It has been said that the day Linux refuses to open a file because the right ap isn't installed is the day that Linux ceases to be Unix.
It will also be the day I have to abandon Linux in favor of a more "user friendly" OS, in the way that I define user friendly.
I can't say that I'm happy with the idea that "Linux" could turn into a "brand," just a label which can be attached to any old thing without reference to what that thing is.
You can glue a red oval to a VW instead of a black circle, but that doesn't make it a Bugatti no matter what the script in the oval claims.
If and when Linux ceases to be Linus' Unix it'll be time to acknowledge the fact overtly.
At which point I may well find that the OS I have to use instead is. . . Linux.
Oddly enough Lindy and George found this sort of hero worship repulsive as well and were both famous for doing all they could to avoid it.
They were remarkable men.
To deny this is egalitarian bullshit. I've known a small number of remarkable men, some who are household names, some whom you will never hear of. They are apart from normal run of humanity. By a good deal.
Now, when I read in this story that Frankel was responsible for the online music phenomena my bullshit meter pegged so hard the needle broke. He wrote a few programs. They're nice enough programs I guess. I tried WinAmp once. It was ok. I prefered, and continue to prefer, others.
I have no idea whether Frankel is a remarkable man or not. He's young yet, only time will tell. He could just be l'enfant terrible.
But the article left me with the impression that this was a man I'd like to meet, not from any sense of hero worship, just because he seems an interesting man.
So I'd say the article had some legitimate purpose, even if it was a bit of journalistic hype. Maybe they just need to balance it with an article on an interesting man who has contributed two lines of code to the Apache Project.
Well, I'd have to say that I'm a deeply spiritual person (I'm a Zen Buddhist), but I'm an antimystic (I'm a Zen Buddhist).
A heart unguided by the mind is just as much an error as a mind unguided by the heart.
However, being free to follow one's heart is always a blessing. My mom took me out of school when I was 11, told me "You already know more than I do, you have a library card and you know how to use it." Then she did her best to make sure I at least had a cheap telescope and microscope when I felt I needed them and when she came home one day and discovered I was building a car in the living room gave me a bit of a "that's nice dear, very interesting," and left me to it. Never uttered a peep when I started filling up the basement with TV carcasses dragged home from the dump.
She's also made a couple of pilgramages to Sedona.
I'd like to visit some day. I'm not sure how I'll take to it, but I'm sure I'll find the experience interesting.
Lindy is no more important than someone who hands tools to the guy who is tuning Spirits engine before takeoff.
That would have been Charles Lindbergh. Then Lindy double checked the work himself. He also personally oversaw the design and construction of the Spirit personally.
Lindy was a remarkable man. You should read "We" sometime.
George Mallory was another remarkable man, even though he "failed." We don't normally admit that "failures" are remarkable men. George made it impossible not to.
I fully understand the concept that every member of a team is important. I've never understood why the last run batted in is hailed as the "winning run" when the first run batted in was just as much the winning run as any other. There is also certainly a kind of hero worship I find repulsive.
Ya know, once upon a time that's what we said about you kids who could just go out and buy computers instead of having to hardwire bistable multivibrators from discrete componants scrounged from the town dump.
Well, you take a geek genius, get him the hell out of the public school system as early as possible and let him do his own thing, he'll manage to "cut his geek teeth" somehow. His nature will see to it.
Keep him in that school system, drug him and send him to counseling until he fits into all the neat little rows and columns of the standarized test, standardized people state of mind that is the highest the mediocre thought processes of those that dream such up can muster, well, it doesn't matter after that what you give him to cut his teeth on. His teeth have been filed down to dull little stumps.
The equipment isn't the key, the enviroment is.
If you wish to protect the next generation of geek geniuses ( and do please bear in mind that "geek" doesn't mean "computer nerd") then do what you can to get them out of school and into a library.
Add a little peace and quiet and they'll manage the rest on their own just fine.
