Oh, and don't happen to be a prominent member of the other party. Or a scientist working on global warming research. Or a pro-choice activist. Or some other group that the facists behind the Bush administration don't like. Do you really believe that Karl Rove wouldn't "accidently" put some prominent Democrat's names on the to-watch list, and that the NSA agents who review those taps wouldn't (be ordered to?) "accidently" forward useful information to the White House?
Anyone who has power will abuse that power. Do you believe that the Bush administration won't abuse the power to listen to anyone it wants with no oversight for the end of political gain? Do you think that [shudder} President Hillary Clinton wouldn't?
IIRC, the weak force is involved in natural radioactive decay (alpha/beta). The strong force that binds the nuclei together with incredible energy is ultimately behind the the bomb's nuclear thing.
If you want to learn about nuclear weapons, visit the Nuclear Weapons FAQ. It's an incredible resource for learning about them.
But to answer your question, compressing the bomb's core doesn't make the EM force affect the Strong force. It makes the material dense enough to start a divergent chain reaction, where each nuclear fission causes more than one more fission. Huge amounts of energy are released because when the atoms split, the sum of the mass and nuclear binding energy of the smaller fragments is less than that of the original Pu/U nucleus. The difference shows up as gamma radiation, neutrons, and a spray of other subatomic particles.
Develop A superlens. Since it isn't affected by the diffraction limit, you can focus any light you want to any scale you want, right down to the atomic layer. The "only" problem is that e and u have to both be exactly -1, but once that material is created, look out optics...
The electron and positron both have positive mass and positive energy, and release a pair of ~511KeV positive-energy photons when they annihilate each other. The only way to have negative energy is to have something with negative mass (since mass and energy are equivalent), which has never been observed.
Talking about negative energy is like talking about less than 0 Kelvin... How can something move slower than not moving or have less than no energy (relative to a zero-energy plane)?
So you're saying that as long as you're not doing anything wrong/illegal, you wouldn't mind me searching you at any time? In that case, you won't mind me installing a camera in your shower, would you? Because since you're not doing anything wrong by taking a shower, you shouldn't feel invaded if I search you...
Fission? Not enough uranium, unless you want to spread nuclear weapons technology around the world via fast breeder reactors.
Just to nitpick... A crude nuclear weapon is pitifully easy to make if you have the requisite materials (Take one subcritical mass, shoot it at another - Yes, Plutonium would predetonate, but it's still 10K times more powerful than a chemical bomb). Breeder reactors would spread the materials, not the technology.
Fusion? If anyone can ever get it to work, and what about all that dangerous radioactive tritium that's bound to leak out all the time?
Given a choice of nuclear disasters, I'd take the Tritium leak. It's half-life is only 12.4 years, and the radiation it emits is pitiful compared to most (~18Kev beta and no gamma); See Nuclear Weapons FAQ section 6.3.1.2. If it's a gas, let it float away, if it's water don't drink it and you'll be fine.
Is anyone doing any research into quantum energy sources? What about tapping the Higgs field? Could there be a better way to utilize E=MC^2 than just making hot water to power a steam/turbine engine? There's got to be a better way to liberate the energy locked into normal matter. Who's looking into that?
Don't know about tapping quantum energy or vacuum energy other than via the Casimir effect, but ought to be possible to funnel the charged particles from a nuclear reactor down conductive coils, generating power directly by induction. Have miniscule lengths of wire arranged pointing toward the center of the reactor, connected to full-wave bridge rectifiers; As the particle shoot by, they drive a current into the wires that can be tapped. My dumb theory:).
NASA studied space based solar power in 1976 and again in 1995. They shelved it each time. Why? Why can't we tap the unimaginably huge amount of sun generated energy that's just wafting by between the Earth and the Moon? It's not a question of how- we know several ways how. It's a question of cost and politics. What technologies need to be improved, invented, or abandoned to make it cost competitive with coal? What politics can we get involved in? Are there even better solutions than solar power?
First we need to create rectennas that can work in wavelengths up to blue light. Devices have already been created that work up to 1000nm wavelength; They convert any EM wave longer than that into DC at ~50% efficiency (Optica Rectenna paper Warning 1M pdf). Put a fresnel lens over one of these and let the cheap power roll.
