This is from the Apple website page describing the Apple Pencil:
iPad Pro knows whether youâ(TM)re using your finger or Apple Pencil. When iPad Pro senses Apple Pencil, the subsystem scans its signal at an astounding 240 times per second, giving it twice the data points it normally collects with your finger. This data, combined with Appleâ'designed software, means that thereâ(TM)s only milliseconds between the image you have in your mind and the one you see on the display.
That doesn't sound like a separate stylus digitiser layer, it's more like the regular capacitive touch layer goes into turbo mode when the Pencil tip gets close to the screen.
We'll find out definitively when the first teardowns occur I suppose.
From what I've seen and read the iPad Pro stylus uses the classic capacitive touch sensor of the sort used on all the iPads, maybe with a higher-definition capability. That that means the user can't rest their hand on the screen while drawing. All the videos I've seen of users demoing the iPad stylus show them being very careful not to let their hand get anywhere near the screen, holding the stylus in a rather unnatural fashion.
The Surface Pro has a separate digitising screen for the stylus as well as the regular capacitive touch screen and it's possible to rest a hand on the Surface Pro's screen while writing and drawing as it can ignore the capacitive touch signal.
The Sun isn't visible on any given point on the Lunar surface for two weeks every month and it gets cold at "night". An RTG-powered lander and rover can stay operational in such circumstances and the excess heat from the RTG can stop the electronics, motors, batteries etc. from freezing up and failing. The solar-only solution would require lots and lots of PV panels plus enough battery storage to, at the minimum, warm the lander/rover and prevent damage to the instruments and systems. That's a lot of extra mass to carry compared to a small RTG that can provide power and heat.
LH2/LOX engine technology is very well-developed and modern versions like the Vulcain 2, the RS-25 and RS-68/RS-68A produce close to the maximum possible Isp given the reaction chemistry involved absent a slight loss of efficiency due to the need to throttle up and down. The bad news is the amount of mass they throw out the back to provide thrust is low because hydrogen is a very light gas. Most LH2 engines run oxygen-rich to improve their total thrust by increasing the mass of the exhaust.
LH2-fuelled engines don't perform at their best in thick atmosphere as the large volume of exhaust gas is fighting the back pressure. LH2/LOX rockets really do well in vacuum where there's no back-pressure on the exhaust -- the Delta 4's RS-68 engine has an Isp of 365 seconds as sea-level (100kPa) but that increases to 410 seconds in vacuum.
The low density of LH2 also means the pumps, plumbing, injectors and most critically the tankage have to be substantially larger and heavier than a motor burning a denser fuel like kerosene or maybe liquid methane, the fuel for SpaceX's future Raptor engine.
it looks like all the stages of Saturn V used liquid H and O for fuel:
Well apart from the first stage of the Saturn V which burned kerosene and liquid oxygen, about half the total all-up weight of the entire stack, in rather crude inefficient engines.
The Hugo awards are a part of the Worldcon, nominated and voted on by members of the Worldcon. Anyone can be a member of the current Worldcon by paying a membership fee. Supporting membership usually costs $40. That doesn't get you physical access to the con itself, attending membership is a lot more.
Joining the Worldcon makes you a member of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) for that year. As part of that membership you get nominating and voting rights for the Hugos including the right to nominate the next year but not vote. If you want to vote next year (that con will be in Kansas City in 2016) you need to pay for a supporting or attending membership for that specific convention.
I was a member of the 2014 Worldcon, nominated and voted that year and nominated this year but I couldn't vote this year since I didn't join Sasquan.
As I understand it a lot of people joined Sasquan as supporting members after the nominations closed simply to vote for the Hugos, generally opposing the slate nominees. They couldn't change the nomination lists but they could vote against the slate nominees. In the end the opposition was strong enough that most slate nominees ended up below No Award (or as David Gerrold calls it "Noah Ward").
JAXA is currently flying its second asteroid material return mission, Hayabusa 2. The first was not a total success but the craft did get to its target and return a capsule to Earth. Number of NASA asteroid material return missions, zero.
Hayabusa 2 is carrying a lander built by the French CNES and three smaller "hopping" landers as well as an IED meant to blow a hole in the asteroid's surface to expose fresh material for inspection and analysis.
