Waste disposal problems are just a special case of the NIMBY tax. We could just toss it all into a big, dry hole in the ground. As I understand it, we'd come out ahead over coal in terms of health even if we ground up all the waste and tossed it into the atmosphere, or the ocean. The problem really is that people don't understand the cancer risks of living near a coal plant, whereas nuclear energy is OMG NUCLEAR!!!!, so they're trying to compare to perfection instead of as an improvement over what we already have.
Nuclear costs mostly depend on the amount of (not necessarily useful) regulation, and the amount of opposition to building new power plants. If we replaced all the NIMBY Americans with Frenchmen, the costs for nuclear would be much lower than they are now in the US. Wind, solar, and nuclear all have their plusses and minuses, and currently solar and wind are growing while nuclear is stagnating, so you also have to consider what the costs will be in the future.
While it is theoretically more energy efficient to get our hydrogen from electrolysis than from methane, we mostly don't do so. Why? Because we can skip the whole burning fuels to create electricity steps, and go directly to making hydrogen. If we count the inefficiency of creating electricity then electrolytic efficiency decreases substantially.
This new method uses electrolysis to generate a mixture of ammonia and hydrogen. This will likely be very useful in the future as solar and wind become widely deployed, and the price of fossil fuels increases. It might also be useful for space colonization. Overall, I think for once the editors have given us something that won't be vaporware, even if it likely won't be used for quite a while.
The first is like increasing fuel economy by designing a better engine, the second is like increasing your own fuel economy by patching that leaky fuel tank. Even I know how to turn off or put my computer into sleep mode to save energy -- will anyone but Facebook gain anything from this?
Is this a case of "Facebook was being obliviously wasteful" or a case of "Facebook discovers way to increase efficiency"? I'm guessing it's the former.
If one considers gravity in our nominal 3d space, isn't it correct to say that gravity imparts momentum without anything comparable to "high momentum exhaust"?
This is the principle behind the "slingshot" maneuver, which allows you to transfer momentum to a planet without using fuel. It can be used to speed up your ship or slow it down, depending on whether you pass behind or in front of the trajectory of the planet. (I suppose you could count the planet as being a portion of your exhaust) However, you have to be much less picky about where and when you're going, because this maneuver requires a planet. However, it is sufficiently worthwhile that scientists are willing to wait decades for the right planetary alignments for certain missions.
No, it is perfectly possible (and well understood) that you can produce thrust using pure energy with no mass. Just put a lightbulb and a reflector on your ship; as long as you can power the lightbulb you will produce thrust. The problem with this is that it is ridiculously inefficient, and since your power generation is not massless, this is roughly equivalent to using pathetically bad fuel.
Also, don't confuse energy and momentum. They are separate things, and both are conserved independently of each other.
The trick to making a good spaceship engine is converting energy efficiently into ship momentum. As far as we know this means creating high-momentum exhaust; conservation of momentum then means your ship gains momentum in the opposite direction. However, the problem is that to create high-momentum exhaust you either need high mass (and this means your ship carries, and has to accelerate, tones of fuel), or you create high-velocity exhaust (which due to the kinetic energy formula means you use a lot more energy).
If you could find a way to skip the whole exhaust thing and transfer momentum directly into something not on your ship, you would have a space engine far superior to any we know of. The idea with this research was to transfer it into the quantum vacuum something-or-other. This would be analogous to how an airplane transfers momentum to the atmosphere or a boat to the water or a car to the land. In theory this could work and even be more efficient than using light as your exhaust.
Sure, it would be easy to root out the dissenters... but that costs you a productive citizen each time you do it. If you can prevent them from becoming dissenters in the first place, you come up way ahead.
People should be going to prison for such deceit. We don't hold our officials accountable.
But, who should be held accountable? There was at least one point in time (and maybe it is the case currently) that an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle by that description would not be considered a drone. This was certainly the opinion of most Slashdotters when the question involved the FAA's jurisdiction over Amazon's innovative new delivery system. The only thing we can unanimously agree on is that the editors should (but won't) be held accountable.
I too am sick of companies getting away with false advertizing of all kinds. (This wouldn't be a problem if it was simply a failure to develop according to plan, but they also advertize their resolution on the box.)
