It's the same reason why many of the oppose geothermal power, keeping Hawaii reliant on burning oil for most of its electricity. Also why there's opposition to even trying to redirect lava flows as most countries do when their people are threatened (with a number of successful redirects having been achieved).

Apparently Pele wants people to be ignorant of the cosmos, to destroy the climate, and to lose their dearest possessions without putting up a fight.

I've seen plenty of work on accelerator-drive heavy isotope reactors but nothing for light isotope reactors like lithium. Accelerator driven heavy isotope reactors still deal with many of the problems of conventional fission reactors - they're greatly improved in many regards, but still problematic (you still have some plutonium, you still have some fuel availability/cost limitations, you still have some long-lived waste, you still have some harder to shield radiation, you still have a wide range of daughter products making corrosion control more challenging, etc - just not to the degree of a regular fission reactor). A light isotope reactor using lithium would virtually eliminate all of these problems. And it has a higher burnup ratio, which is of course critical for space uses.

And while everything I've seen about past improvements in accelerator efficiencies and spallation process improvements, and what's being worked on now, suggests no limit any time soon on neutron production efficiencies - at least that's how it looks from the papers I've read. Plus, even if efficiencies couldn't be improved any further (there's not that much further one needs to go), one could hybridize a heavy isotope and light isotope reactor, using a heavy isotope target as a neutron multiplier to bombard the lithium. You'd require significantly reduced quantities of heavy isotopes relative to a pure heavy isotope reactor, and most of the energy from the lithium side could be as mentioned captured without Carnot losses, which is a big bonus. Any non-thermalized neutrons of sufficient energy would produce tritium as a byproduct, which of course would be a value-added product - in fact, given that the tritium-breeding reaction with 7Li and a high energy neutron yields a lower-energy neutron, the thermalization could potentially be done via tritium breeding in the first place. And tritium is a valuable product whether one has interest in D-T fusion or not.

I just think it's weird that I've not come across any work on a lithium-based accelerator-driven spallation reactor, and was just wondering if there's a reason for that. It certainly looks appealing to my non-expert eyes. I mean, it looks even cleaner and more fuel-available than D-T fusion, and looks closer to being viable on a full-system perspective. Versus accelerator-driven heavy isotope fission you get less power per neutron (about a quarter as much), of course, even accounting for Carnot losses in the former - but that's not what matters. Cost is what matters, and if you're eliminating the use of super-expensive fuel, not producing any costly-to-manage waste, have no incident radiation, no proliferation concerns, etc, you're completely changing the cost picture - without even considering the possible joint production of saleable tritium.

I have a polite canned reply, which basically says that unless the recruiter's client is looking for developers to work 100% remotely, AND that their pay scales are likely to exceed Google's by a significant margin, AND that they do really cool stuff, then I'm not interested. Oh, and I don't do referrals of friends (they get plenty of spam themselves).

I don't actually mind the recruiter spam. It only takes a couple of keystrokes to fire the canned response, and there's always the possibility that someone will have an opportunity that meets my criteria. Not likely, but possible. I'm not looking for a new job, but if an opportunity satisfies my interest requirements, I'm always open to a discussion.

However, when they keep pushing even when they know their job doesn't fit my requirements, then I get pissed and blackhole their agency. That also takes only a couple of keystrokes :-)

That's one way. There are always other options. The key is to hook in at the layer that you're debugging. The wire is almost never that layer, unless you're debugging the network card driver. Or the hardware, but in that case Wireshark (or Ethereal, as I still think of it in my head) is usually too high-level.

I own a 2001 Honda Insight hybrid modified to be a PHEV and plugged in nightly to charge on geothermal power.... and a Ford Ranger ;) The "why" is obvious, because I have regular needs to carry big heavy things, now that I own land in the countryside. Back when I had no such need... I didn't own any such vehicle.

I guess it's hard for him to imagine that a woman would have a need to carry large and/or heavy items?

And the crazy thing is, they did consult with male colleagues before publishing. The reviewer just assumed that because two women submitted a paper with a conclusion that he disagreed with, that it's specifically because they're women "making ideologically biased assumptions" who refuse to talk to men.

