OK, then. That's just full on moronic.

Actually, I am a pragmatist who is quite interested in nuclear technology and its applications. I am also a pragmatist. I am also quite interested in technology in general. Due to those things, I evaluate technology based on utility. By virtually every metric I find suitable for measuring, current renewables seem to beat nuclear power as pragmatic power sources for the majority of both electrical generation and, longer-term, primary power generation. I have listed the reasons why over and over and over again.

I have looked at those numbers, evaluated them in the larger context of overall decarbonization of power, questioned the change over time of the numbers and, most critically pointed out that the 19 grams of CO2 per kWh generated seems to be impossible considering that France burns garbage to generate electricity and still has overall about 6% of its electricity generated by burning things. Since pretty much the absolute most efficient thing in terms of CO2 produced that you can burn for electricity is natural gas at 450 grams of CO2 per kWh, that 6% should have France up at least at 27 grams of CO2 per kWh, and probably higher. I have asked you about that multiple times and you just will not answer. Also, you go on and on about how much France generates from nuclear power, but it's actually 6% from burning stuff and about 67% from nuclear power. What do you think the other 27% is from? The simple fact is that you have not actually done any sort of critical analysis. You can play the schoolyard game of trying to turn the accusation around on me, but it is pretty obvious that you're the one who does not bother to inform themselves and ignores inconvenient facts due to your fanaticism ("Nuclear for life" as your .sig says)

For electricity generation alone, or for primary power in general? Also, can you confirm that France actually does meet this since your 19 g per kWh seems impossible given the facts.

Uh, sure. You know Volkswagen stopped being a state enterprise back in the 1960's, right? Technically, there were still some government owned shares, but they were divested years before the scandal. Also, there were a whole lot of car companies that were cheating (and let's face it, continue to) cheat on emissions testing. Yet another reason to move away from ICE vehicles, but not exactly some sort of indictment of the German government when it comes to figures on CO2 emissions from power generation. I mean, it's kind of hard to fake those numbers since the fuel consumption, efficiency of the plants, and typical CO2 produced when burning a particular fuel are all pretty well known and EU regulators as well as a ton of others would be all over a discrepancy in the numbers. All that said of course, I do not think that you are particularly reliable at sourcing your numbers because of the France CO2 per kWh discrepancy I have noted over and over again. I will give you the benefit of the doubt over whether you are cherrypicking, but I do suspect you may be comparing apples to oranges.

I don't recall having to pay that much for rentals, but like I said, these trips were when I was younger. They were also when I would splurge after saving up. In any case, it's not like I always did rentals, just when it made sense.

My logic on such trips is that vehicle range is not a huge obstacle for trips I would take for a long weekend. I generally avoid vacation trips where the travel time is too high a percentage of the actual vacation time. So, for a long weekend trip, I would not need a vehicle with either extended range or extra space (not to mention that one of my current vehicles is an ICE with extra space, although that just reminded me that the battery in it is dead and I need to charge the battery and take it for a drive).

The trips I was talking about were thousand plus miles each way to stay for a week at the very least. Also usually with about five people to locations with various pricey things to pay for.

I wasn't even really commenting on your actual argument. I'm not the poster you were discussing that with. I was actually just commenting on simply linking to youtube videos to support an argument without actually making the argument.

Fair enough. I was basically just trying to express that there is no general solution. However, what I should note is that one of the things that prevents a general solution is the assumption of an infinite universe. If the universe and information are finite and if the speed of light is the universal speed limit then it appears that they are (at least the observable universe, which is the universe for all intents and purposes) then many problems that fall apart because of problems with infinity no longer have that issue because a Platonic universe of math is just not actually a thing. In that case the universe can definitely be a simulation run on more capable hardware than our observable universe.

Well, it was more a work on theology and philosophy than math. But Pascal was a mathematician, so he should have known better than some of the mistakes he made. Of course, it was also from his private notes and he never published it and it may have been a disservice to him for anyone to have published it. He was almost certainly intending some version of the Wager for inclusion in a book on Christianity he was working on, but he might not have published it as it was.

