Just keep the laser on the ground and use adaptive optics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics so that it remains coherent up to the junk you're trying to get rid of. You don't have to change the orbit much, just enough to drop the Perigree into the upper atmosphere which can be done by pushing the junk straight upward away from the Earth. It's called a Laser Broom, they've been talking about it to protect the ISS from debris for a while now but there's no reason it couldn't be applied to the larger problem of space debris in general.
The main problem is that the power of the beam needed to do this contravenes the Outer Space Treaty, which bans laser weapons in space. Personally, I don't see how it applies since the laser itself would be on the ground, but that is what the wiki page says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom
What they don't understand is that it isn't going to be the government or the military that responds to a real cyber attack, it's going to be a nation wide army of several hundred thousand IT admins working 70 hour weeks to keep their companies secure and operational. Once solutions are found they'll be posted to the web and disseminated faster than the new attacks can be devised. In short, cyberwarfare won't work for the exact same reasons that censorship won't work, there's too many people working against the attackers who can communicate too quickly and too effectively.
nobody puts money into malaria research except for philanthropic reasons
Oh I don't know, they can't very well buy MS products if they're dead now can they?
In all seriousness, why is giving '3rd world kiddies' free access to your companies software cynical? Ok, yes you can make the argument that you're trying to indoctrinate them, but isn't it more likely that Bill Gates genuinely believes that MS products are some of the best available and that the kids should have the best available products? Especially since, given his contacts, the software can be had at little to no cost? Not every act of a millionaire is duplicitous, it seems to me that he's just trying to do the most good possible. His opinion of the software may be wrong, but I doubt that he is conciously trying to brainwash the developing world.
The only part of this article worth mentioning was the lying under oath. The tritium leak was harmless to anyone not 3 feet away when it happened. As for the American taxpayers being 'on the hook' for new power plants that will only happen if the plants somehow default on their loans, something no nuclear power plant has done in American history and given the subsidies already given to nuclear power it is highly unlikely that any new (and therefore more easily maintained and more efficient) reactor would do so.
Because having more than one car on the road drastically changes the nature of the competition. No drafting, no passing, no jockeying for position... I don't even watch racing and I can tell you it would be a totally different event. Watch a rally race sometime (which would be a more accurate representation of only one car on the track at a time) and then watch NASCAR and ask yourself if you think the best NASCAR driver would also be the best rally driver and vice verse.
Don't forget that in another 10-15 years 10% of their population won't be able to find a spouse. For what it's worth, I doubt that kind of societal pressure can be dealt with safely without great loss of life. I might be wrong, but if I certainly wouldn't want to be the one responsible for the country when 100,000,000+ young men are desperate, lonely, and sexually repressed.
eBay says they installed 5 of the devices (at $700-800k each) nine months ago and have saved $100,000 since. Doing the math, each device is saving them about $27k a year, meaning that it will take right around 28 years to recoup the investment. Worse, the actual ROI on the purchase is a whopping 3.6%, and that's assuming that natural gas prices don't increase since it is still burning gas as fuel. Other than saving space, how is this better than solar panels which typically have a 15-20 year payoff period?
Ok, if the price quoted is before federal and state subsidies (California I would imagine has some pretty good clean energy grants), that might change the equations a bit. But even if the price was cut in half, the ROI would only be 7.2 percent, I thought companies like eBay and Google tended to be a bit more aggressive with their investments than that.
Dedicated hardware random number generators are expensive and therefore aren't found in regular run of the mill consumer electronics. This is a simple, easy to manufacture, solid state device that improves randomness considerably. It's almost impossible to have a true random number generator, so we generally use pseudo-random number generators instead, generally software based ones. The problem is that given a certain seed value, a random number generator will always produce the same outputs. You might say to yourself "who the hell would go through the time and effort needed to predict the next random number?" but people have done it for everything from Nethack games to Keno machines. This device removes the seed value from the equation, wrapping the random number in an extra layer of randomness.