Comparing the safety of the Shuttle and that of a common jetliner is fallacious; Jetliners don't operate the same way the shuttle does, and don't have the same modes of failure. Riding on top of a massive directed explosion in a vehicle that's more than 95% fuel will never be entirely safe, certainly not as safe as riding a jetliner that will never reach more than 1/20 of the shuttle's orbital speed and probably not one ten-thousandth it's power output.
With this increase the drawbacks of interpreted languages and languages run on virtual machines, such as Java, will be null and void.
Oh, I have no doubt that lazy programmers expecting faster hardware to cover their sloppiness will find a way to make it run slowly like they always have. "Oh, this new hardware is so much faster than I can go ahead and use this method that will take 5x longer to execute; No one will notice" or "Ah, I'll just use this BASIC interperter written in Java... my box is so fast no one will notice." *sigh*
Probably has a lot to do with shape... A combined 12" by 1" by 1" rod vs a 3" diameter 1" thick disk. I find that rods have a massive magnetic field confined near themselves, and disks project a less dense field much farther... My cubes might not pick up steel more than 8" away, but when they do, goddamn do they ever hold it:)
Oh, please, NIB magnets are strong, but they're not that strong. This is the kind of magnet that sucks in steel utensils from 20 feet away. I've got a dozen 1" cube N45s myself; Combined, they'll pull in metal from about 8 inches away. Mod -1, factually incorrect.
I think you're missing what Net Neutrality is about.
If a website owner's ISP starts offering bad service or starts demanding protection money^W^Wa premium access fee they can switch to innumerable other hosting services or ISPs. That's not the problem. The problem comes when ALL of the other backbones and ISPs start demanding protection money.
If the local Mafia moves in on your shipping business, you can move to somewhere they aren't. The problem here is that all of the other Mafia families everywhere are demanding protection money from you, because it'd be a shame if your packages were to get... lost en route while traveling through their territory, wouldn't it?
But you need to understand something: We are at WAR. And the enemies of our country do not give a goddamn about our liberties, or freedoms, our lives, and do not operate by any societal rules whatsoever. We therefore have to conduct ourselves under this reality, and understand something basic such as knowing that if an enemy combatant (or agent or participant, or whatever) is making a PHONE CALL to someone else, and either (or both ends) of that phone call happen to be in that country... the government MUST have that information, period.
Congress is the only body in the United States that can declare war. It never did so, therefore we are not at war. The military may be engaged in overseas actions, but without a congressional declaration it is not a war.
Do you realize how bizzare it is to read "The enemy doesn't care about our liberties and freedoms" and then "We need to abandon them to defeat the enemy" in the very next sentence? In particular when considering the overwhelming threat that these enemies present. How many people have been killed or wounded by terrorism in the last 15 years? Ten thousand in Israel, 3000 on 9/11, thousands by Basque separatist attacks in Spain, 50000 Iraqis and 2000 American soldiers killed in Iraq, thousands by separatists in Indonesia? Even if the number comes in at almost 120000, you realize that that means you're willing to sacrifice critical liberties to stop an "enemy" who has killed as many people total in 15 years as America's highway system did since mid-2003? Who has killed as many Americans in those 15 years as our highways have since last month? An enemy about twice as dangerous as being hit by lightning?
The reason you're willing to sacrifice your liberties to stop "Terrorists" and not to stop highway deaths (which are 180 times more likely to kill you), is because terrorist attacks are spectacular. They scare you, and when people get scared they turn off rational thought and abandon all other considerations in the pursuit of safety or perceived safety. The terrorists know this, and corrupt governments the world over know this.
The terrorists know that if they can just strike occasionally, repeatedly shattering the perceived safety, they can destroy a democracy by making it's people give up anything (and eventually everything) to anyone who promises safety. It worked in Israel. It's working on the United States. Terrorists terrorize because they know it works, and it works because people let it work.
