Remember that the speed of sound changes with the properties of the air through which an object is travelling. The absolute speed of an object (i.e. in m/s) corresponding to a high Mach number deep in our atmosphere (say in the troposphere or stratosphere) would actually be much, much slower than the speed of sound in the mid-thermosphere (where the ISS is located).
Its a similar reason to why de-orbiting objects can travel faster than terminal velocity; they accelerated to that speed before the air resistance built up.
Without reading the article, I would guess that what they meant was "harmonic drive" transmissions.. that's the only relation to something that sounds like "sonic" that I can think of.
Harmonic drives can provide incredible output torque and extreme precision (i.e. no backlash).
Agreed; its certainly not an efficient way to produce Helium (where efficient means "we would get enough out of it"). However, the cost would still be as low as we wanted to make it;)
You're forgetting something.. why would all of the costs of running the reactor be passed on to Helium consumers? I would imagine the primary revenue source for a fusion power plant would be selling the electricity it generates. Hopefully someday in the not-so-distant future, it will be sufficiently cost-effective to do this.
Once that point is reached, they could slough off the Helium at whatever price people will be willing to pay for it.
I'm a severe asthmatic, and in the summer here (just North of Toronto) it can get pretty wicked.. 40C raw temperature, pus humidex. At those levels, my lungs stop being able to provide me enough oxygen to stay conscious. Add to that "smog" that gets washed up from Toronto and the States, and I need to stay inside an air-conditioned house on the worst of days. Of course, these are the same days that would prompt them to raise the temperature in my home.
For anyone who's health is related to ambient temperature and humidity/large-particle density, air-conditioning is a vital part of staying alive, and there's no way I would ever hand that control over to someone with a happy button-finger, nor a computer program with perfectly optimized sequencing.
Actually, I don't think scramjets are going to get any plane off the ground. They only work at hyper-sonic velocities, which means you need some sort of conventional propulsion for launch and landing. Also, people seem to think that these things would fly the same routes as current jets, just faster. They actually fly much, much, much higher, so ambient temperature and pressure are greatly reduced, meaning less skin heating due to friction etc.
I would setup a dedicated box with XP on it that would just sit their with their spy software installed and 2girls1cup running on replay. Stuff it in the basement and forget about it for three months:D
I am also not a physicist (Aerospace Engineer), but here's my understanding for what its worth: "Interstellar Medium" comprises the gases etc. that exist between stars within a galaxy, while WHIM stands for "Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium", meaning the gases etc. that exist between galaxies.
From long ago, perhaps, but there is an important difference in the past several (hundred? thousand?) millenia; Earth has a much thicker (pressure-wise) and thicker (altitude-wise) atmosphere than Mars does. A meteor(ite) that enters Earth's atmosphere is far more likely to burn up before impacting than one of the same size entering Mars' atmosphere. Furthermore, because Earth is so much bigger, we have a deeper gravity well, meaning you need a greater impact energy to get ejecta to reach escape velocity.
I've been around long enough to know not to trust the summary let alone the headline, but that still doesn't mean I check the article frequently. Thanks for the info m8.
I suspect they mean flat as in it conforms to the curvature of the Earth. Having said that, my guess is that the areas they are dealing with are small enough that this curvature may be neglected.
I'm not saying its a bad idea to use force when necessary (like your example), however the way I see the issue is this: tasers are viewed as a non-lethal weapon (i.e. non-lethal force), and so many police forces are using them in situations where they wouldn't even consider using a gun. Take a look at the footage from the Vancouver incident; the victim is in no way putting the police officers in danger when they decide to taser him.
There is a lot more to this issue than "taser vs gun".
I have my Firefox set up with all the keyword searches I need, essentially turning it into a command line. i.e. if I want to search for ${string}, I type "google ${string}"; if I want a definition I type "define ${string}"; if I want to look it up on Wikipedia, I type "wiki ${string}"; if I want to look up the weather somewhere I type "weather ${location}" (where it defaults to my hometown if I don't enter anything), and several others.
