The military contracts jobs out all the time (think Halliburton). The results are mixed at best. This one feels more likely to be fair, cheaper, and successful, but I still have my doubts. As much heat as NASA catches for the flaws in its designs, space travel is VERY hard. I'm not sure Virgin can do it that much better.
In open space, yes. But 20mph is not enough to escape Earth's gravity. So if this is in orbit, it'll stay in orbit. But this is more a proof of concept than an actual speed test.
Right now the accuracy with which the kilogram can be measured is about 1 part per 1E8. The paper mentions a noise of around 1 part per 1.6E11. That's over 1,000 times better. That certainly suggests that this method will be sufficiently "better" to be used as the new standard.
I, for one, welcome our incredibly accurate overlords.
At this size (0.000038 km^2) the amount of thrust generated by this sail will be 0.0003477N. If the total mass of sail and attached spacecraft is 100kg, then the acceleration will be 3.477E-6 m/s^2. After a month at this acceleration, the craft will be traveling at 9m/s. That's only about 20mph. Not very fast, but an important proof of concept.
Gasification using a waste product would be more renewable and green. But coffee requires significant water, pesticides, and human intervention to grow. This is probably no better than corn ethanol fueling a vehicle. Ho hum. I could power a car by burning diamonds, too...interesting, yes...efficient, no.
If this is in a rec room or den, just buy a mini-fridge. Cool your CPU and your beer of choice at the same time. You'll have to get creative with the cabling, and your electric bill will suffer, but so long as there's nothing perishable in the fridge you can run it at the lowest setting. And the large thermal mass of all of that beer (you'll have to keep it stocked, of course) housed in aluminum (with its high thermal conductivity) is the perfect heat sink.
Agreed. What I can't understand is how Oracle failed to recognize the value of OpenOffice. They sat on an open source software package as if by doing so they could monetize it. Bizarre.
But nothing of value was lost. I love LibreOffice and as previous commenters have said, it definitely seems to be improving more rapidly than its predecessor.
I thought the same thing...if the planets outnumber stars, but tend to be smaller than stars, then perhaps the mass of them is roughly equal. Not enough to account for all of the "missing mass", but certainly enough to affect the hypotheses regarding its quantity and properties.
Do you know how many people are employed in authoring, navigating, collecting, and enforcing our complex tax system?
Well, the IRS alone employs over 100,000 people IRS Employees and there are somewhere around 800,000 tax preparers Tax Preparers. So lets say 1,000,000 people are employed "doing taxes". This number is probably really low, considering all of the tax attorneys, consultants, etc. If you factor in tax educators, accountants, investment advisers, etc., you might get 2 or 3 million people employed by "doing taxes".
There are around 150,000,000 people working in this country. Workforce So if we instituted a really simple flat tax, we would "unemploy" between 1 and 3% of our workforce. That would send us into an instant recession.
So a simple flat tax won't work if instituted immediately. Even if the computer just simplified the code somewhat, it would still reduce employment. That would reduce the income generated by taxes and, as a result, nullify the work of the computer.
So, I propose that the tax code be made so complex that it employs 100% of the US workforce. People work all day every day calculating taxes. This is a sure fire way to reduce unemployment!
But then maybe this will spur the development of better FOSS alternatives.
That said, I still threw up in my mouth a little bit. This is awful news. Mark my words: Skype will be integrated into Internet Explorer 12 and thus rendered unusable by anyone running Mac / Linux / anything other than Windows. And it won't work well on Windows.
CBS should sue Google for providing searches that linked to CNET which, in turn, linked to LimeWire. If it weren't for Google, most people would not have found CNET, and then LimeWire, and then typed in the movie they wanted to download illegally, then waited for that download to finish, then watched that movie.
After Google is successfully sued, I suggest CBS should sue "eyes". Without "eyes", computer users wouldn't be able to intercept photons from Google, thus never finding CNET, LimeWire, Movies.
After eyes are successfully sued, all people will have to have DRM-enabled "SuperEyes (TM)" installed, thus eliminating the problem and freeing the world from dirty, nasty piracy.
I upgraded to 11.04 and I like Unity. It's a lot quicker and, while a little buggy, I'm already moving faster than with Gnome.
That said, if you don't like Unity or Gnome 3, then either stay with 10.10 or 10.04 (LTS) or go to Linux Mint or Debian or pick a distro but quit bitching or pay for Windows / Mac. Either way, get off my lawn!
This idea is an excellent one...build your spacecraft in orbit and then launch it from there with fuel from an orbital gas station. Significantly less danger for the crew, much faster travel, and shorter periods in outer (read: Cosmic Radiation) space.
But it isn't politically sexy, so it probably won't happen.
