Humorously, the wikipedia article claims Jinx is 6 times more massive than Earth and "very dense", with a surface gravity of 1.78 times that of Earth. The only problem with this is that if the planet had exactly Earth density, it would have a surface gravity of 1.82 times Earth. Therefore, Jinx must actually be slightly less dense than the Earth.
I think that in planetary terms we can safely assume 5x mass will create an environment of roughly 5g... maybe give or take 20%. Enough to ensure that the simple act of getting out of bed would be a gruelling ordeal.
Another problem I noticed after actually reading TFA:
No, it would not. It would need to be much denser than Earth for that to happen. This is basically impossible for an object of that mass.
Assuming roughly Earth like density (which is quite plausible), Radius will scale like Mass to the 1/3, while gravity scales like mass / radius squared. This works out to about 1.7 times Earth gravity at the surface.
Acceleration due to gravity scales as mass over Radius squared, whereas Radius will scale as Mass to the one third, assuming relatively constant density. So, the radius would be about 1.7 times that of Earth.
Thus, acceleration due to gravity would be about 5 / (1.7 ^ 2) or about 1.7 times Earth acceleration (10 m / s ^ 2). This is all assuming it is Earth like in composition, which we don't know for sure.
1.7 times Earth gravity would be pretty high, but it might be livable. It is worth noting, however, that this is only a MINIMUM mass estimate - the mass could be higher.
I believe they are charging because they know that plenty of people are willing to shell out a piddly $10 for an early crack at the creature editor. Not to say you were implying otherwise, but they obviously have every right to do this.
I doubt very much they will have any problem churning out ample creatures for the full release.
Have you not bought a television or monitor in the past three decades? Screen area is almost always described the length of the diagonal. It's a little confusing when comparing screens of different aspect ratios, but it's way more succinct to talk about your "42 inch" screen than your "902 square inch" screen, or even your "40 inch by 22.5 inch" screen. True enough, but you don't generally see such screens advertised as 42 inch area, which is the point I was trying to make.
where they are the sole cable provider, and DSL is not offered
AND WiMax is not available, AND satellite isn't possible, AND dial-up isn't available. I think if you lived in an area that remote, Comcast cable being in the ground is kind of a laughable impossibility. None of the three options you listed provide anywhere close to the bandwidth of cable. Satellite would be the closest, but of course with that you are still using dialup for uploads and you have to deal with high latency.
I would agree that DSL is probably available in most places where cable is available. Indeed, there are plenty of rural areas where DSL is available but cable is not.
Still, it is a very common situation even in cities to have your only options for high speed internet be Comcast cable or Verizon DSL. You are basically between a rock and a hard place in that situation.
It seems strange to me that so many people on slashdot (and more generally on the internet at large) seem so gung ho free speech, yet at the same time are ready to burn spammers at the stake.
I am sorry for your inconvenience, but I think free speech is a little bit more important than that.
Strange that they use such antiquated units of measure as hours of video or MP3 songs. Clearly, the useful measure would be Libraries of Congress (LoCs).
From the article:
ET: Whenever someone hears about GPU-accelerated FAH, their first question is why there is no client with support for Nvidia cards. In the past it was said that it had more to do with Nvidia's drivers. Now that the core doesn't use DirectX, couldn't a GPU client use Nvidia's CUDA? Is there any work going on there, and if not, why not?
Dr. Pande: We are interested in CUDA and are investigating how well FAH on CUDA would work. I am awaiting this with some serious excitement. Getting Folding@home working on Nvidia GPUs would definitely add a lot of computing power into the mix. This is especially true now, as it seems that the current crop of high end GPUs seems to favor Nvidia.
From the benchmarks I have seen, it seems that there are currently no games that can effectively utilize, for example, 2 9800 GX2s. If Folding@home releases an Nvidia client, those people who have plunked $1000 into graphics cards may finally be able to put them to use!
This would not be possible without changes to the tax code. To pay state taxes, the business in question would need to open an account with the appropriate agency in each of the fifty states (assuming they had customers in each of the fifty states). Having gone through this process for Maryland, DC, and Virginia, I can tell you that the administrative burden this would put on small businesses would be very severe. This alone could probably keep an employee occupied full time for weeks.
