Actually, you can get a self-sufficient reaction to work quite easily in a small lab rig.
Of course, if you reach and maintain the conditions necessary for fusion, yes, it will be self-sufficient (that is, the nuclei fuse by themselves. I'd like to see the "small lab rig" that can do that for at least a second.
Also, if you call "self-sufficient reaction" something that relies on a machine to heat and maintain some gas to a few tens of mega-Kelvin, I'd say you're stretching the meaning of the word a bit.
And finally, as to your first point, I've often looked upon an ~ 2E+30 kg self-sufficient fusion reactor (about 380 yottawatts) with no apparent damage to my eyes. If you're far enough from it ('bout 8 light-minutes), you need only squint and avoid looking for more than a second or so. If you like technical gizmos, anything from a piece of smoked glass to a video camera & monitor can be used to avoid eye damage, in most cases at least:)
If by "self-sufficient reaction" you mean a long-time (at least a few seconds) fusion reaction that doesn't suck power for most of its lifetime, I'd really like to see one of those.
Sorry to troll, but do you mean you just bought a MacOS copy you won't use?
No, I'm running it as the host for virtualized OS's.
You might, but the parent suggested he just deleted it and uses Fedora or something. He was implying that he got a better deal by buying an Apple (thus not paying for Windows, which is usually bundled with other laptops), disregarding the fact that he did pay for MacOS (which is bundled with Apple hardware). Which is the same thing as the MS tax if you don't use it.
I doubt you can buy an Apple machine without MacOS.
You forgot the origin of the thread. It is about hardware: it's got little memory, no camera, no wi-fi, no headphone (that's what the thread is about, whether it'll be true or not).
I don't know, deciding to start a revolution through the elective process sort of defeats the whole purpose, don't you think?
I can almost see the news reports:
The Florida Supreme Court finished evaluating the results of the recount, and decided in favor of the revolution. The recount was requested by presidential candidate Bush the IIIrd, who alleged massive election fraud by the people. The decision is final, with no possibility of appeal to a higher court. The current president will finish his mandate in two weeks, at which point the revolution is scheduled to start, it is believed at 9:30 on a Monday.
It can do ANYTHING, because it runs Linux. It's GSM so it can send and receive text messages like anything else. It can do web browsing, IRC, VOIP, whatever else you want, because it runs Linux.
You forgot the origin of the thread. It is about hardware: it's got little memory, no camera, no wi-fi, no headphone (that's what the thread is about, whether it'll be true or not). Which means that even though the software can do anything, it can't take pictures, it can't do VoIP (well, it can do it over the carrier's lines, but that's not as nice as wifi), it can't be an mp3 player, etc.
<blockquote>What else are you looking for? What can your "cheap candy bar Nokia" do that this can't?</blockquote>
So his point was that without these hardware options, a "cheap candy bar Nokia" can do exactly on thing that this can't: be cheap. Implied in his comment was that he didn't care much about the software freedom without the hardware options.
On a completely unrelated note, why don't all devices have a solid-state six-degrees-of-freedom motion sensor? Especially hand-held devices with a screen or a GPS receiver...
Yes, but if my ISP inlines the bugs (if it's an image, it downloads it and adds it as an attachment), then it looks as if I opened the mail, and any forwarding is invisible (because I forward the attachment, not the link).
- McDonald's executives testified they KNEW their coffee was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns (burn occur over 130 degree, McDonalds was brewing their coffee as high as 205).
I read about this case several times and there's something I don't understand: anybody I know who brews coffee (without a coffee machine) does this by boiling the water. That's a bit above 205F if Google serves me well. What is so unexpected about having hot coffee in a cup?
Unless all teachers have guns. Someone'll get shot anyway. Though I don't think I agree with teachers having guns; we used to be pretty stressful when we were in school...
Just like you can't really blame the buyers of ivory, leopard skins, rhinoceros horns and shark cartilage for the near extinction of the respective species, right? I mean, if the hunters will hunt them, it's their decision, the buyers just pay for it!
(Note that none of the above species is yet extinct, as far as I know (though that I think some have <i>very</i> low populations, and I think some big cats have been exterminated). But we didn't slow down killing them until they were very close, and some are still being killed.)
As a side note, we don't have a theory of quantum gravity, so we don't actually know what the absolute center of a black hole is like, but we do understand the physics up to and past the event horizon, all the way to the singularity, all of which is just subject to general relativity. All the effects with astronomical significance occur outside the event horizon, as information that goes past there is effectively meaningless.)
You know, I've been wandering about that and it feels a bit weird. Consider one of those very big black holes, that have the event horizon the size of a solar system. Now consider a neutron star close to the upper size limit (it's much smaller than the Earth and a few times the Sun's mass, IIRC) that falls into the event horizon.
Now, think what happens right after the neutron star crossed the event horizon. For the big black hole I mentioned, the tidal forces are small; a neutron star is very rigid, so it shouldn't break (right?) Anyway, what happens is that we "know" there's a neutron star just below the event horizon, and falling towards the singularity. As far as I understand the theory, we shouldn't be able to see anything below the EH, and we shouldn't be able to know anything that happens below the EH except total mass, spin and electric charge. What is weird is that (A) I expect the NS isn't instantly teleported into the singularity, so (B) gravitationally we should see two (almost) point masses approaching instead of a single point mass (as a black hole should look like).
Or, take it differently: before the fall, we should see (gravitationally, I mean, not through light) two almost point-like masses approaching (with. After the NS crosses the EH (meaning it's still quite far from the singularity) I would expect we don't just see them suddenly becoming one. Again, by "see" I mean looking at gravitational effects. I know we can't watch gravity waves yet, but (if we could go close enough) I'm we could tell the difference between two points and one point...
