You vastly underestimate the size and diversity of India.
Their middle class is bigger than that of the USA or I think even that of the entire EU.
The can have a low rate on pretty much every statistic, while still having a higher total amount of it than us, simply due to.the sheer size of people. They could have an entire state, more modern, rich and with more people than Germany, while keeping their current statistics. No problem.
Also: Are you Indian (I think not), or what is your basis for the ”rootless“ statement. To us Germans, Americans appear rootless. But we are not competent to judge that!
Finally, things like this right here ARE how you get Indians out of poverty and illiteracy! Even if just via the resulting businesses lobbying for more education.
It's obviously not an exact science, since "middle class" has as much to do with how people define their own social status as it has to do with their actual income. But those measures counting hundreds of millions of Indians as middle class are doing that by including people surviving on a few dollars a day. Maybe in an Indian context where poverty is widespread this is considered middle class, but it's quite misleading to present that as middle class to a Western audience.
That is not the claim that was being made though. The one I replied to said India's middle class was bigger than the American and European ones. Being comparable to country with 5% of India's population basically just underlines the fact that India's middle class is tiny.
That is not the case at all[1]. I appreciate the thought out post and tone /sarcasm.
For further reading.[2]
> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)
So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline.
Why do we need bookmarks when we have softlinks. They are the same concept, and an OS that makes a distinction, is a faulty OS, IMHO.
Ditto for tabs. The task bar already serves that. It't the task bar's flaw if it isn't hierarchic.
And actually, a directory already solves that too. Which even exists on Linux. (/proc)
All you need, is a (filtered?) horizontal directory tree listing for the tasks/tabs and a sidebar with another directory that you can put softlink URL into.
Add a bit of window manager placement automation, and you got your browser.
And with JS, as a former pioneer web developer: A website whose HTML relies on a certain way of being presented or a certain interactive logic, is a defective website, full stop.
The whole point of HTML, is that it is semantic markup, and semantic ONLY!
E.g. an audio browser must work just as fine with a website. If one’s website fails at that, it’s because of disinfomatiom spread by the What(TF)WG and because of incompetence, and the causing people must be fired.
For me there's a sweet spot for software where you get something that's lightweight and configurable but still comes with features that are considered essential. Browsers without tabs or bookmarks don't tick the last box, something like qutebrowser does. In other words, I dislike bloat but I don't hate it to a degree where I'm willing to switch to something more limited just because it has fewer lines of code.
And JS may not be necessary and I wish that it would be used much less(if at all). But JS won't go away for some time and I still want to be able to use most websites. So I run a browser that supports JS and block everything I find too annoying.
I don't know who would downvote this. There are lots of articles about someone creating their own browser and they all turn out to be a variation of 'they didn't create their own browser, they made their own skin'.
Many different browsers use the same engine at the core. That doesn't mean they aren't different pieces of software. just that they use the same engine.
(In this case, one might nitpick that "programmed" suggests something different, but I don't think that's clear cut)
At some point surely there is a line when the whole headline is 'this is bad, I made my own'. That would be like me saying 'modern OSs are bad, I made my own' and it actually being a new task bar for a Linux distribution.
At some point people need to take responsibility for the titles they write.
Sure, but it's IMHO clearly arguable where that line is. The underlying engine is only a part of the user experience of a browser, and browser based on a common engine are commonly described as different products.
Chrome, Chromium, new Edge, Brave and Qutebrowser all use the same engine, but even the first two are not uncommonly considered to be different products. Same with Safari, Chrome and Firefox on iOS, despite Apple only allowing their own browser engine on iOS.
The moon's dust contains huge amounts of helium-3.
Which apparently is an amazing power source.
Also, why fission? We do have working fusion reactors. They are called hydrogen bombs. (The outer part, at least.) As long as you can keep the G forces low ...
I'm not sure what you're talking about? RTGs don't have short decay paths, they have to have long decay paths to last through a mission. P238 is what we use for most probes and has a half life of 88 years. It decays to U234 which has a half life of 200,000 years, short enough to be dangerous but long enough to almost never go away. RTGs tend to produce on the order of 100 watts of electricity from 500 watts of heat. A good nuclear engine will want to use 100+ megawatts when in use.
And more importantly RTGs don't put out nearly enough heat to make a usable nuclear thermal rocket. The important thing is being able to turn them on when you're doing a burn but then turn them off when you're coasting to your destination then turn them on again to stop there. RTGs can't do that.
What was asked for sounded like an RTG to me. I wasn't saying it was a nuclear thermal rocket or that it could be used as one. As you point out, it's a constant power source.