I find it pretty useful; but its really annoying when you sit down at another computer that does have it, and you type something into the search bar and it doesn't do what you expect:P
No, the Earth does not revolve around the Moon.. The Earth revolves around its axis of rotation, independently of any orbits. Assuming you meant "orbit", it doesn't orbit about the Moon either. If you take the Earth and Moon to be a two-body system (i.e. ignore the effects of gravity due to the Sun and other planets, as well as things like solar radiation), then the Earth and Moon are orbiting about a point called the "Centre of Mass" of the system. Due to the relative sizes of the Earth and Moon, and their distance from each other, this point lies within the Earth itself.
I am not myself an audiophile (though I do exhibit some audiophile tendencies); I thought the idea behind using gold-plated connectors was not that they sounded better, but because they stayed sounding the same for longer due to not corroding?
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I think the blank-media levy is a good idea; I'm not particularly fond of it. Regardless of how I feel, though, that doesn't change what the levy does and does not allow as it currently stands.
Taxes pay for schools for example, but not everyone paying those taxes have kids in school. Yet it's justified because having more people in society educated benefits everyone in that society. So what is the benefit of the music/copyright levy if you're not allowed to download? Maybe it benefits the copyright holders - but they are the ones *not* paying the tax. Is it like welfare? Well, welfare benefits society as a whole, since the indigent can eat and live without resorting to robbery and theft. But copyright holders are typically rich, not starving in the street.
The supposed benefit of the levy is to reimburse any "loses" that copyright holders may incur due to their material being pirated. In an ideal world, the more money they make, the more music/movies/etc they are willing to create and release to the public. Artistic talent of any form is a valued cultural commodity, so the more we generate the better it is for society.
Now please keep in mind, this is what the levy is supposed to do. In my personal opinion, I agree with you with respect to your following statement, except for how you present it (see below):
Why the levy on everyone? Why an extra tax on every consumer for a specific business, when other businesses subject to losses are not compensated?
I don't think its fair that we should all have to pay the levy to compensate for these loses; however, in fact, we don't. This is where your labelling of the levy as a "tax" is misleading; it is not a tax like those that we pay for roads/health-care/etc, because not everyone has to pay it. If you don't want to pay the levy, don't by blank media that it applies to. In the case of CDs and DVDs, you can buy "data" versions to which there is no levy.
The only conclusion possible is one of these:
The levy is in place so that citizens are provided with free digital content, or
The government is corrupt and officials have engaged in a quid-pro-quo with the entertainment industry to provide them with revenue that they have not earned.
How do you figure that the entertainment industry is receiving revenue they haven't earned? I don't have the numbers to prove it one way or the other, but the principle behind the levy is to provide them with revenue that they would otherwise have received if not for content piracy. I propose to you a third possible conclusion:
The government initiated the levy in good faith that the beneficiary artists would give back to the community with more material. (Whether it is actually working or not is a debate I'm not prepared to get into right now; suffice to say both you and I think it doesn't, but I'm sure there are people that do).
These are not the "only" conclusions, there are many more not listed here. The two you present may be the only two you are willing to accept, but that does not mean either of them is correct. I am not a government insider, so I can't tell you whether the government was acting in good faith or is dealing under the table with the industry (I have my beliefs, but they are irrelevant here). But either way, the letter of the "law" still implies that copyright infringement is not legalized by the levy.
HOWEVER (and this is why I hate these things.. so complex), note that there is a difference between your "free downloads" and copyright infringement. In Canada, it is still legal to download copyrighted material as it is considered "making a copy for personal use." The analogy used in court (I don't have the judges name or a citation handy) is that copies for personal use will be legal as long as there are photocopiers in libraries. In Canada, copyright infringement comes into play when you start uploading copyrighted material.
I understand what you're trying to say, but its coming across as just plain naive. Scientific research is a practice of incremental improvements. If you think back to the early part of the century when scientists were trying to break the so-called "sound-barrier", do you think that every time a test failed they said "Oh well, that failed, guess it was a waste of time since it doesn't mean anything"? They took the little bits of information that they learned and improved upon it and tried again.
You would be hard pressed to find any scientific experiment that "has no meaning".
From what I know of the event, and as is stated in the summary, it was an aerial blast; i.e. the asteroid/comet/alien-spaceship exploded before impact. The "crater" where the remains of the $object should be found would not be directly under that explosion, as the $object would have some unknown velocity at some unknown angle.
