If the boxed version of Episode 17 includes Episodes 16, 15, 14... etc AND the original Half-Life 2, then my kids won't likely be able to afford to play Half-Life as the box will cost $39065437649543755433444554352148895045314.
That wouldn't cover myself, but I can ensure you that I am quite gay...
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
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· Score: 1
What do you think the browser is going to do that you can't?
Your implication is basically that web-developers are more competent in terms of security than those who design the clients, and thus the client should just swallow the stuff without even bothering. In reality there are MANY people who make web pages who would probably trust the browser developers a lot more than they trust themselves not to make a mistake.
Also, you're not looking at this from the point of view of the user. I might want to tell my browser to trust John Smith not to put malicious stuff into his webpage, but that doesn't mean I trust him to be capable of finding all known and unknown exploits some of the third parties may have sent him. In this situation I would very much appreciate it if John Smith had marked the data on his webpage saying "this is from me" , "this is from somebody else".
This also seems to be the case when ever somebody bitches about web designers changing fonts, using javascript, or doing something to make their page look nice.
Strawman. Nobody minds a page which uses these things properly ( i.e gracefully fall back when not supported , don't rely on them for navigation etc... ). Problem is, some people get it VERY wrong. There's a Swedish news site I like because they have good journalists, but their web developers deserve to be shot. They actually implemented a "marque-like" news scroller using javascript and DHTML, the thing is slow as hell and for some reason interferes with scrolling the page (i'm guessing the engine chokes when it tries to render an element which is moving vertically across the edge of the window while scrolling with "smooth"-scroll enabled ). So why don't I just disable javascript for that page? Well, the site's navigation relies on it...
Btw, if you actually need javascript to make your page "look nice" then I'd claim that you are actually doing something wrong. If you did it right it would look nice even when printed.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is the object tag. It can be used as a client-side include. All it really needs is a "permissions" attribute or something like that:
My passphrase is: "field kitty sr53"... " or maybe that was 35, I never remember, the 5 could have been a 7".. then there is "tulip Sandiwch"... "or was it sandwich Tulip?, you know I was only playing around with this partition I don't actually store anything on it... Hmm, did I decide to use underscores or hyphens? I think I used underscores because I decided spaces might brak things, or maybe it was underscores, they are on the same key you know... try holding down shift... Maybe I misspelt "sandwich", english is'nt my mother tonge.
I'll admit that my knowledge of quantum computers is , limited, but surely if you entangle a large number of qubits then an interaction which destroys the state of a single quibit will in fact destroy the state of ALL the qubits. Thus even if you can get reduce the probability that any particular qubit will be distrubed during your calculation, once you try to scale this up to a gigabyte or so, you have a problem anyway since the probability that NO qubit was disturbed increases exponentially with the number of qubits.
Has this issue been resolved yet ? If not it appears that you would just be gaining performance at the expense of reliability. Being able to factor large integers quickly is not much use if you have to repeat the calculation many times to make sure it was correct. I seem to remember that there were more fault resistant QC schemes, but that they suffered memory needed instead (i.e, performance and stability scales, but number of qubits needed does not ). Obviously that would cause just as many problems since running rapidly with a large amount of memory would have to compete against several slow machines in parallel.
As much of a nuisance as it would be, it appears quite plausible that quantum computers might have a "tradeof" relation of some sort, similar to the uncertainty principle. Something along the lines of: S*E*t*M*T > C
Where S is the complexity of the problem, E is energy needed, t is time to complete a calculation, M is the amount of memory needed (roughly the mass of the computer ), T is temperature, and C is a non-zero constant. It is pure speculation of course, and even if it turns out to be true C might be very small (i.e M = 1kg might be absolutely massive when measured on atomic scales ), but there could be a lot of catches to scaling these things...
Welcome to capitalism. If one can get away with it, one can make as much money as they want
That isn't a feature of capitalism, it's a feature of human nature. Yes, it does mean you can't blindly trust a capitalist system from sorting everything out, but it is the very same principles which causes communist countries to go corrupt, and it is also why extreme liberalism will be taken advantage of by those who have the power/influence/money whatever to game the system.
