Yes, I agree with you. I fired off a hasty 1-sentence reply to a thread of hasty 1-sentence posts. Too hasty? Probably. Sometimes that leads to a minor regret later, but TBH some articles/posts deserve a more well-thought out response than others. While I wouldn't bother defending my earlier post as "good", I also wouldn't argue that this thread deserved much more consideration.

No, that paradox is set theory, this was calculus.

A Google search found it pretty quickly. It was Gabriel's Horn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It was over 30 years ago, so I don't recall specific details. Naturally he proceeded to point out the flaw in that "proof" after presenting it. He liked throwing unusual aspects of Calculus at the students to try to keep them interested. His favorite was an equation that, when rotated around the x axis to make it 3-dimensional (and applying integrals to determine its surface area and volume equations), had a finite volume but an infinite surface area. He got a kick out of saying "you can fill it with paint, but you can't paint it". He may have just been trying to keep up with our physics teacher, though.

There's a simpler way if you just want to read TFA text... Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V into a text editor.

Cute. I'll reply with something I hope comes close.

This was too long ago to recall the specifics, but my high school Calc teacher presented a proof that 1 = 6 (and had us all do the math, which checked out), and explained how the same technique could be used to prove that any number equals any other number. So it is possible to prove that 1 equals N, but it requires breaking 1 up into an infinite number of infinitely small parts and putting them back together again in a way that arrives at a different number, which is impossible to do outside of mathematical theory and has no practical use. So perhaps P = NP but it's equally impossible to do anything useful with it.

Well then I would argue that it is a completely bogus bullshit article from a respected journal, and this is how respected journals lose respect.

"is within the realm of practical?" - Practical enough to support all life on Earth, and theoretically self-sustaining for billions of years. Sure it may kill us all someday, but the fact remains that we wouldn't be here without it.

"I don't wish to get into useless pedantic arguments that add no value" - LOL, that's the funniest comment I've seen today. I'm seriously not trying to attack anyone here. Re-read what you posted and, if you're honest with yourself, you should see that you cast the first pedantic stone, and you cast it from a glass house.

"What a load of BS you talk." - That sounds more like you than gweihir.

"practical over-unity fusion may be impossible" - The most important key word he used was "practical". Taken in context of his post and TFA, it's crystal clear that it means "a safe and long-term sustainable reaction for generating electricity 24/7", which automatically precludes a near-instantaneous explosion large enough to take out an entire city. The second most important key word he used was "may", as in "no one knows for sure yet", which is true. That has been true for longer than I've been alive, and I'm turning 50. While I hope it will be proved false before I die, there is no guarantee (no matter how much money is thrown at it).

"Educate yourself man" - You may want to take this advice yourself before taking cheap shots. You failed the reading comprehension part of this argument, so IMO you lost it before you even started.

I'm not saying we shouldn't keep trying to crack the fusion nut. I think we should, but I also agree it would be incredibly stupid to put all (or even too many) of our eggs in that basket.

How about a nice game off chess? ;-)

I don't think it's that impressive when you think about the smallest patch they found being "a hundred times larger than Manhattan". That's over 2200 square miles, which is close to 6000 square km (thanks to the Google unit converter). How many glow-sticks of light is that?

Using (extremely) rough guesses, pretend each square meter of ocean puts out roughly 100 glow-sticks worth of light over that much surface area (that's 1 glow-stick per square decimeter, which is close to 16 square inches, which is a good deal larger than the surface area of a single glow-stick). Each square km would put out 100 million glow-sticks, and 6000 square km would put out 600 trillion.

Even if I over-estimated and it's only 10 glow-sticks per square meter, it's still 60 trillion glow-sticks for the smallest patch detected. It would be more impressive/scary if they could spot patches of bioluminescent plankton significantly smaller than one square kilometer.

LOL. Thank you. That is the funniest post I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. ;-) I would mod you up but I already posted on this one.

I don't believe adding more digits of PI would help even a tiny bit with course corrections. As planets/moons/asteroids are not perfectly smooth and evenly dense spheres, any slingshot maneuver used to accelerate/decelerate will require course corrections. And of course, very tiny effects from microgravity, solar wind, space dust, etc. add up over sufficiently long periods of time, requiring more course corrections. Plus thrusters aren't 100% perfect either, and neither are the instruments used to measure position/orientation. There are so many different possible causes for inaccuracy, and I suspect every one of them is orders of magnitude larger than using a 64-bit float for PI.

Doing a little math... Assuming Google gave me the correct answer, the average distance between the sun and Pluto is roughly 5,906,380,000,000 meters (13 digits). So in a 3D chart with the origin at the center of the solar system, everything out to Pluto's orbit could be modeled accurately down to the centimeter level with 64-bit floats (assuming we had modeling data that precise, which we don't). Regardless, no matter how many digits of PI you use to attempt to perfectly aim an "unguided rock" toward Pluto, its path is not going to be accurate down to the centimeter level by the time it gets there. ;-)

P.S. - Why on Earth would you EVER want someone to toss unguided rocks around the solar system. IMO one of the best lines ever in a sci-fi novel... Q: "What are we going to do, throw rocks at them?" A: "Yes."

Maybe this is the governor's way of telling people to hurry the hell up with that.

Look on the bright side... after rivers fed by glaciers and snow-capped mountains vanish, a number populated areas may be desperate enough to fight for fresh water (and food, as crops need fresh water). If any countries with nukes get desperate enough, nukes may be launched along with retaliation strikes, giving us a nice nuclear winter to cool things off for a bit. Plus Florida will be completely underwater soon, so we've got that to going for us. It's not all bad news. ;-)

"I've no idea why they use an electronic hood latch in the first place though."

Because it's one more thing that can fail that they can charge too much money to fix/replace. I'll bet this design "feature" came directly from the marketing department.