The diligence continues the advancement of the science, slow and steady it may be.
Get a large enough pool of students however, and you are likely to find an Einstein, Shakespeare, Heisenberg or Hawking.
You don't need the geniuses around all the time, and in fact that can become problematic if the I.Q. density reaches critical mass, as egos clash and brilliant flames are burned out too quickly trying to shine the brightest.
The occasional paradigm-shifting insight or perspective it all it takes to give guidance to the army of the diligent for the next period of refinement and progress.
This of course assumes the genius isn't burned at the stake for heresy or committed to an institution first.
If math cannot be patented, then digital logic, which is binary mathematics, cannot be patented, which makes hardware unpatentable as well. Of course, anyone so inclined, and with sufficient knowledge, can describe anything in mathematical terms, which by that logic would thus invalidate all patents. Certainly, since the one of the foundations of quantum theory is the many worlds hypothesis, which is mathematical in nature, states that all possibilities occur somewhere in the multiverse, all things are also prior art.
It looks like the buyout by Amazon does predate Friendster and MySpace... though to be honest, there's no way in hell this should pass any "obvious" test.
That may well be true, but, the website based social networking sites are far from the first to utilize this "technology"
'A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users. For example, in one embodiment, users can identify other users based on their affiliations with particular schools or other organizations. The system also provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users, and to grant permissions for such other users to view personal information of the user. The system may also include features for enabling users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. In addition, the system may automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.'
This has a very strong similarity to "elite" status granted to users of old school dial up BBSs for uploading or otherwise providing coveted data or services. Such similar systems were even loosely in place within AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and other dial-up ISPs long before 1998. Even forum profiles could conceivably fall into this category.
1) Buy company that "invents" un-patented technology everyone is using.
2) Patent said technology yourself, because the USPTO can't be bothered to actually think about what they are doing.
3) Wait for the other users of "your" technology to make a substantial amount of money.
4) Profit!
I can't even begin to calculate the probability of a single bit flip due to impact from a cosmic ray causing unintended acceleration in multiple vehicles. Possible? Certainly, nearly anything is. Plausible? Maybe in a very broad sense of the world. Likely? Not very.
Too many divergent threads with faulty assumptions to respond to each individually, and obviously many of you did not bother to read beyond the summary, if that.
Just because your iPhone has a 600MHz processor does not make it equivalent to a 10 year old computer. It is not running a fully functional operating system, does not have the same capabilities as a desktop system of that era even in sheer number crunching capabilities, and if your portable device attempted such, it would quickly drain the batteries due to inefficient components that lose a significant portion of their energy to current leakage and heat dissipation, while at the same time overheating the components themselves to a point of failure. Try using you iPhone to render high polygon count 3D models and see how it performs. Besides these simple points, there were distinct leaps in production technology that allow this approximation of performance to even occur. More efficient chip based transistors being a primary factor of not needing a large cooling system attached to the back of your phone to allow your display to show you video at a decent framerate
A virtually ideal component is one that is almost 100% efficient, with little to no leakage and heat loss. With the reduction in waste heat, more components can be in close proximity to one another without interfering in their operation by skewing values due to heating. This new design is much faster than a traditional transistor, requires much less energy to bias, and is easy to manufacture.
From the second page of the article:
"The current flows in a very thin silicon wire and the flow of current is perfectly controlled by a `wedding ring` structure that electrically squeezes the silicon wire in the same way that you might stop the flow of water in a hose by squeezing it. These structures are easy to fabricate even on a miniature scale which leads to the major breakthrough in potential cost reduction," explained Professor Colinge.
This squeezing is a biasing voltage, and no actual current flow through the gate is required, only a potential. Since there is no valence junction to bias before current can flow from source to drain, you do not need to supply signals of sufficient voltage to be registered, again requiring much less energy to operate.
