That’s impressive, or should I say scary? 150w is a lot of heat to dissipate… I hope those aren’t laptop chips…

Capitalism does not breed innovation, it steals it.

That does make me wonder though, which countries do breed the most innovation?

What’s the startup capitol of the world? How does one set of national policies stack up against another when it comes to the number of patents or successful businesses per Capita?

As much as the sentiment of your statement feels right, I wonder if the numbers back it up, or if it’s more truthiness than truth?

And to be clear, I’m really not trying to throw shade here, I’m actually curious, questioning my own preconceptions.

Well he’s not Tony Stark…

Oh good, that’s better.

That is hilarious.

I spent a while trying to figure out how a cat could possibly long press a power button, even pressing it at all should be a challenge…

Then I remembered that most people use laptops.

I would be impressed if a cat could hold the power button in for several seconds on my tower, you have to depress the button about a 1/4 inch.

Lol, Tim Apple. Who was it that said that? Was it Biden?

When I check out a device in the store I definitely pick it up, hold it, turn it over, and generally look at every part of it. Things like a charging port on the bottom would probably stick out…

Or like in this case, with the power button on the bottom, I’d definitely notice that as annoying.

What software do they let you load?

Basically anything you want, they don’t tend to watch you at the apple store, unless you seem like you actually want to buy something. They want you to mess around with the machines, so I’ve never seen them password protected in any way, you have admin access.

Users aren’t trying before they buy so the display is the most important aspect

Trying before you buy is literally the entire point of the apple store

Hey, I agree with you, the yuca mountain facility was literally built for that. And yet, even then there was enough nimby sentiment to prevent it from going into use. Just crazy.

What’s amazing about this headline is that it’s clearly inaccurate as they’re confusing causation and correlation, but then at the same time, the correlation itself is completely obvious and hardly worth researching. Of course groups of different demographics behave differently, that’s what the word “demographic” is all about.

Huh, weirdly I don’t remember that. I remember having to uncheck a whole bunch of check boxes for browser extensions, toolbars, WinZip pro, etc. But I didn’t remember that chrome was one of those. I’m sure you’re right though.

And if somehow, despite that efficiency, we still have problems figuring out how to store that nuclear waste today. I know this ought to be a solvable problem, but we seem to struggle with it.

You’ll find that nuclear fission is not very different.

Nuclear submarines for example only need to be refueled once or twice in their multiple decade lifespan.

Not all, but a lot of this equipment is also made by caterpillar, right?

Well I have no experience with these particular drives, but they do seem to have 11 platters. Which is beyond insane as far as I’m concerned. More platters means more moving parts, more friction more noise (all other things being equal).

It does, it produces low and intermediate level waste, the waste decays over about a hundred years, not thousands. So it’s better, but still an issue requiring management.

I think people still don’t understand what the problem is with fusion. The problem is not that it doesn’t work, it will work, and soon. The problem is that everyone seems to think fusion means cheap limitless energy, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. When fusion does finally work, it will be the most expensive form of energy available. That’s going to be a gamebreaker, right out of the gate.

So far, the only method we know of to guarantee that your reactor will be energy positive is to make it truly enormous. Let me tell you, going truly enormous is not a good way to keep costs down. But let’s say you just spent 8 years building a cutting edge fusion power plant and you want it to work smoothly. Well you better hire a large team of nuclear physics PHDs to keep that reactor working, they must be a dime a dozen, right? You’ll need them for all the maintenance of your cutting edge reactor, get ready for those maintenance costs to mount up. And be prepared to continue paying for all your staff and facilities even while the reactor is (frequently) power down for maintenance.

Also, you do have an economical way to dispose of nuclear waste right? Because fusion reactors are probably going to generate a significant amount of nuclear waste… That’s one of the side effects of actually turning the high energy particles released by the reactor into heat. Those free protons and neutrons get absorbed by a physical shield around the reactor called the blanket. That blanket becomes radioactive over time and needs to be replaced. Congratulations, your clean fusion energy is now producing radioactive waste, and your back to the exact same problems we have with fission.

My advice, keep using the nuclear energy we understand really well at this point, fission. Also, renewables and storage are already a cheaper solution to do exactly the same thing fusion will eventually do. I’m certain that fusion will be a fantastic technology for large spacecraft someday, but I make no promises it will ever become the first choice for general terrestrial power generation.

That turns out to not be true, at least not with the tokamak reactors most groups are pursuing.

You see, at some point you need a shield around the reactor to actually absorb all the high energy particles released, and turn that energy into heat. That’s the whole point of the reactor, to generate heat and run a turbine. You absorb those high energy particles with a “blanket”, that’s just what they call the shield around the reactor.

Here’s the issue, absorbing all those high energy particles necessarily results in transmuting the material absorbing them. That blanket becomes brittle and eventually needs to be replaced. Not coincidentally, that blanket is also now radioactive, because you’ve bombarded it with protons and neutrons and it’s now partially made up of unstable, radioactive elements.

So while fission reactors have radioactive fuel rods to dispose of, fusion reactors will have radioactive blankets to dispose of. Who knows if this is an improvement.

Have you used other ebook readers?

My mother in law had a nook, and that was one of the worst goddamned devices i’d ever used. Low res screen and cheap buttons, buttons that you had to use all the time because the touch controls were so awful. The interface was just extraordinarily bad.

I hate to say it, but the Kindle line are the best devices on the market for ebooks. But I’d pay a little extra if Besos got kicked in the balls with every purchase.

Also note that 100km is the minimum height to be “in space”, not the minimum height for achieving orbit.

That doesn’t really mean anything. You could achieve an orbit at a lower altitude if you wanted to, it would decay faster, but you could do it. The 100km karman line is an arbitrary thing, there is no solid line where on one side you can orbit and on the other side you can’t.

Finally, I disagree with the note that having “enough fuel” to reach orbit means they have demonstrated such capability

Well this seems like a bad semantic argument to me. I guess the question is, what does it mean to you to “demonstrate capability”. Like, for you, what would be the difference between demonstrating a capability to do something and actually doing that thing? How would those two things look different? Or in this specific case, how could they have demonstrated that capability without putting their rocket into a stable orbit (because it would be negligent to do that with this prototype rocket)?

Given what they have done, is there any reason to doubt they could have gone a little bit further? And conversely, was there a good reason to stop where they were, or do you think they would have gone further if they could have?