At first I was trying to figure out what Trademark law had to do with this. After a search or two, I found this info. Just an FYI for anyone who wants to know what the parent is talking about.
To the parent: thanks for the info! This may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. If the judge awards IBM damages for violation of the Lanham Act, IBM might just end up owning the Unix licensing business! (Through liquidation of assets during bankruptcy procedures, in case anyone's interested.)
Isn't this libel by SCO? Unless they can show substantial evidence, they are tarnishing IBM's reputation for personal gain. Even then, this is the type of thing that should be restricted to court. Would IBM be able to sue for wrongful damages?
Even so...solar cells typically have efficiencies in the 20% range, and they tend not to be happy at high temperature.
That's actually why I wouldn't recommend using standard Solar Panels for such a station. I was just using them as an example. Pulling the necessary info from the 'net is worse than untrained dentistry, but my opinion is that converting the heat to energy may be a bit easier, and definitely more efficient. Place a heating surface toward the Sun, a cooling surface away from the Sun, and some Stirling engines in between. The very operation of the engine should cool the heating surface, and produce quite a bit of energy. Would it be more efficient than solar panels? I would like to think so, but I don't know that for a fact.
Antimatter production is about 0.000001% efficient in current facilities, but they're not designed with antimatter production in mind. Applying favourable estimates and solid engineering, it is speculated that we can get an extra four orders of magnitude in efficiency, up to the neighbourhood of 0.01%.
Correct. That's where my 0.01% figure came from.
Unless we develop some new physics, we're stuck there, but I'm willing to concede another two orders of magnitude in efficiency gains--chalk it up to 'cleverness'.
I don't think we need any "new physics". Just a better way to reverse the spin of particles. Right now, particle accelerators are the only method we've managed to create. But if antimatter entered common usage, you'd get more minds working on the problem.
As you noted, even with 100% efficient energy conversion at each step, you're only pushing a kilogram per year at 0.9c. Yer gonna need more silicon football fields in space. Thousands of them, for manned travel.
Indeed. Early craft will probably *have* to be unmanned probes with highly capable radio equipment. Still, even that would be an amazing achievement. It always helps when you can give people a dream that they feel could be accomplished.:-)
As for the number of silicon football fields, it wouldn't surprise me if these were created before anyone considered using them for antimatter. Human beings are becoming more energy hungry, because we always want to go somewhere in a hurry. We're quickly outstripping the energy the Sun is providing to our planet, and even a move to nuclear materials would only provide a few centuries of reprieve. Moving to space would allow us to mine more nuclear materials, but would it be enough to meet our growing energy demands?
The Sun currently wastes more energy than we would know what to do with. As a result, I see it becoming a very popular choice for power providers who can place a station in a close orbit and never have to worry about fuel costs. The energy could then be beamed to a more useful location (e.g. a frozen comet) where it can be used to create fuels or add power to the grid.
It is still Democracy, but not pure Democracy but Representative Democracy.
Which is the very definition of a Republic. The reason why "Republic" has bad connotations is that so many third world countries added "Republic" to their name in an attempt to make themselves appear legitimate. In reality, they were no more "Republics" than the USSR was.
The thing is the speed of light in water is 2/3's the speed of light elsewhere so particles can easily go faster than light does
Strictly speaking, what you're saying is not correct. Photons (who's speed we're measuring) always travel at "light speed". When light "travels" through a medium, it's not actually traveling. Rather, the photons are absorbed and then recreated by the particles. This gives "light waves" a speed less than "light speed", but the speed of the photons never changed.
Redoing the numbers to correct 1 Newton = 1 kg/m^2/s^2:
1 Newton = 1 Joule/m 1 Newton = 1 kg/m/s^2 1 Kilogram at 9.81m^2 = 9.81 Newtons 9.81 Newtons = 9.81 Joules/m/sec^2
1 Light Year = 9.46e15 meters 4 * 9.46e15 light years * 9.81 J/m = 3.71e17 Joules
So for 15.21 metric tons, we'd be looking at an energy requirement of:
15,210 * 3.71e17 J = 5.64e21 Joules
So it seems that I've invented a method for travel inside the solar system, as opposed to engines for interstellar travel. But what if there was a a tremendous increase in efficiency? Would we be able to produce enough antimatter for interstellar travel?
