It will be interesting to see whether this research on the phenomenon in the large scale produces insights useful at the smaller scale of fusion plasma confinement.

In case it's not clear, magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of magnetic field/plasma interaction. (Without the plasma and its currents (or extreme accelerations like those around black holes) the magnetic field wouldn't be simultaneously twisted up and bent around so it can reconnect differently.

I see two ways this might apply to plasma confinement in fusion systems:
  * It may give insight into the details of plasma instabilities and lead to ways to suppress them - enough for a practical reactor.
  * It might lead to a way to use the phenomenon deliberately, to produce a (probably pulsed) past-breakeven plasma confinement, along the lines of Dense Plasma Focus.

The hit is taken by the store owners and their landlords. [Insurance usually has escape clauses for riots.]

Just heard on the news that more than half of the stores destroyed last night in Fergusun were minority owned, too. (I think it was actually "black owned" but I'm not sure.)

IMHO the main point of the burning is so that, once the stores have been looted, the evidence of who did it is largely destroyed. Video survelience tapes, fingerprints, serial number records, ...

To heck with the local charges - why the hell hasn't Holder's Justice Department filed federal civil rights charges against the officer?

They're working on it.

They generally hold off on those until the state's criminal justice aparatus has had a chance to product the verdict they want. They'll file once the state system has "failed". Like maybe this week or next.

Black Friday starts tonight. Insurance companies to take the hit.

No. The hit is taken by the store owners and their landlords. Insurance policies generally exclude damage during riots, along with other civil insurrections and wars.

The net result of rioting that involves looting and/or store trashing is stores that move out or go out of business. Lots of little family businesses are bankrupted, while the big box store chains look at all the red ink and don't reopen. (That's why the Koreans were on the roofs of their stores with guns during the Rodney King post-verdict activities in Los Angeles.)

Think there's a shortage of decent-paying (or paying at all) jobs in Ferguson? Just wait... (This is what happened to Oakland, California, which is mopping up the last holdouts tonight "in sympathy with Ferguson".)

Lenovo's stupid touchpad destroys the posting, just as it's being posted, once again:

They're not interested in any kind of justice. They're only interested in revenge.

And loot.

Christmas is coming up, after all. Time to do a little shopping. You can afford a lot more stuff when you apply the five-finger discount.

Assuming you don't get captured or shot, of course. But so far the cops are just standing back and letting the looters go at it. The hundred forty plus shots reported (at last count) are all attributed to the "protestors". (No word on whether any are from those defending themselves their families, or their property from looters and vandals.)

They're not interested in any kind of justice. They're only interested in revenge.

And loot.

Christmas is coming up, after all. Time to do a little shopping. You can afford a lot more stuff when you apply the five-finger discount.
attributed to the "protestors". (No word on whether any are from those defending themselves their families, or their property from looters and vandals.)

That doesn't appear to be true.

And to prove that you're quoting Soviet propaganda from a quarter of a century ago? You're way out of date.

Not to mention, the LK wasn't even tested until 1971... hardly "ready to go" in 1968. On top of that, the Soyuz 7LK1 didn't have a successful test (I.E. one the crew would have survived) until 1969.

Your alleged only runner in the race is completely false. Good grief man, read some history.

I have - extensively. I also, unlike you, grasp that the topic of discussion is the *Moon* race - which indeed, we were essentially the only runner in. If you expand it to include the whole of the space race, the Soviet Union still doesn't fare much better... after the empty 'firsts' you list, Gemini gets rolling in 1964 and racked up practical first after practical first. Leaving the Soviets behind for the balance of the race.
 

Your other statements about JFK backing away is just as wrong, at least in terms of the race to the Moon. Are you confusing US involvement in Vietnam with the Space Race or something? You sure don't seem to have any concern for actual events and history.

See my other message for links. And no, I'm not confusing anything with anything - I'm relating actual facts and history.

And why had we been developing the engines in the first place?

Sheer lack of anything better to do. Seriously, it started as a (USAF) research project to develop a million pound thrust engine - not a booster program, and there wasn't a particular or intended use.
 

Looked at one way the goal itself did nothing practical for us, it was all the things we had to learn to be able to achieve it.

Except... we learned very little in the process of achieving it. The number of practical technological advancements that came out of Apollo can be counted on the thumbs of one foot. The tight deadline mitigated against developing any new technologies, and as a result Apollo was a plagiarizer. Taking a bit here, and a bit there, and duct taping the whole affair together and claiming it as it's own.

And if you go by federal laws which require truck drivers to take a 30 minute break within the firs 8 hours of their maximum 11 hour drives, then the requirement to recharge doesn't really seem like a big deal.

0.o? That has to be the most nonsensical thing I've ever heard.

And it's great that you can drive for 16 hours just about straight through, but put a wife and two kids in the car and good luck with that.

My dad did it with a wife and four kids.

And that you ignored my other scenario.. well, that's telling.

...to use a natural gas home filling station to power a fuel cell car. It might make more sense to just use the gas to power a more conventional combustion engine. CNG engines are simpler and have been around forever.

Using natural gas to power a fuel cell in a vehicle would require an onboard reformer. The process is rather complex to implement at such a small size, involves some temperature extremes and produces carbon dioxide in the end anyways. Though i suppose if done right it would be quite a bit more efficient than a regular combustion engine.

Why are people so quick to go to the sci-fi stories of the army of robots rising up to destroy humanity when there's still ample room for exploration of the robot's masters subjugating Earth to their will (a far likelier prospect, to boot?)

Weak. Cliché.

I also subscribe to the "great filter" theory. About 25 years after the radio was invented, we were busy gassing each other in trenches, followed closely by a global pandemic, then mass genocide, then teetering on the edge of nuclear war. That's not a very wide window for aliens to notice our presence, if they rely on artificial radio waves to detect intelligent life.

My take is that technological improvements make radio sound like noise after a few decades. Early radios systems are very simple things which have signals (CW, AM, FM, ...) that are very distinct from electrical and thermal noise. Their signals were both drastically different from, and drastically stronger than, the background, enabling simple detectors to separate a signal's information from all that chaff.

Modern radios (such as spread spectrum systems, especially OFDM) squeeze nearly the Shannon Limit out of precious bandwidth (and also be frugal with transmit power) by using nearly all of it to carry information. This makes them virtually indistinguishable from a celestial object with a little extra heat (buried among things like stars, which have a LOT of heat).

It was only about 120 years from when Hertz and Tesla started making easily detectable radio waves to the Analog Television Shutdown, a significant milepost in the decommissioning of easily detectable radio signatures. I expect that, within anther few decades, the Earth will be emitting very little that might be recognizable as a radio signature of intelligent life, unless we expend a bunch of energy sending such a signature deliberately.

So my solution to the mystery expressed in the Drake Equation is that L (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space) is short, not due to the falls of civilizations, but to economic incentives to use the aether only in ways that are no longer noticeable at a distance.

Also; you can't call it "Engineering" if you don't have a process that is well-documented, tested, proven, and repeatable. Also: good luck with that.

Just remember to get buy-in from ALL stakeholders, first!

(good luck with that).