Hey/. hive mind help me here. I've looked at the html source of euler and this new thing and they appear to be custom.
Does anyone know of a "framework" "CMS" or whatever you'd call it, specializing in what for lack of a better term I'd call "competitive problem solving koan websites"?
If not, I'm about 75% committed to writing one on github. Probably in Scala / Lift because I'm teaching myself Scala and Lift, which is a great personal project justification but a terrible architecture decision justification... anyway...
Nice enough enduser frontend, database schema behind it to hold the goods, semi static stats and rankings pages for speed, backend for admin...
I like Euler and this looks fun. Much more interesting than massively online classes, which are a pretty boring concept, and this will probably be compared to it. But I see this as a fun project, not educational. Wedged sideways into the.edu system it would just exercise cheating ability. Big Eh.
You know what else is boring? The technological silver bullet for education. I've spent my entire life under the spell that new technology is going to revolutionize education. The filmstrip and LP vinyl record. The VCR. The computer. The computer graded standardized test. The computer again. Shitty internet videos. Online classes with 20 classmates. Online classes with 200000 classmates. They all suck. I'm sure the older/.ers will chime in about the invention of papyrus and written language.
The whole meme of "tech will fix education" is tired, obsolete, and needs to go away.
AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year. This trend is a byproduct of the unhealthy competitive landscape in the desktop CPU arena
Whats unhealthy about that? Virtually no CPU purchasers are going to be CPU limited, if a 5 year old CPU currently does everything the average user needs, then a 6 month old one for half the price should be massive overkill. So your best economic move seems to buy a 6 month to 1 year old AMD processor for half price and spend the savings on something that actually matters to the user experience, like graphics card or high res (higher than clunky 1080) monitor, or a decent keyboard like my model M, or larger SSD, or...
And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began.
No it was lost when G+ came out with circles, which was Diasporas main killer feature. The second killer feature being able to download all your stuff, which google ALSO does on "your account" "data liberation" page.
Honestly when I first saw G+ circles I though the almighty GOOG had bought out the diaspora devs or something like that.
the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience
It is/was a kinda-federated intranet scale website, OK? They're not writing a OS, or a compiler, or hand coding machine code. In the olden days, one young kid should have been able to do it, four is a little excessive.
It seems pretty simple to me..... Causation is 'A causes B'. But go on...
Yeah see that's kinda my whole point. Liberal arts grads probably sat thru at least one philosophy course. For centuries the british empiricists / logical postivists / skeptical realists have been fighting pointless yet longwinded battles. They would understand... "nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion." and all that kind of stuff.
the best I can figure is they're doing something like shutting off memory refresh and seeing what the cells look like. That's the most best source of random mfgr "stuff" I can think of.
Other than that, I'm mystified how they're doing it. There just shouldn't be that much mfgr variation.
It could be that there's only a couple bits of randomness (like they're reading out the model number and calling it good). The fact they aren't advertising the details implies the details are less than impressive. For example this ancient box has a Radeon HD 4350, so my "real"/. UID is not VLM, its RadeonHD4350-VLM. Unimpressed... so far.
My guess is the idea is to use the device characteristics as a REALLY crude second factor for authentication. So if I log in on my phone, or any of the other dozens of machines I have access to, it'll pester me for my pet dogs mother's maiden name, the city name where I got my first pedicure, the month of the year that I was divorced in, the usual BS authentication questions that anyone with access to facebook can crack in a few minutes.
um... if security is so lax, why aren't all those terrorists out there taking advantage of these security lapses? something doesn't add up here.
From reading the report, which is pretty interesting, the best slashdot car analogy I can come up with is that if this was a car crash it would be about as severe as a headon collision with a mosquito, or maybe some bird droppings. Even better, say you wanted to steal a car out of the showroom. Well, these guys got as far as jumping the perimeter fence. There's a little more to accomplish before the joyride can begin.
