Uh...actually Mr.Newton agrees with me in saying increased mass means increased inertia.
That's not what you said before.
The bigger my sail is the more it weighs thus the more sail area I need to collect energy to overcome intertia.
Wrong. You don't need to "overcome inertia" to start moving. In free space, any force at all will cause acceleration. F=ma. If F is smaller, or m is larger, a will be smaller, true, but it will still be there. The effect of acceleration is cumulative.
Acceleration caused from taking energy from solar wind particles is also not linear or infinite like you retardedly believe.
Where did I say I believe that? I asked you to do a calculation. Obviously you didn't do it.
By the way, solar sails don't use the solar wind to work.
Any realistic mission is going to involve dozens, more likely hundreds, of people. There's quite a bit of evidence that H. Sap. evolved to live in a society with about 200 people in it (that's about how many people you can know on a personal level, e.g.). More than that and you start getting the stress problems common among city dwellers.
stupendously large which means increased mass and you guessed it needs more force to get it moving.
Isaac Newton disagrees that increased mass requires increased force to "get it going". Hint #1: these things operate in free space. Hint #2: Suppose the sail only provides.001 g acceleration. Work out how fast it'll be going in 6 months. You'll be quite surprised.
I won't even go into your assumption that effective star travel is equivalent to reaching the other side of the galaxy.
but there is no way that anyone will ever be able to finance film extravaganzas like Pearl Harbor or, more to the point for this group, The Lord of The Rings for a dollar a ticket
You may be right, but one could certainly argue otherwise. Producing movies is a lot like software in that almost all of the costs are upfront. Once the movie is made, or the distribution CDs are burned, the added cost to the production company of adding another viewing is minimal. Example:
Suppose I go to the movies about 4 times a year at the current $7.00 price (which is about right). Now suppose the price drops to a buck and I start going every week. In the first scenario I transfer $28.00/year to the theater (and indirectly to the studio). In the second one, I transfer $52.00/year to the theater. The added costs incurred by the theater are very small (in fact, they wind up making a lot more money on concessions). The added costs to the studio are minimal (they'd need to strike more prints, and they're expensive, but they'd be amortized across a larger number of viewings).
The point is that you can't automatically assume that "higher retail price" == "higher profit". Rolex watches cost a lot more than Timex ones. Which company makes more money? A meal at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant costs a lot more than one at McDonalds. Which company makes more money?
Another example: In the early days of VHS tapes they were selling them for $70-$100 each (in less-inflated dollars!). Now they're more like $20. Guess which price has proven to yield more money?
It MAY be that the current ticket prices maximize revenue. It may not. Expecting reasonable business practices from Hollywood is a little unrealistic, so I don't think we know for sure.
Of course, your point about no one producing a big-budget movie in an atmosphere of universal piracy is spot on. Lower prices can increase profits, but the price has to be greater than 0.:-)
Your laptop will start to smell like an old steam engine.. You know, those little kit ones you had as a kid.. choo-choo.. And it's oily..
Are you sure you're talking about the same stuff? I'm only familiar with "meths" as a term from the U.K. and don't think I've ever seen anything labeled as such in this country. Methanol isn't oily. It evaporates quickly and leaves no residue, just like grain or rubbing alcohol. The similarity occasionally causes problems when people try to drink it (it's pretty toxic when ingested).
Older USians may be more familiar with the smell of methanol in the form of mimeograph fluid (used to produce those illegible purple school handouts in the days before cheap copiers and laser printers). I don't mind the smell, myself. It takes me right back to first grade.:-)
The infrastructure for methanol will have to be vastly improved before a methanol fuel cell battery will ever be successful in laptops.
You can buy it by the gallon in any hardware store or by the 55 gallon drum at a paint wholesaler. It's dirt cheap. It sounds like this particular design takes pre-filled cartridges, but I'd bet it's not long before someone comes up with a way to refill them (see inkjet cartridges).
A back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that $36M to now be $350K.
You're assuming that ESR wasn't smart enough to dump at least part of the stock when the 6 month waiting period was over. He doesn't strike me as being that stupid. Even though it had declined to the $50 range from its ~$250 height, his stock still would've been worth $7 million or so.
Using it to boil water for a steam engine might work.
Most of the "conventional" space solar power ideas (not this one, of course) are based on that. Big-assed focusing mirror (can be very, very thin and very, very cheap in orbit, since you don't have to worry about it collapsing under its own weight) aimed at a boiler. Steam spins turbines, turbines produce electricity, electricity generates microwaves, microwaves beamed to earth. Way more efficient than photovoltaics.
Of course the envirowhackos are going to throw a clot if this idea ever looks like it might take off.