As for something being more or less random, fire up some old VB code and generate a bunch of random numbers, then plot them on a graph. You'll see a pattern almost instantly. Newer random number generators are better, but the software the drives them will always be derivable given enough samples.
But the principle cannot without your publicly funded education simply because of something you said about him. Free speech does not mean freedom of consequences, but it does mean freedom of consequences from the government, which the school is a part of.
A) Only from your stationary reference point, if you were running alongside the electron you wouldn't see anything out of the ordinary. B) That statement is true for all massive particles as they approach c
Not saying your wrong, but using a graph from 2002 to the present to show how an event that happened in 2001 has affected the price doesn't seem quite fair. Especially considering that said graph trends upward from 2002 to the present.
The lawsuit alleges the cameras captured images of Harriton High School students and their families as they undressed and in other compromising situations.
Emphasis added. I know there's a lot of strong emotions going around on this subject, but lets try to keep it reasonable shall we?
Don't get me wrong, I agree with the sentiment and the emotion but throwing one of our basic civil right out the window (no cruel and unusual punishment) in an effort to protect a different one (privacy) is exactly the kind of thing that we need to be fighting against. Our basic rights exist for a reason, and while I hold privacy and the first ammendment especially close to my heart, I don't want to see any of them eroded. Besides, the legal system had better be more than capable of dealing with this situation, it's so clear cut that I can't even imagine what was going through the heads of those responsible. If our legal system can't deal with it correctly... well then I'm one step closer to believing that our country is heading for the sewers (if it's not already there).
I'm sure the school made it clear that use of the laptops would be monitored, non-official use is verboten, etc.
They aren't monitoring the use of the laptop, they're monitoring the room the laptop is in. I can't see how they thought this was a good idea at any level, the downright pervi-ness of putting a camera and microphone in every students' bedroom is well beyond what could possibly be considered reasonable.
The only reason the school got away with it for as long as they did was because it was a secret and the students didn't know they were being watched. If the students had known they were being watched they would have taken the school to court, taped over the cameras, or just closed the laptops. Contrasted to the telescreen which everyone knew about, couldn't be turned off, and couldn't be legally fought. This was, undoubtably, a fuck up by the school, but Big Brother would be if this was an official policy of the federal government and there existed no way to fight it, since even the act of fighting it would be enough to have you tortured and/or killed.
In that case, even better would be to pulverize it and spread it equally over the world. If you spread it perfectly evenly, you'd have a density of 2.35 * 10^-8 kg per km^2. I'd be willing to bet that the average person gets more radiation from smoke alarms than they would get from spreading the waste over the planet. And I'd gaurantee that a single coal powerplant produces more radiation in the environment around it than such a disposal method would.
The problem is that more recent work has found that Bussard Ramjets are probably impossible. No matter how you design the scoop you end up losing more energy dragging the atoms in than you can get out of fusing them. That said, I don't see those kinds of energies being a problem. A few yards of lead laced through with a coolant of some kind should do the trick if nothing else. If you're building a near lightspeed intersetellar spaceship, I would think that radiation shielding and cooling would be relatively low on your list of problems, even if it is at LHC energy levels.
100 Mbps? Does the FCC not realize that 99% of all residences only have copper cabling to them (either twisted pair or coax)? It is impossible to get 100 Mbps out of such a transmission medium over any meaningful distance. The only solution to this would be to overbuild the entire telecommunications infrastructure with fiber optic cable.
Maybe you don't realize, but yes. That is exactly what they're going for here. A complete overhaul of the US telecommunications infrastructure.
Let me put it this way. December 26 of last year, I was 25 lbs overweight. I woke up that morning and said to myself "Today, I'm going to start eating healthy and lose weight". And then I went and did it, exactly as I explained in my comment above; writing down every single thing I eat and drink, and not going a single calorie over my daily target (1500 Kcals compared to 2800 before). Since then I've lost 30lbs, with another 10-15 to go before my goal weight. And most importantly, I cannot imagine eating the amount of food that I did 2 months ago. I do a once a week cheat day and I guarantee I don't eat more than 2300 Kcals on those days.