While I agree that being able to define a range for error bars is nice, does anyone within the scientific community seriously use a spreadsheet for data analysis? In my experience the capabilities of Excel and the like are woefully inadequate for this purpose.
I am ok with them pursuing this line of research, as long as they don't try something truly dangerous, like a half bear, half pig. Or worse, a half man, half bear, half pig.
Now that would be trouble.
While I don't disagree with the spirit of your comment, the iPhone has only 27% of the US smartphone market, which is of course far less than the entire US mobile phone market.
Slashdot Mirror
Humorously, the wikipedia article claims Jinx is 6 times more massive than Earth and "very dense", with a surface gravity of 1.78 times that of Earth. The only problem with this is that if the planet had exactly Earth density, it would have a surface gravity of 1.82 times Earth. Therefore, Jinx must actually be slightly less dense than the Earth.
I think that in planetary terms we can safely assume 5x mass will create an environment of roughly 5g ... maybe give or take 20%. Enough to ensure that the simple act of getting out of bed would be a gruelling ordeal.
Another problem I noticed after actually reading TFA:
No, it would not. It would need to be much denser than Earth for that to happen. This is basically impossible for an object of that mass.
Assuming roughly Earth like density (which is quite plausible), Radius will scale like Mass to the 1/3, while gravity scales like mass / radius squared. This works out to about 1.7 times Earth gravity at the surface.
Acceleration due to gravity scales as mass over Radius squared, whereas Radius will scale as Mass to the one third, assuming relatively constant density. So, the radius would be about 1.7 times that of Earth.
Thus, acceleration due to gravity would be about 5 / (1.7 ^ 2) or about 1.7 times Earth acceleration (10 m / s ^ 2). This is all assuming it is Earth like in composition, which we don't know for sure.
1.7 times Earth gravity would be pretty high, but it might be livable. It is worth noting, however, that this is only a MINIMUM mass estimate - the mass could be higher.
I believe they are charging because they know that plenty of people are willing to shell out a piddly $10 for an early crack at the creature editor. Not to say you were implying otherwise, but they obviously have every right to do this.
I doubt very much they will have any problem churning out ample creatures for the full release.
Looking at their (awful, difficult to navigate flash based) website, I discover that they actually mean 6.6m diagonal.
I would agree that DSL is probably available in most places where cable is available. Indeed, there are plenty of rural areas where DSL is available but cable is not.
Still, it is a very common situation even in cities to have your only options for high speed internet be Comcast cable or Verizon DSL. You are basically between a rock and a hard place in that situation.
It seems strange to me that so many people on slashdot (and more generally on the internet at large) seem so gung ho free speech, yet at the same time are ready to burn spammers at the stake.
I am sorry for your inconvenience, but I think free speech is a little bit more important than that.
Strange that they use such antiquated units of measure as hours of video or MP3 songs. Clearly, the useful measure would be Libraries of Congress (LoCs).
From the benchmarks I have seen, it seems that there are currently no games that can effectively utilize, for example, 2 9800 GX2s. If Folding@home releases an Nvidia client, those people who have plunked $1000 into graphics cards may finally be able to put them to use!
This would not be possible without changes to the tax code. To pay state taxes, the business in question would need to open an account with the appropriate agency in each of the fifty states (assuming they had customers in each of the fifty states). Having gone through this process for Maryland, DC, and Virginia, I can tell you that the administrative burden this would put on small businesses would be very severe. This alone could probably keep an employee occupied full time for weeks.
While I agree that being able to define a range for error bars is nice, does anyone within the scientific community seriously use a spreadsheet for data analysis? In my experience the capabilities of Excel and the like are woefully inadequate for this purpose.
I am ok with them pursuing this line of research, as long as they don't try something truly dangerous, like a half bear, half pig. Or worse, a half man, half bear, half pig. Now that would be trouble.
While I don't disagree with the spirit of your comment, the iPhone has only 27% of the US smartphone market, which is of course far less than the entire US mobile phone market.