Without positrons (anti-electrons) orbiting the nucleus, these are just high energy anti-particles. Technically anti-matter, but not really available for interesting study.
What would be much more interesting would be molecular anti-hydrogen, complete with positron bonding. Then you could test many properties of anti-matter.
But cooling and storing is still a major problem. This is an interesting discovery, but we're no closer to really understanding anti-matter because of it (or, for that matter, having warp drive.)
Silverlight != FOSS
Therefore, this awesome piece of the legacy of Richard Feynman is currently != free.
Furthermore, what is to prevent MS from making this no longer "free"? Nothing.
The real tragedy, though, is that 50-year-old video of a man who is long dead is still covered by copyright.
+5 FTW
How much smarter does the refrigerator need to be? Is the "perfect" refrigerator possible within the limits Kaku proposes? I have to think the answer is yes. Therefore, for most applications, Moore's Law is irrelevant. This might cause problems for supercomputing, but for most applications it's a non-issue.
Where are my mod points when I need them!
I couldn't agree more and the evidence is in the outcomes: Linux has no problems with all kinds of monitors / printers / peripherals / etc. Those things don't have a MAFIAA "protecting" them. The things that do (video / audio) are a mess of copywrong and proprietary crapware.
No way. When I'm downloading something from a torrent, I always seed. Sometimes I seed after the downloads have completed. I think this is pretty typical of BT users. That means that MOST users are also seeding most of the time. Since many users are downloading the most popular content, they are also uploading the most popular content.
That's how it's supposed to work.
Citation needed...
LOTS of infants / young children die from influenza, and the flu epidemic of 1918 was particularly hard on young adults (20s and 30s). There's no reason to suspect a new flu epidemic would not also target younger people.
Car accidents kill people of all ages and, last time I checked, amounted to nowhere near the annual death toll of the 1918 epidemic.
Hard to do! It's speed is about 31 km/s...geosynchronous orbit is more like 3 km/s. So delta V is about 28km/s...for an asteroid with a mass of 2.7×10^10 kg, that's a kinetic energy of about 1E19 J or around 2.5 billion tons of TNT (2.5 gigatons).
Yeah...that's a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
The military contracts jobs out all the time (think Halliburton). The results are mixed at best. This one feels more likely to be fair, cheaper, and successful, but I still have my doubts. As much heat as NASA catches for the flaws in its designs, space travel is VERY hard. I'm not sure Virgin can do it that much better.
Users who are afraid they broke their monitor because it powered off after 15 minutes.
In open space, yes. But 20mph is not enough to escape Earth's gravity. So if this is in orbit, it'll stay in orbit. But this is more a proof of concept than an actual speed test.
Right now the accuracy with which the kilogram can be measured is about 1 part per 1E8. The paper mentions a noise of around 1 part per 1.6E11. That's over 1,000 times better. That certainly suggests that this method will be sufficiently "better" to be used as the new standard.
I, for one, welcome our incredibly accurate overlords.
At this size (0.000038 km^2) the amount of thrust generated by this sail will be 0.0003477N. If the total mass of sail and attached spacecraft is 100kg, then the acceleration will be 3.477E-6 m/s^2. After a month at this acceleration, the craft will be traveling at 9m/s. That's only about 20mph. Not very fast, but an important proof of concept.
Nope. I thought that, too.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/750/
Gasification using a waste product would be more renewable and green. But coffee requires significant water, pesticides, and human intervention to grow. This is probably no better than corn ethanol fueling a vehicle. Ho hum. I could power a car by burning diamonds, too...interesting, yes...efficient, no.
If this is in a rec room or den, just buy a mini-fridge. Cool your CPU and your beer of choice at the same time. You'll have to get creative with the cabling, and your electric bill will suffer, but so long as there's nothing perishable in the fridge you can run it at the lowest setting. And the large thermal mass of all of that beer (you'll have to keep it stocked, of course) housed in aluminum (with its high thermal conductivity) is the perfect heat sink.
Agreed. What I can't understand is how Oracle failed to recognize the value of OpenOffice. They sat on an open source software package as if by doing so they could monetize it. Bizarre. But nothing of value was lost. I love LibreOffice and as previous commenters have said, it definitely seems to be improving more rapidly than its predecessor.
In other news, Superman comics paved the way for other comics, Thomas Edison was a really awesome inventor, and the quantum world is often strange.
Seriously, how did this get on to the main page. There is no NEWS here...
I thought the same thing...if the planets outnumber stars, but tend to be smaller than stars, then perhaps the mass of them is roughly equal. Not enough to account for all of the "missing mass", but certainly enough to affect the hypotheses regarding its quantity and properties.
Do you know how many people are employed in authoring, navigating, collecting, and enforcing our complex tax system?
