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  1. Re: Boom! on Deflecting an Asteroid Will Be Harder Than Scientists Thought (upi.com) · · Score: -1

    Or you can carefully land on it, and drill and put it in place. If you have the time. Or develop robot missiles. That don't detonate on arrival in a bunker buster haphazard way, but land, dig, execute procedures, like xray the mass density, calculate where the best place to dig is, then detonate deep. There should be enough time for that. Practice in the asteroid belt, make sure they function.

  2. Re:Don't worry guys... on IT Workers Facing Layoffs Jolted By CEO's Message (computerworld.com) · · Score: -1

    Amen.

  3. No, this is a story telling the world that the chips used by the US banking system and regulatory agencies are Made in China. Hardware, with hard wired programming, that runs under any software layer. Yeah, they make that, and can do anything they want with it in their factories. Hide hardware easter eggs, see if you can find them.
    How many times I gotta tell ya that the only chip you can trust is the one that you make. Oh you mean we no longer know how to make chips anymore? Then what's this posturing coming from the Hague. China can give them the finger and tell them we got you by the balls, or more like by the chips you type and store your legal documents on. Unless you wanna go back to a mechanical typewriter and a filing cabinet at the Hague, like in the days of Columbo, it used to work, people use to live like that just fine. Talk about security from "hackers" on the Internet, which are pretty much just scare tactics of big money powers involved in computing and internet to scare you into continuous buy buy buy or be attacked maffia style, and otherwise there are really no hackers, like there were really no "evil, criminal people" blowing up your restaurant if you did not buy business protection insurance from the mafia back in the 1920s, but it was the mafia itself doing the blowing up. Or you can just simply pony up the effort to make your own chips, and actually use them at the Hague. Like, that should go without saying, duh.
    I'm not saying don't buy stuff from China. I love global harmony and cooperation, and the last thing I'd like to see is that they, or anyone else on the planet starve, because you don't buy from them, and it's like you're obligated to buy from them, even if they are your enemies, enemies in a hazy, vague sense, simply to keep them from starving, in a Christian love way. But as long as they don't starve, some things like everyone having their own military instead of having to blindly rely for protection on someone else that might turn on them, is like a right or a duty. And then making your own weapons or even chips is like a right and even a duty. How you gonna rely on guns and chips Made in China for your military, yet issue a declaration against them at the Hague? You're an idiot, right? It's like making the basics back at home, at least to some degree, is a right and a duty. Like making hammers and screwdrivers, every country should be able to make those within their borders if they want to, and be able sell those within their own markets, without being run into the dust from globalized competition who can sell at undercut prices that make it impossible to make anything in your country, and about to drive you into economic collapse. Tariffs are a way to de-globalize softly. Suppose something made in china is $5 free shipping, and the equivalent made in USA is $25 because of minimum wage which is because of free market housing cost plus mandatory insurance purchases like Obamacare plus mandatory osha and epa costs, etc, none of the costs that China has to deal with in their minimum wage, so they can dominate shelves competing against you on walmart shelves. So the answer is obviously, when trying to sell a tool kit box with hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, hacksaws, tape measures, etc, is to add a $21 tariff, so Made in USA is $25, and Made in China is $26. Simple, right? It would obviously piss off the Chinese, but it's like they don't have to buy from you, and you don't have to buy from them, except if you don't buy from them they collapse economically, and starve, so you have to buy from them. So I been thinkin about this. The idea is that even with tariffs, you might be able to make it so that the number of Made in China items sold x the price, or more like x the profit to the chinese is greater with tariffs than without them, if you share the tariffs with them. Suppose two toolkits are sitting side by side on the shelf at Walmart - made in USA for $25, and Made in China for $26, and everyone knows its because of tariffs, else the chinese goods would be sitting there for $5. No

  4. Re:Contract abuse: Where will it all end? on TOS Agreements Require Giving Up First Born -- and Users Gladly Consent · · Score: -1

    2050 sounds like an eternity away. I want to know what happens if you don't have your first born by 2050, and it's required by their contract? What is the penalty? Anything they feel like? See, there is this thing called forward looking statements: nobody knows the future for sure. Yes, there are lots of people involved in predicting it, forecast it, like the weather people, but even signed agreements, which is what almost all signed agreements deal with, have this issue of being full of forward looking statements that nobody can guarantee. The only thing guaranteed is intent at the present, at the time of signing, by a signature. If the terms were read, and agreed to, in heart. Sometimes though, just as a practical matter, you are sort of bludgeoned into, forced into signing an agreement. Not by an actual gun point, but by simple necessities of life. Such as how can you deny someone the use of computer technology in this age, when some monopoly gorilla is running rampant making everyone sign anything they feel like asking. What are people supposed to do? Not sign? And live their lives in complete absence of computing technology, like a monk in a mountain cave in isolation and spiritual purity, simply because there is a weasel that hijacked a whole field of science and is milking it? Most people sign Windows EULA's not because they agree with anything in there, but because they "need" to use computers, and there is no other way to use them, but click accept. It's kinda like blackmail. Or, a more extreme example, a gun pointed at your head, sign or we shoot. In such cases people willfully sign or click accept in hostile ways, fully aware of the hostility. Or just not even read it, and then there is less proof they willfully agreed to it, even if in hostile ways, in face of abuse. What chance do they have to fight off the abuse? Like, look at what happened to Bill Clinton - he got Monica Lewinskied, and when his DOJ declared Microsoft was a monopoly, the stockmarket had the biggest single day percentage drop ever, as a penalty, or kind of a conspiracy, punishment, when instead they should have rallied. The government should learn not to fuck with Da Man's money, because Da Man with his money has greater power than the government or we the people. At least that's the idea, and whether it's true, well, that hasn't truly been tested yet. But Da Man and his agents are really akin on taking the guns away from the people, because such time is approaching, and when that happens people instead buy faster. Like last month june was the biggest gun sales on record. Guess why? Because we the people are chickening out? The constitution guarantees the right to bear arms. And ultimately that is what all such signing bullshit comes down to, at the ultimate ultimate ultimate push comes to shove. Unfortunately that's the way things work. Anybody can do anything they want, and twist the system and the rules in their favor, in obnoxious ways, even force people to sign agreements that would technically stand up in court, but ultimately even a court decision is BS, taking your first born son away, if you got a gun. Come get it. Like China says to to the Hague. Of course when you are fighting a corrupt government by yourself, like Waco, you are gonna lose because the government has so much more military power, and the rest of the population doesn't really care, because they live well, but when the rest of the population all cares about an issue, constantly on their mind, some even like that can ignite, and then the truth comes to light that the people, and their weapons that the government hasn't taken away yet, or just simply makeshift weapons like bows and sticks and spears and arrows can outnumber and overpower even the most highly developed military in the world, especially if it's full of brothers, sisters and cousins of those rebelling that they are supposed to fight. Hence the government wants robots. Robots that won't sympathize with We The People, because they are not cousins of We The People. Yeah, sign an agreement like that, and t