Corruption isn't a matter of how governance is organised or how you set prices in your economy, it is a matter of transparency, openness and people being held responsible for their actions. If that does not apply it matters fuck all what economic system you use, you will just get different people screwing you over.
Now before people start suggesting direct democracy or some far-fetched ideal about having every company democratically controlled by the workers, you need to take into consideration that for democracy to work you need a transparent electoral system you can trust. Thus it still boils down to government transparency and people being slapped when they break the rules. There is no way around that.
That's a good point. And generates some good advice for future student/gamers: Do not install any new software of any kind a week or two before a paper is due*
Well, over at my university we have deadlines every second week or so... that advice would pretty much require you to not keep your system up to date with patches. This would be why I backup my entire/home directory to an external drive that isn't connected when I'm not making the backups, and keep copies of important papers on a USB key I carry with me. I guess if my house burns down I might lose the computer and the drive, but I'd still have the important stuff on the USB key, and quite frankly I think my university would consider my house burning down "exceptional circumstances".
Fix the damn rj45 connector. You know just what is wrong with it. Bah, same thing happened to my thermostat the other day... Somewhere some engineer is going to go straight to hell for making a screw that had to hold force out of plastic.
At least USB deserves that much credit, the connector is quite nice. it plugs in easily, doesn't break unless you do something really stupid, and it is easily removed. Only thing I'll complain about is the tiny version you find in cameras and cellphones. I'm just wondering why they didn't make it a slightly asymetric shape however. You still end up guessing which side goes which way.
Oh well, thou I'm wandering off-topic here my favourite connector is still the 3-pin plug for British household wiring ( and no, I'm not British ). It is solid, it does its job, it is damn obvious how to connect it, and I've never found one you have to force. Why can't more connectors be like that? I'm sick of sockets that are impossible to connect without a flashlight, pins and clips that break if you do something more violent than sneeze on them, quasi-standard plugs that are just different enough so you have to force them, tiny screws that get dented and then stuck.
Really, it shouldn't be this hard. Use solid pins ( giving good contact and stopping them from bending ). Make it easy to see how to connect it, and make it easy to position one pin right and then adjust the other ones. The British power plug has it right, the PCI bus has it right. The stereo jack and phono-plugs have it right. The BNC contacts have it right. The SCART, rj45 and VGA plugs have it wrong. Whoever designed ps2 deserves to spend an eternity in hell trying to connect round 13765-pin contacts with randomly spaced and easily bendable pins, in the dark, using one hand, rebooting the system every time it ends up wrong.
To be honest in principle I don't see the downside of a water landing. The craft has to have a sufficiently low density to float, which could increase air resistance, but a certain degree of air resistance will be needed for re-entry anyway, too little of it and the majority of the slowdown will occur in lower ( i.e denser ) parts of the atmosphere. You want to decelerate over as long a distance as possible tor educe the requirements on the heat-shield. I guess you must test the whole thing for water-compatibility, but if it is to deal with vacuum, intense heat, and solar wind, I would imagine it should be able to deal with some water. I suppose there may be investment costs associated with developing new technology for water based landings, but it does seem like it should be the easier and more fault-proof way to do it, so I wouldn't be surprised if it will work out cheaper in the end.
Oh, you mean like provide a minimal install CD that lets you chose what programs you want and only install the ones you need? Or perhaps a tool which lets you easily remove programs you no longer want with a simple command? Or maybe even provide support for multiple competing browsers so the user can choose which he prefers?
Yea, no way Red Hat will ever do that... , nor will Debain, FreeBSD or Open Solaris...
Really, nobody gives a shit that the default is to Install IE, what people are pissed about is that you are FORCED to install it, and even if you WANT to remove it, Windows refuses to let you do so. The "how would you get a browser then?" argument is also rubbish. You can get it off a USB key-drive, you could order it separately, or even have somebody e-mail it to you. Point is that if I want to create a minimal system without IE installed, I should at the very least have the option to remove it if I chose to.
Ok, over and over again I see the same nonsense. "Lithium batteries burn because they contain lots of energy".
