This'll be insightful as soon as you can name a plant or meat in which subtle color changes indicate rot. The chef among us will quickly point out that the first and most accurate way to determine the state of food is smell, not sight. The variations between perfectly good plants in some cases reach across thirty degrees of both hue and value.
And, by the way, the article points out that the women simply have a greater statistical domain for eyesight, being able to carry both a normal and a mutant vision gene, whereas we lowly men have to choose. This is also why tetrachromacy is virtually unknown amongst men, yet afflicts more than three percent of women.
I don't think most people have any idea what it would take to successfully swing a cable through maybe 20,000 objects at various altitudes, all travelling at 17,000 MPH or so, all day every day without hitting anything.
This is a bit melodramatic. The space elevator concept is essentially a vertical pole; very few of those orbits would even come within a hundred miles of the elevator.
That said, yes, junk is a serious issue. Given that the US military has just run recent successful tests zapping mortars out of the air with lasers, and given that US aircraft carriers have automatic heavy-bore machine guns which can cut enemy planes in half in flight, I should think that a series of automated defense points along the cable, paired with redundancy not only in defense but in the cable itself, should provide a reasonable basis for extrapolation.
There's a long ugly road between this idea and reality.
Not really. All we need to do is raise our production capacities and prepare the cable to defend itself. Neither of those are fantastic even given current technology. Whereas I agree that 2010 isn't realistic, I doubt you'll see today's teenagers having to wait for middle age for the construction to begin.
A lot of people have said things like this each time we've laid down some form of massive engineering project. Electrifaction, the telegraph, the rail and highway systems, fiber optic communications, computer connectivity and satellites were all denigrated as borderline impossible by many people with good experience and the appropriate knowledge.
The truth is, it's just going to take a hell of a lot of money and refinement of what we already have. Don't confuse waiting for new technologies with needing to refine existing technologies. Only one of those is risky.
MADMEN is a similar boondoggle.
This is called a straw man. Just because you're aware of one bone-headed project doesn't mean that this one is any less realistic. This is a fallacy. This is a bit like saying that hybrid cars can't be done, because look at the Yugo, what a dismal failure, and it's a car too.
Honestly. Someone which worked at NORAD should know better.
Sorry. Microwaves heat food by exciting water molecules, not air. Whereas this is on a larger scale, given the tremendous amount of atmosphere encircling the planet, I'd be surprised if this amounted to even a hundreds of a degree a decade. That's the sort of things which can be easily turned around via technical means. Asphalt and concrete covering such a large portion of the surface of the planet should have a far larger impact than this.
Besides, you could easily just beam the power to a collector satellite at the top of the elevator and bring the power down in a huge conduit cable (perhaps as light in a fiber optic cable, so we don't have to worry about ionospheric charge.)
And, to think. You first heard about this theory of the continuance of our civilization on/.
No, I first heard it in a 1970s Larry Niven book. That said, there are many older examples. Vannevar Bush is the earliest person I'm aware of to have raised this observation.
You're not even in the right ballpark, son. Here's a hint: just because you don't know about it doesn't make you the first, and making wild claims like that embarrasses everyone who watches.
I can think of so many seperate reasons that we need to avoid the band Air Supply, despite their being otherwise borderline canonical elevator music . . .
2) It wouldn't be that hard to snap a superstrong cable. Please differentiate between tensile strength and resistance to incindiary devices. A carbon nanotube ribbon would catch fire when presented with even a mediocrely-sized bomb. You think they can hurt a skyscraper, but not a ribbon cable? Do you honestly think the ribbon, which has serious weight concerns, will be more resistant to bombs than hundreds of millions of tons of gridded steel and slab concrete?
As far as when terrorists attacked where expected, well, let's see. They took a third stab at the same building, attacked our capital and the hub of our military. I'd say that's pretty damned predictable.
3) So what if they thought of this? There isn't a good answer yet. We're allowed to discuss unsolved problems, y'know.
If you don't like geeks discussing technical issues of a proposed system and making bad, repetitive jokes, why the hell are you on SlashDot?