Oh hey, since we've got (assumedly) a lot of physics nerds on this thread, and because my mind hasn't suddenly stopped being curious about random topics even though I grew old: here's one of my more recent things that left me with unanswered questions:

One of the commonly cited tritium-generating reactions is 7Li+n(>2.466 MeV) -> 4He + 3H. But is 7Li not also capable of transmutation to 8Li via slow neutron capture? If so would that not yield a 16.004 MeV beta to 8Be, and then immediately into 2 alphas with an additional energy of 0.092 MeV? If so, is there not potential for a future nuclear reactor? Spallation currently yields neutrons for about 25MeV each. If one could cut that in half or less - which I don't see any laws of physics in the way, just improvements in accelerator efficiencies and the spallation process - could this not yield a net positive, using direct deceleration/capture of the beta to generate power without having to suffer Carnot losses? And if so, would that not be a very desireable reactor - nonproliferative, abundant fuel, harmless waste, high ratio of fuel to energy conversion, direct spacecraft thrust possibilities, etc? Or am I totally off base here?

Haha, my concept as a child was to have a buoyant container on wheels in a tube full of water that would rise up, roll down a ramp on the other side, and re-enter the tube through an airlock on the bottom.

Wish my dad had taken the time to tell me why it wouldn't work rather than just saying "perpetual motion is impossible".

Or, rather than all of physics being wrong, maybe they have an erroneous measurement setup.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't investigate anomalous measurements. But at this stage you shouldn't be writing fluff pieces with page after page of how much your new technology will change spaceflight. You should be publishing a paper with a name like "Measurement of anomalous thrust in a microwave apparatus operated in a hard vacuum" and trying to avoid the media insomuch as possible - and when you need to talk with them, trying to explain "we don't know what's going on... we have some theories but they're controversial... we need to do more testing." etc.

What bank is this? There's nothing wrong with public shaming in cases like this, in fact it does the world a service.

Also, you should seriously consider switching banks. Your post prompted me to check the banks I use. One is great, one is okay. I'll watch the okay one.

Yes, it is, and the same holds everywhere. Being able to grab the data on the wire has long been an easy way to get sort of what you want to see, but it's almost never exactly what you're really looking for. HTTPS will force us to hook in elsewhere to debug, but the "elsewhere" will almost certainly be a better choice anyway.

Nonsense. The people running the OpenSSL project are competent and dedicated. OpenSSL's problem was lack of resources. It was a side project with occasional funding to implement specific new features, and the funders of new features weren't interested in paying extra to have their features properly integrated and tested. That's not a recipe for great success with something that really needs a full-time team.

- there is absolutely 0 wrong with providing a company with a promise to buy scheduled services on the clock without interruptions and to pay for the service whether or not you can use 100% of its capacity that day.

If I want to start a shipping business I can talk to an import/export broker and work out a schedule, where regardless of my circumstances I will ship 1 container every 2 days with him on a clock and because of that certainty of payment he will give me a much better price than he could anybody else.

As to Rockefeller's 'secret deal to prevent shipping for others' - baloney. The so called 'secret deal' was no such thing, it was a discount that Rockefeller was getting that nobody else could get because they would not ship a supply of that much oil on the clock, whether they have it or not that time and pay for a prearranged amount of delivery as promised.

Rockefeller was absolutely right and the reason that oil never went below 7 cents was exactly because government destroyed his company and did not allow him to find new ways to increase demand by lowering prices even further. Nobody was finding any better way of doing business in that time, otherwise they would have won against Rockefeller and that is all there is to it.

Microsoft had a temporary monopoly for a very good reason: they provided the computing platform that nobody else could provide at the price and just because you can't accept that doesn't change that fact. Microsoft and others also pushed hard enough in the market that competitors actually had to innovate to become competitive in that market, which is how free and open source software came to existence.

As to me being 'religious' about free market - I cannot stand hypocrisy of the modern society that will vilify the individual and promote the collective and use the force of the collective to oppress the individual. If I am 'religious' about anything that would be the belief that individual freedom tramps every so called 'societal good' that you can come up with that is based on lies, oppression, destruction of the individual, theft from the individual, slavery of the individual by the collective.