Nuke

what if we take optical media up the spectrum? using hf uv and xray. could we get more information density than what we currently have available with hard drives and better?

sd cards come with all the wear leveling machinery taken out and is essentially dumb flash that fails when it fails. its completely unmanaged unlike say an ssd. im not to thrilled about flash's data retention rates either. or rather the lack of hard data about data retention rates. im not sure if we have been using ssd's long enough to characterize their failure rates accurately when used for archival storage.

might want to look up the feep thruster while you are at it. very low thrust, but with a very high isp. i think some satellites already use it. uses liquid metals as propellant.

replace star trek with the expanse and profit more.

i wouldnt want to build an exobyte storage cluster on microsd for obvious reasons. m.2 sticks are up to about 2tb. and i know ive seen quad m.2 to pcie-16 adapter cards. so thats 8 tb per board. i found server boards with 7 16x slots to give you 56 tb per server. of course the server eats all the space you save with the m.2 and on top of that for large nas clusters you probably want mechanical drives, ssds just aren't cut out for server loads. 14 tb drives are available. you could get a 48 bay nas server for about $20k that gets you up to 672tb. about 2000 of those and there's your exabyte. congratulations, you have invented the datacenter. you might be able to cram 3 of those per rack so you would need 666 racks because math worships satan. thats not counting routers and switches and everything else that setup would need. so it would be about the size of a fairly large room if you want practical storage. if speed is not an issue you could go with a tape system with a robotic tape recovery. i think 10 tb tapes are the norm these days and you would only need 100000 of them.

rockets without kerbals is like a hamburger without cheese. its just not as good. there probably is a kerbal plushie on the iss right now.

im also more convinced that modern cartoons and advertisements are more likely to cause autism than any vaccine. i think science exists for that, but i dont have any sources (just something i read somewhere).

well its just the display. right now its connected to an esp32 and an imu board. the inertial reference code needs work but the screen works great. there was the time back when they used crt as memory (a williams tube). think of it as optical dram. you charge the phosphors, sort of like the cap in dram. writing was accomplished by an electron gun which illuminates the phosphors and changes the electric charge on the surface. the x,y coordinates of the gun act as the memory address. this can be read back with a thin metal plate on the surface. it had the added bonus that you could see the contents of the memory which certainly helped with debugging. they could store about 2.5kbits. modern screens pretty much are memory at the low level. if you didnt have a lot of ram to work with you could get away single buffering your render, once you send it to the screen it stays there until you write to it again.

i have an oled display in my desk somewhere. its a nifty display. but ive yet to figure out how to do math with it.

i take a less is more attitude to the modern internet. social media is seen as a panacea to all your website's traffic issues so when websites make a bunch of demands on me i simply tend to not use them. "follow us on facebook" "login with google" "turn off your adblocker". and phone culture as certainly made a lot of websites unreadable on my huge 4k display (im too old to squint). when articles use literally the center band of 800 pixels and try to cram everything in there including navigation links, social media icons, and ads (at least the ones that get through the adblocker) getting in the way of content, while you got all this empty space on either side that you could move some of that crap to. and all the unnecessary scrolling, and who ever invented infinite scroll pages should be shot in the gut, both kneecaps and hung (in lynchmob fashion). when i took webdev class all this stuff was in the part about bad design choices. of course when i took that class it was all html with very little scripting and none of this bs. you know back when the internet was fast, that golden age between broadband and web 2.0.

hey elon, leave the happy grass alone.

i just did a google search for black metal memes, i am dissapoint.

its ok, no matter how bad things get there is still bacon.

can someone point it out? its kind of a big article and reading is hard.

no

gargantua makes the assumption of a rather uniform accretion disk. but data trumps predictions. everything else that we dont see in the image is likely due to orientation of the disc in relation to our viewpoint.

have you tried the bacon? its really good this time of year. * 3 minutes later * aliens: give us all your bacon or we will destroy you!

its not intended to.