Actually, the Rotovator is a waste of time. Once you have a cheap way to tow things into space, a large railgun is a far cheaper and more practical way to accelerate things, especially given that you no longer have to wrestle with significant atmosphere. Mach 12, in the eyes of a large railgun, would me moderate, perhaps even below average, and the energy cost would be dramatically lower.
There is a hell of a big difference between being afraid to go out to a movie and engineering what would be mankind's single largest, heaviest and arguably most complex building in history.
Skyscraper builders, airport builders, shipping hubs, nuclear plant builders, and other creators of systems which could be subverted have an ethical responsibility to create systems which are resistant not only to attack but which when fail do as little damage as possible. You'll note, as a recent example, the way the Twin Towers collapsed; they caused comparatively next to no collateral damage to the surrounding buildings.
That is because engineers figured out smart ways to reduce and mitigate risks. This is no different. If the space elevator were to collapse with some form of sideways momentum, it could leave a scar that traversed an entire continent. Whereas America is reeling (still!) from the attack which cost thousands of lives, such an impact even accidental could cost potentially tens or hundreds of millions of lives.
Go ahead and look down your nose at the US all you like. Nobody's launched a serious successful terrorist attack against us from the outside since the British burned down the white house, and that was during war, when we were expecting that sort of thing. We have restarted our economy, and you seem to think we're a hell of a lot more afraid than we actually are.
Traffic didn't even dim when the potential bombing of the Golden Gate Bridge was announced. He probably had a few thousand people worried, and I'll bet a few hundred even stayed home that day. But we don't cower in our basements in any way.
I often wonder why so many people outside the nation have such wildly incorrect and frequently conflicting views of Americans. I've had the pleasure of travel, including throughout Europe and a few parts of Asia. Aside from things like language and the stuff we eat, people are people pretty much everywhere you go, no different coast to coast except in how well they're educated and what their economic opportunities are.
For all the time a certain subset of people spend talking about Americans as isolationist xenophobic predjudiced freaks who are war-mongering cowards, one wonders if the people speaking that way ever realize how thoroughly fit the stereotype they're attempting to apply to others.
Grow up. Americans are no different than you are; we just have a lot of resources and a fucking idiot for a president. It gets old watching people from other nations kvetch about things with no basis in fact as a way to lambast their personal punching bag.
Try travelling some time. I used to really hold a grudge against a few nations in the way that you seem to hold a grudge against us. Then, I visited France, and my eyes opened. It's just Paris. And, for the US, it's just New Jersey.
Because the shuttle launch facility is on the ground, and is relatively small. It's a lot easier to defend something on Terra with a fence than it would be to stop any missile going at any height, including out of our atmosphere.
In essence, because the Shuttle facility is 2D in the plane with easy defense and the space elevator is 2D in the plane which we can only reach by riding the cable or flying a plane. Fences don't run out of fuel and can stay in one place.
Whereas you're correct, I didn't actually make any attempt to imply otherwise. It is the case that many consumer lasers, even when well focussed, simply do not apply enough light to even annoy the retina.
I hate to be a dick, because I generally tend to agree with you. That said, this is one of my pet peeves, and I'm hoping people will band with me and illuminate this, as it's widespread on slashdot.
The word you're looking for is error, not fallacy. A fallacy is a supporting argument which is based on an invalid claims mechanism, not an argument with ungrounded assumptions or an invalid base premise. Fallacies are things like relying on authorities or the opinion of the people to make a point, attacking someone's character rather than what they're saying, circular argument, that sort of thing.
Please do not use the word fallacy to describe something you disagree with or think is incorrect. The word is very specific.
Re:Scientists need some common sense
on
Banana Power!
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· Score: 1
It's actually relatively common for a power plant (pardon the pun) to take years to pay itself off. That said, you're making a whole bunch of assumptions about how the plant works and how much it would cost to operate. If it's based on something as incredibly dangerous as rotten bananas, I'd say you could probably run it with no more than one or two people.
