Mainly to "ourselves". The government borrows money from its own companies and citizens (and pension funds, in particular). To a lesser extent, we owe this money to foreign banks, mainly in th efar east.
Interesting. Sounds like you count at every polling place. Most countries don't do that. They gather the boxes up some smaller set of places (in the UK it's one per constituency) and count them all there. Obvious advantage -- much easier for parties and the press to scrutinise the count; obvious disadvantage -- it takes longer.
In the US they also have a curious attachment to having huge numbers of elections all at once and putting them all on the same piece of paper. I guess this probably is easier for the voters, at least in the sense of being less work, but it means that hand counting would be infernally complicated because the same ballot papers need to be counted in multiple different ways for everything from president of the USA to town dogcatcher.
except at 55-75 mph there's that much less room to react when the tire of the car in front of you blows out...
Yes, if that happens you hit them! But, you don't hit them very hard because they haven't had time to decelerate very much and your autopilot slammed on the brakes the millisecond they started to slow.
In the worst case, if the lead car suddenly loses a tire or something, the whole train probably collides, rather gently and then comes to a stop as a mass. Might scratch some paintwork, but unlikely to kill, or even hurt, anybody.
On a totally automated road system you would have trains like this separated by gaps big enough to ensure that even if one train is brought to a sudden halt (say by hitting a falling tree or a rogue motorist) the one behind has space to do a controlled stop.
50 thousand miles of conducting rail is (a) heavy and (b) not conducting enough to prevent it losing a lot of energy to resistance. Over long distances sending photons through nice empty space is simpler and more efficient.
This one is actually easy. You have powerful computers, you know all the forces acting and you have (in computer terms) plenty of time to react. If you have a few ways of controlling some of the forces, you can work out how to apply them to damp out any oscillations
1. You can do quite a lot by scheduling cargo cleverly -- effectvely moving point masses up and down the cable
2. You can tug on the cable from the ground, the station at GEO or the anchor mass if there is one.
3. You can use high impulse low thrust rockets (ion engines say) powered by the same lasers you use for the climbers to thrust on the cable. They will need refueling occasionally, which uses up a little of your cargo capacity, but not very often
By the way, the same website that describes the competition describes the state of play on cable materials. It's not as bad as some people make out -- carbon nanotubes are strong enough with a significant factor to spare. We have to work out how to stick them together and make fibres and how to stick them together to make a cable, without compromising the strength. All of these are hard problems, but we don't actually need a fundamentally new material at the molecular level.
No. It does look a bit similar but it isn't. In reverse osmosis the water has to pass through the membrane, driven by high pressure pumps, leaving its impurities behind.
In this version the impurities pass through the membrane (two separate membranes in fact) driven by an electrical current. Cleverly, the electrical current itself is generated by the salt passing through other membranes out of the highly concentrated brine that you made in your solar ponds.
The limit is on the amount of computation you can do per gram per second. Unless your computer was VERY VERY dense and compact (close to being a black hole, in fact) then it would have to be parallel to achieve this limit.
The population density throughout the US is not really set up for a bullet train system because even if you did connect major cities, you would need cars and buses to get people to their spread out homes.
If that is true then airports also must not be viable.
Indeed, the obvious places to put the HST terminals are the airports. The "last mile" problem already has solutions from those places, and you get to connect with inter continental flights, replacing short-haul, without really forcing people to change their travel habits.
Air is poor at both carrying and conducting heat, compared to water. Losing that much heat to the air would involve blowing a vast amount of air through the building, especially in warmer climates where the ambient air might be at 40C to start with. Water is much more compact and it costs less to pump enough water past the computers to carry the heat. Especially if you have a source of free chilled water.
For Data Centres. If Google can run on 100 000 chips each consuming 200W to run its 1024 cores, rather than 25M chips, each consuming 100W with 4 cores it saves about 2GW plus a fortune in warehouse space etc.
Let's see. first of all, it's entirely possible that some guy's personal world flooded, wiping out his neugbours and that he and his livestock escaped becase he happened to have a boat. Indeed, statistically, it must have happened often. I think the Epic of Gilgamesh has a somewhat similar event.
The solar wind is hydrogen nuclei, and going much faster than 33000 mph, but it's VERY VERY thin. I doubt the total amount impacting on the Earth's magnetic field in a year would be enough to raise sea levels a millimeter. Also, the same impacts will knock a certain amount of hydrogen off water molecules in the upper atmosphere and kick them off into space, so we lose as well as gaining.
I imagine they will build something along those lines. Lots of highly specialised cores that can do Floating Point really well if it carefully compiled for them; some switches for some fast short-range network protocol probably and a few general purpose cores to manage things. Maybe some field-programmable components so that you can customise the hardware for new applications. The current nVidia Tesla series achieves around 1GFLOP per Watt, and you can get 1 TFLOP, consuming 1 KW per U, (ignoring host processors and many other things), so they're looking at roughly a 50 fold improvement by designing for HPC from the ground up, rather than graphics first and HPC as a side-show. That, plus a couple of generations of Moore's law doesn't sound too improbable.
