Slashdot Mirror
Wave/Sea Power - What Are the Dangers?
worldwide_ants writes: "My main worry about power generation from waves, is that we would put the earth in danger by accellerating the descent of the moon into the earth, since the moon would have to expend more energy in generating tides, and thus lose it's kinetic energy.
How serious a problem is this? What are the solutions?
Could we send a rocket up to give the moon a 'kick' once in a while?" This reminds me of an Isaac Asimov novel I once read ...
I'm sorry, but damning water is insignificant compared to the millions of holiday travelers distributing their fat mass South every winter and moving right back North to their summer homes *every* year.
This is going to swing the earth's seasons off balance and this planet is going to be spinning in two directions.
Being here in California where we're more reliant on wind power than tidal power (and we've all seen how reliable that is recently), I'm more worried about the proliferation of wind farms around here. I mean, what happens when we've farmed all the wind? Most of the weather patterns for the entire United States start in the Pacific and travel via the wind eastward over the country. If we use all the wind here in California for power, suddenly all those clouds and the jetstream and stuff will stop here, the rest of the country will get sucked into a terible drought and pilots won't be able to make up for the late departure from SFO to JFK!
Think about it, the US will be devistated, the dot-com stocks will crash taking the economy with it, the country will go into uncontrolled recession, the free world will fall and the commies will take over. At least if the moon were to fall, NASA could send it into some uninhabited part of the Pacific Ocean, just like they did with MIR.
None of this stuff is funny.
/. are funny. This is slashdot's day to troll all the whining, bitching, can't-code IE5'ers who hang around here and play "devil's advocate" all day long. And boy have you boys come through.
I disagree. You're funny. All the fucking losers who like you who bitch about
The articles today weren't supposed to be amusing. The comments were. And you, my friend, in true Casey fashion, have stepped up to the tee and taken a mighty swing with your whiffle ball bat. I laughed at your post so hard I coughed soda through my nose.
I salute you.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
I always figured that the April 1 stories are nothing but an excuse for the editors to get back at people like you. Frankly, I'm amazed that there are so many people reliant upon slashdot. You might want to think about all the other days you're dissing the regualr stuff before bitching that you want it back now.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
the fact that you actually took the time to bitch about something so trivial as the quality of jokes for one day on /., speaks volumes more about how much of a no-life looser you are than it does about slashdots comedic abilities.
/. kicks ass; who cares if one day out of the year they stop normal reporting.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Now THAT is class. Someone who takes April 1 so seriously that they even redo their banner ads.
Funniest stuff I've seen or heard all day.
The moon is spiraling away from the earth, not towards that. The little elf on the other side of my mirror told me so.
This question belongs in April 1, methinks.
The Moon is receding from Earth, and doing so rapidly enough that that their surfaces would have been touching about a billion years ago. The infinitesimal amount of wave and tide energy that we can extract, even if we work on every section of coastline, woun't even slow this recession down noticeably. Plain, ordinary vannilla-flavoured physics is slowing the recession several orders of magnitude faster than we eevr could.
BTW, lightning damage (like Schroter's Valley) and other more or less Transient Lunar Phenomena hint that dear old Luna isn't as inactive as has previously been thought.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Maybe the catch is still to come tomorrow or so, A poll with the questions
:)
o one of the stories posted on april 1st was serious?
o one of the stories was remotely funny
o I submited all stories posted april 1st
o Huh? Did they post anything different then usual?
Must admit, im gonna have trouble picking my vote
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
This reminds me of something funny I once heard a few years back. I was talking to one of my dad's friends who was postively convinced (and just a little drunk) that mankind was slowing down the rotation of the earth by launching lots of rockets and space shuttles from it.
I shit you not.
Nevermind that a rocket's thrust is completely insignificant in any timeframe compared to the inertia of the earth. And that they take off vertically rather than horizontally.
As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...
Sitting is making the laws of gravity work harder, so they will have to stop soon sending us all out into outer space except for those who grab onto something who will have the joy of plumetting into the sun as the orbits misalign spelling death for everything.
You know, the really sad thing is, tomorrow's stories won't be much different.
Or else I'm going to seriously gripe about my article on "the courtship and mating dances of orange and black umbrellas" not getting posted.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type