Unfortunately, your numbers omit one observation that might make you quite correct: the cost of banana transportation. If it takes 60 kg of bananas to power a fan heater for 30 hours, how do we validate the cost of gasoline?
Re:Banana Bread, recipe courtesy of Emeril Lagasse
on
Banana Power!
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· Score: 1
Oh baloney. Putting a p inside angle braces isn't obvious. Mixing two things together with a blender is. How many ways can you think of to get that incorrect?
Yes, and certainly hackers don't exist because they were in novels too. In fact, I think I'll write a book about terrorists so that we can also stop worrying about them.
The effect of a space elevator ribbon crash would be absolutely devastating. People are right to be worried about it. NASA engineers are among the worried. Don't want to hear about it anymore? Stop reading about the Space Elevator.
Re:Make sure that you know what ripe means.
on
Banana Power!
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· Score: 1
You misunderstand the reason the fruit flies go for the older bananas. It's the same reason that lions go for the rotten meat before the fresh kill: as long as you eat the out of date one, you've got food supply for next week, and you're far less likely to face a starvation path during times of thin.
Besides, it's probably much easier for a creature that simple to digest.
Whereas I agree with most of what you said, this last bit isn't really the case. The PS2 is the last of the big consoles to use proprietary hardware; case in point, the PSP as discussed is a series of standard issue general purpose processors (as are the DS, the PS3, the XBox and XBox Next, the Game Cube, et cetera.)
Whereas ASICs outperform GP CPUs, GP CPUs' margins allow them to be pushed harder than ASICs by a wide enough margin that GP CPUs win out in the long run.
As of E3 Sony was able to crank (depending on games) 6-8 hours out of their battery system, and was claiming they'd expect that number to jump to 7-10 by release. Movies, which make far more demanding use f the optical drive, are expected to drain the battery in about three and a half.
The processors don't honestly take that much power, and the big screen doesn't actually draw as much as the DS' two screens. The optical drive is pricey, yes, but the system has 32 meg of RAM; caching behavior and intelligent design should minimize disc access in well written games.
Sure, for movies the battery isn't incredible. But, um, I think that's honestly not such a big deal. Yes, the battery is an issue, but I don't think it's as big an issue as you paint it to be. Sony has almost certainly learned from the other hardware manufacturers that Nintendo put into an early grave; you'll notice that all of Sony's other systems have carefully not made the mistakes that Sega, Atari and Bandai made (though they did make a few original mistakes with the PSOne.)
One thing which distinguishes Sony is their ability to learn from other companies' failures. As a Nintendo developer and fanboy, I'm worried. I suggest you give credence to the possibility, too.
Hokum. Every one of Sony's platforms has had development tools available to gen general public. Sony is the only company which supports amateur development on consoles (though it looks like Microsoft is about to change this.)
By the way, third party apps would be from other game publishers. Third party apps are Sony's strong point, not their weak point. They've already got a list of more than a hundred and fifty third party apps to be released at the same time as the platform, which by experience I expect to be about 90% satisfied.
Whoever marked parent informative needs a stiff espresso.
Assuming we find a substance strong enough to build such a cable from
Actually, carbon nanofiber layered in a crosshatch pattern to form a wide ribbon, instead of the rope one tends to think of by default, is beginning to look like it might be way more than strong enough. (Do remember, strong enough isn't strong enough; it has to tolerate occasional extreme stress even by its own standards.)
and ultimately the consequences of altering Earth's rotation?
Well, y'know, if you were trying to tie to the Moon, maybe. But, it's much more realistic to make an artificial satellite as a far-end anchor, set it in an orbit at extreme distance geosynchronicity, and use that. Once you're in space, it's easy enough to do a little bit of jetting to get to the Moon, or wherever else.
Will the artificial satellite alter the Earth's rotation or movement path? Only in the way that you have to be a mathematician to appreciate. Think of it a little bit like Roseanne Barr barrelling down a hallway after a twinkie on a remote control car, with the head of a pin tied to her by a strand of spider silk. She's not even going to notice, and the satellite isn't nearly that big or heavy by scale.