  5. Re:Far enough in the future... on San Diego To Run 100 Percent On Renewable Energy By 2035 (outerplaces.com) · · Score: -1

    Just one more thing. In case anyone does not know, in the SI system of units 1 watt is 1 joule/second, 1 W=1 J/s, so a 1W solar panel produces 1 joules per second, and 60 joules per minute and 3600 joules per hour, 86,400 joules in 24 hrs (if there were no darkness at night.) A megajoule is one million joules, so a 100W solar panel running 24 hrs in the sun gives 8,640,000 joules or 8.64 megajoules, MJ. A kg is 2.205.. lbs. A lead acid battery at 0.17 MJ/kg capacity can fit only 170,000 Joules in 2.2 lbs of weight, and a $111 costing 100W solar panel collects 360,000 joules = 0.36 MJ an hour, so less than 30 minutes of sunlight of full 100W power, (or a whole hour if only lucking out harvesting 50W due to morning and afternoon times of steep angles not fully facing the sun head on.) that would fit inside that battery. Say this electric energy then gets used by a hairdryer running at 1875 watts or 1875 joules per second gets used up in 170,000/1875=90,66 seconds, a minute and a half of running time stored in a 2.2+ lb lead acid battery (or roughly 1.2+ lb NiMH or NiCd.) So imagine the kind of battery storage rig you need in a basement to run a household powered by it, other than some camping lights and cellphones, laptops and LED TV's all of which run under 50 W, and none near the 1800W UL limit per wall power socket, or near the 1000W range of a usual window air conditioner. Alas collecting sunlight for almost free (other than the one time $111 capital cost of the solar panel, and whatever the 2.2 lb lead acid battery costs to run plus recycle once in a while into a new one) and getting one and a half minute of hairdryer time out of it for each hour of collection is better than nothing, right? Or 3 minutes of cooking hotplate or small microwave time, or 7 minutes of 400W refrigerator running time, or 28 minutes of 100W refrigerator actual compressor noise and running time for each hour of collection. A kWh (kilowatthour) is 1000 watts for 1 hour, or 1000 joules/second x 3600 seconds=3,600,000 joules or 3.6 MJ (megajoules) and it costs 13.5 cents on the electric utility bill. Basically 1 kilowatthour is 3.6 megajoules, and a kilogram of gasoline or propane has 46 megajoules of heat energy (that can be converted to electric or via a generator only 25% efficiently, or even car motion in an engine is 25% efficient, but heat can be extracted 100% from them, and also electric can get car motion 95% efficiently converted, and everything can give you "waste heat" 100%, so if you run electric into a hotplate or hairdryer or microwave, even the microwave fan generated wind ultimately turns into friction heat in the air and stops moving from friction, and gives you 100% heat, maybe not where you want it though. Gasoline specific gravity is 0.71 - 0.74 (relative to water which is specific gravity of 1, and the SI units of systems is also designed such, that water, at its maximum density at temperature of 4 C (39.2F) happens to weigh almost exactly 1 grams per cubic centimeter which also happens to be a milliliter (thousandths of a liter), or 1000g/liter or 1 kilogram/liter. Gallons and cubic inches and lbs give you non exact multiples of 10, for instance water weighs 8.33 lbs/gallon, and gasoline therefore 5.9-6.2 lbs/gal, let's say 6 lbs. So 1 kilogram or 2.2 lbs of gasoline (roughly a third of a 3.78 liter gallon or 1 1/3 liters) (propane about the same, but goes by 2.2 lbs not gallons) contains 46 megajoules of heat, equal to 12.8 kWh of 3.6 MJ electric heat from the socket, which at 13.5 cents per 3.6 MJ is $1.73 for a third gallon of gasoline, or 3x$1.73=$5.19/gal of gasoline heat equivalent, if you had to decide whether to heat with gasoline or electric. But who's gonna run a hair dryer with gasoline, or a microwave oven that heats quick throughout the bulk of the mass? If you dealt with motion, considering that motors convert heat content to motion horsepower only 25% efficiently from gasoline or diesel or propane, but even 85-95% efficiently from electric motor, then all of a sudden you are back at that $1.73 number, mult

  6. Re:Far enough in the future... on San Diego To Run 100 Percent On Renewable Energy By 2035 (outerplaces.com) · · Score: -1

