When you blow stuff up, you're wasting a lot of energy going off in all directions.
It turns out that the shape of the filler determines the shape of the plasma wave - a pancake-shaped filler results in a cigar-shaped plasma wave, and a cigar-shaped filler results in a pancake-shaped plasma wave. By placing the bomb at the bottom of a cylinder, a pancake filler at the top, surrounding the bomb with a radiation mirror, and tuning the bomb to release as many X-rays as possible (in order to allow the filler to absorb as much energy as possible), you get what is essentially a nuclear shaped charge. The Orion team was able to make designs that produced beams of plasma with a divergence of only a few degrees. And with the large pusher plates mounted on the bottom of the spaceship (order of 100 meter diameter), you could capture most of the energy of the nuclear explosion.
As for photonic engines, yes, they have a very high specific impulse, but as you mentioned, their thrust is abysmal and their energy requirements are enormous. Somebody pointed out elsewhere in the comments that in order to get to Mars in a week powered by this hypothetical photonic engine, you would need to have a power plant with a generation capacity on roughly the same order of magnitude as the generation capacity of the entire United States. That's one giant power plant.
The concept of external (i.e. explosions are not contained within the ship's structure) nuclear pulse propulsion was actually studied in the late 50s, early 60s as Project Orion (internal NPP, which is like your car analogy but with nuclear explosions instead of fuel-air explosions, places too great of a stress on the ship's structure to be feasible).
They never did get enough funding for a test with a nuke, but they did build 1-meter scale models powered by RDX charges. Powered by I believe 6 explosive charges, one of these reached 100 meters in a controlled test flight, proving that the concept worked (at least with lower energy pulses). As for whether or not it would work with nukes, their numerical modeling strongly indicated that it would.
You mentioned that the blast wave might be moving too fast to be useful, but actually that's the whole point - the impulse of the blast wave impacting against and then rebounding off the back of the spaceship is what provides thrust, so the faster the blast wave is moving, the greater the impulse and thrust.
Of course, the spaceship would have to be stupidly large to survive the instantaneous acceleration, but that was why it was so attractive. A ship around 10000 tons could've made it to Pluto and back within a year. Plus, it had a very high thrust-weight ratio, which meant that the fraction of the weight that was useful payload was stupidly high as well.
So then if NPP is so good, why was the project killed? It wasn't because it didn't work... it was a combination of quite a few political reasons:
1) NASA had thrown its support behind the competing NERVA rocket.
2) Fallout was problematic.
3) There was no mandate from Congress for missions that would require such performance, and NASA had no desire to dictate policy.
4) Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned all above-ground nuclear testing.
I did quite a bit of reading on spacecraft propulsion recently (specifically Nuclear pulse propulsion and basically what I got out of it is that if you have a massive energy source (say, antimatter) you're better off just blowing it up and riding the blast wave. You can get extremely high thrust AND specific impulse that way, which is not possible with almost any other engine technology (either high thrust and low specific impulse like chemical rockets, or low thrust and high specific impulse like ion engines). NPP (and its derivatives) is basically the best way we know of right now to get high enough performance for interplanetary, or even interstellar, missions.
NPP originally started with using nuclear explosions, but more recent research has focused on inertial confinement fusion and even antimatter-catalyzed fusion. The obvious extreme is using antimatter-matter detonations and riding the blast wave, which I'm fairly certain would be more efficient and yield better performance than taking that energy and pumping it into a laser.
4. They predict an impact 160 million years ago, 95 million years off the mark. Example: Dino fossils are as new as 65 million. They believe that the BREAKUP occurred 160 million years ago, not whatever wiped out the dinosaurs. It takes time for things to move from the asteroid belt to the Earth, you know.
Good point. Does pressing shift when you insert the stick work like it does with CDs? It does. Pity only a relatively small number of people know that.
Google cannot, as a profit-motivated corporation, play to win this auction.
From a pure profit perspective, you're right that it would be hard to justify trying to win. However, it's more than just profit. Google is, I think, extremely worried by the possibility of the telecoms twisting the rules of the Internet in their favor (i.e. non-network neutrality). Google has no desire to be held hostage by the whim of the telecoms, who, if they have their way in Washington, will be able to discriminate against content as they see fit. But by purchasing a chunk of the spectrum, Google essentially bypasses the telecoms, ensuring that no matter how the network neutrality debate resolves itself, it'll end up winning.
So, yes, "make a [large] profit" might be incompatible with winning the auction, but that's not the point. The point is ensuring that even if the telecoms end up being able to discriminate against content (i.e., charge extra for Google searches), Google has a way out. And that, I think, is more important than simply writing down a larger black number.
