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LukeTim

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Posts posted by LukeTim

  1. The issue should be less about "helping the poor", and more about eliminating being poor as a possibility... thereby no needing to help anyone since they can then help themselves.

    A fantastic welfare policy I recently discovered from The Green Party in the UK reads thus:

    "Everyone to receive a basic Citizen's Income to allow everybody to make meaningful choices between paid employment, part-time work, self employment, volunteering and encourage a better balance between work and everyday life."

    ie, work is no longer something that must be done for the sake of survival - security is guaranteed - but it is something we can choose to do because it is meaningful to us. I know people are going to comeback and say "somebody has to do the jobs nobody wants to" and things like that... but who said those jobs had to be done solely by specific individuals?

    I do probably need to consider this more before a fully formed idea can take shape in my head... but I firmly believe that to hold people's lives to ransom, until they work for it, is wrong, and we need some immense change to stop it... because it is no longer necessary.

  2. [ATTACH=CONFIG]34989[/ATTACH]

    Believe me I'm as frustrated with the lack of progress in deep space exploration as you are and I think warp drive is a bunch of hocus pocus but I believe a polywell based deuterium magnetothruster is very do-able as an upper stage, Bussard reckons for breakeven fusion you'll need at least a 3m in diameter "wiffleball" and he never successfully did an exhaust for the million degree waste helium exhaust whereas I think it could both make power and the helium waste could be the propellant.

    I'm working on it.

    I propose a pulsed polywell design that in one instance holds and ignites a wiffleball and there need to be very carefully sequenced capacitor banks ready to fire and if one fails a computer MUST immediately re-organize which cap bank is firing and which is charging so at hundreds of hz can ignite/eject/ignite/eject the deuterium to helium wiffleball/wifflejet transition.

    Won't work in atmosphere

    Its also possible this will ONLY work in outer space because how else can you eject a superheated ionized gas without letting air into a reactor that will charge the ions and negate the effects of the liquid helium cooled yttrium barium copper oxide magnetic rings?

    Right now you'll laugh at me saying this is science fiction, but I'm sure it will work.... eventually.

    I dunno... perhaps I'd laugh at you saying this is science fiction if I had understood a word you just said.

  3. we somehow manage to control our urge to destroy one another...

    I don't know about you, but I have never felt any urge even remotely approaching that... and I am pretty sure that a large (>95%) percentage of people don't feel any such urge either.

    Reading your post was a really depressing experience.

    I'll give you credit for the commercial sub-orbital flights around the world, though. That is definitely going to happen. London to Sydney in 30 minutes AND a view of the Earth from an altitude of 500km?... Yes please.

    Anyway, I think that chemical energy (unless you count batteries) is on its way out... it will either have a much lesser presence by 2070 or will have virtually gone completely. In its place will be early forms of Fusion energy (how about a rocket powered exclusively by a controlled fusion reaction? Much like Orion but with much less nuclear fallout), more renewable energies (some much more efficient and effective ion thruster designs), and perhaps some very early matter-antimatter solutions.

    Heck, with NASA looking at Warp Drives now, we could have seen those at work (short distances and small objects, probably) by 2070.

  4. I know it's unlikely to happen due to the potential computational complexity of having this on a planetary scale, but cities with destructible buildings would be amazing.

    Sitting in sandbox mode firing rockets at Kerbin's capitals in order to reduce them to rubble would be pretty fun. Maybe launching multiple warheads into orbit, and coordinating a simultaneous strike...

    Y'know, just for fun.

  5. I also agree on this. Currently in England there's a crisis arising basically by 2015 the power plants won't be able to cope with the demands and so major blackouts in some places will occure also high in energy bills. But currently renewable energy is lacking and has a "tree hugger" stigma about it which it shouldn't do. I'm big on solar energy.

    We should be going mostly Nuclear whilst we look at ways to make a totally renewable solution a viable option.

    Really frustrating that ignorant "environmentalists" insist that Nuclear is a worse option than Fossil Fuels.

  6. I was just wondering if it is possible to create and maintain an orbit using magnets. For example, could a satellite hold a smaller satellite in orbit around itself use magnets? Do magnets work that way?

    Well, if the magnet is strong enough then I can't imagine why not... provided you could ensure somehow that the force is always attractive, so it is then an effective allegory for gravity, you wouldn't want one magnet spinning around and starting to repel the other away.

    I guess monopoles could achieve this, though I don't know whether they exist at a macro scale.

