I cited Mythbusters for convenience. Plus, they actually try stuff and aren't afraid to admit that they got it wrong and retry in later episodes. That is a lot more scientific than certain groups I could name.
When they get a "Confirmed" result, that's real data. The proposed effect happened under those conditions. When they make a number of attempts, fail, and label a myth "Busted", is when they're the least scientific. Later episodes may prove them wrong. Kind of ironic for a show named Mythbusters.
Anyway, back to the topic. Yes, your 21" CRT does indeed produce large magnetic fields when it is first turned on. There's a
degaussing coil wrapped around the front of the tube, inside the enclosure. It's there to erase any stray magnetic fields on the shadow mask. It only runs for a short time.
Thereafter, magnetic fields mess up the picture, as anyone who has held a bar magnet up to a color TV or monitor can confirm.
If we could manage all those years sitting in front of huge degaussing coils, I suspect that our mag-stripe cards are pretty safe. Just exercise a little care.
you have to figure that there should be a considerable magnetic field around these devices so how will this work with say Flash drives credit cards and other "stuff" that does not like being in a above background mag field??
The article stresses efficiency, so presumably it just sends out a periodic magnetic "ping" and doesn't turn on full power charging until a compatable device answers and completes a handshake. Note the 2-Way Secure Communication and Foreign Objection blocks in the block diagram.
Flash drives aren't based on magnetic media, so they don't care about mag fields until they're strong enough to be a concern for you as well. (See
Diathermy.) Shouldn't be a problem at the power levels they're talking about.
Credit cards are magnetic, but are fairly resistant to being demagnetized. See the Mythbusters episode "Barrel of Bricks, Third Rail, Eelskin Wallet Demagnetize" on their Collection 1, disc 1, episode 3. It took a fairly strong and changing field to erase credit cards. I suppose I'd keep all my cards several inches away from the charging coil, just to be safe.
Floppies could be demagnitized, but they're curiosities now.
Bare disk drives maybe could be affected, since their cases are now mostly plastic. Not a problem for most people.
I'm not seeing much of a downside otherwise. As is often the case in such matters, convenience in charging stuff will likely outweigh the hassle of an occasional erased mag-stripe card.
A second amendment to be passed should require all federal laws to be renewed thirty years after their passing, applied retroactively such that for the next thirty years Congress will have to actually go to work and do something, formalizing a new set of laws that get rid of the cruft we have today.
When every law is plain-spoken and recorded on video so we the people may hold our representatives accountable, we will have succeeded in having a government for the people.
Forget video, how about going for "plain-spoken?" Require everything passed by the US Congress to be written in plain English. Use a standard text complexity analyzer to verify it. Yes, they'll have a legal jargon to compress complex concepts into single words, but overuse of them will count against them. (Require hyperlinks to the official definition of each such word.) At least it would remove some of the deliberately verbose and obfuscated sentences in too many laws that seem to be deliberately hiding the meaning of the law.
I agree that sunset provisions would help clean out all the legal cruft built up over the decades, and force old laws to be rewritten in plain English.
... I guess the guy who wrote the first IDE used vi, but what did the guy who wrote vi use? It boggles the mind.
That would be Bill Joy, originally. Back then (~1976), he probably used ex, which was an extended rewrite of en, itself an improvement on em by George Coulouris. Em was Editor for Mortals, since only immortals could use ed. I've used ed. The horror! The horror! 8^)
All the programs from ed to ex were line editors. Vi contained ex, but also was a screen editor using termcap.
Would a kind soul explain what "crafting" is, in relation to MMORPGs?
Also, what's an "overarching storyline"? I did a search on google and it's funny that it is used almost exclusively in game reviews.
Simple. There are just two things to do in almost all MMORPGs: 1) Kill stuff, 2) Make stuff. Crafting is making stuff. You sell it to other players or the NPC stores. Most of the games I've played (EQ, DAOC) have made getting useful levels of skill at crafting mind-numbingly tedious. Only an obsessive-compulsive could get good at crafting in DAoC without using a mouse/keystroke injector like Xylobot. It's that bad. Anarchy Online was much better at crafting, allowing Engineers and Traders to make useful items without investing lots of time and effort. And, as the article notes, SWG is a vast improvement over everything else for those who would rather build than destroy.
