Superconductors were discovered in the early 1900s by Onnes (in mercury). In the 80s they discovered the so called type 2 superconductors which have much higher critical temperature, i.e. they are superconducting at higher temperatures, making it possible to use cheap liquid nitrogen for cooling instead of liquid helium. Type 2 superconductors are not metals (or have impurities) and are usually some kind of copper oxide. They have much different properties than Type 1 (which are usually pure metals).
IIRC it was not manned and operational continuously (it was also not capable of that). There were a total of 3 missions to the station, the longest one lasting 84 days. Skylab was more or less abandoned since early 1974 up until reentry. Mir was manned continuously from 1986 up until some time in 1999. Also, the Russians had other space stations before that (Salyut 1-7). Salyut 7 was up for 9 years, but was also not manned all the time. I'm not as ignorant as you think.
Many airlines have it actually on international flights. The new Airbus A340 has TV/computer on each seat. The Boeing 777 also (at least for Air France). I haven't seen US airlines do it, because they really like to screw their coach passengers. BTW the quality of service on US flights compared to other airlines is fucking horrible.
I came to the US for college 3.5 years ago and now I get pre-approved offers for Visa Gold and Platinum Mastercard with $1000 limits. Very strange since I have no credit in the US or any property to speak of. (I have another VISA on my parents' account)
There is a possibility that time travel would require a time machine at both the departure and destination places, so that we would only be able to do time travel to times that are later than the date of discovery.
Even if gravity is instantaneous, the problem is you can't make big masses appear and disappear out of nothing. You can break something up, but the mass will still be there due to conservation of mass, unless you have a big piece of antimatter with you. Anyway, AFAIK gravity is not instantaneous anyway.
IMHO if we develop a faster (than light, presumably) means of communication through space, we will no longer have problems going to Mars or anywhere else in the Universe instantaneously, so the health problem would not exist.
They don't learn like humans do, but a (three layer) neural net can express *any* function. That is, if you have a finite number of combinations of inputs and outputs and you don't have the answers for each one, you can enter the ones you know and extrapolate from there. In this case there are not many possible combinations for the lights, etc. so the results should be reasonable. Neural nets have been successfully used for face and handwriitng recognition, which are hardly trivial. Neural nets are useful when you need results more or less immediately but the system can improve as you go along and get more examples.
Re:Please consider the power shortage
on
World Wide Cluster
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· Score: 1
I agree. I calculated that running SETI 24/7 on my computer added like $25 to my electricity bill. The whole thing is about $50. (This is because I have the super-hot PII-233 plus three harddrives)
Guess again. Without convective cooling, fans will be useless and the only thing that works is heat sink, but since there is no convective cooling, you'll have to rely on radiative cooling. Cooling is a problem with many satellites.
The proper Hohman transfer alignment window for Mars occurs every 2.2 years. For all other planets it is about 1 year, because the relative orbit velocities are high and Earth takes 1 year to orbit. Since Mars is close to us and orbits at a speed close to ours, it takes longer for Earth to overtake it and go back to a good position.
Small half-life means highly radioactive. That's why you can hold a piece of uranium-238 in your hand (half life 4 billion years), but I would not recommend holding a piece of say Cobalt-60 (halflife 5 years).
Heads up: A large section of Siberia *is" permafrost and that does not mean the trans-Siberian railway has been sinking (except may be financially that is).
Japan is a seismic zone and yet they have really long tunnels between islands. I think it's fairly easy to take into account several centimeters per year of drift, with rails being piecewise and stuff. I'm sure thermal contraction and expansion is a bigger problem.
Putting stuff from Earth to Moon costs the same amount of energy as putting it in parking orbit and then sending it to the Moon. So unless you bring materials from somewhere else (asteroids?), those intermediate orbiting stations would be useless. The reason astronauts came back in a reentry capsule is that their speed was too high and it would take too much fuel to decelerate to Earth orbit velocities. They would have had to lug that fuel with them all the way. Not very feasible, even if there was an orbiting station. Putting stuff on the Moon in general is not that expensive, if you don't want to bring it back, like parts for a base for example. My guess is, they could have set up a base on the Moon instead of ISS for about the same amount of money.