What I'd like to do eventually is have parallel wiring in the house, one string coming from the inverter, and one coming straight from the batteries, (through a fuse box of course) so that things like lights and electronic devices that don't mind working on 12 volts can use the native voltage, and things that need 110 will have 110. (Did you know that you could get CFLs that run on 12 volts?)
If you have 12 volts DC, you can set up some cheap, efficient, and long-lasting LEDs. Most of the cost and inefficiency of "lightbulb replacement" LEDs are because they need a transformer and rectifier to reduce the household current to low voltage DC; if you already have that you are probably better off using LEDs, and they will be (much!) cheaper, more efficient, and longer lasting than the "screw into a regular lightbulb socket LEDs", and also than compact fluorescent.
So 40% of the people on the list either have nothing to do with terrorism, or are independent terrorists, or are sufficiently sneaky that they don't know what group they belong to but not sneaky enough not to attract attention.
And 60% of the people are suspected of having ties to terrorist groups.
So anywhere between 0% and 100% of the people in either category could be terrorists.
I had to create to make sure nobody else could create a fake account about me and fill it with slander
Rerouting auxiliary power to the tinfoil hat.
My college friends threatened to make an account for me if I wouldn't. The implication was that it would be more "interesting" than the one I would make for myself.
Oh bull..... Why do you need a GPS collar to figure this out?
You don't need the tracking system to figure it out... you need it to measure how much time they spend together, whether besides having a buddy they also form groups, how often they interact with their group or with random cows, etc. With these numbers they can model the spread of various diseases, how cow health changes their interactions, how feeding system changes cow socialization (that will need a similar study with a different feeding system), and perhaps other things. Also they can verify that it wasn't a confirmation bias "discovery".
Both to the pedophile and to the illusion of privacy people had when using Gmail.
(They have an obligation to report child porn if they find it, but they don't have an obligation to look. My suspicion is Google is not happy about what happened.)
If all the Russian bloggers are just government controlled parrots, just switch to reading foreign blogs.
Also, you could have a setup where your Russian blogger has only a single reader, a foreigner who re-blogs everything they write (unless Russia doesn't take kindly to being clever like this).
So steps in terraforming mars would need to start with creating an artificial magnetic field to block the solar wind.
There is a really cool (pun intended) system that would not only produce a large magnetic field, but provide an extremely efficient energy storage system capable of handling large unexpected spikes. Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage
or should I ignore it since municipal elections are not that important anyway?
Municipal elections are to national elections as car accidents are to shark attacks: just because something is more "newsy" doesn't mean it's more important. Think about it: which election does your vote affect more, and which result will affect you more? (Hint: it's the one which can pass laws without dragging their mutilated corpses through the House and Senate pork acquisition specialists.) Bonus points: which election can someone accomplish half of a single item from their list of campaign promises (think mutilated but passed health care bill), yet be elected a second term? (Hint: it's the one which requires lying to^W^W convincing a larger and more diverse group of people.)
I thought the trouble with mining gold was more to do with the "interesting" chemicals used to separate a few specks of gold from a few tons of rock, than the energy cost of the process. Not that the computers used for bitcoin mining don't themselves require lots of "interesting" chemicals.
Why would anyone SELL bitcoin mining rigs instead of simply building them and getting rich themselves?
They'd lose money by giving up their competitive advantage. Specifically, while anyone with money can buy bitcoin mining gear, very few people can build some. Produce and sell the mining gear, and you get guaranteed and instantaneous profits. Also, producing the specialized computers you're competing against other businesses; mining bitcoins you're competing against everyone who follows the "easy money this way" sign. Also if the latter group is optimistic, it means you can sell the mining gear at higher than its actual value.
Mayank Sharma of Linux Voices tests and compares five text editors for Linux, none of which are named Emacs or Vim.
Real men don their asbestos suit and compare the most useful and popular text editors as well. What's next, are we replacing car analogies with analogies to tunnel boring machines (so that we can compare something no one knows to something else no one knows)?
