It seems to me that the obvious solution would be to pump compressed air under the train. That way the track could be just as wide as the train is, like any normal railroad.
Power could be transfered using an overhead catenary cable plus a return conductor under the train. Perhaps this conductor could also be used to make a linear induction motor, with less losses than propellers.
the amount of room available at a given altitude, after all, increases with the square of that altitude
The geostationary orbit has zero thickness and, therefore, zero volume. Any debris there is a very serious problem.
A small deviation from geostationary altitude will cause the debris to drift east or west and, because the orbit will never be exactly circular, it will cross the geostationary altitude at least two times a day.
next batch of research missions should be various cleaning devices to see what they can do and how well they do it
"Barring the discovery of a disruptive technology within the next decade or so, there will be no practical removal solution," Kaplan added. "We simply lack the technology to economically clean up space."
Problem is, "space" didn't get that name by accident. It's big. And the debris are millions of pieces. A big laser, you say? The Soviet Union went broke trying to develop one. Perhaps a big sheet made of monocrystalline unobtainium would do the trick.
In the end, we may be able to catch a few pieces of junk, at a cost of a few million dollars each. If only we had the several hundreds of trillions of dollars it would take to catch each of them...
Not quite. The geostationary orbit, one of the most valuable commercially, is infinitesimally thin. Any debris that goes by there requires maneuvers from the operating satellites, which burn fuel and take a toll on the useful life of the satellite.
Won't a large percentage of the junk re-enter the earth's orbit on its own given enough time?
Sure, for big enough values of "enough time". Which could be millions of years.
Although for some orbits not even that. In geostationary orbit I don't think the satellite will reenter earth's atmosphere before the sun goes red giant.
They have been trying for years to take away this guy's domain. So far, the courts have sided with the rightful owner.
I suppose the idea now is to take away the site from the first person who had the idea of registering a site with his name and give it to a corporation that happens to have the same name.
Imagine if your neighbor's toilet clogged and, instead of calling a plumber, he started taking a dump over the fence on your garden.
What would you do?
A) call the police
or
B) complain about lack of a regulation on taking a dump over the fence?
There are already laws in effect stating that no one is allowed to poison their neighbor's water. However, since natural gas extraction *is* regulated, and the regulations do not prohibit fracking, then an exception is created allowing the corporations to poison the water in this manner.
The problem with regulations is that when you create them, instead of using the existing laws, something that would not normally be permitted could be allowed by the regulations by default.
Aristotle argued the world was round in about 350 BCE, and Eratosthenes had attempted to measure it sometime in the 3rd century BCE.
Yes, and the Romans built great works of engineering that were abandoned a thousand years later. The fact that ancient Greeks knew the earth was round does not imply medieval Europeans knew it. Sure, a few scholars did, but it was a counter-intuitive fact that went against all logic.
Of course, the king of Spain did have "technical" consultants that knew the classic Greek writings, so they knew about the theory of the round earth, but it probably had the same credibility as that of evolution in present day Texas.
As for the question of the size of the earth and the longitude of east Asia, that involves the problem of calculating longitude, a problem that didn't have a solution until the late 1700s
So, I will give Columbus credit for this: he was the only person in his era that had such a firm conviction on the roundness of earth that he was willing to bet his own life on it. He may have got the size of the earth wrong, but he might have also assumed that some islands should exist along the way so he would not starve.
Formula 1 had KERS (kinectic energy recovery system) as an option in 2009 and a required feature in all 2011 cars. This is, essentially, a regenerative braking system. It charges a battery during braking and gets an 80 HP boost from an electric motor during acceleration.
her purpose was for us to learn from our suffering
Then she's a fucking bad teacher, if her methods rely on punishment. We, imperfect humans that we are, have evolved over those primitive teaching methods long ago.
Breaking his own laws is what's called a "miracle".
But regarding omnipotence there's a question that has been unanswered for so long that there's a special name for it: theodicy. If god is both infinitely powerful *and* infinitely good, then why does he allow suffering to exist?
So, let's cut out the middle man and worship whoever made the rules that God can't break.
Precisely. We have no need to believe in a conscious and intelligent being taking charge of everything if logic alone controls the universe.
However, SOME PEOPLE have a need to believer in a superior being, because they cannot handle logic. The problem with logic is that it doesn't always give the answers we want. Some people need an imaginary friend in the sky to give them what's logically impossible.
"Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey," Francis Everitt, GP-B principal investigator at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., said in a statement
Doh, this is Slashdot, we want a car analogy, please. And have the numerical results expressed in libraries of congress per football field. Thanks.
"As is the nature of dual-GPU graphics cards, they sometimes suffer from the lack of multi-GPU support in certain titles.... On the negative side, most games will have aspect ratio problems with multiple screen configurations and those that don't will likely need you to fine-tune the FOV (Field of View) setting. Another annoying issue which is very difficult to overcome in most games is stretched screens which lead to a fish eyed view of the game from the side screens."
In conclusion, to get good multi-monitor performance you need games that are *designed* for multi-monitors.
I'd love to have a racing simulation where one could put the front view in the central monitor and side-looking views on the other two. That way I could do just like I do in real life driving, turn my head to look through the side window.
For twice the $5000 it'll cost you for one of these cards and 3 x 30" monitors, I know a guy who's father is a consultant urologist and can give you a real manhood extension.
No thanks. For that kind of money, I'd rather buy a bunch of hookers and *use* the manhood I have right now.
the real question is how history will judge this assassination
Killing someone who resists arrest is not assassination. Sometimes law enforcement must take a hastier approach when taking charge of a suspect, it's not always that they have a safe way to make him surrender.
There are famous examples, like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, John Dillinger, or Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, where law enforcement seems to have committed summary executions rather than controlled arrests, but who are we to judge that?
I'd rather risk being unfair in calling a confessed but not convicted criminal like Osama a terrorist, than calling assassin a law enforcement official who kills a suspect during his arrest.
The 44% is nearly non-negotiable mandated spending. You can't really cut mandated spending except to streamline the programs
Either that or change the mandate. That spending was created by law, the law can be changed by the Congress.
On the whole, military spending has no real "net gain". There is no financial return on $1 million Tomahawk missiles, whether fired or sitting in storage. It's therefore harder to justify investments in technology.
If a Tomahawk missile cost $1 million, that's $1 million paid to the people who built it, that money didn't simply disappear. Compare that to $1 million spent on health care, that money was paid to the people who work for health care.
From a financial point of view, spending on the military or health care is more or less the same thing. Both of those expenses involve big payrolls, so in the end it will be money paid to working people anyhow.
as history tells us, spending too much on your military and not enough on your economy will lead to your downfall
No country can survive indefinitely if the *government* spends too much, no matter if it's the military, health care, pensions, or whatever is the reason for that spending.
Every dollar the government spends is taken from a citizen somewhere who cannot decide where that dollar should go. When the government spends too much the common people (and corporations, too) lose control of their personal budgets. Money that would be spent on repair and maintenance, invested in new developments, or simply spared for the future, will be taken away.
It's not like we're going to have a ground war with any other nuclear power.
No, but would you be happy to live in a world ruled by petty warlords, like those Saddams, Gaddafis, Milosevics everywhere? Would you be happy to have Bin Laden enthroned in his cave in Afghanistan sponsored by the Taliban government? How would you like a world where those despots could threaten you with events like the Lockerbie bombing or 9/11 and you had no way to threaten them?
If anything, the western world is simply not spending enough on defense, a thug like Gaddafi should have been brought down as soon as firm evidence of his involvement in the Lockerbie bombing appeared.
The last time the world was ruled by petty warlords was known as the "dark ages", let's not go back to that era.
Sometimes you need to read a bit more than the huffpost in order to broaden your point of view. That "western support for the dictators who run governments in the middle east" line is a bit tired, don't you think? Could you ([citation needed], of course) point out which "western" governments support the dictatorships of Syria, Iran, and Gaza?
It's truly ironic how someone can talk about "gross oversimplification" in the same sentence they talk about "western support" for dictatorships.
Slashdot Mirror
This one needs a wing span space
It seems to me that the obvious solution would be to pump compressed air under the train. That way the track could be just as wide as the train is, like any normal railroad.
Power could be transfered using an overhead catenary cable plus a return conductor under the train. Perhaps this conductor could also be used to make a linear induction motor, with less losses than propellers.
the amount of room available at a given altitude, after all, increases with the square of that altitude
The geostationary orbit has zero thickness and, therefore, zero volume. Any debris there is a very serious problem.
A small deviation from geostationary altitude will cause the debris to drift east or west and, because the orbit will never be exactly circular, it will cross the geostationary altitude at least two times a day.
next batch of research missions should be various cleaning devices to see what they can do and how well they do it
"Barring the discovery of a disruptive technology within the next decade or so, there will be no practical removal solution," Kaplan added. "We simply lack the technology to economically clean up space."
