The abstract says 1) the annoyance was independent of the driving speed of the maglev train,...
The maglev goes faster and when it does it pushes more air than a regular train.The power to move the train increases with the square of the velocity due to air friction. That power is what bystanders are hearing. I couldn't read the study but I'd be curious to see how people rated two trains moving at the same speed.
In any event, if maglev is ever going to prevail, noise is going to have to be dealt with. It can be done either by encasing the train in a tube to isolate the noise or better yet, encase the train in vacuum tube and then really crank up the speed since you're not shoving air out of the way. The inventors of superconducting maglev which uses repulsion instead of attraction like Transrapid figure that a train could go coast to coast in under an hour using the equivalent of about 20 gallons of gas. The cost of course is in building and evacuating a 2000 mile long tunnel.
The planet killers don't show up very often but the little guys show up routinely. A 3 meter piece of ice has about as much energy as a small nuclear warhead.
Just the thing to show up unexpectedly during a face-off such as the Indian/Packistani one a few years back.As it happens, a chunk of something did happen to show up at about the same time except it exploded over the mediterranean instead of the Indian/Pak border.
To me, the immediate value of MIT Linear and JPL's NEAT program isn't in finding the one in 100 million big rocks, it's in spotting these little ones that could be mistaken for a nuke going off at the wrong time.
They added the heat resistant leading edge to the wings in response to the December flight. That cost them 3 months. Prior to the Dec 11 flight, they'd been going up on a fairly routine basis. Now, it's been almost a month since they glide-tested the new edges and they haven't flown since. Either the new edges gave them some undesired flight charateristics or possibly, they're worried about the effect of an unprotected belly as they try to return from 100k up.
Whatever it is, something's got them held up. If they were as open as Carmack has been, we'd all have a better idea as to what it is.
Detroit was faced with the same problem in the 70's. The Japanese were whipping us six ways to Sunday. The unions wanted us to support American-made cars even though they were utter crap. You could go into a showroom and see that the doors were mis-aligned, switches were poorly installed, etc. And that's just what you could see doing a casual inspection. American public said, "I don't think so" and purchased Hondas, Toyotas and Datsuns (now Nissan) They were simply far better products.
Detroit bitched bellered and bawled about it but finally got their act together and started producing a much better product. For Detroit, it was a stark reminder that they couldn't just throw up barriers and hope to have a captive market. It was painful but they came around and are able to compete globally now where in the 70's they were getting creamed.
Same thing is happening to us - we simply have to be able to compete. Whining about unfair competition just makes us look like whiners.
You might ask how you can compete with a $5/hour worker. What I've done is started a small business that uses software I wrote. The business is large enough to support me and a couple of other people but small enough that it doesn't attract competition. Niches abound if you're willing to go look for them. Just don't sit around waiting for someone to hand you a job - get out and create your own job.
A free market economy would have multiple cable providers in an area. True.
But then the concrete on your roads would nver set for cable companies laying down cable. Not true. If the first cable company lays a fat enough conduit, the follow-on companies only need pull cable, not tear up the street. Wet concrete is not the problem.
The problem is, the cities get a kickback from the cable company in exchange for the monopoly license. The city is loathe to give up the revenue source and so grants the monopoly. You, the cable consumer, pay the tax in the form of higher cable fees. Sometimes, the city screws you both ways - both by collecting the hidden tax in the form of the kickback and being up front and tacking on a cable tax.
It's the city's fault that the cable fees are so high - not the FCC's. Let two or more cable companies do business in your area and watch your cable fees drop.
Throwing away information
on
X-43A Hits Mach 7
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm perplexed by the fact that NASA intentionally threw away the plane before they'd done a post-mortem. The airframe could yield an awful lot of information about how well the craft stood up to the stress and yet they just let it sink in the Pacific. Seems to be either a waste of valuable information or suggests that this is more a publicity stunt than science.
I remember the first color show I saw was a Hallmark Special. It was awful - the colors were smudged and speckly and I wondered why anybody would want a color TV. Things stayed that way for several years until I happened to be at a friend's around 1962. They had just bought a brand new TV that put up an image that looked pretty much as they do today and I thought - "Gee (we said Gee back then) - that looks as good as a movie! These color TV's might be pretty nifty (another word we used back then...)"
Meanwhile, another friend of mine's dad was working with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley to develop the Trinitron tube. Sony ended up with the manufacturing rights because not one of the 5 U.S. television companies was interested and the Europeans couldn't manage the manufacturing difficulties.
