You have IBM to thank for the current big big drives. They invented GMR (Giant MagnetoResistive heads), one of the things which allows current drives to reach densities far beyond what was possible a few years ago.
Also don't forget their microdrives, pretty bloody advanced stuff...
Many many other aspects of current HDD design come from IBM research.
It usually takes 5-10 years for such research to turn into commercial products, so don't hold your breath, but don't discount these discoveries because you can't see further than the present...
All your cash comes from ATM machines? You never change money in the store. I doubt "they" are able to track bank notes that have exchanged hands a couple of times before being spent on a book.
I'm not saying that Microsoft does it better or perfect.
If that's not what you are saying(the "better", not the "perfect") (which is not how I read it in your original message), then what was your point?
compared to it you don't gain anything in terms of better quality by using a Red Hat or SuSE distribution
I suspect this is debatable, and will depend on your definition of "quality"...
your SysAdmin will leave the company sometime, and nobody knows the peculiarities of your "own" Linux.
That's why you should insist that everything is documented, not documenting important changes may be good for the employee, its very bad for the employer (unfortunately, many employers don't understand this and don't allow sufficient time for documentation, but that's another story...)
And a tech consultant who fixes Linux kernels is surely very expensive
How much would you have to pay MS to change the Windows Kernel? (hint : much, much more than te cost of a capable tech consultant)
they do not fix it mainly by patching it, but rather have the customer wait for the next release.
And where does that differ from MS Windows? (Except that in Linux, if the issue is important enough for you, you _can_ fix it yourself or get it fixed, whereas in Windows, you are totally at the mercy of MS
Besides, in the Linux-world, there is no monopoly. If one of the vendors isn't quick to respond to bugs, people will switch to another vendor.
Your original message made it seem that if there's a problem with Linux, all you can do is tell "the community" and hope it gets fixed, while this is not true.
In the same message you stated:
Microsoft may not be "responsible", but they give support for certain features... Also, they patch the system, also in a improvable way, on a regular basis.
Implying that this somehow works better with Microsoft. That this is patently untrue is quite easy to prove : I remember how for NT4 Service Pack 6 broke many server apps (Lotus Notes most prominently), so hardly an improvement (although it didn't take them too long to release 6a, which fixed the issues again).
Red Hat (and the other distro's) releases fixed kernels if there is a serious bug in the kernel version in the release, just like Microsoft releases "Hot Fixes" and "Service Packs" to do the same...
The point remains : The distributions release bug-fixes just like Microsoft does (and usually more quickly), and if you are not a huge company, I wish you lots of luck trying to get MS to fix a bug in Windows that only affects you, something which is at least possible with Linux.
Also:
The update cycle with Linux (distributions) is crazy. You cannot live with it in a mission critical environment.
This must be why SuSE, Redhat and other distributions kept offering 2.2.x kernels at the same time as they offered newer, "less stable" 2.4.x kernels.
Yes, I can pay anyone to fix my Linux problem. If I fix it long enough this way, I will end up with my own operating system.
And that's just the beauty of the system, if the standard OS doesn't allow you to do what you want, you *can* customise it until it can. Or you can look for another distribution that more closely approaches what you want. (You can also do this, in a very limited way, with microsoft, with W2K Data Center at the very high end and Windows CE at the lower end, but which Microsoft OS will run on both Mainframes and a wristwatch, and everything in between, and do so from essentially the same kernel codebase...)
If, say, there is a critical kernel bug, they will turn to the open source community to make it known, but they will never be responsible to fix it.
Bull! A Red Hat "2.4.x" kernel usually contains a whole bunch of changes and bugfixes compared to the standard "2.4.x" kernel, even if Linus hasn't got round to adding the fix to "2.4.x+1", that's the beauty of open source.
If IBM has to provide support for Windows, and there's a bug in there, they will refer you to Microsoft, who, unless you're a huge company, will completely ignore you.
In the worst case, where the problem you have is specific to your system, and noone else has the problem, you can *pay* anyone you want to fix the bug for your specific configuration. You then use your own patched kernel and sleep happily.
I predict that nobody will ever find remains of living creatures on Mars. That is a falsifiable hypothesis.