If this was the case a discharged battery would be safe, yet it contains just as much lithium as when it was charged, meaning it is still a fire hazard. The problem with lithium ion batteries is NOT their electrical energy density, it is the low activation energy of the chemicals they are made of.
To really put this in perspective, your cutlery and pots all contain A LOT of chemical potential energy. Burning iron in air releases vast quantities of it. Of course, because steel has a very good heat conductivity, and as the activation energy is high, you can't really set a piece of steel on fire at normal temperatures. If, on the other hand, you were to grind that iron into a fine powder, then you better make sure not to bring it close to sources of ignition as it will explode into a fireball.
Similarly, iron oxide doesn't burn in air because it is already oxidised, but if you mix it with aluminium powder, a strong reducing agent, then you got a Thermite mix which will burn at such a high temperature that it is little you can do but wait until it has completed. Even choking it doesn't work since it contains its own oxidiser.
The reason lithium ion batteries can catch fire is simply that lithium is easy to ignite. If the energy recoverable from a battery was directly related to how strongly it burns, then you would most certainly see batteries made from titanium or aluminium, and not lithium ( which releases a lot less energy when combusted than does many other metals ).
I realise it was a joke, but you will never have synchrotrons on the desktop for the simple reason that it is easy to build cyclotrons of that size. The reason you use synchrotrons for larger particle accelerators is that it would be a hell trying to create a several tesla strong magnetic field over such a large area. For smaller accelerators you would either use a cyclotron ( if you want a continuous beam ), or as the article mentioned, a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator ( if you want high particle energy ).
Essentially the cool thing about using plasma wakefield accelerators is that you don't have to worry about dielectric breakdown. Traditional accelerators are limited to electric fields of about 1 MeV per meter since higher fields would ionise the dielectrics used. A wakefield accelerator uses plasma-waves induced by lasers to generate the electric field, and since plasma's are already ionised they are not limited in the same way.
The concept is quite simple, but I imagine the details get tricky. In particular, to use the electron beam for a FEL it needs to have a good beam quality and relatively uniform electron energy ( the output frequency depends on the electron energy, so if you want monochromatic light you probably want reasonably monoenergetic electrons ). I didn't realise wakefield accelerators could achieve a sufficiently high quality beem to power a FEL, so this is quite interesting.
I know it's not very likely, since all the scientists will likely not be inventing any more, but getting hammered every day until the holidays are over
You got it backwards, to come up with a really crazy, and hence genious, idea you NEED to be hammered. I personally think we should be allowed to write it off as a business expense...
All that GW and the green push accomplish at the government level is to give politicians new ways to spend money... Carbon Capping? Basically new embedded tax passed onto consumers so big dirty corporations can still pollute.
Your post is so empty of logic that it is hard to debunk it because your claims are not even self-consistent with one another. Seriously, didn't you just say global warming was a fraud? Yet carbon capping is an excuse for business continuing to pollute? But carbon is not a pollutant? Oh you meant all the OTHER pollution from fossil fuels? Which is why there is no sense in capping their use and it is just a fraud? So restricting fossil fuel use due to carbon emissions is just an excuse to use more fossil fuels, and this is bad because fossil fuels emit pollution? Do you per chance just spew out arbitrary nonsense without thinking about it, thus ending up contradicting yourself? It certainly seems that way.
What is this about geeks not having girlfriends? I've had plenty of girlfriends... boyfriends too for that matter, and I'm about as geeky as it gets (For my desktop background I made an in my opinion artistic SVG diagram of U-235 and U-238 fission cross-sections plotted against incident neutron energy, I think that qualifies...)
So I'd say that joke is thoroughly debunked, unless you somehow come claim boyfriend - girlfriend interaction causes destructive interference... Hmm, thinking about it, that is probably true...
There is, assuming you have created something new and innovative. I.e: "Our last product was great, since then we have taken advantage of this awesome new tech to make it even better!".
Instead we have: "Our new and expensive product implements what the competition did 10 years ago ( for free ), you should spend a lot of money buying new hardware to run it since the last thing we sold you was a broken piece of shit."
