Nuke

thing is touch screens are nothing new. the first one came out in 1983! for nearly 3 decades they were completely impractical. only through success in the ultra portable niche have we finally found a place for them. however this does not make them any more practical for a desktop. i certainly dont want to hover my arm in front of my screen all day, and i dont think anyone who works in a cubicle wants to either. thats where resistance to global acceptance of touch screens will come from, in the office. it would be rather foolish to completely alienate mouse users to push an impractical technology.

i always liked a machine where i could get my hands dirty, dig into the hardware and make modifications. the apple route really doesn't give you that experience to the same degree a pc does. though i have had a lot of fun keeping my 5th gen ipod running. gone through 2 batteries and a screen, its run ipod linux and rockbox so far and its still kicking.

i dont like touchscreens, they are always plastered with finger prints. i yell at people who touch my display. its just not practical for a large high resolution display to be a touchscreen. i dont even like them on portable devices.

thats what norad does.

we could do a lot with gravity assists, aerobreaking, and minor course corrections. you are going to need an rtg for the outer solar system, and a lot of propellant. computing power is pretty much irrelevant. you are not doing lots of collision tests and structural simulations like you do in ksp and you can focus all cpu power on integrating your trajectory, which mathematically speaking isn't very hard. you dont need anything but your typical rad-hard 32-bit system on a chip module.

battleships are ment to be able to slug it out. you dont need to do that if your offensive and defensive weapons have a really long range. you actually want something closer to a destroyer or corvette.

all of my usual recipes.

you probibly have some kind of noisemaker just to keep birds away from the launch area. tight security takes care of humans.

ive mostly been holding off, for no other reason than the fact that i am quite comfy with 7. im going to do a new pc build next month sometime and so will likely use win8 as its os. if i dont like it, i can nuke it from orbit and install win7. ive known for a long time that ms seldom does little more than a few major changes to its products each version. win 8 appears to be a spit and polish upgrade (windows 7 was pretty much a 'make vista suck less' release that turned out to be a pretty solid os). gives ms a chance to make it look pretty, and to try new interfaces, and shoehorn in a horrible app store (and possibly rename all the icons in the control panel again). im more interested in the refinements of its internals rather its outward appearance. id be happy with the win2k interface if the guts of the os were more up to date. i always tend to use as little of the os as possible anyway, disabling as many features as i can.

seems like part of having such a device installed in your skull is learning an electronic language of sorts. that or use some kind of external signal processor that can interpret the data in real time. probibly a combination of both.

i always figured radio augmented telepathy would be a thing one day. i guess that day is now. but il wait for peer review.

railguns are pretty simple machines when it comes right down to it. they just need a lot of power. nuclear reactor kind of power. naval vessels for example will be likely candidates.

depends on which is lighter. i have an old e-reader that weighs more than your typical paperback, so i like having a book in that case. then again if i was reading war and peace, i think i would use the e reader. newer e-readers dont have this issue though.

i like to call it 'not vodka'

im not a narcissist, so i dont care.

i think the question should have been: 'can haz nuclear combined cycle engine?'. you cant use the sabre design because of the cold sink issue. but you can do a multistage thermal engine. turbine, ram and scram can operate purely on a heat source with no combustion. sabre does let you push your turbines further than they could go without the precooler which eliminates the need for complex ram/scram stages, but you still might be able to make mach one, and then isolate the turbines from the airflow allowing rams to take over. even an air augmented nuclear thermal design might be plausible if you can isolate the core from the ariflow without causing too much loss in efficiency.

i like to think of it as an engineering problem. a mechanical switch to move a car from one tube to another tube would be very complex. but you see modern rail yards with with complex arrays of rail switches that can accomplish the job, all be it in more or less 2d and using a lot of land area. you might draw other parallels with highway systems, or pneumatic tube transport in large buildings. automated factories are another good example of how computers can control complex events with absolute precision. analogies with packet switching networks are just analogies, but similar protocols for managing one can be used for the other, despite being carried out through mechanical rather than electrical means. so its not like we dont know how to engineer these kinds of things. your basic unit is an intersection between 2 perpendicular 2 way lines. by default they never intersect, like an overpass. you dont want to change velocity while in the main lines. you need a system to take a car out of the main tube, decelerate, turn, accelerate, and rejoin the desired main line (and this might be a good place for a transit station as well). this all has to be done without interrupting traffic or endangering its safety. how its done also depends on the technology used. maglev trains might use magnetics to switch from one tube or another. you might use aerodynamic forces if you are in a low pressure tube, but this wouldn't work in a vacuum tube. the size of the interchange also depends on the speed of the main lines. the faster the cars move, the longer the acceleration/deceleration tubes need to be and the bigger the interchange structure needs to be. of course i would engineer this as part of the urban substructure, you might have a large building on top of the interchange to maximize land usage. grid topology works best, you have a large array of fairly simple interchanges connecting intersecting lines. if one interchange is down for maintenance, you can use the next one. you might also have high speed<->low speed interchanges for the global lines. hub and spoke topology would be a nightmarish mash of tubes everywhere, and very complicated hub stations, loosing one of which would cripple or at least slow down a large number of routes. your tubes need to be smart. they need to be able to sense traffic patterns and usage. if one tube is congested, it might switch some of its traffic to another tube. the shortest route might not always be direct because of queues at interchanges, congested tubes that would be unsafe to add additional traffic, or perhaps you would need to bypass too many interchanges because of maintenance. there is a catch though. its going to be astronomically expensive and very complex to do a planet wide transit system. it would likely be the greatest feat of urban planning ever attempted. even doing one on a typical urban scale without the super high speed lines would be difficult.

