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Well, the roller coaster sim is wireframes only, which is always much easier to compute. You’ll notice that the Doom clone has lighting and shaders, which, however primitive, add complexity to the render.

It’s like the difference between text rendering versus decompressing JPEG images. Both can pile up enough data to exhibit lag, but you get more bang for your buck with the lighter data stream.


  You'd have to scour a big chunk of the solar system.
No, bombarding regular water with neutrons from fission reactions will produce heavy water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Production


I stand corrected.


Well, based on another comment in this thread [0], after the ocean's concentration of nuclear fuel is covered, maybe about 2 million Tsar Bomba's would do the trick.

The physical dimensions of the Tsar Bomba are on the wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

If 2 million are needed, then that's 100 cubed, twice. So two cubes of this bomb, with each cube measuring 100 units per edge, filled solid. The bomb is already designed, so producing 2 million of them would be a matter of setting up an assembly line, and churnning them out like automobiles, once the raw materials are procured.

Each one is about the size of a car, so a parking garage that holds 2 million cars is an okay frame of reference. Most stadiums have parking lots that hold 10,000 spaces, so 100 stadiums, across one hundred cities, but all together in one place. Realistically, though, two million cars easily fit inside any large city.

As for the gaseous concentration of fusion gas in the ocean, that's a much tougher problem to tackle. Really, because the huge fusion bombs that use deuterium (and tritium) are sourcing that material from the oceans (or other bodies of water). Culling deuterium from natural water sources is among the easier ways to produce weaponizable amounts of the gas. So, in order to create twenty times the natural standing concentration would require synthesizing your own new, man-made deuterium from the normal variety of hydrogen, by irradiating non-heavy water.

For every million gallons of ocean water, you can pull out maybe 156 gallons of heavy water, so you'd get about six hundred trillion gallons of heavy water, if you could capture all of the natural heavy water in the world. Take 600 trillion gallons, and multiply it by twenty. Bingo, you're there. That's the ignitable concentration, if you had 2 million Tsar Bombas.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011959


I have a hunch - mathematically unverified - that yield wouldn't increase linearly with volume. And you might have to build your stadiums underwater, because a surface explosion would be unlikely to create the energy density.

Also, it's not obvious there's enough uranium in the world for that many fission devices.

If you want to kill everyone with nuclear weapons, there are easier ways to do it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb

This wouldn't scour all life from the earth, but enthusiastic use of cobalt salt weapons would probably put life back to the plant and mutant insect stage.


There are a few reasons it was a terrible idea:

  - You can't take lightning headphones 
    and use them as headphones in all 
    lightning ports.

  - You can't take lightning headphones
    and use them on any other Apple 
    product other then modern, premium 
    iPhones.

  - It doesn't enable compatibility with 
    other new Apple products. In fact, it
    hinders compatibility with USB-C ports
    in newer Apple laptops. *What?*

  - If Apple went all-in on USB-C with 
    laptops, the lightning port on new
    iPhones feels like either an anachronism
    or accentuates the lock-in attempt.

  - Bluetooth really isn't very good, not
    at a level that guarantees perfect,
    continuous audio streams. It's not 
    an ideal step up from a good, durable wire.

  - Air pods and  other headphone upgrades
    are double disposable, in that, not only
    are they particularly expensive options,
    but easily lost, stolen or destroyed.
    Laundry and drop hazards, above and beyond 
    theft, basically add constant anxiety to 
    the total cost of ownership for air pods 
    in particular.

  - General inconvenience of replacement 
    forces odd work-around strategies for 
    times when you can't find your headphones.
    If you're running late, and you lost them
    in the couch cushions or under the bed, 
    what are your options?
I can think of a number of additional diminishingly valuable what-ifs, but you get the point. Life always turns out better with the widely adopted standardized options, since headphones take on the primary expendable accessory, and the alternatives are hemmed in, such that they're always worse.

But now what? It's just going to be this irritating thing, until an excuse lets Apple back down while saving face.

Whatever.


I was really hoping it would be something more like, because there's a mechanical flaw that causes the clock to run slow, and it takes three minutes reach the belfry of the clock tower from, the street. This means that when the clock master notices that the clock is running on time, he has three minutes to reach the belfry, and set the clock forward three minutes, so that it never runs slow enough to make people late.

Or something like that.


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