You've already been linked examples of warnings that uranium is pyrophoric (do you even know what that means?) and will react even with cold water. No catalysts needed or high temperatures needed.
Unable to read?
Should ask that your self, since you've been shown to be wrong about a lot of things, by several people, with links, yet you keep finding ways to be so fundamentally wrong, you either can't read, or are a troll.
Powerharvester stuff is designed for use with a base station that transmits 1-3 W of power, and has a maximum range listed as 40-50 ft for such a base station. That is not designed for use with ambient RF.
There are other systems for collecting ambient RF, but their power is considerably less without a large antenna. Even Powerharvester supplies ~6" antennas for use with their dev kits.
That requires gating the camera on the nanosecond time scale, which is many orders of magnitude away from something like this and a whole different technology. Most work with such cameras are limited to actually very slow frame rates (e.g. 60 Hz) but with a very fast shutter. The speed of such cameras is improving, and there is some tech coming out that allows multiple frames at nanosecond to picosecond separation, but it would still be a burst situation where you take a couple dozen images then have to wait milliseconds or longer to do it again. Neat videos of light propagation using such methods typically involve taking thousands of identical sequences and stitching them back together.
Argon compounds have been formed in the lab for nearly 15 years. No Nobel compounds have been directly observed in space of any kind, which is the new part, not that Argon in particular was found in a compound.
2. He is signing executive orders for gun control rather than letting Congress make laws.
You complain of people being delusional and yet make such a stupid mistake as this. Which executive order and which action within controls guns? He's issued orders telling people to review polices and internals rules, to discuss and analyze the implications of various things and to share information or promote something. None of that is overriding Congress's laws or creating laws or new gun control without Congress. To be so disconnected from reality, you expect others to listen to what you say and trust your judgement of others' grip on reality?
Now, teaching 3 or 4 classes a semester may not be "relaxing," but it is less than 15 contact hours per week. Once you've taught the classes a couple of times, got the powerpoints made and the lectures down, that doesn't have to be very stressful. Be a good performer, put on a good show/lecture, and you'll get tenure.
What universities and fields offer tenure positions for just instructing 3 to 4 classes a semester? At the places I've worked, you would get maybe $2-3k per course you instructed, with no guarantee you would be rehired the next semester. As more tenure track professors retired, the number of people being paid as instructors like this has grown to the point of being the majority of how course instructors are paid at some places. To get tenure, you had to climb the ladder several years of successfully pulling in grant money and getting recognized for research, while hoping that there would still be a possible tenure position when you get that instead of some budget freeze preventing it, or the department deciding they want use the few tenure options on a different subfield, so as to not even give you a chance.
The word "impartial" in the first sentence should, hopefully obviously, be the word "partial." Inflammable and flammable might mean the same thing thanks to Latin, but impartial and partial should be kept straight...
This works in any simple base using the same concept of decimal representation.
In base x, consider the number zero followed by n digits of (x-1) after the decimal point, e.g. 0.FF...F with n Fs for hexadecimal. One minus this number gives the difference 1/x^n. In the limit n goes to infinity, this difference goes to zero for real numbers. And with the real numbers, zero difference means they are the same number.
you have only ever done math with an approximation of pi.
This is only true if you define limit "math" to mean arithmetic and what simple calculators do. Algebra gives the abstract tools to work with numbers without needing the decimal expansion. By trigonometry and especially calculus, pi gets used a lot in an exact sense. Although sometimes the fundamental basis of what it means to work with an real numbers doesn't get covered until a course on real analysis.
Mathematical proofs are a way of finding new properties of a system by making deductions from previously known properties, and in a practical sense are often a short-cut finding, the new property without testing every possible case.
For a simple example, consider the property that every integer multiplied by by 10 will end up with a zero in the ones place. Someone could respond: "How could you know that? There are an infinite number of integers and it would take infinite amount of time to multiply each by 10 to check it." But using a proof can rigorously show this is a pattern without testing every number by exploiting the properties of numbers.
In the case of multiplying 0.999... you can workout what the pattern any given digit will follow, and use that instead of manually performing the calculation.