There are also satchel charges which can be, in extremis, thrown a certain distance by hand so they could be classed as "large hand grenades", I suppose. On the other hand there's the Special Atomic Demolition Munition which was (theoretically) man-portable...
I suspect that large Li-ion technology cells are used in certain circumstances such as submarines but not usually in "civilian" environments like cars because of Li-ion's ability to release its stored energy in a short period of time as heat or even a low-order explosion due to its low internal resistance. A rough calculation suggests a fully charged Li-ion battery holds about 15% of the energy of a similar mass of TNT. Building a battery pack out of a lot of smaller cells extends the time for a fire to propagate and engage neighbouring cells. A few large cells each storing several megajoules of energy are more likely to burn faster (the square/cube law at work) and set off their neighbours similarly.
My understanding is that the Tesla car batteries are built from large arrays of commodity Li-ion battery cells, they're nothing special in terms of capacity or size or design. An 80kWh Tesla battery pack might have ten thousand cells each of which is a 3.7V 2.2AH unit of the sort you'd find in a laptop battery pack, arranged in series-parallel.
Tesla's "secret sauce" is the charging and conditioning of their batteries as well as armouring them against damage in a collision and preventing propagation of a fire in a series of cells spreading too quickly to the other cells in the pack.
Making Li battery cells in the Musk Gigafactory will bring the cost down a bit, cutting out the middleman as Henry Ford did but I don't expect them to change the design much, for safety reasons if nothing else. Battery makers don't sell large Li-ion cells for the same reason they don't sell large hand-grenades...
We did workarounds on the ATA bus spec for known hardware bugs in older VIA chipsets. These were silicon bugs, not chipset firmware so they couldn't be fixed afterwards with patches and there were millions of these boards out there. Declaring our devices (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives) wouldn't work with these boards was not going to happen for sales reasons so our code included a lockup-recovery function that was invoked when the rare bug conditions were met and the IDE bus froze. The average user never noticed these lockups and we didn't tell them about them.
Out-of-spec bugs like this were well-known in the industry and workarounds were easy to produce as long as you had access to a few million bucks worth of test equipment and a good team of professional engineers with decades of experience, not something that's common in the Linux world.
Right now, as I type this, France is importing 2.5GW of electricity from Germany and 450MW from Switzerland. It is exporting 2GW to Britain, 2.6GW to Italy and 890MW to Spain though, a next export from France of 3GW.
You can find real-time details of France's generating capacity, imports and exports at this website, http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk....
I've seen times on this page when France has been exporting as much as 10GW of electricity to other countries (Britain in particular takes 2GW of cheap French nuclear electricity nearly all the time). I don't think I've ever seen a case where France was importing more electricity than it exported.
The title of this submission talks about "phones", the Fine Article discusses Nokia's possible entry into the smartphone world after the noncompete agreement with MS lapses. This being/. I can comprehend that "smartphones" and "phones" are synonymous in most readers minds but Nokia is still building and selling dumb phones and feature phones (profitably, I presume) and has been all the time they were being funded by MS to make the Lumia range.
The Nokia board probably have a good idea about their ability to leverage the good name of Nokia in the Android smartphone biz by looking at the sales of their N1 Android tablet in the markets it's already been released in. No public numbers yet though.
The two big differentiators that Nokia could bring to a new smartphone design based on its long phone-making track record would be voice call quality and the radio hardware, not something any of the other smartphone makers (with the exception of the Lumia series spawned by Nokia) seem to bother with much.
Pumped storage and all other storage systems cost money to build and operate (construction costs for pumped storage are about $200 million/GWh) and they waste energy in the storage/regeneration cycle (about 30% losses for pumped storage round-trip). The renewables boosters never mention these costs and resulting energy losses when claiming how economic solar and wind are, focusing instead only on the peak generating capacity of new-build renewable plant and pretending the large amount of combined-cycle gas and coal generating plant "backing up" renewables doesn't exist.
Back in the day friends were into doing Lazertag with the original retail guns and detectors and they came to me to see what I could do for them. I reverse-engineered a gun, scoped the output to the IR LED in the muzzle and discovered it was a simple short burst of 1kHz, nothing complicated for the target detectors to register.