Yes, it was hard. The first couple weeks I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do it. I was hungry all the time, and literally dreamed about food on a regular basis. Eventually I learned what I could and could not eat to control my hunger without going over my limit, namely more veggies, less carbs and absolutely no diet soda (I know that the research is questionable at this point but diet soda made me massively hungry). Obviously I'm still hungry at some times, my wife hasn't latched on to the healthier lifestyle as much as I have which is incredibly frustrating when she's eating junk food and I'm hungry.
Am I going to keep it off? Honestly, I think I will. Keeping it off is going to be a matter of maintaining a daily Calorie intake of about 2300, which will be a piece of cake compared to what I'm doing now. As for the Biggest Loser... Well, for every person on it that keeps the weight off there's at least one that puts some or most of it back on. But you also need to remember why those people are losing the weight, a lot of them are there for the money first and to lose weight second. Is it more complex than calories in calories out? Yes and no. What you eat and when affects your metabolism, as does your genes and your activity level. But if you significantly cut Calories you will lose weight.
Ugh. The glib "just lose the weight" pseudo-argument. Yeah sure, all fat people are fat by choice, and, with a little elbow grease, could lose weight and be normal like everyone else.
Ah, the glib "all fat people are fat because of hormonal imbalance" pseudo-argument. Despite that fact that 2/3rds of adults in the US are overweight and the kind of hormone imbalances that cause massive weight gain occur in less than 2% of the population.
Honestly, it isn't that hard for 98% of people to lose weight, eat less and, optionally, excersise more. And yes, that means writing down what you eat so you can actually track it. Yes, that means weighing or measuring your food before you cook it so you know how much there is. Yes, that means sticking with it over the course of atleast several months. In my opinion, diligently keeping a food diary is the only way to consistently lose weight. If you're honest about filling it out and you have the will power to keep the calorie count at or below your target, it's almost impossible not to lose weight.
A mortgage isn't a living document because it is a contract between to organizations, a lender and a lendee. You could argue that the constitution is likewise a contract between the government and the governed, so where's the difference? The constitution lays out in it's contract exactly what needs to take place in order for the contract to be amended. Most notably, the contract can be amended without the support of, or indeed in opposition to, the government (realistically this would never happen but it is never the less allowed by the contract. Mortgages have no such clause and are therefore not living documents, you might be able to exercise a different part of the contract but unlike the constitution you can't rewrite the contract after it has been accepted by both parties.
The single most important part of the constitution are the rules for changing it, without those rules we would never have had the bill of rights, never been able to give women and minorities the right to vote, or been able to end the threat of slavery. The flexibility of our system of government is what has allowed it to survive and prosper for over 200 years, you can't just pretend that that flexibility doesn't exist because it is only exercised in extreme situations, you also can't pretend it doesn't exist just because you personally happen to like the state that it's currently in.
Putting said 1.21 Gigawatts power supply light enough to mount on an airplane however is anything but easy. In fact, since laser tracking that accurate has been possible since the 80s and since no ones ever made a laser that powerful while still being relatively light, I'd say that the hard part is going to be getting the weight down, not hitting the target.
A) There is undoubtably money to be made installing ultra-high speed internet, the market is large and the suppliers are few. It's entirely possible that they simple intend to move into the ISP business B) It's in Google's best interests for everyone to have a high quality internet connection. Specifically, this is probably more about creating a market to test the next generation of web based apps than it is about anything else. Presumably, ultra-high speed connections will be more common in a few years, and Google would like the opportunity to see what exactly people will use them for. We already have the bandwidth for video, VOIP, and webapps, so what's next?