A Tale in the Desert tried to break this kill/make mold with a series of trials, many of which require player cooperation, but I never played it. They had totally removed combat. Interestingly, they have a Linux client.
Game designers want you to believe that you can alter the "overarching storyline" by your actions, and thus change the destiny of the online world. In no game I have played has that been true. They are all pre-scripted. SWG allows a limited amount of variation based on how many people complete a monthly story quest. If more players on one side than the other complete the quest then their side will a bonus for the next month. This is much like DAOC's relict raids, just on a monthly schedule.
... I'm hard pressed to think of any social problem that has ever been solved by technology. Can you please list some? (There are social problems that have been eased as a side effect of technology, but none I can think of that have a technological 'solution'.)
Edward Jenner's discovery of cowpox and its use to innoculate against smallpox saved generations from the embarassment of unsightly facial scars, a social problem. (The smallpox vaccine also saved those generations from many agonizing deaths, which is also a serious social problem.;^)
Now that smallpox has been totally eradicated, I'd say that this is a social problem with a complete technological solution.
... To assume that Microsoft is automatically to blame for the other half of OS problems completely ignores what everybody here should know is the #1 source of computer problems: User error.
Thank you Mr. HAL 9000.
In other news, communications with the Jupiter mission are expected to be interrupted occasionally during the next few days as work is done on a failing AE-32 unit in the antenna control system....
What a shame. The poor write-cycle life seems like a solveable problem though. Isn't the technology magnetic, just like a HD?
Maybe I'll just need to get a spool of copper wire, some ferrite, a needle, and enough free time to fab myself some core.:)
No, compact flash is just a cheaper form of EEPROM. It stores bits based on the electric charge on a 'floating' gate, one that is completely enclosed by glass -- no connecting wires.
The methods used to get the charge on or off the floating gate are fairly drastic: Fowler-Nordheim tunneling, hot carrier transfer, etc. So, there is a certain amount of wear, tear, and electrons embedded in the glass to mess things up. This limits the number of write cycles on any one cell. As cells die, if your file system can work around the bad bits, you might be able to manage for a while. Load leveling HW or filesystems help too.
Only at frequences that resonate with water (2.4ghz) like your microwave oven or your WiFi card. In the case of the WiFi card it isn't a big deal since the power is very low.
That's a common misconception. The resonant frequency of water is not at 2.45 GHz (the freq of microwave ovens). There is an absorption peak around 22 GHz for liquid water. (See How a microwave oven works and the graph from Ask Mr. SETI.) Of course, the molecules of water interact more than those of a gas, so things are a bit more complicated.
2.45 GHz was chosen as a compromise that would heat water, fats/oils, etc, as well as what was easily manufacturable back then.
In any case your are very likely correct. Neither WiFi cards nor diagnostic devices will be emitting very strong microwaves.
[ Congresscritters quash SCO-vs.-IBM suit with a bill rider on some legislation or another ]
No way! This is one lawsuit that must go to a conclusion in the courts. The legal discovery process must continue so that IBM can get all the information it can from SCO.
There are probably lots of smoking guns among SCO's back email and old memos. (Unless both have been purged prior to starting this farce.)
Linux and the OSS process must be vindicated. IBM itself needs to demonstrate that any frivolous IP lawsuits against them will end with the plaintif a smoking hole in the ground (fiscally speaking). IBM has more patents than anyone. They can always find another company in violation of one or more of them. (Google for stories about IBM's patent goon squad.) IBM also has more IP lawyers than I care to think about, and they probably keep a paper trail a mile long on everything they do. (Due to their own anti-trust suit in the 80's.)
It may take years because they are very cautious, but IBM has what it needs to smash SCO -- and SCO must be crushed in a very public and humiliating fashion.
Once that is done, I hope that the Securities Exchange Commission investigates Daryl McBride and other SCO officers for stock pump-and-dump fraud. While jail time is probably too much to hope for, let McBride & Co.'s ill-gotten gains be eaten up by legal fees and their reputations be tarnished. (Although IMHO their actions have already tainted them. What a bunch of maroons!)
Re:NDA is FUD
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Please remember that GPLed code is not public domain. It is still under copyright, just with the GPL copyleft twist.
However, your point is valid. There's no point in a NDA when the disputed code is already on dozens of mirrors worldwide and on CDs pressed by many distros over the last N years.