I was of the impression that the Accelerator Driven System's main advantage was not rapid shutdown ( even critical reactor can turn of in seconds if you SCRAM the rods ) but that the sub-unity criticality means the reaction can't enter an unlimited criticality excursion, thus allowing you to burn fuel which doesn't respond well to delayed neutrons. I.e, rather than having to worry about how large a fraction of minor actinides you have mixed in your uranium-plutonium fuel, you could make the fuel completely out of the long-lived minor actinides and destroy a sizable quantity of them using a single reactor. Also, surely the main challenge with safely shutting down a modern reactor is not killing the chain reaction, but rather to dissipate the decay-heat from the fission products ( which produce some 10% of the reactor energy ). Sure, most ADS systems suggest using low-pressure molten lead for this task, but that is perfectly possible for critical designs as well. The main advantage with ADS systems is the inherent stability which allows efficient transmutation of nuclear waste. The disadvantage is cost.
As for Thorium it is indeed superior due to its high neutron yield and low production of actinides, but I have to wonder if this will make much of a difference with fast reactors that have superior neutron economies and capability to destroy the actinides as fuel anyway. If I remember correctly Thorium is also trickier to reprocess due to the large quantity of gamma-emitters, but perhaps there are cost savings possible with thermal designs that would make them attractive anyway. In the mean time my bet is on Lead Cooled Fast reactors. They are cheap, can destroy the actinides, and are probably among the safest designs there are ( except perhaps a lead cooled ADS system, but the cost of those is a bit of a bummer ).
That can be solved by hooking up two flywheels spinning in the opposite direction, thus having their angular momentum cancel. You would have to take care to ensure that you withdraw energy from each one of them at equal rates, and there could be trouble if one of them failed ( thou arguably no worse than if other critical components of your car failed ). Dunno if you could get it cheap enough thou. You would need some damn high quality bearings to keep them spinning safely at the necessary velocities.Batteries would probably be cheaper.
If it wasn't for the cost it is perfectly possible to build plants that use biomass, hydroelectric, nuclear etc... that can rapidly adjust their power output. Hydroelectric plants can change their output close to instantly, for plants using turbines it is just a matter of how rapidly you can adjust the turbine speed, and while the most efficient turbines can only be adjusted slowly, you could easily use a few plants at slightly lower efficiency for load balancing ( as is done in many gas fired plants ). Heck, even gigawatt-class nuclear plants can drop the rate of their chain reaction by 90% within seconds, likewise it can increase it.
So why isn't this done? Well, simply put it is all about cost. A large power plant is an expensive investment so you would prefer using it at maximum output to get the best return. The turbines that can rapidly adjust their speed are also less efficient than the ones that can't. So essentially, for electric storage for load balancing to be worth it, it will have to be cheaper than the cost of running a power plant at less than maximum power output. If batteries could achieve this the electric utilities would have already installed lots of them, optimized for the purpose. A big fat stack of batteries connected to a single DC - AC converter could utilize economies of scale, weight and size wouldn't be an issue so they could be optimized differently than batteries for cars, and unlike a million electric cars scattered around, it could be relatively easily synchronized with existing plants without upgrading the entire grid.
So bottom of the line, if the utilities don't consider this to be worth it using for-the-purpose optimized batteries that exploit economies of scale, it is unlikely to be economical using batteries optimized for a car.
The above would be a little more credible if there was actually a breeder reactor that worked as well as expected
Partial list: EBR-II - USA - Operated flawlessly between 1964 and 1994 , Project canceled over proliferation concerns FBTR- India - Reached Criticality in 1985 and has operated flawlessly since Rapsodie - France - Research reactor without electricity generation operated from 1967 to 1983 Phénix - France - Grid connected since 1973 and still operating , used for nuclear waste transmutation DFR - UK - Research reactor, operated from 1959 , project canceled by the government in 1994 PFR - UK - Prototype reactor built in the 70ies, canceled as above KNK-II - Germany - Built 1977 canceled due to government policy change in 1991 BN-350 - Kasakstan - 1973, shut down in 1999 BN-600 - Russia , Comissioned 1980 still in operation
Long story short, fast breeders are a proven technology, and while not every project has been successful many operated flawlessly. You can't just quote one project in Europe which had problems and extrapolate those problems to every other reactor that has been built. Furthermore, while Superphenix had problems it was an experimental reactor built with the intention to research a promising technology. Its entire purpose was to develop the technology so that problems could be avoided with future plants. Shutting it down with the argument that old-tech pressurized water reactors were cheaper [ and consume 60 times as much uranium, and produce waste with 1000 times longer half-life] was nothing but an excuse to push through a senseless policy promoted by the "greens".