    After thinking more about it, I think that critical mass rules may set a limitation on just how nano your nano-tsar-bombas can get, and there may be another Lawson-2 criterion that may set the minimum size to say 50 micron pellets or even 100 micron, and then you need like a Yucca mountain underground mine chamber that can fit the tallest buildings on the planet to keep blasting off your micro bombs in, or even millibombs, to heat your helium to 800-1000C required for the combined cycle gas turbine + steam turbine generator. If push comes to shove, blasting off a full sized mini-nuke daily or hourly or every 5 minutes underground, with the smallest kiloton TNT yield weapon you got, to heat your helium via a heat exchanger to provide the daily full energy needs of the US from one or a couple such sites, including all electricity and liquid ammonia hydrogen economy gasoline needs, may be an option. If desperate to harvest that 238 U and thorium energy, on a power plant costing less than $45 billion, if there is a will, there is a way. Of course ultimately what matters is the final cleanup cost when you have to strip the contaminated underground mine chamber walls with diamond clawed UAV type remote control robots, then relining it with new wall material to get the nuke-heat-harvesting gigareactor back in working order vs dismantling the $45 billion power plant that works with control rods at slower speeds, and also the bang per buck, the gigawatts of energy per dollar invested you get to harvest. Railroad Tycoon has a scenario about "geocore" in Spain, then a distaster scenario about it in France. It also has an America after the flood scenario, but i think such a scenario would take at least to 2100AD, or more like 2800AD, or so, maintaining present day carbon emission rates, even if the loss of arctic ice and mountain peak ice reflectivity alone self accelerates the planet self heating, the increased cloud cover then should compensate, and you really have to go that long and keep emitting carbon at the present rate before you see floods depicted in that video game scenario, otherwise even things like the northwest passage clearing up from that 1 centigrade increase in temperature, may get compensated by increased cloud cover. Do we understand the atmosphere and how increased cloud cover forms if temperatures increase, and there is more moisture evaporated? Wait, moisture gets evaporated, but if the temperature up there is high, then it does not precipitate into clouds of water droplets or ice crystals, and once it does, it has only so much moisture bearing or cloud bearing capacity before it starts crying it back out as rain. Ultimately the only brute force way to check global warming might be putting up a ginormous massive thin film solar panel flippable window blind shades at the Lagrangian between the Earth and the Sun.

  7. Re:Far enough in the future... on San Diego To Run 100 Percent On Renewable Energy By 2035 (outerplaces.com) · · Score: -1

    But for now that 13.5c utility electric is pretty much the way to go. Coming out of a global warming coal power plant, or global warming combined cycle natural gas power plant. Oil is usually used for better things, like a car.

    With all the issues of nuclear, it's the only thing that gives you bulk massive doses of power without emitting CO2. It does have proliferation issues, and it does emit nuclear waste, but it's like a handful of nuclear fuel can power a whole city, tens of thousands of people live off of what can fit in the palm of your hands, instead of needing something like 20,000 50-ton railcars full of coal.

    So I go to the wikipedia energy density page to get the actual numbers: uranium used in a breeder (i.e. nonenriched nonmoderated reactor) 80,620,000 MJ/kg. Diesel 48 MJ/kg. Gasoline 46 MJ/kg. Propane Coal 30 MJ/kg (10-35 depending on quality and dirt in it). Animal fat: 37 MJ/kg. Carbohydrates and proteins: 17 MJ/kg. These food items are usually listed with 9 calories (kilocalories) per gram for fat, and 4 calories for proteins and carbs. Btw 1 food calorie (kilocalories in physics) is enough to raise 1 kg of water by 1 celsius. I.e. 1 gram of sugar you eat is enough to increase the temperature of 4 kg (8.8 lbs) of water 1 celsius or 1.8 fahrenheit higher in your body.

    Lithium metal only (for burning in air): 43 MJ/kg. Lithium-air battery: 9 MJ/kg. Lithium battery(nonrechargable) 1.8 MJ/kg. Lithium-ion (rechargeable): 0.3-0.9 MJ/kg. Zinc Air battery(nonrechargeable): 1.5 MJ/kg. Alkaline battery(nonrechargeable): 0.5 MJ/kg. NiMH(rechargeable, similar to NiCd) 0.3 MJ/kg. Lead acid:(rechargeable) 0.17 MJ/kg. Water at 100m (330 ft) dam height: 0.001 MJ/kg. Yeah, 1MJ/kg can raise a thousand 2 L coke bottle to 165 ft height, so imagine what the 46 MJ of the 2.2lb gasoline or propane can do, if there were a 100% way of converting the theoretically stored energy. Or the 80,000,000 MJ/kg of Uranium or Thorium if they built a proper reactor that breeds and uses all the 238 uranium, not just the less than 1% 235 uranium they go for when enriching.

    Yeah, that's how bad it is. Unfortunately that's the way things are, and the whole planet is at risk from heated emotions and nuclear war, so it's like a bad economy where people are so desolate they barely have electric for cellphone and laptop use, and live in absence of electricity otherwise.
    But while they are talking about the plans for the most expensive building on Earth, a nuclear plant in the UK, to power the world, and possibly create something like carbon neutral liquid NH3 (ammonia) that could replace gasoline in a fuel cell based hydrogen economy of the future (yes, liquid ammonia should meet all the US DOE requirements for a hydrogen economy) I been thinking about that pricetag of I forget what it was, 45 billion? (the international space station is 110 billion, but it's not built on earth as the most expensive building ever, it's built in space)

    The basic problem with a breeder reactor is the gigantic size required, and the special structural materials (zirconium) required to withstand the neutron bombardment inside them. An enriched uranium based power plant (or submarine for that matter, that has enough fuel on board for its full life of 40 years, never reeds a refueling/recharging stop) can be built much smaller size, because of the reactivity of the 235 U is so much greater for thermal neutrons than the reactivity of U 238 for fast neutrons in a breeder. You're probably talking a football field size thing made of gold, besides the huge huge cooling towers and added real estate needed for the rest of the plant, to convert the steam into electric, or so, that's the idea behind a $45 billion price tag for a power plant.