Quite appropriate then, I'd say. People are soft matter, buying things is governed by nonlinear processes, and sociology is largely treated statistically;)
Am I the only one who thinks economy and sociology are physics subjects?
I'm curious, how do you manage to synchronize the installed plugins between the different versions? I often need to install the browser on different computers (with several operating systems) and it's always annoying to install and, more importantly, configure each extension to my liking.
I'm not much above you in my understanding of these things, but there is in the comments above a very good (easy to visualize) analogy to the "electron hole" idea: bubbles in a liquid. They're all really places where there is no liquid, but it's still easier to think of them as "particles". They can move in the liquid, they have a sort of "negative mass" because they float to the surface in a gravity field, unlike something with positive mass that falls (it's all relative to the system you're looking at, somewhat like the centrifugal force), they can split or combine (with "negative mass" conservation and probably impulse conservation), they can "vibrate in volume" (grow or shrink as the pressure changes).
The astute reader will notice that bubbles are not really empty, there's gas inside that makes them "real". Then again, the EM field plays an analogue role for electron holes. It's just an analogy, don't start nitpicking for differences; but it is very useful to visualize the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, if you call "self-sufficient reaction" something that relies on a machine to heat and maintain some gas to a few tens of mega-Kelvin, I'd say you're stretching the meaning of the word a bit.
And finally, as to your first point, I've often looked upon an ~ 2E+30 kg self-sufficient fusion reactor (about 380 yottawatts) with no apparent damage to my eyes. If you're far enough from it ('bout 8 light-minutes), you need only squint and avoid looking for more than a second or so. If you like technical gizmos, anything from a piece of smoked glass to a video camera & monitor can be used to avoid eye damage, in most cases at least :)
If by "self-sufficient reaction" you mean a long-time (at least a few seconds) fusion reaction that doesn't suck power for most of its lifetime, I'd really like to see one of those.
They might as well fire warning shots with the speaker... Which is, of course, silly.
No, you should have taken more liberal arts courses. Ever heard of figurative speech?
Wooosh!
Now I can't tell if it flew by my head or yours.
I doubt you can buy an Apple machine without MacOS.
Sorry to troll, but do you mean you just bought a MacOS copy you won't use?
I can almost see the news reports:
You forgot the origin of the thread. It is about hardware: it's got little memory, no camera, no wi-fi, no headphone (that's what the thread is about, whether it'll be true or not). Which means that even though the software can do anything, it can't take pictures, it can't do VoIP (well, it can do it over the carrier's lines, but that's not as nice as wifi), it can't be an mp3 player, etc.
<blockquote>What else are you looking for? What can your "cheap candy bar Nokia" do that this can't?</blockquote>
So his point was that without these hardware options, a "cheap candy bar Nokia" can do exactly on thing that this can't: be cheap. Implied in his comment was that he didn't care much about the software freedom without the hardware options.
On a completely unrelated note, why don't all devices have a solid-state six-degrees-of-freedom motion sensor? Especially hand-held devices with a screen or a GPS receiver...
Yes, but if my ISP inlines the bugs (if it's an image, it downloads it and adds it as an attachment), then it looks as if I opened the mail, and any forwarding is invisible (because I forward the attachment, not the link).
Unless all teachers have guns. Someone'll get shot anyway. Though I don't think I agree with teachers having guns; we used to be pretty stressful when we were in school...
I bet you drive an SUV :)
Just like you can't really blame the buyers of ivory, leopard skins, rhinoceros horns and shark cartilage for the near extinction of the respective species, right? I mean, if the hunters will hunt them, it's their decision, the buyers just pay for it!
(Note that none of the above species is yet extinct, as far as I know (though that I think some have <i>very</i> low populations, and I think some big cats have been exterminated). But we didn't slow down killing them until they were very close, and some are still being killed.)
You know, I've been wandering about that and it feels a bit weird. Consider one of those very big black holes, that have the event horizon the size of a solar system. Now consider a neutron star close to the upper size limit (it's much smaller than the Earth and a few times the Sun's mass, IIRC) that falls into the event horizon.
Now, think what happens right after the neutron star crossed the event horizon. For the big black hole I mentioned, the tidal forces are small; a neutron star is very rigid, so it shouldn't break (right?) Anyway, what happens is that we "know" there's a neutron star just below the event horizon, and falling towards the singularity. As far as I understand the theory, we shouldn't be able to see anything below the EH, and we shouldn't be able to know anything that happens below the EH except total mass, spin and electric charge. What is weird is that (A) I expect the NS isn't instantly teleported into the singularity, so (B) gravitationally we should see two (almost) point masses approaching instead of a single point mass (as a black hole should look like).
Or, take it differently: before the fall, we should see (gravitationally, I mean, not through light) two almost point-like masses approaching (with. After the NS crosses the EH (meaning it's still quite far from the singularity) I would expect we don't just see them suddenly becoming one. Again, by "see" I mean looking at gravitational effects. I know we can't watch gravity waves yet, but (if we could go close enough) I'm we could tell the difference between two points and one point...
Yes, but maybe he wants to reuse the star :)
Whooooosh!
sqr("Woooosh!");
On the other hand, I have also tried to raise a glass of water with the mouse cursor once. That didn't work any better, either.
I noticed that after extended use of Deus Ex I would raise my right hand when trying to check out a chick at a distance. I had my binoculars on '9'.
Am I the only one who thinks economy and sociology are physics subjects?
So what is E for?
I'm curious, how do you manage to synchronize the installed plugins between the different versions? I often need to install the browser on different computers (with several operating systems) and it's always annoying to install and, more importantly, configure each extension to my liking.
The astute reader will notice that bubbles are not really empty, there's gas inside that makes them "real". Then again, the EM field plays an analogue role for electron holes. It's just an analogy, don't start nitpicking for differences; but it is very useful to visualize the issue.