The NERVA engineers were never able to keep the fuel rods from cracking and chipping under thermal stresses and pressures from the reaction mass, making it too unreliable to use in practice (one of the reasons the program was abandoned). It's possible that's a problem that could be addressed, but of all the technologies discussed on this thread nuclear thermal is the one with the highest technical risk. It would be far easier and cheaper to build a nuclear reactor.
I think people make tubes because a normal person can with some combination of money and effort - used vacuum pumps aren't that hard to rebuild. You could cheap out and use fixtures, but a reasonable quality glass lathe is something like $14k. It would be a relatively expensive hobby, but still cheaper than cars.
I love that first link, but I notice he doesn't include a getter, which would reduce the life of his tubes. The second guy uses getters that still have some life from broken tubes..
Actually, San Francisco used to have a cash payment program for General Assistance. Somebody noticed the city was employing a lot of bureaucrats to provide services, and that it would be far more efficient to hand out cash instead of housing vouchers and meal tickets. What the GP said is exactly what happened. People spent their assistance on booze and drugs and then begged for food. Gavin Newsom made his political bones replacing the cash program with something very similar to the one that preceded it.
I'm not wrong. Change does happen faster than expected. But long, long after it was expected. Certainly we can build single-purpose machines, in some cases, cheaply enough to use. That's automation. But we're not even close to a self-repairing machine that has the coordination, stamina, and sensory capabilities of a person, and that's what it's going to take to displace people entirely from productive work.
We're still a long way from general purpose robots, and even longer from general purpose robots that are cheaper to operate than employing a person. Nobody alive today is going to see this.
This. What did central bankers expect to happen when they started giving away money for almost free? They made it mandatory for corporations to automate everything that can be automated - if you don't do it your competition will.
Nobody starves to death in the US either. When they talk about people "having hunger" the standard is exactly that - being involuntarily hungry at least once that year.
I would think the line would be drawn will below $40m. If it's enough money that a group of ten people would be willing to work full time for a year to set up a scam, it's worth a ten minute phone call.
There's a time component involved here. It may be the Russians compromised it easily a few years ago, but she wiped the data when it became clear it would be subpoena'd.
Destruction of evidence is itself a crime. The difficulty is always in proving that's what happened - by definition you're missing a key piece of evidence.
We didn't even have to win to win. If the US was willing to pay the price Vietnam would be partitioned to this day. There's no way they could have defeated us militarily even if we didn't invade the North. But the public wasn't willing to pay the price. I suspect we wouldn't even have needed troops on the ground - the South Vietnamese destroyed a large invasion force with the help of US air power in 1973 and might have been able to hold indefinitely if we had continued to provide air support.
It sucked for the people in the South, but I wonder if the country isn't better off today. Like China, Vietnam only pays the barest lip service to communism these days. They have more economic freedom than Americans. If we had forced a partition maybe Vietnam would be like Korea, with both armies on a hair trigger and Ho Jon Un building nuclear weapons to intimidate the neighbors.
That "800 bases" thing is bogus. If you look at the list the vast, vast majority are small detachments of men working at a base belonging to the host country. Five guys tasked with training F-16 mechanics in BFE do not constitute a "base".
I don't understand how the quote is relevant. The only thing related to the Steam API is user names, and they don't have the Steam passwords. What changes to the API should Valve be making?
Sure, we have "scientific research" from sociologists and psychologists who can't seem to be able to replicate more than 30% of their studies. So let's talk about bias...
I don't see Valve has any reason to change anything. If Walmart sells you a boxed game and someone steals it out of your car, is this Walmart's problem?
I had to install DOSBox to play Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares, which was released twenty years ago. It took about fifteen minutes of fiddling.
On the other hand, I accidentally bought a brand new Xbox 360 game for my Xbox-One-owning nephew and had to return it. So explain to me again why I would want a console if backwards compatibility matters to me?
Sure, the old console is in the closet somewhere, and someday you'll hook it up and play one of your old games, for nostalgia's sake. If you can find a television with the right kind of inputs.
It seems like every few years another layer of abstraction is added that makes things easier. I play games exclusively on the PC and haven't had a problem in ages. The only real advantage to consoles these days is cost, and that's only up-front cost since the games themselves are quite a bit more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
The NERVA engineers were never able to keep the fuel rods from cracking and chipping under thermal stresses and pressures from the reaction mass, making it too unreliable to use in practice (one of the reasons the program was abandoned). It's possible that's a problem that could be addressed, but of all the technologies discussed on this thread nuclear thermal is the one with the highest technical risk. It would be far easier and cheaper to build a nuclear reactor.