Returning to the output of the sun on our football field:
So the energy is there, we just can't access it without serious improvements to our efficiency in creating antimatter. If advances are made to get the overall process up to a few percent of efficiency (the current process I'm proposing would be.002% efficient), interstellar travel could become slightly more realistic.
You forgot to do the kinetic energy calculation. I'm neglecting relativistic effects out of laziness. At 0.99c (a bit less than 3E8 m/s), each kilogram of spaceship would have kinetic energy of roughly 4.4E16 joules.
Relativity states that a craft notice no change in mass from its own frame of reference. As long as the fuel is contained aboard the spaceship (the rocket formula), its mass will increase along with the rest of the ship's. Only an outside observer will see the ship struggle as it gets closer to light speed. This is because aboard ship, it's impossible to tell if it's actually moving or everything else in the Universe is moving. All the occupants know is that the ship will reach a given destination. Since that is their goal, it does not matter if they are moving toward the planet, or the planet is moving toward them.
As for the.99c, who says we need to reach that speed? The parent asked for something "near light speed".,9c will do just fine. Let's take a trip of 4 light years as an example. According to this calculator, such a trip would take a relativistic time of 3.4 years. Using one year of energy generated by one of our sun power plants, let's see how many kilograms we can send to Alpha Centauri. Here's the math, so I can be checked:
1 Newton ~= 1 Joule 1 Newton = 1 kg/m/s^2 1 Kilogram at 9.81m^2 = 9.81 Newtons 9.81 Newtons = 9.81 Joules/sec
1 Year = 60*60*24*365 = 31,536,000 seconds 3.4 years * 9.81 Joules = 3.09e8 Joules 4.7e12 Joules / 3.09e8 Joules = 15,210 kilograms of ship
The figures seem to check in my books. So it seems we can send 15.2 metric tons there on one year's worth of fuel. Of course, it's a good idea to wait for another year's worth of fuel so we can get them back.
Feel free to respond. I love sinking my teeth into this stuff.:-)
That's why you track all large objects in your way before embarking on your trip. Calculations can be done to find where the objects will be at what time.
Besides, space is a pretty big place. The chances for a collision with a large object are very, very small. As for micro-particles, one suggestion is to use ice for the skin of the ship. By flowing new sheets of water onto the skin of the ship, it can be constantly repaired from whatever damage travel inflicts on it.:-)
BTW, I think the calculator I used gave an incorrect distance traveled. I think it was running into an overflow situation and blew up. This calculator is a bit more accurate. A 1G trip of 4 light years, taking into account the deceleration at the half-way mark, gives the following results:
Trip length: 4.0 light years. Acceleration: 1.0 g. Time on earth: 5.614136130857504 years. Time on ship: 3.460041443177856 years.
BTW, you all might be interesting in knowing how long a million light-year space-flight might take:
Trip length: 1000000.0 light years. Acceleration: 1.0 g. Time on earth: 1000289.2434369829 years. Time on ship: 26.837453649066713 years.
Only 26 years! How's that for fascinating data!:-)
Of course, if you were to measure the distance in light years, you'd find that the distance between your source and destination had shrunk. Or did light speed up? Or did time dilate? That pesky relativity keeps getting in the way!
We normally measure velocity as distance over time. If you were to use the distance figures given when you were on Earth, you'd find that you arrived at your destination faster than the speed of light. The problem is that you're mixing two frames of reference. If you were to take the measurements again from your spacecraft, you'd find that space-time dilated on you, thus decreasing your distance.
Surprisingly, my plan isn't all that far fetched. Fermilab has stated that the primary limitation to creating antimatter is power, and NASA has a wide variety of plans on the drawing boards for antimatter engines. One of them (utilizing antimatter-enhanced fission) is being constructed by NASA as we speak. The reason why the other engines are not being built is that there's no antimatter to power them. With our current supplies, a pure antimatter craft would never make it off the ground.