We already have weapons that use (uncontrolled) fusion power. We've had them since the 1950s. They are called Hydrogen Bombs. You be the judge if they led to war.
I was talking more about the actual design process and the complexity of those things, but anyway let's see:
I see you agree with me on the Concorde. Also, while military fighters can go supersonic, they can't CRUISE supersonic, like the Concorde does. The exception is the F-22 which is not even in service yet.
The SR-71. I am not aware of a replacement of the SR-71 especially since it was brough back into service for the Gulf war. Why didn't they use a more capable replacement if they had any? Anyway it still is the highest and fastest flying aircraft on record (bar some top secret projects, which I doubt).
Apollo 11. Ah, you agree again. We have not gone back to the Moon or any further for that matter. The Vikings had a 100% success rate on Mars in the 70s. The latest two Mars probes, well, you know... A proof that the computer is only as smart as the person who operates it.
H-Bomb. I agree they were perfected except on the capability. The Russians had a 100 Megaton H-bomb (the biggest ever) in the 50s and that's pretty much all you need for wholesale destruction, and it was designed by hand.
Lastly, I know that technically my argument holds because nobody has surpassed these things since they came about. But, I do agree that we probably are capable of doing better, just the will is not there. The problem is we can claim we are better all we want, but actions speak louder than words and in the large scale engineers in the 60s make us look like wussies as far as actions are concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Superconductors were discovered in the early 1900s by Onnes (in mercury). In the 80s they discovered the so called type 2 superconductors which have much higher critical temperature, i.e. they are superconducting at higher temperatures, making it possible to use cheap liquid nitrogen for cooling instead of liquid helium. Type 2 superconductors are not metals (or have impurities) and are usually some kind of copper oxide. They have much different properties than Type 1 (which are usually pure metals).
IIRC it was not manned and operational continuously (it was also not capable of that). There were a total of 3 missions to the station, the longest one lasting 84 days. Skylab was more or less abandoned since early 1974 up until reentry. Mir was manned continuously from 1986 up until some time in 1999. Also, the Russians had other space stations before that (Salyut 1-7). Salyut 7 was up for 9 years, but was also not manned all the time. I'm not as ignorant as you think.
The US will withdraw their support for Tawian in a heartbeat if China invades it. You will se why.
Many airlines have it actually on international flights. The new Airbus A340 has TV/computer on each seat. The Boeing 777 also (at least for Air France). I haven't seen US airlines do it, because they really like to screw their coach passengers. BTW the quality of service on US flights compared to other airlines is fucking horrible.
As long as I can still get porn.
I came to the US for college 3.5 years ago and now I get pre-approved offers for Visa Gold and Platinum Mastercard with $1000 limits. Very strange since I have no credit in the US or any property to speak of. (I have another VISA on my parents' account)
There is a possibility that time travel would require a time machine at both the departure and destination places, so that we would only be able to do time travel to times that are later than the date of discovery.
Even if gravity is instantaneous, the problem is you can't make big masses appear and disappear out of nothing. You can break something up, but the mass will still be there due to conservation of mass, unless you have a big piece of antimatter with you. Anyway, AFAIK gravity is not instantaneous anyway.
the only things that would impress me are:
Faster Than Light Travel
Teleportation.
Time Travel
Anything else would not deserve so much hype. Remember the hype around Transmeta, and now we know Crusoe is (almost) just vaporware.
You know you are linking to the same site (mozilla.org) so chances are that if I can't get to the actual page, I can't access the mirror list either.
That's because you sir, are an idiot.
Thank you.
IMHO if we develop a faster (than light, presumably) means of communication through space, we will no longer have problems going to Mars or anywhere else in the Universe instantaneously, so the health problem would not exist.