And don't forget that we can't use a pair of pliers on files if we don't have the proper tool.
That doesn't always work.
Let's see a show of hands. How many here are old enough to remember sitting down for the first time in a GM car with a lap full Allen wrenches and screwdrivers intending to remove an interior panel and suddenly thinking:
Well, I play chess and go for entertainment and fun, certainly waste countless hours playing them, and when I'm through have nothing to show for it except memories. Of a partially artificial reality.
I must say all I have to show for most of my real reality is memories as well.
The differene is that my chess and go sets are decades old. Computer games are designed to be used up and replaced.
They aren't games. They're heroin. With each hit having to be stronger than the last as tolerance is built up.
Pop music and adventure movies follow much the same pattern.
I consider myself a computer gamer. That is to say I spend a good deal of my time involved in playing computer games and am a member of very strong online gamer communities.
But I haven't bought a game in five years. I chose my games carefully for their real gaming value.
I installed them. They just work. I play them, but otherwise leave them alone. Like my chess set.
For me they "produce" what I intend them to and provide me with personal "profit" on my own value scale, which is admitedly rather different from the common yardstick.
But MS and the game publishers probably don't like me very much because I have provided them with very little profit as measured by their own yardsticks.
Yes, the engineering world has discovered that it's far more profitable to standardize bolts but proliferate drive types.
The consumer never feels they're locked in, but has to buy mulitple sets of tools, if only to remove the patented head bolt and replace it with a standard one. Very profitable for the patent holder.
The software industry seems to be learning this trick.
Witness XML, a standard for creating standards. You can claim XML compliance and yet extend it in propriatary ways. It is plain text, but the file sizes are truly gargantuan, so you need to compress them, for which you can use your own propriatary compression method. Certain outfits are now even starting to create propriatary XML parsers.
The bolts are all standard, but you still have to buy the tool.
There's one essential difference between file formats and bolt design though. Bolts aren't given extraordinary protection by the DMCA.
There are an awful lot of theories as to what seperates man from the animals, however, I've always thought it really came down to the fact that we're not afraid of vacuums.
I'd note, however, that your experiment left out the radiation and fast moving rocks. I suggest you repeat while watching the Daytona 500 on the Telly and tossing a mini superball around.
Cat behaviour can become very interesting under these conditions. Although closets still seem to figure prominently for some of them.
They aren't the worst of the bunch either. That prize goes to the people who suddenly discover magnetism and think "Ahhhhhhhhh, deep Juju!" and spend the rest of their lives trying to find just the right sort of clever combination of magnets to make an infinate repulsion loop.
What's more getting it out is always easier. (KFG's coronary to Teslacle's deviant to Fudd's Law)
There's actually a fairly deep reason for this.
Within certain limits there's really only only one state in which your car can be said to be properly parallel parked. It must fit inside a boundry barely larger than the car itself. Period.
On the other hand to unpark you only need to get the car anywhere else in the universe.
Think about that. It really does have deep ramifications for understanding a number of physical phenomena.
And the Corniche set off a virtual flurry of literal ostentation as people literally competed to find ways to pay more than their neighbor did for the same car.
Of course, as a friend of mine commented while observing this phenomenon, "You've pretty much identified yourself as an ostentatious twit when you buy a Roller instead of the Bentley anyway."
Not that it matters now that one is an overpriced VW and the other an overpriced BMW.
See? I make mistakes. Just drop the ass in the bag and I'll deal with it later.
And all that while suffering from two fatal diseases?
Ok, I got a bit "lucky" there. They were both death sentences at the time I was born.
Being genetic neither can be cured, but one is now survivable with strict attention to diet (one of the reasons I grow my own food. It isn't fun knowing that anything you consume could, at least theoretically, kill you if it doesn't come from a trusted source) and the other has a rare genetic variation in people of eastern European descent ( my mother's family is Russian/Polish/Romanian) that gives an off chance at survival of you make it through childhood, but even then something as simple as a cold could conceivably do me in. Last I checked there were 14 of us known.