Governments also know that a scared populace is a compliant populace, which will allow them to do nigh anything without risk of reprisal. Throughout history, evil leaders have either used existing enemies or otherwise created fictitious ones that served just as well to sow fear and help them take power. Robert Mugabe uses fear (and hate) of Whitey to keep himself in control of Zimbabwe. Fidel Castro uses fear of evil running-dog exploitative Capitalists. Hitler burned the Reichstag and blamed the Communists to get elected, then he told everyone it was das Jugen that were threatening them. And so the Bush administration uses the fear of Terrorists and terrorism to keep people scared and in line.
LIKE IT OR NOT, NATIONAL SECURITY CONCERNS TRUMP CIVILIAN PRIVACY CONCERNS, PERIOD. DEAL WITH IT.
Blocking the government's ability to get the information it needs to potentially save lives or avert an attack, simply because you don't want the governement to know what you said to whomever is, in my view, giving indirect assistance to the enemy. YES, I SAID THAT.
We just have a fundamental divide here. I don't believe that giving up civil liberties in the name of fighting a nebulously-defined "enemy" which is somewhat more threatening than lightning and far less threatening than drunken assholes behind the wheel is acceptable.
Spammers are like mosquitoes; you can slap and slap, you can spray poisons until it knocks you unconscious, but really the best you can hope for is to keep them (relatively) under control most of the time.
Mosquitos and malaria were under control before the world stopped using DDT. Now, malaria is back with a vengeance. I'll take the risk if I get to go out spraying electronic-DDT.
You might want to rethink your analogies, since cable, dish, dry-cleaners, and car washes don't actively take away what you already paid for if you stop using them (Except Dish will make you pay once to keep the DVR, and if you're cheap you can just plug the HDD into your box and copy the video files over), unlike this DRM bullcrap . Dunno about XM.
Ringtones, I admit, I don't understand. Are people allergic to a fscking beep?
The resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope is roughly.1 arc-seconds, or 2.7e-4 degrees.
The Apollo landers are roughly 5 meters across, 2.5M in radius. If the distance of the moon from earth is assumed to be an even 384,000 kilometers, the angular size of a lander from earth is 2 * arctan ( 2.5 / 3.84e8), which is a vanishingly small 7.4e-7 degrees.
You would need a telescope with a resolving power 2700 times finer than Hubble to recognize the landers as dots. Of course, dots prove nothing. A picture of the landers 50 pixels on a side, taken from earth, would require a resolving power 18095 times finer than Hubble's. Achieving a diffraction limit that would allow the 50x50 pixel picture would require either a single mirror or an interferometer 1.1 kilometers across. I believe Nasa imaged the lander sites a few years ago with the two Keck telescopes, but their combined seperation is 'only' a few hundred meters.
(I go the Hubble resolving power and lander sizes from quick Google searches.. correct me if I'm wrong:P)
By using a non-braindead reactor design where the coolant and moderator are the same thing, which makes a meltdown nigh-impossible.
How are you going to dispose of the waste?
Load the stuff onto a ship. Take it out to the middle of the Pacific ocean. Drill a hole a few hundred feet into the Abyssal plains. Dump it in. Waste safely interred for a hundred million years in the most geologically inactive place on earth.
If sexual orientation is a choice, then tell us: When did you 'choose' to be straight? And if it's a choice, then you wouldn't mind confirming this by being gay for a day?
Or we could go with the obvious answer. Some boys hit puberty and realize that they like girls for no rational reason, and some realize that they like other boys for no rational reason.
On proposition 1, using a laser to beam something into orbit: The value of the kinetic energy of something in low orbit (roughly 8.8KW-h/kg) is indeed cents, depending on where you live. However, it promptly becomes dollars when you consider the efficiency of the driving laser (Typically 1-3%, 25% for CO2) and the efficiency of converting laser joules to kinetic energy joules (?). If you get the power for $.10/KW-h, and assume the laser and propulsion to be 10 and 50% efficient, the cost to orbit becomes 8.8KW-h * 10 * 2 * $.10/KW-h = $17.6/Kg.
Vastly superior to $x00/KG, and good enough to put the cost of reaching orbit within reach of the affluent (75Kg adult + 500Kg of vehicle -> $10000), but until power is too cheap to meter, the cost will never be pennies/KG.
