Except if you give it's velocity a downward component in addition to its tangential component (let's call that one lateral). In that case, it goes straight into the atmosphere at which point the lateral component is dissipated or brought under control via friction/steering. Like I said at the end, I did some rough simulations in STK (before the trial expired), and found it feasible...
By the time they were what they were, they evolved way past slugthrowers. After that, they didn't target races too primitive, so they never encountered them again, until the Day of the Holodeck.
Not exactly in orbital bombardment, the full title was "Mining the Moon? - Dilemmas of Space Law". One of the topics explored was the use of space for warfare, and inside this, I showed that even the Shuttle can (could, by now...) carry a requisite satellite into orbit: it has a lifting capacity of 22 tons of cargo, a 20 ton projectile (ten meters long, half a meter radius cone) is well inside this limit, even if I'm generous with the support structure. Ideally, the satellite needs no maneuvering, nor targeting, the only thing it needs to do is house the round, then drop it when ground control tells it to. It may include a large capacitor bank and a railgun assembly to give it more punch (since it fires only once anyway, rail erosion can be ignored), and maybe some additional processing power to select targets for itself, and maybe maneuvering capacity to change orbits. The strike is the ultimate tactical weapon: fully anonymous (the course cannot be traced back to a launch point, unlike a ballistic missile), devastating, undetectable and indefatigable (the launch generates no observable signature and the round descends too fast to even come up on radar before it's too late to do anything about it. Not quite relativistic, but taking into account today's reaction times for weapons, it's like "By the time you see it coming, it's already too late".), and ultimately targetable (with the proper inclination, it will eventually fly over all points of the planet. At this point, it's just choosing the time of release to hit any nation you want).
It can also be aimed precisely, though I only did rough mock-ups in Satellite ToolKit, but those indicated that the descent path is roughly like the cot(x) function, and the ground path is predictable at any latitude, so it can theoretically be aimed with pinpoint precision, discounting signal lag.
To be honest, guns DO have "stun settings", if they're loaded with stun rounds: beanbag, hard wax, rubber, and maybe some others. It's just that these leave a ruddy big bruise, while phasers just drop you like a sack.
IANASTN, but here's my angle: phasers are something that the Borg encountered often enough to warrant an adaptation, but slugthrowers are something so ancient the Borg don't even remember them, therefore saw no reason to ever adapt to it. If Picard was slower to pick them off, they might have, eventually. Also, I recall that the phasers are not full-time weapons, but multipurpose tools that can cut, weld, heat, stun, kill, etc. Typical jack-of-all-trades, acceptable in all, great in none. Our guns, however, have one purpose: to kill. And being the single-minded things they are, they perform this task admirably.
Hey, I just used a Mass Effect reference (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77XnhzJz7g) in another discussion, although that pertained to why you need to aim properly at those energies. Maybe not grains of sand, but a 20kg steel slug sure packs a punch. I also used the idea in my thesis as an orbital bombardment system: 20 tons of iron dropped from 20,350 km, impacting with 1/500 the energy of a tactical nuke. Sure, a lot less, but clean and a darn sight cheaper in the long run to maintain then a nuke...
So are many of the guns in Doctor Who. The ones used in The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit are barebones P90s, the ones in The Doctor's Daughter have a small flamethrower-like attachment to generate muzzle flash. Why is the P90 so popular with sci-fi writers?
They're just beginning construction of the tokamak complex, with the actual tokamak starting in 2015, first ignition in late 2019. Do you have better intel, or a better idea?
By the way, this is not a meme, since it does not define a behavior or culture. But let's not get into memetics, that would be off-topic...
By firing clusters of five lithium-deuterid balls per second into a chamber, where they are ignited with a focussed laser pulse. The plasma is then held together by electromagnets for about a second to achieve a positive energy balance, then it is accelerated outwards by a dynamic reshaping of the magnetic bottle after being diluted by hydrogen used to cool the chamber walls. This adds reaction mass to the plasma, raising pressure and exit velocity. A magnetohydrodynamic converter located around the exhaust provides added efficiency. Presto: fusion power and propulsion in one easy(not) package!
Seriously, with the progress ITER is making, fusion power is not that much of a vaporware as Duke Nukem Forever. The first commercial fusion plant may be operable in the EU as soon as 2050, with widespread adoption by 2080.
Maybe a fusion plant running on hydrogen collected by a Bussard ramscoop? I'll admit I haven't seen this angle coming, but I'm pretty sure there's a way to work around this too...