You can't ignore the economics
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 1
I fail to see why it should be the only possible motive to start exploring space
Economics aren't the only possible motive. It's just that if the process doesn't pay for itself, it isn't sustainable absent some large incentive. Weinberg is arguing that no such incentive exists.
I gave up trying to work with AOL over a year ago. Now, whenever a new client signs up for our service and they tell me they use AOL, I suggest they go with another ISP. I explain to them that the weekly reports we send to our customers get to them by 8 AM the next day unless they're an AOL customer in which case it's a craps shoot as to whether they'll get the email or not.
They usually blow me off until the third or fourth time they call wondering why they haven't received their weekly status report at which point they'll ask for recommendations as to which ISP to go to. The final piece de resistance is when they start raving about how much simpler email is now that they don't have to slog their way through all the ads.
The computations aren't that hard given the quality of data they have to work with. A lot of these objects are spotted once and never seen again for a variety of reasons. What's needed are more data, not more cpu cycles.
Amatuer astronomers continue to make significant contributions to the field. It was an amatuer who first noticed that al0667 might hit the earth and it was another amatuer who recorded the key observation that placed the same object on a safe trajectory. If you're serious about wanting to help spot these things, you can start here.
To win the X-Prize they would need 3 people in the SSO.
The ship only has to have accomodations for three people. The rules allow for substituting ballast for the passenger's weight and letting the single pilot go up alone. The relevant rule is
3. The flight vehicle must be flown twice within a 14-day period. Each flight must carry at least one person, to minimum altitude of 100 km (62 miles). The flight vehicle must be built with the capacity (weight and volume) to carry a minimum of 3 adults of height 188 cm (6 feet 2 inches) and weight 90 kg (198 pounds) each. Three people of this size or larger must be able to enter, occupy, and be fastened into the flight vehicle on Earth's surface prior to take-off, and equivalent ballast must be carried in-flight if the number of persons on-board during flight is less than 3 persons.
I installed an 80 mm Panaflow on top of a $30 all-copper heatsink to cut the noise from my computer but it didn't do much. As soon as the cpu fan noise was gone, the power supply noise was that much more noticeable. I ended up installing a new power supply. It was the best $80 I ever spent. The combination of a quiet cpu fan and quiet power supply result in a reasonably quiet computer. Not dead silent but at least it's no longer objectionable.
Watch out- that's a slippery slope you're on. The next thing you'll realize is that cable is pretty worthless altogether and you'll wonder why you subscribe at all.
The best part happens about 3 or 4 years after you cancel your subscription. The cable company starts sending you all kinds of offers to try to re-addict you. First three months free! No hookup fee! Most of the shows I used to watch are available on DVD so I don't feel the need to resubscribe. Perhaps if Netflix hadn't come along it would have been a different story but then if the queen had balls she'd have been king.
The one thing that all the conspiracies have in common is someone is selling a book that will tell you all the secrets that are being covered up. Buy the book and then "YOU TOO WILL KNOW WHAT THEY AREN'T TELLING YOU!!!!!" or "DON"T BE CAUGHT UNAWARES! BUY THIS BOOK TO KNOW THE ***REAL*** TRUTH!"
Only problem is I'm not sure what the fake truth is.
Way back when I was old enough to have started reading/. but there wasn't any such thing, a company called Xerox sold computers. They had a proprietary operating system that turned out to have a rather glaring hole in it - a user-level program could take over the entire machine by exploiting the weakness. The hole was discovered by a couple of Xerox employees out in the field (read customer service) who promptly wrote up a bug report. The report was ignored. So they sent another which was also ignored.
So, thinking that the only way to get headquarter's attention that the bug was a serious problem, they wrote a program called Robin Hood. They mailed the program to headquarters where an unsuspecting computer operator executed it. Robin Hood typed a message on the console that said something to the effect, "Friar Tuck where are you?" Seeing that Friar Tuck wasn't running, Robin Hood fired off a copy of himself. The two programs started spinning tape drives, conversing with each other on the console, took over the line printer, and punched cards with abandon. When the sysop would attempt to kill one process, the other process would resurrect it. "Robin Hood! I'm fatally wounded!" "Never fear Friar Tuck! I'll save you!" and so it went.
The only way to kill both processes was to pull the plug. Wouldn't ya know? The necessary patch was in the next OS release.
