Well, I never thought I'd be standing up for Microsoft, at least a little, But IMHO they had at least a LITTLE justification for putting up the warning message. Old Windows HAD to make MANY patches into the DOS resident code, and it depended on MANY undocumented data areas inside the DOS resident code. Any DOS clone, if it was to have a chance of running Windows, had to be very carefully engineered to match all those undocumented locations in DOS. The odds of Digital Research being able to guess all the exact locations that Windows depends on, and will depend on, is somewhat slight.

Farms on the Moon? Why stop there, how about dairy farms in S.P.A.C.E?

How's about we run a few numbers?

If we assume that 50 square meters can feed one person, ( quite an assumption, IMHO ), and if we round down sunlight to 1,000 watts per square meter, then you need about 50 kilowatts of light, 8 to 12 hours a day, to support one person. Well, no, you need water, minerals and some energy too, but lets ignore that.

Now LED's are at about 100 lumens per watt. Spread that out over a square meter and you have 100 lux. Sunlight is right around 130,000 lux,. So you need about 1,300 watts to light up one square meter to the same intensity as sunlight. Very roughly.

Solar cells and inverters and wiring have an end-to-end efficiency of around 10%. So you need about 13,000 watts of collected sunlight to light up one square meter of hydroponics.

So we need about 13 meter-square panels at right-angles all the time to the Sun to get 13,000 watts during sunny days on the Moon. Let's round that down to 10, as sunlight is a bit more potent there.

Now sunlight is only there about 2/3 the time, and off for like 10 days, so we need batteries, let's say those are 75% efficient, round-trip through the batteries and diodes and inverters.

So we're back up to about 20 meter-square panels to light up one meter. To light up 50 square meters, one person's worth, that's ONE THOUSAND SQUARE METER STEERABLE PANELS.

That's an awful lot of hardware. I'm not sure one person could maintain 1,000 panels-- wiping off the dust, checking the steering motors, repairing meteorite damage, freeing vacuum-welded joints, swearing at al the dust they've stirred up walking from panel to panel, etc, etc, etc.

Doesn't leave much time for farming, among other things.

And oh, where are you going to get the water for 50 square meters of whatnot growing?

Swell idea, except:

Both sets of wings have to be strong enough to act like wings- that requires spars and stuff that are usually run through the center of lift. That makes it difficult to fit in stuff like people and cargo.

You can't sweep the wings at your typical 20 to 40 degree angle, which limits your top speed in either mode.

You can't have wings with the usual asymettrical front-back tapers, limiting your lift and lift/drag characteristics.

You can't have a tail, which makes stability and control very difficult.

Otherwise okay.

Except the 5.5GHz may not be all that fast, as the Z-line of CPUs are the old IBM 360 instruction set, which is is so large, complex, and baroque that it is mostly usually implemented through a thick layer of microcode.

So 5.5GHz may be the speed of the microcode level, the actual "machine instructions" may be a considerable sub-multiple of that.

You left out a few prefixes of "million" and "milli", making your analysis way off, at first. There are 30 million cubic meters per sec of gulf stream flow. there are 3 milligrams of Uranium per cubic meter of seawater. So that's 90 Kilos of Uranium per second.

But you're unlikely to be able to intercept more than a thousandth of the gulf stream, so we're back to 90 g per second. the goofs cancel out!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ATraveling_wave_reactor:

". The recent admission by the TerraPower group that they decided "to move fuel through the burn wave instead of having the burn wave move through the fuel" is an implicit acknowledgment that they have not found a true TWR solution. "

Ridiculous.

Their first proposed reactor, which they showed off on their web site for over a year, violated all the basic rules of reactor flux, geometry, and physics.
You can't get nuclea material to burn down, like a cigarette, due to basic geometry and entropy. A totally wacko concept that no real nuclear engineer would entertain, not for a minute.

Their new design is just a teensy bit less wacko.

Indeed. I've been parachuted in to several companies with major software issues.

Three had avoided even starting a migration from hardware and databases that hadn't been supported in a decade or more.

Another placehad no concept of file locking or threading, or QA, and was using 8 different programming languages on just one project.

Two companies that handled 80,000 to 300,000 transactions a day did not have any way of simulating input or comparing the input to output.

One company that depended on several million TCP/IP connections a day had no idea that TCP/IP data might not all arrive in one packet.

Another place whose business was dependent on several custom fonts would not believe the veracity of both the Postscript and TrueType font verifiers when they said "your font has 488 serious errors".

About 3/4 of the places had not a clue what SQL injection was and how they were vulnerable.

The quality of the stuff out there is just horrible.

The source-code ripoff is a ridiculous starting point. CP/M was largely written in PL/M, Intel's quasi high level PL/I-like language. QDOS was written in X86 assembly language. There is no possibel pathway between the two, unless you posit that Tim Patterson somehow got a hold of the PL/M source code, and played the role of a super-optimizing cross-compiler. Ridiculous.

Very variable in accuracy.

A few geek-related pages where I have intimate knowledge of the reality, quite often the Wikipedia page is way, way, way off.

And of course if you make an edit, saying "I WAS THERE, I SPENT 3 YEARS working with that thingy, I HAVE SIX OF THEM IN MY ATTIC", your edit gets removed within an hour, time and again.

Sigh.

Let's see:

Compared to being hit by sunlight:

param. .Water Meter ..Sun

energy. ..0.1 watts. .300 watts
exposure. .1 sec/month .1 hr/day
photon energy . 6E-25 Joules.. 3E-19 Joules

Looks to me like that Sun is DANGEROUS, exposing you to about 3,000 times more energy per unit time, for about 110,000 times longer, and with individual photons 500,000 times more energetic.

The 900MHz radio wave photons are so weak they can't excite any atom to any higher energy level, or cause any kind of chemical change, not by a factor of 1000 or more.

Say what? ANY company "involved"?

I suspect to make nuclear weapons, you need, like, EVERYTHING. Bricks, mortar, screwdrivers, voltmeters, paper, pencils, pens, pipes (lots of pipes), cars, gasoline, welding rods, drill presses, lathes, etc, etc, etc, etc..............

I think you'd be blocking the buying of almost everything, except maybe nail salon services.

A ridiculouos idea, if you're an electrical engineer, for many reasons:

(1) The noise on the wire, for reasonable values of resistors and bandwidth, is down in the low microvolts. If the cable is unshielded, it's going to pick up several microvolts of radio signals per foot. Even if it's really well shielded, we're still talking microvolts per kilometer.

(2) Eve can put a probe signal on the wire, it just has to be random noise. Alice and Bob have no way of proving that a small spike of random noise, only half a standard deviation above the average, isn't perfectly fine Johnson noise coming from the other end. Eve knows the amplitude of the noise she is putting on the wire, so she can subtract that amount, and the difference reveals the values of the resistors.

(3) For any moderately long wire, in the kilometer range, there is a time delay, allowing Eve to inject short bursts of noise and get the resistor info from each end coming back, spread out in time.

(4) Bell Labs proposed this idea, the part about injecting noise inn from both ends, back around 1955.

My son suggested we name our wireless box "FEMA Death Camp #7327"

Ahem, what about the not so insignificant details such as transistor speed, performance, scalability, yield, and reliability?

To get transistors to the level they're at, they've had to be very carefully shrunk and the silicon carefully controlled for resistance and impurity level, something that these deposited semiconductors will be many, many orders of magnitude worse in each and every parameter.

There's not a whole lot of point making transistors that are 1,000 times larger, 1,000,000 more power-hungry, have 100,000 times lower yield, 10,000 times slower, and have 10,000 times shorter life, (as a rough estimate).