Cost reduction is another key benefit of this technology, rather than having to grow the silicates with an inaccurate doping method over a preformed substrate, which leads to inefficiencies in power consumption and the need for large transition zones due to no two junction type semiconductors having the exact same biasing voltages, which is why standard CMOS is off at 0.8V or lower, and generally on at 2.0V or higher, depending on tolerance. Transistors using less power to transition from one state to the other require less powerful power supplies, enabling even more compact designs, and to top it off, the technology is robust enough to directly interface with CMOS.
I realize it takes more than a cursory knowledge of electronics to understand the true implications of this, which is why a number of you have made incorrect assumptions, but with a bit of extra reading, I firmly believe that at least some of you could become as excited about this breakthrough as I am.
Something to get excited about in the field of basic electronic components. Virtually ideal transistors that are easy to fabricate will revolutionize the nanoprocessor industry. I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years from this.
It is interesting how much that diagram resembles the path of creation and destruction from Wu Xing. Having not read the referenced book, I do not know if this was independently derived, or built upon from this ancient Chinese philosophy, but it is intriguing nonetheless.
If you watch carefully, the "Full Solve", which states such and claims to be a "totally random cube (Honest)", takes 10.75 seconds, including inspection. The 2.01 second solve is a demonstration of the MINIMUM time required for "inspecting and making one twist" on an unsolved cube. It is the blogger, and not the video, who makes the claims of solving in 2.01 seconds, and while it technically is a solve, the inventor rightfully does not claim such. The world record human solve of 7.08 seconds is not including the untimed inspection period. I would not consider this a dishonest video, since the video does not claim anything but the 10.75s solve to be a real solve, which by the rules of the second video's competition, would actually be an 8.74s solve....
There are also (sit down, this might be a bit of a shock) lots and lots of people who rarely, if ever visit youtube.
Just like there are also lots and lots of people who can't get anything better than dialup.
While both of these statements may be true, that does not make them equate one to the other. There are many people, myself included, with a broadband connection of >10Mbps that do not use YouTube for the simple fact that there is rarely anything of intellectual interest to be found within its pages. The rare YouTube video that does fill the role of intellectually stimulating is usually found through the dissertation pertaining to the content rather than browsing YouTube.
All Fallout games have been referred to as simulations in their respective manuals, the premise from the original Fallout being that these were simulations experienced by Vault dwellers to prepare them for life outside the vault.
There's nothing like that in DDO. The store has some stat boosts and potions, most of which you could get from vendors in-game with the "fake" money you earn on quests. You can also use real money to buy in-game money.
The DDO Store has been balanced so you can NOT make in-game money from store transactions. The items bought with Turbine points are bound to character or account, and cannot be traded or sold. There are no items purchasable through the DDO store that cannot be found in game with the exception of the cosmetic items that have no gameplay impact. For less than the price of a year's subscription, you can buy every Adventure (Content) Pack, Warforged, Monk, a shared bank tab, and have enough left over for a couple of extra character slots, making your account access the same as a VIP (subscriber), while keeping access to this content without ever paying again. With Turbine running sales just about every weekend, you could likely end up will all content for less than that if you are patient and vigilant. I like being able to get the equivalent of a lifetime subscription when I know it is a game I would have spent that much on in the long run anyways. You can also get access to Adventure Pack material without committing to the entire pack's purchase by someone who already owns the content getting a guest pass for you. VIPs who already have all content and get the 500 bonus points a month, and are not total social reprobates, are usually willing to get a guest pass for guild mates or friends to run a particularly good quest chain with.
>>>First, why did the point of origin for the 9 symbol address have to be Earth's symbol? They weren't on Earth, and they weren't using the Earth gate.
Precisely. Which is why it didn't work until they changed their point-of-origin to the new planet. Please pay closer attention to the fake, make-believe magic incantations.;-)
Apparently you were not paying attention, as they were using the planet's symbol for point of origin and it did not work until they changed to the Earth symbol. The 9th chevron was obviously not a point of origin, rather a code lock, as was stated in the episode,
>>>if no one has been on the ship since it was launched, why are the CO2 scrubbers full of gunk?
For the same reason why your car's engine oil would turn to with gunk if you left it sitting-around for 10,000 years.
