4chan.org Reachable.
worldofwarcraft.com Reachable.
http://asdasd.fjordsdfoj.com.ch Unknown host, but also doesn't DNS resolve on my home machine in Canada, so it appears this doesn't really exist.
http://www.bankofamerica.com Reachable.
Please try finding the article "Media edicts recall China's Maoist past" from the Financial Times' website (14 May 2008, ft.com) Yes, I can read that article using my unproxied konqueror. I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Beijing, sending all packets through the national firewall. It's not being blocked at this time (00h36 EDT).
I'm in China right now. I was here (Beijing) the day the earthquake hit. At 6:00, I was having dinner in a restaurant, and the television was tuned to the national news service. I speak Chinese, and I understand it well. It was all-earthquake, all the time. Reporters were everywhere in Sichuan (they hadn't arrived in the worst-hit areas yet, it having been less than four hours). The premier was on TV talking about sending help. There were pictures of people carrying bodies and bandaged victims on their backs, footage of destroyed buildings, everything you would expect to see in a major disaster, with no conspicuous absences. It was the exact antithesis of news suppression.
In the days following the quake, I've turned on the television a couple of times. There is a lot of earthquake coverage, but I've also seen costume dramas, soap operas, musical variety shows, fund raisers, home-shopping-network style shows, and billiards tournaments.
I proxy my internet through an SSH tunnel, so I haven't noticed any changes to website availability, but I just fired up an unproxied konqueror, and I can get to the BBC, CBC, arstechnica, and slashdot through the national firewall. If somebody wants to post URLs they think are unreachable, I can give quickly determine whether they are reachable.
> microwave ovens use frequencies that are specifically "tuned" to the water molecule.
This is incorrect, but a common misconception. Microwave ovens work by dielectric heating of the material inside them. Certain materials are more efficiently heated than others, but there is no tuning to the water molecule involved. Look at the frequency response of the absorption coefficient of water to electromagnetic energy, there's an excellent one on page 291 of the second edition of Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_ (that graph is one of the most dramatic I've ever seen, just for so well answering the question "why have our eyes evolved to see light only on the range 400-700nm?"). On that graph, you'll see that the absorption coefficient is smoothly increasing between 100 MHz and 10 GHz, there's nothing magic about the frequency chosen for microwave ovens, it was an available frequency in a band not reserved for communication.
It appears as if the claim is that by drawing energy from the wind, you will actively cool the planet. That's not a valid argument, as the vast majority of the electricity consumed in the world ultimately dissipates as heat, so you'd be putting that energy right back somewhere else. If your computer draws 70 Watts, it is a 100.0% efficient 70 Watt heater, which happens to do some pretty things along the way. To cool the planet this way, you'd have to take the electricity and beam it out into space as laser or microwave energy.
It is not true that the BCS theory of superconductivity has been proven wrong. It is a very good theory for certain types of materials. It accurately predicts things like the ultrasonic attenuation, the isotope effect, and others, and did garner the Nobel prize (recall that the Nobel committee is very conservative, and won't offer the prize unless the result can be confidently expected to hold up).
BCS theory does say that the maximum reasonable temperature for phonon-mediated coupling in a homogeneous medium is approximately 27 degrees. Above that temperature, the elastic response of the lattice would have to be so high that the lattice would make a phase change to a more stable state. As this new material appears to be superconducting above this temperature, it implies that its superconductivity arrives by a different mechanism than that described by the classical BCS theory. That was the same reasoning which made the original lanthanum-based high-Tc superconductors such big news the moment they were announced.
Solid fuel boosters usually use some sort of nitrogen compound and the end result is some sort of nitogen oxide, which is also non-toxic (mostly that is, some particular compounds of N and O are called laughing gas IIRC and they make you errr, happy when you inhale).
The solid rocket boosters on the Space Shuttle burn a nasty mix of ammonium perchlorate oxidizer, aluminum metal as the fuel, a rubber matrix to hold them, and small amounts of other material. You do not want to take deep breaths near a burning SRB.
It seems like at very high speeds it might be difficult to navigate around obstacles under water.
As mentioned in the article, it's a bit worse than that. They're hoping to find some way to steer the thing. Forget navigating, at the moment it travels a straight-line course. The other problem is that if it ever drops below its critical speed, there's no reasonable way for a vessel to reinitialize its cavitation drive. Once up to speed, you're fine. Drop below that speed, and the drag shoots way up, and you need a specialized launcher to get yourself into the cavitation regime again.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but Helium 3 makes a better fusion fuel that the classic Hydrogen 2 & 3 mix, and his fact combined with its complete scarcity make it currently the most valuable substance known to mankind.
Well, first thing to point out is that there are, currently, no helium-3 fusion reactors, so its extreme value is somewhat speculative. It is valuable, in part because of its scarcity, its primary use is in physics apparatus, notably in helium dilution refrigeration equipment. A dilution refrigerator can cool something down to millikelvins. Helium-3 is the end-product of the beta decay of a tritium atom, the primary source of it at the moment is from "expired" fusion-boosted nuclear weapons, those which don't generate their tritium from lithium fission but store it in molecular form (I believe that it's mostly used in dial-a-yield weapons).
As to why it makes a better fusion fuel than the classic H-2 + H-3, it's because deutrium-tritium fusion releases energy and a high energy neutron. Neutrons are messy things to play with, they tend to stick onto nuclei and change their isotope numbers, making the surrounding materials radioactive (sometimes dangerously so). This observation, in fact, led to the "mad scientist" myth. It was noticed that certain radioactive materials could activate other things just by being put into contact with them. This "radioactive infection", it was reasoned, could then spread to other materials, until the entire planet was a fissioning mass of radioactivity. A single scientist with a briefcase of this material and a grudge could destroy the world!