I expected a project-Orion-type interstellar solution.
Not a measly ”twice as fast as conventional“ water kettle.
Also, no word about what they will acually use.
Because classic uranium is a quite limited resource actually. It has been said to run out even before fossil fuels.
Also, why not a fusion rocket? Given that we know how to make fusion bombs. Because until we find a massive amount of anti-matter, this will be the next best thing for a loong time.
The only limiting factor would be a human body's ability to withstand G forces.
All of those things are harder than a nuclear thermal rocket. Got to walk before you run. And a fusion reactor is actually likely to be much heavier than a fission one (at least in the near term).
They're using Low Enriched Uranium for this design. We have plenty of uranium (resources are huge, but no one bothers to prove them into reserves until the price is right), and not much is required for this project.
Don't be disappointed by the first step in a journey not taking you immediately to the destination.
> Because until we find a massive amount of anti-matter
I honestly hope this never occurs, or we never are able to contain/store such a mass for any real length of time.
Because if we can do it, it will be used for a weapon.
Seriously - I can't even imagine what - for instance - one kilogram of anti-matter coming in contact with regular matter - the amount of energy that would be released...it staggers the imagination. Today's fusion weapons release only a fraction of their potential energy; anti-matter conversion would be 100% (roughly):
"Using the convention that 1 kiloton TNT equivalent = 4.184×1012 joules (or one trillion calories of energy), one gram of antimatter reacting with one gram of ordinary matter results in 42.96 kilotons-equivalent of energy (though there is considerable "loss" by production of neutrinos)."
So...one kilo of anti-matter would be equivalent to 42 megatons - which is close to yield of the Tsar Bomba:
...but in a much more compact package. 50 kg of antimatter - which would be feasible for current launch systems, and comparable in size to current warheads:
Well - that's a 2 GT weapon...while I'm sure such a thing has been considered as to it's effects...I honestly don't know what that would be. Best guess might be that one such warhead could easily take out a good portion of say, the west coast (of the United States)?
Ultimately - we are not ready in any manner - socially, morally, politically - as a species to wield that kind of power responsibly. Honestly, even nuclear weapons fall into that assessment, despite recent history - I'm honestly not sure how we have gotten this far without a major nuclear war occurring.
Sadly, though, I know that my conjecture (in which I am not alone, I hope) will not do anything to stop the research - right now, though, the cost to produce anti-matter (let alone contain it) is so high as to make even a small mass cost an exorbitant amount of money. I sincerely hope there isn't any breakthrough on that front.
I honestly think we, as a species, are not ready for it (that isn't to say none of us are - but those who would be responsible with such "stuff" are likely very few - I know I am not one of them).
Well, if we found it, it would already be contained unless accessed by definition.
Also, magnetic fields could definitely contain it, as is already done.
We can already make anti-matter, as it't essentially the process of making matter bounce off, using a photon, in such a way that it reverts its time direction.
Or, in classical view: Turn a photon into a particle/antiparticle pair.
The problem is, of course, that it first takes those shitloads of energy, that it would release later.
And to actually find anti-matter in nature, you would most likely have to turn into anti-matter yourself, travel back in time, and somehow survive the big bang without touching anything, to come out the hypothetized other side where time is reversed and anti-matter expanded to. Or try to get inside a black hole, and revert your direction of motion (as time and space are reversed in there).
Both not yet technically available, to say the least. ;)
Who cares about weapon power? We already have _ridiculously_ and _maximally_ powerful weapons now. Our urge to kill one another is no longer constrained by the limits of our tools. It doesn't matter whether we're able to make even more powerful weapons.
Well, the Tsar Bomba was made as a single of a kind, ust for testing, and at half of its designed size because a bomb of that size is basically useless.
So I don't think we would get larger warheads. It's more likely we would get smaller ones, at power levels that can be used, and use their small weight as a feature. (Not something great, but I don't think we will ever use an Earth Crust removing bomb.)
Antimatter bombs emit mostly gamma radiation and so are unlikely to efficiently couple it to air. You would need a tungsten or lead (or even uranium) coupler to absorb the gamma radiation and heat up to drive the explosion.
The can have a low rate on pretty much every statistic, while still having a higher total amount of it than us, simply due to.the sheer size of people. They could have an entire state, more modern, rich and with more people than Germany, while keeping their current statistics. No problem.
Also: Are you Indian (I think not), or what is your basis for the ”rootless“ statement. To us Germans, Americans appear rootless. But we are not competent to judge that!
Finally, things like this right here ARE how you get Indians out of poverty and illiteracy! Even if just via the resulting businesses lobbying for more education.