any browser based adblockers.
This will no doubt be billed as a "feature" allows Microsoft to examine your behavior not only on the net but in how you use the OS as well to get detailed user info that can be used to increase the value of their advertising services.
Well, the idea is to make the removal process as energy efficient as possible. Breaking the CO2 chemical bond requires more energy than was gained in its creation (the burning of fossil fuels). That means any power source behind a technology for reverting CO2 to C + O2 would be better used "replacing" existing fossil fuel plants, preventing its creation in the first place.
:)
Simply condensing the CO2 out of the atmosphere removes it without the need for re breaking the bond.
There's always the problem of asphyxiating ourselves since we're permanently removing oxygen as well, but we can leave that to future generations to solve
Dry ice production is not difficult - a simple compressor and heat exchanger would suffice. The colder the environment, the easier it will be to remove enough heat from the atmosphere to cause the co2 to precipitate out as dry ice. It certainly requires far less energy to extract and solidify CO2 than is needed to actually re break the molecular bond.
It occurs to me however that regions with exceedingly cold air temps are also regions which generally have very little sunlight - so the whole idea of a solar powered heat exchange is not very practical.
Setup a solar array in Northern Siberia (where temps drop as low as -70F), and use the energy to sublime the carbon dioxide out of the atmopshere for underground storage. The low ambient temp reduces the energy needed to freeze and store the dry ice.
:)
And a billion tons of CO2 would form a cube only about 2700ft on a side
Ok, so it's insane - but it still requires far less energy than trying to break the CO2 bond.
That's all well and good, but even if power is 28% cheaper at night you've only hit a break even point. Now try and recoup your $10k investment.
Honestly, it's hard to say which way this falls. I don't know what the numbers are on losses charging a gel battery and further losses during the inverter cycle drawing that power back. Even assuming large enough night time power discounts and high enough battery efficiencies to let you get an ROI over 4 years, the odds are against you that the batteries will last that long with daily fully cycling, and gel type batteries are not cheap to replace.
Doesn't this assume that the device can store power with 100% efficiency? Seems like a 15% cost savings would be lost upfront unless the charging efficiency is at least 85%. And this doesn't even take into account the capital investment in the device itself.
Whoever moderated this as -1 Troll is an idiot. Everything in my comment is backed up by Steve Gibsons own words as documented in the link I supplied. That moderator needs to get his head out of his *ss and get a clue as to what TROLL means.
Unbelievable...
Despite all the speculation that this was a poorly coded Escape/SETABORTPROC routine, it seems there is potential that something far more sinister was afoot! Namely that this was a deliberately coded backdoor and that Microsoft has known about it for years.
The Windows MetaFile Backdoor?
If you RTFA you'll see:
"Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday."
Yet blamanj quotes it as:
"Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting from North America at such a clip that it could end up in Siberia in the next 50 years."
These are VASTLY different statements - nowhere in the article does it give an indication that the north pole will swing that far out of alignment - only that the aurora may relocate over the horizon from Alaska. An actual shift of the magenetic pole to Siberia would be catastrophic, but a circular wobble around the north is merely interesting.
I understand the need to make spectacular headlines but quotes are suppose to be LITERAL by definition.
If the purpose of this system is to tax the public based on miles of highway driving then why does the system need to report the vehicles position back at all? It would seem a simpler system would be to simply have the installed device use GPS to see if the vehicle is on the highway and keep a count of the miles driven. You could then report the annual mileage total when the vehicle gets a smog check or is due for registration renewal. The highway tax could even be added to the registration renewal fee.
No need to keep detailed records of time and position at all. The state gets its tax dollars and no one needs fear being "watched" from above. Not to mention the enormous reduction in complexity involved in actually monitoring every vehicle all the time.
We started seeing a number of strange security failures during boot on older IBM 300PL machines:
The RF-ID Tag has changed.
System-security - Keyboard is locked.
After which the system was dead - it would never boot further.
Turns out it had nothing at all to do with the RFID device inside (an inventory control tag). Instead, after trying everything under heaven and earth to revive the systems we finally noticed that the three 560uf caps in the processor VR had bulged.
We pulled the three old caps and replaced them with a pair of 1000uf units and viola! the machines were restored to their former glory.
In point of fact the actual theft of the data occured over a month ago. The public is only being notified now.
So what's a few hours here and there when the event is already so old?
I couldn't agree more. A couple years back I was running dual Viewsonic 21" CRTs and found it infuriating to to have a border in the center of my viewing area. I moved to a Sony W900 24" 16:10 CRT (at 1920x1200) with a 17" LCD (1280x1024) to my left. The CRT sits straight ahead and runs my core apps while the LCD is dedicated to the distracting things like IMs, Email, etc.
A large primary and a smaller secondary off to one side is absolutely the way to go IMO. Makes it much easier to concentrate on a central task while still being able to quickly glance to the side to check on less important things.
It could very well be that Microsoft knows that its OS and Office based platforms are reaching their EOL. As they try and turn their corporate leviathan around to a new business model (online only services?) they are making one final stab at generating the revenue needed to make the changeover.
They don't mind seeing a large mass of folks move away from XP since in the years to come their revenue source will be from providing connected services that are OS independant.
Granted, we're talking 3-5 years down the line, but I doubt microsoft limits its business plans to just next year...
Oh yes, very safe, and don't worry when it does THIS in the upper atmosphere during launch. Everyone knows plutonium dust is perfectly healthy in really small quantities right? This is the fundemental problem with launching such engines into space - you're placing extremely toxic materials on top of a potential bomb. And what's the upside? This new engine only doubles the efficiency of a chemical reactor. I doubt that the result justifies the risk.
Women of the dynastic period (3000BC - 322BC) enjoyed legal, social, and sexual independence unrivaled in any other time save since the late 19th century. Herodotus was quite intrigued by it and wrote often of how Egyptian women could own and trade property, work outside the home, marry foreigners, and even live on their own without a male guardian.
So yes, gender-neutral potrayal would actually be far more consistent in a game like this. Sexist slurs are historically out of place, not to mention just bad taste.