    I was making a comment about laser confinement micro explosions for powering space ships in deep space, instead of laser accelerating nano-sized spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. You definitely can't lug around a football field sized reactor in space on a small craft. The fusion research community focus

  8. Re:Far enough in the future... on San Diego To Run 100 Percent On Renewable Energy By 2035 (outerplaces.com) · · Score: -1

    Yeah. I bought a solar powered fountain pump at harbor freight back in the good days when I thought I had a lot of money, wasn't sick and had no credit card debt. Still have it. The thing comes with a centrifugal pump that will pump water only about a foot high - I guess it's enough to aerate a pond, for free. The actual website description http://www.harborfreight.com/s... says peak output power is 1.2W. Yeah, 1.2W on a full sunny bright day, like they have in San Diego. You can probably get 0.5W power out of it. But let's keep that 1.2W number in mind.

    Here is ebay $111 12V 100W solar panel selling like hotcakes on ebay from missouri wind and solar: http://www.ebay.com/itm/371071....
    Here is ebay $45 12V 35W etc, http://www.ebay.com/itm/371418... that I have contemplated buying for LED TV, laptops and LED house lights off of. Of course on home made batteries, or at least car jumping powerpack, including an cigarette light socket inverter that makes 110VAC from 12VDC.

    Compare those above prices for the more accessible and tangible to a customer harbor freight stuff:
    Here is $200 12V 45W solar panel http://www.harborfreight.com/4... . Yeah it includes some gadgets like an inverter and some LED lights bling bling, that you can probably buy on ebay for like $25 directly from China. Still, $200 for 45W max? (on a bright sunny day at noon, 9AM or 5PM it's probably 10-20W, and on a cloudy day probably 1W.)

    Wind power deals with similar price/watt issues, plus moving parts that fail faster than solar panels, so solar is kind of growing faster, especially in the bright sunny desert areas, compared to wind. But wind works on a cloudy day, and especially at night too. But as a home user expect to deal with 100W or so capacities under optimum (rare) conditions, once in a blue moon, not reliable, especially cannot be relied on now now when you need it now, especially without awesome storage.

    You can run a lot of small motors backwards, and may get 10-20W power via a handcrank or a windmill out of the larger ones from older heavy duty dot matrix printers or hand vacuum cleaners, if they are properly constructed DC motors, and car alternators are possibly the cheapest form of bulk power generators, but only if they are form a junkyard, not off the shelf where the price is not better than a windmill. Also car alternators they may be higher powered than what's possible to harvest via a small windmill, and only if you live near a steep slope river may they be economical, or you run a steam engine boiler on woodchip or corn pellet burner, or have means to put up one of them huger windmills on your property instead of a dinky 25W-100W one. Solar power is so much easier to just keep adding to your roof - buy 100W today, another 100W tomorrow, til you end up with 2000W-20,000W easy. You probably need a 20,000W peak power supply that runs at 5000W average if you want to cover air conditioner use and cooking (but don't forget about a possibly even greater cost of basement battery storage.)

    Note that I presently get electric from the utility at $0.135/kWh (meaning 1000W for 1 hr costs me 13.5 cents , besides the tolerable $5 minimum charge.)

    So let's compare that to household items:
    https://www.daftlogic.com/info...

    Hair dryer: 1800 W (maximum per wall socket allowed by UL, 120V x 15A, circuit breaker trips in basement at 20A.)
    Typical microwave: 1000W-1500W.
    Typical electric hotplate: 1000W (mine advertised at 1000W uses 900W as running, but cooks faster from better thermal contact than the old one at 1100W)
    Typical window air conditioner unit: 1000W
    Typical refrigerator-freezer: 150W-400W.

    My water distillation rig: 180

  9. Re:California 'High Speed' Rail may beat it on Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built (bbc.com) · · Score: -1

    Actually Railroad Tycoon 2nd century has a California scenario map, and it is Modesto and Bakersfield that end up being connected, in an economic sense, all because of one simple thing: terrain. In all of California the terrain sucks, except in that fertile valley. By far the greatest cost with rail is either modifying terrain to get a fast low slope straight line, or to wind along serpentines and high grades and inclines, requiring a lot of capital in the strong large horsepower engines and a lot of wasted time and fuel. Railroad Tycoon is an awesome economic simulator about things they don't teach you in school - the balance between fuel efficiency, capital investment, straight line and speed to ignore a resource, curved meandering track to access all resources paying on speed and acceleration/deceleration and time. On a strictly horizontal straight line track 1 live horse of 3-4 horsepower can pull like 10 rail cars, given the low friction. Give it a 0.1% grade, and a train of 100-200 rail cars needs a super strong super expensive super fuel consuming engine to pull uphill.

