Please give us an option to turn off all useless animations which slow down gameplay. I'm talking about 1/2 second to move a unit, another 1/2 second to pan to the next unit. A second to zoom into city screen. It really pissed me off in Civ 4 that it took too long to do anything in multiplayer because I was fighting the slow interface. Make it snappy like Alpha Centauri.
So, the primary concern about nuclear power is what to do with all the waste. Reprocessing will get you pretty far. But the best solution is to destroy the waste. This can be done with a fusion-fission hybrid system. http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/ In a normal fission reactor, isotopes of heavy elements break apart, producing neutrons which can cause other heavy elements to break apart. But some isotopes are easier to break down than others, and eventually, you break down most of the "easy" isotopes, and there isn't enough density of high energy neutrons to continue a chain reaction with the "hard" isotopes, aka the sludge. We have the technology to build fusion reactors... the problem is that they currently require more energy to operate than we can harvest from them. This is likely to change soon with NIF breakthroughs and ITER being built, but we cannot yet use pure fusion as a power source. But we CAN currently use fusion as a powerful neutron source, and these neutrons can be use to fission the sludge from the normal fission reactor. It will cost some energy to produce the neutrons, but it's more than made up for by the energy from the fission reactions. The best part of this is that the long-lived heavy isotopes are mostly destroyed. You still have fission byproducts and secondary nuclear waste, but this will drastically cut down on the amount of waste to deal with.
The other frozen star theory is that black holes never fully form, but as matter accumulates, it asymptotically approaches the state known as a black hole. Eventually, it's indistinguishable from a black hole, although it never quite reaches the "ideal" black hole.
You have to think of spacetime as a malleable thing. You can end up inside the black hole before you fell into it. From your vantage point, you just fall in and quickly hit the center. During your journey, you cross over imaginary lines which represent the passage of time as recorded by an observer far from the black hole. When you start out far from the hole, you are crossing over each 1 second demarcation line every second on your clock ("proper second"). But the lines appear in increasing density nearer to the event horizon so you are suddenly crossing many seconds every proper second. You cross into time infinity, or the end of the black hole, whichever comes first, at the event horizon,... but you don't stop there. You cross densely packed lines now going in reverse... you are ticking back seconds of observer time as you move closer to the center. You are moving back in time, in a sense. Finally, you crash into the center at a time close to when you started your journey.
So, from the observer's perspective: you are seen falling toward the black hole. You slow down as you get closer to the horizon. The black hole gets bigger as if you had been swallowed by the black hole but you are never seen to cross the horizon. There are now two copies of you in the timeline of the outside observer. One is asymptotically moving toward the horizon. The other is inside the black hole moving backwards toward the horizon. But the second copy can't be seen, only felt by the increased mass of the black hole.
The conversion from temperature units to energy is generally understood. Multiply by Boltzmann's constant to convert from temperature to energy. Temperature can be thought of as 1/2 the average energy in any degree of freedom of a system. Therefore, it SHOULD have units of energy. But we didn't understand the relationship between temperature and energy in the old days, so now we have a unit conversion between them.
(Another way of defining temperature is the rate of change of energy per entropy, and should still have units of energy.)
That depends on which definition of temperature you use. In thermodynamics, absolute hot would be negative 0 Kelvin. Absolute hot only exists for systems with limited number of energy states. When you add more energy, eventually you start to fill up the energy states and you can't add more energy. In this case, the temperature scale is pretty weird. Negative values of temperature are hotter (contain higher energy) than positive temperatures. When the system is at minimum energy, you are near absolute 0, then as you add energy, the temperature increases. When you pass 1/2 energy capacity or so, the temperature reading shoots off to infinity, wraps around to negative infinity, and rises towards 0. When you reach full energy capacity, you return almost to 0.
This is only for the case of a system with finite energy states. As far as we know, the universe has infinite energy states, so there is no maximum energy capacity and there are no negative temperatures. It just goes up, up, up.
Usually, in high energy physics, temperature is given in units of electron volts. One electron volt ~= 11600 Kelvin. So this would be written, 0.4 GeV. Which is still extremely hot.
Come now, we can't expect one foundation to solve all the world's problems. There has to be some focus. I think you just can't seem to accept that Gates is not the devil.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't do that. and I'm Asian.
Please give us an option to turn off all useless animations which slow down gameplay. I'm talking about 1/2 second to move a unit, another 1/2 second to pan to the next unit. A second to zoom into city screen. It really pissed me off in Civ 4 that it took too long to do anything in multiplayer because I was fighting the slow interface. Make it snappy like Alpha Centauri.
mirrors aren't all that cheap, and they take up lots of room and maintenance.
So, the primary concern about nuclear power is what to do with all the waste. Reprocessing will get you pretty far. But the best solution is to destroy the waste. This can be done with a fusion-fission hybrid system.
