Ok, I'm not exactly a major consumer here, but before I got into music downloading I NEVER bought any CDs at all. I just listened to the radio. Of course, since I could never remember the names of the songs I liked, I never bought anything. Now, queue filesharing, just yesterday I spent some $100 on music because I couldn't be bothered trying to find hundreds of individual tracks that may or may not be of decent quality, and which may or may not be correctly labelled etc... Sure, maybe I'm not in the main target group, but I'd imagine making it easy and convenient for people to actually go legit would make a lot more sense than creating a DRM riddled hassle and threatening to sue your customers...
I consider myself an environmentalist, and this is one of the reasons I have a serious problem with a number of organisations similar to greenpeace. A number of technologies that can do a lot to help the environment, have been irrationally opposed, or hung out, not because of any rational considerations, but for these organisations to make themselves look important. The most notable example is Nuclear power, but there are plenty of others. Over in Sweden the environmentalists are heavily opposing carbon capture and storage ( arguing that it is "just an excuse to continue using certain [evil] technologies". ) despite it being pretty much the only technology we know of that could end the emissions from our steel industry. Electric heating has been shot down as "inefficient" despite being orders of magnitude cleaner than oil and gas (Sweden's electricity production is very clean ).
Seriously, the more I hear about these organisation the more it becomes obvious that they are oblivious to the real issues involved and just want to make themselves look important. In my eyes greenpeace has about as much credibility when it comes to environmental issues as the bush administration. Now just to make things perfectly clear, I think the Bush administration is a bunch of dishonest, selfish and corrupt bastards, and I wouldn't trust a thing they say when it comes to environmental policy, same goes for greenpeace.
You can't DRM digital paper because you can just photocopy it, right?
You can do better than that. Use a lens to focus the thing into a high quality digital camera and you can capture a whole video stream ( this works for TFTs as well ). Only issue is to synchronise the camera to the paper's refresh rate, and this is fairly easy to do if you have good equipment.
Thing with DRM is that it can't work in a free society. The only way it could work would be if the government banned all recording equipment other than that controlled by the media industry (and the DMCA is certainly playing with the idea by banning you from distributing circumvention methods, given that a non-DRM-crippled digital camera is a perfectly decent circumvention method ). I just hope the media industry will fall apart due to its own incompetence before it comes to that.
As in, the fact that they aren't revealing them means that they aren't anything to write home about. Refresh rates are going to keep this technology confined to ebook readers and advertising posters.
I wouldn't bee too sure. While it will probably be a while before you get HD-video on these things at an affordable price ( 5 years ? ) you really don't need that much in order to browse the web. 5 frames a second would be more than enough to navigate static content, and 24 would be enough for simple animated stuff. Remember that these things don't flicker the same way a CRT does, so you only really need to worry about visual artefacts, like ghosting, which isn't too much of a concern for things that aren't video.
I thought in order to actually have "anti-matter" you needed whole anti-atoms. I think the proper term is simply anti-electrons. (Could be wrong in my pedanticism)
I seriously doubt most physicists would give a crap as long as you are consistent and it is clear what you mean. Kinda like nobody beyond high school really cares if you say that a proton is "heavier" than an electron when it is technically more accurate to say it is more massive. There's an XKCD which illustrates this kinda thing rather well: http://www.xkcd.com/123/
Please note that this may not apply when it comes to more important questions that may arise in the cafeteria... THE MILK GOES FIRST! *brings out the pitchfork*
Yes, and one of the news magazine shows (20/20, 60 minutes, I forget which) had an article about the complete lack of security at these reactors. Often, the security is a grad student with next to no sleep.
Did they also mention that these reactors have a very low power output and that you couldn't cause a meltdown even if you tried? Even for a dirty weapon the material in these reactors would be rather useless. You can find more dangerous chemicals in your local paint shop.
Having said that, I think we should ban the nuclear family on health and safety grounds. IT'S NUCLEAR! THINK OF THE CHIDLREN!
For flights that don't cross the oceans it seems to me that Maglev trains is the way to go. They can actually reach higher speeds than a commercial airliner, and if you want to be really sci-fi you could operate them inside an evacuated tube, effectively eliminating air-resistance, and thus allowing velocities far above the speed of sound. Power would of course come from nuclear reactors, because as we all know, nuclear reactors cure cancer... ( no, really ).
Taking bets on weather this will be seen as a reason to make the game "phone home" about what users "look at" in-game ? I'd expect them to track your cursor, camera angles, and zoom at the very least.