  10. Re:More "pleasant" weather on Rise In CO2 Has 'Greened Planet Earth' (bbc.com) · · Score: -1

    the more people there are in California, the more the more the abundance of hot looking porn star candidates.. as California is probably where 80% of all porn in made, isn't it? so if you wanna bitch about too many people, pick a different place than California please

  11. Re:More "pleasant" weather on Rise In CO2 Has 'Greened Planet Earth' (bbc.com) · · Score: -1

    maybe the problem is not the extra emitted CO2
    maybe even if no CO2 were emitted, people would still cause global warming
    by cutting trees and putting lawns in their places, then constantly mowing them
    in any system in-out=net gain, i.e. you can stay at zero if you put CO2 in the atmosphere, and take it all out with biomass, you're at 0 increase
    even if you don't put any CO2 into the atmosphere by combustion, just mere killing carbon store like trees or grass and letting them rot, the fungi will exhale them as CO2 - some percentage does end up as topsoil humus though, which, over geologic times can end up as coal, oil and natural gas, but the bulk is exhaled
    basically, as population keeps growing, and people keep putting lawns everywhere, as a matter of fashion or style, then here comes global warming even in a hydrogen economy - the carbon has to go somewhere from the atmosphere, or it builds up - ocean overfishing doesn't help either
    if instead of eliminating carbon stores as population grows, if instead of that you'd compensate, and where there was little vegetation, and people expanded there and brought green life and sustained it, you could even outdo the effects of fossil fuels and fix global warming and melting glaciers.. desert and semidesert greenhouses come to mind that need an active caretaker, though you'd lose some solar reflectivity in deserts, but gain it back at glaciers and lakes like lake chad used to be, because the ratio of reflectivity lost to tons of co2 captured as green is minuscule, probably 1% of all desert land could more than store all the extra CO2 that we don't want (i.e. 0.030% target from the present 0.045% CO2 in the air, which otherwise when dry is 78%N2, 21%O2, 0.93%Ar, and some Ne, He, Kr, Xe, CH4, H2S, NO, NO2, CO, acetone, freon, dmso, etc.)

  12. Re:Dangerous on New Heating Technology Uses Seawater and Carbon Dioxide (csmonitor.com) · · Score: -1

    Electrical resistance gives you straight heat, whatever your energy source, fossil or not.
    Heat pumps instead "steal" heat from the cold seawater and lift it to a higher temperature, spending the same electric energy on driving the compressors instead, ending up with a lot more heat than just straight electric to heat conversion. A heat pump "pumps" heat, instead of generating it. The COP (coefficient of performance) can be as high as 400% (i.e. 4x as much heat obtained by stealing it with a ginormous air conditioner in reverse heat pump, instead of straight conversion with a tiny and cheap heating filament) if the temperature differences are small, such as 5 F, but it can drop to as little as 115% if the temperature differences are huge. Air "cooled" heat pumps also build up ice superfast, and in a situation where it's -40F outside, and you want 60F inside, and all you have is air cooling that will massively frost over, and even if it's constantly scraped clean, the COP is no better than 105%, that extra 5% of heat seldom justifies the running costs and maintenance involved. (Luckily seawater is always above 30F or so if not frozen.) So it's always a question of economics, you have x amount of dollars to invest, and you get a savings of 15,000/yr, so what's the APR, 2%, 20%? A lot of businesses are so tight on cash and want to keep their process so uncomplicated (because complications can creep up on you and ultimately bite you in the ass hard when you end up with something with so many possible details that can go wrong, that you're constantly down - availability is number one business consideration, efficiency is not always top, see the douglas self Loco Locomotives site about complicated fuel savings on engines and how they don't make it, and i personally was a qc tech somewhere with 19 parameters tested, which is too many, almost guaranteed nothing ever passes, but with 15 or 6 different possible things to go wrong, almost everything always passes) - that unless the APR is 100% (i.e. the thing pays for itself in savings within 1 year, 50% or 2 years not good enough) the project is not undertaken. I assume their heat pumps cost a lot more than $15K. On the other hand, a normal payback time for a solar panel installation is often 7 years, and it's undertaken. And heat pumps are nothing new, but yeah, if you have a pond or lake or seawater available for heat pump heat exchange, that's nice.

  13. it's in the friggin chipset... no matter how secure you implement the software, Da Man is snoopin on you, and will forever snoop on you, and collect information, including the microsoft shortwave bands in the amateur wavelength range, and all possible frequencies and venues, including stray wifi and cellular signals that you don't even get a "connected" signal, because the chipset does not provide a software interface to the snooping hardware, it's all one way, it listens, but does not emit even a whimper.. it's built into the chipset by intel, amd, etc, and there is no such thing as computer security, unless you built a chip and you know what it does, and nobody has physical access to it to swap it out with a fake one that looks like the one you built.. then you can begin to talk about computer security... until then just live with it, and every time you get hacked, start talking about suing the manufacturers, microsoft, intel, dell, etc.. that will hold them back from using their channels to actively attack you to "prove" that you should spend more on computer security such as buy buy buy upgrade buy, and will be satisfied with simply collecting secret information about you, just so they have a little card file about you and everyone of what they are guilty of, what their weaknesses are, and how they can be dealt away with, in case they are in their way

  14. Re:'10 times more efficient' and xenon gas on NASA Gives Solar Ionic Propulsion A Monster Boost (networkworld.com) · · Score: -1

    i was thinking the same thing, why not use liquid oxygen instead, freely available from silicate rock in space
    but then i realized you're spending $2 worth of electricity to accelerate $0.0001 worth of xenon, gold, platinum or diamond to 30% speed of light in a cyclotron (where relativistic mass might get it out of sync, unless you modulate your field to pulses that change the frequency as the particles relativistic mass grows to keep the cyclotron in sync, and get 80% speed of light), so whatever.. use xenon for start, then replenish out there in outer space with whatever gaseous ionizable things you can get your hands on, such as solar wind hydrogen or vacuum vaporized meteorite atoms sorted out in a magnetohydrodynamic generator, in a mass spectrometer way, each isotope of each element getting their own accelerator tunnel and cyclotron, and meteorite silicate elemental abundance means dealing with vaporized isotopes atoms of O, Si, Al, Ca, Fe, Na, K, Ti, that's pretty much it, the rest you can discard

