Well, like I said in my reply, it really depends on the design of the warhead. Some use a VERY small fusion device (typically at the core of the weapon) to further complete the fission of the initial device. This could increase the fission efficiency from less than 20% to greater than 60% and obviously making the bomb SAFER from a long term standpoint as well. The same thing happens in a three stage device, only there is generally a much larger fusion stage with a very large fission stage finale. These are typically pretty dirty bombs though. The more environmentally friendly version though is a fission device with a large fusion device and no follow up, this produces a lot less fallout while still producing a pretty darned big bang...
Re:Nuclear fusion?
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That would actually depend on the warhead design. Fairly clean bombs don't HAVE a third stage. The largest nuclear weapon ever developed (the Tsar Bomba) was originally designed to be roughly 50/50 fusion/fission. However the third stage was removed and replaced with lead, yielding 50 megatons instead of 100 and so almost 99% fusion derived energy.
Regardless though, saying that humans have yet to detonate a fusion device is pretty obviously wrong.
Re:Nuclear fusion?
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 2, Informative
We've got this crazy new tech called thermonuclear weaponry...it uses the wacked out idea of starting a small and mundane fission explosion which then triggers a much larger fusion explosion.
Damned, no one is asking you to read Physics Today, but at least pay attention to the inventions from the 50s...
As far as that goes, even in Green Bay and Chicago only the last half of the season is even cold. September and October is generally fairly warm anywhere in the continental US (obviously not including some locations in the Rockies...).
Obviously by the end of the season it is cold everywhere but the desert southwest, Florida, and southern Texas but the best tailgating is always at the beginning of the season for most teams anyway. Everyone thinks they were massively underrated and "this is the year!." By the end of the season,reality has set in and the parties aren't quite as good;)
OK, what I should have said was "no more radioactive than naturally occuring uranium." I've seen natural pitchblend deposits, I know it is radioactive but so are Coleman lantern "wicks" and smoke alarms. My point was that we weren't dumping out nuclear waste on countries we invade. From the site you link "The material is about 20% less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium" in reference to depleted uranium.
I agree with your first few paragraphs, but then you talk about "shooting nuclear waste into the desert of countries they invade," are you talking about depleted uranium? First off, that isn't radioactive and second it isn't even nuclear waste, more like a side product. When nuclear fuel is refined from naturally occuring uranium, 99.9% of it is a non-radioactive uranium isotope. This isotope is as stable as iron and has the interesting properties of being heavier than lead and as hard as steel, sounds like a pretty good thing to make armor piercing rounds out of to me.
I think that useful fusion will change the world, but current fission technology could do a pretty darned good job too, given half the chance.
I would hope it would be a better multiplayer game since that is the entire focus of the game. Doom 3 on the other hand hs multiplayer thrown in as little more than an afterthought for added replayability. Doom 3's ENGINE will ultimately power some very impressive multiplayer FPS games, but without those mods (and complete commercial overhauls) it's not exactly a fair comparison.
The real rates are only $29.99 and $39.99. They even offer those to pre-existing customers who are willing to "sign" for another year. I've had DSL at my current address for about 4 years and when the price went from $49.99 (what I originally signed up at) to $29.99 for the same service I called and they were more than willing to switch me over to the $29.99 rate. A few months ago there was also a speed bump to 256kbit up that I was never notified about but was more than happy to receive:)
I personally can't stand the direction this country and specifically this administration are going, but there is no evidence that it was a missile that took down the towers. No one really saw the FIRST plane, but many people saw the second plane. Also the people who were ON those planes that died kind of implicates a plane being involved. Why would the US orchestrate a major attack in NYC using planes, then have a half-assed missile attack on the pentagon? 99% of the emotion generated by 9/11 and used by the administration was in response to what happened in NYC, not what happened in the Pentagon. Honestly only an idiot could believe that an attack on the short, squatty and deep Pentagon could cause the same sort of damage as the much taller and narrower WTC towers.
I would say that a 100% always perfect spam filter is a fairly hard challenge, it would after all have to be not only intelligent but "think" in the exact same manner as its owner. What I call spam, you wouldn't necessarily. The definition of spam depends on the circumstances as well. If I was planning a trip then those Orbitz e-mails might not be really completely spam, the rest of the time they aren't worth the 25K. Basically, the only perfect spam filter will be a digital copy of our own brain which pre-reads our mail.
