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Comment Re:Congrats Mark Zuckerberg (Score 1) 89

When people say Detroit, they mean the Greater Metropolitan Detroit Area, Detroit proper has lost 25% of it's population, not dissimilar to places like Ethiopia, Darfur and Rowanda; where as you mean Detroit meaning the area including the new General Motors data center in Rochester Hills I'm seeing ads and job fairs for anything IT, Software Engineering, mechanical and or automotive engineering. There's lots of startups and high-tech 50 minutes down the road near Ann Arbor (where /. started BTW) and in between. The cost of living is favorable in Michigan right now.

Comment Re: intuitively I would think steam would be bette (Score 1) 217

The problem with propane or any other LNG is they don't want some "Luke Skywalker" to get off one lucky shot and blow the whole thing up, which is what flammable highly compressed gasses tend to do. Most ships run on bunker fuel, and that's more like thick fuel oil rather than traditional diesel, they even have to heat it to get it to burn in the engines.

Comment Re:Sheesh! Some numbers. (Score 1) 217

Primary and secondary loops are, cooling for the secondary loop is seawater, I strongly suspect there are evaporators for fresh water use, I suspect that even gas turbine powered ships will have evaporators in their exhaust stream primarily for IR signature reduction and fresh water as a secondary benefit.

Comment Re:Too hard to use (unfortunately) (Score 1) 138

One advantage would be that right now only high value information is encrypted, so the opposing entities can assume that anything encrypted is high value info. Encryption works because it keeps the cost of decrypting higher than the value of the information, if all of the crap flying was encrypted then the cost of getting the high value info would skyrocket so my sales presentation would be more secure from industrial spies because "Mary found a lost lamb on her farm" notices are encrypted too.

Comment Re:Doesn't get it (Score 1) 306

So why not, instead of teaching these 11 year olds computer programs i.e. clear, concise, logical instructions to machines, we teach them to give clear, concise, logical instructions in general? If an 11 yo has a mind that is wired to program, it's going to be impossible to stop him, if it isn't you'll probably turn him off for life; unless by programing your talking about Logo which the kids would love, but learning a Lisp dialect at that tender age could very likely make learning procedural languages more difficult later in life.

Comment Re:They are just going to end it all. (Score 1) 148

Dude If that thing spawns an "Earth eating black hole" living next door to it would be like about Mars. What everybody forgets is a blackhole has conservation of mass, charge and angular momentum, so a blackhole whizzing around the LHC ring would act pretty much like every other thingy whizzing around with the same mass, charge and angular momentum. Even if the blackhole escaped the ring, it would only be a blackhole as long as it's energy was high enough to maintain it's event horizon; that energy is dependant on it's velocity, which is a vector involving speed and direction! Yeah that's right a quantum blackhole can un-blacken if it collides with another particle and loses energy, it can un-blacken through Hawking radiation and it's only black if your close enough to it's direction of travel.

Comment Re:Which string theory? (Score 0) 148

Imagine a "theory" with a bunch of adjustments. So many adjustmentrs that no matter what happens, there is some adjustment that canm be made such that it "retroactively) predicts it. That is string theory.

The big problem with string "theory" is that it predicts everything and so, nothing.

String toolkit might be a better name. It is just that, a bag of parts and tools that might one day be used to construct a theory that predicts something in particular.

So your saying that Climatology is a sub-discipline of String Theory?

Comment Re:a microscopic black hole won't hurt you (Score 1) 148

Close but the Schwartzschild radius solution only applies to non-rotating bodies and any particle I can think of that is subject to relativistic mass increases also have spin, a closer fit would be a Kerr–Newman metric, however I'd assume that these solutions ignore external gravitational fields, which might be valid approximation over interstellar distances, it might not be valid in Earth's atmosphere for cosmic rays or inside the LHC. Perhaps a real physicist could chime in with a more learned point of view.

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