We could build a generation ship, most of the trip would be coasting anyway. If there are any asteroids or strays, we could harvest resources from them. If not, well, colonists will just have to go green and recycle...
Seriously, though, recycling is what this mission hinges on, in lieu of asteroid mining.
Yes, the language of the law is also a problem. I wouldn't be against having to write legislation in Lojban... if it wasn't for the whole "Lojban" part, and how motherfuckingly complicated it looks despite being totally logical...
The spirit of laws lends themselves rather well to an if-then programming interpretation. Therefore, the current legislation could be rewritten into a programmatic form as a series of if-thens of case switches, where each evaluates a certain aspect of the applicant, changes a variable, and uses these variables to calculate the final tax value by multiplication and subtraction (for tax breaks and tax-deductible donations). The final code could then be stored in a subversion repository to enable easy versioning.
If I remember correctly, that uses a specialized bacterial colony, and is not very efficient, compared to its size. Probably even less than this turbine...
I would disagree with that, maybe your friends were using it 'wrong'.
A tablet is primarily a presentation device, not to be used even in a meeting, but in a vis-a-vis negotiation, where you can present rich content to your partner to illustrate and help get your point across, or make annotations and constructive cooperation possible when discussing a contract or treaty. In a meeting, I'd use a PDA to read my notes from, and possibly stream the slides to the projector (is such technology available? It would be insanely cool, and handy...).
Reading a book is another thing, I still prefer hardcover, but a specially formatted PDF or ebook is good too. Yesterday, I thumbed through Sun Tzu's Art of War on my Nexus S, and it was fairly enjoyable, although Art of War is formatted as a list of paradigms to uphold, not as prose, making it easier to adapt to a small screen.
All in all, I'll give you this: today's tablets have fairly limited uses, but I think mostly because of software-side issues (without having access to any tablet-specific app stores though, feel free to contradict me on this!). On the hardware side, the main issue is still weight: when an A4 tablet weighs little more than an A4 notebook, while still maintaining a battery life of ~6 hours and a reasonable price tag (1000-1500€), I think we've hit the last obstacle in front of general public adoption. But even then they won't be the be-all-end-all of computing, but another distinct device and step on the mobility-power graph, with its own use: just like you probably won't try using a Nexus S smartphone (low-mid power-extreme mobility) to do 3D modelling or CAD, tablets will always be a mid-power-mid-mobility presentation device where content creation is a secondary objective, as opposed to the mainly creation-oriented laptops (high power-mid-high mobility) and the singularly creation-focused desktops (extreme power-no mobility).
Hijacking, airline bombing, etc. The TSA is supposed to stand against these all. As it is, now it only stands against US civil liberties. There were bombs in WTC too, timed to blow when the firefighters got there and started trawling the rubble. Sort of an additional 'Fuck you'.
And who cares about the number of casualties? The terrorists need to kill just one person in the US to win, the US needs to foil every attempt to break even. Differing weights on differing priorities. The situation clearly favors terrorists...
... the kilogram of home-brew RDX in my backpack, surrounded by another kilogram of small iron nails oriented outwards and dripped in anticoagulant rat poison, explodes, peppering the meters-long queue and anyone nearby with poisoned shrapnel, ensuring that many victims bleed to death before the medics can get to them. Good Job, TSA!
Sure, I'll die, but I'm going to take at least a hundred more people with me if I time the blast right. Nobody would pick me out beforehand, because I'm not through the security checkpoint yet, so it's basically risk-free. And I'd die if I bombed the airplane anyway, the queue at the checkpoint just makes for a cheaper and less risky target.
Only if you have an Android phone. Otherwise, and even if you do, you can opt for/have to use text messages, an automated phone call, or a OTP you printed earlier.
what Fukushima has shown us, is that greed and corruption can and will undermine those security measures.
No, what Fukushima showed is that you can build a reactor that withstands a quake ten times the size it is rated to withstand, shut down gracefully (as graceful as a SCRAM can be) and still maintain enough power to engage its emergency cooling, but there's fundamentally no defense against having about the mass of the Great Lakes flung into your face at ~150km/h.
Slashdot Mirror
Except if you give it's velocity a downward component in addition to its tangential component (let's call that one lateral). In that case, it goes straight into the atmosphere at which point the lateral component is dissipated or brought under control via friction/steering. Like I said at the end, I did some rough simulations in STK (before the trial expired), and found it feasible...