All your points are true and since they don't spend much needless time explaining science which doesn't exist it is a decent scifi movie. I think a novel can easily explain science which doesn't exist and make it feel "real" but a movie is just too short for "wild and crazy what if?" scifi.
Let me guess, you went to watch a scifi movie, right? From that aspect it wasn't so great and I hated it the first time I watched it. A year or so later I ended up watching it on DVD and watched it as a horror movie and it was so much better. A lot of the things that made it a bad scifi movie were the exact same things that made it a good horror movie too.
I would say it became the more desirable console because of sports games, but that was just more my own experience and rose-colored memories. I owned a SNES and my neighbor owned a Genesis, ultimately he still liked the side-scrollers while I was liking the newer sports games, we switched consoles and were never happier:)
As others have posted, in some states you would most definitely be breaking the law. The passing lane is for the fastest car in any one specific instance regardless of posted speed limits.
This law is there because you never know WHY that person is going fast, 99.99% of the time they are just people who travel fast, but the one time it is the guy who can disarm the bomb about to go off in the airport...well, you can imagine and more importantly you can't know why they are speeding.
Well, the problem is that they aren't really "insane-mad power" so much as insane mad high gain antenna like you say later in your post. The problem is though that those antenna are highly directional and focused. They produce a very high gain at a given point in space and then get worse and worse as you travel away from that point. Since that focus point in only a few tens of thousand miles or so from the surface, at a few light minutes out they would be nearly indistiguishable from a NON-directional source such as a broadcast tower. The thing is though that broadcast towers use MUCH more power than uplink satellites so from a given far away distance, the broadcast tower would be much easier to "see".
I agree with Mr Drake in the long run, it won't be too much longer before all of our comms are by laser light which is so much more directional and non-focused (read: coherent) that we will be spilling only small fractions of our broadcast spectrum out into space. Eventually it is probable that we won't use comm sats at all, if the world is completely linked by fiber. All RF will be extremely local transmission for mobile objects and we will be near undetectable from a few lightyears distant unless we WANT to be noticed.
Basically, right now we are at the peak of transmission, but are rapidly approaching the downhill phase.
You wouldn't know it was a message, but you would know it was most likely an artificial transmission. Like the parent said, this would allow us to focus on that region a lot more closely looking for real messages.
Imagine if you and I are in a large dark room filled with other people and we want to locate each other. The best way to do that isn't to talk it is to be very loud for short stretches of time (shreak in other words), then when we get close to start talking. This is a massively flawed analogy, but shows how a non-message can convey information (in this instance, location).
I think he meant that simply being in a large downtown area prevents high amounts of sunlight from reaching the buildings surface. Obviously the tallest buildings don't have this problem, but smaller ones would. Basically a 20-35 story building in Chicago or Manhattan is ALWAYS (well, except for a few minutes either side of noon certain parts of the year) in a shadow unless it is lake/river side. The same things applies in the heart of many largish cities downtowns.
I'm also going to attack your list of cities a bit. Sante Fe isn't very big at all, definitely not a sprawling downtown. New Orleans only has two or three skyscrapers. Solar wouldn't even begin to touch the neon needed in Vegas. Austin also doesn't have a really large downtown area (nor for that matter does Dallas when compared to its population, but I'll let that one slide).
I agree with everything you are saying, except for the publicly funded research thing. While only a small part of the population is directly interested in any one research project, science as a whole MASSIVELY benefits society. Don't think that much crappy science gets funded, at least not for long. It is very hard to get the grant money you need, and while only a small set of people are directly interested in your results, they indirectly benefit far more. Take the human genome project for instance, it was incredibly expensive and in all honesty would have been done entirely in the private sector had the public not ponied up some of the cash (and it was an expensive, multilab project...to say the least). Obviously most people didn't read the draft sequence announcement in Science, probably not everyone even knew it was DONE (in all honesty, I would say less than 25% actually understand what it is all about anyway). The knowledge gained though will be used to better mankind more than your or I could ever imagine when it is all said and done.