Over 100,000 years, not 10,000, this was launched long before the Ancients even left for the Pegasus galaxy, which was, interestingly, the first leg of Destiny's journey. The scrubbers were using a chemical reactant for cleansing the air, which would degrade over time even if not used, though with the amount of damage to the ship, it is likely there have been inhabitants on board in the past.
>>>if the air has been leaking out of the ship since it was damaged, where is the new air coming from?
Good point. It's funny how all these problems just suddenly "happened" on precisely Day 3.6 Million of the ship's log, and humans just happened to be there.
The ship would only have to stop by a planet with a suitable atmosphere and remotely dial the gate on the planet to get an incoming wormhole to the ship, pressure differential would allow air to flow from the planet to the ship..
Would I find this book about imaginary technology in my college library?;-) Oh and by the way photon torpedoes are warp-driven vessels filled with antimatter - they don't pass through the ship when they impact, even though they are traveling at warp speed.
1) The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss is a very enlightening book, if a bit outdated, that discusses the physics behind the warp drive, inertial dampeners, transporters, and other things. Warp drive is a localized warping of space-time which allows the vessel to travel faster than the speed of light relative to distant objects, local objects within the warp field are relatively stationary with respect to the vessel.
2) Photon torpedoes use an impulse drive for propulsion, not a warp drive. If they used a miniaturized warp drive, there would be no need for a warhead, just initiate a core breach, and no variable yield to the torpedo either.
I do agree there were some solutions to problems that could have made the ship more powerful, such as combining replicator and transporter technology to beam replacement parts into place as soon as they were damaged, but this is a fictional show, and would grow quite boring if the ship was nigh indestructible.
As for SG:U, the Senator's sacrifice was a dramatic plot element, which will have a greater impact than just cutting off one of the air leaks. The ramifications will reverberate through the characters' relationships, and will serve as motivations for the future. If you insist upon a technological explanation, consider that the Ancients were an intelligent race of engineers, who would not want something as important at the rear hatch of a shuttle to be opened or closed by a falling object, and would likely include biometric sensors to determine if the contacting appendage was living or not. For remote operation of the door, there were internal systems of the ship itself, that have obviously degraded over the hundreds of thousands of years the ship has been traveling.
Destiny is not traveling through hyperspace, as I have seen some say, rather it is moving faster than light through normal space. Some would say this is impossible as it requires infinite energy to accelerate any mass to the speed of light, and they would be correct except that Destiny does not appear to accelerate at all. From the visual effect used, I would venture a guess that there is a form of transporter beaming technology being used to shift the entire ship instantaneously from sub-light speeds to FTL without acceleration.
Just because a formula is unknown does not mean it does not exist.
Chaos is simply something of a high enough order as to be too complex for current knowledge to accurately describe.
Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
If we knew all the laws of the universe, and the current state of all variables involved, we could accurately predict the outcome of any situation. There is no free will, only the guise of such due to a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics.
Ok, great, they put the heat in one side of the Sterling Cycle Engine, and it moves to the other side and we get motion, but what do they do with the heat? There's no air/water to bump against a cooling fin to get the activity of the molecules. Does the "icy vacuum of space" actually cool things very well?
Heat is only transferred through conduction or radiation, with radiation being the most efficient, convection is a movement of heated materials, but the heat itself is only ever conducted or radiated away.
If it did, why wouldn't a sterling cycle engine with one side in the shade and one side in the sun work pretty darn well anyhow?
I suspect that it DOESN'T, in which case they'll need to bore a big hole to put the heat in via fluid transferring to lunar dirt.
The key to the operation of any type of thermo-electric device is temprature differential, the greater the difference in temperature from one end to the other, the greater the power output. Sitting in the sun on earth, there would be a maximum of about 20-30 degrees difference in the most ideal situations from the sunny side to the shaded side.