  15. i have horrible karma so it only lets me post 2 comments in 24 hrs, and last time i wrote this comment roughly but i couldn't post it
    i thought about it some more, and of course the whoosh is not so woosh when light takes 8 minutes to reach earth from the sun, and it would take 40 mins at 20% speed of light.. so you got a couple hours, but there isn't much to see you're just lookin at a starry sky, seeing images the likes of seeing venus, mars, saturn in the background of other stars.. just stars that move faster relative to the background "fixed stars".. so there isn't that much to see, and chances of close encounters with a planet are nearly nil, unless you can decelerate and stop there, and hang around, wait for commands to move around

    and here is what i wrote last time but it didn't let me post it, i saved the comment, but somehow it's gone from my computer so i'm writing this from memory
    it's about the aforementioned peltier issues in deep space, where solar power becomes not worth it, here is how to make solar panels worth it high up away from the Sun, powered not by the Sun directly, but by coherent high intensity lasers aimed and shot at them from down here..
    as far as travel in space is concerned acceleration via light is not very "impulse or momentum efficient".. energy transfer via light is "energy efficient" .. to better utilize the energy, one could carry some matter to accelerate in a cyclotron via energy received through solar panels.. which is a better way then simply getting kicked around by photons, partly because you can also decelerate or go about that way.. of course there is still issue of aiming accuracy, especially to lightyears distance away, but getting around in the region of Jupiter/Saturn/Neptune/Pluto you might get away with it.. you'd basically have huge solar panels collect sunlight nearer to the Sun such as orbiting Earth, then from that generate a very focused narrow beam laser to shoot at your spaceship near Saturn, whose solar panels may not function much with light received from the very distant Sun, but in the path of a highly coherent laser beam of many Suns local intensity, it might be worth it.. and then the fuel you carry, such as liquid oxygen you extract from silicate rocks of Saturn's rings, can be efficiently harvested for impulse by accelerating it via a cyclotron to very high speeds.. if aiming accuracy suffers, even if it's oscillating or gets it right most of the time (via feedback of hey, we're not getting any juice here, the beam veered off to the left, 8 o clock last time we saw it, bring it back, hey

  16. One more thing. Or two.
    - the classic computer game Asteroids gives a feel for impulse, interstellar acceleration and deceleration needs. It's not enough to simply accelerate.
    - but if you simply accelerate, and woosh by, the fast the images you get back are at best the likes of Hubble images of the starry sky, and you'd simply get a what the starry sky looks like in that neighborhood, including, if, flying by with 20% of light speed, how it changes from picture to picture to detect nearby planets lit up by the star, kind of like ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans knew about planets that were stars nearby that moved more than the other stars in the background, on their own "epicycles." Such images may be very well worth the trip though, just don't expect closeup pictures of another Saturn or Neptune unless you are able to decelerate and stop and move about in that neighborhood.

  17. Acceleration via a laser beam is quite slow, - and I was just thinking of how astronomers have difficulty even seeing and accounting for all the asteroids near Pluto, especially in some incoming danger way let's shoot a hydrogen tsar bomba and deflect a meteorite heading to Earth, there might be decent accounting of somebody saw something in 1917, so we know about it, we have it listed, but there is no easy monitoring on the minute of some new thing emerging with super speed headed toward us - so they have a problem even seeing things that are small and distant, let alone correctly aim at them with a light beam. But suppose it could be done and the craft could make it there in 20 yrs at 20% speed of light, it would woosh by so fast there barely'd be any time to take pictures. You'd definitely need many of them superhighspeed cameras aimed in all 360 degrees panoramic directions and take a shitload of empty pictures with some (maybe 1 out of a million) that may capture an object too. If anything going 10% and 40 years would give you twice the camera time, or 5% and 80 years 4 times, etc. On the other hand you could preprogram the device to let out a big fighterjet-parachute-solar-sail type of ginormous thing to slow it down and make it stop, then we could forever get pictures back, like with a Mars rover. Of course it would be either too heavy or it would easily break, so the deceleration would have to start halfway there, with a sail the size of 10 Earth surface areas "dragging" through the vacuum vacuum vacuum of interstellar space. You can accelerate with a laser beam (though I have serious doubts about the aiming accuracy for nanodevices at a distance past Pluto), but you can't decelerate. If you could figure out an autonomous largescale macro device (i.e. regular spaceship of the startrek kind) that contains its onboard high energy density plutonium reactor, (perhaps and also filters hydrogen atoms from interstellar space (good luck with that, vacuum is extremely extreme out there)), it could cyclotron generate a beam at 20% speed of light when away from stars, and when it gets enough starlight in proximity of stars, it could switch to solar harvesting or light. Such a device does not need correct laser beam aiming, and it can do its own deceleration. The issue is that if you have matter available to shoot and accelerate like that the impulse you gain is just soo much soo much more than anything you get from shooting a lightbeam out of a spacecraft, but, lacking any matter to spare, it's like the only option. Unfortunately when your energy source dries up, such as plutonium (the highest energy density stable storage thing known to man, its existence is dangerous down here on Earth, but it's very welcome for interstellar travel, or for knocking asteroids headed to impact Earth off track) then your only sources of energy when lost in deep space are either star light solar panels, or vacuum vacuum vacuum harvested hydrogen fusion. Of course there are issues because tapping fusion energy is theoretical for now, and there are even issues with properly harvesting plutonium energy (such as through micro explosions under laser confinement, then milking that in a multistage high pressure potassium vapor bottomed by a high pressure steam engine heat engine.) For now deep space probes do use nuclear fuel, but only harvest a minute minute fraction of the energy released, via a thermoelectric Peltier device - the kind you get for computer chip cooling, it can either create heating or cooling from electricity, or electricity form a heat flow. The way they work is that the nuclear material is hotter than its environment, and constantly releases minor amount of heat. Talk about harvesting like 0.00001% of the energy, or whatever their efficiency is. But such a thing beats solar power for spacecraft at large distances from the Sun, such as past Jupiter or Pluto. Being able to send commands, even if it takes 9 years, is nice, when you found some object, and you want to take more pictures of it. Otherwise we may get a flyby whoosh,