You think the goverment keeps track of everyone subscribing to Nature, Science, Cell et all? There is no auditing at the journals either, you pay your money and you get the journal. The overwhelming majority of the research published in a journal is only interesting to about 0.000001% of the population of the Earth (and I'm being generous). The people studying that particular area NEED access to that research though, it is absolutely essential to keep up with the field. Whether that scientist is being 100% honest and works at an NIH lab in Bethesda or is 100% crooked and works in Tehran (sorry to our Iranian audience, Middle Eastern people are obviously this guys boogy man) he is allowed unfettered access to this information. Remember after 9/11 when people were talking about closing publication on certain biological research such as anthrax? The community decided that for the most part, the benefit to man of publishing that publically was more important than the slim chance that it would be used for ill will.
You have to understand there is a difference between what you are proposing and what we are discussing. All the information they are talking about making public for free is ALREADY PUBLIC, just not free. DoD grant research isn't often published, they pay extra to the researchers to basically cover the loss of credit. Trust me, I am working on a USDA grant right now and we don't have NEARLY the funding of a DoD grant, of course we will get public credit for the research as well. Now, some DoD research is made public (a lot actually) but definitely not all of it. They aren't proposing to make THAT research public.
A better analogy would be that NASA funds a study to Mercury, when the data comes back the researchers publish all the data in Nature (yes, I know I am being very simplistic...but this is an analogy on/. after all), and nowhere else has any of the information. NASA doesn't post any pretty pictures, no updates at all...if you want to find out what your money paid for and the government has OKed you to see, you have to pay again for the Nature publication. Incidentally, at $10 per copy of the journal, if everyone in the country was interested in the research would cost the country 3 BILLION DOLLARS, probably more than the research itself, just to access the results. Think about that for a second.
I assure you, we are using those bacteria to our own advantage at the same time. It isn't a parasitic relationship, but a commensal one...
I agree with your general statement though, just not your specific example. There are many animals which couldn't exist in their niche at ALL without direct microorganism aid (cows and termites immediately spring to mind) and most of the rest would be much worse off.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, like I said in my reply, it really depends on the design of the warhead. Some use a VERY small fusion device (typically at the core of the weapon) to further complete the fission of the initial device. This could increase the fission efficiency from less than 20% to greater than 60% and obviously making the bomb SAFER from a long term standpoint as well. The same thing happens in a three stage device, only there is generally a much larger fusion stage with a very large fission stage finale. These are typically pretty dirty bombs though. The more environmentally friendly version though is a fission device with a large fusion device and no follow up, this produces a lot less fallout while still producing a pretty darned big bang...
That would actually depend on the warhead design. Fairly clean bombs don't HAVE a third stage. The largest nuclear weapon ever developed (the Tsar Bomba) was originally designed to be roughly 50/50 fusion/fission. However the third stage was removed and replaced with lead, yielding 50 megatons instead of 100 and so almost 99% fusion derived energy.
a .h tml
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomb
Regardless though, saying that humans have yet to detonate a fusion device is pretty obviously wrong.
We've got this crazy new tech called thermonuclear weaponry...it uses the wacked out idea of starting a small and mundane fission explosion which then triggers a much larger fusion explosion.
Damned, no one is asking you to read Physics Today, but at least pay attention to the inventions from the 50s...
As far as that goes, even in Green Bay and Chicago only the last half of the season is even cold. September and October is generally fairly warm anywhere in the continental US (obviously not including some locations in the Rockies...).
;)
Obviously by the end of the season it is cold everywhere but the desert southwest, Florida, and southern Texas but the best tailgating is always at the beginning of the season for most teams anyway. Everyone thinks they were massively underrated and "this is the year!." By the end of the season,reality has set in and the parties aren't quite as good
OK, what I should have said was "no more radioactive than naturally occuring uranium." I've seen natural pitchblend deposits, I know it is radioactive but so are Coleman lantern "wicks" and smoke alarms. My point was that we weren't dumping out nuclear waste on countries we invade. From the site you link "The material is about 20% less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium" in reference to depleted uranium.
I agree with your first few paragraphs, but then you talk about "shooting nuclear waste into the desert of countries they invade," are you talking about depleted uranium? First off, that isn't radioactive and second it isn't even nuclear waste, more like a side product. When nuclear fuel is refined from naturally occuring uranium, 99.9% of it is a non-radioactive uranium isotope. This isotope is as stable as iron and has the interesting properties of being heavier than lead and as hard as steel, sounds like a pretty good thing to make armor piercing rounds out of to me.