BUT NO!! LET'S START FROM SCRATCH, BREAK THE BUDGET RE-DESIGNING THE WHEEL AND TAKE TWENTY FIVE YEARS TO GET THERE INSTEAD OF THE TEN IT TOOK US IN THE 60'S
We try to be a bit more careful with our astronauts these days, few applicants are test pilots any more, we like getting people back safely. There is no cold war or space race driving us to take risks to achieve goals. When we lose people and equipment, we now take sufficient time to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. And the budget hasn't been broken so much as drasticly slashed by people who have no concept of the benefit of space exploration.
Since we're talking about the police, I believe that confusing the police with the military is at the root of many of our society's ills.
That was simply one of my statements establishing tone, I believe that attempting to divert fom the issue at hand is a major roadblock to good communication.
And I believe that even the military's ability to force information to be kept secret should be strictly limited.
I was referring to before the action is taken, as in the planning stages. Certain technologies should be kept secret for as long as possible to enable defenses to be developed before rogue states or hostile governments get ahold of them.
I believe that the DEA should be disbanded and that the federal government should stop trying to tell people what they can do with their own bodies.
I personally appreciate the DEA busting the meth lab in the apartment next door before they burn down the building, I like knowing they are trying to keep dangerous chemicals like PCP, GHB, MDMA and others out of the hands of people who would abuse them and cause dangerous situations for others. That said, there are certain controlled substances that have no proven medically detrimental side effects, or certainly less so than alchohol or tobacco, which should be legalized and taxed.
I believe that the more information available, the less likely things like Iran-Contra and Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are. Technical and operational details might be redacted, but in general yes, we the people should be able to get almost all information on what is being done in the name of defending us.
And the less likely things like the space program, satellite communications, GPS, nuclear medicine, and numerous other technologies would have been developed.
We have the absolute right to monitor and comment on how the government does its job. If such scrutiny makes it harder for the government to do some things, maybe that's because those are things it shouldn't be doing.
No, we don't. Are you one of the misguided people who believe the military should announce battle plans to the world before they are carried out? Should the DEA hold a press conference to let us know the details of the multi-million dollar drug ring they are about to bust? That anyone who wants it should be able to get information on what secret defense projects we are working on? Information is valuable, and some information loses value when shared, while others gain value, the trick is being able to recognize which is which. There are certainly some areas where total transparency should be enforced, areas where security and safety would not be compromised, but to demand the information when its dissemination could lead to someone getting hurt or worse, is tantamount to injuring the person yourself.
From what I've seen of the blog in question, there is nothing in the blog to constitute stalking, since all information presented is a matter of public record, it is merely consolidated into a single location for easy access. I cannot say what her actions were outside the blog, if she was calling officers or showing up at their houses when they were off duty to press them about work related subjects, then that is harassment, but providing access to publicly available information is not. While true that some of the information released was of a sensitive nature, and should not, in good concience, have been posted, it was still publicly available. Maybe it is time for the police department to take a closer look at its own data retention policies to ensure that critically sensitive information about ongoing operations is not released until the operation has concluded, excepting valid FOIA requests.
And if you plant a remote detonator mine on the vehicle, the driver put the pedal down and ignores traffic laws. I recommend riding a city bus like this.
It makes me wonder if there are parallel worlds created where this sort of thing happens all the time.
Yes, there are.
Any conceivable universe exists in some parallel. Every story written, game played, world imagined, and possibility contemplated exists somewhere in the multiverse.
That is one of the things I enjoy keeping in the back of my head as I play games like Fable, Oblivion, Fallout, and Neverwinter Nights, and pretty much any game in which you have a world you can influence. Played Black & White? You are a god to some civilizations out there, just not in this aspect of the multiverse, so don't get your ego too inflated.
This can lead to interesting philosophical questions. If the world I was just running around Bowerstone Old Town summoning up Lvl5 Undead with safety mode off and letting them roam around slaughtering everyone really exists, does that have an effect my karma? Does the world where I am loved by all and have vanquished every last scrap of evil couterbalance it? What happenes after I save and quit for the final time, does the world go on without me, or does it wait for the day I might return?