The proposed tax will tax companies like emusic, Amazon etc, and give the money to Sony BMG, Universal etc...
In short, a large cartel is trying to screw over the competition by lobbying politicians to create bad laws. This is pure corruption, and nothing else.
Personally I try to design the page so that it doesn't rely on a particular font, and then I don't specify it in the stylesheet. There are lots of users who may want to change the font for various reasons. If your vision isn't perfect you may want something that is high-contrast. Depending on your monitor size and resolution you may find different fonts to be more legible at the same size, etc...
I guess if you are doing something which has to look "just right" then this may not be an option, but I like to make the webpage so that it has some "breathing space" as you never know what crazy combination of font size, screen resolution and custom fonts the user will force through his browser. Oh, and while we are at it, pretty please, don't fix the font size to some $tiny value. Yea, there are workarounds, but it is a nuisance nevertheless.
a)Don't load an experimental device with more than a few shells to begin with. b)Keep people well outside the fire range and angle of the weapon c)Physically restrict the fire angle and range of the weapon d)Have a big fat "STOP!" emergency button which kills power to device e)Don't use live shells until you have tested the damn thing A LOT. f)multiple redundancy, physical limits, etc etc...
Seriously, I wrote this list in about 20 seconds. How fucking hard can it be to understand that when you deal with something very deadly, like a nuclear power plant or a robotic weapon, YOU DO THINGS PROPERLY! We had better safety procedures than this for my primary school's power drill... Retards...
Depends a bit what it is I'm writing. In general thou: Essays go as ODF Academic stuff go as LyX
When I need to send it to somebody else I export a PDF. Has worked fairly well so far. The day somebody wants a spreadsheet I will play with gnumeric and see what it manages. So far that situation has not been an issue however.
If you have to install additional software to get MP3 support, the music-playing experience is, almost by definition, not as pleasant as it is under OS X.
So you are telling me that the strongest criticism you have against Ubuntu is that it is hard to do:
sudo aptitude install ubuntu-restricted-extras
The above command will give you support for virtually all patent encumbered codecs, fonts, flash, Sun Java, etc... Well, if that is the worst disadvantage of it, then I'd say it is doing pretty well. Besides, you known damn well why you have to input that one line of text at the terminal, and it sure as hell isn't Ubuntu's fault.
A) The temperature of the earth mimics closely the sunspot cycle.
Previously, when humans had little impact, the earth's climate did indeed vary according to solar cycle variations. That, however, does not appear to be the cause now. In particular, the earth has continued to warm at accelerating rates even while solar output has decreased. While being at a high solar activity as compared to a long time before today could perhaps explain some warming, it cannot explain why this warming is accelerating even while solar input decreases. Rather one would expect the rate of warming to decrease as the earth gets hotter, since higher temperatures should result in a greater amount of radiation being emitted by the earth.
B) The CO2 levels are a lagging variable when compared against the temperature of the earth. (ie, it increases only after earth's temperatures increase).
The present theory is roughly as follows: 1)Warming from increased solar output causes increased CO2 release from the oceans. 2)The extra CO2 blocks outgoing infrared radiation 3)The shift in radiative forcing gives rise to more warming, resulting in ice-age termination. It is worth noting that the oceans are presently absorbing a lot of CO2, leading to ocean acidification. Thus while oceans warming due to increased solar activity causes the CO2 spike under ice-age termination, this is not what is happening today.
C) The human imprint of C02 is immaterial - I think something like 6% of all CO2 released? (most of it being released by the Oceans). On top of which, there are other green house gases that have major affect like Methane.
As I mentioned above the oceans are net-absorbers of CO2 at the moment, leading to ocean acidification as the CO2 is transformed into carbonic acid when it dissolves in water. This is in contrast to ice-age termination where oceans are believed to emit a lot of CO2 due to solar cycle variations. In shallow waters this is actually causing a lot of problems since many marine habitats are sensitive to changes in the pH of the water, and the acidification could kill important parts of the ecosystem.
Plants also release a lot of CO2 when they die, but they also absorb the same amount as they grow, so unless you permanently kill them and prevent new ones from growing, the overall emission will be nil. I can't comment on the 6% figure as it doesn't say what it is talking about. Is it perhaps gross CO2 emitted before reabsorption is taken into consideration? Both the oceans and plants emit a lot of CO2, but they absorb even greater amounts, so if you fail to account for the absorption you may arrive at very low amounts of CO2 emitted by humans, while in reality the net emission is largely due to human activities. Methane is indeed an important greenhouse gas, but we emit CO2 in much larger quantities, making it overall more important as far as emissions are concerned.