Slashdot Mirror
Waste disposal problems are just a special case of the NIMBY tax. We could just toss it all into a big, dry hole in the ground. As I understand it, we'd come out ahead over coal in terms of health even if we ground up all the waste and tossed it into the atmosphere, or the ocean. The problem really is that people don't understand the cancer risks of living near a coal plant, whereas nuclear energy is OMG NUCLEAR!!!!, so they're trying to compare to perfection instead of as an improvement over what we already have.
Nuclear costs mostly depend on the amount of (not necessarily useful) regulation, and the amount of opposition to building new power plants. If we replaced all the NIMBY Americans with Frenchmen, the costs for nuclear would be much lower than they are now in the US. Wind, solar, and nuclear all have their plusses and minuses, and currently solar and wind are growing while nuclear is stagnating, so you also have to consider what the costs will be in the future.
And what did you do today that gave you such a high horse?
He probably thinks learning to ride a horse would be a more productive use of these people's time.
While it is theoretically more energy efficient to get our hydrogen from electrolysis than from methane, we mostly don't do so. Why? Because we can skip the whole burning fuels to create electricity steps, and go directly to making hydrogen. If we count the inefficiency of creating electricity then electrolytic efficiency decreases substantially.
This new method uses electrolysis to generate a mixture of ammonia and hydrogen. This will likely be very useful in the future as solar and wind become widely deployed, and the price of fossil fuels increases. It might also be useful for space colonization. Overall, I think for once the editors have given us something that won't be vaporware, even if it likely won't be used for quite a while.
The first is like increasing fuel economy by designing a better engine, the second is like increasing your own fuel economy by patching that leaky fuel tank. Even I know how to turn off or put my computer into sleep mode to save energy -- will anyone but Facebook gain anything from this?
Is this a case of "Facebook was being obliviously wasteful" or a case of "Facebook discovers way to increase efficiency"? I'm guessing it's the former.
If one considers gravity in our nominal 3d space, isn't it correct to say that gravity imparts momentum without anything comparable to "high momentum exhaust"?
This is the principle behind the "slingshot" maneuver, which allows you to transfer momentum to a planet without using fuel. It can be used to speed up your ship or slow it down, depending on whether you pass behind or in front of the trajectory of the planet. (I suppose you could count the planet as being a portion of your exhaust) However, you have to be much less picky about where and when you're going, because this maneuver requires a planet. However, it is sufficiently worthwhile that scientists are willing to wait decades for the right planetary alignments for certain missions.
No, it is perfectly possible (and well understood) that you can produce thrust using pure energy with no mass. Just put a lightbulb and a reflector on your ship; as long as you can power the lightbulb you will produce thrust. The problem with this is that it is ridiculously inefficient, and since your power generation is not massless, this is roughly equivalent to using pathetically bad fuel.
Also, don't confuse energy and momentum. They are separate things, and both are conserved independently of each other.
The trick to making a good spaceship engine is converting energy efficiently into ship momentum. As far as we know this means creating high-momentum exhaust; conservation of momentum then means your ship gains momentum in the opposite direction. However, the problem is that to create high-momentum exhaust you either need high mass (and this means your ship carries, and has to accelerate, tones of fuel), or you create high-velocity exhaust (which due to the kinetic energy formula means you use a lot more energy).
If you could find a way to skip the whole exhaust thing and transfer momentum directly into something not on your ship, you would have a space engine far superior to any we know of. The idea with this research was to transfer it into the quantum vacuum something-or-other. This would be analogous to how an airplane transfers momentum to the atmosphere or a boat to the water or a car to the land. In theory this could work and even be more efficient than using light as your exhaust.
Sure, it would be easy to root out the dissenters... but that costs you a productive citizen each time you do it. If you can prevent them from becoming dissenters in the first place, you come up way ahead.
People should be going to prison for such deceit. We don't hold our officials accountable.
But, who should be held accountable? There was at least one point in time (and maybe it is the case currently) that an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle by that description would not be considered a drone. This was certainly the opinion of most Slashdotters when the question involved the FAA's jurisdiction over Amazon's innovative new delivery system. The only thing we can unanimously agree on is that the editors should (but won't) be held accountable.
I too am sick of companies getting away with false advertizing of all kinds. (This wouldn't be a problem if it was simply a failure to develop according to plan, but they also advertize their resolution on the box.)