I think people make tubes because a normal person can with some combination of money and effort - used vacuum pumps aren't that hard to rebuild. You could cheap out and use fixtures, but a reasonable quality glass lathe is something like $14k. It would be a relatively expensive hobby, but still cheaper than cars.
I love that first link, but I notice he doesn't include a getter, which would reduce the life of his tubes. The second guy uses getters that still have some life from broken tubes..
Actually, San Francisco used to have a cash payment program for General Assistance. Somebody noticed the city was employing a lot of bureaucrats to provide services, and that it would be far more efficient to hand out cash instead of housing vouchers and meal tickets. What the GP said is exactly what happened. People spent their assistance on booze and drugs and then begged for food. Gavin Newsom made his political bones replacing the cash program with something very similar to the one that preceded it.
I'm not wrong. Change does happen faster than expected. But long, long after it was expected. Certainly we can build single-purpose machines, in some cases, cheaply enough to use. That's automation. But we're not even close to a self-repairing machine that has the coordination, stamina, and sensory capabilities of a person, and that's what it's going to take to displace people entirely from productive work.
We're still a long way from general purpose robots, and even longer from general purpose robots that are cheaper to operate than employing a person. Nobody alive today is going to see this.
This. What did central bankers expect to happen when they started giving away money for almost free? They made it mandatory for corporations to automate everything that can be automated - if you don't do it your competition will.
Nobody starves to death in the US either. When they talk about people "having hunger" the standard is exactly that - being involuntarily hungry at least once that year.
I would think the line would be drawn will below $40m. If it's enough money that a group of ten people would be willing to work full time for a year to set up a scam, it's worth a ten minute phone call.
Hillary's defenders seem to engage in a lot of this tu quoque stuff when the facts don't even rise to the level they can reasonably employ a fallacy.
There's a time component involved here. It may be the Russians compromised it easily a few years ago, but she wiped the data when it became clear it would be subpoena'd.
Destruction of evidence is itself a crime. The difficulty is always in proving that's what happened - by definition you're missing a key piece of evidence.
Health care is a huge potential cost if you're in the US.
"Preferred"? I'm not sure the author of this article really understands how the military works.
The Brits did it successfully for hundreds of years.
We didn't even have to win to win. If the US was willing to pay the price Vietnam would be partitioned to this day. There's no way they could have defeated us militarily even if we didn't invade the North. But the public wasn't willing to pay the price. I suspect we wouldn't even have needed troops on the ground - the South Vietnamese destroyed a large invasion force with the help of US air power in 1973 and might have been able to hold indefinitely if we had continued to provide air support.
It sucked for the people in the South, but I wonder if the country isn't better off today. Like China, Vietnam only pays the barest lip service to communism these days. They have more economic freedom than Americans. If we had forced a partition maybe Vietnam would be like Korea, with both armies on a hair trigger and Ho Jon Un building nuclear weapons to intimidate the neighbors.
That "800 bases" thing is bogus. If you look at the list the vast, vast majority are small detachments of men working at a base belonging to the host country. Five guys tasked with training F-16 mechanics in BFE do not constitute a "base".
I would think instead of hurting your hand would go numb.
Again, what Steam data was involved in this breach?
I don't understand how the quote is relevant. The only thing related to the Steam API is user names, and they don't have the Steam passwords. What changes to the API should Valve be making?
Sure, we have "scientific research" from sociologists and psychologists who can't seem to be able to replicate more than 30% of their studies. So let's talk about bias...
I don't see Valve has any reason to change anything. If Walmart sells you a boxed game and someone steals it out of your car, is this Walmart's problem?
I had to install DOSBox to play Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares, which was released twenty years ago. It took about fifteen minutes of fiddling.
On the other hand, I accidentally bought a brand new Xbox 360 game for my Xbox-One-owning nephew and had to return it. So explain to me again why I would want a console if backwards compatibility matters to me?
Sure, the old console is in the closet somewhere, and someday you'll hook it up and play one of your old games, for nostalgia's sake. If you can find a television with the right kind of inputs.
It seems like every few years another layer of abstraction is added that makes things easier. I play games exclusively on the PC and haven't had a problem in ages. The only real advantage to consoles these days is cost, and that's only up-front cost since the games themselves are quite a bit more expensive.
Yes, that's entirely conceivable in the same way wet streets cause rain.