Defense in depth, quite a bit of depth for something this important.... and they got thru... drum roll.... one fence....
Why in the name of Oppenheimer did they fire the one guy who actually did his job
His job was to follow procedures. The procedures were pretty good, assuming camera coverage of the area. Needless to say the cameras are often / usually broken. He invented his own solution to the lack of camera coverage by basically turning himself into a forward observer. Boss not amused because that very publicly points out the procedures are inadequate and the equipment not up to requirements, and doing that is also not a procedure. So that's two strikes right there. You can imagine a guy who was set up to fail as the fall guy being a little pissed off at the time. I'm guessing that's how he earned a third strike and its bye bye, or maybe two is enough.
Are you implying that if the security were nationalized (ala TSA) that such ineptitude would not exist?
Uh, yeah. Or at least that's what the report claims somewhere around page 6. Makes sense to me!
Thus, physical security systems and security personnel were managed by completely different organizations. The fractured management structure appeared to have led to conflicting priorities
Now a nationalized or centralized management or whatever you want to call it can be utterly incompetent for entirely different reasons, look at the TSA. But it wouldn't have conflicting priorities unless they were dumb enough to intentionally bake that into the cake.
Thats the problem with "just give it to the private sector". There's a zillion private sector companies and they often (or at least occasionally) don't work together very well.
Nonsense. I was already interconnected with your mother; the "all other things" bit was merely coincidental.
You're missing a fairly obvious joke about the causational result of him being able to say "I think therefore I am" leading to centuries of mistaken mind-body dualism, aka "whos your daddy"
To put it another way: correlation is an *observed* behaviour, causation is a *tested* behaviour.
Nice, but how bout correlation is a math formula, on the other hand causation has a ten page philosophical wikipedia page and even though Hume died like 300 years ago this year people are still arguing about it, with the exception that on the internet everyone agrees correlation isn't it, which I guess is at least some progress.
In what sense, exactly does science grow more powerful?
In how liberal arts grads, especially journalists, can be completely ignorant of the scientific method, leading to an article with really weird logic, at least from a scientific perspective.
Correlation is incredibly handy to at least initially point the way to a possible scientific model or theory that can be used to make useful falsifiable predictions about the future. But don't confuse the map with the terrain. Its a compass thats often broken, not a GPS unit.
Causation is a pretty fuzzy philosophical topic so arguing about what it is or isn't, is not terribly useful.
Maybe the best way to explain it to a liberal arts grad would be something like the journey is different than the destination, or when you come to a fork in the road and see the road less traveled correlation is how you know its less traveled, or that its all somehow symbolic of Hemmingways Old Man And The Sea and the act of fishing is much different than the expectations about getting a fish. Either that or the point of Joyce's Ulysses wasn't a numerical analysis that people walked around a hell of a lot in Ireland a hundred years ago. Now look at how the liberal arts guys are going to laugh at my pitiful attempt at swimming with their big literary fish... note to lib arts folks... that superior laughing feeling is what the STEM people experience when algebra dropouts try to swim in our sea of math... so when the smart guy says something about statistics, if the 1040EZ form baffles you and you can't find the "any" key on your keyboard, thats a good sign you should probably shut up and do what the smart guy says. Harsh, but that's reality, sometimes.
Yeah but thru the miracle of used parts market, 10 forklifts worth of good used batteries does cost about 10 times as much as one.
The main cost seems to be batteries. High horsepower VFDs are old stuff, cheap, even new. High horsepower electric motors? Cheap. The cabling isn't too expensive. Its all in the batteries.
All we need to be is inclined to make an electric car and we can "probably" do it? Then obviously there is not a need for engineers if just anyone with the inclination could probably reproduce their work.
The only difference between an engineer job title and a skilled amateur at home is an engineer job title spends 160 working hours and $1.38 to do what an amateur would do in one hour with ten bucks. You rarely if ever need an engineer to make one, unless its like one... space station... you need an engineer to make 100K copies profitably.