  18. Re:In the short-to-medium term. yes. on Slashdot Asks: Do You Support Nuclear Energy? (gallup.com) · · Score: -1

    Yeah.
    HVDC from UTAH and WY to NY and Maine and Cali.
    no pluto but thorium
    smart windmills, grid tied yeoman farmers with windmills they buy themselves, maintain themselves, sell electric to industry, and are a bitch to no utility company sending minimum charges.. expects lots of resistance from Da Man who's always tryna keep a brotha down, in fact that's the only thing he ever does or is good at

  19. Re:Reliability of refurbished booster is unknown on Estimating SpaceX's Reusable Rocket Cost Savings (theverge.com) · · Score: -1

    They are trying to compare discardable rockets vs. reusable rockets. Can you discard part of them, and reuse others? Like, navigation computer control systems, and fuel storage spaces should suffer from low thermal stress, and be well insulated from the actual combustion chambers that are taking on hell. The combustion chamber components you could melt down and remake, while the other stuff not suffering from thermal stress, you could reuse.

    And, btw what's this big deal with "landing" a rocket upright using rocket fuel? It seems to me like a royal exercise in stupidity. You know how much fuel it costs to keep a rocket floating or descending? The reason why you use rockets for space travel only is because inside the atmosphere there are cheaper ways to get around - such as an airplane with wings, or a helicopter. Sure, fighterjets and ICBM's use rockets, for speed reasons, but where speed is not needed, there are much cheaper ways to get around inside the atmosphere, and when it comes to landing the cheapest way is parachuting. Which is what 1950's Sputnik and Apollo space programs used, landing modules into the oceans, via parachutes, and that's what model rocket hobbyists use, parachutes, to land their gear and reuse the hobby rocketry components. Who on earth has rocket fuel and money to "burn" on some stupidity like landing a rocket upright using rocket engines? Sure, we can land a military fighterjet upright too, and there it would make sense, because acrobatic skill and every ounce of extra speed is a make and or break it difference when it comes to winning a war, but when it comes to hauling freight to space, or back, speed does not matter that much, but cost is everything. Even the space shuttle had "wings" to land, not a friggin rocket engine. Can it be done? Yeah, as Space X proved it can! Congratulations on such a royal achievement in stupidity!

  20. Re:France on In Response to Open Letter, France Rejects Asylum For Julian Assange · · Score: -1

    You had to repent, after being burnt at the stake, like Jean D'Arc for political reasons, of Giordano Bruno for holding the view that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe, but it's one of the planets that goes round trip around the local center, which is the Sun. Now they claim he also got roasted for believing in pantheism, that God resides in nature. But his biggest heresy at the time, like Gallileo's holding the same views in Italy, who had to publicly recant his his heretic views of a heliocentric solar system as opposed to the Church dogma of terrocentrism, and he was still sentenced to lifelong house arrest. At least he did not get roasted. For his practicing of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, etc, the very first amendment of the US constitution, the 2nd was gonna make it to be the first, but the incursions on the first amendment have been so grave up to that point, that that got to be the 1st. And politicians these days are constantly vying to erase the bill of rights, the original 10. They already "established" a precedent with alcohol control as an amendment, then a repeal of it in the 20's. Right around the time when the country suffered the Great Depression. Guess what's happening these days? Every time corrupt politicians start fucking with bullshit, like suppressing liberties like gun control, forced insurance purchases, like gay marriage rights as an amendment, then repeal of it later, the whole country goes to shit.

  21. Re:France on In Response to Open Letter, France Rejects Asylum For Julian Assange · · Score: -1, Troll

    Asange can only get asylum in Colombia or Ecuador or Peru, where it is still legal to burn people at the stake for heresy by the Catholic Church Inquisition that traces its roots to Spain. You know, from a time and age when all books other than the Bible were banned as heresy. Those times are coming again, books will be banned again. Except the Bible. Or Quran, depending on where you happen to live. That was Adam and Eve's original sin by the way, eating fruit from the forbidden tree, the tree of knowledge. Little did they know that ignorance was bliss in Paradise, and because of their curiosity, now all humanity is wise, but must suffer.

  22. Re:It's that time... on Volkswagen Factory Worker Killed By a Robot · · Score: -1

    The situation is akin to running over a cliff and falling into the abyss with a horse vs. a car or even the segway http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.... The horse refuses to follow your command, like a human factory worker stops if it sees something in the way, but a robot or a car will do whatever you tell it to do. Of course nobody is going to go back to horses and eliminate cars, because, for one, a horse needs daily feeding and stall cleaning, vs. a car you can leave in the car for a whole month, then walk to it and go, and speeds and economics horses can't match. Robots have downsides, but overall, their economics often leave everything else in the dust, as long as you got an economy able to make the chips. A horse is more zombie apocalypse resilient than a high tech car (maybe not a built to crappy tolerances steam car made by a blacksmith) because it manufactures itself and its fuel is abundant grass or weed people so diligently attack with lawnmowers weekly. But who's gonna commute to their 8 hr office job with a horse? Right?