By the time I had finished they had a couple of hand grenades (push a button, toss it at the Other Guys, three seconds later it fired a burst of 1kHz through a bunch of small IR LEDs peeking through holes of the plastic casing made from laundry detergent globes) and a "knife" (push the handle down against the Other Guy's body close to their target, another short burst of IR from LEDs in the handle shielded from the holder). The best item though was the "bomb on a stick", an omnidirectional radiator on a short pole, just push it round a corner and fire it off. That one emitted for as long as the switch was held down and it had a LOT of IR LEDs. One-shot room clearance FTW.
Something went wrong with this Falcon 9 flight. Assuming little has changed in its design over previous flights then that something could have happened on any previous flight and SpaceX were just lucky it didn't happen on an earlier flight.
The goalpost-shifting criteria of "how many successful launches do you achieve before the first bad one happens" is not something the insurers will look on with equanimity. What they want to see is a long unbroken string of successful launches like, say, the Ariane V which had its last failure back in 2002 and which has launched sixty-four times since then with every mission an unqualified success (no OrbComm-style failure-to-achieve-correct-orbit in that sequence BTW).
As for the Japanese HII failure, a strap-on motor on an HII-A failed to separate after burnout and it was aborted by the range safety officer. It was flight number 6 of that design.
The larger HII-B has four successes for four attempts to its credit, all cargo flights to the ISS. Hmmm, just ran some numbers -- the four Japanese HII-B resupply missions have delivered 19.8 tonnes of supplies, spare parts etc. The six successful SpaceX CRS missions have delivered 9.7 tonnes of cargo in total, slightly less than half that amount.
Where's the Ariane Vega, or the Japanese H2 launchers or the PSLV in that list?
Vega - five launches, five successful.
H2 (A and B variants) - thirty-two launches, one failure.
PSLV - twenty-nine launches, one total failure (the first), one partial where the final stage underperformed but the payload satellite used its own propulsion system to get to the correct orbit.
That moves the Falcon 9 down the listings a bit, I think.
"The only alternatives to SpaceX are NASA's AtlasV and the Russian offerings. That's well known."
Well, apart from Arianespace (the Ariane V medium-lift and Vega small-capacity launcher), the Japanese H2-B launchers (one will fly a cargo resupply mission to the ISS in August), the low-cost Indian PSLVs, the Chinese Long March series of man-rated launchers etc. etc. That's well-known.
Saying that this launch failure has certainly put a crimp in SpaceX's plans to nuzzle up to the DoD/NSA funding teat.
That's via ENEnews, the Chicken Littles of the science journalism world especially when it comes to nuclear power and the radiation releases from Fukushima. They never let statements by wild-eyed panic merchants or serial exaggerators go by without blasting it out on their website.
I've got a 4-core 955 AMD CPU running at 3.2GHz in a generic ASUS motherboard populated with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a 120GB Sandisk SSD on SATA-3 for OS and programs with a 3TB spinning-rust Toshiba drive for data. The video card is a lowish-end AMD R250 with 1GB of video RAM, nothing special, chosen because it was the cheapest card I could find with DisplayPort.
Why DisplayPort? Because my mad money went on buying a 32" IPS 4k monitor, the Dell Ultrasharp UP3214Q and I needed DisplayPort to drive it at 60Hz. I have no peripheral vision left. It's the best computer upgrade I've ever spent money on, even better than fitting an SSD as a boot drive. My eyes aren't getting any younger after all.
My previous monitor, a 27" Dell IPS 2560x1440 display is running in portrait-mode as a sidekick off the same card with no hassles but I do most of my computing (video, graphics, photoediting, browsing) on the 4k monitor directly in front of me. If you're hesitating about going 4k, my advice is don't wait. The IPS panels like this Dell are more expensive than the smaller TN 4k displays but I really wanted the extended colour gamut and good off-axis viewing the TN displays lack.
There are the Asha model Nokia phones which are intended for the Indian market but there are also other cheap featurephones like the 105, 120 etc. which are sold here in the UK from Amazon and other sources either SIM-free or locked to carriers as PAYG. They are branded Nokia and, I presume, built by them.
The Lumia smartphones are being rebranded as MS devices with the Nokia name being deprecated although a lot of sales listings still refers to them as Nokia Lumia.
