...there is always a power switch on the machines hosting it.
You haven't seen some of the movies that I've watched. Every time the evil computer takes over, and someone goes to "just" throw the switch, very very bad things happen to them!
Indeed, sending a vehicle out to 'test the waters' based on our current assumptions is a great motivation for this project beyond the 'gee whiz, we sent something out of our solar system, isn't that neat' aspect.
Okay, say we were going to push a "supa-doupa-anti-matter" drive thing out there that cost $$zillions in 200 years time. This sun-sail probe would be good because we could start forming theorys on how to do it (hydrogen for a scoop?) and what sort of sheilding etc. it will need. What is space like outside of our suns protect from the galaxy? How far does the solar wind even go?
I'd rather spend a couple bucks now and know whats out there, than have my nice shiny hydro-scoop-drive-with-anti-matter blow up before it got past the outer edge of the solar system
Dumb thing would probably smack into a comet in the oort cloud knowing NASAs luck lately.
Offtopic: I personally don't care about my karma, or if I can moderate or not (I do it as a "community service") but I'd like my posts to come in higher than an AC. I'm surprised that you didn't dump the account straight away, like I guess most troller's and first posters do.
Maybe I dumb (There's a line there:) but I'm thinking that it would spin/turn.
My reasoning is that all the presure (sunlight) is coming parallel to the craft. Where would the friction come from to change directions? It's not a ship in water with a rudder.
The sunlight would still be pushing it away from the sun, all I see it doing is spinning. Think hot-air baloon. They can spin and carry on but end up going in the direction the wind is pushing them. If I stuck a big sail out of only one side, I can't see it changing directions. There is no fulcrum.
Would be interesting if this solar sail vehicle were to encounter conditions that were unknown/unexpected and forced us to change some of our fundamental assumptions about space.
What a great reason to go! Even if it failed for this reason, it still would have increased our knowledge of the outer solar system.
Personally, I can't see this happening, we would have seen it in the light-scope-prism-things(tm) that break down light, and the gas/matter would (should?) show up in the absorption lines in the specturm.
Why not go and have a look at what's happening in the neighbourhood?
btw, -1's a bit harsh. I didn't know that meta-moderation affected your karma like that.
They always said in school to set goals and aim for them. Do you think that this is why the US got to the moon in ten years? JFK had a dream and set a time frame?
I guess the cold war helped the budget a tad too:)
I'm guessing that they would turn it around and slow down the same way they accelerated.
I remember reading a short story where the ships had a gravity drag engine (or something) and as the approached a large "well" of gravity, it slowed them down (sounds silly), but you would just use light/solar particles the same way.
As you aproach a star you just slowly slow down as the pressure on your sails increases the closer you got. Personally, I think it's pretty risky. You DO NOT want to stuff it up.
That won't stop the rest of the sail from working, but it would create an imbalence in the direction of the light-sail thrust so that it would vere of course.
I don't know about vering course. There's no friction in space, so you don't have a rudder. It would probably keep going in the same direction (away from the sun) but just end up spinning in circles from the force of the impact on one side.
They might be able to have a frontal paracute or something that will eventually let it "right" itself so to speak.
Either way, spinning wouldn't be a problem because the comms dish on it would be desinged to rotate and point towards earth, or have some sort of rockets (pressured gas?) for course correction.
"Trim the mainsail yar land lubber!" belowed NASA.
We used this technology to explore our planet over the last 4000 or so years and here are, in our "ultra-modern" lifestyles intending to use the same technolgy to explore the stars. The same stars that they used to navigate those ships by 100's of years ago, and even not that long ago.
This makes me feel like I did when I was a kid. Reading all those sci-fi books and dreaming about the future. I must admit that recently I've gotten a bit "ho-hum" about the whole NASA thing and shuttles and space-stations. I've been thinking that the human race had lost it's exploring drive, with wanting faster computers and our lust for more bandwidth.
But, like I said, I'm a bit of a romantic, and the similarities really apeal to me. Could this be the technology that we use to finally leave this planet and start populating the universe?
Imaging fleets of these things saling out towards distant suns with humans aboard. Establishing space stations around their planets and eventually terraforming its atmoshpere and surface, seeding it with DNA from a planet light years away.
Then again maybe I just read too much of this stuff when I was a kid, but it's still nice to dream about the future.
I did the same thing when I used to live with my parents. We had this old dining room table in one of our sheds. It was that big that I had trouble hauling it into the house:) Needless to say, that reduced the space in my room a fair bit! All I did was sand it back and put some varnish on it. It wasn't pretty, but it did a great job. As long as you have a good adjustable chair, so that the height of the desk isn't a big issue, then it's not too bad to use for long periods of time.
