phoenix_ca

The problem with silicon as a base for life is the amount of energy required to actually make and break bonds with it, among other things. Not that I'd discount the idea of other life entirely, it's just that we don't even know how the heck carbon-based life ever got started, and we can barely judge whether or not it could exist on certain other worlds. The "Goldilocks" zone is something of a myth too, or at least a rather well debunked idea. The initial idea was based on the assumption that all life as we knew it depended on the sun for energy. Get too far away and it would be impossible for it to exist. However, deep sea exploration proved all that wrong when we found entire ecosystems underwater in the pitch black, that were based on chemosynthesis. That discovery pretty much blew-apart the idea of planets needing to be in a special zone away from their star to possibly harbour life. Europa, for all we know, could very well support life in a liquid ocean underneath its ice, supported by the heat generated by tidal forces.

It's not a bad idea, mining the gas giants, but it's certainly a long way off. If we can make fusion or q-thrusters work as well as a sub-light Acubierre drive, then yeah, it might even become economically viable some day. Depends on what fuel you're talking about. If you mean aneutronic processes like p+B11, the time for all the side-reaction products to decay is more on the order of hours. Turn it off, wait eight hours, and enough of the C-13 will be gone that you can walk around and frolick inside the reactor...or you know, perform maintenance on it or something like that... I vote for Canada. Have you seen how much room we have here!? We even have our own desert! And on top of that, we can stick pretty much all of that high-level "waste" from everyone else's reactors into our own, so we'd basically be getting free energy. As a Canadian, I'm totally down for that. That's a rather, misleading estimate. Maybe for a tokamak, sure. A more realistic one would peg it at a decade, assuming all goes well. At least for reaching net energy. Once that's done the rest is pretty much just an engineering issue using current technology.

While you're right, you're wrong about the legal precedent that's been already set by cases like Viacom vs YouTube. DMCA Safe Harbours were tested and came through. Not that I like the DMCA but in this case it worked. Allowing anyone, even law enforcement, to just peruse people's data at will is bad business practice in societies like the USA, Canada, the EU, and so on. There's a difference between a company opening its doors for law enforcement and security services to do what they please, and secret court warrants (or particular pieces of legislation) that require it of them lest they face very severe consequences for noncompliance. That data that got turned over was all done legally, believe it or not. No, encryption is not foolproof. Any encryption can be broken, given enough computing power and time, which is the real issue. If the encryption being used by a normal user is robust enough that it would require someone to dedicate a purpose-built supercomputer running ASIC cards designed for the sole purpose of cracking that encryption scheme years to do so (and it's actually pretty easy to get to that point), you're probably safe. Furthermore, Heartbleed has nothing to do with encryption. It is a problem caused by an error in implementation. The encryption itself is secure, as long as you don't break it by using it incorrectly; this is explained very clearly. Tor is an anonymisation service, not a storage service. SpaceMonkey also has nothing to do with anonymity and makes absolutely no claims that it does. So...why are you trying to draw a parallel between the two at all? They're nothing alike. There is no maintenance. If it breaks they send you a new one. It's not like you need to set-up your own NAS, and considering the cost, it's dirt cheap compared to the price of paying for your own internet-accessible storage in another city (the only way to get real backup security is not to just store data off-site, but in an entirely different geographical location). If supposed "lack of control" is something you're willing to pay extra for, fine, but it's not a solution that everyone can afford. Not by a long shot.

Uhhhhh...I think the posts in this thread go toward showing that there indeed are people who get edgy about low-level waste. Hell, I've even met people like that. The ones most crazy about it are pretty much certifiable though... True enough. More energy, easier to create fusion with, more radiation. Although, much of that energy is in the neutron radiation, and can only be collected as thermal energy. DPF may provide a way to use direct conversion, which is much more efficient. We'll have to wait to see how it all shakes-out.

The comment about superfluid helium is what prompted me to say 1°K. Isn't helium only a superfluid around 1-2°K? They're still trying to figure-out how to adequately breed tritium in those reactors. It may never work. It probably will, but that isn't my main issue. My main bone to pick with tokamaks is the D+T fuel requirement. They can't use p+B11, so they're going to irradiate themselves, period. After running it for a while, you'll have a reactor that is radioactive all by itself. People are already edgy about low-level nuclear waste from fission power plants. Purely from a marketing perspective, I'd much rather be able to say that fusion is far cleaner in that regard.