As I mentioned before, we have satelite measurements of outgoing radiation, and detailed measurements of the CO2 and Methane absorption spectrum, and this tells us that CO2 is by quite a large margin the most important of our emissions as far as warming is concerned ( thou the other gases have an impact as well ). Also, as C-14 decays with a very long half-life fossil carbon contains significantly less C-14 than carbon from plants and the oceans, and this shows up in CO2 concentration measurements. Following nuclear bomb tests inthe 60ies the overall C-14 concentration spiked. This concentration has rapidly declined, despite C-14's very long halflife, suggesting that large quantities of C-14 has been absorbed while C-12 has been emitted. The C-14 concentration, in combination with the records of our fossil emissions, therefore allows one to estimate how much of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is from fossil sources and how much is from plants and the oceans. It appears the vast majority is caused by humans.
Obviously this is due to global warming on Earth caused by humans.
Nice flamebait. In response I'd like to point out the following. a)There are direct measurements of incoming solar radiation, making all questions as to if we understand the sun irrelevant. We know that the incoming energy has not changed enough to continuously accelerating warming ( in fact, even while incoming radiation has decreased the earth has kept warming quicker and quicker). b)Satelites sweep out the entire earth's surface measuring incoming and outgoing radiation. This has been going on for some time now. Surprise surprise, the main change is a major reduction in light leaving the earth at wavelengths which correspond to the fringes in CO2's absorption spectrum ( the peaks have saturated already ). c)Analysis of the ratio of C14 to C12 has confirmed that a huge fraction of the increased CO2 concentration is from a fossil origin. The remainder is believed to be due to deforestation. d)The oceans have been absorbing more and more CO2 which lowers the sea water pH, leading to "ocean acidification". This is a well documented problem, so the oceans emitting CO2 due to increased solar radiation is ruled out as a cause of recent warming. e)We know to great detail how much CO2 ( and other greenhouse gases) we have emitted. Since the only other fossil source of carbon is volcanic and geological activity, this together with the C12/C14 analysis tells us volcanos are not to blame. This is also in agreement with our present understanding of geology.
So, in summary: a)We know the change in radiative forcing is due to greenhouse gases. b)We know the major amount of extra CO2 is from fossil sources. c)We know we emit CO2 much more rapidly than volcanos and geologic activity.
You are arguing against the facts, I imagine that is why you insist on resorting to sarcasm and bad jokes rather than addressing the issue at hand.
Does anyone else find it funny that people can bash Microsoft all day long and no one cares, but god forbid anyone attacks Apple or they end up as Flamebait or a Troll... I wish I still had some mod points left.
Do you realize you just refuted your own argument?
How about getting back to basics and quit focusing on the bling-bling. Linux is NOT windows and it never should be. Quit trying to make it look and act like windows. Quit trying to make it run windows crap. Be happy that it's not windows. I do not want windows compatibility. At all. Ever.
Kill the bloat and pork and watch power consumption go down. Not to mention the old PC's being tossed out into the environment.
Ubuntu certainly isn't windows. That is why you can open the package manager and purge most of the stuff that you find bloated, or use Xubuntu, which is designed to have lower requirements yet still be easy to use. Or if you REALLY want to streamline your system you could install a distro with that purpose, like DSL or Feather Linux. If that is too limited for your needs you could grab a minimal debian install and only install the packages you want.
My point? Different users have different needs. Ubuntu is explicitly targeted and those people who WANT an easy to use GUI and those people who WANT painless support for things they expect to just work. Making an operating system which caters to those users is the main purpose of the Ubuntu project. If your main priority is a streamlined system, then quite frankly you should be looking at something targeted at that rather than complaining about Ubuntu. Besides, it is not as if Ubuntu doesn't run just fine on moderate hardware. I'm using the Gutsy beta on a 5+ year old workstation my dad's job threw out because it was "old" as an example.
Instead of producing lengthy expositions about the flaws of technologies that you don't understand, why don't you try learning about them instead?
Well I have seen Bussard's alleged explanation for why he can maintain a non-maxwellian velocity distribution, and quite frankly, it can't work. He seems to argue that there is a spontaneous process in the system which restores the non-maxwellian distribution because the ions thermalise at low energies at the perimeter of the device. However:
a)Restoring a particle distribution to a non-maxwellian energy distribution requires work. It doesn't matter how you do it, if the energy distribution changes towards a more mono-energetic distribution, no matter what the mechanism is, work is required to account for the change in entropy.
b)Because of this a spontaneous process which restores the non-maxwellian velocity distribution must either drain the plasma of energy ( i.e you have large power losses ) or it will require a similarly large input of work.
c)In a p-B plasma you will have a lot of B-B collisions as well as p-p collisions, both of which have neglectable fusion rates and scatter the ions in all directions, and greatly spread their energy distribution. Furthermore, even at optimal energies the p-B collisions have a low fusion probability as compared to the probability for simple scattering.