If market cap was actually an indicator of potential success in the auction, Google would lose.
The telecoms:
AT&T: $242 billion
Sprint: $53 billion
Deutsche Telekom (they own T-Mobile): $79 billion
Verizon: $121 billion
Versus:
Google: $160 billion
Luckily, there's more to this game than pure market caps. Google is probably better able to raise cash, and may also have more cash on hand, than the telcoms. On the other hand, though, you have companies that have been around for a long time, and are fairly good at getting what they want. Regardless, I'm looking forward to the auction. A Google win would be awesome, but the actual event should turn out interesting as well.
to discover that companies edit their own wikipedia entries... The problem arises, I think, when companies make edits that are either inaccurate or attempt to portray their actions in a more positive light.
Is not if it will run Linux (it will), but if it will run windows? CE does not count. That would of course depend on Microsoft. It's certainly a possibility if it ever penetrates the market to a decent degree.
"But, but, it's Google! Waah! I don't want to work my ass off, I don't want to make something better, I just want to call them evil and tell them what to do as a non-shareholder!" That probably works better with companies that don't actually do a half-decent job of trying to live up to their motto of "Don't be evil".
Apparently Yahoo! is catching up to Google, at least in terms of customer satisfaction, so I really don't think Google's dominance in search is that big of a deal. In advertising, maybe, but that's why the FTC and EU are looking into possible antitrust violations... nothing particularly special there. Now, if they actually stopped the merger because of antitrust violations, THEN that's news. Until then, it's just hypothetical bullshit and dreams.
The article does manage to make on good point, though, which is that sooner or later the market would manage to break Google's (hypothetical) monopoly. Heck, there's already countless startups all hoping to displace Google. Google does not come close to enjoying the dominance that Microsoft once did, which is why all this concern about Google shutting out the competition seems premature, at best.
I think the point of this article is that compression is bad, because you lose data from the original audio. But it fails to distinguish between lossy (MP3, AAC, Vorbis, etc.) and lossless (FLAC) compression, as well as the whole point of audio compression. I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty upset if I could only fit ~30 (uncompressed) albums on my iPod, as opposed to 200+ compressed albums. The trick is to find the lowest possible bitrate that still provides (subjective) CD-quality. Newer codecs like AAC and Vorbis can do this better than MP3. All of this hand-waving about the lost data being "bad" for the brain and psychoacoustics not working is just bullshit. If psychoacoustics didn't work, MP3s and other lossless codecs wouldn't be able to achieve transparency.
For digital audio to substantially improve, several major technological hurdles will have to be cleared. The files will have to be stored at higher sampling rates and higher bit rates. Computing power will have to grow. New playback machines will have to be introduced. Higher sampling rates and higher bit rates defeats the purpose of audio compression, since they cause audio files to increase in size. Instead, the current goal of codec research to create codecs that lower the bitrate at which transparency happens. Basically, I don't think the "problem" with digital audio that they see exists.
And one final gem:
FLAC: This codec, favored by Grateful Dead tape traders, stands for Free Lossless Audio Code. It reduces storage space by 30 percent to 50 percent, but without compression. Don't you love black magic that compres... erm, reduces file size by 30-50% without using compression? I sure do!
He needs to get rid of the Saturn V rocket plans in order to keep our enemies from attacking the top secret laser-equipped moon bases he's built to control the earth with.
So THAT'S why the Chinese want to get to the moon! It suddenly all makes sense!
Slashdot Mirror
It turns out that the shape of the filler determines the shape of the plasma wave - a pancake-shaped filler results in a cigar-shaped plasma wave, and a cigar-shaped filler results in a pancake-shaped plasma wave. By placing the bomb at the bottom of a cylinder, a pancake filler at the top, surrounding the bomb with a radiation mirror, and tuning the bomb to release as many X-rays as possible (in order to allow the filler to absorb as much energy as possible), you get what is essentially a nuclear shaped charge. The Orion team was able to make designs that produced beams of plasma with a divergence of only a few degrees. And with the large pusher plates mounted on the bottom of the spaceship (order of 100 meter diameter), you could capture most of the energy of the nuclear explosion.
As for photonic engines, yes, they have a very high specific impulse, but as you mentioned, their thrust is abysmal and their energy requirements are enormous. Somebody pointed out elsewhere in the comments that in order to get to Mars in a week powered by this hypothetical photonic engine, you would need to have a power plant with a generation capacity on roughly the same order of magnitude as the generation capacity of the entire United States. That's one giant power plant.