As for converting the Sun's energy into usable energy, I actually see that as being a highly feasible proposition. If I were an aerospace engineer (which sadly I'm not), I would look into converting the energy via Stirling engines or the like. These would automatically cool the station while generating power at a high efficiency. With a solar panel design, you'd probably need to rotate the station on a parallel axis to the sun (i.e. perpendicular to your orbital plane) to obtain the necessary cooling.
So how do we get the suggested station, or a smaller version, there? By building a space economy! Existing NERVA engines more than suffice for space travel, being at about 2-4x more efficient than current engines. Launch facilities could be made cheaper through large scale launches like the Sea Dragon. Using these methods, we could put large stations in orbit cheaply, use them to build ships, and then make an economy out of asteroid mining, tourism, military, and colonization.
The real "hard part" has very little to do with theoretical physics or engineering. The real "hard part" is solving the chicken and the egg problem of getting the funding and tonnage into space to begin with. No one wants to fund space travel until there's an economic incentive, but there will be no economic incentive until we get into space. Gotta love economics.
Believe it or not, the speed of light is easy to "beat". It's just a problem of "beating it" in some usable fashion.
For example, quantum tunneling allows a particle to travel faster than light for a mere instant of a second by stealing energy from nearby particles. In the end, however, it has to pay back the energy it used. This means that its net velocity never exceeded light speed.
On the more macro level, there is a theory that wormholes could be used to circumvent light speed. Unfortunately, no one knows how to generate enough energy, or where to find the "exotic matter" to create them.
Another (possibly even more credible) theory on FTL travel, is the Alcubierre Drive, often confused with the Star Trek notion of a "Warp Drive". Again, the core problem is that we have no idea where the energy for such a craft would come from.
If none of this suits your fancy, then just load up on a few kilotons of Antimatter, and blast off toward the edge of the Universe at 1G of acceleration. Thanks to the dilation of space-time, you should be able to reach the edge of the known Universe in barely a few years time! Of course, there's this slight issue with Earth no longer existing by the time you got back...
Even if the spacecraft and occupants were composed of 100% fissile uranium, you'd still have trouble getting close to the speed of light. e=mc^2.
Actually e=mc^2 says we've got more than enough energy to spare. The problem is that fission only converts a small portion of the mater into energy. OTOH, antimatter could possibly give us enough energy to reach light speeds. That is, light speeds relative to Earth. From your own position on a space craft, you'd easily exceed light speed relative to the Earth. Of course, if you were to measure the distance in light years, you'd find that the distance between your source and destination had shrunk. Or did light speed up? Or did time dilate? That pesky relativity keeps getting in the way!
Even more annoying, is that your rocket fuel would grow in mass along with your ship, so you'd see no increase or decrease in your engines efficiency. Err... wait a minute. That's not annoying. That means that if you start out at 1G of acceleration, you can maintain 1G of acceleration at a constant rate of fuel burn! Woohoo! We found the loophole! (/enlightening sarcasm)
You might find my post on Antimatter drives to be quite interesting.:-)
Sorry, but light speed, or anything near light speed, just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Odd as it may seem, "something near it" isn't that big of a problem. What we need is lots and lots of antimatter, and working engines that use it. Now here's the difficulty: where do we get the antimatter from? We believe we can make as much as we need, if we just had enough power. Unfortunately, with a efficiency conversion of 0.01% (i.e. for every megajoule you put in, you get 100 joules worth of anitmatter.), we just don't have the power reserves here on Earth to create enough. What would be nice is if we had a super-powerful fusion reactor that could run for billions of years without maintenance. Now where are we going to find one of those...
Did you know that the Earth receives about 1.3kw per square meter from the Sun? If I did my calculations right, a station placed at about 0.1 au should receive about 1,387kw per square meter. If we were to construct a station with a power collecting surface the size of a football field (109.73m x 48.78m = 5,352m^2), it would receive about 7.4gw of power from the sun.
First we must assume that there is some loss in the power conversion method. Let's say the first station uses primitive solar panels with an efficiency of 20%. That leaves us with 1.4gw of power. Assuming that the station had the facilities necessary to transform all that power into antimatter, it would be capable of producing 148kw of antimatter per second, or about 12.8gw worth of antimatter per day! If more than one station was built, then antimatter production could be high enough to regularly send ships to Alpha Centauri.