These three assumptions is enough to calculate the minimum amount of power required to maintain a monoenergetic velocity distribution at a given collision rate and energy. Since the collision rate also determines the rate of fusion at a given ion energy, you thus have a given amount of work required to maintain a monoenergetic energy distribution at a given rate of fusion. To estimate if this is more or less than what is required to make it practical to maintain a mono-energetic velocity distribution, you only need to know the fusion cross section as compared to the scattering cross section, at the given energy. This is exactly what Rider did. The problem is simply that the fusion cross section, even at optimal energies, is very much lower than the cross section for scattering.
the idea in the polywell isn't to contain the ions, but to contain the elcetrons, which will attrack the ions.
From Maxwell's equations div B = 0, so magnetic field lines cannot suddenly stop, and thus magnetic fields alone cannot confine charged particles in a plasma which has the same topology as a sphere ( a charged particle that travels along a magnetic field line will escape the confinement ). Consequentially you WILL have electrons leaking out of the magnetic mirrors, and this effect will increase as the potential well height increases.
Tokamaks and Stellarators don't have this problem because they are topologically equivalent to a torus, and thus their magnetic field lines can completely enclose the plasma, while simultaneously not penetrating the plasma facing components.
There are further problems with the polywell design. As an example, even at optimal energy levels the reactants will fail to fusion in many of the collisions, and thus the ions will thermalise much quicker than they fuse. Bussard claimed he could avoid thermalisation of the ions, but this is simply not possible in the polywell design since it would require a spontaneous process to transfer energy between the ions in such a way that their overall entropy decreases. While the polywell is not a closed system, and thus not subject to the second law of thermodynamics, there is no meaningful energy input other than the initial potential energy of the ions, and thus for thermalisation to be avoided there would have to be a large entropy flow out of the plasma, and thus it would quickly cool to levels bellow that required for meaningful fusion. In short, you will rapidly get thermalisation of the ions, which in turn leads to X-ray losses from the electrons. If you did heat the plasma, by say injecting microwaves or neutral particle beams, it would still not avoid the problem of thermalisation unless you managed to selectively accelerate the low energy ions, while simultaneously slowing the fast ones ( and of course, if this energy exceeds the fusion power, as it will have to do in order to overcome the speed of thermalisation, then you won't get net energy out of the device ).
While we are at it, no, you are not going to produce a Boron plasma with any significant number density without getting electrons in it, just calculate the electrostatic force you would get on an electron outside the device from 1 mole of boron nuclei and you quickly see that this is absolutely impossible. Even if the proton/electron ratio is just 5/4, Q = N_a, so you are talking roughly 6*10^23 times the proton charge ( or 60 million Coulomb ).
You then have to take into consideration other problems, like sputtering of plasma facing compounds, giving impurities that cool the plasma ( and since all potential plasma facing compounds have Z numbers of 6 or above, this will further increase X-ray losses ). There is no proposed way to design a divertor, so the device could most likely not operate for extended periods of time.
Basically I don't see this getting a confinement time even close to that of a Tokamak or Stellarator. The number density will be dramatically less ( since it is limited by the height of the potential well ), and it just doesn't seem likely you will get even close to the lawson criterion. Granted, you don't need to achieve ignition in order to extract a lot of energy, but you won't get a high value of the nTtau triple product without raising T to very high energies, which impacts the amount of energy you can gain.
The catch to these devises appears to be that if you have a strong enough electrostatic field to contain the ions then you will also lose A LOT of high energy electrons (Rider 1995), thus reducing the confinement efficiency. As Rider notes, capturing the escaping electrons to recover their energy may make the scheme feasible for D-T fusion ( there are other issues as well however).
Personally I think stellarators are more promising. For those who don't know stellarators are a bit like Tokamaks, except rather than relying on an electric current in the plasma to create the necessary twist to the magnetic field for confinement, they twist the confinement vessel itself ( a bit like a moebius strip ), making them a lot more stable than Tokamaks, and allowing them to operate continuously (You can't induce a DC current in the plasma so Tokamaks necessarily operate in pulses ). Main problem seems to be that since stellerators have a lot less symmetry than Tokamaks the calculations become more difficult, but if computing power continues to rise this will probably be solveable.