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There. I adjusted it to inflation for you.
Sure, and exponentiation is just repeated multiplication. Hence you should have no trouble calculating pi^(i*e) , right ?
That wouldn't cover myself, but I can ensure you that I am quite gay...
Your implication is basically that web-developers are more competent in terms of security than those who design the clients, and thus the client should just swallow the stuff without even bothering. In reality there are MANY people who make web pages who would probably trust the browser developers a lot more than they trust themselves not to make a mistake.
Also, you're not looking at this from the point of view of the user. I might want to tell my browser to trust John Smith not to put malicious stuff into his webpage, but that doesn't mean I trust him to be capable of finding all known and unknown exploits some of the third parties may have sent him. In this situation I would very much appreciate it if John Smith had marked the data on his webpage saying "this is from me" , "this is from somebody else".
Strawman. Nobody minds a page which uses these things properly ( i.e gracefully fall back when not supported , don't rely on them for navigation etc... ). Problem is, some people get it VERY wrong. There's a Swedish news site I like because they have good journalists, but their web developers deserve to be shot. They actually implemented a "marque-like" news scroller using javascript and DHTML, the thing is slow as hell and for some reason interferes with scrolling the page (i'm guessing the engine chokes when it tries to render an element which is moving vertically across the edge of the window while scrolling with "smooth"-scroll enabled ). So why don't I just disable javascript for that page? Well, the site's navigation relies on it...
Btw, if you actually need javascript to make your page "look nice" then I'd claim that you are actually doing something wrong. If you did it right it would look nice even when printed.
There is the object tag. It can be used as a client-side include. All it really needs is a "permissions" attribute or something like that:
<object permissions="untrusted" codetype="text/html" codebase="foo.html">
</object>
Citizens
Oh shit, did I say that out loud?
My passphrase is: "field kitty sr53"... " or maybe that was 35, I never remember, the 5 could have been a 7" .. then there is "tulip Sandiwch" ... "or was it sandwich Tulip?, you know I was only playing around with this partition I don't actually store anything on it... Hmm, did I decide to use underscores or hyphens? I think I used underscores because I decided spaces might brak things, or maybe it was underscores, they are on the same key you know... try holding down shift... Maybe I misspelt "sandwich", english is'nt my mother tonge.
But anyway, now you know my pass-phrase.
I'll admit that my knowledge of quantum computers is , limited, but surely if you entangle a large number of qubits then an interaction which destroys the state of a single quibit will in fact destroy the state of ALL the qubits. Thus even if you can get reduce the probability that any particular qubit will be distrubed during your calculation, once you try to scale this up to a gigabyte or so, you have a problem anyway since the probability that NO qubit was disturbed increases exponentially with the number of qubits.
Has this issue been resolved yet ? If not it appears that you would just be gaining performance at the expense of reliability. Being able to factor large integers quickly is not much use if you have to repeat the calculation many times to make sure it was correct. I seem to remember that there were more fault resistant QC schemes, but that they suffered memory needed instead (i.e, performance and stability scales, but number of qubits needed does not ). Obviously that would cause just as many problems since running rapidly with a large amount of memory would have to compete against several slow machines in parallel.
As much of a nuisance as it would be, it appears quite plausible that quantum computers might have a "tradeof" relation of some sort, similar to the uncertainty principle. Something along the lines of:
S*E*t*M*T > C
Where S is the complexity of the problem, E is energy needed, t is time to complete a calculation, M is the amount of memory needed (roughly the mass of the computer ), T is temperature, and C is a non-zero constant. It is pure speculation of course, and even if it turns out to be true C might be very small (i.e M = 1kg might be absolutely massive when measured on atomic scales ), but there could be a lot of catches to scaling these things...