Rationalization stuffed full of false dilemma in almost every line. There's nothing wrong with saying you just don't like it, or don't like change, or you're inherently paleoconservative about how you travel or whatever. Don't need to make up strange rationalized constraints to fit a predetermined outcome. "I don't like it" is good enough.
They can keep a long range gas car for those purposes
Rent it. That way when it breaks down in Middle-of-Nowhere, Oklahoma, you just don't care, its somebody else's problem.
I also rent the $20 home depot pickup truck. I'd have to rent that truck a hell of a lot of times to equal just one monthly loan payment on a compensation machine of that size...
But, for another grand or two, he could have bought a brand new 40+ MPG IC vehicle with a warranty, all kinds of new safety features, and a range of hundreds of miles with a "recharge" time of about 5 minutes.
Yeah, but thats way out of his budget and wasteful. First of all if he spent $14K on his hobby car thats probably because his budget was $14K and not a penny more... so telling him there's a really nice donor car available for only $15K is kind of pointless, especially if the total cost of the conversion would be $15K for the donor plus $14K for conversion parts and tools, that's $29K for a guy with a firm $14K budget.... Also he's throwing out a brand new IC engine with warranty, kinda a waste to buy it to begin with. I don't think the aftermarket for a nearly brand new IC engine is very healthy, he's probably not going to get much money for the nearly new engine he would be throwing out.
Most of the guys I've read about who convert, get a donor car for practically free because the engine is hopelessly blown. The demand is low enough that there's a seemingly infinite supply of cosmetically great cars with dead drivetrains. You don't have to get a beater and usually don't have to pay much if anything above scrap value which usually isn't much.
His project car cost of $14K is probably a nearly free car and very nearly $14K of parts and tools. You might be operating under the mistaken assumption his budget distribution was like $13995 for the car and $5 to convert it, kind of like how ricer's take a civic and put and exhaust tip on it and its an insta-racer car, in which case your offer of a vastly superior donor chassis for $15000 makes sense because you're thinking he'd have a much better base chassis and the jump from $14000 total to $15005 total is well worth going over budget in exchange for a much better donor chassis...
There's a guy locally who did about the same thing for about a fifth that. To a first approximation, something made out of used parts with 10 times the performance of a golf cart should only cost about 10 times as much as a used golf cart. His first conversion project was, literally, take the guts of a used $2000 large electric forklift and put the guts into an econobox with a blown engine. His first upgrade was to a real VFD instead of forklift control.
I suspect the guy is suffering from hobby-economics. So I built me a little carpentry project this summer using $100 of wood and a new $500 saw... Is that a $100 project? Well, no, my bank account is $600 lower, it must be more than $100. Is that a $600 project? Well, no, I only spent $600 for a project AND a slightly used saw so assuming the saw is worth more than $1 the project must be worth less than $600.
Ugh. find the word "laws", which apparently is what you're looking at. Look three words to the right. All they need to do is inform them of the requirement that they not "whatever" and the lease is broken.
E-mails about picking their kid up from soccer at a time and place should be kept private, even if they use their work e-mail. E-mails where they call a colleague bad names in confidence to a lab assistant should be kept private.
How do you handle NDAs? I make microwave amplifiers. In my daydream, I come up with a way to make the Worlds Best 1420 MHz preamp. For irrelevant business reasons I'm not able to capitalize on it or even afford the legal docs to patent. But I'll sell my one and only prototype to Big Ole Radio Telescope.gov outta the goodness of my heart and if they sign the usual NDA, I'll email discuss how to properly install it. Their emails get released because a bunch of cranks believe the world was created in 4000 BC so any discussion of stuff more than 6000 light years away is blasphemous hate speech they must use the legal system to stamp out. My signed NDAs can't keep my amplifier secret; I'm pissed.
At a research lab, this is not as far fetched as you might think.