The rumours suggest Nokia want to get (back) into smartphones after the non-compete agreement with MS runs out in 2016. We'll see.
Nokia do make mobile phones. At the moment they don't make small tablet computers with a GSM/CDMA voice stage like the Lumias, Samsung Androids or iPhones. They're called featurephones. You'll find them for sale in out-of-the-way stores like Amazon with options like dual-SIM, basic social networking support and the like for twenty or thirty bucks, no contract.
That's... odd. Australia doesn't have any nuclear power reactors. It burns coal for a lot of its power requirements and exports a shitload more to other countries who do the same. Of course it doesn't take back all the CO2 emitted by the foreign power stations when they burn that coal...
A quick Giggle shows that Australia has sent spent fuel from at least one of its research reactors, HIFAR to France for reprocessing. The waste from that reprocessing operation would normally be returned to Australia after being vtirified.
HIFAR (it's shut down and now being decommissioned) was small with only 7kg of fuel compared to the hundred tonnes plus of fuel oxide in a typical power reactor of today. The problem seems to have been that initially HIFAR was fuelled with highly-enriched uranium which was a proliferation danger hence the desire to reprocess the spent fuel. Most research reactors of this type around the world (such as HIFAR's replacement, OPAL) have been now reconfigured to use low-enriched uranium which poses less of a proliferation threat and in such cases long-term storage on site of spent fuel is probably more appropriate and cheaper.
France imports yellowcake (refined U3O8 uranium oxide powder) and turns it into fuel (enriched UO2 uranium oxide pellets), burns it and reprocesses its spent fuel to make more fresh fuel. The small amount of resulting waste is vitrified and is currently stored above ground until the time there's enough of it to be worth putting in an underground repository which will be built in France, not Australia.
Where you get the weird idea that the countries selling uranium are required to accept and dispose of other people's spent fuel I don't know. In some cases spent fuel from other countries has been recycled by nations with the capacity to do so -- the UK, for example has processed spent Magnox fuel from Japan, turning it into fresh fuel rods which were shipped back to Japan. The deal involved the resulting vitrified waste also being returned to Japan in separate shipments. Japan's last Magnox reactor was decommissioned a few years back and the shipments of spent fuel, recycled fuel and vitrified waste have now come to an end.
Russia's Rosatom is offering some countries like Jordan and Vietnam a turnkey nuclear power capability where they supply fresh fuel and take away the spent fuel at each refuelling meaning the host country does not need to build its own waste disposal and processing facility.
The RBMK-4 reactors were putatively dual-use in that they could be used to expose uranium to a neutron flux for short periods, a necessary step to produce high-purity Pu-239 without much Pu-240. The British Magnox reactors[1] could also be operated in this mode, as can the CANDU family. However by the time many of these reactors (and especially the second-generation RBMK-4s) had been brought online in the mid to late 70s the major nuclear powers such as the Soviet Union had already produced and stockpiled all the weapons-grade Pu they'd ever need as weapons control programs started massively reducing the numbers of deployable weapons any nation possessed. Indeed today's stockpiles of surplus Pu-239 are an expensive logistical headache for the owners as it's difficult to downblend such material to use in power reactors, unlike highly-enriched uranium U-235.
[1] It is thought by some historians that the US test-fired at least one nuclear device which used Pu created in a British Magnox reactor. The US made nearly all if not all of its own nuclear weapons Pu in specialised breeder reactors in places like Hanford. In Britain's case most of its weapons Pu was created at Windscale (now called Sellafield) in an air-cooled reactor which famously caught fire in 1957.
Some uranium (U-233, U-235) and plutonium (Pu-239, Pu-241) isotopes are fissile. Thorium is not fissile and cannot sustain a fission reaction by itself. Th-232 can be bred up into U-233 which is fissile in theoretical LFTRs and the like but at that point the reactor is fissioning uranium to produce energy and neutrons for breeding more useless thorium into uranium.
U-233 produced in thorium breeder reactors can be extracted and used to make nuclear weapons with some work, the uranium and plutonium in conventional power reactor fuel would take a lot more effort to weaponise which is why all nuclear weapons states have used specialised breeder reactors and mil-spec uranium enrichment lines to produce high-purity material for their nuclear weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPad Pro does have a separate digitizer.