It's also an easy one to force... All you need to falsify your "hypothesis" is two astronauts on Mars. One astronaut drops the dead cat he brought with him onto the surface of the planet, and the other one happens to find it, and *bang* there goes your hypothesis... (He doesn't even have to bring a dead cat, if he dies in an accident and the other one finds him, your hypothesis is also dead...)
Next time, try to specify your hypothesis a bit better;-)
I don't understand. Why can't I hypothesize that there is and never has been life on Mars?
Would you also say "until now we have never seen anything travel faster than light" and claim that relativity is not a hypothesis/theory? What is the difference?
"Relativity" is a mathematical description of the world which provides verifiable predictions. Many of the predictions have been verified to great accuracy, which quickly moved relativity from the "Hypothesis" status to "Theory" status.
"Life on Mars" is not a theory, it doesn't make any "predictions" as such and is not a description of anything except itself, and the only "prediction" it makes is circular : "If there's life on Mars, there's life on Mars."
We can perfectly hypothesize what might be the consequences of life on Mars, or hypothesize about the form life would take on Mars, but that does not mean "Life on Mars" in itself is a hypothesis/Theory.
Remember when the 386 came out? DOS ran slower on most 386's
I remember when 386's came out, and DOS did not run slower on them than on 286's.
You seem to be mixing things up. Windows 95 ran slower on Pentium Pro than on equivalent Pentiums, because 95 still contained a lot of 16-bit stuff, and PPro was heavily optimised to do 32-bit operations.
Then Intel came out with Pentium-II, which performed as well as PPro at 32-bit, but could reach higher clock speeds, and performed much better at 16-bit code than PPro of equivalent clock speed.
Linux is now running on both 32-bit and 64-bit CPU's, and there is little reason to assume that it is "performing worse" on 64-bit architectures "because" it was originally designed on a 32-bit basis.
Kernel compilation is hardly the end-all of tests, and many processes will perform much better on dual-processor systems than on single processor systems, although almost always less than 2x better.
Neither claim is scientific, the only correct statement now is "Until now we have not found life on Mars", and that will remain the claim until one of two things happen:
- We discover alien life on Mars
- We start living there
In both cases, the claim "there is life on Mars" will be scientifically correct.
Remember, the existence of life on Mars is not and never will be a hypothesis/theory (which is where Popper comes in), it is either a fact or an unknown.
C'mon, seriously, what are the odds of life on two adjacent pieces of rock?
We don't know, over 4.5 billion years, the odds may be 99.99999% or 0.000001%, we just don't know.
In the case of Earth&Mars, the odds are probably close to 100%, if only because it has been shown that bacteria could easily survive the trip from the one to the other, and we know of a mechanism (asteroid impact) capable of "soft-launching" rocks from one to the other.
The life would be of the same origin of course. The odds of life emerging independently on both rocks are totally unknown, because for now we have a statistically useless sample of 1.
Is there any theory around about how the aggregation of the Northern Ice cap occurred ?
Actually, that's pretty much the hypothesis people are working with today (Mars used to be hotter and wetter).
It's even pretty much a certainty, considering the huge volcanoes on Mars. While they were being created, they would have been spewing absolutely vast amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapour into the atmospher, and seeing as how the atmospheric pressure and temperatures on Mars are even now not too far away from allowing liquid water, it's difficult to imagine those volcanoes being created without also creating a thicker atmosphere.
At the bottom of the deepest canyons on Mars, the atmospheric pressure is a few tens of hectopascals (about 1/30-1/50 of sea level earth) and temps can reach above 0 Celsius, enough so water doesn't flash-evaporate, but can remain liquid for a considerable time.
What are the Polar Ice caps on Mars made of if not water ?
The South Polar Ice Cap on Mars is almost completely CO2 Ice, and during the Southern Martian summer disappears almost entirely.
The North Polar Ice Cap has a large "hood" of CO2-Ice in winter, which disappears in summer, leaving a three times smaller ice cap made of water ice (three times smaller is still bloody big, many hundreds of kilometers across and probable several kilometers thick).