Though maybe I should use an example which is less heavy than the Earth?
Anyway, right now the real stumbling block is defending the ribbon against weather (both on Earth where it's easy and in space where it isn't; yes, meteorites are weather) and worse, like terrorist attack. Even if the ribbon were as light as what you use to tie packages (and current schemes aren't) then the whole ribbon would weigh more than most skyscrapers, and since most of it wouldn't have time to burn up, it'd also have the kind of velocity that something falling thousands of miles tends to accrue. That, falling across a landscape, is the potential for disaster, even if you house the ribbon in the middle of nowhere (the Sahara, Antarctica, the ocean, whatever; the Earth doesn't have any empty spots big enough to take the whole ribbon without potentially leading to populated areas.) When you consider that current plans are a ribbon eight feet wide and half an inch thick of something with a weight comparable to the stuff in lightweight bikes - lighter than metal to be sure, but nothing like packaging ribbon - the consequences of failure or attack could be absolutely monsterous, the price tag aside.
I like sci-fi as much as the next person, but maybe this project calls for some long-term planning.
Why do slashdotters think that just because they haven't seen the plans means that those plans don't exist? NASA, many research institutions and universities and various industrial corporations have been tryihng to crack this nut since the 60s. Do you realize how expensive it is to put a satellite into space, and how much money they're worth? The first company to a space elevator might as well have a license to print money. Believe you me, no small amount of effort and planning has gone into this.
For this: this effect does not supply long distance communication. All it does is supply uncrackable encryption.
BZZT. One, entanglement most certainly does provide long distance communication. The term is "ansible," and the idea is that entangled particles which share properties over any distance instantaneously can share information by encoding within those properties.
As far as unbreakable encryption, horseshit. QC doesn't change the nature of encryption in any way, though it takes a really scary look at cryptanalysis, and my Visa card. What you're mistakenly thinking of is the principle that you cannot secretly snoop a quantuum line, because the contents change on inspection. That doesn't mean that you can't intercept the data stream, or that the data stream is somehow intangible. It just means that the other end will know, no matter what, unless you cut the line, insert a reader and a new writer (which can make the exchange at close enough to line speed that the other end won't notice, which given fiber optics is... unlikely.)
Thanks for playing; we've got some great consolation prizes for you.
This isn't true. Many lasers are far lower power than flourescent lightbulbs, at which you can look all day without more than mild irritation. Just because the lasers you're used to are overpowered doesn't mean that they all are.
Yeah, they used to day they could keep us out of SIO with encryption, too. That didn't work either. None of N's encryptions schemes have worked. They're really there to make it expensive to make 3rd party hardware and to give weight to claims of encryption circumvention, not to defeat anyone. The encryption schemes are rudimentary at best.
As far as ignorant instructors, well, the idea is that someone would release this commercially. Given that the DS still won't application multitask, and given that it has WiFi, it's a simple matter to give the instructor a program guaranteeing that all DSes in the room are reporting to his/her PC as calculators.
Incidentally, that also makes disseminating information easier.
1) Students. Students can't use calculators with softkeys.
Why not? More importantly, since half of them already have a GameBoy, why waste $100 on a ti graphical?
not some Gameboy hack designed by Joe Shmoe that comes up with 2.99998 when asked to calculate the square root of nine.
Way to generalize. If you had read what I wrote, you'd notice that I use YACAS, which is of very high quality.
[G]eneralization is cheaper than specific hardware
That's why my PC is cheaper than my XBOX.
I couldn't have picked a better example if I had been intentionally sarcastic. The XBox is very cheap specifically because it *is* a PC, and had far lower development and delivery costs than proprietary systems like the PS2.
I mean, that's why my Palm is cheaper than my remote control.
Now you're just being stupid. A palm isn't generalized hardware in the theme of a remote control. Similarly, a PC, no matter how general, will not become cheaper than a hammer when used to whack things. Try to make examples with some common sense; they carry more weight that way.
Anyway, calculators just in terms of hardware are cheap
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because surely the site will work best if you're warned first. Please have a funny bone surgically installed.