This is from the Apple website page describing the Apple Pencil:
iPad Pro knows whether youâ(TM)re using your finger or Apple Pencil. When iPad Pro senses Apple Pencil, the subsystem scans its signal at an astounding 240 times per second, giving it twice the data points it normally collects with your finger. This data, combined with Appleâ'designed software, means that thereâ(TM)s only milliseconds between the image you have in your mind and the one you see on the display.
That doesn't sound like a separate stylus digitiser layer, it's more like the regular capacitive touch layer goes into turbo mode when the Pencil tip gets close to the screen.
We'll find out definitively when the first teardowns occur I suppose.
From what I've seen and read the iPad Pro stylus uses the classic capacitive touch sensor of the sort used on all the iPads, maybe with a higher-definition capability. That that means the user can't rest their hand on the screen while drawing. All the videos I've seen of users demoing the iPad stylus show them being very careful not to let their hand get anywhere near the screen, holding the stylus in a rather unnatural fashion.
The Surface Pro has a separate digitising screen for the stylus as well as the regular capacitive touch screen and it's possible to rest a hand on the Surface Pro's screen while writing and drawing as it can ignore the capacitive touch signal.
The Sun isn't visible on any given point on the Lunar surface for two weeks every month and it gets cold at "night". An RTG-powered lander and rover can stay operational in such circumstances and the excess heat from the RTG can stop the electronics, motors, batteries etc. from freezing up and failing. The solar-only solution would require lots and lots of PV panels plus enough battery storage to, at the minimum, warm the lander/rover and prevent damage to the instruments and systems. That's a lot of extra mass to carry compared to a small RTG that can provide power and heat.
LH2/LOX engine technology is very well-developed and modern versions like the Vulcain 2, the RS-25 and RS-68/RS-68A produce close to the maximum possible Isp given the reaction chemistry involved absent a slight loss of efficiency due to the need to throttle up and down. The bad news is the amount of mass they throw out the back to provide thrust is low because hydrogen is a very light gas. Most LH2 engines run oxygen-rich to improve their total thrust by increasing the mass of the exhaust.
LH2-fuelled engines don't perform at their best in thick atmosphere as the large volume of exhaust gas is fighting the back pressure. LH2/LOX rockets really do well in vacuum where there's no back-pressure on the exhaust -- the Delta 4's RS-68 engine has an Isp of 365 seconds as sea-level (100kPa) but that increases to 410 seconds in vacuum.
The low density of LH2 also means the pumps, plumbing, injectors and most critically the tankage have to be substantially larger and heavier than a motor burning a denser fuel like kerosene or maybe liquid methane, the fuel for SpaceX's future Raptor engine.
it looks like all the stages of Saturn V used liquid H and O for fuel:
Well apart from the first stage of the Saturn V which burned kerosene and liquid oxygen, about half the total all-up weight of the entire stack, in rather crude inefficient engines.
The Hugo awards are a part of the Worldcon, nominated and voted on by members of the Worldcon. Anyone can be a member of the current Worldcon by paying a membership fee. Supporting membership usually costs $40. That doesn't get you physical access to the con itself, attending membership is a lot more.
Joining the Worldcon makes you a member of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) for that year. As part of that membership you get nominating and voting rights for the Hugos including the right to nominate the next year but not vote. If you want to vote next year (that con will be in Kansas City in 2016) you need to pay for a supporting or attending membership for that specific convention.
I was a member of the 2014 Worldcon, nominated and voted that year and nominated this year but I couldn't vote this year since I didn't join Sasquan.
As I understand it a lot of people joined Sasquan as supporting members after the nominations closed simply to vote for the Hugos, generally opposing the slate nominees. They couldn't change the nomination lists but they could vote against the slate nominees. In the end the opposition was strong enough that most slate nominees ended up below No Award (or as David Gerrold calls it "Noah Ward").
JAXA is currently flying its second asteroid material return mission, Hayabusa 2. The first was not a total success but the craft did get to its target and return a capsule to Earth. Number of NASA asteroid material return missions, zero.
Hayabusa 2 is carrying a lander built by the French CNES and three smaller "hopping" landers as well as an IED meant to blow a hole in the asteroid's surface to expose fresh material for inspection and analysis.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com...