People here have short memories. Not so long ago the US decided to stick import tarifs on steel in order to "protect local production". The WTO correctly ruled that this was in violation of the treaties and that other countries were entitled to respond accordingly. The EU and a few other countries responded by slapping a huge import tax on goods produced in US swing-states. It didn't take very long for the steel tarifs to be abolished as a result. So yea, the US will pay, if it doesn't you can expect to see a couple of countries starting to deliberately hit the US economy. China alone could probably have a lot of fun, when the EU, Russia, India, Brazil and Canada decides to join the party, $100 billion will not be worth the trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'm not exactly a major consumer here, but before I got into music downloading I NEVER bought any CDs at all. I just listened to the radio. Of course, since I could never remember the names of the songs I liked, I never bought anything. Now, queue filesharing, just yesterday I spent some $100 on music because I couldn't be bothered trying to find hundreds of individual tracks that may or may not be of decent quality, and which may or may not be correctly labelled etc... Sure, maybe I'm not in the main target group, but I'd imagine making it easy and convenient for people to actually go legit would make a lot more sense than creating a DRM riddled hassle and threatening to sue your customers...
I consider myself an environmentalist, and this is one of the reasons I have a serious problem with a number of organisations similar to greenpeace. A number of technologies that can do a lot to help the environment, have been irrationally opposed, or hung out, not because of any rational considerations, but for these organisations to make themselves look important. The most notable example is Nuclear power, but there are plenty of others. Over in Sweden the environmentalists are heavily opposing carbon capture and storage ( arguing that it is "just an excuse to continue using certain [evil] technologies". ) despite it being pretty much the only technology we know of that could end the emissions from our steel industry. Electric heating has been shot down as "inefficient" despite being orders of magnitude cleaner than oil and gas (Sweden's electricity production is very clean ).
Seriously, the more I hear about these organisation the more it becomes obvious that they are oblivious to the real issues involved and just want to make themselves look important. In my eyes greenpeace has about as much credibility when it comes to environmental issues as the bush administration. Now just to make things perfectly clear, I think the Bush administration is a bunch of dishonest, selfish and corrupt bastards, and I wouldn't trust a thing they say when it comes to environmental policy, same goes for greenpeace.
You can do better than that. Use a lens to focus the thing into a high quality digital camera and you can capture a whole video stream ( this works for TFTs as well ). Only issue is to synchronise the camera to the paper's refresh rate, and this is fairly easy to do if you have good equipment.
Thing with DRM is that it can't work in a free society. The only way it could work would be if the government banned all recording equipment other than that controlled by the media industry (and the DMCA is certainly playing with the idea by banning you from distributing circumvention methods, given that a non-DRM-crippled digital camera is a perfectly decent circumvention method ). I just hope the media industry will fall apart due to its own incompetence before it comes to that.
I wouldn't bee too sure. While it will probably be a while before you get HD-video on these things at an affordable price ( 5 years ? ) you really don't need that much in order to browse the web. 5 frames a second would be more than enough to navigate static content, and 24 would be enough for simple animated stuff. Remember that these things don't flicker the same way a CRT does, so you only really need to worry about visual artefacts, like ghosting, which isn't too much of a concern for things that aren't video.
I seriously doubt most physicists would give a crap as long as you are consistent and it is clear what you mean. Kinda like nobody beyond high school really cares if you say that a proton is "heavier" than an electron when it is technically more accurate to say it is more massive. There's an XKCD which illustrates this kinda thing rather well: http://www.xkcd.com/123/
Please note that this may not apply when it comes to more important questions that may arise in the cafeteria... THE MILK GOES FIRST! *brings out the pitchfork*
Did they also mention that these reactors have a very low power output and that you couldn't cause a meltdown even if you tried? Even for a dirty weapon the material in these reactors would be rather useless. You can find more dangerous chemicals in your local paint shop.
Having said that, I think we should ban the nuclear family on health and safety grounds. IT'S NUCLEAR! THINK OF THE CHIDLREN!
For flights that don't cross the oceans it seems to me that Maglev trains is the way to go. They can actually reach higher speeds than a commercial airliner, and if you want to be really sci-fi you could operate them inside an evacuated tube, effectively eliminating air-resistance, and thus allowing velocities far above the speed of sound. Power would of course come from nuclear reactors, because as we all know, nuclear reactors cure cancer... ( no, really ).
Taking bets on weather this will be seen as a reason to make the game "phone home" about what users "look at" in-game ? I'd expect them to track your cursor, camera angles, and zoom at the very least.