The concept of external (i.e. explosions are not contained within the ship's structure) nuclear pulse propulsion was actually studied in the late 50s, early 60s as Project Orion (internal NPP, which is like your car analogy but with nuclear explosions instead of fuel-air explosions, places too great of a stress on the ship's structure to be feasible).
... it was a combination of quite a few political reasons:
They never did get enough funding for a test with a nuke, but they did build 1-meter scale models powered by RDX charges. Powered by I believe 6 explosive charges, one of these reached 100 meters in a controlled test flight, proving that the concept worked (at least with lower energy pulses). As for whether or not it would work with nukes, their numerical modeling strongly indicated that it would.
You mentioned that the blast wave might be moving too fast to be useful, but actually that's the whole point - the impulse of the blast wave impacting against and then rebounding off the back of the spaceship is what provides thrust, so the faster the blast wave is moving, the greater the impulse and thrust.
Of course, the spaceship would have to be stupidly large to survive the instantaneous acceleration, but that was why it was so attractive. A ship around 10000 tons could've made it to Pluto and back within a year. Plus, it had a very high thrust-weight ratio, which meant that the fraction of the weight that was useful payload was stupidly high as well.
So then if NPP is so good, why was the project killed? It wasn't because it didn't work
1) NASA had thrown its support behind the competing NERVA rocket.
2) Fallout was problematic.
3) There was no mandate from Congress for missions that would require such performance, and NASA had no desire to dictate policy.
4) Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned all above-ground nuclear testing.
I did quite a bit of reading on spacecraft propulsion recently (specifically Nuclear pulse propulsion and basically what I got out of it is that if you have a massive energy source (say, antimatter) you're better off just blowing it up and riding the blast wave. You can get extremely high thrust AND specific impulse that way, which is not possible with almost any other engine technology (either high thrust and low specific impulse like chemical rockets, or low thrust and high specific impulse like ion engines). NPP (and its derivatives) is basically the best way we know of right now to get high enough performance for interplanetary, or even interstellar, missions.
NPP originally started with using nuclear explosions, but more recent research has focused on inertial confinement fusion and even antimatter-catalyzed fusion. The obvious extreme is using antimatter-matter detonations and riding the blast wave, which I'm fairly certain would be more efficient and yield better performance than taking that energy and pumping it into a laser.
Come on, at least he didn't use the obvious one!
In Soviet Russia sharks put lasers on you!
From a pure profit perspective, you're right that it would be hard to justify trying to win. However, it's more than just profit. Google is, I think, extremely worried by the possibility of the telecoms twisting the rules of the Internet in their favor (i.e. non-network neutrality). Google has no desire to be held hostage by the whim of the telecoms, who, if they have their way in Washington, will be able to discriminate against content as they see fit. But by purchasing a chunk of the spectrum, Google essentially bypasses the telecoms, ensuring that no matter how the network neutrality debate resolves itself, it'll end up winning.
So, yes, "make a [large] profit" might be incompatible with winning the auction, but that's not the point. The point is ensuring that even if the telecoms end up being able to discriminate against content (i.e., charge extra for Google searches), Google has a way out. And that, I think, is more important than simply writing down a larger black number.
If market cap was actually an indicator of potential success in the auction, Google would lose.
The telecoms:
AT&T: $242 billion
Sprint: $53 billion
Deutsche Telekom (they own T-Mobile): $79 billion
Verizon: $121 billion
Versus:
Google: $160 billion
Luckily, there's more to this game than pure market caps. Google is probably better able to raise cash, and may also have more cash on hand, than the telcoms. On the other hand, though, you have companies that have been around for a long time, and are fairly good at getting what they want. Regardless, I'm looking forward to the auction. A Google win would be awesome, but the actual event should turn out interesting as well.
Of course, I probably missed the memo that stated that such edits are fine unless done as part of an "experiment".
Apparently Yahoo! is catching up to Google, at least in terms of customer satisfaction, so I really don't think Google's dominance in search is that big of a deal. In advertising, maybe, but that's why the FTC and EU are looking into possible antitrust violations ... nothing particularly special there. Now, if they actually stopped the merger because of antitrust violations, THEN that's news. Until then, it's just hypothetical bullshit and dreams.
The article does manage to make on good point, though, which is that sooner or later the market would manage to break Google's (hypothetical) monopoly. Heck, there's already countless startups all hoping to displace Google. Google does not come close to enjoying the dominance that Microsoft once did, which is why all this concern about Google shutting out the competition seems premature, at best.
Easy ... God created the Earth in such a way that it appeared as if the Babylonians had been around for that long! It's all to test our faith, you see.