There's a lot of difficult science to be done (tm GlaDOS) out in the solar system, we can't expect the US to do all of it.
There are also satchel charges which can be, in extremis, thrown a certain distance by hand so they could be classed as "large hand grenades", I suppose. On the other hand there's the Special Atomic Demolition Munition which was (theoretically) man-portable...
I suspect that large Li-ion technology cells are used in certain circumstances such as submarines but not usually in "civilian" environments like cars because of Li-ion's ability to release its stored energy in a short period of time as heat or even a low-order explosion due to its low internal resistance. A rough calculation suggests a fully charged Li-ion battery holds about 15% of the energy of a similar mass of TNT. Building a battery pack out of a lot of smaller cells extends the time for a fire to propagate and engage neighbouring cells. A few large cells each storing several megajoules of energy are more likely to burn faster (the square/cube law at work) and set off their neighbours similarly.
My understanding is that the Tesla car batteries are built from large arrays of commodity Li-ion battery cells, they're nothing special in terms of capacity or size or design. An 80kWh Tesla battery pack might have ten thousand cells each of which is a 3.7V 2.2AH unit of the sort you'd find in a laptop battery pack, arranged in series-parallel.
Tesla's "secret sauce" is the charging and conditioning of their batteries as well as armouring them against damage in a collision and preventing propagation of a fire in a series of cells spreading too quickly to the other cells in the pack.
Making Li battery cells in the Musk Gigafactory will bring the cost down a bit, cutting out the middleman as Henry Ford did but I don't expect them to change the design much, for safety reasons if nothing else. Battery makers don't sell large Li-ion cells for the same reason they don't sell large hand-grenades...
We did workarounds on the ATA bus spec for known hardware bugs in older VIA chipsets. These were silicon bugs, not chipset firmware so they couldn't be fixed afterwards with patches and there were millions of these boards out there. Declaring our devices (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives) wouldn't work with these boards was not going to happen for sales reasons so our code included a lockup-recovery function that was invoked when the rare bug conditions were met and the IDE bus froze. The average user never noticed these lockups and we didn't tell them about them.
Out-of-spec bugs like this were well-known in the industry and workarounds were easy to produce as long as you had access to a few million bucks worth of test equipment and a good team of professional engineers with decades of experience, not something that's common in the Linux world.
Right now, as I type this, France is importing 2.5GW of electricity from Germany and 450MW from Switzerland. It is exporting 2GW to Britain, 2.6GW to Italy and 890MW to Spain though, a next export from France of 3GW.
You can find real-time details of France's generating capacity, imports and exports at this website, http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk....
I've seen times on this page when France has been exporting as much as 10GW of electricity to other countries (Britain in particular takes 2GW of cheap French nuclear electricity nearly all the time). I don't think I've ever seen a case where France was importing more electricity than it exported.
The title of this submission talks about "phones", the Fine Article discusses Nokia's possible entry into the smartphone world after the noncompete agreement with MS lapses. This being /. I can comprehend that "smartphones" and "phones" are synonymous in most readers minds but Nokia is still building and selling dumb phones and feature phones (profitably, I presume) and has been all the time they were being funded by MS to make the Lumia range.
The Nokia board probably have a good idea about their ability to leverage the good name of Nokia in the Android smartphone biz by looking at the sales of their N1 Android tablet in the markets it's already been released in. No public numbers yet though.
The two big differentiators that Nokia could bring to a new smartphone design based on its long phone-making track record would be voice call quality and the radio hardware, not something any of the other smartphone makers (with the exception of the Lumia series spawned by Nokia) seem to bother with much.
Pumped storage and all other storage systems cost money to build and operate (construction costs for pumped storage are about $200 million/GWh) and they waste energy in the storage/regeneration cycle (about 30% losses for pumped storage round-trip). The renewables boosters never mention these costs and resulting energy losses when claiming how economic solar and wind are, focusing instead only on the peak generating capacity of new-build renewable plant and pretending the large amount of combined-cycle gas and coal generating plant "backing up" renewables doesn't exist.
Back in the day friends were into doing Lazertag with the original retail guns and detectors and they came to me to see what I could do for them. I reverse-engineered a gun, scoped the output to the IR LED in the muzzle and discovered it was a simple short burst of 1kHz, nothing complicated for the target detectors to register.
