Investigators want to forensically search the phones for evidence of capital murder.
If they are looking at the phone for evidence of murder then they are looking in the wrong place. Look in the church, the churchyard, the truck, and the street.
Is there any doubt on who did it? Do they suspect an accomplice? Do they expect him to strike again? I'm pretty sure that there were plenty of witnesses that can say who did it, that there were no others, and the one and only suspect is dead. They have the evidence they need. I understand the desire to do a complete investigation, and the need to understand motive. What do they expect to find on this phone that they don't already know?
I know, I know, they want some kind of legal precedent to allow greater ease in future phone searches. They can't find a better case for this than people that commit suicide by cop?
None of those automatically make for a highly intelligent person. Anyone who knows how to pander can do it.
Knowing how to pander is itself an aspect of intelligence, and we even have a term to describe this, "social intelligence". Intelligence isn't just understanding mathematics, there are many aspects to intelligence and any kind of intelligence test worth mentioning will test many different aspects of one's intelligence. Excelling in one aspect of intelligence tends to lead to excelling in others but of course if excelling in one meant an equal grasp of the others then we would not be testing for such different aspects of intelligence.
Trump is a good case in point
I suppose he is. He was intelligent enough to manage a campaign against someone who was thought by many as impossible to defeat. He was intelligent enough to understand that it's the electoral college that counts, not the popular vote. I remember complaints of past presidents being "selected, not elected". Every POTUS was selected, not elected, that's just how it works.
Well, they had to put something in that space where the ashtray used to be. Getting rid of the ashtray was an improvement, no?
Actually lots has changed since the 1970 Mack truck. They got more fuel efficient, have catalytic converters, electronic controls, and many other improvements that add to safety, comfort, and economy. They still burn diesel fuel, sure, but not the same kind of diesel fuel that they ran on 40 years ago since what we have now burns cleaner. The reason we still burn diesel fuel is because that fuel is cheap, energy dense, liquid at atmospheric pressure and temperatures, and reasonably safe to handle by moderately skilled labor.
I'm fine with today's Mack trucks. They are what makes modern living possible.
This is not new, gas turbines operate under this cycle. That's burning stuff though, and people generally don't want to burn stuff for energy. This cycle also works for other high temperature heat sources to derive electricity. Some concentrated solar power plants use Brayton cycle turbines to produce electricity, or at least it's been proposed. The higher the heat the more efficient the heat engine and steam turbines are limited to about 300 C, Brayton cycle turbines run much hotter. I recall temperatures over 800C.
Steam dominates because it's well understood and few energy sources get hot enough to bother with anything else. If there was an energy source that produced these higher temperatures, besides burning natural gas, then we might see this more often.
So tax cuts for the super wealthy and fuck the sciences and basic research because they contradict the bible and climate denial.
There are other ways to have scientific research funded besides taxing and spending. There is a very real problem with nuclear research though that the government can fix, and it will cost next to nothing. They can issue licenses for research reactors. They don't need to fund them, they don't need to insure them. The way the laws are written though the only way to legally possess the materials needed to conduct fission and fusion research is with a license issued by the federal government.
The government could stop all funding for fusion research tomorrow and it's quite likely none of the research would even skip a beat. What they'd have to do though is allow private entities, or state government level entities, to continue doing this research. I believe that there are a lot of people willing to spend their own money to do this research. I believe that this is much more money than the government is willing to spend. But the government has to issue the licenses, or Congress has to change the laws so licenses are not needed.
We don't need the government to solve all of our problems. Sometimes the government is the problem. I believe this is a case of the government being the problem. We don't need more government funding, we need the government to allow private entities to spend their own money on energy research. That's not likely to happen though, otherwise the Department of Energy would have no reason to exist. We can't lay off all those government employees! Won't someone think of the (over paid and under worked government employees') children!
Think of the money pit NASA has been in rocket research. Once NASA figured out that having people compete for government contracts means they can spend less money and get better results we are finally seeing real rocket science being done. Get the Department of Energy out of the business of designing nuclear reactors and let people compete for the government contracts, then we might see real research getting done.
Is some other new fusion design going suddenly break us out of this pattern?
I think so. These magnetic confinement designs have a toroid shape to the plasma, making the volume of plasma needed for breakeven much larger than if it was a sphere. Spherical containment using a magnetic field is not likely possible. What would be possible for spherical containment is an electrostatic force. There's been some research in this funded by the US Navy but they've always been very secretive and underfunded because the Navy suspects that if the project got too large then it'd be taken over by the Department of Energy and killed, as it competes with their magnetic confinement projects.
Another interesting confinement is to use a magnetic field but on a molten metal, the fusion fuel is contained in this molten metal "bottle". By using powerful rams to move the metal inward the fuel is compressed inside this collapsing bottle. The heat and pressure would, theoretically at least, fuse portions of the fuel and keep the metal hot. Repeated ramming would keep fusing the fuel and the excess heat is extracted to produce power.
These are far less expensive experiments in fusion compared to the tokamak designs that so many people (or nations rather, I don't think the people have much say on this) are dumping money into. I believe these other designs are also far more likely to be energy positive at a reasonable scale. Any fusion project can be energy positive if scaled large enough, we have ample evidence of that in the universe. The reason the US Navy is funding their own fusion project is that they believe it can be used to power a future aircraft carrier or submarine. I suspect that they will not find that feasible, but even then they must see value in this as a source of energy for military strategic reasons.
