There was also a political argument about who should be the root signatory.
Since I would expect that the root signatory is able to forge DNS records for any part of the internet (or some such thing), it might be perhaps cynical of me to suggest that this wasn't entirely the simple prestige thing that everyone claimed it to be.;-)
You take a bunch of mini black holes (as opposed to micro black holes that would evaporate too fast), and charge them. You then arrange for them to be in a flat arrangement at one end of the ship, held in place by the charge.
Because they're (to a reasonable approximation) a flat plane the gravity is linear near the middle of the disk.
It's doubtless possible. The tricky bit is getting hold of the black holes in the first place.
Oh yeah, moving: moving is actually quite easy in principle, if you feed masses into a black hole you can extract quite a bit of the rest energy as they fall in; so it's more or less matter-energy conversion drive; it makes nuclear power look pretty sad;-) You can use the energy to squirt reaction mass out the back at very high speed (somehow- this bits a bit handwavy, but it's possible in principle).
I wouldn't like to bet that the BBC really want to do this though.
It looks to me that they know it's a daft idea, and that they're being politically forced into doing something fundamentally useless in order that the content producers will continue to sell them stuff.
If they make the right sounds, they can let the idea gradually collapse under its own useless weight.
Yes, wax is good, but you need to pick the right wax- you need the wax to melt at a useful temperature- it works by leveraging the latent heat of crystalization; wax has ~170 kj/kg, about 20 kg/kWh.
Depends on the soil. If the soil is alkaline then the carbonic acid (which will form very easily and quickly if the soil isn't bone dry) will react and take the CO2 out.
The point of the drive is not that it enables light speed, or that it saves energy, because it doesn't do either.
The point of the drive is that it would accelerate you and you *don't* feel it!
The drive would accelerate you by gravity. Just like the International Space Station astronauts are still falling towards the Earth, but they can't feel it- you can't feel relativistic gravity either.
So you could accelerate at 1000 times the Earth's surface gravity if you wanted, and not even spill your coffee (potentially, if it works, and it should do).
Of course scaling up an effect that is only faintly sensed on an accelerator the size of the LHC is left as an exercise to the reader;-), but it's fundamental research and you never know where it could lead.
No, no, optical repeaters are deployed reasonably often- I used to work for a company that made them. They're not quite as good in some ways as repeaters that turn the signal back into electricity and then back into light again, because they don't retime the signal, so if you go far enough down the fibre the bits in the signal sort of blur together (in several various ways). You can get around that though by lowering the data rate, so I don't think there's an upper limit on distance with pure optical paths.
The launch pad is a form of concrete, and is not flammable.
The flames are coming from inside the engine, the engine uses the fuel (alcohol) to flow through cooling channels to cool the injectors in the combustion chamber.
When the main valves shut off, there's still some fuel remaining in the cooling channels and this tends to vapourise and burn off even after shutoff- but burning unevenly with the air, rather than the LOX. That's why it's a much cooler reddish flame rather than the much hotter blue flame exhaust in-flight.
The real reason they did it is because if too many things are on the screen at the same time, the game slows down. By limiting the number of bullets, they even out the work load. Otherwise you could have many dozens on the screen and the game play would suffer.... or at least that was the original reason; the original arcade games were really up against performance brick-walls they tried very hard to hide, and nearly always succeeded.
These days it may well be a motif they use, or simply to help with gameplay issues/choices (if you can fire a LOT then the game often becomes quite a bit easier easier).
The problem is still there though to a degree, the complexity of the graphics has tended to climb, and modern hardware doesn't actually usually allow so very many more things moving at the same time, because the graphics are now so much more complex and processor intensive.
I sure hope somebody is going to do the decent thing and vote the above post *funny*.
I mean I seem to have missed the Nostradamus-like prediction where Ayn Rand said something like: "in naughty nine there will be explosion of the water, and it will be because they're underpaid over there."
If so, the people who got terminated might have a case. The company have done the equivalent of tossing you off the table, in the middle of the hand, when you have money in the pot.
"The 1983 incident occurred as the rocket exploded while on the pad, and threw the capsule 6,500 feet into the air, subjecting the cosmonauts to approximately 17g of acceleration."
No, that's not quite right. They activated the escape tower (an idea they unashamedly nicked off the Americans BTW) when there was a fire but *before* the explosion. The escape tower is a high-g get-us-the-hell-away system that is intended not to permanently injure the crew- not *quite*. It's far less likely to work if it's activated after an explosion, but you've got some chance even then.
Not as expensive as the costs to the police of having to go to breakup parties you haven't actually invited anyone to... except, effectively, the police.
"Oh high guys, crisps are over there, you can hang your truncheons up here."
Yeah, and some of them were updated by somebody changing the card;-)
Apollo ran on stone-age technology by today's standards. Some of the functions of the launch vehicle itself relied on *mechanical* timers! Still, it all ran like clockwork... well it would wouldn't it.
