Astronomical mirrors are plated by evaporating aluminum in a vacuum. Material requirements are very small.
Once the epoxy has hardened, it can be moved. The mirror can be put in an aimable mount like any other telescope mirror.
My concern is whether this technique actually produces high quality mirrors. Will they be smooth enough and properly shaped? Epoxies do not generally keep a constant volume as they cure, and this will tend to distort the mirror. The forces shaping the mirror (gravity and centrifugal) will be 1/6 as strong as on earth, thus any systematic errors will tend to be 6X larger than on earth.
Actually, there's an existing AMTRAK station near Disneyland (actually at the baseball stadium) and the reference to Disneyland is somewhat coincidental. Property in greater Los Angeles is expensive, and the expensive region extends north to the mountains, where track construction is not practical. So in order to not have excessive property "purchase" costs, tracks must be south of L.A., which means Orange County (Anaheim, Disneyland).
If this were just a way to shuttle Las Vegas people to and from Disneyland, it would be cheaper to build a new Disneyland in Las Vegas.
Part of the reason that train speeds are severely limited is that they are built on the now-idiotic standard of a vehicle height exceeding 12 feet. Even though most of the mass is relatively low, the center of gravity could probably be cut by a factor of 3 if attention were paid to it. Trains should be 3 feet high and passengers loaded like peas in a pod. Then speeds would be limited by track roughness and other such factors, not tipping over because of centrifugal force.
AllTheWeb in its prime produced the best results, but HotBot had a feature I appreciated: I could set a date range, and as long as a site was honest about the date of its page I could eliminate many inappropriate results.
H. Clinton lost because she is widely and correctly perceived as being a vicious and corrupt individual. Based on her espoused policies, she's better than Obama. It's her nastiness that people understand would make her a dangerous as president.
You make a nice point about the futility and waste of government programs. However, using static analysis to imply that there would be an advantage to just giving $15168/yr to each household is an error. Many of those people, and many not far above that income level, would just stop working. The economy would lose the value of their production, effectively making everyone poorer by that fraction of the the economy which that much money represents.
The idea that any finite amount of money could "Eliminate extreme poverty around the world" is a fraud and nothing else. Bad governments in the poorest countries will steal all the money and use it to strengthen the government and enrich the leaders. In relatively rich countries, most extreme poverty is due to personal waste and sloth, and no amount of money can fix that either.
It would send a great message to the rest of the world that Americans are a diverse, caring and accepting people. And it would probably greatly inspire a lot of people who have felt oppressed over the past 8 years.
Wow, what a set of codewords. To see the reality behind the codewords, read disorganized and quarrelling for diverse, soft and gullible for caring, amoral for accepting. The oppressed of the world would be greatly endangered by a United States no longer willing or able to clamp down on aggressive dictators. And as Obama's kleptocratic policies destroy the U.S. economy, we will indeed lose the ability.
Examining the chip with a microscope is close to becoming impossible. Today's finest geometry cannot be resolved with an optical microscope. Using EPROM or similar programmable techniques, the function of the chip is determined by stored charges. Whether a transistor is N-type or P-type is determined by doping concentrations, which is also more difficult to determine as the device becomes smaller.
A chip designed with the intent to make it difficult to reverse-engineer can be made economically infeasible to reverse-engineer.
Many semiconductor companies are fabless, so a semiconductor company doesn't need to be much more than a room with a few computers, people to run the design software, and a pile of money to pay for expenses until the product starts to sell. Massachusetts has MIT, whose graduates often want to be in the semiconductor industry. In fact, the Boston area generally is a big tech center. There are also fabs in the area, although I can't recall any in Massachusetts right now, Fairchild has a fab in Maine. Linear Tech, TI, and many others have design centers in New Hampshire.
GPUs are massively parallel and very poor at processing branches. This doesn't make for good speed with most programs. For a company to put out a product that they claimed is much faster than the competition, they would have to be very selective with their examples and create new benchmarks that took advantage of their product. They might even have to create new programs to take advantage of the power, like a modified gimp.
In all likelihood, if they tried too hard to advertise their speed advantage, they would be called dishonest because most programs would not exhibit a speedup.
It gets better yet. "New" (1.5+) Firefox requires libraries that break Gnome in Red Hat 8.0. I had to put the libraries in a path that only Firefox could find, and even then one of those libraries had a hard-coded path that required components in the original library path. Fun and games.
They probably wanted a 6X improvement so they could rule out fluorescents without having to say so explicitly. Having chosen 6X, they inverted to get the power requirement (16.667%) and rounded to the nearest full percent: 17.
When I saw Rocky Horror it was doing one midnight show a week to a dedicated and rude clique. The Sound of Music toured the country from city to city before general release, thus remaining active for a long time. Star Wars ran several shows every day at New York's Loews Astor Plaza, from the initial release until the film was re-released and cut-rate theatres took the audience. Not the same thing.
When I spend money on a movie, I want to come out of the theatre happier than when I went in. To come out happier, at least 1 of 3 things has to occur: I laughed a lot, I feel better about myself, I feel better about the world. Star Wars I, II, III fail on that ground. The universe is falling into chaos and the moral ambiguity you are so fond of is a primary cause. None of the characters - not one - is attractive; they range from annoying to evil. Too much of the "technology" has flaws obvious to anyone who thinks about it even briefly.