Measuring magnetic fields with an ion generator nearby sounds a bit disturbing. They better turn it off while making measurements.
You've got to say these obvious things because the space boffins seem to forget now and then.
Why? Magnetic field measurements are very common on plasma experiments, which can have similar or even more severe environments than this ion engine. Turning the plasma/ions off kind of defeats the purpose of most such measurements.
As indicated by the Wikipedia article you linked to, xenon has the density of 5.864 g/L at 0 C. This can easily be double checked using the atomic weight and knowing that a mole at STP takes up 22.4 L: 131.3 g/mol / (22.4 L/mol) = 5.85 g/L.
Water has a density of about 1 kg/L.
Although there are some pros to surveillance, I don't consider the commonly stated, "If you don't do anything wrong, you got nothing to hide," a valid one. Just because a person is doing things 100% legal doesn't mean there is nothing a person wants to hide. As long as there is prejudice and malice in the world, people will want privacy for many things.
One example for the car tracking would be to get tracked going to some hentai store. This could be completely legal, but could cause problems if the information leaked out and you depend on seemingly unrelated decisions made by those that look down upon such things. Or even if there are no noticeable effects, maybe you are just shy about it and wish to do what you can to minimize those that know about it.
You mentioned somewhere about how the government is made of us... and that is exactly why I would fear it getting too much power over such things. It is a government of people, and people make mistakes or are sometimes malicious. At least requiring a warrant or judge's approval helps introduce extra eyes and ears into the process to stop one person from having too much power. But with things like information, it can be kind of dangerous since one mistake in a potentially very large system can let loose a flood of problems, e.g. a security mistake in the computer system letting someone get a bunch of data for many people.
Probably someone with that information would not notice what you do unless they were looking for you in particular, but many people don't want to take that risk. An extreme example would be to have collars installed on everyone that could kill them instantly with a command from the police (not really surveillance but same ideas). It would help resolve hostage and terrorist situations, but it also means trusting that there is no way for a malicious person to hit the button for your collar, for a police officer in the heat of a hostage situation to push the wrong one, or for the thing to just malfunction.
So it kind of comes down to trust in a way. I'm not saying that we can't trust people with any information and there should be no surveillance. The risks for a given process and type of information just need to be weighed against what is to gain. (E.g. that collar above would not get used very often, and would probably be pretty risky, where tracking of people's cars might not have as severe of a mistake and may help with things more often, but it comes down to how much people value their privacy, which can be a lot).
Some BSDs were considered, but would probably not make too big of a difference directly. Most of this was more about getting individual nodes working together than raw bandwidth out of a single box. A lot of the tools used were intended for Linux and were otherwise kind of untested or not really configured yet for use on one of the BSDs (although I think that may be looked into soon). In the end, with each node pushing out about 940-950 Mbps on a 1 Gbps connection, there is not too much more to squeeze out of the connection to each node, so they are going to stick with where they have the best tools and familiarity.
I think a similar setup, using the FAST kernel was used when the same team from Caltech broke the Internet2 land speed record (at SC04 and again in early 2005) and with another record between Caltech and CERN. (The former has since been surpassed by another group, I do not know about the latter.)
This sounds very similar to other products I've seen around in the past, just maybe better engineered, since references are made to older ones being rudimentary.
At a previous job of mine, we tested one of the older products, and also made our own electrolyzer to compare it against. Running an engine connected to a generator with a constant load, we compared fuel economies and did pollution testing. Following the directions that came with the electrolyzer we bought, there were no improvements or changes. Various attempts at tuning the engine, and running either electrolyzer at lower and higher levels didn't seem to have any effect either.
At this point, I am pretty skeptical of such a device, as there have been many shady predecessors already. This one may be newer and better engineered, but I can only think of that offering improved safety and reliability, which would not affect short term tests, and maybe an increased output, which we tested some cases by dumping more power into the electrolyzers.
If it is just a case of us not tuning the engine or installing it right, I hope that this model comes with better installation procedures and instructions than its predecessors.
Remove the network/phone cable, and put a piece of duct tape over the port. That should patch most of the holes in Windows. If you want to get all of them, repeat the same procedure, but with the power cord.