Sooner or later one of these is going get me, but if I take care of myself I might well make it to an advanced age in spite of them. Death is not imminent so I perhaps stretched the truth a bit by calling them fatal, at least in my case.
In any case while they impose limitations on me I don't let them limit me.
As for the ignorant "shtick," well, I'm afraid that's one of my defining characteristics. If I didn't actually feel that way I wouldn't know as much as I know. Things interest me. All things. There's just too many things. On a day to day basis I'm far more concious of what I don't know than what I do. I have little compunction these days about admiting that I know far more than most, that I'm smarter than most, or even that I'm wiser than most. I'm even begining to accept that I've done more than most ( although this still surprises me since I consider my life fairly slow moving compared to most. On any given day I'm likely to do little more than read, write, go for a bike ride, dick around in my "lab" a bit and maybe do some street performing or something. Unless I have a contract. Then I have to work just like anybody else).
But that leaves me, in my own estimation, ignorant. It's not my fault if some others are simply a bit more so. It's all just a matter of degree.
And there are certainly people far less ignorant than I on any given subject. I try spend some time around them now and again to become less ignorant.
My thought processes, on the other hand, are weird in the technical sense. Growing up truly aware of my mortality may have something to do with that, at least in a contributory capacity. I have never had the luxury of that particular bit of common ignorance and the bliss it seems to confer on some. In some ways I was thus old even as a child.
But then that carries its own peculiar form of bliss.
The "all-knowing" KFG wouldn't know as much as he does if he weren't willing to be educated. I make mistakes. I get my ass handed to me. I try not to make that mistake again.
Sometimes I'm a bit slow and I need my ass handed to me a few times before I get it.
I was once accused of being a "know it all" in meatspace by someone who didn't know me very well. A friend of 20 years responded with "But you have to understand that in his case he really does know it all.
My friend was very kind, but he lied. I know a lot. One of the things I know is that I'm ignorant, so I strive to become less so.
You have a point though. I type fast. My typing lags far behind my thoughts (which are often ill considered at the time)leaving my fingers on complete autopilot, leading to mistakes I never notice and I don't do a lot of previewing. I've any number of posts that turned into a giant block of italics through failure to close a tag properly (and a few where I've just come from a vB forum and use square brackets instead of angle brackets. What the hell was Jelsoft thinking?)
I shall have to consider that as well.
KFG
Re:why are they still useing rockets
on
Next Goals For The ESA
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They are not ignored by "mainstream" science. Mainstream science has already determined that they don't work.
So mainstream science "ignores" them only in the sense that they also ignore reading chicken entrails to fortell the future.
For starters, this is not a drive without a reaction mass. That's what the ball is.
When the ball hits the spring the spring compresses,i.e. deforms, otherwise it wouldn't be a spring, now would it? But only some of the energy of the ball goes into compressing the spring. Some of that energy goes into driving the entire tube "backwards." When the spring expands, again, some of that energy goes into driving the ball forwards, but some into driving the tube backwards again. In the process, as you note some energy is lost as heat.
When the ball "klunks" it drives the tube forward and the ball backward and some energy is lost as heat.
There is no essential difference between the spring and the klunk with regards to energy transfer other than the difference between the energy losses, as you note, which are very small (the klunk heats the ball more than the spring does).
What you have described is an oscillator that winds down after a relatively few klunks because energy is lost at each exchange. Use your brain. Analyze what "energy is lost" means.
It means the thingy goes back and forth a few times and then stops.
Unless you add energy.
By driving a reaction mass.
i.e. the ball.
And you still need a rocket to get it "up there" 'cause it ain't gonna do squat but fall over if you set it up on end and start it going here on earth. And that rocket has to carry the fuel to get the ball going in the first place, and all the fuel to keep it going, so that it can sit there in space and wobble until the fuel runs out. A quantity of fuel that still has to equal the energy value you intend to get out of the device.