I like the idea but right off the top of my head 100 MCi C-60 is something like the entire national stockpile. Not impossible, but it would be quite the achievement.
I am almost motivated enough to calculate the Cerenkov radiation light flux of that ball before its dropped... is it of the order of magnitude that it would be invisible, or would it make the air around it glow like a searchlight, etc.
To say they have a pretty serious refrigeration problem before "launch" would be an understatement.
Also just as a warning, tungsten doesn't melt until 4000 degrees... in an inert atmosphere. In air you can ignite it and make tungsten oxide at a MUCH lower temperature than melting. They may wanna run the plan past a couple metallurgists, etc. I had / have a small roll of it and it really is useless as a nichrome replacement.
The real problem is the mud. So to more or less balance pressure at the bottom of the hole, you need the drilling mud to be so heavy that I really donno how to make it. Hmm a lubricating coolant with the density of aluminum that can be pumped around at sea level on the surface like water... Oh and it has to be stable around 600 degrees F (which is why they gave up on Kola). So anything other than asphalt (including teflon) will be vapor.... its just a mess.
Another fun limitation is if the bottom pressure is 10000 psi (made up) the pressure half way up is 5000 psi now can your cemented in holes survive that?
You know those engineering puzzles like from statics/dynamics class "how tall of a cylindrical flagpole can you make out of concrete / steel / CF until it buckles" well my cousins in the Louisiana petrochem industry have puzzlers like "imagine an infinite budget and you wanna dig 10 miles straight down, now write an essay explaining all the technical limitations".
Someday the tech might change to something like a vertical tunnel boring machine. Maybe thats what they're going to try. That would certainly be very interesting.
4. MAINTENANCE USE AND LOCATION. Lessee... shall comply with all laws, ordinances, regulations, requirements (from the manufacturer or otherwise) and rules with the respect to the... operation of the Equipment
Slashdot Mirror
Hey /. hive mind help me here. I've looked at the html source of euler and this new thing and they appear to be custom.
Does anyone know of a "framework" "CMS" or whatever you'd call it, specializing in what for lack of a better term I'd call "competitive problem solving koan websites"?
If not, I'm about 75% committed to writing one on github. Probably in Scala / Lift because I'm teaching myself Scala and Lift, which is a great personal project justification but a terrible architecture decision justification ... anyway...
Nice enough enduser frontend, database schema behind it to hold the goods, semi static stats and rankings pages for speed, backend for admin...
I like Euler and this looks fun. Much more interesting than massively online classes, which are a pretty boring concept, and this will probably be compared to it. But I see this as a fun project, not educational. Wedged sideways into the .edu system it would just exercise cheating ability. Big Eh.
You know what else is boring? The technological silver bullet for education. I've spent my entire life under the spell that new technology is going to revolutionize education. The filmstrip and LP vinyl record. The VCR. The computer. The computer graded standardized test. The computer again. Shitty internet videos. Online classes with 20 classmates. Online classes with 200000 classmates. They all suck. I'm sure the older /.ers will chime in about the invention of papyrus and written language.
The whole meme of "tech will fix education" is tired, obsolete, and needs to go away.
I tend to think part of the US problem is that we do not target our money well, instead spending a disproportionate amount on ...
... on administrators and sports. Getting rid of as much as possible of both is probably a very good idea.
AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year. This trend is a byproduct of the unhealthy competitive landscape in the desktop CPU arena
Whats unhealthy about that? Virtually no CPU purchasers are going to be CPU limited, if a 5 year old CPU currently does everything the average user needs, then a 6 month old one for half the price should be massive overkill. So your best economic move seems to buy a 6 month to 1 year old AMD processor for half price and spend the savings on something that actually matters to the user experience, like graphics card or high res (higher than clunky 1080) monitor, or a decent keyboard like my model M, or larger SSD, or ...
And yet, the battle may have been lost before it even began.
No it was lost when G+ came out with circles, which was Diasporas main killer feature.