I recall reading some articles on these alternative fusion reactor designs and it was something like the power input required grew on the square of the diameter but the power output grew by the cube. Their early experiments required X watts of power in, gave Y watts of power out for a given diameter Z. For X to be larger than Y meant Z had to be, again as I recall, much larger than the size of a typical fission reactor. For this to be practical means the capital expense would be much larger than any fission project attempted so far. Who is going to spend that kind of money when fission is already a proven technology?
One thing that determines the size of the reactor is the fuel. Some fuels are better than others and, of course, the best fuels are rare and expensive. If we are going to use a lower quality fuel then the size increases even more.
What's going to break us out of this pattern of fusion always being 30 years in the future is the Department of Energy getting off the idea that magnetic fusion is the only path to take. They need to get serious on this and invest in, or at least issue licenses for, competing fusion technologies. If these competing technologies actually prove successful though then the Department of Energy would look really stupid for investing so much money into something that didn't work AND they'd actually solve the problem that they were set to solve, therefore making the future existence of the department unnecessary.
The Department of Energy isn't going to solve our energy problems because it would not be in their best interests to do so. So long as energy scarcity is a problem they have a mission. I say dissolve the Department of Energy and roll over much of its people, assets, and mission into the Department of Defense. What does not fit into the likes of energy development, nuclear weapons, research, and such, can be rolled into the Department of Commerce or some other government entity. The Department of Energy needs to go away. If we can't make it go away then we should put people in charge that are actually motivated to have the department pursue it's mission.
Some people just are wired that way. Getting the nerve to tell a "superior" (I use that term loosely here) to fuck off and die might be easy for you but that would be impossible for others. This runs the risk of getting fired, and depending on how that is handled by the company that can mean not getting unemployment insurance and make it difficult to find other work. That alone can be quite stressful.
I can't say that I've seen bullying in the workplace but I have seen conflicts of personalities. This can be difficult to manage especially in a small company where a person can't simply do a lateral move to a different position in the company to avoid the conflict.
I saw an interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson discussing the employment of people based on their intelligence and personality. Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, university professor and researcher, and more recently a speaker on social norms because of his stance on some Canadian "hate speech" laws. I suspect many readers of Slashdot has heard of this man.
The interview went into some detail on that there is a portion of the population that have been finding harder and harder to get a job. This 16% of the population have an IQ of 85 or lower. By definition we will always have 16% of the population below 85 because we define an IQ of 100 as average, but what an IQ means in intellectual capacity can shift in time as the average of the intelligence of the population shifts.
The reason these people find getting, and keeping, a job difficult is that the jobs we have rely more and more on being able to handle complex information. People don't pick cotton by hand any more, for example. Even flipping burgers means being able to read orders, manage numbers, and interface with electronic timers and intercoms. Dr. Petersen related his experience with trying to get people with an IQ of 85 to manage living on their own. Just being able to manage a budget, pay bills, and so forth, can be a problem for such people. Will increasing automation make life easier for these people or more difficult in time?
Shortly after seeing that interview I was listening to the radio where there was some group, a government office of some sort I recall, wanted to see more people get education beyond high school. They said that there was about 10% of the adult population of this city, state, or region (I'm not sure which) that did not have a high school education, or equivalent. I did a quick Google search and people with an IQ of 85 have a 50/50 chance of graduating high school. If there are 10% of the people that did not have the equivalent of a high school education then that seems to be doing pretty well, perhaps better than the statistics might lead. Or, alternatively, the graduation rate was marginally higher than statistics might lead because the high school education was sub-standard.
Trying to get better than 90% of people with a certification or degree beyond high school may simply be an impossible task. Doing that would mean a shift in human genetics where an IQ of 85 is now intelligent enough to get a post-high school education, or lowering the standards of what these certifications mean. I'm pretty sure that lowering the standards of what a high school education entails is not where they want to go. If we hand out certifications for welding or forklift driving to people that cannot actually perform those tasks helps no one. Giving out certifications for being able to tie shoelaces helps no one either.
Perhaps automation means this 16% of the population will be able to find work due to much of the thinking being removed from what they need to do. This will be interesting to see how this is resolved.
Speaking of vegetables, they are better than they've ever been today, hundreds of years ago they were tiny and almost flavorless. Apples were the size of today's plums.
Growing up on the farm we had a large wild apple tree growing next to the house. The fruit was small and tasted bitter, we'd pick the larger ones for Mom to make applesauce, with plenty of sugar added in to sweeten it up. Think of a Granny Smith but twice as bitter, and half the diameter. Many of the apples were about the size of a golf ball, my brothers would tee them up to practice their swing. A good swing meant the apple made a nice splat on the golf club face and the debris spread nicely centered down the imagined lane. The small apples didn't have enough "meat" (is that the proper term?) to bother peeling for sauce so they were teed up or gathered to be fed to the cattle.
Calling them flavorless would not be accurate. They were often face puckering sour. Since this was a wild apple tree it's difficult to tell if it had any relation to a modern variant, it may have come from a cultivated plant at some point or it could be a crab apple tree which is native to North America. Oh, the farm where I grew up is in the American Midwest.