The proposed tax will tax companies like emusic, Amazon etc, and give the money to Sony BMG, Universal etc...
In short, a large cartel is trying to screw over the competition by lobbying politicians to create bad laws. This is pure corruption, and nothing else.
Personally I try to design the page so that it doesn't rely on a particular font, and then I don't specify it in the stylesheet. There are lots of users who may want to change the font for various reasons. If your vision isn't perfect you may want something that is high-contrast. Depending on your monitor size and resolution you may find different fonts to be more legible at the same size, etc...
I guess if you are doing something which has to look "just right" then this may not be an option, but I like to make the webpage so that it has some "breathing space" as you never know what crazy combination of font size, screen resolution and custom fonts the user will force through his browser. Oh, and while we are at it, pretty please, don't fix the font size to some $tiny value. Yea, there are workarounds, but it is a nuisance nevertheless.
a)Don't load an experimental device with more than a few shells to begin with.
b)Keep people well outside the fire range and angle of the weapon
c)Physically restrict the fire angle and range of the weapon
d)Have a big fat "STOP!" emergency button which kills power to device
e)Don't use live shells until you have tested the damn thing A LOT.
f)multiple redundancy, physical limits, etc etc...
Seriously, I wrote this list in about 20 seconds. How fucking hard can it be to understand that when you deal with something very deadly, like a nuclear power plant or a robotic weapon, YOU DO THINGS PROPERLY! We had better safety procedures than this for my primary school's power drill... Retards...
Depends a bit what it is I'm writing. In general thou:
Essays go as ODF
Academic stuff go as LyX
When I need to send it to somebody else I export a PDF. Has worked fairly well so far. The day somebody wants a spreadsheet I will play with gnumeric and see what it manages. So far that situation has not been an issue however.
So you are telling me that the strongest criticism you have against Ubuntu is that it is hard to do:
The above command will give you support for virtually all patent encumbered codecs, fonts, flash, Sun Java, etc...
Well, if that is the worst disadvantage of it, then I'd say it is doing pretty well. Besides, you known damn well why you have to input that one line of text at the terminal, and it sure as hell isn't Ubuntu's fault.
That's allright. I'll fix it. ; )
So basically it is very likely that non of these members will be allowed to vote on the final say on OOXML? Nice.
Previously, when humans had little impact, the earth's climate did indeed vary according to solar cycle variations. That, however, does not appear to be the cause now. In particular, the earth has continued to warm at accelerating rates even while solar output has decreased. While being at a high solar activity as compared to a long time before today could perhaps explain some warming, it cannot explain why this warming is accelerating even while solar input decreases. Rather one would expect the rate of warming to decrease as the earth gets hotter, since higher temperatures should result in a greater amount of radiation being emitted by the earth.
The present theory is roughly as follows:
1)Warming from increased solar output causes increased CO2 release from the oceans.
2)The extra CO2 blocks outgoing infrared radiation
3)The shift in radiative forcing gives rise to more warming, resulting in ice-age termination.
It is worth noting that the oceans are presently absorbing a lot of CO2, leading to ocean acidification. Thus while oceans warming due to increased solar activity causes the CO2 spike under ice-age termination, this is not what is happening today.
As I mentioned above the oceans are net-absorbers of CO2 at the moment, leading to ocean acidification as the CO2 is transformed into carbonic acid when it dissolves in water. This is in contrast to ice-age termination where oceans are believed to emit a lot of CO2 due to solar cycle variations. In shallow waters this is actually causing a lot of problems since many marine habitats are sensitive to changes in the pH of the water, and the acidification could kill important parts of the ecosystem.
Plants also release a lot of CO2 when they die, but they also absorb the same amount as they grow, so unless you permanently kill them and prevent new ones from growing, the overall emission will be nil. I can't comment on the 6% figure as it doesn't say what it is talking about. Is it perhaps gross CO2 emitted before reabsorption is taken into consideration? Both the oceans and plants emit a lot of CO2, but they absorb even greater amounts, so if you fail to account for the absorption you may arrive at very low amounts of CO2 emitted by humans, while in reality the net emission is largely due to human activities. Methane is indeed an important greenhouse gas, but we emit CO2 in much larger quantities, making it overall more important as far as emissions are concerned.
