I've been hearing about batteries being needed for sun and wind is as long as I've been hearing about sun and wind...

Mouons are interesting things. Too bad that they need to have tremendous energies behind them to exist for any useful period of time-- As you have pointed out, they can and do cause damage.

It would be nice if they were more easily contained and or directed; Mouon induced fusion would be a very interesting thing to explore if focused high energy mouons were a thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Firing such a beam through some hot water would be a very interesting thing indeed.

except active mouons of sufficient energy are unlikely to be emitted on the fly. A mouon has a life expectency of some few dozen milliseconds, tops.

The reason that we have mouons from the sun this far into our atmosphere?

The mouons are created when highly energetic protons and iron nucleii from the solar wind hit our upper atmosphere. (Collisions many times more energetic than anything currently being done at CERN), and these resulting mouons have a significant imparted inertial energy behind them-- they come into being traveling at relativisitc velocities. So, for them, a few dozen miliseconds pass before they decay-- but to us, they exist for several dozens of seconds. Long enough for them to come streaming down from the sky in an endless daylight barrage of partical radiation.

Mouons that come into being from fission decay reactions arent quite as energetic-- but still useful for imaging purposes. However, being less energetic, they dont live as long to outside observers, like us.

What am I getting at here?

Dr Manhattan is unlikely to come into being from energetic mouons interacting with fissile reactor fuel rods. Transporting said fuel rods by air exposes them to shittons of them. So far, no superheros have been born this way. :D

Quite a fucking stretch on that one, buddy. Just shows how desperate you are to blame everything on him.

So, basically your counter arguments are:

"You misspelled something! OMG!" + "You disagree with my premade conclusions! Evidence be damned!" +"You pointed out something that's true! OMG, you must be a libtard! (Here's a hint for you, I dont intend to wax philosophically on why government has to spend energy and resources doing those things- Only pointing out that it does, and that because it does, it has a competing focus.)" = "ABORT! ABORT! I cant handle this! YOU SPEAK CRAZINESS!"

Or, in other words, your whole chain of counter arguments basically boils down to "Your statements disagree with my beliefs, so I will simply insult you for being stupid, because I dont have any REAL counter arguments"

There's quite a few other groups in the US which take a similar path to argument. Most have pretty bad reputations, given that they try to bootstomp science, lie, make shit up, and generally ignore objective reality. I am sure you know which groups I am referring to without my specifically naming them.

Any time you have a belief, instead of an opinion, there is going to be this problem where you are going to be systemically unable to process another's ideas. This is NOT a virtue sir.

lolwut?

Are you really so naive to think this isn't going on?

The FBI is a bureau (it's in their name), not an agency. And they're in the Dept of Justice, not Treasury.

I was really excited to see that new builds of ffmpeg (which is FOSS) implement the hqx family of filters, but I've also read that these filters are pretty outdated at this point. So I was hoping that this article would be a comparison of upscaling algorithms, both free and proprietary. But alas...

This is why the obvious solution is to compartmentalize the artificial gravity habitats:

You have a single, exterior shell, which does NOT rotate. This allows spacewalks without all those nasty issues.

Inside this shell, you have several cylendrical habitats that counter-rotate. The combined rotational force is a net zero, which is why the exterior shell does not rotate.

(Simplest configuration-- One long cylendar, with two cylendars inside. One of these rotates clockwise, the other counter clockwise. The long axis of all cylendars is conserved.)

This would allow you to use the gravitational habitats as reaction control wheels. They could also be spun down for easy maintenance-- Being INSIDE the vehicle's outer shell, the whole interstitial space between the habitat and the outer hull could be pressurized. Maintenance to the moving parts would be radically less difficult, and lost tools would only happen on exterior hull maintenance. Again, exterior hull DOES NOT SPIN.

The reason we dont design space vessels this way is very blunt: It costs a WHOLE FUCKING LOT OF MONEY to orbit just a few pounds of weight. Proper design is easy--- Logistics of lofting something that works, even halfassed, is NOT.

This argument isnt about long term space missions.

This argument is really about why we arent using the moon for staging our orbiting vehicle construction.

If we used the moon this way, we could AFFORD to build CORRECT space vehicles that DO supply sufficient shielding.

We dont, because that means having a real, self-sustaining colony on the moon, which means having joe sixpack in space, and all the trappings that go with it. (Space pubs/bars, and space hookers. No society in the history of mankind has been without them. The moon would be no different.) This is VERY unattractive to high-minded politicians and researchers. NOBODY wants to be the guy who puts space whores on the moon.

However, private industry has no such qualms. They will happily put "Candy" on the moon, to do her low G poledance routine, as long as she can pay the ficket price for her flight.

We will get there eventually; but really, we should have been more aggressive about getting things set up and running on the moon.

Politically, government has to contend with things like "Making sure single mothers and orphans get subsidized health and food services"-- Again, private industry has no such requirement.

It wont be pretty, but at least it will eventually get there. Just dont expect star trek.

Instead, the grim spectre is "The company store". (I wouldnt be surprised if the early privatized space agencies actually negotiate a fee for candy's services, and actually ship her up themselves!) The companies that fund and build the colony sites up there are going to have literal material monopolies on everything from power, to water, to air, to food. And in a potentially unregulatable environment. Nasty business.

But again-- we WILL eventually get there, but the end result wont be roses and sunshine. Government is not capable of the sustained attention focus in the face of voter interests--- and private industry has no real humanitarian interests.

Private indsutry will go anywhere and do anything that people are willing to pay money for, and will tailor its actions to maximize its financial bottom line. -- That's a two edged sword of truth. (If there's a market, and profit to be made in sacrificing babies to Satan, they would cheerfully sacrifice as many babies as possible to get that money given half the chance. Private industry is NOT a moral actor.)

There is a vast and untapped market in space. The need for orbiting telecom, and improved service and uptime of same, is only getting greater by the minute. The first group to succeed in getting a viable colony on the moon to provide manufacturing, orbiting, and service agreements for terrestrial satellites (based from the moon, where such service can be cheap) will have a veritable monopoly, PLANET WIDE. The financial forcast for that is astounding. Properly managed, that opens the door to monopolized interplanetary flights as well. People who dont see this do not see the big picture. Private industry however DOES. That's why bigtime venture captialists like Musk and pals are all over it like flies on shit.

So, again-- it WILL eventually happen, because that's how you win in that game, and given who is playing now.

And again, it wont be pretty.

Until that time however, we are limited in what we can launch, financially. Which is why we have spacecraft that dont simulate gravity, and are literally made from metal foil, like potato chip bags are made of--- which just so happens to be why most astronaughts develop highly conspicuous occupationally derived health problems.

Do you find your 10-day workweeks more convenient, now that you've completely gone over to the metric system?

Not satire. US person number will look like 703-XXX-XXXX or something like that. Lets you know the number is known and is associated with a US person. You can also label a number as US and it will then be masked. There are other safeguards as well.

Icreach user here. Records are not dossiers, but call metadata, as in this number called that other number. Or did you think there were 850 billion people alive? Also, congress mandated NSA share data after 9/11, and icreach was created to do that.

Wine.

This allows wine to run on exotic hardware. (Well, at least ARMv7)

This means that theoretically, tablet-flavor windows applications can be run on linux derived tablet OSes with wine libraries, and other fun things.

You should not be so cynical about something like this. It's a feature that's been missing from the landscape for some time now.

The gyroscopes and accelerometers are two different things. The gryoscope measures tilt of the device, like when you play a racing game. The accelerometer measures change in velocity, like when you shake the phone to shuffle a playlist. Two different sensors.

And no, the gyroscope in your phone does not spin; it is solid state.