The goal of those nations still agreeing to the accord was to lower their CO2 output, the goal of those that left was to leave the madness behind. Mission accomplished!
"It just makes physics sense that it is more efficient to run your big plants at a constant rate 24/7, and bring your smaller plants on and off line as demand fluctuates throughout the day."
Physics says you cannot shutdown a boiler and expect to be able to bring it back online just a couple hours later. If you want a steam power plant to produce power for an expected peak on Monday at 10:00 AM then the people running it will start heating it up on Sunday at 10:00 PM.
It sounds like the problem is that Germany has a lot of old coal plants yet and not enough peak power plants to follow the load. Offering excess electric capacity for sale to other nations sounds like a somewhat necessary means to manage their own needs. They shut down one coal plant too many and they are buying expensive electricity rather than selling their own cheap. Even if this means selling at a loss it's possible they would still be better off financially.
This is all due to the mistake of shutting down their nuclear power early and not bringing more online. They can fix this with more nuclear but the status quo, burning copious amounts of coal, is much easier politically. Another option is to buy more natural gas from Russia, which it sounds like they are doing. That might also bite them in the ass in the long term.
They can't buy cheap solar collectors from China now either. Germany painted themselves in this corner, if they don't get their act together then they are going to be in much deeper trouble than merely failing to meet some arbitrary goal on CO2 output.
It sure would be nice if we saw something new from Apple besides just cell phones. I know that they make them a lot of money. I also know that they have teams of people dedicated to the design of their desktop and laptop computers. Or they did at one time. What have they been doing? I'll be looking for a new computer soon and I'd like to see something from Apple that's not just a slight variation on what they had before.
I don't mean anything "big and bold" as a change, just put the high resolution screens on all their devices, wider adoption of ThunderBolt 3, just something newer. I'm not even sure what I want, just not the same thing for the last six years might help.
They got great phones. The tablets look good too. Even the iPods don't seem half bad. The laptops and desktops just don't seem all that great any more. That iMac Pro might be nice, if someone could actually buy one.
Time to catch up Apple. You should not have fallen behind in the first place.
Are you suggesting we sterilize the poor? That's not going to go over well. Even if it's just long term birth control like those implants under the skin or something. You are going to have to convince people that have problems buying enough food to take their birth control pills on time, or abstain from sex, or always use barrier birth control. You can give them the pills but they might take them how they are supposed to, or they might sell them to some transgender or more well to do teen that doesn't want a kids and not have to tell their parents of the birth control.
Anyone that wants a condom can get one. I've been to a college student health center, there's just fish bowls on the tables full of condoms for people to take. Certain churches will hand them out too. Planned Parenthood and other women's health centers, offer them free. They are cheap to get most anywhere, Truck stops, bars, pharmacies, most grocery stores.
Much of the same goes for birth control pills, they are cheap or free many places. Then we get back to people that may not be the best educated, intelligent, or just unreliable, to have to take the pills when they are supposed to.
Then again on abstinence, some of these people (mostly females, let's not kid ourselves) have only one skill that they can trade in for enough money to sustain them.
Even if we could make a mandate, there is still enforcement. How would a birth control mandate be enforced?
Birth control is free or cheap for anyone that wants it. What we need are people that want it.
Once you explain that theory then try a stab at explaining this. I saw a YouTube video of a young woman that claims she's a gay man. So she's a woman that cuts her hair short and wears baggy clothes, likes to fuck dudes, and demands to want to use the men's restroom to pee. Preventing this women from using the men's room so she can try to get a peek at some guy's dick is now some outrage. If that's what we should be outraged about then I'm thinking we're doing pretty good.
We've been so well fed, clothed, and healthy now that the outrage is not that this lady has to shit in the street, it's that she has to shit in the women's restroom. We've run out of things to be outraged about that we have to go to new extremes to invent them.
Am I saying that global warming is an invented problem? I'm saying that thought has crossed my mind. It's real easy to get a bunch of signatures that something must be done. It's real hard to actually do something about it. When these people start doing something about global warming instead of just get more signatures then I'd find the problem more convincing.
Do we really need more convincing of the problem? I think we got it already. This outrage has got so bad now I'm wondering if they "protest too much".
I've been using Windows for a very long time. Had a number of issues activating in the past, even when XP first came out. Activation has only got more complex and reliant on an internet connection since.
Activating Windows has always been a headache. I remember those "dongles" that we'd have to use on some software we had, that was a bit inconvenient but at least I didn't need to make a phone call or need internet to get a licensed program to work.
When in an offline network, for security reasons, this became especially problematic. Even bringing in a phone line was a problem. These were "roach motel" systems, you can bring things in but nothing leaves. Just writing down an identifying code for a computer to get an activation code to bring back in could be a problem.
In some cases I'd ask why we couldn't just get a Mac or run Linux, those don't need online activation. I'll get a reply on how they'd need some Windows only program or anything other than Microsoft was not "approved". The needing of a specific software might make sense but this "approval" does not. Do what needs to get done to "approve" an operating system that does not need an internet connection to activate. What could the operating system possibly do to compromise security on an air gap system?
Whatever. I haven't had to deal with that for a while and I hope I won't have to again.