Using this calculator, we find that at 1G of acceleration, we could reach 99% of light speed (relative to Earth) in about a year of acceleration. In that time, our ship would have traveled about.22 light years.
Would anyone like to check my figures? I'd love to make sure I'm getting those power figures correct.:-)
It doesn't matter if it's Quake or Quake II. They're both good, as long as they can run Star Trek: The Quake Simulation! My wife and I used to spend a lot of time Deathmatching in that level. Batleths, phasers, warp core ejection, transporters, shuttle bay, sickbay, hyposprays, quad damage, personal cloak, etc. That level had EVERYTHING!:-)
And it's been said before (including by your article) that nipples are not intuitive. You have to teach babies how to use it. Thank God they're fast learners. I don't think I could withstood someone freaking out about the kid not eating.;-)
While I've always had a love/hate relationship with RealPlayer (love the streaming format, hate the business practices), there's always been one thing that's made them useless on the Linux/Unix platform. It didn't support fullscreen play!
Does this new version support fullscreen playback? That's really the only feature I care about.
They didn't. There are two different events that people confuse:
1. Sun spent hundreds of millions of dollars on proper Unix licensing. This happened long before the SCO debacle.
2. Sun purchased a boat-load of x86 drivers for Solaris x86 at a decent price. This happened right about the time SCO was coming out with their claims, so it made Sun look bad.
The second event is not all that odd when you consider that Sun had just decided to finally work out the bugs from Solaris x86. (Sun had tried to kill the OS nary six months before this. The market didn't take too kindly to that.)
The kernel is written in C. The high level stuff is written in C and C++.
Yeah, some other guy pointed out that I was thinking of Minuet.
The AtheOS kernel has always been about 95% POSIX compliant. There are no KDE or GTK API's for Syllable; it has always had it's own C++ API and appserver.
Hold on a sec here. I'm pretty sure this was one of those pieces of history I'm not screwing up on. As I remember it, there was no attempt by the AtheOS author to be POSIX compliant except for the purpose of running BASH and a few other utilities.
Later on, I remember that KHTML and other KDE software was ported to AtheOS. How you guys did that, I don't know, since AtheOS lacked X11. An X11 mapping perhaps? Which would (hopefully) allow you to support the KDE libs with a simple recompile.
As to the complexity of Linux issue. It appears to me that Syllable is a Linux based system
Incorrect.
using Gnome
Incorrect.
and it looks similar to Fedora in some ways.
Probably superficial.
So I ask you, how can a Linux system be less complex than Linux?
Because it's not Linux. They swiped the icons. IIRC, AtheOS was written in 100% assembler as a pet project by the guy who wrote it. He (and others) later built some POSIX, KDE and GTK API mappings so that Linux and Unix software could be compiled and used.
Yep, remember these are the same guys that helped fund SCO's FUD... and "saw problems" with "IP" aspects of Linux...
No, they didn't "see" any problems with Linux IP. They said they had complete, perpetual, and air-tight licenses for Unix that would allow them to easily indemnify their customers against any attack from "Unix IP holders". Sun long ago made sure to cover their bases on Unix IP, so SCO would literally not be able to get past a preliminary hearing if they were to sue Sun.
Perhaps my explanation has been lacking some clarity, I have nothing against drama or making the reader think. I have a problem with the author's conclusions. In your example, the man struggled with his own humanity and made a decision. That's why the final scene was dramatic.
In this case the character does very little struggling. An event that should completely devastate any normal human being, merely makes the character "feel bad". There is no inner struggle to come to terms with what happened. He buys his sweater and presumably goes on with life.
One could imagine a situation whereby his humanity was somehow stripped from him. But what is the rationale for that occurrence in this book? There's no tangible antagonist. In fact, it sounds like all of human kind has become lazy and conceited just because there's a data feed in his head. How does this force him to lose his humanity? Does no one in this society care to philosophize on the human condition? Where did all those works of Shakespeare that are currently scattered across the 'net, go? If no one is educated, how is society maintained?
It doesn't make any sense. Drama makes sense. It deals with the human condition head on, rather than avoiding it as if it didn't exist.
For my suggestion of a far more dramatic ending, read the last paragraph of this post.