A minor suggestion I would make is to be careful using air compressors instead of canned air. Just don't set the pressure too high, otherwise it would damages stuff, particularly the fans if you let the air spin them up too fast.
The only bad example I've seen personally is a friend cleaning a laptop keyboard with an air compressor, which cleaned some of the keys right off the keyboard onto the floor.
So beforehand, parties A and B can predict they have no chance of winning against party E and then join forces by compromise on issues to form party AB with roughly 35% of the vote. This is because it is better to win and get some of the issues your way instead of losing and getting nothing. Party E doesn't want to lose completely either, so they join forces with party D, and end up with roughly 50% of the votes in another compromise. Then the party AB will start moving towards party C's views to gain more votes. The result: a two party system.
If you have an election where the single party/person with the most votes wins, it will tend to a two party system as parties start joining or adopting views from another party in order to get more votes. It is considered a "law" (a bit strong of a description in my opinion) of political science, unfortunately the name escapes me at the moment.
It is also why I think third party votes aren't necessarily wasted even if the independent person doesn't ever win. In an effort to get a few more votes, one of the two parties will start shifting a tiny bit to better cover the views of significant third parties.
I think the current Slashdot quote has some relevance: "Dibble's First Law of Sociology: Some do, some don't."
Some people have an interest in this stuff, others don't. It is much easier to skip over an article that doesn't interest you than to find ones that do interest you, but are not posted.
I tend to think that if a topic is really that uninteresting, why bother with spending the time to read or to reply to the posts.
The Focus Fusion stuff looks extremly similar to a spheromak which has a fair amount of research being performed and several large projects in the US that I know of. Same concept of letting the plasma do all of the work to shape and contain itself, although I still hear of power being collected in the traditional heating methods (such simple designs have an advantage to the tokamak when using heating, since there is a lot less structural material to absorb neutrons). So I think there are already several experiments very similar to that idea and they are getting a fair share of money (although it wouldn't hurt if our team had a bit more...).
I don't think you can call a method of fusion "wrong" though. Currently the tokamak seems to be the most mature method and will likely be the first to achieve sustained fusion, so that is where a lot of the money goes. There are a huge variety of ways of confining plasma outside of the leading tokamak, and each has its pros and cons. I think it would be proper to try all of them because we can't always see where things will go and how well they scale until we actually test them. At this point you can't say one is clearly better than the others or call another design nonsense until you actually have the working commercial reactor and the other design is unable to develop anymore (and that kind of supports the tokamak research as it has promising results).
And it is not like all other designs and projects will be canned once tokamaks "work." They will continue develop other designs, some of which I think may over take tokamaks in efficiency. The only problem is that they have a ways to catch up to the tokamak, and will likely not be the first type of reactor that reaches the desired goals.
I wonder about some of the same things as the parent mentions (although you have to be careful comparing to the sun, as a lot of that energy is in different regions of the spectrum).
If the EM radiation is bad at these low frequencies, what about the radio operators, or even worse, various scientists that are exposed to extremely high levels of the stuff? A lot of the equipment around various labs probably produces orders of magnitude stronger low-energy EM radiation. I don't hear too much of there being that much cancer in the scientists I know that passed away. Of course anecdotal evidence doesn't show much, so maybe it would be appropriate to study those that really get blasted by this stuff.
As the probability of failure becomes smaller and smaller, then the probability of there being a failure in two drives becomes more and more closer to being doubled. Even if your failure probability was 0.01% for one drive, then the failure probability of two drives would be 0.019999%.
The fans and other components make it more complicated, but still make RAID-0 often a lot messier. Suppose a cooling fan does die, it might not instantly kill the drive, but will shoot the probability of failure way up. So now you are back to a 10% failure probability or something, and you still end up with a 19% probability of failure in at least one drive. This does assume that both drives are cooled by the same fan, but if they are cooled by different fans, you now have a larger probability of a fan failure and we are still back to the same problem.
That said, I don't think there is a problem with RAID-0 if you think the gain is worth the cost and you don't mind the decreased reliability.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is clearly wrong at body temperature :D
You've already been linked examples of warnings that uranium is pyrophoric (do you even know what that means?) and will react even with cold water. No catalysts needed or high temperatures needed.