As I mentioned before, we have satelite measurements of outgoing radiation, and detailed measurements of the CO2 and Methane absorption spectrum, and this tells us that CO2 is by quite a large margin the most important of our emissions as far as warming is concerned ( thou the other gases have an impact as well ). Also, as C-14 decays with a very long half-life fossil carbon contains significantly less C-14 than carbon from plants and the oceans, and this shows up in CO2 concentration measurements. Following nuclear bomb tests inthe 60ies the overall C-14 concentration spiked. This concentration has rapidly declined, despite C-14's very long halflife, suggesting that large quantities of C-14 has been absorbed while C-12 has been emitted. The C-14 concentration, in combination with the records of our fossil emissions, therefore allows one to estimate how much of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is from fossil sources and how much is from plants and the oceans. It appears the vast majority is caused by humans.
Nice flamebait. In response I'd like to point out the following.
a)There are direct measurements of incoming solar radiation, making all questions as to if we understand the sun irrelevant. We know that the incoming energy has not changed enough to continuously accelerating warming ( in fact, even while incoming radiation has decreased the earth has kept warming quicker and quicker).
b)Satelites sweep out the entire earth's surface measuring incoming and outgoing radiation. This has been going on for some time now. Surprise surprise, the main change is a major reduction in light leaving the earth at wavelengths which correspond to the fringes in CO2's absorption spectrum ( the peaks have saturated already ).
c)Analysis of the ratio of C14 to C12 has confirmed that a huge fraction of the increased CO2 concentration is from a fossil origin. The remainder is believed to be due to deforestation.
d)The oceans have been absorbing more and more CO2 which lowers the sea water pH, leading to "ocean acidification". This is a well documented problem, so the oceans emitting CO2 due to increased solar radiation is ruled out as a cause of recent warming.
e)We know to great detail how much CO2 ( and other greenhouse gases) we have emitted. Since the only other fossil source of carbon is volcanic and geological activity, this together with the C12/C14 analysis tells us volcanos are not to blame. This is also in agreement with our present understanding of geology.
So, in summary:
a)We know the change in radiative forcing is due to greenhouse gases.
b)We know the major amount of extra CO2 is from fossil sources.
c)We know we emit CO2 much more rapidly than volcanos and geologic activity.
You are arguing against the facts, I imagine that is why you insist on resorting to sarcasm and bad jokes rather than addressing the issue at hand.
The first is the Vista OEM sale, the second is the XP sale when users want to upgrade...
Do you realize you just refuted your own argument?
Ubuntu certainly isn't windows. That is why you can open the package manager and purge most of the stuff that you find bloated, or use Xubuntu, which is designed to have lower requirements yet still be easy to use. Or if you REALLY want to streamline your system you could install a distro with that purpose, like DSL or Feather Linux. If that is too limited for your needs you could grab a minimal debian install and only install the packages you want.
My point? Different users have different needs. Ubuntu is explicitly targeted and those people who WANT an easy to use GUI and those people who WANT painless support for things they expect to just work. Making an operating system which caters to those users is the main purpose of the Ubuntu project. If your main priority is a streamlined system, then quite frankly you should be looking at something targeted at that rather than complaining about Ubuntu. Besides, it is not as if Ubuntu doesn't run just fine on moderate hardware. I'm using the Gutsy beta on a 5+ year old workstation my dad's job threw out because it was "old" as an example.
Well I have seen Bussard's alleged explanation for why he can maintain a non-maxwellian velocity distribution, and quite frankly, it can't work. He seems to argue that there is a spontaneous process in the system which restores the non-maxwellian distribution because the ions thermalise at low energies at the perimeter of the device. However:
a)Restoring a particle distribution to a non-maxwellian energy distribution requires work. It doesn't matter how you do it, if the energy distribution changes towards a more mono-energetic distribution, no matter what the mechanism is, work is required to account for the change in entropy.
b)Because of this a spontaneous process which restores the non-maxwellian velocity distribution must either drain the plasma of energy ( i.e you have large power losses ) or it will require a similarly large input of work.
c)In a p-B plasma you will have a lot of B-B collisions as well as p-p collisions, both of which have neglectable fusion rates and scatter the ions in all directions, and greatly spread their energy distribution. Furthermore, even at optimal energies the p-B collisions have a low fusion probability as compared to the probability for simple scattering.
These three assumptions is enough to calculate the minimum amount of power required to maintain a monoenergetic velocity distribution at a given collision rate and energy. Since the collision rate also determines the rate of fusion at a given ion energy, you thus have a given amount of work required to maintain a monoenergetic energy distribution at a given rate of fusion. To estimate if this is more or less than what is required to make it practical to maintain a mono-energetic velocity distribution, you only need to know the fusion cross section as compared to the scattering cross section, at the given energy. This is exactly what Rider did. The problem is simply that the fusion cross section, even at optimal energies, is very much lower than the cross section for scattering.