Yes, but this is a bad feature not to have, and I'm pretty sure early versions of Mozilla had it, they were much more responsive and then it... went away. The current version of Mozilla has pretty horrible behaviour, with missing clicks, keypresses and freezing for *tens* of seconds. Some of that can very probably be laid at this design 'WONTFIX'. On the same processor Chrome is crisp and responsive. The only downside is the lack of plugins and sometimes adverts can screw with performance, but it's still rarely worse than Mozilla in my experience.
It's not dangerous (you can set the field strengths below the allowed limits, which are pretty conservative anyway).
It is a *bit* inefficient. Wireless are about 30-70% efficient or so. For low power items like cell phones or Ipods that doesn't matter- these devices use very small amounts of power, so inefficiency is not such a big deal (actually batteries are only about 80% efficient anyway).
There's no reason why it would be unreliable; actually it could well be more reliable as there's no connectors or power leads. I for one have destroyed one laptop by tripping over the power lead, so overall reliabilty is probably higher in fact.
Unless the ballot is very close it's extremely easy to get a quick answer to a paper ballot. What you do is just take a *random* cross-section of the votes and count them. Using standard statistical results, unless the result is very close you can get a 99% accurate answer with only a few hundred votes or so. If it's very close then 99% isn't good enough and you need to get a larger cross-section- worse case you end up counting all of them, but that's rare. Then all you do is spend the next few days counting all of the votes to make sure, but that's essentially a formality, and then you declare the official result.
One interesting problem with the theory of faster than light travel, is that in conjunction with special relativity theory (FWIW unlike these weird space bubble theories, SRT is checked literally billions of times every day in particle accelerators), it is possible to build a telephone that you can phone yesterday with.
Needless to say, that causes major problems with causality- you can phone order a hit on yourself yesterday, which would preclude you from making the phone call...
Many plants have very large genomes. That's because plants are very old and have worked out genetic codes for a lot of different scenarios. They are by no means "simple"; they are some of the most complex organisms on earth.
It would be interesting to find out how much of these changes are evolutionary changes and how much are already built into the plants(!)
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you've been touched by His noodly appendage, you're good to go then!
It's done *all* the time; you liquefy the air in a liquefaction plant; the CO2 comes off at one of the taps.
There was also a political argument about who should be the root signatory.
Since I would expect that the root signatory is able to forge DNS records for any part of the internet (or some such thing), it might be perhaps cynical of me to suggest that this wasn't entirely the simple prestige thing that everyone claimed it to be. ;-)
Actually, it is pretty much known how to do this.
You take a bunch of mini black holes (as opposed to micro black holes that would evaporate too fast), and charge them. You then arrange for them to be in a flat arrangement at one end of the ship, held in place by the charge.
Because they're (to a reasonable approximation) a flat plane the gravity is linear near the middle of the disk.
It's doubtless possible. The tricky bit is getting hold of the black holes in the first place.
Oh yeah, moving: moving is actually quite easy in principle, if you feed masses into a black hole you can extract quite a bit of the rest energy as they fall in; so it's more or less matter-energy conversion drive; it makes nuclear power look pretty sad ;-) You can use the energy to squirt reaction mass out the back at very high speed (somehow- this bits a bit handwavy, but it's possible in principle).
I wouldn't like to bet that the BBC really want to do this though.
It looks to me that they know it's a daft idea, and that they're being politically forced into doing something fundamentally useless in order that the content producers will continue to sell them stuff.
If they make the right sounds, they can let the idea gradually collapse under its own useless weight.
Yes, wax is good, but you need to pick the right wax- you need the wax to melt at a useful temperature- it works by leveraging the latent heat of crystalization; wax has ~170 kj/kg, about 20 kg/kWh.
Depends on the soil. If the soil is alkaline then the carbonic acid (which will form very easily and quickly if the soil isn't bone dry) will react and take the CO2 out.
The point of the drive is not that it enables light speed, or that it saves energy, because it doesn't do either.
The point of the drive is that it would accelerate you and you *don't* feel it!
The drive would accelerate you by gravity. Just like the International Space Station astronauts are still falling towards the Earth, but they can't feel it- you can't feel relativistic gravity either.
So you could accelerate at 1000 times the Earth's surface gravity if you wanted, and not even spill your coffee (potentially, if it works, and it should do).
Of course scaling up an effect that is only faintly sensed on an accelerator the size of the LHC is left as an exercise to the reader ;-), but it's fundamental research and you never know where it could lead.
No, no, optical repeaters are deployed reasonably often- I used to work for a company that made them. They're not quite as good in some ways as repeaters that turn the signal back into electricity and then back into light again, because they don't retime the signal, so if you go far enough down the fibre the bits in the signal sort of blur together (in several various ways). You can get around that though by lowering the data rate, so I don't think there's an upper limit on distance with pure optical paths.
The launch pad is a form of concrete, and is not flammable.