Slashdot Mirror
Just keep the laser on the ground and use adaptive optics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics so that it remains coherent up to the junk you're trying to get rid of. You don't have to change the orbit much, just enough to drop the Perigree into the upper atmosphere which can be done by pushing the junk straight upward away from the Earth. It's called a Laser Broom, they've been talking about it to protect the ISS from debris for a while now but there's no reason it couldn't be applied to the larger problem of space debris in general.
The main problem is that the power of the beam needed to do this contravenes the Outer Space Treaty, which bans laser weapons in space. Personally, I don't see how it applies since the laser itself would be on the ground, but that is what the wiki page says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom
What they don't understand is that it isn't going to be the government or the military that responds to a real cyber attack, it's going to be a nation wide army of several hundred thousand IT admins working 70 hour weeks to keep their companies secure and operational. Once solutions are found they'll be posted to the web and disseminated faster than the new attacks can be devised. In short, cyberwarfare won't work for the exact same reasons that censorship won't work, there's too many people working against the attackers who can communicate too quickly and too effectively.
Or, to put it another way, http://xkcd.com/705
nobody puts money into malaria research except for philanthropic reasons
Oh I don't know, they can't very well buy MS products if they're dead now can they?
In all seriousness, why is giving '3rd world kiddies' free access to your companies software cynical? Ok, yes you can make the argument that you're trying to indoctrinate them, but isn't it more likely that Bill Gates genuinely believes that MS products are some of the best available and that the kids should have the best available products? Especially since, given his contacts, the software can be had at little to no cost? Not every act of a millionaire is duplicitous, it seems to me that he's just trying to do the most good possible. His opinion of the software may be wrong, but I doubt that he is conciously trying to brainwash the developing world.
The only part of this article worth mentioning was the lying under oath. The tritium leak was harmless to anyone not 3 feet away when it happened. As for the American taxpayers being 'on the hook' for new power plants that will only happen if the plants somehow default on their loans, something no nuclear power plant has done in American history and given the subsidies already given to nuclear power it is highly unlikely that any new (and therefore more easily maintained and more efficient) reactor would do so.
The summary reads like a troll to me, but YMMV.
Because having more than one car on the road drastically changes the nature of the competition. No drafting, no passing, no jockeying for position... I don't even watch racing and I can tell you it would be a totally different event. Watch a rally race sometime (which would be a more accurate representation of only one car on the track at a time) and then watch NASCAR and ask yourself if you think the best NASCAR driver would also be the best rally driver and vice verse.
Don't forget that in another 10-15 years 10% of their population won't be able to find a spouse. For what it's worth, I doubt that kind of societal pressure can be dealt with safely without great loss of life. I might be wrong, but if I certainly wouldn't want to be the one responsible for the country when 100,000,000+ young men are desperate, lonely, and sexually repressed.
My hovercraft is full of eels
Is that some kind of weird Portuguese sequel to Snakes on a Plane?
eBay says they installed 5 of the devices (at $700-800k each) nine months ago and have saved $100,000 since. Doing the math, each device is saving them about $27k a year, meaning that it will take right around 28 years to recoup the investment. Worse, the actual ROI on the purchase is a whopping 3.6%, and that's assuming that natural gas prices don't increase since it is still burning gas as fuel. Other than saving space, how is this better than solar panels which typically have a 15-20 year payoff period?
Ok, if the price quoted is before federal and state subsidies (California I would imagine has some pretty good clean energy grants), that might change the equations a bit. But even if the price was cut in half, the ROI would only be 7.2 percent, I thought companies like eBay and Google tended to be a bit more aggressive with their investments than that.
Dedicated hardware random number generators are expensive and therefore aren't found in regular run of the mill consumer electronics. This is a simple, easy to manufacture, solid state device that improves randomness considerably. It's almost impossible to have a true random number generator, so we generally use pseudo-random number generators instead, generally software based ones. The problem is that given a certain seed value, a random number generator will always produce the same outputs. You might say to yourself "who the hell would go through the time and effort needed to predict the next random number?" but people have done it for everything from Nethack games to Keno machines. This device removes the seed value from the equation, wrapping the random number in an extra layer of randomness.