Not just videos, but videos that load and play automatically. If I want to watch the video, when the transcript of the video is right below it, then I'll take the fraction of a second to hit play. I have to pay for my bandwidth and I don't appreciate someone demand that I must have text, video, and sound, all giving me the same information.
If you demand I have scripting enabled on your site then expect me to simply close the page without reading your article or viewing your adverts. You want adverts on the page? Fine. Just don't make them take over the page, I'll just click away and not come back. We've had advertising since forever, put them on the fringes, break up the article with them, maybe even have a video ad that reads, "Click me to find more!" Although I'm not sure how well that would go over any more given that so many assholes use that to trigger grabbing the browser window and screaming at me on how my computer is now infected and I have to "call Windows" to get it fixed.
Even major websites that one would think would want to keep their site clean of such bad behaving adverts are not safe. With so much crap on these websites to read a simple news article the actual content I'm looking for is just a tiny fraction of what I'm looking to download. Again, put in advertising if you must. Just don't make be download 50 MB of shit to view a few kilobytes of the text I'm looking to read.
Think this through? Many people opposed to gun control seem perfectly fine with using laws to control other 'concerns', like gay marriage, abortion, drugs, etc, etc, etc.. So do laws work, or don't they?
Laws work if they make sense. The government got in the business of marriage to encourage the growth of the population, with children, and the formation of stable families. Same sex marriage meets neither goal. If a pair of people, regardless of sex, wish to create some legal contract for the purpose of shared private resources (bank accounts, homes, income) and enabling certain rights (power of attorney, hospital visitation rights, inheritance, etc.) then that was always possible before. We didn't need to corrupt the ritual of a marriage for them to have what they wanted. It's obvious the goal is not some legal protection in law, it was to redefine the purpose of marriage.
People will find ways to get abortions if they're illegal, so why make these laws?
Because abortion is murder. If we agree that one person's rights ends where it infringes on the rights of another then abortion should be illegal. Would people still agree that partial birth abortion should be legal if the process was to shoot the baby in the head once the head is out of the birth canal?
People are going to find drugs if they're illegal, so why make these laws?
We should legalize drugs because the possession of the drugs does not infringe on the rights of another. If the drugs are stolen then that's theft, like any other property that is stolen this should be punished. I suspect that marijuana will be regulated like alcohol in five years or so, and the rest of the drug laws will start falling away in time shortly after. That's not the government condoning drug abuse, only recognizing that there is a distinction between use and abuse.
Drug enforcement officials have been caught violating the rules. Republican lawmakers have been found pushing their girlfriends or whatever to get abortions.
That just shows people can be screwed in the head, and I'm not sure that has anything to do with whether or not something should be a law. If we have corrupt officials then we need to remove them from office or reconsider what we consider being corrupt. Stealing drugs that are evidence is wrong on many levels. Encouraging an abortion sounds like domestic abuse.
There's going to be issues, of course. But you know what's going to make a difference? Less guns = less gun deaths.
That's like saying we'd have less food poisoning if we had less food. What is the result of disarming those that need arms the most? More death, that's what. At best all that happens is fewer guns, which just means the government arbitrarily denied a right that no one has abused. Fewer guns does not mean fewer crimes. It means that the big and strong can pick on the small and weak. If you think fewer guns would mean fewer gun deaths then lets start with the government. When they start getting rid of their guns then they can come around and take them from the citizens.
Go have another swig of your NRA kool-aid, they're literally the biggest terrorist organization in the US, given how much violence they've enabled, and refuse to take steps to prevent.
I don't agree with the NRA all the time, I do believe that they have very effective gun safety programs for children and adults. If you want "gun safety" then talk to the NRA, they are the ones that created the Eddie Eagle child gun safety program. http://www.eddieeagle.com/#/ If you have a problem with that material then you've drank the kool-aid to the point that anything the NRA does is evil because it's the NRA not because of what they actually do.
The International Space Station is not expected to still be in orbit in 2040. Current and future modules of the ISS might be reused in a Russian station, but the international mission will not remain. Unless the Russians plan on maintaining this archive then this orbital museum will be at the bottom of the ocean in 15 years or so. Maybe it is wise to plan on creating more than one such archive.
If this is a private archive then this could be profitable for someone. They can sell space on the archive and offer trips to the orbiter. They could allow artists to create works of art there, which could be sold on Earth or merely add value to the trips there. Something like the Mona Lisa might be created there, something too valuable to risk sending to land on Earth just like few would risk putting the Mona Lisa on a rocket to space.
I'll agree. So many other planned communities failed based on far smaller problems.
That's one thing that bothered me about some of these planned projects for a new floating nation-state, or some other plan to create some kind of new community, they never considered the basic problem of having an economy. People will need jobs, they need food, and the two kind of go hand in hand.
Reading the article it sounds like they've figured out a lot of such things. Creating a government will be a problem, especially when the vision for the city is in one person's mind. His vision might quickly come into conflict with how others think things should be run.
Slashdot Mirror
Investigators want to forensically search the phones for evidence of capital murder.
If they are looking at the phone for evidence of murder then they are looking in the wrong place. Look in the church, the churchyard, the truck, and the street.