From Maxwell's equations div B = 0, so magnetic field lines cannot suddenly stop, and thus magnetic fields alone cannot confine charged particles in a plasma which has the same topology as a sphere ( a charged particle that travels along a magnetic field line will escape the confinement ). Consequentially you WILL have electrons leaking out of the magnetic mirrors, and this effect will increase as the potential well height increases.
Tokamaks and Stellarators don't have this problem because they are topologically equivalent to a torus, and thus their magnetic field lines can completely enclose the plasma, while simultaneously not penetrating the plasma facing components.
There are further problems with the polywell design. As an example, even at optimal energy levels the reactants will fail to fusion in many of the collisions, and thus the ions will thermalise much quicker than they fuse. Bussard claimed he could avoid thermalisation of the ions, but this is simply not possible in the polywell design since it would require a spontaneous process to transfer energy between the ions in such a way that their overall entropy decreases. While the polywell is not a closed system, and thus not subject to the second law of thermodynamics, there is no meaningful energy input other than the initial potential energy of the ions, and thus for thermalisation to be avoided there would have to be a large entropy flow out of the plasma, and thus it would quickly cool to levels bellow that required for meaningful fusion. In short, you will rapidly get thermalisation of the ions, which in turn leads to X-ray losses from the electrons. If you did heat the plasma, by say injecting microwaves or neutral particle beams, it would still not avoid the problem of thermalisation unless you managed to selectively accelerate the low energy ions, while simultaneously slowing the fast ones ( and of course, if this energy exceeds the fusion power, as it will have to do in order to overcome the speed of thermalisation, then you won't get net energy out of the device ).
While we are at it, no, you are not going to produce a Boron plasma with any significant number density without getting electrons in it, just calculate the electrostatic force you would get on an electron outside the device from 1 mole of boron nuclei and you quickly see that this is absolutely impossible. Even if the proton/electron ratio is just 5/4, Q = N_a, so you are talking roughly 6*10^23 times the proton charge ( or 60 million Coulomb ).
You then have to take into consideration other problems, like sputtering of plasma facing compounds, giving impurities that cool the plasma ( and since all potential plasma facing compounds have Z numbers of 6 or above, this will further increase X-ray losses ). There is no proposed way to design a divertor, so the device could most likely not operate for extended periods of time.
Basically I don't see this getting a confinement time even close to that of a Tokamak or Stellarator. The number density will be dramatically less ( since it is limited by the height of the potential well ), and it just doesn't seem likely you will get even close to the lawson criterion. Granted, you don't need to achieve ignition in order to extract a lot of energy, but you won't get a high value of the nTtau triple product without raising T to very high energies, which impacts the amount of energy you can gain.
Of course, you also have the Z machine. A bit more wacky, but certainly scores high on my looks-cool-o-meter. :P
The catch to these devises appears to be that if you have a strong enough electrostatic field to contain the ions then you will also lose A LOT of high energy electrons (Rider 1995), thus reducing the confinement efficiency. As Rider notes, capturing the escaping electrons to recover their energy may make the scheme feasible for D-T fusion ( there are other issues as well however).
Personally I think stellarators are more promising. For those who don't know stellarators are a bit like Tokamaks, except rather than relying on an electric current in the plasma to create the necessary twist to the magnetic field for confinement, they twist the confinement vessel itself ( a bit like a moebius strip ), making them a lot more stable than Tokamaks, and allowing them to operate continuously (You can't induce a DC current in the plasma so Tokamaks necessarily operate in pulses ). Main problem seems to be that since stellerators have a lot less symmetry than Tokamaks the calculations become more difficult, but if computing power continues to rise this will probably be solveable.
As a bonus stellarators look damn cool ; )
http://www.efda.org/pictures_html/stellarator_schema_and_live.jpg
http://www.psl.wisc.edu/hsx.jpg
People here have short memories. Not so long ago the US decided to stick import tarifs on steel in order to "protect local production". The WTO correctly ruled that this was in violation of the treaties and that other countries were entitled to respond accordingly. The EU and a few other countries responded by slapping a huge import tax on goods produced in US swing-states. It didn't take very long for the steel tarifs to be abolished as a result. So yea, the US will pay, if it doesn't you can expect to see a couple of countries starting to deliberately hit the US economy. China alone could probably have a lot of fun, when the EU, Russia, India, Brazil and Canada decides to join the party, $100 billion will not be worth the trouble.