The second killer feature being able to download all your stuff, which google ALSO does on "your account" "data liberation" page.
Honestly when I first saw G+ circles I though the almighty GOOG had bought out the diaspora devs or something like that.
the team of four young kids with little real-world programming experience
It is/was a kinda-federated intranet scale website, OK? They're not writing a OS, or a compiler, or hand coding machine code. In the olden days, one young kid should have been able to do it, four is a little excessive.
It seems pretty simple to me. .... Causation is 'A causes B'. But go on...
Yeah see that's kinda my whole point. Liberal arts grads probably sat thru at least one philosophy course. For centuries the british empiricists / logical postivists / skeptical realists have been fighting pointless yet longwinded battles. They would understand... "nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion." and all that kind of stuff.
From:
http://puffin.eu.org/WP1.html
the best I can figure is they're doing something like shutting off memory refresh and seeing what the cells look like. That's the most best source of random mfgr "stuff" I can think of.
Other than that, I'm mystified how they're doing it. There just shouldn't be that much mfgr variation.
It could be that there's only a couple bits of randomness (like they're reading out the model number and calling it good). The fact they aren't advertising the details implies the details are less than impressive. For example this ancient box has a Radeon HD 4350, so my "real" /. UID is not VLM, its RadeonHD4350-VLM. Unimpressed... so far.
My guess is the idea is to use the device characteristics as a REALLY crude second factor for authentication. So if I log in on my phone, or any of the other dozens of machines I have access to, it'll pester me for my pet dogs mother's maiden name, the city name where I got my first pedicure, the month of the year that I was divorced in, the usual BS authentication questions that anyone with access to facebook can crack in a few minutes.
um... if security is so lax, why aren't all those terrorists out there taking advantage of these security lapses? something doesn't add up here.
From reading the report, which is pretty interesting, the best slashdot car analogy I can come up with is that if this was a car crash it would be about as severe as a headon collision with a mosquito, or maybe some bird droppings. Even better, say you wanted to steal a car out of the showroom. Well, these guys got as far as jumping the perimeter fence. There's a little more to accomplish before the joyride can begin.
Defense in depth, quite a bit of depth for something this important.... and they got thru ... drum roll.... one fence....
Why in the name of Oppenheimer did they fire the one guy who actually did his job
His job was to follow procedures. The procedures were pretty good, assuming camera coverage of the area. Needless to say the cameras are often / usually broken.
He invented his own solution to the lack of camera coverage by basically turning himself into a forward observer.
Boss not amused because that very publicly points out the procedures are inadequate and the equipment not up to requirements, and doing that is also not a procedure.
So that's two strikes right there.
You can imagine a guy who was set up to fail as the fall guy being a little pissed off at the time. I'm guessing that's how he earned a third strike and its bye bye, or maybe two is enough.
Are you implying that if the security were nationalized (ala TSA) that such ineptitude would not exist?
Uh, yeah. Or at least that's what the report claims somewhere around page 6. Makes sense to me!
Thus, physical security systems and security personnel were managed by completely different organizations. The fractured management structure appeared to have led to conflicting priorities
Now a nationalized or centralized management or whatever you want to call it can be utterly incompetent for entirely different reasons, look at the TSA. But it wouldn't have conflicting priorities unless they were dumb enough to intentionally bake that into the cake.
Thats the problem with "just give it to the private sector". There's a zillion private sector companies and they often (or at least occasionally) don't work together very well.
Nonsense. I was already interconnected with your mother; the "all other things" bit was merely coincidental.
You're missing a fairly obvious joke about the causational result of him being able to say "I think therefore I am" leading to centuries of mistaken mind-body dualism, aka "whos your daddy"
To put it another way: correlation is an *observed* behaviour, causation is a *tested* behaviour.
Nice, but how bout correlation is a math formula, on the other hand causation has a ten page philosophical wikipedia page and even though Hume died like 300 years ago this year people are still arguing about it, with the exception that on the internet everyone agrees correlation isn't it, which I guess is at least some progress.