The plot is not what I have an issue with. The author's conclusions are my primary concern. He concludes that it is possible and even desirable to no longer *be* human. The author asks no relevant questions about the human condition, he merely creates a story of a franken-society with no soul. Even more frustrating is that such a failure to ask these questions only results in more questions about how such a thing could happen.
Where were the thinkers, dreamers, historians, artists, and great authors? How did they allow these things to happen? Did these soulful people die in a major catastrophe or something? How could one have a direct data line into their head without having access to the thought provoking works of history? Who was the antagonist who forced this sheep-like state on society? How is society maintained when there apparently no longer exists anyone with sufficient intelligence and education to advance science and industry?
Slashdot Mirror
At first I was trying to figure out what Trademark law had to do with this. After a search or two, I found this info. Just an FYI for anyone who wants to know what the parent is talking about.
To the parent: thanks for the info! This may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. If the judge awards IBM damages for violation of the Lanham Act, IBM might just end up owning the Unix licensing business! (Through liquidation of assets during bankruptcy procedures, in case anyone's interested.)
Isn't this libel by SCO? Unless they can show substantial evidence, they are tarnishing IBM's reputation for personal gain. Even then, this is the type of thing that should be restricted to court. Would IBM be able to sue for wrongful damages?
That's still a heck of an if...
:-)
:-)
Chalk it up to "what the future may hold".
Even so...solar cells typically have efficiencies in the 20% range, and they tend not to be happy at high temperature.
That's actually why I wouldn't recommend using standard Solar Panels for such a station. I was just using them as an example. Pulling the necessary info from the 'net is worse than untrained dentistry, but my opinion is that converting the heat to energy may be a bit easier, and definitely more efficient. Place a heating surface toward the Sun, a cooling surface away from the Sun, and some Stirling engines in between. The very operation of the engine should cool the heating surface, and produce quite a bit of energy. Would it be more efficient than solar panels? I would like to think so, but I don't know that for a fact.
Antimatter production is about 0.000001% efficient in current facilities, but they're not designed with antimatter production in mind. Applying favourable estimates and solid engineering, it is speculated that we can get an extra four orders of magnitude in efficiency, up to the neighbourhood of 0.01%.
Correct. That's where my 0.01% figure came from.
Unless we develop some new physics, we're stuck there, but I'm willing to concede another two orders of magnitude in efficiency gains--chalk it up to 'cleverness'.
I don't think we need any "new physics". Just a better way to reverse the spin of particles. Right now, particle accelerators are the only method we've managed to create. But if antimatter entered common usage, you'd get more minds working on the problem.
As you noted, even with 100% efficient energy conversion at each step, you're only pushing a kilogram per year at 0.9c. Yer gonna need more silicon football fields in space. Thousands of them, for manned travel.
Indeed. Early craft will probably *have* to be unmanned probes with highly capable radio equipment. Still, even that would be an amazing achievement. It always helps when you can give people a dream that they feel could be accomplished.
As for the number of silicon football fields, it wouldn't surprise me if these were created before anyone considered using them for antimatter. Human beings are becoming more energy hungry, because we always want to go somewhere in a hurry. We're quickly outstripping the energy the Sun is providing to our planet, and even a move to nuclear materials would only provide a few centuries of reprieve. Moving to space would allow us to mine more nuclear materials, but would it be enough to meet our growing energy demands?
The Sun currently wastes more energy than we would know what to do with. As a result, I see it becoming a very popular choice for power providers who can place a station in a close orbit and never have to worry about fuel costs. The energy could then be beamed to a more useful location (e.g. a frozen comet) where it can be used to create fuels or add power to the grid.
It is still Democracy, but not pure Democracy but Representative Democracy.
Which is the very definition of a Republic. The reason why "Republic" has bad connotations is that so many third world countries added "Republic" to their name in an attempt to make themselves appear legitimate. In reality, they were no more "Republics" than the USSR was.
The thing is the speed of light in water is 2/3's the speed of light elsewhere so particles can easily go faster than light does
Strictly speaking, what you're saying is not correct. Photons (who's speed we're measuring) always travel at "light speed". When light "travels" through a medium, it's not actually traveling. Rather, the photons are absorbed and then recreated by the particles. This gives "light waves" a speed less than "light speed", but the speed of the photons never changed.