While the method you propose makes sense, all it really tells you is where the explosion occured, not where the remains can be found.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that the speed of sound changes with the properties of the air through which an object is travelling. The absolute speed of an object (i.e. in m/s) corresponding to a high Mach number deep in our atmosphere (say in the troposphere or stratosphere) would actually be much, much slower than the speed of sound in the mid-thermosphere (where the ISS is located).
Its a similar reason to why de-orbiting objects can travel faster than terminal velocity; they accelerated to that speed before the air resistance built up.
Aikon-
3) We've had the same phone number for 23 years =/
Aikon-
Without reading the article, I would guess that what they meant was "harmonic drive" transmissions.. that's the only relation to something that sounds like "sonic" that I can think of.
Harmonic drives can provide incredible output torque and extreme precision (i.e. no backlash).
Aikon-
Agreed; its certainly not an efficient way to produce Helium (where efficient means "we would get enough out of it"). However, the cost would still be as low as we wanted to make it ;)
Aikon-
You're forgetting something.. why would all of the costs of running the reactor be passed on to Helium consumers? I would imagine the primary revenue source for a fusion power plant would be selling the electricity it generates. Hopefully someday in the not-so-distant future, it will be sufficiently cost-effective to do this.
Once that point is reached, they could slough off the Helium at whatever price people will be willing to pay for it.
Aikon-
I'm a severe asthmatic, and in the summer here (just North of Toronto) it can get pretty wicked.. 40C raw temperature, pus humidex. At those levels, my lungs stop being able to provide me enough oxygen to stay conscious. Add to that "smog" that gets washed up from Toronto and the States, and I need to stay inside an air-conditioned house on the worst of days. Of course, these are the same days that would prompt them to raise the temperature in my home.
For anyone who's health is related to ambient temperature and humidity/large-particle density, air-conditioning is a vital part of staying alive, and there's no way I would ever hand that control over to someone with a happy button-finger, nor a computer program with perfectly optimized sequencing.
Aikon-
Actually, I don't think scramjets are going to get any plane off the ground. They only work at hyper-sonic velocities, which means you need some sort of conventional propulsion for launch and landing. Also, people seem to think that these things would fly the same routes as current jets, just faster. They actually fly much, much, much higher, so ambient temperature and pressure are greatly reduced, meaning less skin heating due to friction etc.
Aikon-
I would setup a dedicated box with XP on it that would just sit their with their spy software installed and 2girls1cup running on replay. Stuff it in the basement and forget about it for three months :D
Aikon-
I am also not a physicist (Aerospace Engineer), but here's my understanding for what its worth: "Interstellar Medium" comprises the gases etc. that exist between stars within a galaxy, while WHIM stands for "Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium", meaning the gases etc. that exist between galaxies.
Hope that helps,
Aikon-
From long ago, perhaps, but there is an important difference in the past several (hundred? thousand?) millenia; Earth has a much thicker (pressure-wise) and thicker (altitude-wise) atmosphere than Mars does. A meteor(ite) that enters Earth's atmosphere is far more likely to burn up before impacting than one of the same size entering Mars' atmosphere. Furthermore, because Earth is so much bigger, we have a deeper gravity well, meaning you need a greater impact energy to get ejecta to reach escape velocity.
Aikon-
I've been around long enough to know not to trust the summary let alone the headline, but that still doesn't mean I check the article frequently. Thanks for the info m8.
Aikon-
I think you need to grow a few feet, because that one completely missed your head.
Aikon-
I suspect they mean flat as in it conforms to the curvature of the Earth. Having said that, my guess is that the areas they are dealing with are small enough that this curvature may be neglected.
Aikon-
I think you are using Alanis Morissette's definition of the word irony.
Google says: irony
Aikon-
I find it kind of sad that this was modded funny.. had I gotten here first, I think I would have used "Insightful".
Aikon-
I'm not saying its a bad idea to use force when necessary (like your example), however the way I see the issue is this: tasers are viewed as a non-lethal weapon (i.e. non-lethal force), and so many police forces are using them in situations where they wouldn't even consider using a gun. Take a look at the footage from the Vancouver incident; the victim is in no way putting the police officers in danger when they decide to taser him.
There is a lot more to this issue than "taser vs gun".