I was impressed how they pulled off digitally altering the actors' sizes according to their races
Actually, a lot of that was done with good old-fashioned trick photography. The technique is called "forced perspective".
I agree. It was done extremely well.
Even more impressive is the near-universal acclaim. Conservative websites (National Review), liberal websites (Salon), even most of the fundie Christian websites (other than the babbling lunatic at capalert.org) all thought it was fantastic. True, Tolkien was himself a devout Christian, and the theology of LOTR is essentially Christian, but I didn't expect them to Get It.
It missed 4 stars in Ebert's review, only because Ebert himself is something of a Tolkien fanboy, and found some of the (necessary) changes a little offputting.
Still, I can't recall the last time a movie got anything like this level of critical support COMBINED with this level of popularity. Well done, Mr. Jackson!
I'm not sure why, but many apartment complexes near college campuses have high speed internet connections in each apartment.
It's easy. The students have gotten used to high-speed connections in their dorm rooms. It's a lot easier to convince them to rent your apartment if they don't have to go back to a crappy dialup.
As mentioned above, Quake has already been ported to the Cave. You can even play over the network from the Cave UIUC with someone playing in the Cave at UI-Chicago.
Yes, there's a Cave in Beckman. I've been in it several times and it rocks (though physically turning your body when you're playing Quake takes some getting used to... be prepared to die many, many times at first).
A buddy of mine was an RA for the Cave for a while. The CS department occasionally offers a Cave programming class.
I believe the Cave folks have free open tours one day a week. You just have to sign up.
As others have pointed out, the advance here is that this new system runs on commodity hardware. You will indeed still need some expensive stuff to make it work. The standard Cave uses two LCD projectors (if you haven't priced these projectors, cheap ones cost $1,500, good ones cost $5,000 and up) for each wall to get the 3D effect. You use LCD shutter goggles so each eye sees the image from the appropriaate projector.
Instead it (ZMODEM) sent the file in one chunk with ack at the end. You had to have compatible hardware error correction on both sending and receiving modems.....If you lost one bit or dropped carrier, then your file download was history.
You are mistaken. ZMODEM not only recovered from transmission errors gracefully, it would even recover from a dropped carrier, resuming the transmission at the point it aborted.
Technology marches on. I remember buying a 2400 bps modem back in the late 80s (when such things were state of the art). It came with a stern warning that exporting it to countries such as the Soviet Union, Iran, etc. was considered trafficking in arms. Hard to believe now, isn't it?
Yes, indeed.... that "business decision" was boneheaded even by.com standards. There were a lot of great writers on TT who were providing them with content for free. "Hey, I know! We'll start charging the people who are providing the content, while allowing those who consume it to continue to freeload!".
I never even considered subscribing once I heard the details of this "business model". It was pretty obvious that the regular posters would decamp en masse, which of course meant that the lurkers had nothing to read, which of course meant that the whole thing went into the toilet.
I think I must've seen that at least tacked onto 5 stories this week. Isn't it funny how nothing on/. is new anymore?
I think they got tired of trollboys commenting on every single story with comments like "Jesus! Another story with the word 'the' in it! Don't the moderators even read the damned board? There was another story with 'the' in it just last week!"
It's an easy proof. Suppose the cost of an n-state device was proportional to n, so that e.g., a 3-state device cost 1.5 times as much as a 2-state device (as it happens, we know how to make 2-state devices very cheaply, meaning that this doesn't hold in the Real World, but you asked for math:-).
Give a number n, the number of digits required to represent that number in base k is approximately logk(n). {actually, floor(logk(n)) + 1, but that's not important). Each digit will cost $a*k dollars, where a is the proportionality constant from above, so the total cost of representing the number is a*k*logk(n) = a*k*ln(n)/ln(k) = a*ln(n)*[k/ln(k)]. Taking the derivative gives
a*ln(n)*[(ln(k) - k/k)/(ln(k)^2)] = a*ln(n)*[ln(k)-1/(ln(k)^2)]. This (assuming I haven't screwed up my ASCII math) has a critical point at k=e. Substituting k=e, k=2 and k=3 in the original equation show that this is indeed a minimum, and that 3 is slightly better than 2. QED.
It doesn't change the fact that (so far) 3-state devices cost a whole lot more than 1.5 times 2-state devices. That's why we're still using binary.:-).
Slashdot Mirror
most reputable general science publication on the planet
Scientific American is a popular magazine, not a scientific journal. It's about one step above "Mr. Wizard's Weird Science Experiments".
The reason why movies like that are made in the first place is to alert people of potential dangers.
No, the reason movies like that are made is to separate people from their cash.
If promoting bad science and pandering to the fears of the ignorant will help in that endeavor, Hollywood is happy to rise to the occasion.