New series, seasons 2 and 4. During the old series, I doubt there was even thought of the P90... :)
By the time they were what they were, they evolved way past slugthrowers. After that, they didn't target races too primitive, so they never encountered them again, until the Day of the Holodeck.
Not exactly in orbital bombardment, the full title was "Mining the Moon? - Dilemmas of Space Law". One of the topics explored was the use of space for warfare, and inside this, I showed that even the Shuttle can (could, by now...) carry a requisite satellite into orbit: it has a lifting capacity of 22 tons of cargo, a 20 ton projectile (ten meters long, half a meter radius cone) is well inside this limit, even if I'm generous with the support structure.
Ideally, the satellite needs no maneuvering, nor targeting, the only thing it needs to do is house the round, then drop it when ground control tells it to. It may include a large capacitor bank and a railgun assembly to give it more punch (since it fires only once anyway, rail erosion can be ignored), and maybe some additional processing power to select targets for itself, and maybe maneuvering capacity to change orbits. The strike is the ultimate tactical weapon: fully anonymous (the course cannot be traced back to a launch point, unlike a ballistic missile), devastating, undetectable and indefatigable (the launch generates no observable signature and the round descends too fast to even come up on radar before it's too late to do anything about it. Not quite relativistic, but taking into account today's reaction times for weapons, it's like "By the time you see it coming, it's already too late".), and ultimately targetable (with the proper inclination, it will eventually fly over all points of the planet. At this point, it's just choosing the time of release to hit any nation you want).
It can also be aimed precisely, though I only did rough mock-ups in Satellite ToolKit, but those indicated that the descent path is roughly like the cot(x) function, and the ground path is predictable at any latitude, so it can theoretically be aimed with pinpoint precision, discounting signal lag.
To be honest, guns DO have "stun settings", if they're loaded with stun rounds: beanbag, hard wax, rubber, and maybe some others. It's just that these leave a ruddy big bruise, while phasers just drop you like a sack.
IANASTN, but here's my angle: phasers are something that the Borg encountered often enough to warrant an adaptation, but slugthrowers are something so ancient the Borg don't even remember them, therefore saw no reason to ever adapt to it. If Picard was slower to pick them off, they might have, eventually.
Also, I recall that the phasers are not full-time weapons, but multipurpose tools that can cut, weld, heat, stun, kill, etc. Typical jack-of-all-trades, acceptable in all, great in none. Our guns, however, have one purpose: to kill. And being the single-minded things they are, they perform this task admirably.
Hey, I just used a Mass Effect reference (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77XnhzJz7g) in another discussion, although that pertained to why you need to aim properly at those energies.
Maybe not grains of sand, but a 20kg steel slug sure packs a punch. I also used the idea in my thesis as an orbital bombardment system: 20 tons of iron dropped from 20,350 km, impacting with 1/500 the energy of a tactical nuke. Sure, a lot less, but clean and a darn sight cheaper in the long run to maintain then a nuke...
So are many of the guns in Doctor Who. The ones used in The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit are barebones P90s, the ones in The Doctor's Daughter have a small flamethrower-like attachment to generate muzzle flash.
Why is the P90 so popular with sci-fi writers?
If so, yes, I did misunderstand you. You did, after all, reply to my post, not his...
They're just beginning construction of the tokamak complex, with the actual tokamak starting in 2015, first ignition in late 2019. Do you have better intel, or a better idea?
By the way, this is not a meme, since it does not define a behavior or culture. But let's not get into memetics, that would be off-topic...
By firing clusters of five lithium-deuterid balls per second into a chamber, where they are ignited with a focussed laser pulse. The plasma is then held together by electromagnets for about a second to achieve a positive energy balance, then it is accelerated outwards by a dynamic reshaping of the magnetic bottle after being diluted by hydrogen used to cool the chamber walls. This adds reaction mass to the plasma, raising pressure and exit velocity. A magnetohydrodynamic converter located around the exhaust provides added efficiency.
Presto: fusion power and propulsion in one easy(not) package!
Seriously, with the progress ITER is making, fusion power is not that much of a vaporware as Duke Nukem Forever. The first commercial fusion plant may be operable in the EU as soon as 2050, with widespread adoption by 2080.
Maybe a fusion plant running on hydrogen collected by a Bussard ramscoop? I'll admit I haven't seen this angle coming, but I'm pretty sure there's a way to work around this too...
Umm, drones? Deployable mining stations? Maybe even stopping/slowing down/entering into orbit/capturing them?