I don't really agree. Say you have 4 weeks notice. Assuming that the actual bottleneck would indeed be the edges of Britain (the shorelines and the airports):
Channel Tunnel : let's make some assumptions : 1,000 people per train, one train per 30 minutes for 4 weeks. This would allow 1.34 million people to leave Britain. (Timings and numbers might be a little off, but it's likely to be between 500,000 - 2,500,000 people, assuming of course that no fire breaks out.) You might get more people out by allowing them to pass through the tunnels on foot (you could use both tunnels for outgoing traffic and the service tunnel for emergencies.
If you allow 20 people per "row" in through the tunnel, and leave 1 meter between rows, you can get 800,000 people to fit in the tunnel. For realism's sake, lets reduce this to 200,000. 40 km walking at 3.5km/h takes about 12 hours, so figure 400,000 people can leave every day. After 4 weeks, you will have evacuated 11 million people through the Channel Tunnel alone (and under optimal conditions, probably more than 20 million).
Take all planes : Boeing 747's can take 600 people on board, Heathrow alone can handle a lift-off every 2 minutes, so this results in 12 million people leaving through this one airport, and there are at least 20 airports capable of handling significant air-travel in Britain, so even if you reduce this traffic to 10% of optimal, you would still get 24 million people off that way. (so, in total, we'd be able to move between 25-100 million people using only the channel tunnel and the airports.
Modern large freighters can easily carry 1,000 people or more on board, and the journey to France/Belgium/Holland/Ireland only takes 3-10 hours, so 1,000 freighters/ferries can easily move a million people a day, counting up to 28 million by large ferry. There are probably at least 100,000 smaller boats in Britain capable of carrying on average 50 people, so another 5,000,000, perhaps once every two days, moving out 70,000,000 people in four weeks.
Remember Dunkerque,1940, 350,000 people were evacuated in horrendous conditions in just 7 days, while under German attack and from a single port city, with far fewer resources than would be available now.
Conclusion:
An evacuation of Britain in 4 weeks would probaly be quite doable.
Would it cause much hardship and loss of life? Certainly
Would it not be complete? Also certainly, probably several percent of the population would not be evacuated for many different reasons (too sick to be moved, stupid enough to want to stay,...)
But, it is quite likely that 90% or more of the population of Britain could be moved of the island in 4 weeks.
If this scramjet engine technology is so small, could this possibly be retrofitted
Nope, sorry. Basically a scramjet needs to be travelling at extremely high speeds before it can even function, that is why they launched it from a cannon. (Getting it up to operational speeds fast).
A scramjet airplane would need another type of engine to first get it up to multi-mach speeds
The ratio of distances from the centre of mass of the Earth is (43630km + radiusEarth):(35785km + radiusEarth) = 50000:42115 = 1.187:1
So my satellite needs to be moving 1.187 times faster than yours
Gravity reduces with the square of the distance, meaning your satellite needs to move at SQRT(1.187) = 1.089 times the speed of the geosynchronous satellite to have a circular orbit. If you put it at the height you mentioned, at the speed you mentioned, it would go into an eccentric orbit with your height as the perigee (or lowest point).
A satellite's orbital "speed" (if it is circular) is determined two factors, its distance from the center of mass, and the mass of that mass (strictly speaking it also depends on the mass of the satellite, but that factor is negligable when talking about artifical satellites around earth).
Basically, the closer to earth a satellite in a circular orbit is, the shorter the time it takes to orbit the earth. As an example : ISS takes about 90 minutes to orbit the earth, at an altitude of roughly 400km, so it does (2*PI*r) = 2*3.14159*6778km = 42587 km in 1.5h = 28400km/h for a roughly circular orbit.
Now, a geosynchronous satellite is at 35785km above the earth's surface, meaning r=42163km. Which means it does 2*3.14159*42163km = 11069 km/h
Why does it move more slowly? because gravity is less strong at that distance.
The moon orbits once every 29 days at a distance of (roughly) 400.000 km. The same calculation gives us 3500km/h for the moon.
the speed that the satellite must move is directly proportional to the altitude.
As pointed out above, this is where you are mistaken. This would only be true if gravity decreased linearly with distance from the source, while it decreases with the square of the distance.
You cannot have an object go round the earth in a circle in 1 day at any other altitude than 35785km unless you are constantly accelerating/decelerating it (using up fuel very very quickly!)
There's no particular altitude that needs to be used for geosynchronous orbit. The only limit is that the satellite must be over the equator.