Uh...actually Mr.Newton agrees with me in saying increased mass means increased inertia.
That's not what you said before.
The bigger my sail is the more it weighs thus the more sail area I need to collect energy to overcome intertia.
Wrong. You don't need to "overcome inertia" to start moving. In free space, any force at all will cause acceleration. F=ma. If F is smaller, or m is larger, a will be smaller, true, but it will still be there. The effect of acceleration is cumulative.
Acceleration caused from taking energy from solar wind particles is also not linear or infinite like you retardedly believe.
Where did I say I believe that? I asked you to do a calculation. Obviously you didn't do it.
By the way, solar sails don't use the solar wind to work.
You obviously need to repeat freshman physics.
Any realistic mission is going to involve dozens, more likely hundreds, of people. There's quite a bit of evidence that H. Sap. evolved to live in a society with about 200 people in it (that's about how many people you can know on a personal level, e.g.). More than that and you start getting the stress problems common among city dwellers.
stupendously large which means increased mass and you guessed it needs more force to get it moving.
.001 g acceleration. Work out how fast it'll be going in 6 months. You'll be quite surprised.
Isaac Newton disagrees that increased mass requires increased force to "get it going". Hint #1: these things operate in free space. Hint #2: Suppose the sail only provides
I won't even go into your assumption that effective star travel is equivalent to reaching the other side of the galaxy.
"Landing and moving around on the moon offer so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them"
"X-rays are a hoax"
"Radio has no future"
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible"
All from Lord Kelvin, one of the most prominent physicists of his day. Perhaps you've heard of him, or were you too busy studying cold "fission"?
but there is no way that anyone will ever be able to finance film extravaganzas like Pearl Harbor or, more to the point for this group, The Lord of The Rings for a dollar a ticket
:-)
You may be right, but one could certainly argue otherwise. Producing movies is a lot like software in that almost all of the costs are upfront. Once the movie is made, or the distribution CDs are burned, the added cost to the production company of adding another viewing is minimal. Example:
Suppose I go to the movies about 4 times a year at the current $7.00 price (which is about right). Now suppose the price drops to a buck and I start going every week. In the first scenario I transfer $28.00/year to the theater (and indirectly to the studio). In the second one, I transfer $52.00/year to the theater. The added costs incurred by the theater are very small (in fact, they wind up making a lot more money on concessions). The added costs to the studio are minimal (they'd need to strike more prints, and they're expensive, but they'd be amortized across a larger number of viewings).
The point is that you can't automatically assume that "higher retail price" == "higher profit". Rolex watches cost a lot more than Timex ones. Which company makes more money? A meal at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant costs a lot more than one at McDonalds. Which company makes more money?
Another example: In the early days of VHS tapes they were selling them for $70-$100 each (in less-inflated dollars!). Now they're more like $20. Guess which price has proven to yield more money?
It MAY be that the current ticket prices maximize revenue. It may not. Expecting reasonable business practices from Hollywood is a little unrealistic, so I don't think we know for sure.
Of course, your point about no one producing a big-budget movie in an atmosphere of universal piracy is spot on. Lower prices can increase profits, but the price has to be greater than 0.
Your laptop will start to smell like an old steam engine.. You know, those little kit ones you had as a kid.. choo-choo.. And it's oily..
:-)
Are you sure you're talking about the same stuff? I'm only familiar with "meths" as a term from the U.K. and don't think I've ever seen anything labeled as such in this country. Methanol isn't oily. It evaporates quickly and leaves no residue, just like grain or rubbing alcohol. The similarity occasionally causes problems when people try to drink it (it's pretty toxic when ingested).
Older USians may be more familiar with the smell of methanol in the form of mimeograph fluid (used to produce those illegible purple school handouts in the days before cheap copiers and laser printers). I don't mind the smell, myself. It takes me right back to first grade.
The infrastructure for methanol will have to be vastly improved before a methanol fuel cell battery will ever be successful in laptops.
You can buy it by the gallon in any hardware store or by the 55 gallon drum at a paint wholesaler. It's dirt cheap. It sounds like this particular design takes pre-filled cartridges, but I'd bet it's not long before someone comes up with a way to refill them (see inkjet cartridges).
A back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that $36M to now be $350K.
You're assuming that ESR wasn't smart enough to dump at least part of the stock when the 6 month waiting period was over. He doesn't strike me as being that stupid. Even though it had declined to the $50 range from its ~$250 height, his stock still would've been worth $7 million or so.
Most of the "conventional" space solar power ideas (not this one, of course) are based on that. Big-assed focusing mirror (can be very, very thin and very, very cheap in orbit, since you don't have to worry about it collapsing under its own weight) aimed at a boiler. Steam spins turbines, turbines produce electricity, electricity generates microwaves, microwaves beamed to earth. Way more efficient than photovoltaics.