skylon was always going to be a paper airplane. a marketing tool used in order to secure the funding for their actual ambition, making an air breathing hybrid rocket engine. what becomes of that engine? who knows. seems it would be more viable as a reusable first stage. if you can get it on a sub orbital trajectory and seperate out of the atmosphere it would be a lot more viable than stratolaunch ever will. it would also have to be competitive with what spacex is doing.

it works in the lab and they are doing test runs with it, which is lightyears beyond where iter is right now. testing it under all conditions it would encounter during actual use is something else. that probably requires actually flying it on some kind of test bed that can operate up to mach 5 (sr71, if you can get one out of mothballs). there will be holdups, like if you need to design a completely new aircraft to test it. but i dont see it being the same circular pattern as with high budget fusion research. you have to realize with all the money that it pulls in, you have a bunch of scientists with cushy jobs that would vanish if they ever got the damn thing working.

if fringe fusion could get the kind of money that rel can get we would have fusion power plants now. or you can give it to iter which makes the skylon look a lot like a much more viable goal in the short term. iter only fuses money into broken dreams. i think the successful end goal hear is not the skylon space plane, but to get the engine itself to the point where it can be purchased by the private sector with the military likely getting first dibs. the precooler design itself will likely find uses all over the place. biggest potential i see is for things like more efficient and/or higher capacity heat exchangers, which have applications from hvac and refridgeration to more efficient power plants. not to mention licensing their manufacturing techniques. if the engine is successful then much of the money to build the skylon itself is going to start pouring in. i think they got what they need to finish the engine. i blame tokamaks for that analogy. 20 years is just how long it takes to fund, build, run, and come to the conclusion that it wasn't big enough and that you need a bigger one. this causes the whole thing to repeat thus adding the 'always' part. saber on the other hand is pretty much all known and proven technology. the only real secret sauce in the engine is the anti-icing solution that they have come up with to keep the precooler from becoming useless in short order. that is the thing they need to prove and demonstrate. eliminate that and its just a systems integration problem.

lollipop guild prime?

near death experiences, while often being misconstrued as a religious experience is probably what happens in the early stages of when your brain starts shutting down from lack of oxygen. or maybe that's just what happens when the defibrillator comes out. pumping all that voltage into your body likely plays havoc with your nervous system and brain. or simply your body dumping a lot of dopamine and adrenaline in a last ditch attempt at survival. the body has many rather interesting survival mechanisms.

modern web dev is something that has always illuded me. i had a web design class but that was way back in 2002 and we only did html. we didnt even have to use any real code or handle any client server interactions, which doesn't make any sense because i was after an it degree. seems like an important thing to gloss over.

i figure its kind of like what happens to a computer when you unplug it and bury in in the ground long enough to stop being a computer. all non-volatile memory has been allowed to degrade, thus if you ever did get the cpu/ram to work you wouldn't be able to boot strap (even the bios code is gone). i figure the human mind is similar. you got your wetware that runs on the neural net of your brain tissues. of course the lines between hardware and software are somewhat blurred in this case, but what is certain is the time to complete degradation from functioning to not functioning would be significantly shorter. as much as id like to say it would be a simple fade to black. i figure it would be a lot like that scene in 2001 when hal gets deactivated, slipping away one component at a time. religion has its own ideas about this, but to date scientists have yet to find any backup system in the brain that would allow for immortality, reincarnation, etc. i prefer to think of humans as an iterative process. scientists have found that this is completely possible, hell humans had that figured out long before there were scientists (and likely theologians as well), you wouldnt be here otherwise. our ability to carry knowledge from generation to generation rather uncanny, everything else is just state machine variables. ultimately you are just a step along the way. if humans continue to progress at the current rate, they will have that backup problem solved eventually in lieu of divine intervention. its probably better to put your faith in humans rather than some flying spaghetti monster, at least humans can produce results. also when was death ever considered non family friendly. ever seen the lion king? not to mention all the times we killed jeb. i dont like this trend of talking down to children, shielding them from things they will have to deal with sooner or later. fred rogers would be disappointed.