Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Lol (Score 1) 12

I even wonder why they haven't done it much sooner.

We didn't have good ion thrusters back in the 50s, 60s and 70s and after that launching nuclear reactors into space was considered a bad idea, not without reason. A nuke plus ion engines isn't a slam dunk either, ion engines produce very little thrust and reactors are heavy even if you don't have to bother shielding them much, so there's an efficiency threshold you need to hit before it's worthwhile.

NASA has realized that beating, or at least competing with, the Chinese to a moon base is probably going to require a reactor, so why not demonstrate it as part of a drive too?

Comment Re:Specific impulse (Score 1) 42

the original formulation of relativity and physics in general did not distinguish between rest mass creating gravitation and light speed particles generating gravitation

Maybe you have access to some early draft notes of Einstein's, but in his actual papers on relativity mass does not "create gravitation." Energy, momentum and some off-diagonal terms like stress and pressure gravitate. There is no mass term in the stress-energy tensor, nor anywhere else in the Einstein Field Equation. Mass is not fundamental in relativity, it's a property of a system. That property is the product of energy and momentum (and the other stuff) in particular configurations within the system so in many situations it can be used as a surrogate for the underlying energy, momentum and other stuff.

Physics prior to relativity did indeed say a lot of different, confusing things about mass, gravitation and light speed particles.

Comment Re:Death by milestones (Score 1) 42

"Creating fusion" isn't hard. Kids do it for science fair projects. Here's a guy on Youtube making a fusion reactor.

Making a fusion reactor that produces more electricity than it uses is hard. That's what you're thinking of. Rocket engines famously do not usually produce electricity, and if they do they do it extremely inefficiently, so it's a completely different problem.

Comment Re:Specific impulse (Score 1) 42

we don’t have massless drives

Reactionless drives. A massless drive would be an engine that didn't have any mass, I guess. We have lots of drives that don't involve throwing mass out the back, including solar sails, magnetotorquers, electrodynamic tethers, flashlights, etc. Hard drives have a few. Your car has at least one big one and a bunch of others besides, as does your body. None of them are reactionless though.

Reactionless drives are called that because they violate Newton's third law, which is really a statement about the conservation of momentum.

Comment Re:Blessing in disguise? (Score 1) 77

I got one around 2008. They were the best of the non-premium 1080p HDMI screens at the time.

The one I got had slightly better test review scores on display quality than the LG that year. The Sony was 20% better for 3x the price.

It lasted about twelve years and by then a bigger 4K with much brighter colors was half the cost in nominal dollars, so probably 1/4 the cost in real terms.

And by then cheap flashable streaming sticks were available as was pihole and fairly easy outbound NAT rewriting rules to keep the beasts contained.

Comment Re:All copper is "oxygen-free" (Score 4, Informative) 69

Have you ever seen a shiny new penny versus an old tarnished one? Or the Statue of Liberty? Or an old building with one of those weird green roofs?

They're all copper, with varying amounts of oxygen. Oxygen free copper is expensive copper that's specially made to get rid of as much of the oxygen as possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If the article got something so simple as THIS completely wrong, one can easily presume that the REST of the article is incorrect gibberish.

"oXyGEn-fREE cOppER", lmao

Indeed.

Comment Re:Is packet delivery really a good idea? (Score 1) 200

You can of course have it delivered to your door as well. If you can't receive it at home, as is the case being discussed in this thread, then you can have something delivered to a locker. When you go to pick it up you tell Amazon you're there and they pop open the correct door.

Slashdot Top Deals

There are no games on this system.

Working...