No matter what you say now, this is plainly wrong. The orbit needs to be at an altitude of ~36.000km for it to be geosynchronous. It doesn't need to be in an equatorial orbit, because to be geosynchronous, a satellite doesn't need to stay above the same longitude all the time, it just needs to orbit the earth in one day (=23h56m , the extra 4 minutes every day being provided by our orbit around the sun).
What you are talking about are geostationary orbits, which require the satellite to remain above a single point on the earth's surface, which is only possible with equatorial orbits.
Check out this definition of geosynchronous:
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-017/_2459 .h tm
Or this one, specifically answering the issue here:
http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/08251997/g eo sync1.htm
Be sure to remove the spaces from the URL's...
There's no particular altitude that needs to be used for geosynchronous orbit. The only limit is that the satellite must be over the equator.
Nonsense, GeoSYNCHRONOUS orbit implies an orbital period of 23:56 minutes, exactly the time the earth itself takes for one rotation. This causes the satellite to remain stationary in longitude. All that is required for this is for the satellite to orbit at an altitude of 35785 km above the earth's surface.
For the satellite to always be above exactly the same spot on the surface, it needs to be placed over the equator, otherwise it moves up and down in latitude during its orbit, however, even such a "hopping" satellite would be geosynchronous.
If you don't believe me, just do a search on google for geosynchronous orbit altitude which will give you oodles of info on the subject.
Hey, it's got ssh installed and installing telnet is as easy as opening their RPM installer and selecting it. There is a reason telnet isn't installed by default... (Hint : de Mandrake people want to tell you it's not secure enough...).
Next thing you know, people will start complaining it doesn't install a web server with default passwords by default... sheesh...
For the price of one small space telescope (HST mirror is only 2.4m in diameter) you can build the largest earth-based telescopes ten times over (the ESO VLT, 4 8m telescopes working as an array will, when fully operational in 2003-2004 have cost maybe 1/5 of what Hubble has cost until now). Furthermore, in visible light, earth-based telescopes are already producing images as sharp as, and even sharper than Hubble. At the time the HST was conceived, Adaptive Optics, which can eliminate most atmospheric turbulence, was still a US Military classified technology). The only short-term reasons for building space telescopes are:
1) observing in wavelengths absorbed by our atmosphere (like much of the IR and UV spectrum)
2) Getting spectra of earth-like planets surrounding other stars, this would require a space-based interferometer, because the earth probably isn't a sufficiently stable base to do this type of observations...
>I've never quite understood this - how can you >store antimatter, why don't the >particle/antiparticle pairs annihilate each >other? I'm grasping at nothingness here, but >I've always visualized antimatter being stored >as a non-gas in a vacuum, out of contact with >the container.
The trick is to use magnetic confinement, don't allow the antimatter to touch the container.
Problem is : antimatter produced in accellerators is insanely hot, so you need extremely strong magnetic fields to confine it, at least until you can cool it down. We'll have "regular" nuclear fusion figured out a long time before we can reliably produce antimatter in significant quantities. I'm not even going to mention the safety issues connected to storing considerable amounts of antimatter. Any failure of the confinement field would result in a big badaboom (making Hiroshima look like a fart in a bottle...) - you wouldn't have to much trouble with radiation afterwards though, but when you're vaporised, you tend not to care too much...
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of Psion? they just stopped producing such machines after doing so for over a decade...
You have IBM to thank for the current big big drives. They invented GMR (Giant MagnetoResistive heads), one of the things which allows current drives to reach densities far beyond what was possible a few years ago.
Also don't forget their microdrives, pretty bloody advanced stuff...
Many many other aspects of current HDD design come from IBM research.
It usually takes 5-10 years for such research to turn into commercial products, so don't hold your breath, but don't discount these discoveries because you can't see further than the present...
All your cash comes from ATM machines? You never change money in the store. I doubt "they" are able to track bank notes that have exchanged hands a couple of times before being spent on a book.
Start-Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs - MS Office97
This doesn't directly uninstall Office, but runs the Setup tool.
Obvious, isn't it
Google has been profitable for quite some time... Just do a search on Google with the keywords "Google Profitable"...