Is there any doubt on who did it? Do they suspect an accomplice? Do they expect him to strike again? I'm pretty sure that there were plenty of witnesses that can say who did it, that there were no others, and the one and only suspect is dead. They have the evidence they need. I understand the desire to do a complete investigation, and the need to understand motive. What do they expect to find on this phone that they don't already know?
I know, I know, they want some kind of legal precedent to allow greater ease in future phone searches. They can't find a better case for this than people that commit suicide by cop?
None of those automatically make for a highly intelligent person. Anyone who knows how to pander can do it.
Knowing how to pander is itself an aspect of intelligence, and we even have a term to describe this, "social intelligence". Intelligence isn't just understanding mathematics, there are many aspects to intelligence and any kind of intelligence test worth mentioning will test many different aspects of one's intelligence. Excelling in one aspect of intelligence tends to lead to excelling in others but of course if excelling in one meant an equal grasp of the others then we would not be testing for such different aspects of intelligence.
Trump is a good case in point
I suppose he is. He was intelligent enough to manage a campaign against someone who was thought by many as impossible to defeat. He was intelligent enough to understand that it's the electoral college that counts, not the popular vote. I remember complaints of past presidents being "selected, not elected". Every POTUS was selected, not elected, that's just how it works.
ok they added a cup holder
Well, they had to put something in that space where the ashtray used to be. Getting rid of the ashtray was an improvement, no?
Actually lots has changed since the 1970 Mack truck. They got more fuel efficient, have catalytic converters, electronic controls, and many other improvements that add to safety, comfort, and economy. They still burn diesel fuel, sure, but not the same kind of diesel fuel that they ran on 40 years ago since what we have now burns cleaner. The reason we still burn diesel fuel is because that fuel is cheap, energy dense, liquid at atmospheric pressure and temperatures, and reasonably safe to handle by moderately skilled labor.
I'm fine with today's Mack trucks. They are what makes modern living possible.
Brayton cycle turbines are what you are looking for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is not new, gas turbines operate under this cycle. That's burning stuff though, and people generally don't want to burn stuff for energy. This cycle also works for other high temperature heat sources to derive electricity. Some concentrated solar power plants use Brayton cycle turbines to produce electricity, or at least it's been proposed. The higher the heat the more efficient the heat engine and steam turbines are limited to about 300 C, Brayton cycle turbines run much hotter. I recall temperatures over 800C.
Steam dominates because it's well understood and few energy sources get hot enough to bother with anything else. If there was an energy source that produced these higher temperatures, besides burning natural gas, then we might see this more often.
So tax cuts for the super wealthy and fuck the sciences and basic research because they contradict the bible and climate denial.
There are other ways to have scientific research funded besides taxing and spending. There is a very real problem with nuclear research though that the government can fix, and it will cost next to nothing. They can issue licenses for research reactors. They don't need to fund them, they don't need to insure them. The way the laws are written though the only way to legally possess the materials needed to conduct fission and fusion research is with a license issued by the federal government.
The government could stop all funding for fusion research tomorrow and it's quite likely none of the research would even skip a beat. What they'd have to do though is allow private entities, or state government level entities, to continue doing this research. I believe that there are a lot of people willing to spend their own money to do this research. I believe that this is much more money than the government is willing to spend. But the government has to issue the licenses, or Congress has to change the laws so licenses are not needed.
We don't need the government to solve all of our problems. Sometimes the government is the problem. I believe this is a case of the government being the problem. We don't need more government funding, we need the government to allow private entities to spend their own money on energy research. That's not likely to happen though, otherwise the Department of Energy would have no reason to exist. We can't lay off all those government employees! Won't someone think of the (over paid and under worked government employees') children!
Think of the money pit NASA has been in rocket research. Once NASA figured out that having people compete for government contracts means they can spend less money and get better results we are finally seeing real rocket science being done. Get the Department of Energy out of the business of designing nuclear reactors and let people compete for the government contracts, then we might see real research getting done.
Is some other new fusion design going suddenly break us out of this pattern?
I think so. These magnetic confinement designs have a toroid shape to the plasma, making the volume of plasma needed for breakeven much larger than if it was a sphere. Spherical containment using a magnetic field is not likely possible. What would be possible for spherical containment is an electrostatic force. There's been some research in this funded by the US Navy but they've always been very secretive and underfunded because the Navy suspects that if the project got too large then it'd be taken over by the Department of Energy and killed, as it competes with their magnetic confinement projects.
Another interesting confinement is to use a magnetic field but on a molten metal, the fusion fuel is contained in this molten metal "bottle". By using powerful rams to move the metal inward the fuel is compressed inside this collapsing bottle. The heat and pressure would, theoretically at least, fuse portions of the fuel and keep the metal hot. Repeated ramming would keep fusing the fuel and the excess heat is extracted to produce power.
These are far less expensive experiments in fusion compared to the tokamak designs that so many people (or nations rather, I don't think the people have much say on this) are dumping money into. I believe these other designs are also far more likely to be energy positive at a reasonable scale. Any fusion project can be energy positive if scaled large enough, we have ample evidence of that in the universe. The reason the US Navy is funding their own fusion project is that they believe it can be used to power a future aircraft carrier or submarine. I suspect that they will not find that feasible, but even then they must see value in this as a source of energy for military strategic reasons.