This is nothing more than an obfuscated version of the drop hammer that lifts veeeeeeeeery slowly and thenswings down against a stop suddenly.
When the hammer lifts slowly the machine moves backwards slowly. When it swings down and hits the stop it moves forwards quickly but an equal distance less the heat loss in the impact versus the heat loss in the bearings as it rises and it needs fuel to drive it. Fuel which must be lifted into space and carried by the device. About the same amount of fuel that a conventional rocket uses.
I promise I'll give the matter some consideration.
Please bear in mind that it was only fairly recently that I started doing this instead of *this* and I'm used to cut and pasting urls by taking a wax impression of the cuneiform tablet and impressing that into fresh clay.
It's not that I don't know how to make a link, it's simply that I don't think about it, having plain text relexes.
One never "knows" such things when one cannot experiment directly with pricing over time on a mass scale (such as the "As Seen on TV" folk can), however, certain things are very suggestive.
Such as the popularity of the car, which rose as the price rose. The relative popularity of the Roller model compared to essentially the same car badged as a Bently (which followed traditional pricing models) when compared to similar differences in the past.
It's only "circumstancial" evidence, but then so is a trout in the milk.
Ever notice that most stuff "As Seen on TV" costs $19.95; and that if it costs more it tends to be multiple payments of $19.95?
Yes, they've studied the price points and picked the one proven to generate the most sales and that price has nothing to do with the "true value" of the item.
I recall that when the Rolls Royce Corniche was developed the board got together and figured that their sell point for the car was about $66k, but that they'd actually sell more of them if they "overpriced" it at $99k.
That's the important question. If they saved your dying kid or something that's one thing.
But if you feel loyalty because they write your paycheck you've got a 'coon up a tree that's going to jump off a branch and scratch your eyes out someday.
They bought all that computer equipment they threw out last year too. Didn't feel a bit of loyalty to the poor little Pentium Pro who never did them any harm and saved them an assload of money.
Which brings up another question. Why do you consider it "your" company? Given the scenario you put forward you don't own any significant part of it, otherwise you'd be upstairs already.
You work there. You get payed to work there. If you do a good job there's a good chance you're even underpaid for the work you do. There's a thousand guys standing at the door waiting to take your job and managment has no particular compunction about letting them have it.
You have friends there; and you like working with them?
Perhaps. Maybe one or two. If they're really your friends though they don't care where you work. You have friends that work at other companies, no? The rest are really just acquaintences of circumstance. They'll forget you, you'll forget them when you leave. Really. I don't have a clue about your age, but if you're young and school is your basic social model this idea might be a bit of beyond. You'll learn the hard way I'm afraid.
In any case, CYA. I don't mean just about that meeting either. Save your money. Don't get into debt unresolvable if you lose your job, because you are going to lose it someday.
It may well be worth it to you to shoot straight and from the hip for moral and ethical reasons, and I have no quarrel with you if you do that. ..
So long as those ethics aren't based on some romantic idea of company loyalty.
Tell 'em what you need. Tell 'em why. Then shut up. Don't discuss management issues unless you are payed to manage. They'll only resent it, because that's what they are payed to do, no?
All else failing make a bunch of pirate copies of "Up the Orginization" (after reading it first yourself) and leave them scattered about the Executive lunchroom/washroom.
Slashdot Mirror
It has been said that the day Linux refuses to open a file because the right ap isn't installed is the day that Linux ceases to be Unix.
It will also be the day I have to abandon Linux in favor of a more "user friendly" OS, in the way that I define user friendly.
I can't say that I'm happy with the idea that "Linux" could turn into a "brand," just a label which can be attached to any old thing without reference to what that thing is.
You can glue a red oval to a VW instead of a black circle, but that doesn't make it a Bugatti no matter what the script in the oval claims.
If and when Linux ceases to be Linus' Unix it'll be time to acknowledge the fact overtly.