If that's not what you are saying(the "better", not the "perfect") (which is not how I read it in your original message), then what was your point?
I suspect this is debatable, and will depend on your definition of "quality"...
That's why you should insist that everything is documented, not documenting important changes may be good for the employee, its very bad for the employer (unfortunately, many employers don't understand this and don't allow sufficient time for documentation, but that's another story...)
How much would you have to pay MS to change the Windows Kernel? (hint : much, much more than te cost of a capable tech consultant)
And where does that differ from MS Windows? (Except that in Linux, if the issue is important enough for you, you _can_ fix it yourself or get it fixed, whereas in Windows, you are totally at the mercy of MS
Besides, in the Linux-world, there is no monopoly. If one of the vendors isn't quick to respond to bugs, people will switch to another vendor.
Your original message made it seem that if there's a problem with Linux, all you can do is tell "the community" and hope it gets fixed, while this is not true.
In the same message you stated
Implying that this somehow works better with Microsoft. That this is patently untrue is quite easy to prove : I remember how for NT4 Service Pack 6 broke many server apps (Lotus Notes most prominently), so hardly an improvement (although it didn't take them too long to release 6a, which fixed the issues again).
Red Hat (and the other distro's) releases fixed kernels if there is a serious bug in the kernel version in the release, just like Microsoft releases "Hot Fixes" and "Service Packs" to do the same...
The point remains : The distributions release bug-fixes just like Microsoft does (and usually more quickly), and if you are not a huge company, I wish you lots of luck trying to get MS to fix a bug in Windows that only affects you, something which is at least possible with Linux.
Also:
This must be why SuSE, Redhat and other distributions kept offering 2.2.x kernels at the same time as they offered newer, "less stable" 2.4.x kernels.
And that's just the beauty of the system, if the standard OS doesn't allow you to do what you want, you *can* customise it until it can. Or you can look for another distribution that more closely approaches what you want. (You can also do this, in a very limited way, with microsoft, with W2K Data Center at the very high end and Windows CE at the lower end, but which Microsoft OS will run on both Mainframes and a wristwatch, and everything in between, and do so from essentially the same kernel codebase...)
Bull! A Red Hat "2.4.x" kernel usually contains a whole bunch of changes and bugfixes compared to the standard "2.4.x" kernel, even if Linus hasn't got round to adding the fix to "2.4.x+1", that's the beauty of open source.
If IBM has to provide support for Windows, and there's a bug in there, they will refer you to Microsoft, who, unless you're a huge company, will completely ignore you.
In the worst case, where the problem you have is specific to your system, and noone else has the problem, you can *pay* anyone you want to fix the bug for your specific configuration. You then use your own patched kernel and sleep happily.
Try that with Windows!
It's also an easy one to force... All you need to falsify your "hypothesis" is two astronauts on Mars. One astronaut drops the dead cat he brought with him onto the surface of the planet, and the other one happens to find it, and *bang* there goes your hypothesis... (He doesn't even have to bring a dead cat, if he dies in an accident and the other one finds him, your hypothesis is also dead...)
Next time, try to specify your hypothesis a bit better
"Relativity" is a mathematical description of the world which provides verifiable predictions. Many of the predictions have been verified to great accuracy, which quickly moved relativity from the "Hypothesis" status to "Theory" status.
"Life on Mars" is not a theory, it doesn't make any "predictions" as such and is not a description of anything except itself, and the only "prediction" it makes is circular : "If there's life on Mars, there's life on Mars."
We can perfectly hypothesize what might be the consequences of life on Mars, or hypothesize about the form life would take on Mars, but that does not mean "Life on Mars" in itself is a hypothesis/Theory.
I remember when 386's came out, and DOS did not run slower on them than on 286's.
You seem to be mixing things up. Windows 95 ran slower on Pentium Pro than on equivalent Pentiums, because 95 still contained a lot of 16-bit stuff, and PPro was heavily optimised to do 32-bit operations.
Then Intel came out with Pentium-II, which performed as well as PPro at 32-bit, but could reach higher clock speeds, and performed much better at 16-bit code than PPro of equivalent clock speed.
Linux is now running on both 32-bit and 64-bit CPU's, and there is little reason to assume that it is "performing worse" on 64-bit architectures "because" it was originally designed on a 32-bit basis.