Unable to read?
Should ask that your self, since you've been shown to be wrong about a lot of things, by several people, with links, yet you keep finding ways to be so fundamentally wrong, you either can't read, or are a troll.
Powerharvester stuff is designed for use with a base station that transmits 1-3 W of power, and has a maximum range listed as 40-50 ft for such a base station. That is not designed for use with ambient RF.
There are other systems for collecting ambient RF, but their power is considerably less without a large antenna. Even Powerharvester supplies ~6" antennas for use with their dev kits.
That requires gating the camera on the nanosecond time scale, which is many orders of magnitude away from something like this and a whole different technology. Most work with such cameras are limited to actually very slow frame rates (e.g. 60 Hz) but with a very fast shutter. The speed of such cameras is improving, and there is some tech coming out that allows multiple frames at nanosecond to picosecond separation, but it would still be a burst situation where you take a couple dozen images then have to wait milliseconds or longer to do it again. Neat videos of light propagation using such methods typically involve taking thousands of identical sequences and stitching them back together.
At a distance of 1 light year, it would be about 40 arcseconds across, so about the size of Jupiter as seen from Earth.
Argon compounds have been formed in the lab for nearly 15 years. No Nobel compounds have been directly observed in space of any kind, which is the new part, not that Argon in particular was found in a compound.
2. He is signing executive orders for gun control rather than letting Congress make laws.
You complain of people being delusional and yet make such a stupid mistake as this. Which executive order and which action within controls guns? He's issued orders telling people to review polices and internals rules, to discuss and analyze the implications of various things and to share information or promote something. None of that is overriding Congress's laws or creating laws or new gun control without Congress. To be so disconnected from reality, you expect others to listen to what you say and trust your judgement of others' grip on reality?
Now, teaching 3 or 4 classes a semester may not be "relaxing," but it is less than 15 contact hours per week. Once you've taught the classes a couple of times, got the powerpoints made and the lectures down, that doesn't have to be very stressful. Be a good performer, put on a good show/lecture, and you'll get tenure.
What universities and fields offer tenure positions for just instructing 3 to 4 classes a semester? At the places I've worked, you would get maybe $2-3k per course you instructed, with no guarantee you would be rehired the next semester. As more tenure track professors retired, the number of people being paid as instructors like this has grown to the point of being the majority of how course instructors are paid at some places. To get tenure, you had to climb the ladder several years of successfully pulling in grant money and getting recognized for research, while hoping that there would still be a possible tenure position when you get that instead of some budget freeze preventing it, or the department deciding they want use the few tenure options on a different subfield, so as to not even give you a chance.
The word "impartial" in the first sentence should, hopefully obviously, be the word "partial." Inflammable and flammable might mean the same thing thanks to Latin, but impartial and partial should be kept straight...
This works in any simple base using the same concept of decimal representation.
In base x, consider the number zero followed by n digits of (x-1) after the decimal point, e.g. 0.FF...F with n Fs for hexadecimal. One minus this number gives the difference 1/x^n. In the limit n goes to infinity, this difference goes to zero for real numbers. And with the real numbers, zero difference means they are the same number.
you have only ever done math with an approximation of pi.
This is only true if you define limit "math" to mean arithmetic and what simple calculators do. Algebra gives the abstract tools to work with numbers without needing the decimal expansion. By trigonometry and especially calculus, pi gets used a lot in an exact sense. Although sometimes the fundamental basis of what it means to work with an real numbers doesn't get covered until a course on real analysis.
Mathematical proofs are a way of finding new properties of a system by making deductions from previously known properties, and in a practical sense are often a short-cut finding, the new property without testing every possible case.
For a simple example, consider the property that every integer multiplied by by 10 will end up with a zero in the ones place. Someone could respond: "How could you know that? There are an infinite number of integers and it would take infinite amount of time to multiply each by 10 to check it." But using a proof can rigorously show this is a pattern without testing every number by exploiting the properties of numbers.
In the case of multiplying 0.999... you can workout what the pattern any given digit will follow, and use that instead of manually performing the calculation.