I recall reading some articles on these alternative fusion reactor designs and it was something like the power input required grew on the square of the diameter but the power output grew by the cube. Their early experiments required X watts of power in, gave Y watts of power out for a given diameter Z. For X to be larger than Y meant Z had to be, again as I recall, much larger than the size of a typical fission reactor. For this to be practical means the capital expense would be much larger than any fission project attempted so far. Who is going to spend that kind of money when fission is already a proven technology?
One thing that determines the size of the reactor is the fuel. Some fuels are better than others and, of course, the best fuels are rare and expensive. If we are going to use a lower quality fuel then the size increases even more.
What's going to break us out of this pattern of fusion always being 30 years in the future is the Department of Energy getting off the idea that magnetic fusion is the only path to take. They need to get serious on this and invest in, or at least issue licenses for, competing fusion technologies. If these competing technologies actually prove successful though then the Department of Energy would look really stupid for investing so much money into something that didn't work AND they'd actually solve the problem that they were set to solve, therefore making the future existence of the department unnecessary.
The Department of Energy isn't going to solve our energy problems because it would not be in their best interests to do so. So long as energy scarcity is a problem they have a mission. I say dissolve the Department of Energy and roll over much of its people, assets, and mission into the Department of Defense. What does not fit into the likes of energy development, nuclear weapons, research, and such, can be rolled into the Department of Commerce or some other government entity. The Department of Energy needs to go away. If we can't make it go away then we should put people in charge that are actually motivated to have the department pursue it's mission.
Absolutly!
Some people just are wired that way. Getting the nerve to tell a "superior" (I use that term loosely here) to fuck off and die might be easy for you but that would be impossible for others. This runs the risk of getting fired, and depending on how that is handled by the company that can mean not getting unemployment insurance and make it difficult to find other work. That alone can be quite stressful.
I can't say that I've seen bullying in the workplace but I have seen conflicts of personalities. This can be difficult to manage especially in a small company where a person can't simply do a lateral move to a different position in the company to avoid the conflict.
I saw an interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson discussing the employment of people based on their intelligence and personality. Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, university professor and researcher, and more recently a speaker on social norms because of his stance on some Canadian "hate speech" laws. I suspect many readers of Slashdot has heard of this man.
The interview went into some detail on that there is a portion of the population that have been finding harder and harder to get a job. This 16% of the population have an IQ of 85 or lower. By definition we will always have 16% of the population below 85 because we define an IQ of 100 as average, but what an IQ means in intellectual capacity can shift in time as the average of the intelligence of the population shifts.
The reason these people find getting, and keeping, a job difficult is that the jobs we have rely more and more on being able to handle complex information. People don't pick cotton by hand any more, for example. Even flipping burgers means being able to read orders, manage numbers, and interface with electronic timers and intercoms. Dr. Petersen related his experience with trying to get people with an IQ of 85 to manage living on their own. Just being able to manage a budget, pay bills, and so forth, can be a problem for such people. Will increasing automation make life easier for these people or more difficult in time?
Shortly after seeing that interview I was listening to the radio where there was some group, a government office of some sort I recall, wanted to see more people get education beyond high school. They said that there was about 10% of the adult population of this city, state, or region (I'm not sure which) that did not have a high school education, or equivalent. I did a quick Google search and people with an IQ of 85 have a 50/50 chance of graduating high school. If there are 10% of the people that did not have the equivalent of a high school education then that seems to be doing pretty well, perhaps better than the statistics might lead. Or, alternatively, the graduation rate was marginally higher than statistics might lead because the high school education was sub-standard.
Trying to get better than 90% of people with a certification or degree beyond high school may simply be an impossible task. Doing that would mean a shift in human genetics where an IQ of 85 is now intelligent enough to get a post-high school education, or lowering the standards of what these certifications mean. I'm pretty sure that lowering the standards of what a high school education entails is not where they want to go. If we hand out certifications for welding or forklift driving to people that cannot actually perform those tasks helps no one. Giving out certifications for being able to tie shoelaces helps no one either.
Perhaps automation means this 16% of the population will be able to find work due to much of the thinking being removed from what they need to do. This will be interesting to see how this is resolved.
Speaking of vegetables, they are better than they've ever been today, hundreds of years ago they were tiny and almost flavorless. Apples were the size of today's plums.
Growing up on the farm we had a large wild apple tree growing next to the house. The fruit was small and tasted bitter, we'd pick the larger ones for Mom to make applesauce, with plenty of sugar added in to sweeten it up. Think of a Granny Smith but twice as bitter, and half the diameter. Many of the apples were about the size of a golf ball, my brothers would tee them up to practice their swing. A good swing meant the apple made a nice splat on the golf club face and the debris spread nicely centered down the imagined lane. The small apples didn't have enough "meat" (is that the proper term?) to bother peeling for sauce so they were teed up or gathered to be fed to the cattle.
Calling them flavorless would not be accurate. They were often face puckering sour. Since this was a wild apple tree it's difficult to tell if it had any relation to a modern variant, it may have come from a cultivated plant at some point or it could be a crab apple tree which is native to North America. Oh, the farm where I grew up is in the American Midwest.
I took a look at deaths per terawatt hour by energy source. This is what I found:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
Nuclear is in its own category here, as the safest energy source we have available to us today.
