Nuke

for me they are, and often the middle mouse button is what gets sacrificed in the name of a functional mouse. unless you have spares.

middle button failures are rare. its usually the left one that dies first. my fix is to take the mouse apart and (assuming the switches are the same type) and swap middle for left with my soldering iron. this wont work for you though. but fairly recently somone dropped a box of old ball mice on my doorstop and they have been an invaluable source of parts (and rubberized metal balls that the cats like).

you said it cost $2000. i assume the other $1000 was parts. most of my builds are a few hundred below that. my i7 build cost a little under $800. i probibly put less than 4 hours work into design and build, and when i was building machines professionally back in 2002, i didnt get paid very much per hour. simple fact that you have much wider profit margins at the high end.

i dont think building a computer is a one grand job. ive built several and never got paid that much.

freelancer was a good game. keyword was. without a multiplayer community of note, there is no reason to play it.

they may have been omitted to save weight or reduce complexity. neither of which you want on a mission critical engine.

ive pulled bigger screens out of dumpsters.

you usually have the fuel, say hydrazine, in a flexible bladder inside of a tank, which is pressurized with an inert gas. the pressurant never touches the fuel. all you have to do is activate a solenoid valve between the tank and the engine, and because of the pressure differential fuel will get squeezed out of the badder through the piping and into the combustion chamber. it hits the catalyst in there and goes boom. you want to turn it off, close the valve. its stupid simple.

i dont like change, unless its the planet line of my address. i would be less concerned with going to space, and living in space, than i would be with returning to earth. after space has degraded the systems of the body of an already unhealthy individual and then putting them through the shock of re-entry and living under a gravity well. you might have a heart attack 3 steps out of the lander before you get a chance to brag about going to space.

25% of your hard drive space is ballast.

the performance of mechanical hard drives is a major bottleneck on a modern system. i use them pretty much exclusively for backup purposes. they are also good for static data storage. ssds are definitely worth it for the decreased loading times for pretty much every piece of software one could use, especially your os. it was one of the few times in recent memory that an upgrade actually felt like an upgrade.

i dont think so. an equatorial hunter gather might not need to store energy as readily as an inuit for example. human genetics is diverse.

its the capacity for energy storage that evolved, not the obesity. you take those people out of their natural habitat of failed crops and poor hunts, and put them in a world where food can be had year round in large quantities, and they get big. its the healthier branch of that subset you want setting up a colony on mars.

i am kinda chubby, but if you gave me a ticket to space and the condition that i had to get down to a healthy weight, i would make every effort to do so. id give up soft drinks, start jogging and i would start eating the food that food eats. motivation is a key factor in loosing weight. ive done it before and i could do it again. then again i might be over the height limit too, so that is also an issue. fat people evolved in climates where food was not readily available year round, so they evolved a way to store energy. so while they may not be a good choice for space missions, they might be very useful to have when bootstrapping off world colonies. they could survive long periods on tiny rations where a skinny person with a high metabolism would just whither away and die. so if your first space crops fail or you need to wait for a resupply mission, you can survive it.

thing is if you can afford a trip to space, you can afford a gym membership. im sure the chance to go to space would provide the neccisary motivation.

you will probibly have to pay extra if you are fat.

developed by nasa... art department. is that round disc thing under the cockpit supposed to be a centrifuge, its kinda small.

it was nice. then i saw last night's episode of game of thrones almost immediately afterward. so it was kind of stacked amazement for me.

i think they should rerun the biosphere experiment, but in an open loop fashion (and of course after dealing with the roach problem). this time keeping close tabs on what gets imported to maintain the health of the participants. this will give us an idea of what the required isru output would need to be to maintain a habitat. im also convinced you could have a microbial ecosystem that can do much of the heavy lifting for you. algae are nature's co2 scrubbers, and they can run on light. for every waste product we have, there is a germ that converts it to something useful. the only actual plants you should be growing are food crops.

dpf seems like a scam because of all the green folk supporting it. i know that most of the articles ive read on it seem to prattle on about the environment this and global warming that, rather than discussing the technology in any detail. this is obviously neccisary to aid in the crowd funding, but it also has the side effect of making it look like a scam since there are some elements in the green movement that are totally nuts. however what ive seen from the tech side looks interesting. especially the part about exploiting the natural characteristics of plasmas, rather than fight them with magnetic fields. well this was in , which i assume anyone who gives a damn about fusion has seen (and i post that link a lot on this board), its well worth the watch. its rather amusing, he talks about how the dod loves to defund energy projects, then he talks about how the navy wants fusion reactors on all its ships. i especially love all the tokamak bashing.no source on the weaponry, but its not like those kinds of systems are scifi anymore, and having a reactor on board makes those weapon systems possible to integrate on smaller vessels without fission reactors. since the polywell is a small reactor, retrofitting them into almost anything the navy has should be possible.

not the dod, the navy. they want polywells on all their ships so that they can have unlimited propulsion and power left over for lasers and railguns. polywells are funded for the current phase, they still need 200m to build a demo reactor. they better impress some admirals.

id go to the moon. first of all regolith is rich in oxygen. it also has iron, and aluminum as well, both useful structural materials, as well as silicon for the fabrication of solar cells and glass. the stuff is already pulverized for you, so you just have to collect it. this saves you the mass of rock crushing equipment. i figure use some kind of electrostatic or mechanical system can be used for its collection. robots can collect and bag the stuff long before humans arrive. this serves 3 purposes. first is obvious, it clears the landing site of all of that annoying dust that screw with airlock seals. second, you can just sandbag your habitat modules for radiation shielding as soon as you arrive. finally its ready to be processed for resource extraction. you could magnetically separate out all the iron from the stuff, and use it as a material for dmls 3d printers for making hardware, or you can feed it into a furnace with o2 and make steel (idk where the carbon would come from, we might need to bring it). another thing robots can do is sinter lunar basalt into bricks, this can be used for construction/radiation shielding. you might eventually start using lunacrete for more permanent structures, depending on the availability of water. concrete is porous but these structures can be sealed with epoxy coatings brought from earth. there are also now several projects to allow 3d printing with concrete, so smaller structures and prefab parts can be created. it might even be possible to construct tunnel boring machines to create well shielded underground complexes for permanent habitation. you might also bore circular tunnels to encase subterranean centrifuges for earth-like gravity. with stuff to build with, you need people to build things. that requires life support. we can already inhabit space for months at a time without resupply. if you can resupply some of those materials locally from the moon, that would extend the habitability of the colony. we might develop some radiation hardened crops for growing in surface domes, or just grow regular plants underground with hydroponics. then the moon base becomes the gateway to the rest of the solar system. mars included. you can construct prefab habitats on the moon and drop them all over the solar system. these would be large spare no expense units to help bootstrap other colonies at a much faster rate. the advantages of having a manufacturing center outside of earth's gravity well are huge.

i read an article awhile back on direct conversion specifically in reference to polywells. ive yet to find the thing again. i know a couple times i wanted to use it as a source now and just drew a blank.

i think a direct conversion scheme for polywells exists, but you wont see it on first generation devices.

i think the reason for the smaller scale device was to come up with operational procedures prior to integrating all the subsystems into the full scale device. of course this is all sourceless scuttlebutt.