"Science is a religion because science is done with the faith that knowing more about the world will make humanity better, and better is a subjective term. Some would even argue, scientists in particular, that all science has done is teach us how to destroy the planet and each other, so, what's the point?"
TODO list for tjstork:
1) Read about history 250 years ago, at dawn of scientific age.
2) Realize just how much life SUCKED back then by any imaginable measure.
3) Realize that without science, you couldn't sit in a house that that stays at any temperature you want, eating any food you want as fast as you can stuff your face, looking at your screen through contact lenses as you bash science using a device that would have been seen as the magic of God even 100 years ago during the several hours a day of free time you have, and would instead be out hunting and gathering all day to barely survive.
You seem to be saying that we should stop investigating neutrinos because we don't know enough about neutrinos. More broadly, should we should give up investigating any field we don't completely understand because we don't completely understand it? The entire basis of science is using what we do know to learn more about what we don't. If pursuing explanations for things in the absence of a Grand Unified Theory is utterly foolish, call me the village idiot.
Except that if you have to call the ISP to get the porno unblocked, I'm taking bets on how long it will be before they're compelled to log all such requests and on how long after that the police or the local fundamentalists request access to said logs. (Slippery slope? Yeah - Originally, SocSec# was explicitly and legally NOT a national ID either)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and don't happen to be a prominent member of the other party. Or a scientist working on global warming research. Or a pro-choice activist. Or some other group that the facists behind the Bush administration don't like. Do you really believe that Karl Rove wouldn't "accidently" put some prominent Democrat's names on the to-watch list, and that the NSA agents who review those taps wouldn't (be ordered to?) "accidently" forward useful information to the White House?
Anyone who has power will abuse that power. Do you believe that the Bush administration won't abuse the power to listen to anyone it wants with no oversight for the end of political gain? Do you think that [shudder} President Hillary Clinton wouldn't?
IIRC, the weak force is involved in natural radioactive decay (alpha/beta). The strong force that binds the nuclei together with incredible energy is ultimately behind the the bomb's nuclear thing.
If you want to learn about nuclear weapons, visit the Nuclear Weapons FAQ. It's an incredible resource for learning about them.
But to answer your question, compressing the bomb's core doesn't make the EM force affect the Strong force. It makes the material dense enough to start a divergent chain reaction, where each nuclear fission causes more than one more fission. Huge amounts of energy are released because when the atoms split, the sum of the mass and nuclear binding energy of the smaller fragments is less than that of the original Pu/U nucleus. The difference shows up as gamma radiation, neutrons, and a spray of other subatomic particles.
Develop A superlens. Since it isn't affected by the diffraction limit, you can focus any light you want to any scale you want, right down to the atomic layer. The "only" problem is that e and u have to both be exactly -1, but once that material is created, look out optics...
The electron and positron both have positive mass and positive energy, and release a pair of ~511KeV positive-energy photons when they annihilate each other. The only way to have negative energy is to have something with negative mass (since mass and energy are equivalent), which has never been observed.
Talking about negative energy is like talking about less than 0 Kelvin... How can something move slower than not moving or have less than no energy (relative to a zero-energy plane)?
So you're saying that as long as you're not doing anything wrong/illegal, you wouldn't mind me searching you at any time? In that case, you won't mind me installing a camera in your shower, would you? Because since you're not doing anything wrong by taking a shower, you shouldn't feel invaded if I search you...
Given a choice of nuclear disasters, I'd take the Tritium leak. It's half-life is only 12.4 years, and the radiation it emits is pitiful compared to most (~18Kev beta and no gamma); See Nuclear Weapons FAQ section 6.3.1.2. If it's a gas, let it float away, if it's water don't drink it and you'll be fine.
Don't know about tapping quantum energy or vacuum energy other than via the Casimir effect, but ought to be possible to funnel the charged particles from a nuclear reactor down conductive coils, generating power directly by induction. Have miniscule lengths of wire arranged pointing toward the center of the reactor, connected to full-wave bridge rectifiers; As the particle shoot by, they drive a current into the wires that can be tapped. My dumb theory
First we need to create rectennas that can work in wavelengths up to blue light. Devices have already been created that work up to 1000nm wavelength; They convert any EM wave longer than that into DC at ~50% efficiency (Optica Rectenna paper Warning 1M pdf). Put a fresnel lens over one of these and let the cheap power roll.