Let's face it -- SCO probably wants the NDA to keep the reviewers from announcing that they found stolen Linux and/or *BSD code in SCO's source tree.;^)
What difference does it make if there's some bacteria or whatever on Mars? How does this affect life on Earth? I'm all for space exploration and pure science.. but I'd spend my dollars on getting humans to Mars rather than finding out whether there are bacteria there.
{voice="early Woody Allen"} Sure. Go ahead. Then you get to Mars and the space germs eat your brain. And they would, too. They love brains in a light basil sause with a dry Italian wine.
Space germs always give me existentialist nightmares. Is a God that would make gourmet brain-eating germs worthy of our respect? Would it be better if they only drank cheap beer and never used napkins? What is the meaning of life anyway?... If only God would give me a clear sign!... Like a large deposit in a numbered Swiss bank account.
{/voice}
Not surprisingly, one of the proposed early uses of nanotech will be to design and build thin, rugged, more efficient, and above all, cheap photovoltaic films. With precise control over molecules this may be possible.
Imagine spraying your rooftop with a thin goop, which turns into a layer of solar cells. Just add wires leading to your synchronous power inverter. The deluxe goop would not only make your roof into solar cells, it would convert asphalt based shingles into a leak-proof, self-healing, ultra-strong fullerene substance.
Hmm interesting - couldn't you just add enough electrons to transform atoms? My atomic-physics is a little rusty but transmutation isn't a longshot anymore....
Not quite. While the chemical properties of any atom are determined by the outer shell of electrons, those are controlled by the number of protons in the nucleus. (You're probably thinking of the recent Programmable Matter: The New Alchemy)
The only method of bulk transmutation used today is neutron bombardment. Ex: breeding Plutonium 239 from Uranium 238, or making any of the medical isotopes.
Nuclear fusion would be nice, but that hasn't reached scientific break-even yet, let alone engineering break-even.
Sorry, that'll teach me not to proofread better before posting. After 196Hg absorbs a neutron it becomes 197Hg, which decays to 197Au. (See the fine Web Elements
site for details.)
And yes, it is still hopelessly too expensive to show a profit.
I was reading some discussion board a while ago when someone with a physics background claimed that it actually was possible to change lead to gold. All you had to do was take a thin strip of lead and bombard it with beta radiation for a while. He said it wasn't practical enough to make a profit out of, but it was possible.
Can anyone here confirm or deny this?
Hmmm.... Lead has an atomic number of 82, gold is 79.
Beta radiation (really fast electrons) isn't generally used for transmutations. I suppose you could knock off some protons or neutrons off the lead nucleus with it, but it's not a good choice. If you're going to use classic transmutation, be aware that most of lead's radioisotopes decay via Electron Capture to Thallium or beta radiation to Bismuth.
A better choice would be to bombard 196Hg (mercury) with neutrons. That will decay via Electron Capture to 196Au (gold) with a half-life of 2.672 days. The catch? 196Hg is only 0.15% of naturally occuring mercury. You'd need to make a lot of neutrons, and would end up with very little gold amongst a stew of other isotopes, radioactive and stable.
In a home system the users home directory is MORE important than the system files. How many people give a flying f' if they have to reinstall the OS?? Most won't if it's fairly easy, they WILL care if their financial spreadsheet or other important doc is deleted, and that is the much harder problem to solve. This is not a distro targeted at servers or multiuser workstations, it is a distro for single user home pc's, if they trash their home dir they are probably going to reinstall anyways, so why add the extra hassle.
What extra hassle? Joe Sixpack wouldn't and shouldn't know the difference if Click-N-Run used a SUID root installer, or he was running as root all the time. He picks apps off a menu, they download and install, he's good to go. End of story.
Remember, especially with the WalMart sales, Lindows is targeting people who don't want to reinstall their box. They want to treat their computer like a toaster. So, it had d@mn well better protect itself from external malware and from Joe himself. Ever had to rebuild a WinXX install after a luser deleted "unnecessary" files like autoexec.bat or anything from system32? Now imagine how thoroughly Joe SixPack could screw up a *nix box given root access....
Your point about the user's data being the most important thing on the box is valid, however. Maybe Lindows or Xandros should implement home directory backups to protected tarballs via a cron job or some annoying widget that pops up occasionally. They'd need a reasonably nice restore program too.