Mod parent down heavily.
This'll be insightful as soon as you can name a plant or meat in which subtle color changes indicate rot. The chef among us will quickly point out that the first and most accurate way to determine the state of food is smell, not sight. The variations between perfectly good plants in some cases reach across thirty degrees of both hue and value.
And, by the way, the article points out that the women simply have a greater statistical domain for eyesight, being able to carry both a normal and a mutant vision gene, whereas we lowly men have to choose. This is also why tetrachromacy is virtually unknown amongst men, yet afflicts more than three percent of women.
I don't think most people have any idea what it would take to successfully swing a cable through maybe 20,000 objects at various altitudes, all travelling at 17,000 MPH or so, all day every day without hitting anything.
This is a bit melodramatic. The space elevator concept is essentially a vertical pole; very few of those orbits would even come within a hundred miles of the elevator.
That said, yes, junk is a serious issue. Given that the US military has just run recent successful tests zapping mortars out of the air with lasers, and given that US aircraft carriers have automatic heavy-bore machine guns which can cut enemy planes in half in flight, I should think that a series of automated defense points along the cable, paired with redundancy not only in defense but in the cable itself, should provide a reasonable basis for extrapolation.
There's a long ugly road between this idea and reality.
Not really. All we need to do is raise our production capacities and prepare the cable to defend itself. Neither of those are fantastic even given current technology. Whereas I agree that 2010 isn't realistic, I doubt you'll see today's teenagers having to wait for middle age for the construction to begin.
A lot of people have said things like this each time we've laid down some form of massive engineering project. Electrifaction, the telegraph, the rail and highway systems, fiber optic communications, computer connectivity and satellites were all denigrated as borderline impossible by many people with good experience and the appropriate knowledge.
The truth is, it's just going to take a hell of a lot of money and refinement of what we already have. Don't confuse waiting for new technologies with needing to refine existing technologies. Only one of those is risky.
MADMEN is a similar boondoggle.
This is called a straw man. Just because you're aware of one bone-headed project doesn't mean that this one is any less realistic. This is a fallacy. This is a bit like saying that hybrid cars can't be done, because look at the Yugo, what a dismal failure, and it's a car too.
Honestly. Someone which worked at NORAD should know better.
Sorry. Microwaves heat food by exciting water molecules, not air. Whereas this is on a larger scale, given the tremendous amount of atmosphere encircling the planet, I'd be surprised if this amounted to even a hundreds of a degree a decade. That's the sort of things which can be easily turned around via technical means. Asphalt and concrete covering such a large portion of the surface of the planet should have a far larger impact than this.
/.
Besides, you could easily just beam the power to a collector satellite at the top of the elevator and bring the power down in a huge conduit cable (perhaps as light in a fiber optic cable, so we don't have to worry about ionospheric charge.)
And, to think. You first heard about this theory of the continuance of our civilization on
No, I first heard it in a 1970s Larry Niven book. That said, there are many older examples. Vannevar Bush is the earliest person I'm aware of to have raised this observation.
You're not even in the right ballpark, son. Here's a hint: just because you don't know about it doesn't make you the first, and making wild claims like that embarrasses everyone who watches.
I can think of so many seperate reasons that we need to avoid the band Air Supply, despite their being otherwise borderline canonical elevator music . . .
1) Agreed.
2) It wouldn't be that hard to snap a superstrong cable. Please differentiate between tensile strength and resistance to incindiary devices. A carbon nanotube ribbon would catch fire when presented with even a mediocrely-sized bomb. You think they can hurt a skyscraper, but not a ribbon cable? Do you honestly think the ribbon, which has serious weight concerns, will be more resistant to bombs than hundreds of millions of tons of gridded steel and slab concrete?
As far as when terrorists attacked where expected, well, let's see. They took a third stab at the same building, attacked our capital and the hub of our military. I'd say that's pretty damned predictable.
3) So what if they thought of this? There isn't a good answer yet. We're allowed to discuss unsolved problems, y'know.