We could build a generation ship, most of the trip would be coasting anyway. If there are any asteroids or strays, we could harvest resources from them. If not, well, colonists will just have to go green and recycle...
Seriously, though, recycling is what this mission hinges on, in lieu of asteroid mining.
Cool, so now I can log into my laptop by giving it thumbs up if I buy the device?
Double thumbs up for su?
Yes, the language of the law is also a problem. I wouldn't be against having to write legislation in Lojban ... if it wasn't for the whole "Lojban" part, and how motherfuckingly complicated it looks despite being totally logical...
The spirit of laws lends themselves rather well to an if-then programming interpretation. Therefore, the current legislation could be rewritten into a programmatic form as a series of if-thens of case switches, where each evaluates a certain aspect of the applicant, changes a variable, and uses these variables to calculate the final tax value by multiplication and subtraction (for tax breaks and tax-deductible donations). The final code could then be stored in a subversion repository to enable easy versioning.
If I remember correctly, that uses a specialized bacterial colony, and is not very efficient, compared to its size. Probably even less than this turbine...
I would disagree with that, maybe your friends were using it 'wrong'.
A tablet is primarily a presentation device, not to be used even in a meeting, but in a vis-a-vis negotiation, where you can present rich content to your partner to illustrate and help get your point across, or make annotations and constructive cooperation possible when discussing a contract or treaty.
In a meeting, I'd use a PDA to read my notes from, and possibly stream the slides to the projector (is such technology available? It would be insanely cool, and handy...).
Reading a book is another thing, I still prefer hardcover, but a specially formatted PDF or ebook is good too. Yesterday, I thumbed through Sun Tzu's Art of War on my Nexus S, and it was fairly enjoyable, although Art of War is formatted as a list of paradigms to uphold, not as prose, making it easier to adapt to a small screen.
All in all, I'll give you this: today's tablets have fairly limited uses, but I think mostly because of software-side issues (without having access to any tablet-specific app stores though, feel free to contradict me on this!). On the hardware side, the main issue is still weight: when an A4 tablet weighs little more than an A4 notebook, while still maintaining a battery life of ~6 hours and a reasonable price tag (1000-1500€), I think we've hit the last obstacle in front of general public adoption. But even then they won't be the be-all-end-all of computing, but another distinct device and step on the mobility-power graph, with its own use: just like you probably won't try using a Nexus S smartphone (low-mid power-extreme mobility) to do 3D modelling or CAD, tablets will always be a mid-power-mid-mobility presentation device where content creation is a secondary objective, as opposed to the mainly creation-oriented laptops (high power-mid-high mobility) and the singularly creation-focused desktops (extreme power-no mobility).
very, very long cat
Can't resist, have to say it: "Longcat is loooooooooooooooooooooong!"
Hijacking, airline bombing, etc. The TSA is supposed to stand against these all. As it is, now it only stands against US civil liberties.
There were bombs in WTC too, timed to blow when the firefighters got there and started trawling the rubble. Sort of an additional 'Fuck you'.
And who cares about the number of casualties? The terrorists need to kill just one person in the US to win, the US needs to foil every attempt to break even. Differing weights on differing priorities. The situation clearly favors terrorists...
... the kilogram of home-brew RDX in my backpack, surrounded by another kilogram of small iron nails oriented outwards and dripped in anticoagulant rat poison, explodes, peppering the meters-long queue and anyone nearby with poisoned shrapnel, ensuring that many victims bleed to death before the medics can get to them.
Good Job, TSA!
Sure, I'll die, but I'm going to take at least a hundred more people with me if I time the blast right. Nobody would pick me out beforehand, because I'm not through the security checkpoint yet, so it's basically risk-free. And I'd die if I bombed the airplane anyway, the queue at the checkpoint just makes for a cheaper and less risky target.
Only if you have an Android phone. Otherwise, and even if you do, you can opt for/have to use text messages, an automated phone call, or a OTP you printed earlier.
Nuclear plants are thirsty things. This is why Hungary has its right on the bank of our biggest friggin' river.
what Fukushima has shown us, is that greed and corruption can and will undermine those security measures.
No, what Fukushima showed is that you can build a reactor that withstands a quake ten times the size it is rated to withstand, shut down gracefully (as graceful as a SCRAM can be) and still maintain enough power to engage its emergency cooling, but there's fundamentally no defense against having about the mass of the Great Lakes flung into your face at ~150km/h.