... to make a SetUID root installer that only works for the install CD and their.deb repository?
Let the user run unprivileged and free of worries about corrupting the system. That would be a real value-add and improvement over Win9X. Think about it Mr. Robertson....
Microwaves will work only work on one frequency, which is the frequency that water likes to vibrate at. So it's not like they can change the frequency because then it would do a crappy job of heating the food. I suppose they could be very well sheilded.
That's a common misconception. The resonant frequency of water is not at 2.45 GHz (the freq of microwave ovens). There is an absorption peak around 22 GHz for liquid water.
(See How a microwave oven works and the graph from Ask Mr. SETI.) Of course, the molecules of water interact more than those of a gas, so things are a bit more complicated.
2.45 GHz was chosen as a compromise that would heat water, fats/oils, etc, as well as what was easily manufacturable back then.
So, airlines could use ovens at a different frequency, but what would be the point? They need to harden their electronics agains leaky home ovens, plus any misguided "death rays" cobbled up out of surplus microwave oven parts.
Yes, but it would be a very useful experiment. What we learned we could apply back to Earth.
OK. I'm trying to figure out what you're saying here. You want to experiment on another planet, and use what we learned on our own planet?
First off how would this be useful? Why do we need to apply terraforming procedures to earth?
That's the general idea. Our biosphere has a zillion interrelated parts. Trying to start one in isolation will doubtless be educational. It's easier to try something with fewer dependent variables than with many, wouldn't you agree?
And, let's admit it -- it's better to make ecological mistakes on some other planet, isn't it?
Secondly, what right do we have to terraform another planet? Specifically one that may already support life.
Step one is to make sure Mars is devoid of Life As We Know it(TM).
Step two is to check for Life Unlike Any We Have Ever Encountered Before, Jim(TM).
Then we can try and terraform Mars. It probably won't work. The reasons why will likely teach us more than centuries of careful experiments on Earth.
Everyone on this thread is talking about colonizing Mars.
Let's learn to live together on the same frickin' planet before we go and screw up the rest of the solar system.
Hmmm... Your post contains some species self-loathing which a Freudian might say is projected self-loathing. Take a close look at yourself, friend, before you tar us all with one brush.
Disregarding that, the reason I want to go to Mars is simple:
I want to get away from the morons, lamers, and losers that infest this planet.
;-)
Re:Asteroid Deflection how?
on
Beaming into Space
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah, how would that even work in space? I thought lasers could push things on Earth because it heats the projectile, and the heat difference causes some reaction with the atmosphere, but there is no air in space to interact with. What gives?
Simple. The "reaction with the atmosphere" is that the air is so strongly heated by the beam that it ionizes, expands, and shoots out the bottom of the projectile. Turn off the beam. Wait for the ionized air to get out of the way. Repeat tens or hundreds of times per second.
The asteroid deflection plan would work much the same way. Very high energy pulsed beams would vaporize some of the asteroid material from one side of the rock. That jets off into space, creating a small amount of thrust. Keep the beam on the asteroid until it has enough velocity to miss us.
(Delivering that much energy accurately to the target over astronomical distances is left as an exercise for the student.;^)
Build Death Rays at Home for Fun and Profit! (Was:
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 2
as I recall from high school physics, a microwave oven works by emitting microwaves at the specific frequency that excites water molecules, which in turn cause things that contain water (most food products) to heat up.
call me crazy, but I bet those lunar generators would beam microwaves at a different frequency.
Actually, that's a common misconception. Water's resonant frequency is several GHz higher than a microwave oven's 2.4 GHz. That was chosen as a good tradeoff between what was manufacturable back then and water's absorption spectrum.
Future power sats may use a different band, but maybe not. I once saw a frequency chart that had the 2.4 GHz slot marked "Power Broadcast". Wouldn't it be a kick if they used the same freq as ovens? It would make sense -- cheap magnetrons are readily available and the band is already cluttered with noise from leaky ovens.
It's also used for Bluetooth. I wonder if there would be any problems when the power sat switched on....
Slashdot Mirror
When they get a "Confirmed" result, that's real data. The proposed effect happened under those conditions. When they make a number of attempts, fail, and label a myth "Busted", is when they're the least scientific. Later episodes may prove them wrong. Kind of ironic for a show named Mythbusters.