As for something being more or less random, fire up some old VB code and generate a bunch of random numbers, then plot them on a graph. You'll see a pattern almost instantly. Newer random number generators are better, but the software the drives them will always be derivable given enough samples.
But the principle cannot without your publicly funded education simply because of something you said about him. Free speech does not mean freedom of consequences, but it does mean freedom of consequences from the government, which the school is a part of.
A) Only from your stationary reference point, if you were running alongside the electron you wouldn't see anything out of the ordinary.
B) That statement is true for all massive particles as they approach c
Not saying your wrong, but using a graph from 2002 to the present to show how an event that happened in 2001 has affected the price doesn't seem quite fair. Especially considering that said graph trends upward from 2002 to the present.
The lawsuit alleges the cameras captured images of Harriton High School students and their families as they undressed and in other compromising situations.
Emphasis added. I know there's a lot of strong emotions going around on this subject, but lets try to keep it reasonable shall we?
Don't get me wrong, I agree with the sentiment and the emotion but throwing one of our basic civil right out the window (no cruel and unusual punishment) in an effort to protect a different one (privacy) is exactly the kind of thing that we need to be fighting against. Our basic rights exist for a reason, and while I hold privacy and the first ammendment especially close to my heart, I don't want to see any of them eroded. Besides, the legal system had better be more than capable of dealing with this situation, it's so clear cut that I can't even imagine what was going through the heads of those responsible. If our legal system can't deal with it correctly... well then I'm one step closer to believing that our country is heading for the sewers (if it's not already there).
I'm sure the school made it clear that use of the laptops would be monitored, non-official use is verboten, etc.
They aren't monitoring the use of the laptop, they're monitoring the room the laptop is in. I can't see how they thought this was a good idea at any level, the downright pervi-ness of putting a camera and microphone in every students' bedroom is well beyond what could possibly be considered reasonable.
The only reason the school got away with it for as long as they did was because it was a secret and the students didn't know they were being watched. If the students had known they were being watched they would have taken the school to court, taped over the cameras, or just closed the laptops. Contrasted to the telescreen which everyone knew about, couldn't be turned off, and couldn't be legally fought. This was, undoubtably, a fuck up by the school, but Big Brother would be if this was an official policy of the federal government and there existed no way to fight it, since even the act of fighting it would be enough to have you tortured and/or killed.
In that case, even better would be to pulverize it and spread it equally over the world. If you spread it perfectly evenly, you'd have a density of 2.35 * 10^-8 kg per km^2. I'd be willing to bet that the average person gets more radiation from smoke alarms than they would get from spreading the waste over the planet. And I'd gaurantee that a single coal powerplant produces more radiation in the environment around it than such a disposal method would.
The problem is that more recent work has found that Bussard Ramjets are probably impossible. No matter how you design the scoop you end up losing more energy dragging the atoms in than you can get out of fusing them. That said, I don't see those kinds of energies being a problem. A few yards of lead laced through with a coolant of some kind should do the trick if nothing else. If you're building a near lightspeed intersetellar spaceship, I would think that radiation shielding and cooling would be relatively low on your list of problems, even if it is at LHC energy levels.
100 Mbps? Does the FCC not realize that 99% of all residences only have copper cabling to them (either twisted pair or coax)? It is impossible to get 100 Mbps out of such a transmission medium over any meaningful distance. The only solution to this would be to overbuild the entire telecommunications infrastructure with fiber optic cable.
Maybe you don't realize, but yes. That is exactly what they're going for here. A complete overhaul of the US telecommunications infrastructure.
Let me put it this way. December 26 of last year, I was 25 lbs overweight. I woke up that morning and said to myself "Today, I'm going to start eating healthy and lose weight". And then I went and did it, exactly as I explained in my comment above; writing down every single thing I eat and drink, and not going a single calorie over my daily target (1500 Kcals compared to 2800 before). Since then I've lost 30lbs, with another 10-15 to go before my goal weight. And most importantly, I cannot imagine eating the amount of food that I did 2 months ago. I do a once a week cheat day and I guarantee I don't eat more than 2300 Kcals on those days.