The encryption, on top of the splitting of data into blocks like the BitTorrent protocol does, makes it very unlikely that any court of law could actually pin the liability for the entire piece of content someone uploads on any one other user. On top of that, this is very clearly and effectively dealt with in Space Monkey's ToS: This shifts liability for the content onto the user, just like any other storage service does, and protects the users storing other people's data in much the same way. If it were proven that illegal or unlicensed or what-have-you data were on their service, then it would be up to SM to remove it to comply with law enforcement, and they have very explicit clauses in the ToS allowing just that. Space Monkey and its users would only be liable for a bad user using the service for illicit purposes if they were informed of the criminal activity and didn't act; that would make them an accessory. But in past, legal precedent (at least in Canada and the USA) has followed the path of blaming the user who uploaded the content, not the company providing the service to share that content. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't have things like YouTube, or even this forum, because the onus of policing everyone's uploads for any possible infringement on copyright or and data that could be criminal would be far too immense for the service to continue. YouTube has already fought and largely won (well, sorta) this battle in US courts. They aren't liable for people uploading content that infringes on copyright, as long as they act quickly when informed of the infringement, and the same goes for criminal activity. They would only be liable if they are informed of the infringement or criminal content and didn't act to remove it from their service within a reasonable time frame. As far as law enforcement goes from a practical standpoint though, it's very unlikely for any law enforcement agency to just stumble upon someone's Space Monkey data and go "Oh my, that's child ****ography!" It's not like anyone can just poke their head in and look at people's data; the entire system, like most secure data systems, is designed to prevent just that. No corporation in the USA would put-up with that kind of fishing without a warrant, and if the data is encrypted with a key that only the user has anyway, those law enforcement officers will be SOL, warrant or no. Not that that's a good thing; it's just one of the prices paid for a free society.

Ah, well at least that explains how it's cooled, but there's still the issue of all that power being eaten for refrigeration. Reaching net positive energy is more difficult. It's not like refrigeration to around 1°K is easy. O.o A design that doesn't need a superconductor has a distinct advantage right from the start because of that. All that aside, the fuel choice is likely the biggest issue. D+T fusion produces a high-energy neutron (14.1MeV), which will certainly turn the reactor itself radioactive. Not really a solution to the problem of nuclear waste. That and the problem of tritium breeding hasn't been solved. It may well be eventually, but p+B11 reactors have the advantage there again by using fuel that is (ridiculously) abundant in nature.

Did you look at the Space Monkey link, cantab? I don't think you looked at the Space Monkey link.

https://www.spacemonkey.com/ Best of both worlds. (The best part probably being the distributed nature of the storage, meaning no possibility of all your data suddenly being inaccessible or lost because a data centre gets flooded, loses power, or is otherwise damaged.)

The penalties for a storage provider knowingly enabling copyright violations are huge in the USA. Easily in the millions of dollars. It's far, far safer for the provider to simply close the account than it is to risk a lawsuit. Even the legal fees wouldn't compare to the tiny cost of cutting-off a single user, or even thousands of users, at a service that charges something around $60/month; and most charge way less than that. This is partly why companies like Google keep pretty strict hands-off policies when it comes to what users are doing with their services. If they violate the EULA or ToS they can point to that and say to the authorities "See? We didn't want them to do this anyway. We'll close that account right-quick!" whenever they're told to do so. Otherwise, they really don't want to know exactly what you're doing, because knowing makes them liable.

@AngelLestat: I gave you two videos because it was the quickest thing I could pull-up on short notice. Digging-up source material again for decisions made as far back as the 60s isn't easy; often there isn't even public record, so all we've really got to go on is their word and integrity...and the fact that the DoE hasn't funded research for any other types of fusion devices, and instead exclusively dedicated their time and money to tokamaks. They don't even make a nod to the existence of these other types of fusion on the ITER website, which is odd. You'd think they'd at least point-out that there are other ways being tried. As for the salesman bit...am I supposed to take that as a compliment or a veiled insult? If by "life cycle" you mean the turnover between prototypes, you're wrong. For polywells and DPF designs it takes from a few months to a few years (far less than a decade) to make significant modifications to the design and build a new prototype. They have the benefit of being very small designs that can be put together very easily for research. Tokamaks, on the other hand, have to be absolutely gargantuan, requiring years of planning and construction just to build one. Granted, they need to add a lot of variability to the design like adjustable magnetic fields to get a more reasonable research life out of them, but it's not like they have the option of just going right back to the drawing-board and making significant changes. (I also find it rather amusing that tokamaks require superconductors to be efficient. The only superconductors we have now require serious refrigeration to near absolute zero. So you're building a reactor that is to be used as a heat source for thermal power, that requires super-cooled parts to contain the plasma in it. It's amusing, and a little bass-ackwards. So...what, are they waiting for room-temperature superconductors? Who knows how long that'll be. Polywells and DPF have the benefit of being based on currently available technology.)

It's not uncommon for legislation to be an utter mess like that. No one can be an expert in every facet of a modern nation-state's laws. Lawyers divide themselves into general categories like constitutional, corporate, criminal, civil, family, tax, or even municipal law (and there are plenty more categories) for a reason. Legislators are in an even worse position because they need to be at least somewhat familiar with all of it, so they're bound to make errors like that by passing amendments that create very different and even illogical differing applications of the same general law. ... Everything about modern life is chaotic. O.O

Well as I said, Polish law might not be applicable at all. And yes, there is fair use in USA copyright law; in fact it's quite lax when it comes to fair use. Direct sharing though, not so much.