Ahem, OK, getting back to He-3, The fusion of He-3 and H-2 produces He-4 and a high energy proton. Fast protons don't activate their surroundings, and it's easy to extract energy from them. The result is expected to be a much cleaner-burning fusion fuel.
If they set up the links automatically, it begs the question of what happens when the file is opened for write access. Do we want the changes to appear in all incarnations of the data, or do we want to do a copy-on-write? Do you want your OS to decide this for you?
For the programs I develop at my job, I'm often quite worried about storage requirements and about execution time. I find C to be comfortably close to the bare metal, that I have a fairly good idea of what the machine code is going to be like, and how much space my structures will consume. While I use C++ for some applications, I shy away from it in this particular context because I'm not confident about how much overhead is involved in things like method pointer tables or vector operations. For my compute bound, memory-limited programs, a 10% increase in either run time or memory consumption would be difficult to justify. This is almost an implementation question, actually: are these considerations relevent with modern C++ compilers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in China right now. I was here (Beijing) the day the earthquake hit. At 6:00, I was having dinner in a restaurant, and the television was tuned to the national news service. I speak Chinese, and I understand it well. It was all-earthquake, all the time. Reporters were everywhere in Sichuan (they hadn't arrived in the worst-hit areas yet, it having been less than four hours). The premier was on TV talking about sending help. There were pictures of people carrying bodies and bandaged victims on their backs, footage of destroyed buildings, everything you would expect to see in a major disaster, with no conspicuous absences. It was the exact antithesis of news suppression.
In the days following the quake, I've turned on the television a couple of times. There is a lot of earthquake coverage, but I've also seen costume dramas, soap operas, musical variety shows, fund raisers, home-shopping-network style shows, and billiards tournaments.
I proxy my internet through an SSH tunnel, so I haven't noticed any changes to website availability, but I just fired up an unproxied konqueror, and I can get to the BBC, CBC, arstechnica, and slashdot through the national firewall. If somebody wants to post URLs they think are unreachable, I can give quickly determine whether they are reachable.
> microwave ovens use frequencies that are specifically "tuned" to the water molecule.
This is incorrect, but a common misconception. Microwave ovens work by dielectric heating of the material inside them. Certain materials are more efficiently heated than others, but there is no tuning to the water molecule involved. Look at the frequency response of the absorption coefficient of water to electromagnetic energy, there's an excellent one on page 291 of the second edition of Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_ (that graph is one of the most dramatic I've ever seen, just for so well answering the question "why have our eyes evolved to see light only on the range 400-700nm?"). On that graph, you'll see that the absorption coefficient is smoothly increasing between 100 MHz and 10 GHz, there's nothing magic about the frequency chosen for microwave ovens, it was an available frequency in a band not reserved for communication.
It appears as if the claim is that by drawing energy from the wind, you will actively cool the planet. That's not a valid argument, as the vast majority of the electricity consumed in the world ultimately dissipates as heat, so you'd be putting that energy right back somewhere else. If your computer draws 70 Watts, it is a 100.0% efficient 70 Watt heater, which happens to do some pretty things along the way. To cool the planet this way, you'd have to take the electricity and beam it out into space as laser or microwave energy.
BCS theory does say that the maximum reasonable temperature for phonon-mediated coupling in a homogeneous medium is approximately 27 degrees. Above that temperature, the elastic response of the lattice would have to be so high that the lattice would make a phase change to a more stable state. As this new material appears to be superconducting above this temperature, it implies that its superconductivity arrives by a different mechanism than that described by the classical BCS theory. That was the same reasoning which made the original lanthanum-based high-Tc superconductors such big news the moment they were announced.
The speed of sound in water is about five times that in air. If you had read the article, you would have known this.
As to why it makes a better fusion fuel than the classic H-2 + H-3, it's because deutrium-tritium fusion releases energy and a high energy neutron. Neutrons are messy things to play with, they tend to stick onto nuclei and change their isotope numbers, making the surrounding materials radioactive (sometimes dangerously so). This observation, in fact, led to the "mad scientist" myth. It was noticed that certain radioactive materials could activate other things just by being put into contact with them. This "radioactive infection", it was reasoned, could then spread to other materials, until the entire planet was a fissioning mass of radioactivity. A single scientist with a briefcase of this material and a grudge could destroy the world!
Ahem, OK, getting back to He-3, The fusion of He-3 and H-2 produces He-4 and a high energy proton. Fast protons don't activate their surroundings, and it's easy to extract energy from them. The result is expected to be a much cleaner-burning fusion fuel.
If they set up the links automatically, it begs the question of what happens when the file is opened for write access. Do we want the changes to appear in all incarnations of the data, or do we want to do a copy-on-write? Do you want your OS to decide this for you?
For the programs I develop at my job, I'm often quite worried about storage requirements and about execution time. I find C to be comfortably close to the bare metal, that I have a fairly good idea of what the machine code is going to be like, and how much space my structures will consume. While I use C++ for some applications, I shy away from it in this particular context because I'm not confident about how much overhead is involved in things like method pointer tables or vector operations. For my compute bound, memory-limited programs, a 10% increase in either run time or memory consumption would be difficult to justify. This is almost an implementation question, actually: are these considerations relevent with modern C++ compilers.
Check the site again. They apologize for misleading, there will be no DVD release at the same time as the video release.
That's a Galileo project picture. Some Hubble shots are available at http://marvel.stsci.edu/top.html.