I think that useful fusion will change the world, but current fission technology could do a pretty darned good job too, given half the chance.
I would hope it would be a better multiplayer game since that is the entire focus of the game. Doom 3 on the other hand hs multiplayer thrown in as little more than an afterthought for added replayability. Doom 3's ENGINE will ultimately power some very impressive multiplayer FPS games, but without those mods (and complete commercial overhauls) it's not exactly a fair comparison.
The real rates are only $29.99 and $39.99. They even offer those to pre-existing customers who are willing to "sign" for another year. I've had DSL at my current address for about 4 years and when the price went from $49.99 (what I originally signed up at) to $29.99 for the same service I called and they were more than willing to switch me over to the $29.99 rate. A few months ago there was also a speed bump to 256kbit up that I was never notified about but was more than happy to receive :)
I personally can't stand the direction this country and specifically this administration are going, but there is no evidence that it was a missile that took down the towers. No one really saw the FIRST plane, but many people saw the second plane. Also the people who were ON those planes that died kind of implicates a plane being involved. Why would the US orchestrate a major attack in NYC using planes, then have a half-assed missile attack on the pentagon? 99% of the emotion generated by 9/11 and used by the administration was in response to what happened in NYC, not what happened in the Pentagon. Honestly only an idiot could believe that an attack on the short, squatty and deep Pentagon could cause the same sort of damage as the much taller and narrower WTC towers.
Didn't you know that was the cool new slang for 8/16"?
Man, nerds never get out...
I would say that a 100% always perfect spam filter is a fairly hard challenge, it would after all have to be not only intelligent but "think" in the exact same manner as its owner. What I call spam, you wouldn't necessarily. The definition of spam depends on the circumstances as well. If I was planning a trip then those Orbitz e-mails might not be really completely spam, the rest of the time they aren't worth the 25K. Basically, the only perfect spam filter will be a digital copy of our own brain which pre-reads our mail.
99.9% accuracy though is already here.
All your points are true and since they don't spend much needless time explaining science which doesn't exist it is a decent scifi movie. I think a novel can easily explain science which doesn't exist and make it feel "real" but a movie is just too short for "wild and crazy what if?" scifi.
Let me guess, you went to watch a scifi movie, right? From that aspect it wasn't so great and I hated it the first time I watched it. A year or so later I ended up watching it on DVD and watched it as a horror movie and it was so much better. A lot of the things that made it a bad scifi movie were the exact same things that made it a good horror movie too.
I would say it became the more desirable console because of sports games, but that was just more my own experience and rose-colored memories. I owned a SNES and my neighbor owned a Genesis, ultimately he still liked the side-scrollers while I was liking the newer sports games, we switched consoles and were never happier :)
As others have posted, in some states you would most definitely be breaking the law. The passing lane is for the fastest car in any one specific instance regardless of posted speed limits.
This law is there because you never know WHY that person is going fast, 99.99% of the time they are just people who travel fast, but the one time it is the guy who can disarm the bomb about to go off in the airport...well, you can imagine and more importantly you can't know why they are speeding.
Well, the problem is that they aren't really "insane-mad power" so much as insane mad high gain antenna like you say later in your post. The problem is though that those antenna are highly directional and focused. They produce a very high gain at a given point in space and then get worse and worse as you travel away from that point. Since that focus point in only a few tens of thousand miles or so from the surface, at a few light minutes out they would be nearly indistiguishable from a NON-directional source such as a broadcast tower. The thing is though that broadcast towers use MUCH more power than uplink satellites so from a given far away distance, the broadcast tower would be much easier to "see".
I agree with Mr Drake in the long run, it won't be too much longer before all of our comms are by laser light which is so much more directional and non-focused (read: coherent) that we will be spilling only small fractions of our broadcast spectrum out into space. Eventually it is probable that we won't use comm sats at all, if the world is completely linked by fiber. All RF will be extremely local transmission for mobile objects and we will be near undetectable from a few lightyears distant unless we WANT to be noticed.