Absolutely, though given the constraints of our current forms it would be pretty much impossible for any human to ever understand this objective reality in a truly objective manner. In fact the existence of objective reality is sometimes used as a (sort of but not really) more robust defence of the existence of a god than things like the circular reasoning of saying that a book says so. In the field of science, the term "universe" is anything but general. There is quite literally no evidence that you should actually believe that what you observe is true. It could all be an elaborate hoax played on you by some outside entity. You could be a brain in a vat, or a computer, or a sophisticated simulation. Not that living your life thinking that would be rational at all; there is no evidence for it.

Uhhh...Science Labs? For this? Anyway, what matters is where the file is stored. If you're talking about OneDrive, I'd bet the files if you're a Polish user are stored somewhere in France, Germany, or the UK, but you'd have the ask Microsoft. They might even limit their storage to the USA, in which case it's US law that applies, to the service. So, if a Polish user used a US-located service to host files for sharing with other Polish people, even if Polish law allowed for it, the content owner could us US law to demand that Microsoft remove the files. Similarly, if the user was in the USA, but the storage was in Poland, the content owner could sue the user, but might have trouble attacking the storage service. Copyright is a complete and total mess since the invention of the internet.

@Red Iron Crown: The existence of a subjective reality necessitates the existence of an objective reality for one to subjectively understand.

Great, you need to add safety systems to make something safe. How does this support your initial assertions that nuclear power is inherently unsafe, and that it is so unsafe that it's not even worth pursuing?

No. It could be upside-down.

Of course you can say something is scientifically impossible. All that means is that based on current scientific knowledge, something is not possible. Should that understanding change, what was once impossible would become possible, but this stems from science being, the most absolute sense, a subjective body of knowledge. If it were completely objectively true, this change wouldn't be possible. Something that is objectively true is immutable. The law of identity might be and example of this, though I prefer Descartes' cogito ergo sum, as it's even more difficult to imagine any possible universe where that would not be true. Furthermore, there is objective reality. Our best method for aligning our knowledge as closely as we can to this reality is science. An omniscient being could claim to know objective reality. So, yes, one can claim something to be scientifically impossible in the same way one can claim something to be biblically impossible. Both are based on incomplete sets of knowledge compared to objective reality.

Ohhhh yes they would. A long time ago, the USA DoE made the very stupid decision to only pursue the tokamak design for fusion power generation. It was a massive blunder, and pretty much every scientist in the field said so, including proponents of the tokamak design. Other countries followed suit, and we get JET and ITER. In terms of progress toward adequate density and temperature for self-sustaining fusion, the tokamak has been soundly beaten by DPF and polywells, and they're aiming for a far more difficult fuel to get to fuse, p+b11. Tokamaks are using the easiest fuel to fuse, D+T, and they are still miles away. We don't have a thorium fuelled reactor that could be used for power generation either. But like thorium fuel in fission, what's left with DPF and polywell fusion is largely engineering problems, not new and unproven science. They're both close enough to commercial viability that they're worth talking about.

Tokamaks show no sign of working at all, let alone any time soon.

LWR designs have come a long way since then. They actually have capacity factors that are quite reasonable now; they've even eclipsed CANDU. But at the time Japan was making the choice, the American PWRs on offer were terrible by comparison, with capacity factors around 50%, which the CANDU had around 80-90%. As with everything else, it's just not that simple. :/

It was a mistake. They chose the less efficient PWR and BWR designs which had terrible capacity by comparison. They had options, and they chose the objectively worse one. O.o

Tantalizingly close, in fact. :3

I didn't suggest that they were, and if there is one salient point to be made is that when it comes to public policy, democratic nations are practically schizophrenic and bipolar. Whether or not the country is technologically advanced is not absolutely related to how good their policy is regarding nuclear reactors. Japan is pretty much the case-in-point of that. I've pointed-out before, their entire culture surrounding nuclear power was toxic from the beginning; this kind of wake-up call was bound to happen to them eventually by carrying on the way they were. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization Read it. All of it. And then look at your statements again. You've completely missed the point. It took me about twenty seconds to dig-up this: So, yeah. Reactors. Being built to withstand aircraft smashing into them even better than the current design. I'll read the rest later, but I'd rather like a full citation (not just a link to the document). And if those safeties are removed to compete in the US market? Guess what, that's not a design problem, it's a policy problem. It's certainly possible to design a safer reactor; whether or not you do it is the problem. LFTR, dense plasma fusion, and polywell fusion (using p+b11). Polywells can be used to retrofit existing thermal power plants, DPF could be used for small distributed loads (which would be great for countries like Canada with various areas of very low population density), and thorium fission might provide piles of clean power on the cheap.