Comment Re:clean? (Score 1) 200
Wow, you are really making stuff up bigly. Good work coward!
Wow, you are really making stuff up bigly. Good work coward!
"Environmentalists" protest even hydroelectric dams.
Since dams create artificial lakes that entirely destroy all of the habitat on the submerged land it is odd that you regard damming up rivers as being particularly benign, and opposition to destroying such habitats particularly deluded.
and we need Nuclear power to make up for the loss of solar power
A 2% reduction in insolation only reduces the output of solar power plants by 2%. So you build 2% more of them to compensate. Do you even read the TFS?
The gas flow is way down from the start of the war, about 30% of pre-war levels and steadily declining. Ukraine allows the gas through because it is needed by countries supporting its war effort, especially Poland and Slovakia. These countries are in the process of transitioning off of Russian gas, and the level of flow is expected to go to zero next year.
Yeah I know, you meant to provide context then totally forgot.
key skills for success are a) being convincing in person
b) playing golf
- I can't see an AI really filling those roles. The COO does all the day-to-day execution work that an AI might actually be good at.
LLMs seem more than half-way there in putting out glib bullshit ("being convincing in person"), so it seems what we are lacking is the robotic golfer. "Full self-driving", also "full self-putting".
Silos are unmanned. No one is there, except when people go out to do maintenance (rarely). There are control centers that are a long distance from the silos, and they are underground heavily shielded facilities. So the notion that the balloon was getting cell phone signals from soldiers manning the missile system is just fantasizing.
Solar panels are 15% efficient, and only get effective use 25% of the day. So 25% vs 3.75% (.15x.25). I am still skeptical of the costs though.
Try not to do low-balling, it is irritating. Commercially used panels are in the range of 18-22%, so lets take a current average of 20%, not the incorrect 15%, and over time (remember you are comparing it to pie-in-the-sky systems that won't exist for a decade or more) the steady improvement of panel efficiency makes a long term target of 25% realistic (laboratory silicon has broken 30%).
Linux could have something similar to Mac if you copied your home directory
I gave done that a number of times, and it does work pretty well, but it becomes very problematic if you keep doing it. I have had five Linux systems (after giving up on dual boot) in series, and if you do it a two or three times it is works but odd issues accumulate, along with lots of "dot" directories of unknown purpose. Eventually you must give up and do a clean install then try selective copying from an old home directory and hope you get everything you need (and archive the old one forever just in case).
And it's also possible that someone somewhere is already using it to decrypt saved messages.
It is not. The technology is not there, and the days in which three-letter-agencies had access to technologies many years ahead of those available to the public are long gone. You are just indulging in conspiracy theories.
I don't think the quantum tech is there yet either, but the idea that TLAs will get the ability ahead of everyone else is not "indulging in conspiracy theories". First, they have access to everything happening in the public space and in the commercial world, public or not. In addition they have billions of dollars of black budget money to invest in exploiting and extending all of that tech in secret, and the privileged position of a government spy agency. The first organization on the planet to have an operational quantum cracking operation will be the NSA.
True. NFTs are at best a pointer to a JPEG,
"Space junk" is a bigger problem in pop-science journalism than in reality.
Most satellites are in LEO, 600 km or below, where there is enough air friction to deorbit them within a few years. If a collision occurs in LEO, the smaller particles will have much higher friction/mass ratios and deorbit within a few days.
A more informative way of looking at it is the the "space junk" problem is so severe that it restricts large scale exploitation of space to 600 km or below. The original plan for StarLink was to place all of their satellites at 1100 km - which would have been a disastrous decision. When outsiders started pointing this out Musk reduced the altitude to 550 km. This means that StarLink has to operate at a sub-optimal altitude to avoid this problem. Thus the claim that "most satellites are in LEO, 600 km or below" is not because "that's where the people who operate them want them" but because they have to be below that altitude to avoid a Kessler Syndrome catastrophe.
For reference previous studies of the Kessler Syndrome have concluded that most LEO altitude bands above 600 km already are above the critical density and that collision cascades are inevitable some day unless this stuff is deorbited by special means - which is why deorbiting schemes are being studied and proposed..
You are defining "practical" as using less fuel than is delivered. There is no particular reason that criterion is important. They could burn many times as much fuel as they deliver and still be profitable.
Quite true. The ill-considered objection the poster was making is a manifestation of the "energy budget" obsession of lots of space fanbois that neglects that the cost of doing stuff in space is entirely driven by the cost of space hardware and operations support, not energy expenditure. The reason for this seems to be an attraction only to physics and not the essentials of engineering, which are fundamentally economic and involve complex systems.
One can only imagine the cost for these materials.
That is correct, one can only imagine the cost for these materials because nobody is refining them in space yet. But if they aren't cheaper to make there than to send there, something is wrong.
Do you think the raw materials are found in orbit?
You have to send the raw materials to orbit - then process them in a hard vacuum, with entirely remotely operated equipment without any maintenance available. What is wrong, and it is very wrong, is to think that this is cheaper than simply processing them to final form in a plant here on Earth, then sending the finished material to orbit.
Musk doesn't seem to have much of an attention span
You are talking about a guy who has been going on about transition to solar-electric, and colonising Mars since he was a kid in South Africa. Even the Twitter debacle is a continuation of his ambitions for X.com and Paypal 20 years ago.
Having long term obsessions and a short attention span are not really contradictions. Having both together is commonly observed - the fixations provide the theme around which the attention jumps.
Take for example the "colonizing Mars" thing you bring up - does he really have a coherent approach to getting to "colonizing Mars"? What we have seen is in 2016 Musk planning to land the Dragon capsule on Mars "as soon as 2018", and a Mars colony by 2024maybe 2028?, or (last year) sending someone to Mars in 2029?
You see here the long term fixation combined with the erratic short term jumps from one imaginary scheme to the next. And the Mars fixation is explained by the Musk's apparently life-long grand delusion that he is the most important person in human history since he is going to save the human race by colonizing Mars. The Verge piece was written more than 9 years ago, but Musk is still obsessing on it. But he really has no plausible strategy for achieving this self-aggrandizing delusional objective. Despite the real achievements of SpaceX the Mars thing is one half-baked hare-brained scheme after another.
That’s the neat thing, people keep thinking it will be our tv shows or am radio that will leak to the stars and be heard. But the easiest to detect signals from earth are the radio waves that are so powerful they will cause unshielded circuits to fry in a massive area with voltages as high as 50,000 volts/meter over many kilometers, the EMP of nuclear weapons. That’s what aliens will hear the loudest and thus likely first.
So far there has only been one large EMP event ever generated which was the 1.4 megaton Starfish Prime event so this is the only such signal out there (and it is only one single pulse).
A 1.4 megaton high altitude EMP explosion produces an EMP signal of about 5*10^11 J in a pulse 500 microsecond long for a total omnidirectional signal of 10^15 W in a bandwidth of 100 MHZ.
The most detectable repeated emitted of pulses are the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radars that emit a powerful narrow bandwidth, narrow beam that can be detected with Earth technology out to 250 light years.
The AN/FPS-50 radar has a pulse strength of 10^7 W, which due to the highly directional nature is equivalent to about a 10^11 W omnidirectional signal. It is in addition confined to a frequency band of only 0.1 MHZ. This gives it a relative detectability with a narrow band filter comparable to a 10^14 W EMP pulse. So the Starfish Prime event is a pulse about 10 times stronger, true, but the BMEWS radar pulses 27 times a second every second for decades. One single pulse of strength X or 4*10^10 pulses of 0.1 X, which is really the more detectable signature?
Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"