Slashdot Mirror
Considering (s)he cared enough to actually make a post, I would say that they could care less, in that they could have not posted anything at all...
The diligence continues the advancement of the science, slow and steady it may be.
Get a large enough pool of students however, and you are likely to find an Einstein, Shakespeare, Heisenberg or Hawking.
You don't need the geniuses around all the time, and in fact that can become problematic if the I.Q. density reaches critical mass,
as egos clash and brilliant flames are burned out too quickly trying to shine the brightest.
The occasional paradigm-shifting insight or perspective it all it takes to give guidance to the army of the diligent for the next period of refinement and progress.
This of course assumes the genius isn't burned at the stake for heresy or committed to an institution first.
They already did, but no one paid it any attention.
If math cannot be patented, then digital logic, which is binary mathematics, cannot be patented, which makes hardware unpatentable as well. Of course, anyone so inclined, and with sufficient knowledge, can describe anything in mathematical terms, which by that logic would thus invalidate all patents. Certainly, since the one of the foundations of quantum theory is the many worlds hypothesis, which is mathematical in nature, states that all possibilities occur somewhere in the multiverse, all things are also prior art.
Never heard of long pig?
There are no good reasons for giving up bacon! After all bacon is a vegetable.
It looks like the buyout by Amazon does predate Friendster and MySpace... though to be honest, there's no way in hell this should pass any "obvious" test.
That may well be true, but, the website based social networking sites are far from the first to utilize this "technology"
'A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users. For example, in one embodiment, users can identify other users based on their affiliations with particular schools or other organizations. The system also provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users, and to grant permissions for such other users to view personal information of the user. The system may also include features for enabling users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. In addition, the system may automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.'
This has a very strong similarity to "elite" status granted to users of old school dial up BBSs for uploading or otherwise providing coveted data or services. Such similar systems were even loosely in place within AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and other dial-up ISPs long before 1998. Even forum profiles could conceivably fall into this category.
1) Buy company that "invents" un-patented technology everyone is using.
2) Patent said technology yourself, because the USPTO can't be bothered to actually think about what they are doing.
3) Wait for the other users of "your" technology to make a substantial amount of money.
4) Profit!
I can't even begin to calculate the probability of a single bit flip due to impact from a cosmic ray causing unintended acceleration in multiple vehicles. Possible? Certainly, nearly anything is. Plausible? Maybe in a very broad sense of the world. Likely? Not very.
Just because your iPhone has a 600MHz processor does not make it equivalent to a 10 year old computer. It is not running a fully functional operating system, does not have the same capabilities as a desktop system of that era even in sheer number crunching capabilities, and if your portable device attempted such, it would quickly drain the batteries due to inefficient components that lose a significant portion of their energy to current leakage and heat dissipation, while at the same time overheating the components themselves to a point of failure. Try using you iPhone to render high polygon count 3D models and see how it performs. Besides these simple points, there were distinct leaps in production technology that allow this approximation of performance to even occur. More efficient chip based transistors being a primary factor of not needing a large cooling system attached to the back of your phone to allow your display to show you video at a decent framerate
A virtually ideal component is one that is almost 100% efficient, with little to no leakage and heat loss. With the reduction in waste heat, more components can be in close proximity to one another without interfering in their operation by skewing values due to heating. This new design is much faster than a traditional transistor, requires much less energy to bias, and is easy to manufacture.
From the second page of the article:
"The current flows in a very thin silicon wire and the flow of current is perfectly controlled by a `wedding ring` structure that electrically squeezes the silicon wire in the same way that you might stop the flow of water in a hose by squeezing it. These structures are easy to fabricate even on a miniature scale which leads to the major breakthrough in potential cost reduction," explained Professor Colinge.
This squeezing is a biasing voltage, and no actual current flow through the gate is required, only a potential. Since there is no valence junction to bias before current can flow from source to drain, you do not need to supply signals of sufficient voltage to be registered, again requiring much less energy to operate.