If you don't like geeks discussing technical issues of a proposed system and making bad, repetitive jokes, why the hell are you on SlashDot?
Actually, the Rotovator is a waste of time. Once you have a cheap way to tow things into space, a large railgun is a far cheaper and more practical way to accelerate things, especially given that you no longer have to wrestle with significant atmosphere. Mach 12, in the eyes of a large railgun, would me moderate, perhaps even below average, and the energy cost would be dramatically lower.
Mod parent down.
There is a hell of a big difference between being afraid to go out to a movie and engineering what would be mankind's single largest, heaviest and arguably most complex building in history.
Skyscraper builders, airport builders, shipping hubs, nuclear plant builders, and other creators of systems which could be subverted have an ethical responsibility to create systems which are resistant not only to attack but which when fail do as little damage as possible. You'll note, as a recent example, the way the Twin Towers collapsed; they caused comparatively next to no collateral damage to the surrounding buildings.
That is because engineers figured out smart ways to reduce and mitigate risks. This is no different. If the space elevator were to collapse with some form of sideways momentum, it could leave a scar that traversed an entire continent. Whereas America is reeling (still!) from the attack which cost thousands of lives, such an impact even accidental could cost potentially tens or hundreds of millions of lives.
Go ahead and look down your nose at the US all you like. Nobody's launched a serious successful terrorist attack against us from the outside since the British burned down the white house, and that was during war, when we were expecting that sort of thing. We have restarted our economy, and you seem to think we're a hell of a lot more afraid than we actually are.
Traffic didn't even dim when the potential bombing of the Golden Gate Bridge was announced. He probably had a few thousand people worried, and I'll bet a few hundred even stayed home that day. But we don't cower in our basements in any way.
I often wonder why so many people outside the nation have such wildly incorrect and frequently conflicting views of Americans. I've had the pleasure of travel, including throughout Europe and a few parts of Asia. Aside from things like language and the stuff we eat, people are people pretty much everywhere you go, no different coast to coast except in how well they're educated and what their economic opportunities are.
For all the time a certain subset of people spend talking about Americans as isolationist xenophobic predjudiced freaks who are war-mongering cowards, one wonders if the people speaking that way ever realize how thoroughly fit the stereotype they're attempting to apply to others.
Grow up. Americans are no different than you are; we just have a lot of resources and a fucking idiot for a president. It gets old watching people from other nations kvetch about things with no basis in fact as a way to lambast their personal punching bag.
Try travelling some time. I used to really hold a grudge against a few nations in the way that you seem to hold a grudge against us. Then, I visited France, and my eyes opened. It's just Paris. And, for the US, it's just New Jersey.
Get over yourself.
Because the shuttle launch facility is on the ground, and is relatively small. It's a lot easier to defend something on Terra with a fence than it would be to stop any missile going at any height, including out of our atmosphere.
In essence, because the Shuttle facility is 2D in the plane with easy defense and the space elevator is 2D in the plane which we can only reach by riding the cable or flying a plane. Fences don't run out of fuel and can stay in one place.
Whereas you're correct, I didn't actually make any attempt to imply otherwise. It is the case that many consumer lasers, even when well focussed, simply do not apply enough light to even annoy the retina.
I hate to be a dick, because I generally tend to agree with you. That said, this is one of my pet peeves, and I'm hoping people will band with me and illuminate this, as it's widespread on slashdot.
The word you're looking for is error, not fallacy. A fallacy is a supporting argument which is based on an invalid claims mechanism, not an argument with ungrounded assumptions or an invalid base premise. Fallacies are things like relying on authorities or the opinion of the people to make a point, attacking someone's character rather than what they're saying, circular argument, that sort of thing.
Please do not use the word fallacy to describe something you disagree with or think is incorrect. The word is very specific.
It's actually relatively common for a power plant (pardon the pun) to take years to pay itself off. That said, you're making a whole bunch of assumptions about how the plant works and how much it would cost to operate. If it's based on something as incredibly dangerous as rotten bananas, I'd say you could probably run it with no more than one or two people.