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/
In a normal fission reactor, isotopes of heavy elements break apart, producing neutrons which can cause other heavy elements to break apart. But some isotopes are easier to break down than others, and eventually, you break down most of the "easy" isotopes, and there isn't enough density of high energy neutrons to continue a chain reaction with the "hard" isotopes, aka the sludge.
We have the technology to build fusion reactors... the problem is that they currently require more energy to operate than we can harvest from them. This is likely to change soon with NIF breakthroughs and ITER being built, but we cannot yet use pure fusion as a power source.
But we CAN currently use fusion as a powerful neutron source, and these neutrons can be use to fission the sludge from the normal fission reactor. It will cost some energy to produce the neutrons, but it's more than made up for by the energy from the fission reactions.
The best part of this is that the long-lived heavy isotopes are mostly destroyed. You still have fission byproducts and secondary nuclear waste, but this will drastically cut down on the amount of waste to deal with.
that's why it's funny
The other frozen star theory is that black holes never fully form, but as matter accumulates, it asymptotically approaches the state known as a black hole. Eventually, it's indistinguishable from a black hole, although it never quite reaches the "ideal" black hole.
You have to think of spacetime as a malleable thing. You can end up inside the black hole before you fell into it. From your vantage point, you just fall in and quickly hit the center. During your journey, you cross over imaginary lines which represent the passage of time as recorded by an observer far from the black hole. When you start out far from the hole, you are crossing over each 1 second demarcation line every second on your clock ("proper second"). But the lines appear in increasing density nearer to the event horizon so you are suddenly crossing many seconds every proper second. You cross into time infinity, or the end of the black hole, whichever comes first, at the event horizon, ... but you don't stop there. You cross densely packed lines now going in reverse... you are ticking back seconds of observer time as you move closer to the center. You are moving back in time, in a sense. Finally, you crash into the center at a time close to when you started your journey.
So, from the observer's perspective: you are seen falling toward the black hole. You slow down as you get closer to the horizon. The black hole gets bigger as if you had been swallowed by the black hole but you are never seen to cross the horizon. There are now two copies of you in the timeline of the outside observer. One is asymptotically moving toward the horizon. The other is inside the black hole moving backwards toward the horizon. But the second copy can't be seen, only felt by the increased mass of the black hole.
Yeah, sort of. Actually, thermodynamics and information theory are utterly entwined.
I think more user outrage would be focused on youtube then on the browsers if this change were made.
oops. Twice the average energy, not half.
The conversion from temperature units to energy is generally understood. Multiply by Boltzmann's constant to convert from temperature to energy. Temperature can be thought of as 1/2 the average energy in any degree of freedom of a system. Therefore, it SHOULD have units of energy. But we didn't understand the relationship between temperature and energy in the old days, so now we have a unit conversion between them.
(Another way of defining temperature is the rate of change of energy per entropy, and should still have units of energy.)
Better to search for "quark-gluon plasma" if you are looking for more info on this subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma
Some space quantization theories purport that there is a limit on energy density of the universe, but I don't think any of these are mainstream.
That depends on which definition of temperature you use. In thermodynamics, absolute hot would be negative 0 Kelvin. Absolute hot only exists for systems with limited number of energy states. When you add more energy, eventually you start to fill up the energy states and you can't add more energy. In this case, the temperature scale is pretty weird. Negative values of temperature are hotter (contain higher energy) than positive temperatures. When the system is at minimum energy, you are near absolute 0, then as you add energy, the temperature increases. When you pass 1/2 energy capacity or so, the temperature reading shoots off to infinity, wraps around to negative infinity, and rises towards 0. When you reach full energy capacity, you return almost to 0.
This is only for the case of a system with finite energy states. As far as we know, the universe has infinite energy states, so there is no maximum energy capacity and there are no negative temperatures. It just goes up, up, up.
Usually, in high energy physics, temperature is given in units of electron volts. One electron volt ~= 11600 Kelvin.
So this would be written, 0.4 GeV. Which is still extremely hot.
I can't figure out if you are trying to make a joke or something, but those two values are the same, and they are both very, very hot.
No, we need to switch over to using Johnny Mnemonics to carry our sensitive data.
too abusable
Better than cars, which use lead-acid batteries as well.
Why protect bicycle makers in particular, when everything else gets imported from China?
No place to park bikes inside in America either (unless it's your house).
Somehow, I don't think vitamin D is as big a problem in poorer nations, particularly those nearer to the equator. The sun is free.
It's entirely a byproduct of our sedentary office lifestyle that vitamin D deficiency is a problem.
What are you smoking? People live in deserts in USA. They even build golf courses in them. Go visit Scottsdale. It's crazy.
Come now, we can't expect one foundation to solve all the world's problems. There has to be some focus. I think you just can't seem to accept that Gates is not the devil.
Having a lot of kids is a higher guarantee that some of them will survive, when mortality is high.