Hope I helped!
Comparing the safety of the Shuttle and that of a common jetliner is fallacious; Jetliners don't operate the same way the shuttle does, and don't have the same modes of failure. Riding on top of a massive directed explosion in a vehicle that's more than 95% fuel will never be entirely safe, certainly not as safe as riding a jetliner that will never reach more than 1/20 of the shuttle's orbital speed and probably not one ten-thousandth it's power output.
Probably has a lot to do with shape... A combined 12" by 1" by 1" rod vs a 3" diameter 1" thick disk. I find that rods have a massive magnetic field confined near themselves, and disks project a less dense field much farther... My cubes might not pick up steel more than 8" away, but when they do, goddamn do they ever hold it :)
Oh, please, NIB magnets are strong, but they're not that strong. This is the kind of magnet that sucks in steel utensils from 20 feet away. I've got a dozen 1" cube N45s myself; Combined, they'll pull in metal from about 8 inches away. Mod -1, factually incorrect.
I think you're missing what Net Neutrality is about.
If a website owner's ISP starts offering bad service or starts demanding protection money^W^Wa premium access fee they can switch to innumerable other hosting services or ISPs. That's not the problem. The problem comes when ALL of the other backbones and ISPs start demanding protection money.
If the local Mafia moves in on your shipping business, you can move to somewhere they aren't. The problem here is that all of the other Mafia families everywhere are demanding protection money from you, because it'd be a shame if your packages were to get... lost en route while traveling through their territory, wouldn't it?
There's a reason it's a crime in the real world.
Congress is the only body in the United States that can declare war. It never did so, therefore we are not at war. The military may be engaged in overseas actions, but without a congressional declaration it is not a war.
Do you realize how bizzare it is to read "The enemy doesn't care about our liberties and freedoms" and then "We need to abandon them to defeat the enemy" in the very next sentence? In particular when considering the overwhelming threat that these enemies present. How many people have been killed or wounded by terrorism in the last 15 years? Ten thousand in Israel, 3000 on 9/11, thousands by Basque separatist attacks in Spain, 50000 Iraqis and 2000 American soldiers killed in Iraq, thousands by separatists in Indonesia? Even if the number comes in at almost 120000, you realize that that means you're willing to sacrifice critical liberties to stop an "enemy" who has killed as many people total in 15 years as America's highway system did since mid-2003? Who has killed as many Americans in those 15 years as our highways have since last month? An enemy about twice as dangerous as being hit by lightning?
The reason you're willing to sacrifice your liberties to stop "Terrorists" and not to stop highway deaths (which are 180 times more likely to kill you), is because terrorist attacks are spectacular. They scare you, and when people get scared they turn off rational thought and abandon all other considerations in the pursuit of safety or perceived safety. The terrorists know this, and corrupt governments the world over know this.
The terrorists know that if they can just strike occasionally, repeatedly shattering the perceived safety, they can destroy a democracy by making it's people give up anything (and eventually everything) to anyone who promises safety. It worked in Israel. It's working on the United States. Terrorists terrorize because they know it works, and it works because people let it work.
Governments also know that a scared populace is a compliant populace, which will allow them to do nigh anything without risk of reprisal. Throughout history, evil leaders have either used existing enemies or otherwise created fictitious ones that served just as well to sow fear and help them take power. Robert Mugabe uses fear (and hate) of Whitey to keep himself in control of Zimbabwe. Fidel Castro uses fear of evil running-dog exploitative Capitalists. Hitler burned the Reichstag and blamed the Communists to get elected, then he told everyone it was das Jugen that were threatening them. And so the Bush administration uses the fear of Terrorists and terrorism to keep people scared and in line.
We just have a fundamental divide here. I don't believe that giving up civil liberties in the name of fighting a nebulously-defined "enemy" which is somewhat more threatening than lightning and far less threatening than drunken assholes behind the wheel is acceptable.
And there was nothin
Are you my Daddy? Where's my Daddy! I want my Daddy!