Problem is, "space" didn't get that name by accident. It's big. And the debris are millions of pieces. A big laser, you say? The Soviet Union went broke trying to develop one. Perhaps a big sheet made of monocrystalline unobtainium would do the trick.
In the end, we may be able to catch a few pieces of junk, at a cost of a few million dollars each. If only we had the several hundreds of trillions of dollars it would take to catch each of them...
The higher orbits are high volume areas
Not quite. The geostationary orbit, one of the most valuable commercially, is infinitesimally thin. Any debris that goes by there requires maneuvers from the operating satellites, which burn fuel and take a toll on the useful life of the satellite.
Won't a large percentage of the junk re-enter the earth's orbit on its own given enough time?
Sure, for big enough values of "enough time". Which could be millions of years.
Although for some orbits not even that. In geostationary orbit I don't think the satellite will reenter earth's atmosphere before the sun goes red giant.
They have been trying for years to take away this guy's domain. So far, the courts have sided with the rightful owner.
I suppose the idea now is to take away the site from the first person who had the idea of registering a site with his name and give it to a corporation that happens to have the same name.
Imagine if your neighbor's toilet clogged and, instead of calling a plumber, he started taking a dump over the fence on your garden.
What would you do?
A) call the police
or
B) complain about lack of a regulation on taking a dump over the fence?
There are already laws in effect stating that no one is allowed to poison their neighbor's water. However, since natural gas extraction *is* regulated, and the regulations do not prohibit fracking, then an exception is created allowing the corporations to poison the water in this manner.
The problem with regulations is that when you create them, instead of using the existing laws, something that would not normally be permitted could be allowed by the regulations by default.
Aristotle argued the world was round in about 350 BCE, and Eratosthenes had attempted to measure it sometime in the 3rd century BCE.
Yes, and the Romans built great works of engineering that were abandoned a thousand years later. The fact that ancient Greeks knew the earth was round does not imply medieval Europeans knew it. Sure, a few scholars did, but it was a counter-intuitive fact that went against all logic.
Of course, the king of Spain did have "technical" consultants that knew the classic Greek writings, so they knew about the theory of the round earth, but it probably had the same credibility as that of evolution in present day Texas.
As for the question of the size of the earth and the longitude of east Asia, that involves the problem of calculating longitude, a problem that didn't have a solution until the late 1700s
So, I will give Columbus credit for this: he was the only person in his era that had such a firm conviction on the roundness of earth that he was willing to bet his own life on it. He may have got the size of the earth wrong, but he might have also assumed that some islands should exist along the way so he would not starve.
I suppose they are planning on a really close flyby to the star
Tie a white piece of cloth to a broomstick, wave it out of a door. Show both of your hands, then walk slowly out. Lie down in the floor.
... and then detonate your vest when the soldiers move in.
You should lie down spread eagled, it would be difficult to detonate a suicide vest that way.
In Israel the procedure is to make the suspect keep a distance of several meters and raise his shirt.
I would want a full, honest, complete and realistic account of how the soldiers would have accepted a surrender or affected a capture of any kind.
Tie a white piece of cloth to a broomstick, wave it out of a door. Show both of your hands, then walk slowly out. Lie down in the floor.
Coming from an acknowledged leader of a suicide squad, anything else should be considered armed resistance.
Formula 1 had KERS (kinectic energy recovery system) as an option in 2009 and a required feature in all 2011 cars. This is, essentially, a regenerative braking system. It charges a battery during braking and gets an 80 HP boost from an electric motor during acceleration.
her purpose was for us to learn from our suffering
Then she's a fucking bad teacher, if her methods rely on punishment. We, imperfect humans that we are, have evolved over those primitive teaching methods long ago.
He can't break his own laws
Breaking his own laws is what's called a "miracle".
But regarding omnipotence there's a question that has been unanswered for so long that there's a special name for it: theodicy. If god is both infinitely powerful *and* infinitely good, then why does he allow suffering to exist?
So, let's cut out the middle man and worship whoever made the rules that God can't break.
Precisely. We have no need to believe in a conscious and intelligent being taking charge of everything if logic alone controls the universe.
However, SOME PEOPLE have a need to believer in a superior being, because they cannot handle logic. The problem with logic is that it doesn't always give the answers we want. Some people need an imaginary friend in the sky to give them what's logically impossible.
"Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey," Francis Everitt, GP-B principal investigator at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., said in a statement
Doh, this is Slashdot, we want a car analogy, please. And have the numerical results expressed in libraries of congress per football field. Thanks.
I RTFA and in the last page I found this:
"As is the nature of dual-GPU graphics cards, they sometimes suffer from the lack of multi-GPU support in certain titles. ... On the negative side, most games will have aspect ratio problems with multiple screen configurations and those that don't will likely need you to fine-tune the FOV (Field of View) setting. Another annoying issue which is very difficult to overcome in most games is stretched screens which lead to a fish eyed view of the game from the side screens."
In conclusion, to get good multi-monitor performance you need games that are *designed* for multi-monitors.
I'd love to have a racing simulation where one could put the front view in the central monitor and side-looking views on the other two. That way I could do just like I do in real life driving, turn my head to look through the side window.
For twice the $5000 it'll cost you for one of these cards and 3 x 30" monitors, I know a guy who's father is a consultant urologist and can give you a real manhood extension.
No thanks. For that kind of money, I'd rather buy a bunch of hookers and *use* the manhood I have right now.
the real question is how history will judge this assassination
Killing someone who resists arrest is not assassination. Sometimes law enforcement must take a hastier approach when taking charge of a suspect, it's not always that they have a safe way to make him surrender.
There are famous examples, like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, John Dillinger, or Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, where law enforcement seems to have committed summary executions rather than controlled arrests, but who are we to judge that?
I'd rather risk being unfair in calling a confessed but not convicted criminal like Osama a terrorist, than calling assassin a law enforcement official who kills a suspect during his arrest.
The 44% is nearly non-negotiable mandated spending. You can't really cut mandated spending except to streamline the programs
Either that or change the mandate. That spending was created by law, the law can be changed by the Congress.
On the whole, military spending has no real "net gain". There is no financial return on $1 million Tomahawk missiles, whether fired or sitting in storage. It's therefore harder to justify investments in technology.
If a Tomahawk missile cost $1 million, that's $1 million paid to the people who built it, that money didn't simply disappear. Compare that to $1 million spent on health care, that money was paid to the people who work for health care.
From a financial point of view, spending on the military or health care is more or less the same thing. Both of those expenses involve big payrolls, so in the end it will be money paid to working people anyhow.
as history tells us, spending too much on your military and not enough on your economy will lead to your downfall
No country can survive indefinitely if the *government* spends too much, no matter if it's the military, health care, pensions, or whatever is the reason for that spending.
Every dollar the government spends is taken from a citizen somewhere who cannot decide where that dollar should go. When the government spends too much the common people (and corporations, too) lose control of their personal budgets. Money that would be spent on repair and maintenance, invested in new developments, or simply spared for the future, will be taken away.
It's not like we're going to have a ground war with any other nuclear power.
No, but would you be happy to live in a world ruled by petty warlords, like those Saddams, Gaddafis, Milosevics everywhere? Would you be happy to have Bin Laden enthroned in his cave in Afghanistan sponsored by the Taliban government? How would you like a world where those despots could threaten you with events like the Lockerbie bombing or 9/11 and you had no way to threaten them?
If anything, the western world is simply not spending enough on defense, a thug like Gaddafi should have been brought down as soon as firm evidence of his involvement in the Lockerbie bombing appeared.
The last time the world was ruled by petty warlords was known as the "dark ages", let's not go back to that era.
Do you know why there are so few competent suicide bombers?
Because only those who flunk their exams graduate from the training.
Goat porn
You think Goatse is actually OBL? Could be, no one ever saw Goatse's face...
People just fear change mostly, and really love to feel affronted about something to get attention and validation.
I don't fear change, I just hate it. Why should I waste my time to relearn how to use the GUI every time a new version comes out?
If you want to keep the Ubuntu distro with a good UI all you need to do is install KDE
Despite still not being up to its best 3.5.9 shape, KDE 4 is much better than that unity abomination Ubuntu is trying to impose.
To be more precise, they want to kill everyone who does not believe as fervently as they do in the same interpretation of their religion.
Citation needed.
OK, here it is.
Sometimes you need to read a bit more than the huffpost in order to broaden your point of view. That "western support for the dictators who run governments in the middle east" line is a bit tired, don't you think? Could you ([citation needed], of course) point out which "western" governments support the dictatorships of Syria, Iran, and Gaza?
It's truly ironic how someone can talk about "gross oversimplification" in the same sentence they talk about "western support" for dictatorships.