Kernel compilation is hardly the end-all of tests, and many processes will perform much better on dual-processor systems than on single processor systems, although almost always less than 2x better.
Rubbish
Neither claim is scientific, the only correct statement now is "Until now we have not found life on Mars", and that will remain the claim until one of two things happen:
- We discover alien life on Mars
- We start living there
In both cases, the claim "there is life on Mars" will be scientifically correct.
Remember, the existence of life on Mars is not and never will be a hypothesis/theory (which is where Popper comes in), it is either a fact or an unknown.
We don't know, over 4.5 billion years, the odds may be 99.99999% or 0.000001%, we just don't know.
In the case of Earth&Mars, the odds are probably close to 100%, if only because it has been shown that bacteria could easily survive the trip from the one to the other, and we know of a mechanism (asteroid impact) capable of "soft-launching" rocks from one to the other.
The life would be of the same origin of course. The odds of life emerging independently on both rocks are totally unknown, because for now we have a statistically useless sample of 1.
Actually, that's pretty much the hypothesis people are working with today (Mars used to be hotter and wetter).
It's even pretty much a certainty, considering the huge volcanoes on Mars. While they were being created, they would have been spewing absolutely vast amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapour into the atmospher, and seeing as how the atmospheric pressure and temperatures on Mars are even now not too far away from allowing liquid water, it's difficult to imagine those volcanoes being created without also creating a thicker atmosphere.
At the bottom of the deepest canyons on Mars, the atmospheric pressure is a few tens of hectopascals (about 1/30-1/50 of sea level earth) and temps can reach above 0 Celsius, enough so water doesn't flash-evaporate, but can remain liquid for a considerable time.
I don't really agree. Say you have 4 weeks notice. Assuming that the actual bottleneck would indeed be the edges of Britain (the shorelines and the airports):
...)
Channel Tunnel : let's make some assumptions : 1,000 people per train, one train per 30 minutes for 4 weeks. This would allow 1.34 million people to leave Britain. (Timings and numbers might be a little off, but it's likely to be between 500,000 - 2,500,000 people, assuming of course that no fire breaks out.) You might get more people out by allowing them to pass through the tunnels on foot (you could use both tunnels for outgoing traffic and the service tunnel for emergencies.
If you allow 20 people per "row" in through the tunnel, and leave 1 meter between rows, you can get 800,000 people to fit in the tunnel. For realism's sake, lets reduce this to 200,000. 40 km walking at 3.5km/h takes about 12 hours, so figure 400,000 people can leave every day. After 4 weeks, you will have evacuated 11 million people through the Channel Tunnel alone (and under optimal conditions, probably more than 20 million).
Take all planes : Boeing 747's can take 600 people on board, Heathrow alone can handle a lift-off every 2 minutes, so this results in 12 million people leaving through this one airport, and there are at least 20 airports capable of handling significant air-travel in Britain, so even if you reduce this traffic to 10% of optimal, you would still get 24 million people off that way. (so, in total, we'd be able to move between 25-100 million people using only the channel tunnel and the airports.
Modern large freighters can easily carry 1,000 people or more on board, and the journey to France/Belgium/Holland/Ireland only takes 3-10 hours, so 1,000 freighters/ferries can easily move a million people a day, counting up to 28 million by large ferry. There are probably at least 100,000 smaller boats in Britain capable of carrying on average 50 people, so another 5,000,000, perhaps once every two days, moving out 70,000,000 people in four weeks.
Remember Dunkerque,1940, 350,000 people were evacuated in horrendous conditions in just 7 days, while under German attack and from a single port city, with far fewer resources than would be available now.
Conclusion:
An evacuation of Britain in 4 weeks would probaly be quite doable.
Would it cause much hardship and loss of life? Certainly
Would it not be complete? Also certainly, probably several percent of the population would not be evacuated for many different reasons (too sick to be moved, stupid enough to want to stay,
But, it is quite likely that 90% or more of the population of Britain could be moved of the island in 4 weeks.
Bart
It couldn't, not by a long shot. The smallest details HST can see on the moon are around 100 meters in diameter...
Bull, all of Europe has metered local calls...