Returning to the output of the sun on our football field:So the energy is there, we just can't access it without serious improvements to our efficiency in creating antimatter. If advances are made to get the overall process up to a few percent of efficiency (the current process I'm proposing would be
Thank you for your input!
Relativity states that a craft notice no change in mass from its own frame of reference. As long as the fuel is contained aboard the spaceship (the rocket formula), its mass will increase along with the rest of the ship's. Only an outside observer will see the ship struggle as it gets closer to light speed. This is because aboard ship, it's impossible to tell if it's actually moving or everything else in the Universe is moving. All the occupants know is that the ship will reach a given destination. Since that is their goal, it does not matter if they are moving toward the planet, or the planet is moving toward them.
As for the
Feel free to respond. I love sinking my teeth into this stuff.
That's why you track all large objects in your way before embarking on your trip. Calculations can be done to find where the objects will be at what time.
:-)
Besides, space is a pretty big place. The chances for a collision with a large object are very, very small. As for micro-particles, one suggestion is to use ice for the skin of the ship. By flowing new sheets of water onto the skin of the ship, it can be constantly repaired from whatever damage travel inflicts on it.
BTW, I think the calculator I used gave an incorrect distance traveled. I think it was running into an overflow situation and blew up. This calculator is a bit more accurate. A 1G trip of 4 light years, taking into account the deceleration at the half-way mark, gives the following results:
:-)
Trip length: 4.0 light years.
Acceleration: 1.0 g.
Time on earth: 5.614136130857504 years.
Time on ship: 3.460041443177856 years.
BTW, you all might be interesting in knowing how long a million light-year space-flight might take:
Trip length: 1000000.0 light years.
Acceleration: 1.0 g.
Time on earth: 1000289.2434369829 years.
Time on ship: 26.837453649066713 years.
Only 26 years! How's that for fascinating data!
*Ahem* I believe that's why I added:
Of course, if you were to measure the distance in light years, you'd find that the distance between your source and destination had shrunk. Or did light speed up? Or did time dilate? That pesky relativity keeps getting in the way!
We normally measure velocity as distance over time. If you were to use the distance figures given when you were on Earth, you'd find that you arrived at your destination faster than the speed of light. The problem is that you're mixing two frames of reference. If you were to take the measurements again from your spacecraft, you'd find that space-time dilated on you, thus decreasing your distance.
Relativity is very frustrating that way.
Surprisingly, my plan isn't all that far fetched. Fermilab has stated that the primary limitation to creating antimatter is power, and NASA has a wide variety of plans on the drawing boards for antimatter engines. One of them (utilizing antimatter-enhanced fission) is being constructed by NASA as we speak. The reason why the other engines are not being built is that there's no antimatter to power them. With our current supplies, a pure antimatter craft would never make it off the ground.
As for converting the Sun's energy into usable energy, I actually see that as being a highly feasible proposition. If I were an aerospace engineer (which sadly I'm not), I would look into converting the energy via Stirling engines or the like. These would automatically cool the station while generating power at a high efficiency. With a solar panel design, you'd probably need to rotate the station on a parallel axis to the sun (i.e. perpendicular to your orbital plane) to obtain the necessary cooling.
So how do we get the suggested station, or a smaller version, there? By building a space economy! Existing NERVA engines more than suffice for space travel, being at about 2-4x more efficient than current engines. Launch facilities could be made cheaper through large scale launches like the Sea Dragon. Using these methods, we could put large stations in orbit cheaply, use them to build ships, and then make an economy out of asteroid mining, tourism, military, and colonization.
The real "hard part" has very little to do with theoretical physics or engineering. The real "hard part" is solving the chicken and the egg problem of getting the funding and tonnage into space to begin with. No one wants to fund space travel until there's an economic incentive, but there will be no economic incentive until we get into space. Gotta love economics.
Believe it or not, the speed of light is easy to "beat". It's just a problem of "beating it" in some usable fashion.
For example, quantum tunneling allows a particle to travel faster than light for a mere instant of a second by stealing energy from nearby particles. In the end, however, it has to pay back the energy it used. This means that its net velocity never exceeded light speed.
