Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.
Nuclear energy is limited to a little less than 1% of the energy release possible with antimatter, per mass.
The practical limit for nuclear energy is about 5 to 10 times less than that, because the theoretical limit corresponds to the transmutation of hydrogen into iron, coupled with the capture of the entire energy, which will not be achievable any time soon.
But there is an essential difference between nuclear energy and antimatter energy. Nuclear energy is stored in our environment and you just have to exploit it. Antimatter energy is a form of energy storage, so you need some other form of energy to make antimatter. The energy efficiency of making antimatter is many orders of magnitude worse than the factor of less than 100 that exists between nuclear energy and antimatter energy and the mass of the confinement device needed for storing antimatter is also orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the stored antimatter.
For now, there is absolutely no hope of ever using antimatter in practice for storing energy. Such a thing could be enabled only if some technologies that we cannot imagine would be invented.
Despite the great technological progress of the last couple of centuries, it is hard to say that there have been many inventions that have never been imagined before. After all, already 3 millennia ago the god Hephaestus did his metal smith work with the help of intelligent artificial robots.
Yeah but when you are talking about energy levels in the nuclear bomb range, the threat to the passenger stops going up. If im in a craft with 1 Hiroshima bomb of energy and another guy is in one with a million tsar bombs worth of energy, we would both be obliterated before we knew anything was wrong no matter how small of a mishap.
I think GP's point is that a chromebook is a perfectly cromulent apternative to windows, running normal ChromeOS, for users looking for a simple web/docs/email machine.
> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, ...
In my experience as a publishing scientist, this is partly because publishing with "reputable" journals is an increasingly onerous process, with exorbitant fees, enshittified UIs, and useless reviews. The alternative is to upload to arXiv and move on with your life.
Every field and every publisher has this issue though.
I've read papers in the chemical literature that were clearly thinly veiled case studies for whatever instrument or software the authors were selling. Hell, I've read papers that had interesting results, only to dig into the math and find something fundamentally wrong. The worst was an incorrect CFD equation that I traced through a telephone game of 4 papers only to find something to the effect of "We speculate adding $term may improve accuracy, but we have not extensively tested this"
Just because something passed peer review does not make it a good paper. It just means somebody* looked at it and didn't find any obvious problems.
If you are engaged in research, or in a position where you're using the scientific literature, it is vital that you read every paper with a critical lens. Contrary to popular belief, the literature isn't a stone tablet sent from God. It's messy and filled with contradictory ideas.
That sounds more like an issue of certain fields having crappy standards because the people in those fields benefit from crappy standards than an issue with the site they happen to host papers on.
I was going to ask, why hasn't anyone ported NeXTSTEP to modern architectures? It was a pretty decent windowing system. Then I realized duh that's what Apple did with OS X. Too bad they ruined it.
I wasn't alive at the time NeXTSTEP was a thing, but I did look at a demo[0] to figure out what you were talking about (i love building/tinkering with window managers); it just looks like a regular old window manager?
Is there something I'm missing/something specific you're talking about?
NeXTSTEP was everything from the OS to the user experience and everything inbetween.
I'd say there were 3 distinct abstractions within NextSTEP:
- The microkernel / OS (Mach / BSD) (for the hardware)
- The Objective C based SDK
- The User experience (not just window manager, but largely the window manager)
The SDK is what is still arguably the most highly regarded part of NeXTSTEP even today. That aside, at the time nothing else was so well polished and integrated on almost every level.
I remember when I first learned about GNUstep in 2004 when I was in high school. It's a shame GNUstep never took off; we could have had an ecosystem of applications that could run on both macOS and Linux using native GUIs.
My graduation thesis was to port visualisation software from NeXT into Windows, obviously rewriting it in the process.
My supervisor used to have a Cube, and every time I visited his office for demos or questions, there it was left in the corner, with the expectation that everything related to NeXT was going to be away.
Thus this project, and others, as means to keep the research going.
This was before Jobs coming back to Apple, and OpenStep not really going as well as hoped for.
New and shiny is not always better. Science has spoiled us in the last century, but it has little to say about how a good government should operate.
Many of us have a popular set of ideals that we think are superior and have attempted to overlay those on every aspect of modern life, but they have little to no data behind them and are ultimately just beliefs that make us feel good. As such, there is no reason to expect they are optimal for governing either.
Look, just let us get rid of first-past-the-post as the only voting method, and I'll be happy. I'm not asking for voting via Neuralink, holographic VR Presidential debates, or flying car taxis to the polling places.
This is just not true. The only chugging back then was reading from disks, and the entire Office suite was only a handful of 3.5" floppies. If you had already started Excel earlier, then it was likely still cached in RAM and would start nearly instantly. If not, then it was still only a few seconds.
Now what was slow was actual computations. Like try running a big spreadsheet in Excel or counting words in a big Word document on that hardware. It takes a very long time, while on modern hardware it's nearly instant.
This does not match my memory of using Windows 3.1. Excel would likely not have been cached in RAM from a previous run because a typical Windows 3.1 machine only had 4 megabytes of RAM.
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