Nope, sorry. Basically a scramjet needs to be travelling at extremely high speeds before it can even function, that is why they launched it from a cannon. (Getting it up to operational speeds fast).
A scramjet airplane would need another type of engine to first get it up to multi-mach speeds
Gravity reduces with the square of the distance, meaning your satellite needs to move at SQRT(1.187) = 1.089 times the speed of the geosynchronous satellite to have a circular orbit. If you put it at the height you mentioned, at the speed you mentioned, it would go into an eccentric orbit with your height as the perigee (or lowest point).
A satellite's orbital "speed" (if it is circular) is determined two factors, its distance from the center of mass, and the mass of that mass (strictly speaking it also depends on the mass of the satellite, but that factor is negligable when talking about artifical satellites around earth).
Basically, the closer to earth a satellite in a circular orbit is, the shorter the time it takes to orbit the earth. As an example : ISS takes about 90 minutes to orbit the earth, at an altitude of roughly 400km, so it does (2*PI*r) = 2*3.14159*6778km = 42587 km in 1.5h = 28400km/h for a roughly circular orbit.
Now, a geosynchronous satellite is at 35785km above the earth's surface, meaning r=42163km.
Which means it does 2*3.14159*42163km = 11069 km/h
Why does it move more slowly? because gravity is less strong at that distance.
The moon orbits once every 29 days at a distance of (roughly) 400.000 km. The same calculation gives us 3500km/h for the moon.
As pointed out above, this is where you are mistaken. This would only be true if gravity decreased linearly with distance from the source, while it decreases with the square of the distance.
You cannot have an object go round the earth in a circle in 1 day at any other altitude than 35785km unless you are constantly accelerating/decelerating it (using up fuel very very quickly!)
No matter what you say now, this is plainly wrong. The orbit needs to be at an altitude of ~36.000km for it to be geosynchronous. It doesn't need to be in an equatorial orbit, because to be geosynchronous, a satellite doesn't need to stay above the same longitude all the time, it just needs to orbit the earth in one day (=23h56m , the extra 4 minutes every day being provided by our orbit around the sun).
What you are talking about are geostationary orbits, which require the satellite to remain above a single point on the earth's surface, which is only possible with equatorial orbits.
Check out this definition of geosynchronous:
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-017/_245
Or this one, specifically answering the issue here:
http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/08251997/
Hey, it's got ssh installed and installing telnet is as easy as opening their RPM installer and selecting it. There is a reason telnet isn't installed by default... (Hint : de Mandrake people want to tell you it's not secure enough...). Next thing you know, people will start complaining it doesn't install a web server with default passwords by default... sheesh...
For the price of one small space telescope (HST mirror is only 2.4m in diameter) you can build the largest earth-based telescopes ten times over (the ESO VLT, 4 8m telescopes working as an array will, when fully operational in 2003-2004 have cost maybe 1/5 of what Hubble has cost until now). Furthermore, in visible light, earth-based telescopes are already producing images as sharp as, and even sharper than Hubble. At the time the HST was conceived, Adaptive Optics, which can eliminate most atmospheric turbulence, was still a US Military classified technology). The only short-term reasons for building space telescopes are: 1) observing in wavelengths absorbed by our atmosphere (like much of the IR and UV spectrum) 2) Getting spectra of earth-like planets surrounding other stars, this would require a space-based interferometer, because the earth probably isn't a sufficiently stable base to do this type of observations...
>I've never quite understood this - how can you >store antimatter, why don't the >particle/antiparticle pairs annihilate each >other? I'm grasping at nothingness here, but >I've always visualized antimatter being stored >as a non-gas in a vacuum, out of contact with >the container.
The trick is to use magnetic confinement, don't allow the antimatter to touch the container.
Problem is : antimatter produced in accellerators is insanely hot, so you need extremely strong magnetic fields to confine it, at least until you can cool it down. We'll have "regular" nuclear fusion figured out a long time before we can reliably produce antimatter in significant quantities. I'm not even going to mention the safety issues connected to storing considerable amounts of antimatter. Any failure of the confinement field would result in a big badaboom (making Hiroshima look like a fart in a bottle...) - you wouldn't have to much trouble with radiation afterwards though, but when you're vaporised, you tend not to care too much...