The ethical way to do this is to hack a Diebold and then have the election officials vote for one of two candidates. Tell them they have to vote for candidate B. Have them go through all their procedures and then show them that candidate A won the election though they all voted for candidate B. Diebold keeps harping on the fact that they print a report at the end of the polling process that says how many votes the various candidates got - this demonstration should show the officials that the report is meaningless without each voter being able to verify that their vote was recorded as they expected.
They would then come back and say "But you had to have access to the machine to hack it." The response to that is "Can you guarantee that no one will have illegal access to these machines? Even in San Francisco? New York? Pokipsi?" Of course, they can't do that.
Best case is the paper ballot would then be counted separately to verify the touchscreen. The reason Diebold is fighting this idea is that it doubles the cost of their solution and makes people realize, "Gee if we're going to count paper anyway, why bother with all this fancy touch screen stuff? Why not just count paper and be done with it."
There's a lot of money riding on this issue so the election officials who mistakenly chose Diebold machines aren't going to admit they were wrong to do so unless a Friar-Tuck like hole is demonstrated to them. May as well have the press there as well because last thing you want to see happen is show the officials how you hacked the box and then they try to hush it up.
I don't know what "the gravitational sign" is, let alone whether it "reverses".
This is what I'm thinking of. Say you're in earth orbit and as a result, are constantly being accelerated towards the earth. What the actual magnitude is depends on where you are but think of any acceleration that points "down towards earth" as negative. You now move towards the moon until the moon's gravity on you is stronger than the earth's at which point you start to fall towards the moon. Your acceleration vector has changed direction and hence its sign has changed from pointing in a "negative" direction to a "positive" direction. Where the sign flips over depends on the position of the moon and earth.
Similarly, if you could somehow manage to hover just inside the event horizon and another black hole moves by as it orbits your black hole, you'll feel the second black hole pull you just as the moon did when you crossed into its gravity well. But if you feel the second black hole pull you, that means your black hole isn't pulling on you quite as hard as it was before the second black hole passed by. If that happens, the original event horizon has just dropped below where you are - it has momentarily shrunk in response to the passing black hole. If you happen to be a photon whose vector is in any direction away from the black hole, you're free to go. You've just escaped from a black hole.
I'm having trouble seeing what's wrong with that scenario.
The evidence is in the fucking link I provided! Alrighty then - let's go to your link. Gee, look what it says:
But even the best vacuum pump can pull water up to a height of only 32 ft or so. This is because a column of water that high exerts a pressure (~15 lb/in2) just counterbalanced by the pressure of the atmosphere. How can water be drawn to the top of a sequoia or Douglas fir that may be 300 feet high? Taking all factors into account, a pull of at least 150 lb/in2 is probably needed.
Shit, I don't know what's worse, the stubborn refusal to read the text provided or the ignorant mods that keep moding this tripe up. Yeah, I agree. Next time read the text you link to.
The most important action that allows water to go up in those big trees is negative pressure at the leaves, created by the evaporation of water.
Hmmm, you should have paid attention in your freshman physics class. No such thing as "negative pressure." What you meant to say was "lower relative pressure" and even then you're still wrong. Even if the leaves managed to lower the air pressure above their surface to zero psi, which of course they can't, the highest you can lift water via air pressure differential is 10.3 meters. A water column 10.3 meters high weighs as much as a column of air reaching from sea level to the top of the atmosphere.
If you want to move water to the top of a sequoia, you've got to use some mechanism other than air pressure differentials. In fact, had you carefully read the page you linked to, you would have noticed that transpiration peters out at around 32 feet.
I think the important thing is that people won't have to write for two architectures now.
Eventually, they'll have no choice. Bob Colwell, a former P4 architect, gave an interesting talk which basically said x86 is running out of steam due to, among other things, carrying compatibility baggage going all the way back to early DOS.
Slashdot Mirror
The maglev goes faster and when it does it pushes more air than a regular train.The power to move the train increases with the square of the velocity due to air friction. That power is what bystanders are hearing. I couldn't read the study but I'd be curious to see how people rated two trains moving at the same speed.
In any event, if maglev is ever going to prevail, noise is going to have to be dealt with. It can be done either by encasing the train in a tube to isolate the noise or better yet, encase the train in vacuum tube and then really crank up the speed since you're not shoving air out of the way. The inventors of superconducting maglev which uses repulsion instead of attraction like Transrapid figure that a train could go coast to coast in under an hour using the equivalent of about 20 gallons of gas. The cost of course is in building and evacuating a 2000 mile long tunnel.
