Comment Re:How much money are YOU making? (Score 2) 60
And that means what, exactly?
Salary has no direct link with competence or usefulness.
And that means what, exactly?
Salary has no direct link with competence or usefulness.
The reason lithium-6 deuteride is used in thermonuclear weapons is because it creates tritium and deuterium once bombarded with X-rays produced by the detonation of a fission device, which can then fuse due to the heat and pressure of said detonation to make an even bigger bang; and it's a more maintainable device due to not having to deal with refreshing the tritium all the time because it tends to half-life away, unlike the stable lithium-6 deuteride.
Also, lithium-6 is separated from the >92% of lithium-7 specifically for the creation of nuclear weapons, which nobody is doing anymore because the nuclear powers already have shit tons of it laying around from decommissioning warheads. Which also says nothing about how your phone battery has exactly 0.0% deuterium in it, and even if it did, it's unlikely that you'd be bombarding your phone battery with the X-ray output of a fission bomb at the moment of supercriticality; and if you were, you'd likely have other problems. Like being a wisp of vapor being quickly scattered over the landscape.
I'm thankful for that. The failure mode of most mechanical problems with an average car is that it gently rolls to the side of the road. The failure mode of most mechanical problems with an average light aircraft is plummeting to death, and likely destroying something below you in the process.
Think of all the nitwits you see on the freeway, and then imagine them with hands on stick in a Cessna. No, thanks.
Burning wood is far better for the environment than burning coal or oil. Planting new trees will pull the carbon out of the air to make the tree grow, and trees replenish many orders of magnitude faster than coal or oil. It also doesn't release nearly the chemical filth that burning oil and coal does.
Wood may not be as energetic as oil or coal, but not exactly "bad."
It's because the electrons aren't actually allowed to pass over the border - they end up just getting agitated and wait in line. Like I do at the airport.
(Joke is meant for AC interties only.)
think Houston and it's suburbs.
Okay, I'm thinking about Houston and it's suburbs. Can we flood it and use it for power generation?
To US Energy Dept. estimated, in 2012, that there is ~12GW worth of power that could be tapped from existing, non-power-producing dams [energy.gov]. That's handily 10% more hydro than what we've got now.
10%? Check your math.
One dam on the Columbia puts out 6.8GW by itself.
It's more a problem that pretty much any river in the US that is suitable for a large hydro project, already has large hydro projects built in the 1930s through 1960s.
We weren't afraid of mega-dam projects in the past - look at some of the dams on the Columbia as proof, specifically the Grand Coulee Dam which holds back 9 km^3 of water and produces 6800 MW of power - over 3x what Hoover Dam puts out. And it's one of 14 dams on the Columbia.
There's a reason why we have both the words "renewable" and "sustainable" - they do not mean the same thing.
Costa Rica will get more rain, which will "renew" the reservoirs behind the hydro dams. It's not raining 100% of the time, and the hydro dams release more volume of water than the rain provides in the same unit time, so it's not completely sustainable. But it is still a renewable resource.
No, but then some government body has a list of people that were so concerned with government eavesdropping that they went out of their way to prevent it. Sounds like a target list for investigation / abuse of power to me.
Well, it would no longer be mobile except for the couple million gallons of water they hosed over the whole thing. I imagine that made some of it mobile in ways that people don't appreciate.
The problem being it's utter bollocks [google.com]. Anything that becomes molten will mix into the fuel and dilute it, lowering the reaction rate and moving you further and further away from a self-sustaining reaction.
That's not the only reason it's complete horseshit - once you actually get to the center of the planet, the melting whatever that magically never dilutes would be moving opposite of gravity.
The whole concept is patently stupid.
Isn't it though? I remember when iTunes actually wasn't a completely fucked up pile of shit. It's been a long time.
Wait, are you saying that if you buy two devices from the same manufacturer, that they might work better together than two devices from wildly different vendors?
CRAZY TALK.
I haven't plugged my iPhone into anything iTunes since the iOS 5 release that allowed over-the-air updates and iCloud backup.
iTunes is a complete non-factor, and has been for years.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