Yes, it was hard. The first couple weeks I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do it. I was hungry all the time, and literally dreamed about food on a regular basis. Eventually I learned what I could and could not eat to control my hunger without going over my limit, namely more veggies, less carbs and absolutely no diet soda (I know that the research is questionable at this point but diet soda made me massively hungry). Obviously I'm still hungry at some times, my wife hasn't latched on to the healthier lifestyle as much as I have which is incredibly frustrating when she's eating junk food and I'm hungry.
Am I going to keep it off? Honestly, I think I will. Keeping it off is going to be a matter of maintaining a daily Calorie intake of about 2300, which will be a piece of cake compared to what I'm doing now. As for the Biggest Loser... Well, for every person on it that keeps the weight off there's at least one that puts some or most of it back on. But you also need to remember why those people are losing the weight, a lot of them are there for the money first and to lose weight second. Is it more complex than calories in calories out? Yes and no. What you eat and when affects your metabolism, as does your genes and your activity level. But if you significantly cut Calories you will lose weight.
Ugh. The glib "just lose the weight" pseudo-argument. Yeah sure, all fat people are fat by choice, and, with a little elbow grease, could lose weight and be normal like everyone else.
Ah, the glib "all fat people are fat because of hormonal imbalance" pseudo-argument. Despite that fact that 2/3rds of adults in the US are overweight and the kind of hormone imbalances that cause massive weight gain occur in less than 2% of the population.
Honestly, it isn't that hard for 98% of people to lose weight, eat less and, optionally, excersise more. And yes, that means writing down what you eat so you can actually track it. Yes, that means weighing or measuring your food before you cook it so you know how much there is. Yes, that means sticking with it over the course of atleast several months. In my opinion, diligently keeping a food diary is the only way to consistently lose weight. If you're honest about filling it out and you have the will power to keep the calorie count at or below your target, it's almost impossible not to lose weight.
A mortgage isn't a living document because it is a contract between to organizations, a lender and a lendee. You could argue that the constitution is likewise a contract between the government and the governed, so where's the difference? The constitution lays out in it's contract exactly what needs to take place in order for the contract to be amended. Most notably, the contract can be amended without the support of, or indeed in opposition to, the government (realistically this would never happen but it is never the less allowed by the contract. Mortgages have no such clause and are therefore not living documents, you might be able to exercise a different part of the contract but unlike the constitution you can't rewrite the contract after it has been accepted by both parties.
The single most important part of the constitution are the rules for changing it, without those rules we would never have had the bill of rights, never been able to give women and minorities the right to vote, or been able to end the threat of slavery. The flexibility of our system of government is what has allowed it to survive and prosper for over 200 years, you can't just pretend that that flexibility doesn't exist because it is only exercised in extreme situations, you also can't pretend it doesn't exist just because you personally happen to like the state that it's currently in.
Putting said 1.21 Gigawatts power supply light enough to mount on an airplane however is anything but easy. In fact, since laser tracking that accurate has been possible since the 80s and since no ones ever made a laser that powerful while still being relatively light, I'd say that the hard part is going to be getting the weight down, not hitting the target.
A) There is undoubtably money to be made installing ultra-high speed internet, the market is large and the suppliers are few. It's entirely possible that they simple intend to move into the ISP business
B) It's in Google's best interests for everyone to have a high quality internet connection. Specifically, this is probably more about creating a market to test the next generation of web based apps than it is about anything else. Presumably, ultra-high speed connections will be more common in a few years, and Google would like the opportunity to see what exactly people will use them for. We already have the bandwidth for video, VOIP, and webapps, so what's next?
If you make film and developing supplies illegal, only criminals will have film and developing supplies.