Just the thing to show up unexpectedly during a face-off such as the Indian/Packistani one a few years back.As it happens, a chunk of something did happen to show up at about the same time except it exploded over the mediterranean instead of the Indian/Pak border.
To me, the immediate value of MIT Linear and JPL's NEAT program isn't in finding the one in 100 million big rocks, it's in spotting these little ones that could be mistaken for a nuke going off at the wrong time.
Whatever it is, something's got them held up. If they were as open as Carmack has been, we'd all have a better idea as to what it is.
Detroit was faced with the same problem in the 70's. The Japanese were whipping us six ways to Sunday. The unions wanted us to support American-made cars even though they were utter crap. You could go into a showroom and see that the doors were mis-aligned, switches were poorly installed, etc. And that's just what you could see doing a casual inspection. American public said, "I don't think so" and purchased Hondas, Toyotas and Datsuns (now Nissan) They were simply far better products.
Detroit bitched bellered and bawled about it but finally got their act together and started producing a much better product. For Detroit, it was a stark reminder that they couldn't just throw up barriers and hope to have a captive market. It was painful but they came around and are able to compete globally now where in the 70's they were getting creamed.
Same thing is happening to us - we simply have to be able to compete. Whining about unfair competition just makes us look like whiners.
You might ask how you can compete with a $5/hour worker. What I've done is started a small business that uses software I wrote. The business is large enough to support me and a couple of other people but small enough that it doesn't attract competition. Niches abound if you're willing to go look for them. Just don't sit around waiting for someone to hand you a job - get out and create your own job.
True.
But then the concrete on your roads would nver set for cable companies laying down cable.
Not true. If the first cable company lays a fat enough conduit, the follow-on companies only need pull cable, not tear up the street. Wet concrete is not the problem.
The problem is, the cities get a kickback from the cable company in exchange for the monopoly license. The city is loathe to give up the revenue source and so grants the monopoly. You, the cable consumer, pay the tax in the form of higher cable fees. Sometimes, the city screws you both ways - both by collecting the hidden tax in the form of the kickback and being up front and tacking on a cable tax.
It's the city's fault that the cable fees are so high - not the FCC's. Let two or more cable companies do business in your area and watch your cable fees drop.
I'm perplexed by the fact that NASA intentionally threw away the plane before they'd done a post-mortem. The airframe could yield an awful lot of information about how well the craft stood up to the stress and yet they just let it sink in the Pacific. Seems to be either a waste of valuable information or suggests that this is more a publicity stunt than science.
Isn't that what you put on fish?
Meanwhile, another friend of mine's dad was working with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley to develop the Trinitron tube. Sony ended up with the manufacturing rights because not one of the 5 U.S. television companies was interested and the Europeans couldn't manage the manufacturing difficulties.
Economics aren't the only possible motive. It's just that if the process doesn't pay for itself, it isn't sustainable absent some large incentive. Weinberg is arguing that no such incentive exists.
They usually blow me off until the third or fourth time they call wondering why they haven't received their weekly status report at which point they'll ask for recommendations as to which ISP to go to. The final piece de resistance is when they start raving about how much simpler email is now that they don't have to slog their way through all the ads.
This post has the story straight.
Will my shoelaces suffice?
Amatuer astronomers continue to make significant contributions to the field. It was an amatuer who first noticed that al0667 might hit the earth and it was another amatuer who recorded the key observation that placed the same object on a safe trajectory. If you're serious about wanting to help spot these things, you can start here.
The ship only has to have accomodations for three people. The rules allow for substituting ballast for the passenger's weight and letting the single pilot go up alone. The relevant rule is
I installed an 80 mm Panaflow on top of a $30 all-copper heatsink to cut the noise from my computer but it didn't do much. As soon as the cpu fan noise was gone, the power supply noise was that much more noticeable. I ended up installing a new power supply. It was the best $80 I ever spent. The combination of a quiet cpu fan and quiet power supply result in a reasonably quiet computer. Not dead silent but at least it's no longer objectionable.
The best part happens about 3 or 4 years after you cancel your subscription. The cable company starts sending you all kinds of offers to try to re-addict you. First three months free! No hookup fee! Most of the shows I used to watch are available on DVD so I don't feel the need to resubscribe. Perhaps if Netflix hadn't come along it would have been a different story but then if the queen had balls she'd have been king.