That isn't a feature of capitalism, it's a feature of human nature. Yes, it does mean you can't blindly trust a capitalist system from sorting everything out, but it is the very same principles which causes communist countries to go corrupt, and it is also why extreme liberalism will be taken advantage of by those who have the power/influence/money whatever to game the system.
Corruption isn't a matter of how governance is organised or how you set prices in your economy, it is a matter of transparency, openness and people being held responsible for their actions. If that does not apply it matters fuck all what economic system you use, you will just get different people screwing you over.
Now before people start suggesting direct democracy or some far-fetched ideal about having every company democratically controlled by the workers, you need to take into consideration that for democracy to work you need a transparent electoral system you can trust. Thus it still boils down to government transparency and people being slapped when they break the rules. There is no way around that.
Well, over at my university we have deadlines every second week or so... that advice would pretty much require you to not keep your system up to date with patches. This would be why I backup my entire
Fix the damn rj45 connector. You know just what is wrong with it. Bah, same thing happened to my thermostat the other day... Somewhere some engineer is going to go straight to hell for making a screw that had to hold force out of plastic.
At least USB deserves that much credit, the connector is quite nice. it plugs in easily, doesn't break unless you do something really stupid, and it is easily removed. Only thing I'll complain about is the tiny version you find in cameras and cellphones. I'm just wondering why they didn't make it a slightly asymetric shape however. You still end up guessing which side goes which way.
Oh well, thou I'm wandering off-topic here my favourite connector is still the 3-pin plug for British household wiring ( and no, I'm not British ). It is solid, it does its job, it is damn obvious how to connect it, and I've never found one you have to force. Why can't more connectors be like that? I'm sick of sockets that are impossible to connect without a flashlight, pins and clips that break if you do something more violent than sneeze on them, quasi-standard plugs that are just different enough so you have to force them, tiny screws that get dented and then stuck.
Really, it shouldn't be this hard. Use solid pins ( giving good contact and stopping them from bending ). Make it easy to see how to connect it, and make it easy to position one pin right and then adjust the other ones. The British power plug has it right, the PCI bus has it right. The stereo jack and phono-plugs have it right. The BNC contacts have it right. The SCART, rj45 and VGA plugs have it wrong. Whoever designed ps2 deserves to spend an eternity in hell trying to connect round 13765-pin contacts with randomly spaced and easily bendable pins, in the dark, using one hand, rebooting the system every time it ends up wrong.
To be honest in principle I don't see the downside of a water landing. The craft has to have a sufficiently low density to float, which could increase air resistance, but a certain degree of air resistance will be needed for re-entry anyway, too little of it and the majority of the slowdown will occur in lower ( i.e denser ) parts of the atmosphere. You want to decelerate over as long a distance as possible tor educe the requirements on the heat-shield. I guess you must test the whole thing for water-compatibility, but if it is to deal with vacuum, intense heat, and solar wind, I would imagine it should be able to deal with some water. I suppose there may be investment costs associated with developing new technology for water based landings, but it does seem like it should be the easier and more fault-proof way to do it, so I wouldn't be surprised if it will work out cheaper in the end.
Oh, you mean like provide a minimal install CD that lets you chose what programs you want and only install the ones you need? Or perhaps a tool which lets you easily remove programs you no longer want with a simple command? Or maybe even provide support for multiple competing browsers so the user can choose which he prefers?
Yea, no way Red Hat will ever do that
Really, nobody gives a shit that the default is to Install IE, what people are pissed about is that you are FORCED to install it, and even if you WANT to remove it, Windows refuses to let you do so. The "how would you get a browser then?" argument is also rubbish. You can get it off a USB key-drive, you could order it separately, or even have somebody e-mail it to you. Point is that if I want to create a minimal system without IE installed, I should at the very least have the option to remove it if I chose to.
Ok, over and over again I see the same nonsense. "Lithium batteries burn because they contain lots of energy".
If this was the case a discharged battery would be safe, yet it contains just as much lithium as when it was charged, meaning it is still a fire hazard. The problem with lithium ion batteries is NOT their electrical energy density, it is the low activation energy of the chemicals they are made of.