The goal of those nations still agreeing to the accord was to lower their CO2 output, the goal of those that left was to leave the madness behind. Mission accomplished!
"It just makes physics sense that it is more efficient to run your big plants at a constant rate 24/7, and bring your smaller plants on and off line as demand fluctuates throughout the day."
Physics says you cannot shutdown a boiler and expect to be able to bring it back online just a couple hours later. If you want a steam power plant to produce power for an expected peak on Monday at 10:00 AM then the people running it will start heating it up on Sunday at 10:00 PM.
It sounds like the problem is that Germany has a lot of old coal plants yet and not enough peak power plants to follow the load. Offering excess electric capacity for sale to other nations sounds like a somewhat necessary means to manage their own needs. They shut down one coal plant too many and they are buying expensive electricity rather than selling their own cheap. Even if this means selling at a loss it's possible they would still be better off financially.
This is all due to the mistake of shutting down their nuclear power early and not bringing more online. They can fix this with more nuclear but the status quo, burning copious amounts of coal, is much easier politically. Another option is to buy more natural gas from Russia, which it sounds like they are doing. That might also bite them in the ass in the long term.
They can't buy cheap solar collectors from China now either. Germany painted themselves in this corner, if they don't get their act together then they are going to be in much deeper trouble than merely failing to meet some arbitrary goal on CO2 output.
It sure would be nice if we saw something new from Apple besides just cell phones. I know that they make them a lot of money. I also know that they have teams of people dedicated to the design of their desktop and laptop computers. Or they did at one time. What have they been doing? I'll be looking for a new computer soon and I'd like to see something from Apple that's not just a slight variation on what they had before.
I don't mean anything "big and bold" as a change, just put the high resolution screens on all their devices, wider adoption of ThunderBolt 3, just something newer. I'm not even sure what I want, just not the same thing for the last six years might help.
They got great phones. The tablets look good too. Even the iPods don't seem half bad. The laptops and desktops just don't seem all that great any more. That iMac Pro might be nice, if someone could actually buy one.
Time to catch up Apple. You should not have fallen behind in the first place.
Don't ask questions if you are not prepared for the answer. What did you think you were going to get?
Are you suggesting we sterilize the poor? That's not going to go over well. Even if it's just long term birth control like those implants under the skin or something. You are going to have to convince people that have problems buying enough food to take their birth control pills on time, or abstain from sex, or always use barrier birth control. You can give them the pills but they might take them how they are supposed to, or they might sell them to some transgender or more well to do teen that doesn't want a kids and not have to tell their parents of the birth control.
Anyone that wants a condom can get one. I've been to a college student health center, there's just fish bowls on the tables full of condoms for people to take. Certain churches will hand them out too. Planned Parenthood and other women's health centers, offer them free. They are cheap to get most anywhere, Truck stops, bars, pharmacies, most grocery stores.
Much of the same goes for birth control pills, they are cheap or free many places. Then we get back to people that may not be the best educated, intelligent, or just unreliable, to have to take the pills when they are supposed to.
Then again on abstinence, some of these people (mostly females, let's not kid ourselves) have only one skill that they can trade in for enough money to sustain them.
Even if we could make a mandate, there is still enforcement. How would a birth control mandate be enforced?
Birth control is free or cheap for anyone that wants it. What we need are people that want it.
Once you explain that theory then try a stab at explaining this. I saw a YouTube video of a young woman that claims she's a gay man. So she's a woman that cuts her hair short and wears baggy clothes, likes to fuck dudes, and demands to want to use the men's restroom to pee. Preventing this women from using the men's room so she can try to get a peek at some guy's dick is now some outrage. If that's what we should be outraged about then I'm thinking we're doing pretty good.
We've been so well fed, clothed, and healthy now that the outrage is not that this lady has to shit in the street, it's that she has to shit in the women's restroom. We've run out of things to be outraged about that we have to go to new extremes to invent them.
Am I saying that global warming is an invented problem? I'm saying that thought has crossed my mind. It's real easy to get a bunch of signatures that something must be done. It's real hard to actually do something about it. When these people start doing something about global warming instead of just get more signatures then I'd find the problem more convincing.
Do we really need more convincing of the problem? I think we got it already. This outrage has got so bad now I'm wondering if they "protest too much".
Have you ever worked in the private sector? They expect results!
Right, let's go to the moon so we can mine it. How do we get there though? Nuclear powered rockets!
That doesn't sound like a great idea any more.
I've been using Windows for a very long time. Had a number of issues activating in the past, even when XP first came out. Activation has only got more complex and reliant on an internet connection since.
Activating Windows has always been a headache. I remember those "dongles" that we'd have to use on some software we had, that was a bit inconvenient but at least I didn't need to make a phone call or need internet to get a licensed program to work.
When in an offline network, for security reasons, this became especially problematic. Even bringing in a phone line was a problem. These were "roach motel" systems, you can bring things in but nothing leaves. Just writing down an identifying code for a computer to get an activation code to bring back in could be a problem.
In some cases I'd ask why we couldn't just get a Mac or run Linux, those don't need online activation. I'll get a reply on how they'd need some Windows only program or anything other than Microsoft was not "approved". The needing of a specific software might make sense but this "approval" does not. Do what needs to get done to "approve" an operating system that does not need an internet connection to activate. What could the operating system possibly do to compromise security on an air gap system?