You've got to say these obvious things because the space boffins seem to forget now and then.
Why? Magnetic field measurements are very common on plasma experiments, which can have similar or even more severe environments than this ion engine. Turning the plasma/ions off kind of defeats the purpose of most such measurements.As indicated by the Wikipedia article you linked to, xenon has the density of 5.864 g/L at 0 C. This can easily be double checked using the atomic weight and knowing that a mole at STP takes up 22.4 L: 131.3 g/mol / (22.4 L/mol) = 5.85 g/L. Water has a density of about 1 kg/L.
Although there are some pros to surveillance, I don't consider the commonly stated, "If you don't do anything wrong, you got nothing to hide," a valid one. Just because a person is doing things 100% legal doesn't mean there is nothing a person wants to hide. As long as there is prejudice and malice in the world, people will want privacy for many things.
One example for the car tracking would be to get tracked going to some hentai store. This could be completely legal, but could cause problems if the information leaked out and you depend on seemingly unrelated decisions made by those that look down upon such things. Or even if there are no noticeable effects, maybe you are just shy about it and wish to do what you can to minimize those that know about it.
You mentioned somewhere about how the government is made of us... and that is exactly why I would fear it getting too much power over such things. It is a government of people, and people make mistakes or are sometimes malicious. At least requiring a warrant or judge's approval helps introduce extra eyes and ears into the process to stop one person from having too much power. But with things like information, it can be kind of dangerous since one mistake in a potentially very large system can let loose a flood of problems, e.g. a security mistake in the computer system letting someone get a bunch of data for many people.
Probably someone with that information would not notice what you do unless they were looking for you in particular, but many people don't want to take that risk. An extreme example would be to have collars installed on everyone that could kill them instantly with a command from the police (not really surveillance but same ideas). It would help resolve hostage and terrorist situations, but it also means trusting that there is no way for a malicious person to hit the button for your collar, for a police officer in the heat of a hostage situation to push the wrong one, or for the thing to just malfunction.
So it kind of comes down to trust in a way. I'm not saying that we can't trust people with any information and there should be no surveillance. The risks for a given process and type of information just need to be weighed against what is to gain. (E.g. that collar above would not get used very often, and would probably be pretty risky, where tracking of people's cars might not have as severe of a mistake and may help with things more often, but it comes down to how much people value their privacy, which can be a lot).
Some BSDs were considered, but would probably not make too big of a difference directly. Most of this was more about getting individual nodes working together than raw bandwidth out of a single box. A lot of the tools used were intended for Linux and were otherwise kind of untested or not really configured yet for use on one of the BSDs (although I think that may be looked into soon). In the end, with each node pushing out about 940-950 Mbps on a 1 Gbps connection, there is not too much more to squeeze out of the connection to each node, so they are going to stick with where they have the best tools and familiarity.
I think a similar setup, using the FAST kernel was used when the same team from Caltech broke the Internet2 land speed record (at SC04 and again in early 2005) and with another record between Caltech and CERN. (The former has since been surpassed by another group, I do not know about the latter.)
This sounds very similar to other products I've seen around in the past, just maybe better engineered, since references are made to older ones being rudimentary.
At a previous job of mine, we tested one of the older products, and also made our own electrolyzer to compare it against. Running an engine connected to a generator with a constant load, we compared fuel economies and did pollution testing. Following the directions that came with the electrolyzer we bought, there were no improvements or changes. Various attempts at tuning the engine, and running either electrolyzer at lower and higher levels didn't seem to have any effect either.
At this point, I am pretty skeptical of such a device, as there have been many shady predecessors already. This one may be newer and better engineered, but I can only think of that offering improved safety and reliability, which would not affect short term tests, and maybe an increased output, which we tested some cases by dumping more power into the electrolyzers.
If it is just a case of us not tuning the engine or installing it right, I hope that this model comes with better installation procedures and instructions than its predecessors.
You don't make yourself "cool" by fighting the system over mere word usage. It seems even Webster agrees with the usage.
Quit propagating this mess about semantics and actually challenge points.
Remove the network/phone cable, and put a piece of duct tape over the port. That should patch most of the holes in Windows. If you want to get all of them, repeat the same procedure, but with the power cord.