Unfortunately, your numbers omit one observation that might make you quite correct: the cost of banana transportation. If it takes 60 kg of bananas to power a fan heater for 30 hours, how do we validate the cost of gasoline?
Oh baloney. Putting a p inside angle braces isn't obvious. Mixing two things together with a blender is. How many ways can you think of to get that incorrect?
Yes, and certainly hackers don't exist because they were in novels too. In fact, I think I'll write a book about terrorists so that we can also stop worrying about them.
The effect of a space elevator ribbon crash would be absolutely devastating. People are right to be worried about it. NASA engineers are among the worried. Don't want to hear about it anymore? Stop reading about the Space Elevator.
You misunderstand the reason the fruit flies go for the older bananas. It's the same reason that lions go for the rotten meat before the fresh kill: as long as you eat the out of date one, you've got food supply for next week, and you're far less likely to face a starvation path during times of thin.
Besides, it's probably much easier for a creature that simple to digest.
Something tells me fruit flies aren't gourmands.
How can you be that insightful and yet not know how to spell cognitive?
The mind boggles.
Whereas I agree with most of what you said, this last bit isn't really the case. The PS2 is the last of the big consoles to use proprietary hardware; case in point, the PSP as discussed is a series of standard issue general purpose processors (as are the DS, the PS3, the XBox and XBox Next, the Game Cube, et cetera.)
Whereas ASICs outperform GP CPUs, GP CPUs' margins allow them to be pushed harder than ASICs by a wide enough margin that GP CPUs win out in the long run.
As of E3 Sony was able to crank (depending on games) 6-8 hours out of their battery system, and was claiming they'd expect that number to jump to 7-10 by release. Movies, which make far more demanding use f the optical drive, are expected to drain the battery in about three and a half.
The processors don't honestly take that much power, and the big screen doesn't actually draw as much as the DS' two screens. The optical drive is pricey, yes, but the system has 32 meg of RAM; caching behavior and intelligent design should minimize disc access in well written games.
Sure, for movies the battery isn't incredible. But, um, I think that's honestly not such a big deal. Yes, the battery is an issue, but I don't think it's as big an issue as you paint it to be. Sony has almost certainly learned from the other hardware manufacturers that Nintendo put into an early grave; you'll notice that all of Sony's other systems have carefully not made the mistakes that Sega, Atari and Bandai made (though they did make a few original mistakes with the PSOne.)
One thing which distinguishes Sony is their ability to learn from other companies' failures. As a Nintendo developer and fanboy, I'm worried. I suggest you give credence to the possibility, too.
Hokum. Every one of Sony's platforms has had development tools available to gen general public. Sony is the only company which supports amateur development on consoles (though it looks like Microsoft is about to change this.)
By the way, third party apps would be from other game publishers. Third party apps are Sony's strong point, not their weak point. They've already got a list of more than a hundred and fifty third party apps to be released at the same time as the platform, which by experience I expect to be about 90% satisfied.
Whoever marked parent informative needs a stiff espresso.
Assuming we find a substance strong enough to build such a cable from
Actually, carbon nanofiber layered in a crosshatch pattern to form a wide ribbon, instead of the rope one tends to think of by default, is beginning to look like it might be way more than strong enough. (Do remember, strong enough isn't strong enough; it has to tolerate occasional extreme stress even by its own standards.)
and ultimately the consequences of altering Earth's rotation?
Well, y'know, if you were trying to tie to the Moon, maybe. But, it's much more realistic to make an artificial satellite as a far-end anchor, set it in an orbit at extreme distance geosynchronicity, and use that. Once you're in space, it's easy enough to do a little bit of jetting to get to the Moon, or wherever else.
Will the artificial satellite alter the Earth's rotation or movement path? Only in the way that you have to be a mathematician to appreciate. Think of it a little bit like Roseanne Barr barrelling down a hallway after a twinkie on a remote control car, with the head of a pin tied to her by a strand of spider silk. She's not even going to notice, and the satellite isn't nearly that big or heavy by scale.