Aikon-
I have my Firefox set up with all the keyword searches I need, essentially turning it into a command line. i.e. if I want to search for ${string}, I type "google ${string}"; if I want a definition I type "define ${string}"; if I want to look it up on Wikipedia, I type "wiki ${string}"; if I want to look up the weather somewhere I type "weather ${location}" (where it defaults to my hometown if I don't enter anything), and several others.
I find it pretty useful; but its really annoying when you sit down at another computer that does have it, and you type something into the search bar and it doesn't do what you expect :P
Aikon-
No, the Earth does not revolve around the Moon.. The Earth revolves around its axis of rotation, independently of any orbits. Assuming you meant "orbit", it doesn't orbit about the Moon either. If you take the Earth and Moon to be a two-body system (i.e. ignore the effects of gravity due to the Sun and other planets, as well as things like solar radiation), then the Earth and Moon are orbiting about a point called the "Centre of Mass" of the system. Due to the relative sizes of the Earth and Moon, and their distance from each other, this point lies within the Earth itself.
Aikon-
I am not myself an audiophile (though I do exhibit some audiophile tendencies); I thought the idea behind using gold-plated connectors was not that they sounded better, but because they stayed sounding the same for longer due to not corroding?
Aikon-
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I think the blank-media levy is a good idea; I'm not particularly fond of it. Regardless of how I feel, though, that doesn't change what the levy does and does not allow as it currently stands.
The supposed benefit of the levy is to reimburse any "loses" that copyright holders may incur due to their material being pirated. In an ideal world, the more money they make, the more music/movies/etc they are willing to create and release to the public. Artistic talent of any form is a valued cultural commodity, so the more we generate the better it is for society.
Now please keep in mind, this is what the levy is supposed to do. In my personal opinion, I agree with you with respect to your following statement, except for how you present it (see below):
I don't think its fair that we should all have to pay the levy to compensate for these loses; however, in fact, we don't. This is where your labelling of the levy as a "tax" is misleading; it is not a tax like those that we pay for roads/health-care/etc, because not everyone has to pay it. If you don't want to pay the levy, don't by blank media that it applies to. In the case of CDs and DVDs, you can buy "data" versions to which there is no levy.
How do you figure that the entertainment industry is receiving revenue they haven't earned? I don't have the numbers to prove it one way or the other, but the principle behind the levy is to provide them with revenue that they would otherwise have received if not for content piracy. I propose to you a third possible conclusion:
These are not the "only" conclusions, there are many more not listed here. The two you present may be the only two you are willing to accept, but that does not mean either of them is correct. I am not a government insider, so I can't tell you whether the government was acting in good faith or is dealing under the table with the industry (I have my beliefs, but they are irrelevant here). But either way, the letter of the "law" still implies that copyright infringement is not legalized by the levy.
HOWEVER (and this is why I hate these things.. so complex), note that there is a difference between your "free downloads" and copyright infringement. In Canada, it is still legal to download copyrighted material as it is considered "making a copy for personal use." The analogy used in court (I don't have the judges name or a citation handy) is that copies for personal use will be legal as long as there are photocopiers in libraries. In Canada, copyright infringement comes into play when you start uploading copyrighted material.
I'm tired of people using the levy as an excuse to download; it is not a free ticket to perform copyright infringement!
Aikon-
I understand what you're trying to say, but its coming across as just plain naive. Scientific research is a practice of incremental improvements. If you think back to the early part of the century when scientists were trying to break the so-called "sound-barrier", do you think that every time a test failed they said "Oh well, that failed, guess it was a waste of time since it doesn't mean anything"? They took the little bits of information that they learned and improved upon it and tried again.
You would be hard pressed to find any scientific experiment that "has no meaning".
Aikon-
From what I know of the event, and as is stated in the summary, it was an aerial blast; i.e. the asteroid/comet/alien-spaceship exploded before impact. The "crater" where the remains of the $object should be found would not be directly under that explosion, as the $object would have some unknown velocity at some unknown angle.
While the method you propose makes sense, all it really tells you is where the explosion occured, not where the remains can be found.
Aikon-
Am I the only one that saw the title and wondered what video card drivers had to do with fuel cell technology?
I think I need to get out more =/
Aikon-
English is my first language and I consider myself to be relatively well-spoken; I still didn't know what a lagniappe was.
Aikon-