Nuke

you pretty much discribed wolfenstein 3d. that game is so flat it can pass off as a 2d universe if you pretend the walls are lines. maybe you can run the game in 320*8.

that was the start of moors law. thanks to the apollo program much of the technology needed for modern electronics was invented. multilayerd pcbs, surface mount construction, integrated circuits (agc was all 3 input nand gates), etc. the only thing that hadn't been done yet is cramming more and more stuff onto a chip, which has been a slow and steady process since then thanks to moors law. chip density simply got to the point where you could put an entire cpu on one die, and this grew to more things like memory controllers gpus and cache. much of a modern cpu die is cache. its sort of like we simply ran out of things to put on there so just started piling on sram. i cant imagine it being very long till we put the dram on there too (we already have system on a chip devices). that said i dont think we could go back to 1969 and give them a computer to reverse engineer and have them produce computers similar to what we use now. they simply would not have the tools nor the experience neccisary for the job (it was all fairly new tech). it would more or less point them in the right direction, but they would still need to rely on moors law to produce the desired results. part of that is making products to sell to pay for the next generation of r&d.

yea that is one of the things that has improved greatly. the other is the way it deals with proprietary drivers. i didnt have to do any sudo-fu to install nvidia drivers for example. also wifi now seems to work out of the box. only thing i didnt like is ubuntu's new gui. but thats the thing about linux, dont like something about your distro, find another. i hear good things about mint.

this is a bad attitude to have. just because you run a linux does not mean you will never encounter malicious code. it is less likely that you will, but still one must keep their guard up.

as a hardware person (and i say that loosely cause im also a coder) i could never use a machine i didnt build myself. macs do not fit this criteria and hackintosh is also a thing im not doing (except possibly for science). its ok if you install classic shell. if i dont like 10 i might move to linux. linux is starting to get really good.

i use windows for almost everything. i have a couple linux boxes as well, but i use them rarely. but i also like to mess around with obscure operating systems, things like baremetalos and reactos.

the free scanners seem to work good enough for me. been using avg for a very long time now. it doesnt seem like much of a resource hog, though it does seem to instal a lot of services. ive never liked norton. i used to be a system builder and decided that the practice of preinstalling the norton trial on oem machines caused more problems than it solved. it protects users till it expires and after that gives them a false sense of security. then on top of that norton is really hard to get rid of (especially for non-geeks). we got a number of support calls about viruses, i tell them to uninstall the norton trial and instal avg, and almost every time the machines came back because they didnt know how to do that. after that the preinstaller scripts gave the user the option of installing avg free when they started the computer for the first time. never had a virus call after that.

i picked a channel that wasnt being used at all and got my wifi performing quite well. if you are in a very noisy wifi environment, then chances are you will loose some throughput to everyone else using the same channels.

and this is why i will be watching the kitten bowl instead.

thats the dynamics part of thermodynamics, you have to move the heat before you can use it to generate power. in this case from the heat source, a reactor for example, and a heat sink, the radiator, usually going through a turbine to generate power. rtgs also do this. heat is moved through thermocouples on its way to the radiator fins, generating electricity in the process (in a horribly inefficient manner). in both types of system heat is moving and there is a means for generating electricity somewhere in the middle of the system.

you could just dig really deep trenches until the pressure at the bottom is acceptable to habitation. this would also warm the atmosphere significantly. you cant fill it with oxygen because it would float away, so you still need pressurized habitats, but the pressure difference would be miniscule so these could be built out of less robust materials.

low gravity bodies would be great for industry. but i think it would need to be fairly large. a base on ceres would work out well. a base on a neo would probibly be better though. you must build a 1km centrifuge with radiation shielding, so an object of several km would be needed to provide the materials for the habitat construction. on top of that you want the base to pay off so you need considerable material left over for mining. so were talking objects several km across as being prime real estate.

so far all im interested in is the madmax reboot. new terminator you say?

i was avoiding that thread because at the time i havent seen the movie yet. now im not sure i want to read through it its so long. its a lot more accurate than some of the other crap thats been slung around as scifi lately.

