Remember, it's got a 14 year lifetime because the half-life of Pu-241 is 14.1 years. At the end of that time, half of its mass will be gone, and it'll be producing half as much heat. It won't produce a steady 2KW for 14 years and then bing, go out like a lightbulb. Power produced will slowly fall over time.
You mean, half of the plutonium mass will be gone. It will be almost completely be replaced by other elements. Though I don't know how much energy they give off in radiation, or whether they are stable.
[Wired's rebuttal is] kinda annoying. Ryan Singel, old white guy, repeats
Quinn Norton’s gender (female) five separate times (she is a girl)
because Sogohian, dirt-poor terrorism suspect, is apparently the
chairman of the Patriarchy.[1] Hey, you know who else has white male
privilege, Ryan? Editors at old-media print magazines.
I'm genuinely impressed that we, as a society, have already managed to create a 2.31 GB collection of My Little Pony porn. According to Wikipedia, the first episode aired 668 days ago, so that's an average of 3.7 MB per day. Imagine, if you will, a 343 baud modem continuously sending cartoon porn of talking ponies who are friends. This is one of our species' more embarrassing amazing achievements.
It creates liquidity, which makes it easier to buy and sell shares when you want to buy and sell them.
Unfortunately, the only time you really want liquidity is during a crisis, which is when all the HFT firms exit the market, since they're in it to make money, of course, not to act as a regulated and guaranteed market maker.
Regulated and guaranteed market makers are both (1) required to post a bid and ask even in crisis situations (2) high-frequency and high volume traders because they need to deal with a great amount of market order flow. These things are not necessarily exclusive.
If you conceive to build a perpetual motion machine then you will have taken the first step. The second (more difficult) step will be to conceive how a perpetual motion machine might actually work, or to come up with a plausible way of re-writing the laws of thermodynamics.
The point of the quote is not some wishy-washy "you can if you believe you can". Rather, it might be phrased better as "If you have the vision to see how something might be achieved and the drive to actually achieve it, nothing can stop you from achieving it".
It's not about "just think and you can do it." Vision is key. If you can't conceptualize how something could possible be created, then you're not going to be able to do it, but being able to first conceive the idea takes you to the next step of actually attempting to create it.
Lots of people conceive of ways in which a perpetual motion machine might work - it's why so many people have tried to patent them that the US Patent Office has a specific ban on perpetual motion patents. They don't work, of course, but it tends to require a deeper level of knowlege to figure out why exactly (for instance) any of the magnetic perpetual motion machines won't work than it does to conceive them in the first place.
I think this kind of snarky, rediculous pedantry is exactly one of the things that Russell Kirsch doesn't want people doing, even if you only meant it in jest.
When I read it I think this person might be in pain. This particular message, like "you can do anything you set your mind to" which was recently pilloried on HN [1] combines that thought with a belief in God which also gets the "you must be stupid if you believe ..." treatment.
I've observed it can be the transient signal of some deeper disappointment. Those things eat at people, and in a success focused society it can be hard if not impossible for people who have decided to measure themselves against other people's success to come to grips with that. If emotional damage had a unit of measure it would no doubt be the snark.
Many times I have felt the need to write something snarky in response to an article on HN, but what it really comes back to is my own pride or sense of inadequacy.
I need to learn to be positive and less dismissive.
Then clearly, you have not conceived to do either of those things.
Or do you often just accept the concepts of others as true and therefore beyond refute?
(Really though, the flaw in your comment is that its an impossible statement. It's like asking "If God is all powerful - can he make a rock that even he cannot lift?"
total nonsense.)
Or even 4 dimensional quantum time crystals (which surprisingly, doesn't appear to be completely mental) - http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2539
Course, you can't take any power off them and you have to put them somewhere very very cold, but they will keep going, apparently.
As for the second, we know there are issues with the current physics and I think that might just be what stuff like CERN is for. Or to prove it really really well.
There was an article about HFT recently [0] that mentioned a case where social influence is of small importance: the game is played beyond human capabilities even when really needed.
A Data Grid is an architecture or set of services that enable individuals
or groups of users the ability to access, modify and transfer extremely
large amounts of geographically distributed data for research
purposes.[1] Data grids make this possible through a host of middleware
applications and services that pull together data and resources from
multiple administrative domains and then present it to users upon request.
Bah, Mars. I'd rather live on the Moon. Less gravity, closer to Earth.
Both places require pressure suits, but the Moon is a hard vacuum, which means you can do the usual vacuum industry tricks, while Mars has just enough atomosphere to rule out vacuum applications, but not enough atmosphere to breathe. Maybe in five thousand years we will have terraformed a breathable atmosphere, but in the near future it will be a neat place to plant a flag, like the top of Everest, but certainly not a place you'd like to live.
I think its actually harder to live long-term on the moon than mars, although much easier to get too. With no atmosphere
and a 28 day sun cycle, there's lots of radiation and heat to deal with along with that 14 day night where solar doesn't work. The rovers that are on mars right now wouldn't last long on the moon at all.