Well, the IRS alone employs over 100,000 people IRS Employees and there are somewhere around 800,000 tax preparers Tax Preparers. So lets say 1,000,000 people are employed "doing taxes". This number is probably really low, considering all of the tax attorneys, consultants, etc. If you factor in tax educators, accountants, investment advisers, etc., you might get 2 or 3 million people employed by "doing taxes". There are around 150,000,000 people working in this country. Workforce So if we instituted a really simple flat tax, we would "unemploy" between 1 and 3% of our workforce. That would send us into an instant recession. So a simple flat tax won't work if instituted immediately. Even if the computer just simplified the code somewhat, it would still reduce employment. That would reduce the income generated by taxes and, as a result, nullify the work of the computer. So, I propose that the tax code be made so complex that it employs 100% of the US workforce. People work all day every day calculating taxes. This is a sure fire way to reduce unemployment!
But then maybe this will spur the development of better FOSS alternatives.
That said, I still threw up in my mouth a little bit. This is awful news. Mark my words: Skype will be integrated into Internet Explorer 12 and thus rendered unusable by anyone running Mac / Linux / anything other than Windows. And it won't work well on Windows.
The horror.
CBS should sue Google for providing searches that linked to CNET which, in turn, linked to LimeWire. If it weren't for Google, most people would not have found CNET, and then LimeWire, and then typed in the movie they wanted to download illegally, then waited for that download to finish, then watched that movie. After Google is successfully sued, I suggest CBS should sue "eyes". Without "eyes", computer users wouldn't be able to intercept photons from Google, thus never finding CNET, LimeWire, Movies. After eyes are successfully sued, all people will have to have DRM-enabled "SuperEyes (TM)" installed, thus eliminating the problem and freeing the world from dirty, nasty piracy.
I upgraded to 11.04 and I like Unity. It's a lot quicker and, while a little buggy, I'm already moving faster than with Gnome. That said, if you don't like Unity or Gnome 3, then either stay with 10.10 or 10.04 (LTS) or go to Linux Mint or Debian or pick a distro but quit bitching or pay for Windows / Mac. Either way, get off my lawn!
This idea is an excellent one...build your spacecraft in orbit and then launch it from there with fuel from an orbital gas station. Significantly less danger for the crew, much faster travel, and shorter periods in outer (read: Cosmic Radiation) space. But it isn't politically sexy, so it probably won't happen.
Without positrons (anti-electrons) orbiting the nucleus, these are just high energy anti-particles. Technically anti-matter, but not really available for interesting study. What would be much more interesting would be molecular anti-hydrogen, complete with positron bonding. Then you could test many properties of anti-matter. But cooling and storing is still a major problem. This is an interesting discovery, but we're no closer to really understanding anti-matter because of it (or, for that matter, having warp drive.)
Silverlight != FOSS Therefore, this awesome piece of the legacy of Richard Feynman is currently != free. Furthermore, what is to prevent MS from making this no longer "free"? Nothing. The real tragedy, though, is that 50-year-old video of a man who is long dead is still covered by copyright.
I get about 640,000 hits when I look up this information... Sony, meet the Streisand Effect. Streisand Effect...Sony.
+5 FTW How much smarter does the refrigerator need to be? Is the "perfect" refrigerator possible within the limits Kaku proposes? I have to think the answer is yes. Therefore, for most applications, Moore's Law is irrelevant. This might cause problems for supercomputing, but for most applications it's a non-issue.
Where are my mod points when I need them! I couldn't agree more and the evidence is in the outcomes: Linux has no problems with all kinds of monitors / printers / peripherals / etc. Those things don't have a MAFIAA "protecting" them. The things that do (video / audio) are a mess of copywrong and proprietary crapware.
No way. When I'm downloading something from a torrent, I always seed. Sometimes I seed after the downloads have completed. I think this is pretty typical of BT users. That means that MOST users are also seeding most of the time. Since many users are downloading the most popular content, they are also uploading the most popular content. That's how it's supposed to work.
Citation needed... LOTS of infants / young children die from influenza, and the flu epidemic of 1918 was particularly hard on young adults (20s and 30s). There's no reason to suspect a new flu epidemic would not also target younger people. Car accidents kill people of all ages and, last time I checked, amounted to nowhere near the annual death toll of the 1918 epidemic.
The more you tighten you grip, the more Star Systems, er, informed citizens will slip through your fingers.
Hard to do! It's speed is about 31 km/s...geosynchronous orbit is more like 3 km/s. So delta V is about 28km/s...for an asteroid with a mass of 2.7×10^10 kg, that's a kinetic energy of about 1E19 J or around 2.5 billion tons of TNT (2.5 gigatons). Yeah...that's a lot.