Cost reduction is another key benefit of this technology, rather than having to grow the silicates with an inaccurate doping method over a preformed substrate, which leads to inefficiencies in power consumption and the need for large transition zones due to no two junction type semiconductors having the exact same biasing voltages, which is why standard CMOS is off at 0.8V or lower, and generally on at 2.0V or higher, depending on tolerance. Transistors using less power to transition from one state to the other require less powerful power supplies, enabling even more compact designs, and to top it off, the technology is robust enough to directly interface with CMOS.
I realize it takes more than a cursory knowledge of electronics to understand the true implications of this, which is why a number of you have made incorrect assumptions, but with a bit of extra reading, I firmly believe that at least some of you could become as excited about this breakthrough as I am.
Something to get excited about in the field of basic electronic components. Virtually ideal transistors that are easy to fabricate will revolutionize the nanoprocessor industry. I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years from this.
It is interesting how much that diagram resembles the path of creation and destruction from Wu Xing. Having not read the referenced book, I do not know if this was independently derived, or built upon from this ancient Chinese philosophy, but it is intriguing nonetheless.
If you watch carefully, the "Full Solve", which states such and claims to be a "totally random cube (Honest)", takes 10.75 seconds, including inspection. The 2.01 second solve is a demonstration of the MINIMUM time required for "inspecting and making one twist" on an unsolved cube. It is the blogger, and not the video, who makes the claims of solving in 2.01 seconds, and while it technically is a solve, the inventor rightfully does not claim such. The world record human solve of 7.08 seconds is not including the untimed inspection period. I would not consider this a dishonest video, since the video does not claim anything but the 10.75s solve to be a real solve, which by the rules of the second video's competition, would actually be an 8.74s solve....
There are also (sit down, this might be a bit of a shock) lots and lots of people who rarely, if ever visit youtube.
Just like there are also lots and lots of people who can't get anything better than dialup.
While both of these statements may be true, that does not make them equate one to the other. There are many people, myself included, with a broadband connection of >10Mbps that do not use YouTube for the simple fact that there is rarely anything of intellectual interest to be found within its pages. The rare YouTube video that does fill the role of intellectually stimulating is usually found through the dissertation pertaining to the content rather than browsing YouTube.
All Fallout games have been referred to as simulations in their respective manuals, the premise from the original Fallout being that these were simulations experienced by Vault dwellers to prepare them for life outside the vault.
There's nothing like that in DDO. The store has some stat boosts and potions, most of which you could get from vendors in-game with the "fake" money you earn on quests. You can also use real money to buy in-game money.
The DDO Store has been balanced so you can NOT make in-game money from store transactions. The items bought with Turbine points are bound to character or account, and cannot be traded or sold. There are no items purchasable through the DDO store that cannot be found in game with the exception of the cosmetic items that have no gameplay impact. For less than the price of a year's subscription, you can buy every Adventure (Content) Pack, Warforged, Monk, a shared bank tab, and have enough left over for a couple of extra character slots, making your account access the same as a VIP (subscriber), while keeping access to this content without ever paying again. With Turbine running sales just about every weekend, you could likely end up will all content for less than that if you are patient and vigilant. I like being able to get the equivalent of a lifetime subscription when I know it is a game I would have spent that much on in the long run anyways. You can also get access to Adventure Pack material without committing to the entire pack's purchase by someone who already owns the content getting a guest pass for you. VIPs who already have all content and get the 500 bonus points a month, and are not total social reprobates, are usually willing to get a guest pass for guild mates or friends to run a particularly good quest chain with.
>>>First, why did the point of origin for the 9 symbol address have to be Earth's symbol? They weren't on Earth, and they weren't using the Earth gate.
Precisely. Which is why it didn't work until they changed their point-of-origin to the new planet. Please pay closer attention to the fake, make-believe magic incantations. ;-)
Apparently you were not paying attention, as they were using the planet's symbol for point of origin and it did not work until they changed to the Earth symbol. The 9th chevron was obviously not a point of origin, rather a code lock, as was stated in the episode,
>>>if no one has been on the ship since it was launched, why are the CO2 scrubbers full of gunk?