What I'd like to do eventually is have parallel wiring in the house, one string coming from the inverter, and one coming straight from the batteries, (through a fuse box of course) so that things like lights and electronic devices that don't mind working on 12 volts can use the native voltage, and things that need 110 will have 110. (Did you know that you could get CFLs that run on 12 volts?)
If you have 12 volts DC, you can set up some cheap, efficient, and long-lasting LEDs. Most of the cost and inefficiency of "lightbulb replacement" LEDs are because they need a transformer and rectifier to reduce the household current to low voltage DC; if you already have that you are probably better off using LEDs, and they will be (much!) cheaper, more efficient, and longer lasting than the "screw into a regular lightbulb socket LEDs", and also than compact fluorescent.
So 40% of the people on the list either have nothing to do with terrorism, or are independent terrorists, or are sufficiently sneaky that they don't know what group they belong to but not sneaky enough not to attract attention.
And 60% of the people are suspected of having ties to terrorist groups.
So anywhere between 0% and 100% of the people in either category could be terrorists.
And now a word from our sponsors, the NSA. Oops, I mean look a distraction.
I'd like to see how your friends respond to that.
I had to create to make sure nobody else could create a fake account about me and fill it with slander
Rerouting auxiliary power to the tinfoil hat.
My college friends threatened to make an account for me if I wouldn't. The implication was that it would be more "interesting" than the one I would make for myself.
Oh bull..... Why do you need a GPS collar to figure this out?
You don't need the tracking system to figure it out... you need it to measure how much time they spend together, whether besides having a buddy they also form groups, how often they interact with their group or with random cows, etc. With these numbers they can model the spread of various diseases, how cow health changes their interactions, how feeding system changes cow socialization (that will need a similar study with a different feeding system), and perhaps other things. Also they can verify that it wasn't a confirmation bias "discovery".
If the barge had stuff Google wanted to keep secret, it doesn't anymore and now few people are looking.
Both to the pedophile and to the illusion of privacy people had when using Gmail.
(They have an obligation to report child porn if they find it, but they don't have an obligation to look. My suspicion is Google is not happy about what happened.)
If all the Russian bloggers are just government controlled parrots, just switch to reading foreign blogs.
Also, you could have a setup where your Russian blogger has only a single reader, a foreigner who re-blogs everything they write (unless Russia doesn't take kindly to being clever like this).
So steps in terraforming mars would need to start with creating an artificial magnetic field to block the solar wind.
There is a really cool (pun intended) system that would not only produce a large magnetic field, but provide an extremely efficient energy storage system capable of handling large unexpected spikes. Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage
or should I ignore it since municipal elections are not that important anyway?
Municipal elections are to national elections as car accidents are to shark attacks: just because something is more "newsy" doesn't mean it's more important. Think about it: which election does your vote affect more, and which result will affect you more? (Hint: it's the one which can pass laws without dragging their mutilated corpses through the House and Senate pork acquisition specialists.) Bonus points: which election can someone accomplish half of a single item from their list of campaign promises (think mutilated but passed health care bill), yet be elected a second term? (Hint: it's the one which requires lying to^W^W convincing a larger and more diverse group of people.)
I thought the trouble with mining gold was more to do with the "interesting" chemicals used to separate a few specks of gold from a few tons of rock, than the energy cost of the process. Not that the computers used for bitcoin mining don't themselves require lots of "interesting" chemicals.
Why would anyone SELL bitcoin mining rigs instead of simply building them and getting rich themselves?
They'd lose money by giving up their competitive advantage. Specifically, while anyone with money can buy bitcoin mining gear, very few people can build some. Produce and sell the mining gear, and you get guaranteed and instantaneous profits. Also, producing the specialized computers you're competing against other businesses; mining bitcoins you're competing against everyone who follows the "easy money this way" sign. Also if the latter group is optimistic, it means you can sell the mining gear at higher than its actual value.
Mayank Sharma of Linux Voices tests and compares five text editors for Linux, none of which are named Emacs or Vim.
Real men don their asbestos suit and compare the most useful and popular text editors as well. What's next, are we replacing car analogies with analogies to tunnel boring machines (so that we can compare something no one knows to something else no one knows)?