Anyway, back to the topic. Yes, your 21" CRT does indeed produce large magnetic fields when it is first turned on. There's a degaussing coil wrapped around the front of the tube, inside the enclosure. It's there to erase any stray magnetic fields on the shadow mask. It only runs for a short time.
Thereafter, magnetic fields mess up the picture, as anyone who has held a bar magnet up to a color TV or monitor can confirm.
If we could manage all those years sitting in front of huge degaussing coils, I suspect that our mag-stripe cards are pretty safe. Just exercise a little care.
The article stresses efficiency, so presumably it just sends out a periodic magnetic "ping" and doesn't turn on full power charging until a compatable device answers and completes a handshake. Note the 2-Way Secure Communication and Foreign Objection blocks in the block diagram.
Flash drives aren't based on magnetic media, so they don't care about mag fields until they're strong enough to be a concern for you as well. (See Diathermy.) Shouldn't be a problem at the power levels they're talking about.
Credit cards are magnetic, but are fairly resistant to being demagnetized. See the Mythbusters episode "Barrel of Bricks, Third Rail, Eelskin Wallet Demagnetize" on their Collection 1, disc 1, episode 3. It took a fairly strong and changing field to erase credit cards. I suppose I'd keep all my cards several inches away from the charging coil, just to be safe.
Floppies could be demagnitized, but they're curiosities now.
Bare disk drives maybe could be affected, since their cases are now mostly plastic. Not a problem for most people.
I'm not seeing much of a downside otherwise. As is often the case in such matters, convenience in charging stuff will likely outweigh the hassle of an occasional erased mag-stripe card.
As would I, so long as the are links to reproducible experiments, not just irreproducible anecdotes and oddities.
However, don't forget the real cold fusion: muon-catalyzed fusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion It works best when truly cold -- like the temperature of liquid hydrogen. ;-)
Too bad that the energy cost to make the muons is much greater than that from the fusion....
.-.
Forget video, how about going for "plain-spoken?" Require everything passed by the US Congress to be written in plain English. Use a standard text complexity analyzer to verify it. Yes, they'll have a legal jargon to compress complex concepts into single words, but overuse of them will count against them. (Require hyperlinks to the official definition of each such word.) At least it would remove some of the deliberately verbose and obfuscated sentences in too many laws that seem to be deliberately hiding the meaning of the law.
I agree that sunset provisions would help clean out all the legal cruft built up over the decades, and force old laws to be rewritten in plain English.
That would be Bill Joy, originally. Back then (~1976), he probably used ex, which was an extended rewrite of en, itself an improvement on em by George Coulouris. Em was Editor for Mortals, since only immortals could use ed. I've used ed. The horror! The horror! 8^)
All the programs from ed to ex were line editors. Vi contained ex, but also was a screen editor using termcap.
(For details, see Bill Joy's greatest gift to man - the vi editor and Interview with Bill Joy.)
Simple. There are just two things to do in almost all MMORPGs: 1) Kill stuff, 2) Make stuff. Crafting is making stuff. You sell it to other players or the NPC stores. Most of the games I've played (EQ, DAOC) have made getting useful levels of skill at crafting mind-numbingly tedious. Only an obsessive-compulsive could get good at crafting in DAoC without using a mouse/keystroke injector like Xylobot. It's that bad. Anarchy Online was much better at crafting, allowing Engineers and Traders to make useful items without investing lots of time and effort. And, as the article notes, SWG is a vast improvement over everything else for those who would rather build than destroy.
A Tale in the Desert tried to break this kill/make mold with a series of trials, many of which require player cooperation, but I never played it. They had totally removed combat. Interestingly, they have a Linux client.
Game designers want you to believe that you can alter the "overarching storyline" by your actions, and thus change the destiny of the online world. In no game I have played has that been true. They are all pre-scripted. SWG allows a limited amount of variation based on how many people complete a monthly story quest. If more players on one side than the other complete the quest then their side will a bonus for the next month. This is much like DAOC's relict raids, just on a monthly schedule.
Edward Jenner's discovery of cowpox and its use to innoculate against smallpox saved generations from the embarassment of unsightly facial scars, a social problem. (The smallpox vaccine also saved those generations from many agonizing deaths, which is also a serious social problem. ;^)
Now that smallpox has been totally eradicated, I'd say that this is a social problem with a complete technological solution.