At which point I may well find that the OS I have to use instead is. . . Linux.
KFG
Oddly enough Lindy and George found this sort of hero worship repulsive as well and were both famous for doing all they could to avoid it.
They were remarkable men.
To deny this is egalitarian bullshit. I've known a small number of remarkable men, some who are household names, some whom you will never hear of. They are apart from normal run of humanity. By a good deal.
Now, when I read in this story that Frankel was responsible for the online music phenomena my bullshit meter pegged so hard the needle broke. He wrote a few programs. They're nice enough programs I guess. I tried WinAmp once. It was ok. I prefered, and continue to prefer, others.
I have no idea whether Frankel is a remarkable man or not. He's young yet, only time will tell. He could just be l'enfant terrible.
But the article left me with the impression that this was a man I'd like to meet, not from any sense of hero worship, just because he seems an interesting man.
So I'd say the article had some legitimate purpose, even if it was a bit of journalistic hype. Maybe they just need to balance it with an article on an interesting man who has contributed two lines of code to the Apache Project.
KFG
Well, I'd have to say that I'm a deeply spiritual person (I'm a Zen Buddhist), but I'm an antimystic (I'm a Zen Buddhist).
A heart unguided by the mind is just as much an error as a mind unguided by the heart.
However, being free to follow one's heart is always a blessing. My mom took me out of school when I was 11, told me "You already know more than I do, you have a library card and you know how to use it." Then she did her best to make sure I at least had a cheap telescope and microscope when I felt I needed them and when she came home one day and discovered I was building a car in the living room gave me a bit of a "that's nice dear, very interesting," and left me to it. Never uttered a peep when I started filling up the basement with TV carcasses dragged home from the dump.
She's also made a couple of pilgramages to Sedona.
I'd like to visit some day. I'm not sure how I'll take to it, but I'm sure I'll find the experience interesting.
KFG
Lindy is no more important than someone who hands tools to the guy who is tuning Spirits engine before takeoff.
That would have been Charles Lindbergh. Then Lindy double checked the work himself. He also personally oversaw the design and construction of the Spirit personally.
Lindy was a remarkable man. You should read "We" sometime.
George Mallory was another remarkable man, even though he "failed." We don't normally admit that "failures" are remarkable men. George made it impossible not to.
I fully understand the concept that every member of a team is important. I've never understood why the last run batted in is hailed as the "winning run" when the first run batted in was just as much the winning run as any other. There is also certainly a kind of hero worship I find repulsive.
KFG
Ya know, once upon a time that's what we said about you kids who could just go out and buy computers instead of having to hardwire bistable multivibrators from discrete componants scrounged from the town dump.
Well, you take a geek genius, get him the hell out of the public school system as early as possible and let him do his own thing, he'll manage to "cut his geek teeth" somehow. His nature will see to it.
Keep him in that school system, drug him and send him to counseling until he fits into all the neat little rows and columns of the standarized test, standardized people state of mind that is the highest the mediocre thought processes of those that dream such up can muster, well, it doesn't matter after that what you give him to cut his teeth on. His teeth have been filed down to dull little stumps.
The equipment isn't the key, the enviroment is.
If you wish to protect the next generation of geek geniuses ( and do please bear in mind that "geek" doesn't mean "computer nerd") then do what you can to get them out of school and into a library.
Add a little peace and quiet and they'll manage the rest on their own just fine.
KFG
Then again, at least regarding the Linux kernel, they argue that part of it is theirs, and therefore can't be "donated". . .
Which would be why we have a judicial branch of government.
KFG
Fusion reactor hell. I've got the exact same problem with my windup monkey.
KFG
And don't forget that we can't use a pair of pliers on files if we don't have the proper tool.
That doesn't always work.