i use windows mostly, but have a few ubuntu boxes.

yea its 2015, wheres my mr fusion.

lasers are really inefficient devices.

its not like these parts of the spectrum are suited to moving digital data anyway. i have a 433mhz ism module and you are lucky to get more than one kbit of throughput out of it. you loose about half your throughput to encoding, and then another quarter to protocol overhead.

i think my favorite hobby is neglecting my other hobbies.

i thought the centrifuges depicted were rather narrow myself. especially those oneil cylinders at the end. i can understand the ship being more compact for weight concerns and running at a lower than 1g. they did need to use anti nausea drugs (which i believe is something we already give astronauts), so they get +1 realism for that alone. id rather think about the things they got right, than the tally of miniscule flaws that people can come up with. i like seeing harder scifi in movies these days. i think the movie makers finally figured out that people are smarter than they think they are and wont tolerate so much handwavium. then again you are always gonna find holes in the science part because at the end of the day its a movie. gravity last year and now interstellar up for oscars this year. i think movies like this might bring a new golden age in hard scifi.

software defined radio is becoming a thing. all you need is a fairly fast dac/adc attached to the cpu, and you could theoretically transmit/receive any signal your cpu is fast enough to generate/decode. now i dont think phones currently have sufficiently fast dacs/adcs for the job. you need signals on the order of tens to hundreds of mhz, audio dacs and adcs cant do that (sample rates in the tens of thousands of hz), so you need ones that can push video. most sdr is done with hacked tv tuner hardware.

ethics is the thing you really need to get over if you want offworld colonies. if we want or need to survive off world for more than one generation, we are going to need hard data on human reproduction in non earth-like environments. we can use technology to simulate earth like environments as close as possible, and make it law than all procreation be done in that environment. but even if you have rotating maternity wards/schools with earthlike atmosphere, raditation levels and gravity, there will be cases where for some reason or other it simply is not possible to procreate there. perhaps the centrifuge breaks down and it takes a year to fix it. or perhaps astronauts get frisky on a 2 year mission with no viable early return option. ethically speaking these situations should be avoided at all costs. however human nature pretty much guarantees similar situations will occur. so the only way to ethically do science on this subject is the clinical approach. its sort of how mental illness is handled, you cant just make people crazy for science, that would be unethical. but what you can do is observe those suffering from it. the scientists are not the cause of the situation and are simply gathering data that may help the case being studied as well as others in the future. what this means for colonization, is that you need to make the procreation facilities a priority. unauthorized reproduction will occur for a variety of reasons as the population grows, and then you can see if all your precautions were neccisary.

have your babies in a 1g centrifuge (corrected for natural gravity of course). build it under ground so that you have more earth like radiation levels as well (as many variables that can be made earth like should be). you would have to stay on it for the duration of your pregnancy (possibly starting with conception, which means it would need to be planned) and possibly the child would need to stay on for longer. then adapt them to mars gravity after puberty. however i have a feeling on some future mars mission someone will do something they are not supposed to do and end up getting first hand data on mars babies. human nature does weird things. kinetic energy would do a better job. nukes are nice little energy machines, but they pale in comparison to even a small rock falling from space. find near mars asteroids that come close to hitting it and tweak their orbits with gravity tractors, orion drives, whatever.

laptops are usually moved around and so are subject to more vibration than a desktop would be, and so memory modules do become unseated. replacing or upgrading the ram is possible but id make sure the old stuff is really bad before discarding it.

its not a perpetual motion machine. you need to pump energy into it to go anywhere. and it only works in the presence of a magnetic field, such as that around a star or planet. on top of that a number of tests have been conducted in space and the technology is at trl 6 (a notch above vasimr). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether lack of power supplies is the real hold up. solar is weak and only works close to the sun, rtgs are weak too. what we have is good enough for most one shot missions. but we have labs full of state of the art propulsion technologies that would revolutionize space flight if only there was a space worthy power supply that could output a few megawatts. only way nuclear would work is if we manufacture the fuel off world and just launch an empty reactor. compact fusion with direct conversion and we would colonize the entire solar system in a few hundred years.