Aside from just the possibility of a demon posing as a fake god, Pascal ignored, probably willfully, the multitude of other religions with mutually incompatible systems of eternal reward or punishment. The whole wager breaks down because it presents a false dichotomy: believe or don't believe when the options are actually to believe in the null set, {a}, {b}, {c}, {d}... or indeed in various combination sets. As it stood, Pascal was a Catholic, and clearly there's an issue, especially at the time as you point out with Catholicism vs. Protestantism. Additionally though, Pascal himself was part of a Catholic sect that was considered heretical by mainstream Catholicism. So the whole Wager is a mess from the start because of the false dichotomy.

This, of course, is not the only problem with the wager. The other major one of course is that Pascal did not have a modern understanding of infinity and was using it in arithmetic in ways that are invalid mathematically.

Well, while I would not necessarily use the term bootlicker, the term "christian apologist" certainly applied. In any case, Pascal was sickly through his entire life. Apparently he had Celiac disease and neurological problems and, when he died at 39, he had a severe brain lesion. It is quite possible that those medical issues led to the supposed religious experience he had in his early 30's. The description of it as a "night of fire" suggests to me that he may have had some sort of ecstatic seizure. That, combined with a lifetime of being sickly and with a potential expectation of early death probably pushed him towards rejection of "the god of philosophers" and embrace of Christianity. Sadly, after that, he largely abandoned any serious works on science and math and turned to religion and philosophy.

As a game developer: Even a few percent are, as the article points out, millions of users. Us indie devs cannot compete with AAA studios in marketing. It's not that the playing field isn't level, it's not even the same playing field.

But in a niche, you have a good chance to be noticed and word of mouth spreading. And that means grabbing as much of the niche as you possibly can.

And it matters to you Windos users as well, because it means games are developed without being tied to a specific OS or driver feature. Which means your new game will run even if you're not running it on the latest hardware.

And finally, it matters because Linux gamers are more useful to a game developer. Maybe 3% of the Steam users run Linux, but for my last game, at least 30% of the useful bug reports came from Linux users.

This is completely irrelevant. Do you not understand the difference between rhetoric and logic?

That is just idiotic. There are multiple equations of state that can describe water at its triple point. More to the point, are schizophrenic? Or high? The deep meaning that you seem to think these questions have seems like the result of a disassociative mental state.

Almost certainly not an infinitesimal point. General relativity is just a model, not some form of universal law.

What is your point with all this garbage. This last one seems like a tautology.

I am seeing a pattern here where a lot of your questions seem to be about a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of infinity and misapplication of that concept in basic arithmetic. Are you going to do Pascal's Wager next (among the flaws of which is the use of infinity in basic arithmetic)

Yep, more issues with infinity.

And, yet again, a problem with infinity.

I have good news, especially for the actual article under discussion rather than all this garbage you're tossing out. If the speed of light holds, then the observable universe is the universe and it is finite. That's one more nail in the coffin of both the topic that should actually be under discussion and for most of this nonsense you're throwing out devoid of any sort of context or argument. That's because a finite universe does not have a Platonic Universe of pure math as any part of it. Anything and everything that can be computed is actually finite, constrained by the material substance of the universe (matter, energy, other?). It is really, really, really, really big, but that would not be a problem for an even bigger computer to run the simulation on. Not that I put much stock in simulation theory. It's an interesting thought experiment to a point, but ultimately devolves into a just another form of nihilism. If it's true and we keep researching our universe, we will eventually find the Easter eggs if there are any. If there are not any Easter eggs, then it's simply unknowable to us and there's just no point in worrying about it.

No, it is not. "Too big to fail" is just bullshit bingo. The reason banks et al managed to get saved by taxpayer money with that phrase wasn't that they were. It was that they had a solidly entrenched lobby and connections at the highest levels. "Too big to fail" was simply the icing they coated the shit with to make the public swallow it.

Good grief, it's all just circular with you. As I posted, four posts back:

It's not a fact because it's undefined. What are your actual criteria for what constitutes success or failure in this context (and don't just post the two numbers you constantly post over again for this, it's a serious question). What objective criteria do you actually propose as concrete goalposts.

Why?

Wow, not sure what you are doing to your vacuums, but I've had two that easily lasted over 10 years. My current one is 12 years old.