Let's see a show of hands. How many here are old enough to remember sitting down for the first time in a GM car with a lap full Allen wrenches and screwdrivers intending to remove an interior panel and suddenly thinking:
"What the [i]fuck!?[/i]
KFG
Well, I play chess and go for entertainment and fun, certainly waste countless hours playing them, and when I'm through have nothing to show for it except memories. Of a partially artificial reality.
I must say all I have to show for most of my real reality is memories as well.
The differene is that my chess and go sets are decades old. Computer games are designed to be used up and replaced.
They aren't games. They're heroin. With each hit having to be stronger than the last as tolerance is built up.
Pop music and adventure movies follow much the same pattern.
I consider myself a computer gamer. That is to say I spend a good deal of my time involved in playing computer games and am a member of very strong online gamer communities.
But I haven't bought a game in five years. I chose my games carefully for their real gaming value.
I installed them. They just work. I play them, but otherwise leave them alone. Like my chess set.
For me they "produce" what I intend them to and provide me with personal "profit" on my own value scale, which is admitedly rather different from the common yardstick.
But MS and the game publishers probably don't like me very much because I have provided them with very little profit as measured by their own yardsticks.
KFG
Is this going to turn out to be another UnitedLinux?
Nah. Looks to be more of an ISO 9000 for Linux usage.
And there was much rejoicing. Ehhhhhhhhhhhh!
KFG
Yes, the engineering world has discovered that it's far more profitable to standardize bolts but proliferate drive types.
The consumer never feels they're locked in, but has to buy mulitple sets of tools, if only to remove the patented head bolt and replace it with a standard one. Very profitable for the patent holder.
The software industry seems to be learning this trick.
Witness XML, a standard for creating standards. You can claim XML compliance and yet extend it in propriatary ways. It is plain text, but the file sizes are truly gargantuan, so you need to compress them, for which you can use your own propriatary compression method. Certain outfits are now even starting to create propriatary XML parsers.
The bolts are all standard, but you still have to buy the tool.
There's one essential difference between file formats and bolt design though. Bolts aren't given extraordinary protection by the DMCA.
KFG
There are an awful lot of theories as to what seperates man from the animals, however, I've always thought it really came down to the fact that we're not afraid of vacuums.
I'd note, however, that your experiment left out the radiation and fast moving rocks. I suggest you repeat while watching the Daytona 500 on the Telly and tossing a mini superball around.
Cat behaviour can become very interesting under these conditions. Although closets still seem to figure prominently for some of them.
KFG
They aren't the worst of the bunch either. That prize goes to the people who suddenly discover magnetism and think "Ahhhhhhhhh, deep Juju!" and spend the rest of their lives trying to find just the right sort of clever combination of magnets to make an infinate repulsion loop.
Those people drive me nuts.
KFG
If you can get it in, you can get it out.
What's more getting it out is always easier. (KFG's coronary to Teslacle's deviant to Fudd's Law)
There's actually a fairly deep reason for this.
Within certain limits there's really only only one state in which your car can be said to be properly parallel parked. It must fit inside a boundry barely larger than the car itself. Period.
On the other hand to unpark you only need to get the car anywhere else in the universe.
Think about that. It really does have deep ramifications for understanding a number of physical phenomena.
KFG
And the Corniche set off a virtual flurry of literal ostentation as people literally competed to find ways to pay more than their neighbor did for the same car.
Of course, as a friend of mine commented while observing this phenomenon, "You've pretty much identified yourself as an ostentatious twit when you buy a Roller instead of the Bentley anyway."
Not that it matters now that one is an overpriced VW and the other an overpriced BMW.
KFG
Heh. I said nearly all-knowing. . .
See? I make mistakes. Just drop the ass in the bag and I'll deal with it later.
And all that while suffering from two fatal diseases?
Ok, I got a bit "lucky" there. They were both death sentences at the time I was born.