Basically, right now we are at the peak of transmission, but are rapidly approaching the downhill phase.
You wouldn't know it was a message, but you would know it was most likely an artificial transmission. Like the parent said, this would allow us to focus on that region a lot more closely looking for real messages.
Imagine if you and I are in a large dark room filled with other people and we want to locate each other. The best way to do that isn't to talk it is to be very loud for short stretches of time (shreak in other words), then when we get close to start talking. This is a massively flawed analogy, but shows how a non-message can convey information (in this instance, location).
I think he meant that simply being in a large downtown area prevents high amounts of sunlight from reaching the buildings surface. Obviously the tallest buildings don't have this problem, but smaller ones would. Basically a 20-35 story building in Chicago or Manhattan is ALWAYS (well, except for a few minutes either side of noon certain parts of the year) in a shadow unless it is lake/river side. The same things applies in the heart of many largish cities downtowns.
I'm also going to attack your list of cities a bit. Sante Fe isn't very big at all, definitely not a sprawling downtown. New Orleans only has two or three skyscrapers. Solar wouldn't even begin to touch the neon needed in Vegas. Austin also doesn't have a really large downtown area (nor for that matter does Dallas when compared to its population, but I'll let that one slide).
I agree with everything you are saying, except for the publicly funded research thing. While only a small part of the population is directly interested in any one research project, science as a whole MASSIVELY benefits society. Don't think that much crappy science gets funded, at least not for long. It is very hard to get the grant money you need, and while only a small set of people are directly interested in your results, they indirectly benefit far more. Take the human genome project for instance, it was incredibly expensive and in all honesty would have been done entirely in the private sector had the public not ponied up some of the cash (and it was an expensive, multilab project...to say the least). Obviously most people didn't read the draft sequence announcement in Science, probably not everyone even knew it was DONE (in all honesty, I would say less than 25% actually understand what it is all about anyway). The knowledge gained though will be used to better mankind more than your or I could ever imagine when it is all said and done.
Well, the fact the M$ paid $20 million to Linspire shows that they had a definite fear of loosing.
I bet you always vote Republican, don't you?
You think the goverment keeps track of everyone subscribing to Nature, Science, Cell et all? There is no auditing at the journals either, you pay your money and you get the journal. The overwhelming majority of the research published in a journal is only interesting to about 0.000001% of the population of the Earth (and I'm being generous). The people studying that particular area NEED access to that research though, it is absolutely essential to keep up with the field. Whether that scientist is being 100% honest and works at an NIH lab in Bethesda or is 100% crooked and works in Tehran (sorry to our Iranian audience, Middle Eastern people are obviously this guys boogy man) he is allowed unfettered access to this information. Remember after 9/11 when people were talking about closing publication on certain biological research such as anthrax? The community decided that for the most part, the benefit to man of publishing that publically was more important than the slim chance that it would be used for ill will.
You have to understand there is a difference between what you are proposing and what we are discussing. All the information they are talking about making public for free is ALREADY PUBLIC, just not free. DoD grant research isn't often published, they pay extra to the researchers to basically cover the loss of credit. Trust me, I am working on a USDA grant right now and we don't have NEARLY the funding of a DoD grant, of course we will get public credit for the research as well. Now, some DoD research is made public (a lot actually) but definitely not all of it. They aren't proposing to make THAT research public.
/. after all), and nowhere else has any of the information. NASA doesn't post any pretty pictures, no updates at all...if you want to find out what your money paid for and the government has OKed you to see, you have to pay again for the Nature publication. Incidentally, at $10 per copy of the journal, if everyone in the country was interested in the research would cost the country 3 BILLION DOLLARS, probably more than the research itself, just to access the results. Think about that for a second.
A better analogy would be that NASA funds a study to Mercury, when the data comes back the researchers publish all the data in Nature (yes, I know I am being very simplistic...but this is an analogy on
I assure you, we are using those bacteria to our own advantage at the same time. It isn't a parasitic relationship, but a commensal one...
I agree with your general statement though, just not your specific example. There are many animals which couldn't exist in their niche at ALL without direct microorganism aid (cows and termites immediately spring to mind) and most of the rest would be much worse off.
He didn't say that he upgraded to CD, he said the tapes wore out which they eventually ALL will.