On the more macro level, there is a theory that wormholes could be used to circumvent light speed. Unfortunately, no one knows how to generate enough energy, or where to find the "exotic matter" to create them.
Another (possibly even more credible) theory on FTL travel, is the Alcubierre Drive, often confused with the Star Trek notion of a "Warp Drive". Again, the core problem is that we have no idea where the energy for such a craft would come from.
If none of this suits your fancy, then just load up on a few kilotons of Antimatter, and blast off toward the edge of the Universe at 1G of acceleration. Thanks to the dilation of space-time, you should be able to reach the edge of the known Universe in barely a few years time! Of course, there's this slight issue with Earth no longer existing by the time you got back...
Good luck, intrepid space traveller!
Even if the spacecraft and occupants were composed of 100% fissile uranium, you'd still have trouble getting close to the speed of light. e=mc^2.
:-)
Actually e=mc^2 says we've got more than enough energy to spare. The problem is that fission only converts a small portion of the mater into energy. OTOH, antimatter could possibly give us enough energy to reach light speeds. That is, light speeds relative to Earth. From your own position on a space craft, you'd easily exceed light speed relative to the Earth. Of course, if you were to measure the distance in light years, you'd find that the distance between your source and destination had shrunk. Or did light speed up? Or did time dilate? That pesky relativity keeps getting in the way!
Even more annoying, is that your rocket fuel would grow in mass along with your ship, so you'd see no increase or decrease in your engines efficiency. Err... wait a minute. That's not annoying. That means that if you start out at 1G of acceleration, you can maintain 1G of acceleration at a constant rate of fuel burn! Woohoo! We found the loophole! (/enlightening sarcasm)
You might find my post on Antimatter drives to be quite interesting.
Sorry, but light speed, or anything near light speed, just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
.22 light years.
:-)
Odd as it may seem, "something near it" isn't that big of a problem. What we need is lots and lots of antimatter, and working engines that use it. Now here's the difficulty: where do we get the antimatter from? We believe we can make as much as we need, if we just had enough power. Unfortunately, with a efficiency conversion of 0.01% (i.e. for every megajoule you put in, you get 100 joules worth of anitmatter.), we just don't have the power reserves here on Earth to create enough. What would be nice is if we had a super-powerful fusion reactor that could run for billions of years without maintenance. Now where are we going to find one of those...
Did you know that the Earth receives about 1.3kw per square meter from the Sun? If I did my calculations right, a station placed at about 0.1 au should receive about 1,387kw per square meter. If we were to construct a station with a power collecting surface the size of a football field (109.73m x 48.78m = 5,352m^2), it would receive about 7.4gw of power from the sun.
First we must assume that there is some loss in the power conversion method. Let's say the first station uses primitive solar panels with an efficiency of 20%. That leaves us with 1.4gw of power. Assuming that the station had the facilities necessary to transform all that power into antimatter, it would be capable of producing 148kw of antimatter per second, or about 12.8gw worth of antimatter per day! If more than one station was built, then antimatter production could be high enough to regularly send ships to Alpha Centauri.
Using this calculator, we find that at 1G of acceleration, we could reach 99% of light speed (relative to Earth) in about a year of acceleration. In that time, our ship would have traveled about
Would anyone like to check my figures? I'd love to make sure I'm getting those power figures correct.
It doesn't matter if it's Quake or Quake II. They're both good, as long as they can run Star Trek: The Quake Simulation! My wife and I used to spend a lot of time Deathmatching in that level. Batleths, phasers, warp core ejection, transporters, shuttle bay, sickbay, hyposprays, quad damage, personal cloak, etc. That level had EVERYTHING! :-)
And it's been said before (including by your article) that nipples are not intuitive. You have to teach babies how to use it. Thank God they're fast learners. I don't think I could withstood someone freaking out about the kid not eating. ;-)
While I've always had a love/hate relationship with RealPlayer (love the streaming format, hate the business practices), there's always been one thing that's made them useless on the Linux/Unix platform. It didn't support fullscreen play!
Does this new version support fullscreen playback? That's really the only feature I care about.