Whatever. I haven't had to deal with that for a while and I hope I won't have to again.
Not just videos, but videos that load and play automatically. If I want to watch the video, when the transcript of the video is right below it, then I'll take the fraction of a second to hit play. I have to pay for my bandwidth and I don't appreciate someone demand that I must have text, video, and sound, all giving me the same information.
If you demand I have scripting enabled on your site then expect me to simply close the page without reading your article or viewing your adverts. You want adverts on the page? Fine. Just don't make them take over the page, I'll just click away and not come back. We've had advertising since forever, put them on the fringes, break up the article with them, maybe even have a video ad that reads, "Click me to find more!" Although I'm not sure how well that would go over any more given that so many assholes use that to trigger grabbing the browser window and screaming at me on how my computer is now infected and I have to "call Windows" to get it fixed.
Even major websites that one would think would want to keep their site clean of such bad behaving adverts are not safe. With so much crap on these websites to read a simple news article the actual content I'm looking for is just a tiny fraction of what I'm looking to download. Again, put in advertising if you must. Just don't make be download 50 MB of shit to view a few kilobytes of the text I'm looking to read.
I never made this argument
Then what is your argument? You are not making sense. I think you are just trying to stir things up.
Think this through? Many people opposed to gun control seem perfectly fine with using laws to control other 'concerns', like gay marriage, abortion, drugs, etc, etc, etc.. So do laws work, or don't they?
Laws work if they make sense. The government got in the business of marriage to encourage the growth of the population, with children, and the formation of stable families. Same sex marriage meets neither goal. If a pair of people, regardless of sex, wish to create some legal contract for the purpose of shared private resources (bank accounts, homes, income) and enabling certain rights (power of attorney, hospital visitation rights, inheritance, etc.) then that was always possible before. We didn't need to corrupt the ritual of a marriage for them to have what they wanted. It's obvious the goal is not some legal protection in law, it was to redefine the purpose of marriage.
People will find ways to get abortions if they're illegal, so why make these laws?
Because abortion is murder. If we agree that one person's rights ends where it infringes on the rights of another then abortion should be illegal. Would people still agree that partial birth abortion should be legal if the process was to shoot the baby in the head once the head is out of the birth canal?
People are going to find drugs if they're illegal, so why make these laws?
We should legalize drugs because the possession of the drugs does not infringe on the rights of another. If the drugs are stolen then that's theft, like any other property that is stolen this should be punished. I suspect that marijuana will be regulated like alcohol in five years or so, and the rest of the drug laws will start falling away in time shortly after. That's not the government condoning drug abuse, only recognizing that there is a distinction between use and abuse.
Drug enforcement officials have been caught violating the rules. Republican lawmakers have been found pushing their girlfriends or whatever to get abortions.
That just shows people can be screwed in the head, and I'm not sure that has anything to do with whether or not something should be a law. If we have corrupt officials then we need to remove them from office or reconsider what we consider being corrupt. Stealing drugs that are evidence is wrong on many levels. Encouraging an abortion sounds like domestic abuse.
There's going to be issues, of course. But you know what's going to make a difference? Less guns = less gun deaths.
That's like saying we'd have less food poisoning if we had less food. What is the result of disarming those that need arms the most? More death, that's what. At best all that happens is fewer guns, which just means the government arbitrarily denied a right that no one has abused. Fewer guns does not mean fewer crimes. It means that the big and strong can pick on the small and weak. If you think fewer guns would mean fewer gun deaths then lets start with the government. When they start getting rid of their guns then they can come around and take them from the citizens.
Go have another swig of your NRA kool-aid, they're literally the biggest terrorist organization in the US, given how much violence they've enabled, and refuse to take steps to prevent.
I don't agree with the NRA all the time, I do believe that they have very effective gun safety programs for children and adults. If you want "gun safety" then talk to the NRA, they are the ones that created the Eddie Eagle child gun safety program.
http://www.eddieeagle.com/#/
If you have a problem with that material then you've drank the kool-aid to the point that anything the NRA does is evil because it's the NRA not because of what they actually do.
The International Space Station is not expected to still be in orbit in 2040. Current and future modules of the ISS might be reused in a Russian station, but the international mission will not remain. Unless the Russians plan on maintaining this archive then this orbital museum will be at the bottom of the ocean in 15 years or so. Maybe it is wise to plan on creating more than one such archive.
If this is a private archive then this could be profitable for someone. They can sell space on the archive and offer trips to the orbiter. They could allow artists to create works of art there, which could be sold on Earth or merely add value to the trips there. Something like the Mona Lisa might be created there, something too valuable to risk sending to land on Earth just like few would risk putting the Mona Lisa on a rocket to space.
I'll agree. So many other planned communities failed based on far smaller problems.
That's one thing that bothered me about some of these planned projects for a new floating nation-state, or some other plan to create some kind of new community, they never considered the basic problem of having an economy. People will need jobs, they need food, and the two kind of go hand in hand.
Reading the article it sounds like they've figured out a lot of such things. Creating a government will be a problem, especially when the vision for the city is in one person's mind. His vision might quickly come into conflict with how others think things should be run.