Being genetic neither can be cured, but one is now survivable with strict attention to diet (one of the reasons I grow my own food. It isn't fun knowing that anything you consume could, at least theoretically, kill you if it doesn't come from a trusted source) and the other has a rare genetic variation in people of eastern European descent ( my mother's family is Russian/Polish/Romanian) that gives an off chance at survival of you make it through childhood, but even then something as simple as a cold could conceivably do me in. Last I checked there were 14 of us known.
Sooner or later one of these is going get me, but if I take care of myself I might well make it to an advanced age in spite of them. Death is not imminent so I perhaps stretched the truth a bit by calling them fatal, at least in my case.
In any case while they impose limitations on me I don't let them limit me.
As for the ignorant "shtick," well, I'm afraid that's one of my defining characteristics. If I didn't actually feel that way I wouldn't know as much as I know. Things interest me. All things. There's just too many things. On a day to day basis I'm far more concious of what I don't know than what I do. I have little compunction these days about admiting that I know far more than most, that I'm smarter than most, or even that I'm wiser than most. I'm even begining to accept that I've done more than most ( although this still surprises me since I consider my life fairly slow moving compared to most. On any given day I'm likely to do little more than read, write, go for a bike ride, dick around in my "lab" a bit and maybe do some street performing or something. Unless I have a contract. Then I have to work just like anybody else).
But that leaves me, in my own estimation, ignorant. It's not my fault if some others are simply a bit more so. It's all just a matter of degree.
And there are certainly people far less ignorant than I on any given subject. I try spend some time around them now and again to become less ignorant.
My thought processes, on the other hand, are weird in the technical sense. Growing up truly aware of my mortality may have something to do with that, at least in a contributory capacity. I have never had the luxury of that particular bit of common ignorance and the bliss it seems to confer on some. In some ways I was thus old even as a child.
But then that carries its own peculiar form of bliss.
KFG
Hey, I'm a native Yankee who is known to refer to "The War of Northern Aggression."
KFG
The "all-knowing" KFG wouldn't know as much as he does if he weren't willing to be educated. I make mistakes. I get my ass handed to me. I try not to make that mistake again.
Sometimes I'm a bit slow and I need my ass handed to me a few times before I get it.
I was once accused of being a "know it all" in meatspace by someone who didn't know me very well. A friend of 20 years responded with "But you have to understand that in his case he really does know it all.
My friend was very kind, but he lied. I know a lot. One of the things I know is that I'm ignorant, so I strive to become less so.
You have a point though. I type fast. My typing lags far behind my thoughts (which are often ill considered at the time)leaving my fingers on complete autopilot, leading to mistakes I never notice and I don't do a lot of previewing. I've any number of posts that turned into a giant block of italics through failure to close a tag properly (and a few where I've just come from a vB forum and use square brackets instead of angle brackets. What the hell was Jelsoft thinking?)
I shall have to consider that as well.
KFG
They are not ignored by "mainstream" science. Mainstream science has already determined that they don't work.
So mainstream science "ignores" them only in the sense that they also ignore reading chicken entrails to fortell the future.
For starters, this is not a drive without a reaction mass. That's what the ball is.
When the ball hits the spring the spring compresses,i.e. deforms, otherwise it wouldn't be a spring, now would it? But only some of the energy of the ball goes into compressing the spring. Some of that energy goes into driving the entire tube "backwards." When the spring expands, again, some of that energy goes into driving the ball forwards, but some into driving the tube backwards again. In the process, as you note some energy is lost as heat.
When the ball "klunks" it drives the tube forward and the ball backward and some energy is lost as heat.
There is no essential difference between the spring and the klunk with regards to energy transfer other than the difference between the energy losses, as you note, which are very small (the klunk heats the ball more than the spring does).
What you have described is an oscillator that winds down after a relatively few klunks because energy is lost at each exchange. Use your brain. Analyze what "energy is lost" means.
It means the thingy goes back and forth a few times and then stops.
Unless you add energy.
By driving a reaction mass.
i.e. the ball.