Of course the envirowhackos are going to throw a clot if this idea ever looks like it might take off.
Actually, a lot of that was done with good old-fashioned trick photography. The technique is called "forced perspective".
I agree. It was done extremely well.
Even more impressive is the near-universal acclaim. Conservative websites (National Review), liberal websites (Salon), even most of the fundie Christian websites (other than the babbling lunatic at capalert.org) all thought it was fantastic. True, Tolkien was himself a devout Christian, and the theology of LOTR is essentially Christian, but I didn't expect them to Get It.
It missed 4 stars in Ebert's review, only because Ebert himself is something of a Tolkien fanboy, and found some of the (necessary) changes a little offputting.
Still, I can't recall the last time a movie got anything like this level of critical support COMBINED with this level of popularity. Well done, Mr. Jackson!
I'm not sure why, but many apartment complexes near college campuses have high speed internet connections in each apartment.
It's easy. The students have gotten used to high-speed connections in their dorm rooms. It's a lot easier to convince them to rent your apartment if they don't have to go back to a crappy dialup.
As mentioned above, Quake has already been ported to the Cave. You can even play over the network from the Cave UIUC with someone playing in the Cave at UI-Chicago.
Yes, there's a Cave in Beckman. I've been in it several times and it rocks (though physically turning your body when you're playing Quake takes some getting used to... be prepared to die many, many times at first).
A buddy of mine was an RA for the Cave for a while. The CS department occasionally offers a Cave programming class.
I believe the Cave folks have free open tours one day a week. You just have to sign up.
As others have pointed out, the advance here is that this new system runs on commodity hardware. You will indeed still need some expensive stuff to make it work. The standard Cave uses two LCD projectors (if you haven't priced these projectors, cheap ones cost $1,500, good ones cost $5,000 and up) for each wall to get the 3D effect. You use LCD shutter goggles so each eye sees the image from the appropriaate projector.
You are mistaken. ZMODEM not only recovered from transmission errors gracefully, it would even recover from a dropped carrier, resuming the transmission at the point it aborted.
I think you are thinking of YMODEM-G.
Technology marches on. I remember buying a 2400 bps modem back in the late 80s (when such things were state of the art). It came with a stern warning that exporting it to countries such as the Soviet Union, Iran, etc. was considered trafficking in arms. Hard to believe now, isn't it?
Looks to me like big business is full of shit yet again.
You're invited to have a look at dhmo.org.
Yes, indeed.... that "business decision" was boneheaded even by .com standards. There were a lot of great writers on TT who were providing them with content for free. "Hey, I know! We'll start charging the people who are providing the content, while allowing those who consume it to continue to freeload!".
I never even considered subscribing once I heard the details of this "business model". It was pretty obvious that the regular posters would decamp en masse, which of course meant that the lurkers had nothing to read, which of course meant that the whole thing went into the toilet.
What maroons.
Too good to be true. They seem to "work" "fine" in Netscape 4.61 as well. Bleccccch!
I think they got tired of trollboys commenting on every single story with comments like "Jesus! Another story with the word 'the' in it! Don't the moderators even read the damned board? There was another story with 'the' in it just last week!"
Simple. How does this deal sound..... you give me $100/month and I give you $50/month?
You're better off to stop giving me the $100, even though that means I stop giving you the $50.
Not in the case of identical twins. One sperm, one egg. The embryo splits in two at a later stage. Identical twins have the same DNA.
It's an easy proof. Suppose the cost of an n-state device was proportional to n, so that e.g., a 3-state device cost 1.5 times as much as a 2-state device (as it happens, we know how to make 2-state devices very cheaply, meaning that this doesn't hold in the Real World, but you asked for math :-).
:-).
Give a number n, the number of digits required to represent that number in base k is approximately logk(n). {actually, floor(logk(n)) + 1, but that's not important). Each digit will cost $a*k dollars, where a is the proportionality constant from above, so the total cost of representing the number is a*k*logk(n) = a*k*ln(n)/ln(k) = a*ln(n)*[k/ln(k)]. Taking the derivative gives
a*ln(n)*[(ln(k) - k/k)/(ln(k)^2)] = a*ln(n)*[ln(k)-1/(ln(k)^2)]. This (assuming I haven't screwed up my ASCII math) has a critical point at k=e. Substituting k=e, k=2 and k=3 in the original equation show that this is indeed a minimum, and that 3 is slightly better than 2. QED.
It doesn't change the fact that (so far) 3-state devices cost a whole lot more than 1.5 times 2-state devices. That's why we're still using binary.
Really? I've been to three different universities in three different states. Not one of them had a Phys. Ed. requirement. Have I just been lucky?