For the same reason why your car's engine oil would turn to with gunk if you left it sitting-around for 10,000 years.
Over 100,000 years, not 10,000, this was launched long before the Ancients even left for the Pegasus galaxy, which was, interestingly, the first leg of Destiny's journey. The scrubbers were using a chemical reactant for cleansing the air, which would degrade over time even if not used, though with the amount of damage to the ship, it is likely there have been inhabitants on board in the past.
>>>if the air has been leaking out of the ship since it was damaged, where is the new air coming from?
Good point. It's funny how all these problems just suddenly "happened" on precisely Day 3.6 Million of the ship's log, and humans just happened to be there.
The ship would only have to stop by a planet with a suitable atmosphere and remotely dial the gate on the planet to get an incoming wormhole to the ship, pressure differential would allow air to flow from the planet to the ship..
Would I find this book about imaginary technology in my college library? ;-) Oh and by the way photon torpedoes are warp-driven vessels filled with antimatter - they don't pass through the ship when they impact, even though they are traveling at warp speed.
1) The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss is a very enlightening book, if a bit outdated, that discusses the physics behind the warp drive, inertial dampeners, transporters, and other things. Warp drive is a localized warping of space-time which allows the vessel to travel faster than the speed of light relative to distant objects, local objects within the warp field are relatively stationary with respect to the vessel.
2) Photon torpedoes use an impulse drive for propulsion, not a warp drive. If they used a miniaturized warp drive, there would be no need for a warhead, just initiate a core breach, and no variable yield to the torpedo either.
I do agree there were some solutions to problems that could have made the ship more powerful, such as combining replicator and transporter technology to beam replacement parts into place as soon as they were damaged, but this is a fictional show, and would grow quite boring if the ship was nigh indestructible.
As for SG:U, the Senator's sacrifice was a dramatic plot element, which will have a greater impact than just cutting off one of the air leaks. The ramifications will reverberate through the characters' relationships, and will serve as motivations for the future. If you insist upon a technological explanation, consider that the Ancients were an intelligent race of engineers, who would not want something as important at the rear hatch of a shuttle to be opened or closed by a falling object, and would likely include biometric sensors to determine if the contacting appendage was living or not. For remote operation of the door, there were internal systems of the ship itself, that have obviously degraded over the hundreds of thousands of years the ship has been traveling.
Destiny is not traveling through hyperspace, as I have seen some say, rather it is moving faster than light through normal space. Some would say this is impossible as it requires infinite energy to accelerate any mass to the speed of light, and they would be correct except that Destiny does not appear to accelerate at all. From the visual effect used, I would venture a guess that there is a form of transporter beaming technology being used to shift the entire ship instantaneously from sub-light speeds to FTL without acceleration.
Just because a formula is unknown does not mean it does not exist.
Chaos is simply something of a high enough order as to be too complex for current knowledge to accurately describe.
Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
If we knew all the laws of the universe, and the current state of all variables involved, we could accurately predict the outcome of any situation. There is no free will, only the guise of such due to a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics.
Ok, great, they put the heat in one side of the Sterling Cycle Engine, and it moves to the other side and we get motion, but what do they do with the heat? There's no air/water to bump against a cooling fin to get the activity of the molecules. Does the "icy vacuum of space" actually cool things very well?
Heat is only transferred through conduction or radiation, with radiation being the most efficient, convection is a movement of heated materials, but the heat itself is only ever conducted or radiated away.
If it did, why wouldn't a sterling cycle engine with one side in the shade and one side in the sun work pretty darn well anyhow?
I suspect that it DOESN'T, in which case they'll need to bore a big hole to put the heat in via fluid transferring to lunar dirt.
The key to the operation of any type of thermo-electric device is temprature differential, the greater the difference in temperature from one end to the other, the greater the power output. Sitting in the sun on earth, there would be a maximum of about 20-30 degrees difference in the most ideal situations from the sunny side to the shaded side.