And you still need a rocket to get it "up there" 'cause it ain't gonna do squat but fall over if you set it up on end and start it going here on earth. And that rocket has to carry the fuel to get the ball going in the first place, and all the fuel to keep it going, so that it can sit there in space and wobble until the fuel runs out. A quantity of fuel that still has to equal the energy value you intend to get out of the device.
This is nothing more than an obfuscated version of the drop hammer that lifts veeeeeeeeery slowly and thenswings down against a stop suddenly.
When the hammer lifts slowly the machine moves backwards slowly. When it swings down and hits the stop it moves forwards quickly but an equal distance less the heat loss in the impact versus the heat loss in the bearings as it rises and it needs fuel to drive it. Fuel which must be lifted into space and carried by the device. About the same amount of fuel that a conventional rocket uses.
And all it does is wobble.
KFG
I promise I'll give the matter some consideration.
Please bear in mind that it was only fairly recently that I started doing this instead of *this* and I'm used to cut and pasting urls by taking a wax impression of the cuneiform tablet and impressing that into fresh clay.
It's not that I don't know how to make a link, it's simply that I don't think about it, having plain text relexes.
I shall strive to cure my errant ways.
KFG
Would a colony actually *stay* in the lagrange point?
l ag range.html
http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/
KFG
What are the technical obstacles to Lagrange point colonies?
Mostly all that vacuum and radiation and fast moving rocks and stuff.
Ya know. The usual.
KFG
One never "knows" such things when one cannot experiment directly with pricing over time on a mass scale (such as the "As Seen on TV" folk can), however, certain things are very suggestive.
Such as the popularity of the car, which rose as the price rose. The relative popularity of the Roller model compared to essentially the same car badged as a Bently (which followed traditional pricing models) when compared to similar differences in the past.
It's only "circumstancial" evidence, but then so is a trout in the milk.
KFG
Ever notice that most stuff "As Seen on TV" costs $19.95; and that if it costs more it tends to be multiple payments of $19.95?
Yes, they've studied the price points and picked the one proven to generate the most sales and that price has nothing to do with the "true value" of the item.
I recall that when the Rolls Royce Corniche was developed the board got together and figured that their sell point for the car was about $66k, but that they'd actually sell more of them if they "overpriced" it at $99k.
And they were right.
KFG
And why?
.
That's the important question. If they saved your dying kid or something that's one thing.
But if you feel loyalty because they write your paycheck you've got a 'coon up a tree that's going to jump off a branch and scratch your eyes out someday.
They bought all that computer equipment they threw out last year too. Didn't feel a bit of loyalty to the poor little Pentium Pro who never did them any harm and saved them an assload of money.
Which brings up another question. Why do you consider it "your" company? Given the scenario you put forward you don't own any significant part of it, otherwise you'd be upstairs already.
You work there. You get payed to work there. If you do a good job there's a good chance you're even underpaid for the work you do. There's a thousand guys standing at the door waiting to take your job and managment has no particular compunction about letting them have it.
You have friends there; and you like working with them?
Perhaps. Maybe one or two. If they're really your friends though they don't care where you work. You have friends that work at other companies, no? The rest are really just acquaintences of circumstance. They'll forget you, you'll forget them when you leave. Really. I don't have a clue about your age, but if you're young and school is your basic social model this idea might be a bit of beyond. You'll learn the hard way I'm afraid.
In any case, CYA. I don't mean just about that meeting either. Save your money. Don't get into debt unresolvable if you lose your job, because you are going to lose it someday.
It may well be worth it to you to shoot straight and from the hip for moral and ethical reasons, and I have no quarrel with you if you do that. .
So long as those ethics aren't based on some romantic idea of company loyalty.
Tell 'em what you need. Tell 'em why. Then shut up. Don't discuss management issues unless you are payed to manage. They'll only resent it, because that's what they are payed to do, no?
All else failing make a bunch of pirate copies of "Up the Orginization" (after reading it first yourself) and leave them scattered about the Executive lunchroom/washroom.
KFG