The flames are coming from inside the engine, the engine uses the fuel (alcohol) to flow through cooling channels to cool the injectors in the combustion chamber.
When the main valves shut off, there's still some fuel remaining in the cooling channels and this tends to vapourise and burn off even after shutoff- but burning unevenly with the air, rather than the LOX. That's why it's a much cooler reddish flame rather than the much hotter blue flame exhaust in-flight.
The real reason they did it is because if too many things are on the screen at the same time, the game slows down. By limiting the number of bullets, they even out the work load. Otherwise you could have many dozens on the screen and the game play would suffer. ... or at least that was the original reason; the original arcade games were really up against performance brick-walls they tried very hard to hide, and nearly always succeeded.
These days it may well be a motif they use, or simply to help with gameplay issues/choices (if you can fire a LOT then the game often becomes quite a bit easier easier).
The problem is still there though to a degree, the complexity of the graphics has tended to climb, and modern hardware doesn't actually usually allow so very many more things moving at the same time, because the graphics are now so much more complex and processor intensive.
Actually... the German wikipedia uses this feature as a way to check that articles have been vetted, not to prevent changes going live.
My understanding is that the article edits still go live immediately, but the flags are used to help to find and unwind potentially unhelpful edits.
In fact, the English wikipedia hasn't worked out how it's going to be used yet, so it's still all up for grabs.
I sure hope somebody is going to do the decent thing and vote the above post *funny*.
I mean I seem to have missed the Nostradamus-like prediction where Ayn Rand said something like: "in naughty nine there will be explosion of the water, and it will be because they're underpaid over there."
If I've missed it, I'd like a cite. Anyone?
If so, the people who got terminated might have a case. The company have done the equivalent of tossing you off the table, in the middle of the hand, when you have money in the pot.
"The 1983 incident occurred as the rocket exploded while on the pad, and threw the capsule 6,500 feet into the air, subjecting the cosmonauts to approximately 17g of acceleration."
No, that's not quite right. They activated the escape tower (an idea they unashamedly nicked off the Americans BTW) when there was a fire but *before* the explosion. The escape tower is a high-g get-us-the-hell-away system that is intended not to permanently injure the crew- not *quite*. It's far less likely to work if it's activated after an explosion, but you've got some chance even then.
Not as expensive as the costs to the police of having to go to breakup parties you haven't actually invited anyone to... except, effectively, the police.
"Oh high guys, crisps are over there, you can hang your truncheons up here."
Copyright infringement is usually civil though.
Oi-watch it! They've got a camera watching you slag them off you know!
Yeah, and some of them were updated by somebody changing the card ;-)
Apollo ran on stone-age technology by today's standards. Some of the functions of the launch vehicle itself relied on *mechanical* timers! Still, it all ran like clockwork... well it would wouldn't it.
Yes, but this is a bad feature not to have, and I'm pretty sure early versions of Mozilla had it, they were much more responsive and then it... went away. The current version of Mozilla has pretty horrible behaviour, with missing clicks, keypresses and freezing for *tens* of seconds. Some of that can very probably be laid at this design 'WONTFIX'. On the same processor Chrome is crisp and responsive. The only downside is the lack of plugins and sometimes adverts can screw with performance, but it's still rarely worse than Mozilla in my experience.
It's not dangerous (you can set the field strengths below the allowed limits, which are pretty conservative anyway).
It is a *bit* inefficient. Wireless are about 30-70% efficient or so. For low power items like cell phones or Ipods that doesn't matter- these devices use very small amounts of power, so inefficiency is not such a big deal (actually batteries are only about 80% efficient anyway).
There's no reason why it would be unreliable; actually it could well be more reliable as there's no connectors or power leads. I for one have destroyed one laptop by tripping over the power lead, so overall reliabilty is probably higher in fact.
Unless the ballot is very close it's extremely easy to get a quick answer to a paper ballot. What you do is just take a *random* cross-section of the votes and count them. Using standard statistical results, unless the result is very close you can get a 99% accurate answer with only a few hundred votes or so. If it's very close then 99% isn't good enough and you need to get a larger cross-section- worse case you end up counting all of them, but that's rare. Then all you do is spend the next few days counting all of the votes to make sure, but that's essentially a formality, and then you declare the official result.
One interesting problem with the theory of faster than light travel, is that in conjunction with special relativity theory (FWIW unlike these weird space bubble theories, SRT is checked literally billions of times every day in particle accelerators), it is possible to build a telephone that you can phone yesterday with.
Needless to say, that causes major problems with causality- you can phone order a hit on yourself yesterday, which would preclude you from making the phone call...
Yeah, they need to make the engines out of the same stuff they make the blackboxes out of. It's clearly indestructible!
Many plants have very large genomes. That's because plants are very old and have worked out genetic codes for a lot of different scenarios. They are by no means "simple"; they are some of the most complex organisms on earth.
It would be interesting to find out how much of these changes are evolutionary changes and how much are already built into the plants(!)