BUT NO!! LET'S START FROM SCRATCH, BREAK THE BUDGET RE-DESIGNING THE WHEEL AND TAKE TWENTY FIVE YEARS TO GET THERE INSTEAD OF THE TEN IT TOOK US IN THE 60'S
We try to be a bit more careful with our astronauts these days, few applicants are test pilots any more, we like getting people back safely. There is no cold war or space race driving us to take risks to achieve goals. When we lose people and equipment, we now take sufficient time to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. And the budget hasn't been broken so much as drasticly slashed by people who have no concept of the benefit of space exploration.
Since we're talking about the police, I believe that confusing the police with the military is at the root of many of our society's ills.
That was simply one of my statements establishing tone, I believe that attempting to divert fom the issue at hand is a major roadblock to good communication.
And I believe that even the military's ability to force information to be kept secret should be strictly limited.
I was referring to before the action is taken, as in the planning stages. Certain technologies should be kept secret for as long as possible to enable defenses to be developed before rogue states or hostile governments get ahold of them.
I believe that the DEA should be disbanded and that the federal government should stop trying to tell people what they can do with their own bodies.
I personally appreciate the DEA busting the meth lab in the apartment next door before they burn down the building, I like knowing they are trying to keep dangerous chemicals like PCP, GHB, MDMA and others out of the hands of people who would abuse them and cause dangerous situations for others. That said, there are certain controlled substances that have no proven medically detrimental side effects, or certainly less so than alchohol or tobacco, which should be legalized and taxed.
I believe that the more information available, the less likely things like Iran-Contra and Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are. Technical and operational details might be redacted, but in general yes, we the people should be able to get almost all information on what is being done in the name of defending us.
And the less likely things like the space program, satellite communications, GPS, nuclear medicine, and numerous other technologies would have been developed.
No, we don't. Are you one of the misguided people who believe the military should announce battle plans to the world before they are carried out? Should the DEA hold a press conference to let us know the details of the multi-million dollar drug ring they are about to bust? That anyone who wants it should be able to get information on what secret defense projects we are working on? Information is valuable, and some information loses value when shared, while others gain value, the trick is being able to recognize which is which. There are certainly some areas where total transparency should be enforced, areas where security and safety would not be compromised, but to demand the information when its dissemination could lead to someone getting hurt or worse, is tantamount to injuring the person yourself.
From what I've seen of the blog in question, there is nothing in the blog to constitute stalking, since all information presented is a matter of public record, it is merely consolidated into a single location for easy access. I cannot say what her actions were outside the blog, if she was calling officers or showing up at their houses when they were off duty to press them about work related subjects, then that is harassment, but providing access to publicly available information is not. While true that some of the information released was of a sensitive nature, and should not, in good concience, have been posted, it was still publicly available. Maybe it is time for the police department to take a closer look at its own data retention policies to ensure that critically sensitive information about ongoing operations is not released until the operation has concluded, excepting valid FOIA requests.
And if you plant a remote detonator mine on the vehicle, the driver put the pedal down and ignores traffic laws. I recommend riding a city bus like this.
It makes me wonder if there are parallel worlds created where this sort of thing happens all the time.
Yes, there are.
Any conceivable universe exists in some parallel. Every story written, game played, world imagined, and possibility contemplated exists somewhere in the multiverse.
That is one of the things I enjoy keeping in the back of my head as I play games like Fable, Oblivion, Fallout, and Neverwinter Nights, and pretty much any game in which you have a world you can influence. Played Black & White? You are a god to some civilizations out there, just not in this aspect of the multiverse, so don't get your ego too inflated.
This can lead to interesting philosophical questions. If the world I was just running around Bowerstone Old Town summoning up Lvl5 Undead with safety mode off and letting them roam around slaughtering everyone really exists, does that have an effect my karma? Does the world where I am loved by all and have vanquished every last scrap of evil couterbalance it? What happenes after I save and quit for the final time, does the world go on without me, or does it wait for the day I might return?