StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017 is awarded to the English author Kazuo Ishiguro "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world". https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/l...

The Chemistry prize is out: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 to Jacques Dubochet University of Lausanne, Switzerland Joachim Frank Columbia University, New York, USA and Richard Henderson MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK &...

The Medicine and Physics Nobels are out- Physics: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 with one half to Rainer Weiss LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and Kip S. Thorne LIGO/VIRGO Coll...

^Actually it turns out that Interstellar's black hole is not that big, but it's still significantly bigger than, say, Sagittarius A*.

I think that was an excellent episode, and a clever and interesting use of time dilation, though part of me wants to go and work out how close they'd have to be for less than 400 miles to make that big a difference in relative time. And how the ship can be that close and not be shredded by tidal fo...

The final bit, well I don't see why this version of the doctor is so suicidal and / or afraid of moving on. Has he previously been shown to be so clingy? Ten wasted a whole regeneration just because he didn't want to change his appearance and personality; Twelve's little freakout is nothing by comp...

While the idea is valid as nothing in known physics prohibits it I think they should start small. Build some prototype lightsail craft and scaled down laser station to send lightsail craft on fast flybys of Uranus, Neptune and dwarf planets in outer solar system. It would need a fraction of laser p...

Stephen Hawking working on spacecraft that could reach ‘Second Earth’ in 20 years The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is working on a spacecraft that can travel at a fifth of the speed of light – meaning it could reach the nearest star and send back images of a suspected ‘Second Earth’ within 25...

Wow its actually possible to send a space ship to another star system now, thank you science!! Not really. The plan depends, amongst other things, on the continuation of a Moore's law-like exponential increase in laser power. A more accurate statement would be that it may be possible to send a spac...

You don't need to do that, you just have normal wire coming out at the tapping out points where necessary. Although I think superconducting transformers are better than non-superconducting ones so it would be probably better to do that part inside the sheath. Other sources would be nuclear, wind, f...

The superconducting power line is the sort of thing that gets funded by governments that actually want to spend money on infrastructure. This does not include either the Trump Administration or the Republican-dominated 115th Congress. I mean, I get the idea of "use Trump to do useful things.&q...

My way of doing it would be to have a MgB2 superconducting power line you are using anyway for power from other sources to run alongside the solar wall. Can you plug lv inverters directly into a superconducting power line? What other sources are you intending to power from it? Where are you getting...

Is Trump liable to get sign off on vast sums of money for no particular reason just because its related to 'the wall'? I'm not even sure what you would do with a superconducting power line system to move wall mounted solar... you would need substations every couple of km so why bother with the supe...

Its not really a practical way of deploying solar, your transmission costs would be huge as your spreading lv equipment out over a line rather than clumping it around your transformers and inverter equipment. Also lots of it will be literally in the middle of no where where there is no demand so ag...

Turkey isn't a nuclear power in its own right, but it has a nuclear weapons sharing deal with the US. ...how do you think that works out, exactly? Because you're acting as if the sharing agreement means they can use nukes without US say so. They can't. Well yeah, but the nukes are physically in Tur...

Turkey doesn't have nuclear weapons. The list of nuclear-armed countries, I believe, is: America. Russia. China. Britain. France. India. Pakistan. North Korea. Israel (not officially confirmed, but generally assumed to be the case). Or at least based on what I read when I researched this topic back...

Had we not fought them when we did, I dare say we might have had to when they finished conquering Iraq and invaded Turkey, or Israel. Fuck Turkey, Israel, and especially the Iraquis (nothing personal, just in the political sense). We need to stop trying to be the world's cop and quit the foreign ad...

She can lose confidence votes such as the QS one tomorrow, and still be offed under the fixed term law. To be precise, it would trigger another election if another government doesn't successfully form within 14 days of that confidence vote. Unless the DUP showed signs of backing a Labour government...

I havent watched much media coverage yet. I wonder if they are gonna label this as a terrorist incident even though this was done against muslims. They already label this as a terrorist attack. Suspected terrorist attack. While it looks likely that this is, indeed, a terrorist attack, the police ha...

There is no concept of the prime minister or failing to pass legislation "dissolving parliament" anymore. Non-scheduled elections in the UK can only be held on a 2/3rds vote of the HOC, or a lost no-confidence vote. Besides those specific circumstances, May's government will stand for 5 y...

Not really. Labour picked up UKIP votes too. What happened was that the UKIP vote collapsed and the UKIP voters went back to their previous parties.

Well Norman Lamb was Farron's opponent last leadership election, but if Vince Cable was an MP at the time I think he would have been a strong candidate.

UKIP as a party aren't really fascist, although they're the kind of hard-right populist movement that tends to attract people who believe a lot of the same things as genuine fascists but lack sufficient courage of their convictions to go the whole nine yards and wear the swastika. (Or rather the li...

You think all they want is Brexit? Maybe some of them, but I dare say a lot of them won't be satisfied while anyone who's not lily-white and English going back several centuries is in the country. Don't be ridiculous. A good amount of promenant UKIP people aren't lily-white and haven't got an Engli...

You think all they want is Brexit? Maybe some of them, but I dare say a lot of them won't be satisfied while anyone who's not lily-white and English going back several centuries is in the country. Don't be ridiculous. A good amount of promenant UKIP people aren't lily-white and haven't got an Engli...