By the time I had finished they had a couple of hand grenades (push a button, toss it at the Other Guys, three seconds later it fired a burst of 1kHz through a bunch of small IR LEDs peeking through holes of the plastic casing made from laundry detergent globes) and a "knife" (push the handle down against the Other Guy's body close to their target, another short burst of IR from LEDs in the handle shielded from the holder). The best item though was the "bomb on a stick", an omnidirectional radiator on a short pole, just push it round a corner and fire it off. That one emitted for as long as the switch was held down and it had a LOT of IR LEDs. One-shot room clearance FTW.
Something went wrong with this Falcon 9 flight. Assuming little has changed in its design over previous flights then that something could have happened on any previous flight and SpaceX were just lucky it didn't happen on an earlier flight.
The goalpost-shifting criteria of "how many successful launches do you achieve before the first bad one happens" is not something the insurers will look on with equanimity. What they want to see is a long unbroken string of successful launches like, say, the Ariane V which had its last failure back in 2002 and which has launched sixty-four times since then with every mission an unqualified success (no OrbComm-style failure-to-achieve-correct-orbit in that sequence BTW).
As for the Japanese HII failure, a strap-on motor on an HII-A failed to separate after burnout and it was aborted by the range safety officer. It was flight number 6 of that design.
The larger HII-B has four successes for four attempts to its credit, all cargo flights to the ISS. Hmmm, just ran some numbers -- the four Japanese HII-B resupply missions have delivered 19.8 tonnes of supplies, spare parts etc. The six successful SpaceX CRS missions have delivered 9.7 tonnes of cargo in total, slightly less than half that amount.
Where's the Ariane Vega, or the Japanese H2 launchers or the PSLV in that list?
Vega - five launches, five successful.
H2 (A and B variants) - thirty-two launches, one failure.
PSLV - twenty-nine launches, one total failure (the first), one partial where the final stage underperformed but the payload satellite used its own propulsion system to get to the correct orbit.
That moves the Falcon 9 down the listings a bit, I think.
"The only alternatives to SpaceX are NASA's AtlasV and the Russian offerings. That's well known."
Well, apart from Arianespace (the Ariane V medium-lift and Vega small-capacity launcher), the Japanese H2-B launchers (one will fly a cargo resupply mission to the ISS in August), the low-cost Indian PSLVs, the Chinese Long March series of man-rated launchers etc. etc. That's well-known.
Saying that this launch failure has certainly put a crimp in SpaceX's plans to nuzzle up to the DoD/NSA funding teat.
That's via ENEnews, the Chicken Littles of the science journalism world especially when it comes to nuclear power and the radiation releases from Fukushima. They never let statements by wild-eyed panic merchants or serial exaggerators go by without blasting it out on their website.
I've got a 4-core 955 AMD CPU running at 3.2GHz in a generic ASUS motherboard populated with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a 120GB Sandisk SSD on SATA-3 for OS and programs with a 3TB spinning-rust Toshiba drive for data. The video card is a lowish-end AMD R250 with 1GB of video RAM, nothing special, chosen because it was the cheapest card I could find with DisplayPort.
Why DisplayPort? Because my mad money went on buying a 32" IPS 4k monitor, the Dell Ultrasharp UP3214Q and I needed DisplayPort to drive it at 60Hz. I have no peripheral vision left. It's the best computer upgrade I've ever spent money on, even better than fitting an SSD as a boot drive. My eyes aren't getting any younger after all.
My previous monitor, a 27" Dell IPS 2560x1440 display is running in portrait-mode as a sidekick off the same card with no hassles but I do most of my computing (video, graphics, photoediting, browsing) on the 4k monitor directly in front of me. If you're hesitating about going 4k, my advice is don't wait. The IPS panels like this Dell are more expensive than the smaller TN 4k displays but I really wanted the extended colour gamut and good off-axis viewing the TN displays lack.
There are the Asha model Nokia phones which are intended for the Indian market but there are also other cheap featurephones like the 105, 120 etc. which are sold here in the UK from Amazon and other sources either SIM-free or locked to carriers as PAYG. They are branded Nokia and, I presume, built by them.
The Lumia smartphones are being rebranded as MS devices with the Nokia name being deprecated although a lot of sales listings still refers to them as Nokia Lumia.