In what sense, exactly does science grow more powerful?
In how liberal arts grads, especially journalists, can be completely ignorant of the scientific method, leading to an article with really weird logic, at least from a scientific perspective.
Correlation is incredibly handy to at least initially point the way to a possible scientific model or theory that can be used to make useful falsifiable predictions about the future. But don't confuse the map with the terrain. Its a compass thats often broken, not a GPS unit.
Causation is a pretty fuzzy philosophical topic so arguing about what it is or isn't, is not terribly useful.
Maybe the best way to explain it to a liberal arts grad would be something like the journey is different than the destination, or when you come to a fork in the road and see the road less traveled correlation is how you know its less traveled, or that its all somehow symbolic of Hemmingways Old Man And The Sea and the act of fishing is much different than the expectations about getting a fish. Either that or the point of Joyce's Ulysses wasn't a numerical analysis that people walked around a hell of a lot in Ireland a hundred years ago. Now look at how the liberal arts guys are going to laugh at my pitiful attempt at swimming with their big literary fish... note to lib arts folks... that superior laughing feeling is what the STEM people experience when algebra dropouts try to swim in our sea of math... so when the smart guy says something about statistics, if the 1040EZ form baffles you and you can't find the "any" key on your keyboard, thats a good sign you should probably shut up and do what the smart guy says. Harsh, but that's reality, sometimes.
Yeah but thru the miracle of used parts market, 10 forklifts worth of good used batteries does cost about 10 times as much as one.
The main cost seems to be batteries. High horsepower VFDs are old stuff, cheap, even new. High horsepower electric motors? Cheap. The cabling isn't too expensive. Its all in the batteries.
All we need to be is inclined to make an electric car and we can "probably" do it? Then obviously there is not a need for engineers if just anyone with the inclination could probably reproduce their work.
The only difference between an engineer job title and a skilled amateur at home is an engineer job title spends 160 working hours and $1.38 to do what an amateur would do in one hour with ten bucks. You rarely if ever need an engineer to make one, unless its like one ... space station ... you need an engineer to make 100K copies profitably.
Rationalization stuffed full of false dilemma in almost every line.
There's nothing wrong with saying you just don't like it, or don't like change, or you're inherently paleoconservative about how you travel or whatever. Don't need to make up strange rationalized constraints to fit a predetermined outcome. "I don't like it" is good enough.
They can keep a long range gas car for those purposes
Rent it. That way when it breaks down in Middle-of-Nowhere, Oklahoma, you just don't care, its somebody else's problem.
I also rent the $20 home depot pickup truck. I'd have to rent that truck a hell of a lot of times to equal just one monthly loan payment on a compensation machine of that size...
But, for another grand or two, he could have bought a brand new 40+ MPG IC vehicle with a warranty, all kinds of new safety features, and a range of hundreds of miles with a "recharge" time of about 5 minutes.
Yeah, but thats way out of his budget and wasteful. First of all if he spent $14K on his hobby car thats probably because his budget was $14K and not a penny more... so telling him there's a really nice donor car available for only $15K is kind of pointless, especially if the total cost of the conversion would be $15K for the donor plus $14K for conversion parts and tools, that's $29K for a guy with a firm $14K budget.... Also he's throwing out a brand new IC engine with warranty, kinda a waste to buy it to begin with. I don't think the aftermarket for a nearly brand new IC engine is very healthy, he's probably not going to get much money for the nearly new engine he would be throwing out.
Most of the guys I've read about who convert, get a donor car for practically free because the engine is hopelessly blown. The demand is low enough that there's a seemingly infinite supply of cosmetically great cars with dead drivetrains. You don't have to get a beater and usually don't have to pay much if anything above scrap value which usually isn't much.