Thanks for the info. :-)
I might have to give Syllable a try one of these days. I've only had a chance to use AtheOS back when it was an active project.
Hmm... Oh well, I must have misunderstood the news bits as they were coming across the wire.
BTW, do you guys have any plans to port the Mozilla Gecko engine, or are you sticking with KHTML for the foreseeable future?
I don't doubt it so why did they pay SCO off?
They didn't. There are two different events that people confuse:
1. Sun spent hundreds of millions of dollars on proper Unix licensing. This happened long before the SCO debacle.
2. Sun purchased a boat-load of x86 drivers for Solaris x86 at a decent price. This happened right about the time SCO was coming out with their claims, so it made Sun look bad.
The second event is not all that odd when you consider that Sun had just decided to finally work out the bugs from Solaris x86. (Sun had tried to kill the OS nary six months before this. The market didn't take too kindly to that.)
The kernel is written in C. The high level stuff is written in C and C++.
Yeah, some other guy pointed out that I was thinking of Minuet.
The AtheOS kernel has always been about 95% POSIX compliant. There are no KDE or GTK API's for Syllable; it has always had it's own C++ API and appserver.
Hold on a sec here. I'm pretty sure this was one of those pieces of history I'm not screwing up on. As I remember it, there was no attempt by the AtheOS author to be POSIX compliant except for the purpose of running BASH and a few other utilities.
Later on, I remember that KHTML and other KDE software was ported to AtheOS. How you guys did that, I don't know, since AtheOS lacked X11. An X11 mapping perhaps? Which would (hopefully) allow you to support the KDE libs with a simple recompile.
As to the complexity of Linux issue. It appears to me that Syllable is a Linux based system
Incorrect.
using Gnome
Incorrect.
and it looks similar to Fedora in some ways.
Probably superficial.
So I ask you, how can a Linux system be less complex than Linux?
Because it's not Linux. They swiped the icons. IIRC, AtheOS was written in 100% assembler as a pet project by the guy who wrote it. He (and others) later built some POSIX, KDE and GTK API mappings so that Linux and Unix software could be compiled and used.
Yep, remember these are the same guys that helped fund SCO's FUD... and "saw problems" with "IP" aspects of Linux...
No, they didn't "see" any problems with Linux IP. They said they had complete, perpetual, and air-tight licenses for Unix that would allow them to easily indemnify their customers against any attack from "Unix IP holders". Sun long ago made sure to cover their bases on Unix IP, so SCO would literally not be able to get past a preliminary hearing if they were to sue Sun.
Perhaps my explanation has been lacking some clarity, I have nothing against drama or making the reader think. I have a problem with the author's conclusions. In your example, the man struggled with his own humanity and made a decision. That's why the final scene was dramatic.
In this case the character does very little struggling. An event that should completely devastate any normal human being, merely makes the character "feel bad". There is no inner struggle to come to terms with what happened. He buys his sweater and presumably goes on with life.
One could imagine a situation whereby his humanity was somehow stripped from him. But what is the rationale for that occurrence in this book? There's no tangible antagonist. In fact, it sounds like all of human kind has become lazy and conceited just because there's a data feed in his head. How does this force him to lose his humanity? Does no one in this society care to philosophize on the human condition? Where did all those works of Shakespeare that are currently scattered across the 'net, go? If no one is educated, how is society maintained?
It doesn't make any sense. Drama makes sense. It deals with the human condition head on, rather than avoiding it as if it didn't exist.
For my suggestion of a far more dramatic ending, read the last paragraph of this post.
The plot is not what I have an issue with. The author's conclusions are my primary concern. He concludes that it is possible and even desirable to no longer *be* human. The author asks no relevant questions about the human condition, he merely creates a story of a franken-society with no soul. Even more frustrating is that such a failure to ask these questions only results in more questions about how such a thing could happen.
Where were the thinkers, dreamers, historians, artists, and great authors? How did they allow these things to happen? Did these soulful people die in a major catastrophe or something? How could one have a direct data line into their head without having access to the thought provoking works of history? Who was the antagonist who forced this sheep-like state on society? How is society maintained when there apparently no longer exists anyone with sufficient intelligence and education to advance science and industry?