I can't stand the desks that have "special" bits on them, or anything that I can kick underneath it. And I'm not too keen on keyboard draws either.
I also have seen people put an old phone book under their monitors to add a bit of height, though I don't know what you could do if you wanted to reposition your keyboard.
Thank you for the time you put into the above comment:) Some very good points. Normally I only hear comments like: GPL is for freedom right, so why can't I do what I want? (Make closed source) It's not fair (whinge, moan etc.) It's hurting my rights etc.
I can understand some of the reasons why RMS made the GPL and why he doesn't like the non-free (as in speech) / closed source people. Often though I don't agree with something he has said (eg. I am pro-gun control (I'm Australian) and it appears to me that he is anti-gun control) or is that ESR?
I guess what your saying is "you scratch our back, and we'll scratch yours". i.e. Open source people make good code, the paid developers make it better, put most of the improvements "back out there" and then the open source guys have another play with it. I can understand why they would give back to the open source projects, everyone gets good code
err.... I like the GPL, but I like that idea too... Dammit! Why didn't you just flame me and make me hate "all those BSD bastard" (joking) At least I could have ignored you:)
(sigh) lots more reading about BSD and GPL again...
I guess that the GPL does have a cost. The cost of using the code is that if you improve it _and_ release it, is you help the community by GPLing your improvements too.
btw, I don't agree with your baseball bat theory. (suprise there:) I'm not making your do anything. If you ignore me you don't get hurt. Pretend I don't exist (don't use any GPL code) and your fine. Try that with a baseball bat:)
I don't hate the BSD license, I just think that the GPL is better for everyone as a whole, rather then the individual. I really don't understand why your so upset about this, it's not taking food out of your mouth? Can you explain why GPL code can hurt you?
Hmm.. Can't find any pics of BSOD in the wild. Any links?
Okay, I'll start up a page with pics of BSOD and other computer errors that are found out in the real world, or even something that they are obviously not supposed to be doing (e.g. I once saw a "vanilla" win95 screen on a huge projector at a car display, I think that it must have rebooted but the display program hadn't started properly.)
Okay, so far I've got zero... hhmmm Anyone want to help? Full credits for images etc.. I'm keeping my eyes (and camera) on the lookout from now on:)
Anyway, my email is dmarsh at iname dot com; send some if you want, or don't:)
I think these sort of devices will become more popular when "average Joe" gets a 24/7 net connection. Probably be used as a firewall for dummies (Plug and pray?)
You know, look out or the big bad Internet will get your box and the evil hackers will DELETE YOUR COMPUTER! LOOK OUT! VIRII! HACKERS and CRACKERS (oh-my!)
(Gee Martha, We gotta get us one of those things)
btw, it's 2000 isn't it? Where the heck is my flying car dammit! We should all have them by now, and I've missed out! Must be y2k and problems with the e-car site;)
Went in this morning (.au time) to check everything. All okay until we tried to pass some store orders to the sorter (I work in a warehouse) hrmm...Not getting passed up to merge? strange, not pinging either.
...(5 mins later) Okay, who's the clown that unpluged the Hub???
In 1919, an expedition by the Royal Society of London confirmed Einstein's prediction of the degree of deflection of light passing by the Sun during a solar eclipse.
Not 100% sure, but didn't thier results have more errors than the "deflections" they were looking for? Kind of like cooking the data.
It's been done since then with more modern equipment, and produced better (more accurate) results.
Actually, your wrong. Even though relativity (special and general) started out as what Einstien called "Gedankenexperiment" or a thought experiment, It has actually been proven beyond a doubt since then using very sensitive atomic clocks and high speed planes. Plus lots of other ways, it's just that I can't remember any other examples at moment.
I think that they even have to take relativity into account with GPS systems etc, but then again IANAS:)
Kind of like Engelbarts' idea of a "chord" keyboard. Why not use "chords" to type the more common letters/words rather than having your fingers flying all over the place. Prob. slow you down more though? not sure. have to test:)
I tried to learn to use a Dvorak a few months ago, The main thing that stopped me was that I using a Dvorak at home during my free time and a Qwerty at work.:(
Very hard to switch between them when you use keyboards a lot. Esp. when speed is an issue. Can't really afford to go back to 2 finger typing.
Might just have to get one for work too. Hrmm Confuse the buggery out of anyone trying to use my PC hehehe:)
Then again a similar thing happened when I converted to using the mouse with my left hand, so that I can use the number pad at the same time. Pisses me off! people use the my main PC for 5 mins once a week and they cry about how I've set it up. shesh! Let's see, I ONLY use it for 40 hours a week, guess I don't get a say:(
Has anyone else tried a left hand mouse even if you are right-handed? I seemed to pick it up fairly quickly in the two weeks or so I tried it before being force to change back.
