Get a bit better perspective on this by watching the tazing videos on YouTube.

Basically, it seems, if you repeatedly refuse to follow a simple police command, like "get out of the vehicle" or "lay down on the ground", after 10 or 20 repetitions, the cops have the option of tazing you. Apparently this is SOP. The old-school way was to chicken choke or baton-choke you. You decide which is better.

This isn't really news. The original version of the Smyth Report mentioned research into using Thorium. The second edition deleted that paragraph. It was the only notable change from edition to edition. We're pretty sure the KGB noticed the change and went, like, "Hmmmmm...".

So it's what, a $4 increase in a BOM that totals out around $200? This is news?

I'm thinking there is some UL or ISO or Euro standard that makes it difficult to make server chassis out of flammable materials, and stack dozens of them in a rack, while running 240VAC through them and with lots of cooling air to fan the flames.

let's say it's high noon and you have a plane with every outside surface covered with solar cells.

Now a 747-400 has a wing area of around 6000 square feet.

Full sunlight falling on 6000 square feet, or about 666 square yards, generates about 100,000 watts.

There are 746 watts per horsepower, so you have about 134 horsepower to work with.

Unfortunately a 747-400 needs about 80,000 horses just to stay in the air.

We are only about a factor of 600 short on the horsepower front.

Ah yes, all we have to do is find an algebraic equation whose 1542 roots happen to match packet #1767 of the Angry Birds video. And whose coefficients take up less than 5%, 75 bytes lets say.

I thought up this compression scheme in 8th grade. even then I knew there just had to be some basic problem with it.

This could be a replay of the old days of mainframes. At more than one company, the engineers came up with mainframes on a desk, but the marketers could not see selling a desktop mainframe at the old 7-digit prices. So they just making the big boxes, til their eventual death. This happened to CDC, Data General, Digital, and Perkin-Elmer to name a few. Intel will undoubtedly survive, but it could be a long painful decline or change of direction. The "new architecture" fanatics there probably don't have much traction after the Itanium disaster.

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.