To really put this in perspective, your cutlery and pots all contain A LOT of chemical potential energy. Burning iron in air releases vast quantities of it. Of course, because steel has a very good heat conductivity, and as the activation energy is high, you can't really set a piece of steel on fire at normal temperatures. If, on the other hand, you were to grind that iron into a fine powder, then you better make sure not to bring it close to sources of ignition as it will explode into a fireball.
Similarly, iron oxide doesn't burn in air because it is already oxidised, but if you mix it with aluminium powder, a strong reducing agent, then you got a Thermite mix which will burn at such a high temperature that it is little you can do but wait until it has completed. Even choking it doesn't work since it contains its own oxidiser.
The reason lithium ion batteries can catch fire is simply that lithium is easy to ignite. If the energy recoverable from a battery was directly related to how strongly it burns, then you would most certainly see batteries made from titanium or aluminium, and not lithium ( which releases a lot less energy when combusted than does many other metals ).
I realise it was a joke, but you will never have synchrotrons on the desktop for the simple reason that it is easy to build cyclotrons of that size. The reason you use synchrotrons for larger particle accelerators is that it would be a hell trying to create a several tesla strong magnetic field over such a large area. For smaller accelerators you would either use a cyclotron ( if you want a continuous beam ), or as the article mentioned, a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator ( if you want high particle energy ).
Essentially the cool thing about using plasma wakefield accelerators is that you don't have to worry about dielectric breakdown. Traditional accelerators are limited to electric fields of about 1 MeV per meter since higher fields would ionise the dielectrics used. A wakefield accelerator uses plasma-waves induced by lasers to generate the electric field, and since plasma's are already ionised they are not limited in the same way.
The concept is quite simple, but I imagine the details get tricky. In particular, to use the electron beam for a FEL it needs to have a good beam quality and relatively uniform electron energy ( the output frequency depends on the electron energy, so if you want monochromatic light you probably want reasonably monoenergetic electrons ). I didn't realise wakefield accelerators could achieve a sufficiently high quality beem to power a FEL, so this is quite interesting.
Care to tell us where exactly Arjen was bashing Microsoft ?
Your post is so empty of logic that it is hard to debunk it because your claims are not even self-consistent with one another. Seriously, didn't you just say global warming was a fraud? Yet carbon capping is an excuse for business continuing to pollute? But carbon is not a pollutant? Oh you meant all the OTHER pollution from fossil fuels? Which is why there is no sense in capping their use and it is just a fraud? So restricting fossil fuel use due to carbon emissions is just an excuse to use more fossil fuels, and this is bad because fossil fuels emit pollution? Do you per chance just spew out arbitrary nonsense without thinking about it, thus ending up contradicting yourself? It certainly seems that way.
What is this about geeks not having girlfriends? I've had plenty of girlfriends... boyfriends too for that matter, and I'm about as geeky as it gets (For my desktop background I made an in my opinion artistic SVG diagram of U-235 and U-238 fission cross-sections plotted against incident neutron energy, I think that qualifies...)
So I'd say that joke is thoroughly debunked, unless you somehow come claim boyfriend - girlfriend interaction causes destructive interference... Hmm, thinking about it, that is probably true...
There is, assuming you have created something new and innovative. I.e: "Our last product was great, since then we have taken advantage of this awesome new tech to make it even better!".
Instead we have: "Our new and expensive product implements what the competition did 10 years ago ( for free ), you should spend a lot of money buying new hardware to run it since the last thing we sold you was a broken piece of shit."
I was of the impression that the Accelerator Driven System's main advantage was not rapid shutdown ( even critical reactor can turn of in seconds if you SCRAM the rods ) but that the sub-unity criticality means the reaction can't enter an unlimited criticality excursion, thus allowing you to burn fuel which doesn't respond well to delayed neutrons. I.e, rather than having to worry about how large a fraction of minor actinides you have mixed in your uranium-plutonium fuel, you could make the fuel completely out of the long-lived minor actinides and destroy a sizable quantity of them using a single reactor. Also, surely the main challenge with safely shutting down a modern reactor is not killing the chain reaction, but rather to dissipate the decay-heat from the fission products ( which produce some 10% of the reactor energy ). Sure, most ADS systems suggest using low-pressure molten lead for this task, but that is perfectly possible for critical designs as well. The main advantage with ADS systems is the inherent stability which allows efficient transmutation of nuclear waste. The disadvantage is cost.