I saw "I" a second time because I couldn't believe it was as bad as it seemed. "II" and "III" left no doubt requiring a second view.
If surprise endings are important to you, you should see "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". How do you deal with movies that have several alternate endings, like "Clue"?
Artistically, a movie should be a unified whole. The ending MUST follow from the body of the film, otherwise the movie is incoherent and without purpose.
Geez Louise, you spend $200-$300 a week on food for yourself? I spend about $40 and concentrate on high nutritional quality, otherwise I could spend significantly less. How are you wasting so much money?
Using Carnot cycle calculations for a non-thermal process is invalid. Gear trains have efficiencies well over 90% even when all gears are at the same temperature.
Ignorance can be so funny. "Or a tasmanian tiger accidentally interbreeding with a normal one and the aggressive, man-eating hybrid becoming the dominant species" is about as likely as you crossbreeding with a platypus. Oh, the horrific poison-clawed egg-laying human hybrid!
Slashdot Mirror
Once the epoxy has hardened, it can be moved. The mirror can be put in an aimable mount like any other telescope mirror.
My concern is whether this technique actually produces high quality mirrors. Will they be smooth enough and properly shaped? Epoxies do not generally keep a constant volume as they cure, and this will tend to distort the mirror. The forces shaping the mirror (gravity and centrifugal) will be 1/6 as strong as on earth, thus any systematic errors will tend to be 6X larger than on earth.
If this were just a way to shuttle Las Vegas people to and from Disneyland, it would be cheaper to build a new Disneyland in Las Vegas.
Part of the reason that train speeds are severely limited is that they are built on the now-idiotic standard of a vehicle height exceeding 12 feet. Even though most of the mass is relatively low, the center of gravity could probably be cut by a factor of 3 if attention were paid to it. Trains should be 3 feet high and passengers loaded like peas in a pod. Then speeds would be limited by track roughness and other such factors, not tipping over because of centrifugal force.
AllTheWeb in its prime produced the best results, but HotBot had a feature I appreciated: I could set a date range, and as long as a site was honest about the date of its page I could eliminate many inappropriate results.
We have two extraordinarily poor candidates for president this time. It's a vacuum that the right person could fill.
H. Clinton lost because she is widely and correctly perceived as being a vicious and corrupt individual. Based on her espoused policies, she's better than Obama. It's her nastiness that people understand would make her a dangerous as president.
You make a nice point about the futility and waste of government programs. However, using static analysis to imply that there would be an advantage to just giving $15168/yr to each household is an error. Many of those people, and many not far above that income level, would just stop working. The economy would lose the value of their production, effectively making everyone poorer by that fraction of the the economy which that much money represents.
The idea that any finite amount of money could "Eliminate extreme poverty around the world" is a fraud and nothing else. Bad governments in the poorest countries will steal all the money and use it to strengthen the government and enrich the leaders. In relatively rich countries, most extreme poverty is due to personal waste and sloth, and no amount of money can fix that either.
Nice way to drop context. Let's make the full explicit statement: "Other things being equal, more taxes mean less freedom."
A chip designed with the intent to make it difficult to reverse-engineer can be made economically infeasible to reverse-engineer.
Many semiconductor companies are fabless, so a semiconductor company doesn't need to be much more than a room with a few computers, people to run the design software, and a pile of money to pay for expenses until the product starts to sell. Massachusetts has MIT, whose graduates often want to be in the semiconductor industry. In fact, the Boston area generally is a big tech center. There are also fabs in the area, although I can't recall any in Massachusetts right now, Fairchild has a fab in Maine. Linear Tech, TI, and many others have design centers in New Hampshire.
In all likelihood, if they tried too hard to advertise their speed advantage, they would be called dishonest because most programs would not exhibit a speedup.
It gets better yet. "New" (1.5+) Firefox requires libraries that break Gnome in Red Hat 8.0. I had to put the libraries in a path that only Firefox could find, and even then one of those libraries had a hard-coded path that required components in the original library path. Fun and games.
They probably wanted a 6X improvement so they could rule out fluorescents without having to say so explicitly. Having chosen 6X, they inverted to get the power requirement (16.667%) and rounded to the nearest full percent: 17.
They should call it the Maxwell Demon.
When I saw Rocky Horror it was doing one midnight show a week to a dedicated and rude clique. The Sound of Music toured the country from city to city before general release, thus remaining active for a long time. Star Wars ran several shows every day at New York's Loews Astor Plaza, from the initial release until the film was re-released and cut-rate theatres took the audience. Not the same thing.
I saw "I" a second time because I couldn't believe it was as bad as it seemed. "II" and "III" left no doubt requiring a second view.
Artistically, a movie should be a unified whole. The ending MUST follow from the body of the film, otherwise the movie is incoherent and without purpose.
Do you not understand that "economic incentives" and "capitalist" are mutually exclusive?
Geez Louise, you spend $200-$300 a week on food for yourself? I spend about $40 and concentrate on high nutritional quality, otherwise I could spend significantly less. How are you wasting so much money?
Using Carnot cycle calculations for a non-thermal process is invalid. Gear trains have efficiencies well over 90% even when all gears are at the same temperature.
Ignorance can be so funny. "Or a tasmanian tiger accidentally interbreeding with a normal one and the aggressive, man-eating hybrid becoming the dominant species" is about as likely as you crossbreeding with a platypus. Oh, the horrific poison-clawed egg-laying human hybrid!