I mean, the US among others pretty much signaled to the world that everyone should get nuclear weapons with their relative inaction on Ukraine after pushing them to disarm with promises that they did not need their nukes to protect them. Followed up by continuously failing to take steps to protect them often explicitly because they were scared of offending a dictator and country with lots of nuclear weapons. At one point Ukraine made some noise about acquiring nuclear weapons again, but they stopped saying that publicly probably because they were dinged by the US and probably other Western nations by it. If they don't at the very least have a secret military project exploring nuclear options going now I would be very surprised. The fundamental message after all was that only nuclear-armed countries get real protection from other nuclear-armed countries.

I mean, it's always been that way really. Everyone knows that only nuclear-armed countries get to be on the UN security council (I mean, there are "non-permanent" members, but "non-permanent" means a lot more than just temporary, it also means essentially powerless). Basically, somewhere along the line, the main nuclear-armed countries stopped pretending that nuclear non-proliferation was something they were going to take part in too and it's basically just become nukes for me, but not for thee.

It actually happened at least a couple of times that we know of. At least one was mistaking the sun for a nuclear launch. We all have among others, Stanislav Petrov to thank for averting a nuclear war. For that he was rewarded with a reprimand, and a demotion that basically forced him into retirement. There is also Vasili Arkhipov who disobeyed an order to fire a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban missile crisis. He got away with it, though some of his crewmates were reprimanded. I think the "geese" incident you are thinking of may have actually been swans.

The poster you were replying to was talking about the overall project, not just this part. Quite frankly, since the rest of the system is clearly not even designed yet, it seems pretty likely that any system like the one described for SpaceX here would be obsolete and no longer fit for purpose by the time anything else were ready to go up. So it's not a question of whether they could do it, it's more a question of what the point is.

Also, as an aside, intended more for humor than anything else: If Musk has anything to do with the design, any radar, thermal, or laser sensors will be tossed out in favor of doing everything with just cameras.

Because you wrote:

Well, the most common cargo plane in the world is the Boeing 747. A cargo 747 has a cargo volume of about 735 cubic meters and the mass it can carry is about 130 metric tons. So if you filled up the volume of the cargo area completely, the density of the cargo would need to be below about 184 kg/m^3. That is about 18% of the density of water. Put in package terms, the minimum density of packages for shipping purposes is typically assumed to be 160 kg/m^3 by shippers. The fact that number is so close to our estimated max volume suggests that the other number was probably derived based on estimates about what a plane can carry. Anyway, it seems to suggest that package mass may actually be a more significant factor than volume, but perhaps not be a lot. We can probably declare them to be more or less even as a concern for shippers (who it seems have to consider both).

This is not a real biological tree. This is a tree as you would find in graph theory. In the simplified model I was using, it is a graph that consists of two linear trees each branching off one of two nodes with a single connection between them representing the "trunk", with the two nodes being distribution centers at either end. This represents a simple delivery example with one load of packages coming from various nodes in one location to a distribution center, then being sent by one form of mass transport (plane, truck, ship, etc.) to the other distribution center, then being redistributed. That is a simplified view where there are a set number of routes from each distribution center that travel to each node (address) linearly. Obviously there could be more than one segment making up the "trunk" where he delivery moves from one form of mass transport to another. For example, a plane or ship trip could then become multiple long-distance truckloads to a distribution center. The basic tree pretty well represents the packages in one single delivery from distribution center to distribution center than are then sent out on delivery runs in package cars that travel a route from house to house. Obviously the return route is ignored since it is simpler to imagine as a tree, but most algorithms for planning the routes will optimize for a short route back to the distribution center from the last address. For the purposes of the this tree, which represents one delivery, the weighting for the trip back to the distribution center could actually just be added to the weighting for the last leaf (or the last leaf could just be a pointer to the distribution center node to keep it as a linear tree).

Anyway, point is pretending this is about an actual tree seems like a bit of a weird argument. Once again, this is the kind of tree that you would generate as a solution to something like the traveling salesman problem, not something you would grow behind your house.

Jebus you are daft. Seriously, that really seems to be all your argument actually boils down to in the end, isn't it. The fact that you think that's a remotely useful, coherent, or intelligent argument pretty much says it all.