I just had to look at the name of the article html file to know that this guy is just ranting. It's called "oopbad.html"
Many cars can run on alcohol (ethanol) without modification to the engine. Alcohol can be made from sugar, so there, a clean fuel.
They don't learn like humans do, but a (three layer) neural net can express *any* function. That is, if you have a finite number of combinations of inputs and outputs and you don't have the answers for each one, you can enter the ones you know and extrapolate from there. In this case there are not many possible combinations for the lights, etc. so the results should be reasonable. Neural nets have been successfully used for face and handwriitng recognition, which are hardly trivial. Neural nets are useful when you need results more or less immediately but the system can improve as you go along and get more examples.
I agree. I calculated that running SETI 24/7 on my computer added like $25 to my electricity bill. The whole thing is about $50. (This is because I have the super-hot PII-233 plus three harddrives)
Guess again. Without convective cooling, fans will be useless and the only thing that works is heat sink, but since there is no convective cooling, you'll have to rely on radiative cooling. Cooling is a problem with many satellites.
The proper Hohman transfer alignment window for Mars occurs every 2.2 years. For all other planets it is about 1 year, because the relative orbit velocities are high and Earth takes 1 year to orbit. Since Mars is close to us and orbits at a speed close to ours, it takes longer for Earth to overtake it and go back to a good position.
Small half-life means highly radioactive. That's why you can hold a piece of uranium-238 in your hand (half life 4 billion years), but I would not recommend holding a piece of say Cobalt-60 (halflife 5 years).
Heads up: A large section of Siberia *is" permafrost and that does not mean the trans-Siberian railway has been sinking (except may be financially that is).
Japan is a seismic zone and yet they have really long tunnels between islands. I think it's fairly easy to take into account several centimeters per year of drift, with rails being piecewise and stuff. I'm sure thermal contraction and expansion is a bigger problem.
Amazing, given that Diablo 2 has been out for less than 9 months. You working 30 hours/day or something?
Putting stuff from Earth to Moon costs the same amount of energy as putting it in parking orbit and then sending it to the Moon. So unless you bring materials from somewhere else (asteroids?), those intermediate orbiting stations would be useless. The reason astronauts came back in a reentry capsule is that their speed was too high and it would take too much fuel to decelerate to Earth orbit velocities. They would have had to lug that fuel with them all the way. Not very feasible, even if there was an orbiting station. Putting stuff on the Moon in general is not that expensive, if you don't want to bring it back, like parts for a base for example. My guess is, they could have set up a base on the Moon instead of ISS for about the same amount of money.
We already have weapons that use (uncontrolled) fusion power. We've had them since the 1950s. They are called Hydrogen Bombs. You be the judge if they led to war.
I was talking more about the actual design process and the complexity of those things, but anyway let's see:
I see you agree with me on the Concorde. Also, while military fighters can go supersonic, they can't CRUISE supersonic, like the Concorde does. The exception is the F-22 which is not even in service yet.
The SR-71. I am not aware of a replacement of the SR-71 especially since it was brough back into service for the Gulf war. Why didn't they use a more capable replacement if they had any? Anyway it still is the highest and fastest flying aircraft on record (bar some top secret projects, which I doubt).
Apollo 11. Ah, you agree again. We have not gone back to the Moon or any further for that matter. The Vikings had a 100% success rate on Mars in the 70s. The latest two Mars probes, well, you know... A proof that the computer is only as smart as the person who operates it.
H-Bomb. I agree they were perfected except on the capability. The Russians had a 100 Megaton H-bomb (the biggest ever) in the 50s and that's pretty much all you need for wholesale destruction, and it was designed by hand.
Lastly, I know that technically my argument holds because nobody has surpassed these things since they came about. But, I do agree that we probably are capable of doing better, just the will is not there. The problem is we can claim we are better all we want, but actions speak louder than words and in the large scale engineers in the 60s make us look like wussies as far as actions are concerned.