Thank you Mr. HAL 9000.
In other news, communications with the Jupiter mission are expected to be interrupted occasionally during the next few days as work is done on a failing AE-32 unit in the antenna control system....
No, compact flash is just a cheaper form of EEPROM. It stores bits based on the electric charge on a 'floating' gate, one that is completely enclosed by glass -- no connecting wires.
The methods used to get the charge on or off the floating gate are fairly drastic: Fowler-Nordheim tunneling, hot carrier transfer, etc. So, there is a certain amount of wear, tear, and electrons embedded in the glass to mess things up. This limits the number of write cycles on any one cell. As cells die, if your file system can work around the bad bits, you might be able to manage for a while. Load leveling HW or filesystems help too.
See http://www.howstuffworks.com/flash-memory.htm for details
That's a common misconception. The resonant frequency of water is not at 2.45 GHz (the freq of microwave ovens). There is an absorption peak around 22 GHz for liquid water. (See How a microwave oven works and the graph from Ask Mr. SETI.) Of course, the molecules of water interact more than those of a gas, so things are a bit more complicated.
2.45 GHz was chosen as a compromise that would heat water, fats/oils, etc, as well as what was easily manufacturable back then.
In any case your are very likely correct. Neither WiFi cards nor diagnostic devices will be emitting very strong microwaves.
No way! This is one lawsuit that must go to a conclusion in the courts. The legal discovery process must continue so that IBM can get all the information it can from SCO. There are probably lots of smoking guns among SCO's back email and old memos. (Unless both have been purged prior to starting this farce.)
Linux and the OSS process must be vindicated. IBM itself needs to demonstrate that any frivolous IP lawsuits against them will end with the plaintif a smoking hole in the ground (fiscally speaking). IBM has more patents than anyone. They can always find another company in violation of one or more of them. (Google for stories about IBM's patent goon squad.) IBM also has more IP lawyers than I care to think about, and they probably keep a paper trail a mile long on everything they do. (Due to their own anti-trust suit in the 80's.)
It may take years because they are very cautious, but IBM has what it needs to smash SCO -- and SCO must be crushed in a very public and humiliating fashion.
Once that is done, I hope that the Securities Exchange Commission investigates Daryl McBride and other SCO officers for stock pump-and-dump fraud. While jail time is probably too much to hope for, let McBride & Co.'s ill-gotten gains be eaten up by legal fees and their reputations be tarnished. (Although IMHO their actions have already tainted them. What a bunch of maroons!)
However, your point is valid. There's no point in a NDA when the disputed code is already on dozens of mirrors worldwide and on CDs pressed by many distros over the last N years.
Let's face it -- SCO probably wants the NDA to keep the reviewers from announcing that they found stolen Linux and/or *BSD code in SCO's source tree. ;^)
{voice="early Woody Allen"} Sure. Go ahead. Then you get to Mars and the space germs eat your brain. And they would, too. They love brains in a light basil sause with a dry Italian wine.
Space germs always give me existentialist nightmares. Is a God that would make gourmet brain-eating germs worthy of our respect? Would it be better if they only drank cheap beer and never used napkins? What is the meaning of life anyway? ... If only God would give me a clear sign! ... Like a large deposit in a numbered Swiss bank account.
{/voice}
Imagine spraying your rooftop with a thin goop, which turns into a layer of solar cells. Just add wires leading to your synchronous power inverter. The deluxe goop would not only make your roof into solar cells, it would convert asphalt based shingles into a leak-proof, self-healing, ultra-strong fullerene substance.
Not quite. While the chemical properties of any atom are determined by the outer shell of electrons, those are controlled by the number of protons in the nucleus. (You're probably thinking of the recent Programmable Matter: The New Alchemy)
The only method of bulk transmutation used today is neutron bombardment. Ex: breeding Plutonium 239 from Uranium 238, or making any of the medical isotopes.
Nuclear fusion would be nice, but that hasn't reached scientific break-even yet, let alone engineering break-even.
Sorry, that'll teach me not to proofread better before posting. After 196Hg absorbs a neutron it becomes 197Hg, which decays to 197Au. (See the fine Web Elements site for details.)