As for Thorium it is indeed superior due to its high neutron yield and low production of actinides, but I have to wonder if this will make much of a difference with fast reactors that have superior neutron economies and capability to destroy the actinides as fuel anyway. If I remember correctly Thorium is also trickier to reprocess due to the large quantity of gamma-emitters, but perhaps there are cost savings possible with thermal designs that would make them attractive anyway. In the mean time my bet is on Lead Cooled Fast reactors. They are cheap, can destroy the actinides, and are probably among the safest designs there are ( except perhaps a lead cooled ADS system, but the cost of those is a bit of a bummer ).
That can be solved by hooking up two flywheels spinning in the opposite direction, thus having their angular momentum cancel. You would have to take care to ensure that you withdraw energy from each one of them at equal rates, and there could be trouble if one of them failed ( thou arguably no worse than if other critical components of your car failed ). Dunno if you could get it cheap enough thou. You would need some damn high quality bearings to keep them spinning safely at the necessary velocities.Batteries would probably be cheaper.
If it wasn't for the cost it is perfectly possible to build plants that use biomass, hydroelectric, nuclear etc... that can rapidly adjust their power output. Hydroelectric plants can change their output close to instantly, for plants using turbines it is just a matter of how rapidly you can adjust the turbine speed, and while the most efficient turbines can only be adjusted slowly, you could easily use a few plants at slightly lower efficiency for load balancing ( as is done in many gas fired plants ). Heck, even gigawatt-class nuclear plants can drop the rate of their chain reaction by 90% within seconds, likewise it can increase it.
So why isn't this done? Well, simply put it is all about cost. A large power plant is an expensive investment so you would prefer using it at maximum output to get the best return. The turbines that can rapidly adjust their speed are also less efficient than the ones that can't. So essentially, for electric storage for load balancing to be worth it, it will have to be cheaper than the cost of running a power plant at less than maximum power output. If batteries could achieve this the electric utilities would have already installed lots of them, optimized for the purpose. A big fat stack of batteries connected to a single DC - AC converter could utilize economies of scale, weight and size wouldn't be an issue so they could be optimized differently than batteries for cars, and unlike a million electric cars scattered around, it could be relatively easily synchronized with existing plants without upgrading the entire grid.
So bottom of the line, if the utilities don't consider this to be worth it using for-the-purpose optimized batteries that exploit economies of scale, it is unlikely to be economical using batteries optimized for a car.
Partial list:
EBR-II - USA - Operated flawlessly between 1964 and 1994 , Project canceled over proliferation concerns
FBTR- India - Reached Criticality in 1985 and has operated flawlessly since
Rapsodie - France - Research reactor without electricity generation operated from 1967 to 1983
Phénix - France - Grid connected since 1973 and still operating , used for nuclear waste transmutation
DFR - UK - Research reactor, operated from 1959 , project canceled by the government in 1994
PFR - UK - Prototype reactor built in the 70ies, canceled as above
KNK-II - Germany - Built 1977 canceled due to government policy change in 1991
BN-350 - Kasakstan - 1973, shut down in 1999
BN-600 - Russia , Comissioned 1980 still in operation
Long story short, fast breeders are a proven technology, and while not every project has been successful many operated flawlessly. You can't just quote one project in Europe which had problems and extrapolate those problems to every other reactor that has been built. Furthermore, while Superphenix had problems it was an experimental reactor built with the intention to research a promising technology. Its entire purpose was to develop the technology so that problems could be avoided with future plants. Shutting it down with the argument that old-tech pressurized water reactors were cheaper [ and consume 60 times as much uranium, and produce waste with 1000 times longer half-life] was nothing but an excuse to push through a senseless policy promoted by the "greens".