  7. I had thought that when I have children I will name my first daughter Luna, and my first son Sol (after The Moon and The Sun, respectively, of course)... then I'll think of the rest as they come... hopefully, I will only have one of each... but Miranda (a moon of Saturn, I believe? EDIT: nope, it's a moon of Uranus) would be another good girl's name.. Titan (another moon of Saturn) or Triton (moon of Neptune) might just work for a boy, but I might have to keep thinking on that one...

    Anyway, Solar System bodies would be my theme, is all I am saying.

    EDIT: Larissa is another good girl's one from Neptune... and Ariel from Uranus... Elara, from Jupiter... Rhea, Saturn... Actually, most of them are good girl's names, not many good boy's ones.

  8. Being a Computer Systems Engineer I am sort of half Computer Scientist half Electronic Engineer... so I guess I belong in this thread.

    I use Windows 8 on my PC, which I have hooked up to a Monitor in my living room (next pay day I am getting a 40" LCD-LED, though... then I'll really be set up)... the new UI on Win8 really suits the media PC... Plus, programming in VS whilst sitting on my sofa is actually surprisingly comfortable.

    I do also have Windows Vista and Win7 installed on separate Hard Disks in my PC, but I suspect they won't get much attention now I have Win8... which I just learned this evening has PowerShell installed by default, which is awesome.

    On my little netbook I do have Windows 7 Starter Edition installed but I tend to use Lubuntu because it's so much faster... How they can sell netbooks with Windows 7 installed when the little things can barely boot into it is beyond me... and this is with a 2GB RAM upgrade... plus, with Lubuntu I have stuff like GCC which makes it easy to do some C programming when I get bored... if I tried on Windows the whole thing would probably lock up when trying to compile Hello World. At the moment I am trying to implement my own audio codec... just for fun.

  9. True artificial intelligence, which is indistinguishable from genuine human intelligence, is very possible... and so are artificial emotions (And emotions are incredibly, ridiculously important to a social species like ours... without them we would not have any of the technology or civilization we have today).

    To suggest, however, that these artificial intelligences will be operating on devices anything like the computers we have to day is just naive. We cannot begin to imagine the sort of computing devices which will be in existence in 100 year's time... let alone 1000.

  10. An Arduino isn't going to last very long in orbit, dude. The extreme temperatures coupled with the huge amounts of radiation would kill that thing in no time... same with the camera. Well, especially with the camera at least with the MCU you can stick it in a Lead Box.

    You would need to look at more expensive, very high quality (probably designed specifically for applications in space) devices.

  11. It might be interesting to see how many people who download the game without paying end up actually buying the game because they like what they play.

    With a lot of us here on the forum, we were here long before the game went paid... and so we sort of knew what to expect from the full release and were therefore more willing to part with the cash. However, nowadays, as the demo and full release get separated by a wider and wider gap I can understand, from the point of view of wanting to know what you're going to get, why somebody might pirate the game before spending any of their money.

    Perhaps that's naive... and I certainly don't mean to sound as though I condone it... just to say that I understand it from that point of view. What I don't understand is pirating it, liking it, but not paying for it because you're just cheap. If you can afford a computer to run the game, you can afford the money to buy the game.

  12. Here is the debris in one of my saves, the majority of them are just radial decouplers. If you go into a 270 degree orbit, it starts to feel a bit dangerous, at least 3 pieces of debris fly past every 10 seconds, some coming within the physics sphere.

    E8ubF.png

    Could you upload that save file? I would love to fly through all that and see all the stuff whizzing by at huge speeds.

  13. So basically, they could have just done:

    >Decrease gravity behind

    >Increase gravity in front

    >Time goes faster behind and slower in front

    >Faster time = universe expands faster

    >Slower time =universe expands slower/gravity pulls things back together

    >Take one step forward

    >Return gravity to normal

    >WARPED!!!

    and nobody thought of that until now... *facepalm*

    IDGI...

    Is that how a Warp Drive works? That's not how I understood it...

  14. Yeah, it's sitting around here somewhere, probably underneath a big math or ethics textbook. O.o It's an interesting read (one that makes me even more displeased with those whom I've met who blithely bash Sam Harris as an "idiot", claiming he knows nothing and is totally wrong...from philosophy majors, undergrads, who arguably know very little by comparison).

    Yeah, it frustrates me too when people dismiss him and his ideas. I know I'm not the smartest person in the world, and I don't know much about the subjects he addresses, but I find Sam Harris' reasoning to often be very difficult to argue against.

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