And yes, it is still hopelessly too expensive to show a profit.
Hmmm.... Lead has an atomic number of 82, gold is 79. Beta radiation (really fast electrons) isn't generally used for transmutations. I suppose you could knock off some protons or neutrons off the lead nucleus with it, but it's not a good choice. If you're going to use classic transmutation, be aware that most of lead's radioisotopes decay via Electron Capture to Thallium or beta radiation to Bismuth.
A better choice would be to bombard 196Hg (mercury) with neutrons. That will decay via Electron Capture to 196Au (gold) with a half-life of 2.672 days. The catch? 196Hg is only 0.15% of naturally occuring mercury. You'd need to make a lot of neutrons, and would end up with very little gold amongst a stew of other isotopes, radioactive and stable.
What extra hassle? Joe Sixpack wouldn't and shouldn't know the difference if Click-N-Run used a SUID root installer, or he was running as root all the time. He picks apps off a menu, they download and install, he's good to go. End of story.
Remember, especially with the WalMart sales, Lindows is targeting people who don't want to reinstall their box. They want to treat their computer like a toaster. So, it had d@mn well better protect itself from external malware and from Joe himself. Ever had to rebuild a WinXX install after a luser deleted "unnecessary" files like autoexec.bat or anything from system32? Now imagine how thoroughly Joe SixPack could screw up a *nix box given root access....
Your point about the user's data being the most important thing on the box is valid, however. Maybe Lindows or Xandros should implement home directory backups to protected tarballs via a cron job or some annoying widget that pops up occasionally. They'd need a reasonably nice restore program too.
Let the user run unprivileged and free of worries about corrupting the system. That would be a real value-add and improvement over Win9X. Think about it Mr. Robertson....
That's a common misconception. The resonant frequency of water is not at 2.45 GHz (the freq of microwave ovens). There is an absorption peak around 22 GHz for liquid water. (See How a microwave oven works and the graph from Ask Mr. SETI.) Of course, the molecules of water interact more than those of a gas, so things are a bit more complicated.
2.45 GHz was chosen as a compromise that would heat water, fats/oils, etc, as well as what was easily manufacturable back then.
So, airlines could use ovens at a different frequency, but what would be the point? They need to harden their electronics agains leaky home ovens, plus any misguided "death rays" cobbled up out of surplus microwave oven parts.
That's the general idea. Our biosphere has a zillion interrelated parts. Trying to start one in isolation will doubtless be educational. It's easier to try something with fewer dependent variables than with many, wouldn't you agree?
And, let's admit it -- it's better to make ecological mistakes on some other planet, isn't it?
Step one is to make sure Mars is devoid of Life As We Know it(TM).
Step two is to check for Life Unlike Any We Have Ever Encountered Before, Jim(TM).
Then we can try and terraform Mars. It probably won't work. The reasons why will likely teach us more than centuries of careful experiments on Earth.
Hmmm... Your post contains some species self-loathing which a Freudian might say is projected self-loathing. Take a close look at yourself, friend, before you tar us all with one brush.
Disregarding that, the reason I want to go to Mars is simple: I want to get away from the morons, lamers, and losers that infest this planet.
Simple. The "reaction with the atmosphere" is that the air is so strongly heated by the beam that it ionizes, expands, and shoots out the bottom of the projectile. Turn off the beam. Wait for the ionized air to get out of the way. Repeat tens or hundreds of times per second.
The asteroid deflection plan would work much the same way. Very high energy pulsed beams would vaporize some of the asteroid material from one side of the rock. That jets off into space, creating a small amount of thrust. Keep the beam on the asteroid until it has enough velocity to miss us.
(Delivering that much energy accurately to the target over astronomical distances is left as an exercise for the student. ;^)
Actually, that's a common misconception. Water's resonant frequency is several GHz higher than a microwave oven's 2.4 GHz. That was chosen as a good tradeoff between what was manufacturable back then and water's absorption spectrum.
Future power sats may use a different band, but maybe not. I once saw a frequency chart that had the 2.4 GHz slot marked "Power Broadcast". Wouldn't it be a kick if they used the same freq as ovens? It would make sense -- cheap magnetrons are readily available and the band is already cluttered with noise from leaky ovens.
It's also used for Bluetooth. I wonder if there would be any problems when the power sat switched on....