  23. Re:Oh please. on Asteroid Day On June 30 Aims To Raise Awareness of Collision Risks · · Score: -1

    They forget about the role of playing a macroscale Maxwell-demon by sorting out the tiny shooting stars and only allow those to impact the atmosphere which increase Earth's rotation, and deter those that would slow it. Else in a couple billions years Earth will be gravity locked to the Sun like Venus is, and like the Moon is gravity locked to Earth, always showing the same face. That means one giganto Sahara desert on one side of the planet, while a huge Antarctica on the other side, and green land based life only along the perimeter that receives sunlight at obtuse angles like Alaska, except for the tropical oceans that self cool via ocean currents from the iced of frozen through sea on the other side.
    Venus, besides massive shades to cool it's atmosphere, also requires some asteroid impacts to get it to spin - even if the day-nights are 2 weeks long - possibly by using one of Jupiter's moons dislodged by sustained near miss turned into a full collision impacts, until finally dislodged from orbit around Jupiter, and sent round trip around the Sun like a comet and impacting Venus on the way back from the Sun, both sending it higher into orbit, and "SPINNING." The spinning part being the more important part, partly for a magnetic shield generation, and partly to avoid extreme temperatures over much of its surface. Covering up 75% of the planet's surface area by a giant thin shade floating at the Lagrange point is something that China that built the great wall might be able to pull off with today's technology and economic capabilities, if they only tried hard enough. But there is no good reason until they can start the planet spinning.

  24. Re: Altough I agree on Microsoft To Sell Bing Maps, Advertising Sections · · Score: -1

    In my mind there is no such thing as intellectual property, or the concept of "owning information." But there is a concept of rewarding creators of information, which presently uses the artifact of temporary ownership, whose terms have been stretched and distorted vastly since they originally been entered into the lawbooks, when it used to be 14 years for copyright renewable to 28, in a day and age when starting up a printing press took forever by hand loading individual letters into page frames, and then the printed book took forever to make a trip between London and New York, or even the Oregon Trail West Coast from Missouri. Now we got the latest extension of Mickey Mouse protection act giving another 20 years to Disney over stuff that's long become cliche and in my mind, part of the body of public knowledge, something you should not deny from a child to know. Like, there is this concept that nobody can own organic chemistry, or any branch of science, such as computer science, but they are slowly creating a world where there is a de facto ownership of branches of science, either through monopoly, or simply through corrupting the laws of perpetual copyright extensions, last public domain entering of copyrighted material stuck at 1923, which was long before organic chemistry, computer science, etc., flourished. Had it not been for the Chinese "People's Liberation Army" sticking up for the rights of the public, or lower class, holding some tangible power, we'd long be living in a world of no wikipedia, no linux or freebsd, any information that's not copyrighted banned and the perpetrators publicly burnt at the stake, etc. Yeah, intellectual property is easy money, the easiest of easy moneys with very little product liability for instance, and a whole lot of money being at stake. And because of that the drive, the tendency to change the rules by a campaign donation to get yet another billion out of some intellectual property protection artifact is great. Just ask pharmaceuticals what they would not give to extend patent protection from 17 to 20, or from 20 to 22 years. But unlike real estate for instance, or gold, or other scarce materials in high demand, information in general is not scarce, the only thing scarce being its creation, which is why the property rules around it were erected as such, to spur creation, and not to hog all public knowledge, erect blackmailing extortion schemes for easy money, all in all resulting in a society and economy of improperly allocated resources. There is absolutely no economic benefit provided by people squatting on intellectual property, such as Microsoft "owning" Windows 2000 in 2040 as copyright. There is indeed a benefit provided by them owning it in 2000 or even 2005.

    So what Microsoft needs to do to stay in business is innovate. That is the sole purpose of intellectual property, not to sit and gloat on your collected laurels, but to keep creating, and if you don't, then you really have no good excuse for draining all that wealth from the rest of the economy as a form of improperly allocated resources. And in this sense intellectual property of an book writer in fiction whose books don't sell much, does need longer protection, compared to someone writing science books, because science is one, it's not fictional, like a novel without which you can live your life just find, but hogging science does harm those you hogging it from. Also things that enter the public sphere simply over reasons of popularity, and becoming sort of a cliche and a requirement of a well rounded education or knowledge about the world, such as Harry Potter, things that are high volume in sales, should get much shorter copyright protection terms, for one, because the creators have been compensated well due to popularity and high sales, unlike a writer who pays amazon like $2000 to get his book published, and barely ever makes a sale. Yeah, I know it's complicated. But property is usually assigned to things that are scarce. I don't really have property rights in my coat when I walk out of an institution

  25. Re: Fucking Lawyers on SCOTUS Denies Google's Request To Appeal Oracle API Case · · Score: -1

    Next the way you masturbate is going to be copyrightable, and you can sue people that follow your patented method or technique. In fact, they are gonna add software versions that, besides the wacky not-for-resale demonstration purposes only, or academic licenses, now you're gonna have a non-masturbator version of windows, where you agree you will not watch pornographic material on it or even if you do, you simply won't touch yourself, and if you want to, you must upgrade to the full version that also includes masturbation rights while using it. If you find that too expensive, then you can get one for a lower price, but you have to declare which hand you will use, Windows 11 masturbator left hand version, Windows 11 masturbator right hand version. You will be in violation of the terms of the contract if you get caught with an xray camera snooping at you through your paperthin wodden walls and plastic siding, and your punishment shall be a cancerous lung infection by tainting the filters of the forced air heating furnace that will blow the disease all over your place.

    Apropo they have yet to invent an antidepressant treatment for men better than seeing a naked woman. Pharmaceuticals just Mc Hammer can't touch this. Ya know, sexual healing, babeh. Maybe Obamacare should help mental patients suffering from chronic depression by taking healthcare into their own hands and taking the patients off the suicide pills they are currently on, that don't work anyway, talk about what a waste, and instead sending them to online porn sites like chaturbate for therapy that does actually work well to uplift the spirit. Health care that works, with proven track record. Best anti depression therapy ever invented - other people, naked. Perhaps Obama can provide some of the tip money too.