A minor suggestion I would make is to be careful using air compressors instead of canned air. Just don't set the pressure too high, otherwise it would damages stuff, particularly the fans if you let the air spin them up too fast.
The only bad example I've seen personally is a friend cleaning a laptop keyboard with an air compressor, which cleaned some of the keys right off the keyboard onto the floor.
So beforehand, parties A and B can predict they have no chance of winning against party E and then join forces by compromise on issues to form party AB with roughly 35% of the vote. This is because it is better to win and get some of the issues your way instead of losing and getting nothing. Party E doesn't want to lose completely either, so they join forces with party D, and end up with roughly 50% of the votes in another compromise. Then the party AB will start moving towards party C's views to gain more votes. The result: a two party system.
If you have an election where the single party/person with the most votes wins, it will tend to a two party system as parties start joining or adopting views from another party in order to get more votes. It is considered a "law" (a bit strong of a description in my opinion) of political science, unfortunately the name escapes me at the moment.
It is also why I think third party votes aren't necessarily wasted even if the independent person doesn't ever win. In an effort to get a few more votes, one of the two parties will start shifting a tiny bit to better cover the views of significant third parties.
I think the current Slashdot quote has some relevance: "Dibble's First Law of Sociology: Some do, some don't."
Some people have an interest in this stuff, others don't. It is much easier to skip over an article that doesn't interest you than to find ones that do interest you, but are not posted.
I tend to think that if a topic is really that uninteresting, why bother with spending the time to read or to reply to the posts.
The Focus Fusion stuff looks extremly similar to a spheromak which has a fair amount of research being performed and several large projects in the US that I know of. Same concept of letting the plasma do all of the work to shape and contain itself, although I still hear of power being collected in the traditional heating methods (such simple designs have an advantage to the tokamak when using heating, since there is a lot less structural material to absorb neutrons). So I think there are already several experiments very similar to that idea and they are getting a fair share of money (although it wouldn't hurt if our team had a bit more...).
I don't think you can call a method of fusion "wrong" though. Currently the tokamak seems to be the most mature method and will likely be the first to achieve sustained fusion, so that is where a lot of the money goes. There are a huge variety of ways of confining plasma outside of the leading tokamak, and each has its pros and cons. I think it would be proper to try all of them because we can't always see where things will go and how well they scale until we actually test them. At this point you can't say one is clearly better than the others or call another design nonsense until you actually have the working commercial reactor and the other design is unable to develop anymore (and that kind of supports the tokamak research as it has promising results).
And it is not like all other designs and projects will be canned once tokamaks "work." They will continue develop other designs, some of which I think may over take tokamaks in efficiency. The only problem is that they have a ways to catch up to the tokamak, and will likely not be the first type of reactor that reaches the desired goals.
I wonder about some of the same things as the parent mentions (although you have to be careful comparing to the sun, as a lot of that energy is in different regions of the spectrum).
If the EM radiation is bad at these low frequencies, what about the radio operators, or even worse, various scientists that are exposed to extremely high levels of the stuff? A lot of the equipment around various labs probably produces orders of magnitude stronger low-energy EM radiation. I don't hear too much of there being that much cancer in the scientists I know that passed away. Of course anecdotal evidence doesn't show much, so maybe it would be appropriate to study those that really get blasted by this stuff.
As the probability of failure becomes smaller and smaller, then the probability of there being a failure in two drives becomes more and more closer to being doubled. Even if your failure probability was 0.01% for one drive, then the failure probability of two drives would be 0.019999%.
The fans and other components make it more complicated, but still make RAID-0 often a lot messier. Suppose a cooling fan does die, it might not instantly kill the drive, but will shoot the probability of failure way up. So now you are back to a 10% failure probability or something, and you still end up with a 19% probability of failure in at least one drive. This does assume that both drives are cooled by the same fan, but if they are cooled by different fans, you now have a larger probability of a fan failure and we are still back to the same problem.
That said, I don't think there is a problem with RAID-0 if you think the gain is worth the cost and you don't mind the decreased reliability.
Unconeivable! I keep using that word, but I don't think you know what it means.