How about something like the WWII German Enigma encryption machine to rotate the letters? A bit big and clunky for a mechanical version, and an electronic version would probably be "tempestable" as well. Though you could have 100s of "rotors".
But then again, you could always get a manual typewriter.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't seen some of the movies that I've watched. Every time the evil computer takes over, and someone goes to "just" throw the switch, very very bad things happen to them!
But if you want to volunteer, be my guest :)
Okay, say we were going to push a "supa-doupa-anti-matter" drive thing out there that cost $$zillions in 200 years time. This sun-sail probe would be good because we could start forming theorys on how to do it (hydrogen for a scoop?) and what sort of sheilding etc. it will need. What is space like outside of our suns protect from the galaxy? How far does the solar wind even go?
I'd rather spend a couple bucks now and know whats out there, than have my nice shiny hydro-scoop-drive-with-anti-matter blow up before it got past the outer edge of the solar system
Dumb thing would probably smack into a comet in the oort cloud knowing NASAs luck lately.
Offtopic: I personally don't care about my karma, or if I can moderate or not (I do it as a "community service") but I'd like my posts to come in higher than an AC. I'm surprised that you didn't dump the account straight away, like I guess most troller's and first posters do.
My reasoning is that all the presure (sunlight) is coming parallel to the craft. Where would the friction come from to change directions? It's not a ship in water with a rudder.
The sunlight would still be pushing it away from the sun, all I see it doing is spinning. Think hot-air baloon. They can spin and carry on but end up going in the direction the wind is pushing them. If I stuck a big sail out of only one side, I can't see it changing directions. There is no fulcrum.
Still pretty cool though :)
What a great reason to go! Even if it failed for this reason, it still would have increased our knowledge of the outer solar system.
Personally, I can't see this happening, we would have seen it in the light-scope-prism-things(tm) that break down light, and the gas/matter would (should?) show up in the absorption lines in the specturm.
Why not go and have a look at what's happening in the neighbourhood?
btw, -1's a bit harsh. I didn't know that meta-moderation affected your karma like that.
I guess the cold war helped the budget a tad too :)
I remember reading a short story where the ships had a gravity drag engine (or something) and as the approached a large "well" of gravity, it slowed them down (sounds silly), but you would just use light/solar particles the same way.
As you aproach a star you just slowly slow down as the pressure on your sails increases the closer you got. Personally, I think it's pretty risky. You DO NOT want to stuff it up.
Hows the weather? A bit too warm for my liking.
I don't know about vering course. There's no friction in space, so you don't have a rudder. It would probably keep going in the same direction (away from the sun) but just end up spinning in circles from the force of the impact on one side.
They might be able to have a frontal paracute or something that will eventually let it "right" itself so to speak.
Either way, spinning wouldn't be a problem because the comms dish on it would be desinged to rotate and point towards earth, or have some sort of rockets (pressured gas?) for course correction.
"Trim the mainsail yar land lubber!" belowed NASA.
We used this technology to explore our planet over the last 4000 or so years and here are, in our "ultra-modern" lifestyles intending to use the same technolgy to explore the stars. The same stars that they used to navigate those ships by 100's of years ago, and even not that long ago.
This makes me feel like I did when I was a kid. Reading all those sci-fi books and dreaming about the future. I must admit that recently I've gotten a bit "ho-hum" about the whole NASA thing and shuttles and space-stations. I've been thinking that the human race had lost it's exploring drive, with wanting faster computers and our lust for more bandwidth.
But, like I said, I'm a bit of a romantic, and the similarities really apeal to me. Could this be the technology that we use to finally leave this planet and start populating the universe?
Imaging fleets of these things saling out towards distant suns with humans aboard. Establishing space stations around their planets and eventually terraforming its atmoshpere and surface, seeding it with DNA from a planet light years away.
Then again maybe I just read too much of this stuff when I was a kid, but it's still nice to dream about the future.
I can't stand the desks that have "special" bits on them, or anything that I can kick underneath it. And I'm not too keen on keyboard draws either.
I also have seen people put an old phone book under their monitors to add a bit of height, though I don't know what you could do if you wanted to reposition your keyboard.
How long before this becomes a node on everything2?
I can understand some of the reasons why RMS made the GPL and why he doesn't like the non-free (as in speech) / closed source people. Often though I don't agree with something he has said (eg. I am pro-gun control (I'm Australian) and it appears to me that he is anti-gun control) or is that ESR?
