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Hey, slashdot rulers. You're idiots, do you know why? Because what you've accepted as "elvish" spelling of "slashdot" is just gibberish. Don't believe me? Check here: http://tengwar.art.pl/tengwar/ott/start.php?l=en Idiots. And to the author of said "logo" - hand in your nerd card.

First, I don't think two cars could travel the ribbon at once. Second, a car already at GEO is stationary relative to the earth so it would not provide any force that could be harnessed to power the other car. The force it could provide would depend on how far down the ribbon the car had travelled since below GEO the centrifugal force will be less than its weight. However that force will start from zero at GEO and increase to a maximum at sea level. Think about that. There is no upward force to help lift the upward bound cargo when it needs to get going and the cargo is being propelled violently when it nears the end of its journey at GEO. So I don't think this system would work.

I have concerns about laser assisted solar panels as well. Shining a laser so close to the ribbon could be problematic. A laser beam will travel in a straight line but a straight line is not perfectly straight inside the atmosphere. Some observatories use lasers now to adjust their mirrors reduce the blurring caused by the atmosphere. I don't know whether the effect would be pronounced enough to worry about for this application but I have another reason to worry as well. I expect the ribbon might oscillate like a guitar string for several reasons.

If the ribbon is not anchored directly over the equator there would be a natural tendancy to oscillate since the tug of gravity would not be completely along the length of the ribbon. To understand, imagine if the ribbon were anchored at the pole then think about the pull of gravity and consider the inverse square law and the fact that sealevel is about 4000 miles from the center of the earth while GEO is about 24000.

Moving the anchor to 'avoid space debris' would also "pluck" the string. Atomospheric winds would cause vibration in the ribbon. Imagine the force of a 150 mile per hour jetstream pushing against a 3 foot wide ribbon! And if there are lateral vibrations as in a guitar string then there would also be a circular precession similar to foucault's pendulum.

I can't say if these effects would be negligible or not, but I don't see any discussion of vibration in their FAQ much less an engineering study.

New?! Concept cars are nothing new.

Hi did his light-sabre fight in June 2000! Later he did with friends whole new SW episode.

Here you can find the KDE version of the tengwar tool used on the site. All the same functionality and it even uses all the same fonts and language sets.

This article reminded me of this, also photographed from this angle too.

To be honest, I'm surprised no one has already posted links to pics of this already! ..it simply needs to be shared!

Of course, it's not real! ..it's a wax-work. It was shown at an exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled 'Apocalypse' - but it has also been shown at other exhibitions, elsewhere in the world. Here's what The Guardian said about it:-

Maurizio Catellan's Pope has celluloid forebears, too, in this case the face-down prelate in Un chien Andalou, burdened with a piano containing a donkey's corpse. But the prostration of John Paul II is hardly so savage or surreal. The fake meteorite that has supposedly plunged through the ceiling - a hole has been engineered in the skylight - rests upon a waxwork with its vestments still in perfect order. The Pope has his eyes closed and frowns as if in prayer. He is down, but not out; indeed, he looks a sight more robust than the pontiff himself. Catellan has a genuine gift for tragi-comedy, but his latest piece makes no headway in either direction. It feels like a punchline without the joke. You can't get close to the Pope - he's yards away behind the barrier ropes. Crowds strain to see what's going on through the scrummage of shoulders. It's a tactical measure, consistent with the governing principle of this show, which is that you should always be aware that you're having the Apocalypse Experience.

You can read another article on this here (2nd article from bottom of page) although it looks to be a variation on the same theme.

Enjoy! (Sorry about the lack of bigger/better pictures)

>Each node can be in one of 3 states

That's true for individual nodes, but in the context of a whole board, just assigning a random state to any position will give you a lot of invalid board configurations.

Trivial example: the groups in this diagram can never occur during a Go game.

There is an excellent book called "Black Oceans" by Polish writer Jacek Dukaj that (among many other brilliant ideas) features so-called "personality managers" which let one tweak the sensory inputs as you describe it, plus much more. Here is the page for the book.

• www.scene.org - sort of a ground central for the demoscene today, the way I guess the Hornet archive used to be, though I didn't even know what a demo was when hornet was in business.
• Orange Juice, the self-proclaimed "demoscene information center, though I've never found anything useful there. Mostly pertanent to Europe, I think.
• The famous hornet archive, which shut down in 1998 but still seems to host something of an archive.
• A few budding Linux demo sites:
  
  • optimum.sourceforge.net
  • linux.scene.org