Though maybe I should use an example which is less heavy than the Earth?
Anyway, right now the real stumbling block is defending the ribbon against weather (both on Earth where it's easy and in space where it isn't; yes, meteorites are weather) and worse, like terrorist attack. Even if the ribbon were as light as what you use to tie packages (and current schemes aren't) then the whole ribbon would weigh more than most skyscrapers, and since most of it wouldn't have time to burn up, it'd also have the kind of velocity that something falling thousands of miles tends to accrue. That, falling across a landscape, is the potential for disaster, even if you house the ribbon in the middle of nowhere (the Sahara, Antarctica, the ocean, whatever; the Earth doesn't have any empty spots big enough to take the whole ribbon without potentially leading to populated areas.) When you consider that current plans are a ribbon eight feet wide and half an inch thick of something with a weight comparable to the stuff in lightweight bikes - lighter than metal to be sure, but nothing like packaging ribbon - the consequences of failure or attack could be absolutely monsterous, the price tag aside.
I like sci-fi as much as the next person, but maybe this project calls for some long-term planning.
Why do slashdotters think that just because they haven't seen the plans means that those plans don't exist? NASA, many research institutions and universities and various industrial corporations have been tryihng to crack this nut since the 60s. Do you realize how expensive it is to put a satellite into space, and how much money they're worth? The first company to a space elevator might as well have a license to print money. Believe you me, no small amount of effort and planning has gone into this.
So sorry.
... unlikely.)
For this: this effect does not supply long distance communication. All it does is supply uncrackable encryption.
BZZT. One, entanglement most certainly does provide long distance communication. The term is "ansible," and the idea is that entangled particles which share properties over any distance instantaneously can share information by encoding within those properties.
As far as unbreakable encryption, horseshit. QC doesn't change the nature of encryption in any way, though it takes a really scary look at cryptanalysis, and my Visa card. What you're mistakenly thinking of is the principle that you cannot secretly snoop a quantuum line, because the contents change on inspection. That doesn't mean that you can't intercept the data stream, or that the data stream is somehow intangible. It just means that the other end will know, no matter what, unless you cut the line, insert a reader and a new writer (which can make the exchange at close enough to line speed that the other end won't notice, which given fiber optics is
Thanks for playing; we've got some great consolation prizes for you.
This isn't true. Many lasers are far lower power than flourescent lightbulbs, at which you can look all day without more than mild irritation. Just because the lasers you're used to are overpowered doesn't mean that they all are.
Yeah, they used to day they could keep us out of SIO with encryption, too. That didn't work either. None of N's encryptions schemes have worked. They're really there to make it expensive to make 3rd party hardware and to give weight to claims of encryption circumvention, not to defeat anyone. The encryption schemes are rudimentary at best.
As far as ignorant instructors, well, the idea is that someone would release this commercially. Given that the DS still won't application multitask, and given that it has WiFi, it's a simple matter to give the instructor a program guaranteeing that all DSes in the room are reporting to his/her PC as calculators.
Incidentally, that also makes disseminating information easier.
1) Students. Students can't use calculators with softkeys.
Why not? More importantly, since half of them already have a GameBoy, why waste $100 on a ti graphical?
not some Gameboy hack designed by Joe Shmoe that comes up with 2.99998 when asked to calculate the square root of nine.
Way to generalize. If you had read what I wrote, you'd notice that I use YACAS, which is of very high quality.
[G]eneralization is cheaper than specific hardware
That's why my PC is cheaper than my XBOX.
I couldn't have picked a better example if I had been intentionally sarcastic. The XBox is very cheap specifically because it *is* a PC, and had far lower development and delivery costs than proprietary systems like the PS2.
I mean, that's why my Palm is cheaper than my remote control.
Now you're just being stupid. A palm isn't generalized hardware in the theme of a remote control. Similarly, a PC, no matter how general, will not become cheaper than a hammer when used to whack things. Try to make examples with some common sense; they carry more weight that way.
Anyway, calculators just in terms of hardware are cheap
Not as cheap as something you already own.