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Comment Time to build high-temperature designs (Score 1) 50

Raising the operating temperature of reactors by using molten salt as a coolant would be a big advantage, even with the current overall design. It would permit dry air to be used as the heat sink. Reactors could be installed in desert and on military bases far from NIMBYs and their lawyers.

We have three years to get this started. When the Democrats come back we will be able to use modern healthcare tech again, but our clean energy options will shrink back to EU levels.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 5, Insightful) 166

This isn't government funded.

And that's is exactly WHY Startship represents economy, not waste.

When the government attacked the problem of getting crews and cargo into orbit, it developed Space Shuttle, which required a standing army of 35,000 people just to keep it running. It never achieved its reusability and reliability goals. SpaceX came into the picture with Falcon-9, whose reusable first stage cut the cost of getting to orbit by 90%, and achieved 100% reliability. Starship is on the way to reusability of both stages and fast turnaround at much greater payloads. And no, these efforts are not being "subsidized by NASA." SpaceX gets the job done so much cheaper that NASA contracts the company for most of its flights, as does an increasing base of purely commercial business operators.

Comment Re:The Empire is dead. (Score 1) 127

Other countries have applied various opportunistic squeezes of that kind to exert control over Internet businesses that are outside their jurisdiction. One example was Brazil forcing X to delete the accounts of its current president's political opponents by threatening the Brazilian presences of SpaceX and Tesla, unrelated Musk-owned businesses. I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump, but I like that he whacked Brazil with punitive tariffs for taking this action. The message sent is that any tinhorn who uses such squeeze techniques to enforce laws not in its jurisdiction can be squeeze right back, and hard.

Comment Re:The Empire is dead. (Score 0) 127

The fine is apparently because they won't provide the online equivalent of a building permi

And that's the whole problem. 4chan is not demanding any sort of "building" right in the UK. It operates in the US and maintains a presence on the international Internet. The limit of the UK's jurisdiction is to block access to it within its own borders. It has no right to impose fines or take police actin outside those borders.

Comment Buy a Mac and don't look back (Score 1) 103

The Mac Mini is ideal for a user just coming up from Windows hell. It can use your existing monitor, mouse and keyboard and can be surprisingly cheap if you buy a year-old unit from the "official" refurb store. This will be your first experience of booting up without that ten-minute wait cursor as the PC rattles away doing Gates knows what.

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