The rumours suggest Nokia want to get (back) into smartphones after the non-compete agreement with MS runs out in 2016. We'll see.
Nokia do make mobile phones. At the moment they don't make small tablet computers with a GSM/CDMA voice stage like the Lumias, Samsung Androids or iPhones. They're called featurephones. You'll find them for sale in out-of-the-way stores like Amazon with options like dual-SIM, basic social networking support and the like for twenty or thirty bucks, no contract.
That's... odd. Australia doesn't have any nuclear power reactors. It burns coal for a lot of its power requirements and exports a shitload more to other countries who do the same. Of course it doesn't take back all the CO2 emitted by the foreign power stations when they burn that coal...
A quick Giggle shows that Australia has sent spent fuel from at least one of its research reactors, HIFAR to France for reprocessing. The waste from that reprocessing operation would normally be returned to Australia after being vtirified.
HIFAR (it's shut down and now being decommissioned) was small with only 7kg of fuel compared to the hundred tonnes plus of fuel oxide in a typical power reactor of today. The problem seems to have been that initially HIFAR was fuelled with highly-enriched uranium which was a proliferation danger hence the desire to reprocess the spent fuel. Most research reactors of this type around the world (such as HIFAR's replacement, OPAL) have been now reconfigured to use low-enriched uranium which poses less of a proliferation threat and in such cases long-term storage on site of spent fuel is probably more appropriate and cheaper.
France imports yellowcake (refined U3O8 uranium oxide powder) and turns it into fuel (enriched UO2 uranium oxide pellets), burns it and reprocesses its spent fuel to make more fresh fuel. The small amount of resulting waste is vitrified and is currently stored above ground until the time there's enough of it to be worth putting in an underground repository which will be built in France, not Australia.
Where you get the weird idea that the countries selling uranium are required to accept and dispose of other people's spent fuel I don't know. In some cases spent fuel from other countries has been recycled by nations with the capacity to do so -- the UK, for example has processed spent Magnox fuel from Japan, turning it into fresh fuel rods which were shipped back to Japan. The deal involved the resulting vitrified waste also being returned to Japan in separate shipments. Japan's last Magnox reactor was decommissioned a few years back and the shipments of spent fuel, recycled fuel and vitrified waste have now come to an end.
Russia's Rosatom is offering some countries like Jordan and Vietnam a turnkey nuclear power capability where they supply fresh fuel and take away the spent fuel at each refuelling meaning the host country does not need to build its own waste disposal and processing facility.
The RBMK-4 reactors were putatively dual-use in that they could be used to expose uranium to a neutron flux for short periods, a necessary step to produce high-purity Pu-239 without much Pu-240. The British Magnox reactors[1] could also be operated in this mode, as can the CANDU family. However by the time many of these reactors (and especially the second-generation RBMK-4s) had been brought online in the mid to late 70s the major nuclear powers such as the Soviet Union had already produced and stockpiled all the weapons-grade Pu they'd ever need as weapons control programs started massively reducing the numbers of deployable weapons any nation possessed. Indeed today's stockpiles of surplus Pu-239 are an expensive logistical headache for the owners as it's difficult to downblend such material to use in power reactors, unlike highly-enriched uranium U-235.
[1] It is thought by some historians that the US test-fired at least one nuclear device which used Pu created in a British Magnox reactor. The US made nearly all if not all of its own nuclear weapons Pu in specialised breeder reactors in places like Hanford. In Britain's case most of its weapons Pu was created at Windscale (now called Sellafield) in an air-cooled reactor which famously caught fire in 1957.
Some uranium (U-233, U-235) and plutonium (Pu-239, Pu-241) isotopes are fissile. Thorium is not fissile and cannot sustain a fission reaction by itself. Th-232 can be bred up into U-233 which is fissile in theoretical LFTRs and the like but at that point the reactor is fissioning uranium to produce energy and neutrons for breeding more useless thorium into uranium.
U-233 produced in thorium breeder reactors can be extracted and used to make nuclear weapons with some work, the uranium and plutonium in conventional power reactor fuel would take a lot more effort to weaponise which is why all nuclear weapons states have used specialised breeder reactors and mil-spec uranium enrichment lines to produce high-purity material for their nuclear weapons.