You might want to rethink your analogies, since cable, dish, dry-cleaners, and car washes don't actively take away what you already paid for if you stop using them (Except Dish will make you pay once to keep the DVR, and if you're cheap you can just plug the HDD into your box and copy the video files over), unlike this DRM bullcrap . Dunno about XM.
Ringtones, I admit, I don't understand. Are people allergic to a fscking beep?
The resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope is roughly .1 arc-seconds, or 2.7e-4 degrees.
:P)
The Apollo landers are roughly 5 meters across, 2.5M in radius. If the distance of the moon from earth is assumed to be an even 384,000 kilometers, the angular size of a lander from earth is 2 * arctan ( 2.5 / 3.84e8), which is a vanishingly small 7.4e-7 degrees.
You would need a telescope with a resolving power 2700 times finer than Hubble to recognize the landers as dots. Of course, dots prove nothing. A picture of the landers 50 pixels on a side, taken from earth, would require a resolving power 18095 times finer than Hubble's. Achieving a diffraction limit that would allow the 50x50 pixel picture would require either a single mirror or an interferometer 1.1 kilometers across. I believe Nasa imaged the lander sites a few years ago with the two Keck telescopes, but their combined seperation is 'only' a few hundred meters.
(I go the Hubble resolving power and lander sizes from quick Google searches.. correct me if I'm wrong
Bastard companies that abuse software patents should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Or perhaps the fools in government that legitimized them in the first place. Both at once?
Load the stuff onto a ship. Take it out to the middle of the Pacific ocean. Drill a hole a few hundred feet into the Abyssal plains. Dump it in. Waste safely interred for a hundred million years in the most geologically inactive place on earth.
If sexual orientation is a choice, then tell us: When did you 'choose' to be straight? And if it's a choice, then you wouldn't mind confirming this by being gay for a day?
Or we could go with the obvious answer. Some boys hit puberty and realize that they like girls for no rational reason, and some realize that they like other boys for no rational reason.
On proposition 1, using a laser to beam something into orbit: The value of the kinetic energy of something in low orbit (roughly 8.8KW-h/kg) is indeed cents, depending on where you live. However, it promptly becomes dollars when you consider the efficiency of the driving laser (Typically 1-3%, 25% for CO2) and the efficiency of converting laser joules to kinetic energy joules (?). If you get the power for $.10/KW-h, and assume the laser and propulsion to be 10 and 50% efficient, the cost to orbit becomes 8.8KW-h * 10 * 2 * $.10/KW-h = $17.6/Kg.
Vastly superior to $x00/KG, and good enough to put the cost of reaching orbit within reach of the affluent (75Kg adult + 500Kg of vehicle -> $10000), but until power is too cheap to meter, the cost will never be pennies/KG.
"Science is a religion because science is done with the faith that knowing more about the world will make humanity better, and better is a subjective term. Some would even argue, scientists in particular, that all science has done is teach us how to destroy the planet and each other, so, what's the point?"
TODO list for tjstork:
1) Read about history 250 years ago, at dawn of scientific age.
2) Realize just how much life SUCKED back then by any imaginable measure.
3) Realize that without science, you couldn't sit in a house that that stays at any temperature you want, eating any food you want as fast as you can stuff your face, looking at your screen through contact lenses as you bash science using a device that would have been seen as the magic of God even 100 years ago during the several hours a day of free time you have, and would instead be out hunting and gathering all day to barely survive.
You seem to be saying that we should stop investigating neutrinos because we don't know enough about neutrinos. More broadly, should we should give up investigating any field we don't completely understand because we don't completely understand it? The entire basis of science is using what we do know to learn more about what we don't. If pursuing explanations for things in the absence of a Grand Unified Theory is utterly foolish, call me the village idiot.
Buying an RIAA-approved MP3 player is like flying on an Al-Qaida approved jetliner.
I think I just found a new sig.
Except that if you have to call the ISP to get the porno unblocked, I'm taking bets on how long it will be before they're compelled to log all such requests and on how long after that the police or the local fundamentalists request access to said logs. (Slippery slope? Yeah - Originally, SocSec# was explicitly and legally NOT a national ID either)