Only problem is I'm not sure what the fake truth is.
So, thinking that the only way to get headquarter's attention that the bug was a serious problem, they wrote a program called Robin Hood. They mailed the program to headquarters where an unsuspecting computer operator executed it. Robin Hood typed a message on the console that said something to the effect, "Friar Tuck where are you?" Seeing that Friar Tuck wasn't running, Robin Hood fired off a copy of himself. The two programs started spinning tape drives, conversing with each other on the console, took over the line printer, and punched cards with abandon. When the sysop would attempt to kill one process, the other process would resurrect it.
"Robin Hood! I'm fatally wounded!"
"Never fear Friar Tuck! I'll save you!" and so it went.
The only way to kill both processes was to pull the plug. Wouldn't ya know? The necessary patch was in the next OS release.
The ethical way to do this is to hack a Diebold and then have the election officials vote for one of two candidates. Tell them they have to vote for candidate B. Have them go through all their procedures and then show them that candidate A won the election though they all voted for candidate B. Diebold keeps harping on the fact that they print a report at the end of the polling process that says how many votes the various candidates got - this demonstration should show the officials that the report is meaningless without each voter being able to verify that their vote was recorded as they expected.
They would then come back and say "But you had to have access to the machine to hack it." The response to that is "Can you guarantee that no one will have illegal access to these machines? Even in San Francisco? New York? Pokipsi?" Of course, they can't do that.
Best case is the paper ballot would then be counted separately to verify the touchscreen. The reason Diebold is fighting this idea is that it doubles the cost of their solution and makes people realize, "Gee if we're going to count paper anyway, why bother with all this fancy touch screen stuff? Why not just count paper and be done with it."
There's a lot of money riding on this issue so the election officials who mistakenly chose Diebold machines aren't going to admit they were wrong to do so unless a Friar-Tuck like hole is demonstrated to them. May as well have the press there as well because last thing you want to see happen is show the officials how you hacked the box and then they try to hush it up.
This is what I'm thinking of. Say you're in earth orbit and as a result, are constantly being accelerated towards the earth. What the actual magnitude is depends on where you are but think of any acceleration that points "down towards earth" as negative. You now move towards the moon until the moon's gravity on you is stronger than the earth's at which point you start to fall towards the moon. Your acceleration vector has changed direction and hence its sign has changed from pointing in a "negative" direction to a "positive" direction. Where the sign flips over depends on the position of the moon and earth.
Similarly, if you could somehow manage to hover just inside the event horizon and another black hole moves by as it orbits your black hole, you'll feel the second black hole pull you just as the moon did when you crossed into its gravity well. But if you feel the second black hole pull you, that means your black hole isn't pulling on you quite as hard as it was before the second black hole passed by. If that happens, the original event horizon has just dropped below where you are - it has momentarily shrunk in response to the passing black hole. If you happen to be a photon whose vector is in any direction away from the black hole, you're free to go. You've just escaped from a black hole.
I'm having trouble seeing what's wrong with that scenario.
The evidence is in the fucking link I provided!
Alrighty then - let's go to your link. Gee, look what it says:
Shit, I don't know what's worse, the stubborn refusal to read the text provided or the ignorant mods that keep moding this tripe up.
Yeah, I agree. Next time read the text you link to.
Am I wrong about the gravitional sign reversal as the black holes approach each other?
Hmmm, you should have paid attention in your freshman physics class. No such thing as "negative pressure." What you meant to say was "lower relative pressure" and even then you're still wrong. Even if the leaves managed to lower the air pressure above their surface to zero psi, which of course they can't, the highest you can lift water via air pressure differential is 10.3 meters. A water column 10.3 meters high weighs as much as a column of air reaching from sea level to the top of the atmosphere.
If you want to move water to the top of a sequoia, you've got to use some mechanism other than air pressure differentials. In fact, had you carefully read the page you linked to, you would have noticed that transpiration peters out at around 32 feet.
Kajillion-bazillion dollars sounds like a lot to me. Are you sure that's not hype?
Which leads to the obvious question - why don't they just call it WindowsMe-2?
Eventually, they'll have no choice. Bob Colwell, a former P4 architect, gave an interesting talk which basically said x86 is running out of steam due to, among other things, carrying compatibility baggage going all the way back to early DOS.