I guess what your saying is "you scratch our back, and we'll scratch yours". i.e. Open source people make good code, the paid developers make it better, put most of the improvements "back out there" and then the open source guys have another play with it. I can understand why they would give back to the open source projects, everyone gets good code
err.... I like the GPL, but I like that idea too... Dammit! Why didn't you just flame me and make me hate "all those BSD bastard" (joking) At least I could have ignored you :)
(sigh) lots more reading about BSD and GPL again...
btw, I don't agree with your baseball bat theory. (suprise there
I don't hate the BSD license, I just think that the GPL is better for everyone as a whole, rather then the individual. I really don't understand why your so upset about this, it's not taking food out of your mouth? Can you explain why GPL code can hurt you?
You can still use BSD if you need to make money.
I can do what I want with it. If I want to GPL/BSD/Commercial it I can. It's my code, my choice
If I GPL it, why should you get pissed off about not being able to get a make money with my code? I'm not making any money.
I was nice enough to give it away to you. Id like to think you were gratefull. I'm not only helping you, but everyone else in the community.
If I GPL my code, it is still my code, NOT yours. It's my choice. Don't complain about what I do with it.
Don't like it? Don't use it the code... easy.
Okay, sorry RMS, but I'm going to start calling Linux: Linux and HURD:GNU. I really don't like the name HURD anyway.
I mean, Linux is a cool name, HURD is not (turd?) It's silly, but a sexy name will "sell" more. If you were a newbie, would you by Linux or GNU/HURD?
I think that the name Linux may have helped it to "beat" the *BSDs. e.g. Linux is cool and sexy, BSD sounds dorky.
*shrug* just my $0.02 + 10% GST worth
Okay, I'll start up a page with pics of BSOD and other computer errors that are found out in the real world, or even something that they are obviously not supposed to be doing (e.g. I once saw a "vanilla" win95 screen on a huge projector at a car display, I think that it must have rebooted but the display program hadn't started properly.)
Okay, so far I've got zero... hhmmm Anyone want to help? Full credits for images etc.. I'm keeping my eyes (and camera) on the lookout from now on
Anyway, my email is dmarsh at iname dot com; send some if you want, or don't
You know, look out or the big bad Internet will get your box and the evil hackers will DELETE YOUR COMPUTER! LOOK OUT! VIRII! HACKERS and CRACKERS (oh-my!)
(Gee Martha, We gotta get us one of those things)
btw, it's 2000 isn't it? Where the heck is my flying car dammit! We should all have them by now, and I've missed out! Must be y2k and problems with the e-car site ;)
Took us a while to find :)
Jesus is coming... Quick! Look Busy!
Tomorrow someone might discover something that shows that Einstein was wrong...
Wouldn't that be the ultimate holy war? For Science/Physics at least :)
Not 100% sure, but didn't thier results have more errors than the "deflections" they were looking for? Kind of like cooking the data.
It's been done since then with more modern equipment, and produced better (more accurate) results.
Actually, your wrong. Even though relativity (special and general) started out as what Einstien called "Gedankenexperiment" or a thought experiment, It has actually been proven beyond a doubt since then using very sensitive atomic clocks and high speed planes. Plus lots of other ways, it's just that I can't remember any other examples at moment.
I think that they even have to take relativity into account with GPS systems etc, but then again IANAS :)
Kind of like Engelbarts' idea of a "chord" keyboard. Why not use "chords" to type the more common letters/words rather than having your fingers flying all over the place. Prob. slow you down more though? not sure. have to test :)
anyway, I'll have mine as a dvorak please ;)
Australia isn't "run" by the British, we are a constitutional monarcy (similar to Canada) We haven't been run by the British since 1901.
I tried to learn to use a Dvorak a few months ago, The main thing that stopped me was that I using a Dvorak at home during my free time and a Qwerty at work. :(
Very hard to switch between them when you use keyboards a lot. Esp. when speed is an issue. Can't really afford to go back to 2 finger typing.
Might just have to get one for work too. Hrmm Confuse the buggery out of anyone trying to use my PC hehehe :)
Then again a similar thing happened when I converted to using the mouse with my left hand, so that I can use the number pad at the same time. Pisses me off! people use the my main PC for 5 mins once a week and they cry about how I've set it up. shesh! Let's see, I ONLY use it for 40 hours a week, guess I don't get a say :(
Has anyone else tried a left hand mouse even if you are right-handed? I seemed to pick it up fairly quickly in the two weeks or so I tried it before being force to change back.
How about something like the WWII German Enigma encryption machine to rotate the letters? A bit big and clunky for a mechanical version, and an electronic version would probably be "tempestable" as well. Though you could have 100s of "rotors".
:)
But then again, you could always get a manual typewriter.
I wonder what the frame rate for quake would be