His project car cost of $14K is probably a nearly free car and very nearly $14K of parts and tools. You might be operating under the mistaken assumption his budget distribution was like $13995 for the car and $5 to convert it, kind of like how ricer's take a civic and put and exhaust tip on it and its an insta-racer car, in which case your offer of a vastly superior donor chassis for $15000 makes sense because you're thinking he'd have a much better base chassis and the jump from $14000 total to $15005 total is well worth going over budget in exchange for a much better donor chassis...
There's a guy locally who did about the same thing for about a fifth that. To a first approximation, something made out of used parts with 10 times the performance of a golf cart should only cost about 10 times as much as a used golf cart. His first conversion project was, literally, take the guts of a used $2000 large electric forklift and put the guts into an econobox with a blown engine. His first upgrade was to a real VFD instead of forklift control.
I suspect the guy is suffering from hobby-economics. So I built me a little carpentry project this summer using $100 of wood and a new $500 saw... Is that a $100 project? Well, no, my bank account is $600 lower, it must be more than $100. Is that a $600 project? Well, no, I only spent $600 for a project AND a slightly used saw so assuming the saw is worth more than $1 the project must be worth less than $600.
Is it depressing? It could be that humanity itself is destined to break up into niche markets, or micro-nations.
Divide and conqueror has historically been the result.
Ugh. find the word "laws", which apparently is what you're looking at. Look three words to the right. All they need to do is inform them of the requirement that they not "whatever" and the lease is broken.
E-mails about picking their kid up from soccer at a time and place should be kept private, even if they use their work e-mail. E-mails where they call a colleague bad names in confidence to a lab assistant should be kept private.
How do you handle NDAs? I make microwave amplifiers. In my daydream, I come up with a way to make the Worlds Best 1420 MHz preamp. For irrelevant business reasons I'm not able to capitalize on it or even afford the legal docs to patent. But I'll sell my one and only prototype to Big Ole Radio Telescope.gov outta the goodness of my heart and if they sign the usual NDA, I'll email discuss how to properly install it. Their emails get released because a bunch of cranks believe the world was created in 4000 BC so any discussion of stuff more than 6000 light years away is blasphemous hate speech they must use the legal system to stamp out. My signed NDAs can't keep my amplifier secret; I'm pissed.
At a research lab, this is not as far fetched as you might think.
I like the idea but right off the top of my head 100 MCi C-60 is something like the entire national stockpile. Not impossible, but it would be quite the achievement.
I am almost motivated enough to calculate the Cerenkov radiation light flux of that ball before its dropped... is it of the order of magnitude that it would be invisible, or would it make the air around it glow like a searchlight, etc.
To say they have a pretty serious refrigeration problem before "launch" would be an understatement.
Also just as a warning, tungsten doesn't melt until 4000 degrees ... in an inert atmosphere. In air you can ignite it and make tungsten oxide at a MUCH lower temperature than melting. They may wanna run the plan past a couple metallurgists, etc. I had / have a small roll of it and it really is useless as a nichrome replacement.
The real problem is the mud. So to more or less balance pressure at the bottom of the hole, you need the drilling mud to be so heavy that I really donno how to make it. Hmm a lubricating coolant with the density of aluminum that can be pumped around at sea level on the surface like water... Oh and it has to be stable around 600 degrees F (which is why they gave up on Kola). So anything other than asphalt (including teflon) will be vapor.... its just a mess.
Another fun limitation is if the bottom pressure is 10000 psi (made up) the pressure half way up is 5000 psi now can your cemented in holes survive that?
You know those engineering puzzles like from statics/dynamics class "how tall of a cylindrical flagpole can you make out of concrete / steel / CF until it buckles" well my cousins in the Louisiana petrochem industry have puzzlers like "imagine an infinite budget and you wanna dig 10 miles straight down, now write an essay explaining all the technical limitations".
Someday the tech might change to something like a vertical tunnel boring machine. Maybe thats what they're going to try. That would certainly be very interesting.
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