no i mean what i mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_metal_laser_sintering though the article does mention selective laser melting, which i guess is what you are thinking.

yay! direct metal laser sintering! these machines have actually been around for quite some time. problem is the part is pretty much just one big weld, and so your part is not as strong as it can be if it were machined from a block of <insert metal or alloy here>. there are parts you cant mill though, such as anything with internal voids. so the technology does have its purposes.

are you using old skool lead solder or the lead free stuff that manufacturers use. you might be creating a brittle alloy. the solution to this is to completely remove the part, clean the pads with some solder wick (do likewise for the part), flux and re solder. flux is your friend. every soldering tutorial ive seen says you should be liberal with the flux. i find that they are right. flux helps remove oxidization and will ensure a solid joint. is your iron clean? tip should be kept shinny. the best way to clean is is to add a bit of solder and remove the excess with a wet sponge. never shut it down without doing this and your tip will pretty much last forever. fail to do it once, and you will forever have a nasty tip. oxidized tip means oxidized joint and poor heat transfer. if its a surface mount part then that is a whole other level of hell. i wouldn't even touch it without a hot air rework station. some solderers would say you can do it with any professional iron (not a radioshack fire starter, something with temperature control), but i have a reflow station and like to use the right tool for the job.

you are going to need a combination of high speed and low speed lines. its a planet size city, if you happen to need to go to the other side of the planet, then a vactrain is exactly what you need. building of runways is going to be a prohibitively expensive use of the land, so air travel would be limited and also not very safe. if planes crash, and they do, its always going to be into densely populated areas, and that should be avoided. smaller vtols are probibly going to be used for police, fire, medivac and buisness uses mostly. general travel would best utilize vactrains. i imagine a system where you can drive your vehicle right onto a vactrain module, which gets loaded into the system and stops at stations every few hundred kilometers. some might be express routes to travel longer distances without all the stop and go. you could also theoretically drive anywhere on the low speed system, and the vactrains are just a means of saving time. you certainly wouldn't want a 4 hour commute. you might even dispense with personal vehicles all together and use a mass transit system on a planetary scale. again using a combination of high and low speed tubes. rather than having large trains, you can have smaller cars which can be called at a station. you punch in your destination and it will find the fastest route for you, working kind of like a big packet switched network. you might get routed through the high speed system if your destination is far away. you just sit and enjoy the ride. in theory you could go pretty much anywhere on the planet in a couple hours.

the problem with mpd is its not the mass of the thruster, its the mass of the power supply and the thrusters (clusters are preferable for fault tolerance). i think they would be most viable for use with a small scale fusion powerplant, preferably one with direct conversion. solar with a lot of panel area or fission/fusion with a lot of radiator area are also options, but not as good. solar/radiator panels and their support structures can get heavy and needlessly complicated.

games have actually gotten better for the most part. source avgn (google it) joking aside games have sort of an accumulated complexity that makes their continued production in lieu of advancing technology rather challenging. its hard to screw up a game like asteroids (i recently ported hackvision asteroids to an arduino with an lcd screen wired to it, hardly any code makes my incomplete 3d engine look like bloatware). there is only so much code you can fit on an antiquated rom chip. a hand full of vector images and algorithms found in every first year computer science book were all you needed. high school students who have had some programming experience can do likewise these days (i made several 2d shooters in highschool). now games are notoriously complicated. you have these massive dev teams (the dev team for quake fit on one screen!), terabytes of assets and millions of lines of code to deal with, and multimillion dollar budgets. a game engine by itself is a commodity, its easier to revamp an old one or lease one thats newer than it is to write a new one from scratch. of course you carry over all the unresolved bugs. then you got bugs in libraries, some of which are locked down as closed source and are outside of your control as a developer. its an impossible job. the fact that we still spend a lot of time playing games would indicate that its a job they are actually pulling off quite well. the fact that games have become such big buisness is the reason why you cant please everybody. its not like the 90s, where all the niche markets were found and exploited. dev teams were cheap then, games would pay for themselves over time eventually. you could shotgun money around and if a few of them were successes you paid the bill and created the next generation of games. you now have to make a game that will be guaranteed to sell to justify the budget. you need something that as wide a swath of players can play as possible. its the kind of industry which would have never made a newtonian space flight simulator with orbital mechanics and a complete solar system, because thats not the thing they expect teenagers to want to do. indie games bring back all the niche genres that have all but been stamped out by aaa titles and thats where i cast my dollar.

the only real requirement is you need to provide a biosphere through artificial means. this is going to utilize a lot of power. i figure the atmospheric reprocessors will be attached directly to the power stations, which would likely be fusion based (like the thing they had in aliens for terraforming). you also need to feed everyone. given enough power you can do hydroponic farming. this can be done in tall buildings and so would take up a lot less space than a traditional farming infrastructure. your main issue is you cant get any natural resources from the city planet, since every square kilometer if covered with buildings. so this kind of configuration probibly isn't viable unless there is an interplanetary economy to feed it. you are probibly better off doing a massive space colony and leave the planet there for mining.