The article does say that someone has proposed this as the best fit to the details of the observed data, while someone has proposed something else (a massive supernova of a star surrounded by carbon dust). Dozens of other possibilities probably got considered and rejected before making the article. If you read the actual scientific papers they will likely consider many more alternatives and explain in detail why they don't fit what's observed. They will also describe in detail
If you want the raw details you need to read the papers and be prepared for some maths (in which they work out which theories fit the data and which don't). The idea that pulsars are neutron stars, for instance, emerged over several years and was confirmed as the predictions it made about what kinds of patterns would, and wouldn't be seen in pulsar radiation panned out. Many other ideas fell by the wayside.
The real data is published and discussed, multiple interpretations are considered, but in scholarly articles, not in press releases.
Initially this is to connect disks to database engines and to push entire virtual machines onto servers to handle demand spikes and things like that. Later to handle the upstream end of pushing multiple HD video streams out from servers towards large numbers of clients.
That's what I thought, but apparently what happens is that the fragment shatters, and most of the pieces carry on at almost the same velocity, while just a few are significantly slowed. Essentially your impactor drills a hole through the fragment almost instantly, slowing down only the material actually excavated from the hole. Later, the shock waves propagate sideways through the fragment, shattering it.
Result, more orbiting fragments (albeit smaller ones).
I proposed something like this, but using something like snowflakes or small particles of dry ice instead of the foil, but it seems collisions at the speeds involved behave quite oddly and even "soft" targets can shatter pieces of debris into multiple smaller pieces mostly in pretty much the same orbit as the originals.
I wonder if some kind of magnetic drag could be devised? a big hoop of superconducting wire with a current in it that would slow down conducting debris that passed through it, but gently, so as to drop it into a more quickly decaying orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plans to accelerate (and collide) lead and possibly uranium nuclei. These would include neutrons as well as protons.
Mainly to "ourselves". The government borrows money from its own companies and citizens (and pension funds, in particular). To a lesser extent, we owe this money to foreign banks, mainly in th efar east.
Interesting. Sounds like you count at every polling place. Most countries don't do that. They gather the boxes up some smaller set of places (in the UK it's one per constituency) and count them all there. Obvious advantage -- much easier for parties and the press to scrutinise the count; obvious disadvantage -- it takes longer.
In the US they also have a curious attachment to having huge numbers of elections all at once and putting them all on the same piece of paper. I guess this probably is easier for the voters, at least in the sense of being less work, but it means that hand counting would be infernally complicated because the same ballot papers need to be counted in multiple different ways for everything from president of the USA to town dogcatcher.
except at 55-75 mph there's that much less room to react when the tire of the car in front of you blows out...
Yes, if that happens you hit them! But, you don't hit them very hard because they haven't had time to decelerate very much and your autopilot slammed on the brakes the millisecond they started to slow.
In the worst case, if the lead car suddenly loses a tire or something, the whole train probably collides, rather gently and then comes to a stop as a mass. Might scratch some paintwork, but unlikely to kill, or even hurt, anybody.
On a totally automated road system you would have trains like this separated by gaps big enough to ensure that even if one train is brought to a sudden halt (say by hitting a falling tree or a rogue motorist) the one behind has space to do a controlled stop.
50 thousand miles of conducting rail is (a) heavy and (b) not conducting enough to prevent it losing a lot of energy to resistance. Over long distances sending photons through nice empty space is simpler and more efficient.
This one is actually easy. You have powerful computers, you know all the forces acting and you have (in computer terms) plenty of time to react. If you have a few ways of controlling some of the forces, you can work out how to apply them to damp out any oscillations
1. You can do quite a lot by scheduling cargo cleverly -- effectvely moving point masses up and down the cable
2. You can tug on the cable from the ground, the station at GEO or the anchor mass if there is one.
3. You can use high impulse low thrust rockets (ion engines say) powered by the same lasers you use for the climbers to thrust on the cable. They will need refueling occasionally, which uses up a little of your cargo capacity, but not very often
By the way, the same website that describes the competition describes the state of play on cable materials. It's not as bad as some people make out -- carbon nanotubes are strong enough with a significant factor to spare. We have to work out how to stick them together and make fibres and how to stick them together to make a cable, without compromising the strength. All of these are hard problems, but we don't actually need a fundamentally new material at the molecular level.
The rope is too long. You'd lose too much power to electrical resistance along the way.
No. It does look a bit similar but it isn't. In reverse osmosis the water has to pass through the membrane, driven by high pressure pumps, leaving its impurities behind.
In this version the impurities pass through the membrane (two separate membranes in fact) driven by an electrical current. Cleverly, the electrical current itself is generated by the salt passing through other membranes out of the highly concentrated brine that you made in your solar ponds.
The limit is on the amount of computation you can do per gram per second. Unless your computer was VERY VERY dense and compact (close to being a black hole, in fact) then it would have to be parallel to achieve this limit.
If that is true then airports also must not be viable.
Indeed, the obvious places to put the HST terminals are the airports. The "last mile" problem already has solutions from those places, and you get to connect with inter continental flights, replacing short-haul, without really forcing people to change their travel habits.
Air is poor at both carrying and conducting heat, compared to water. Losing that much heat to the air would involve blowing a vast amount of air through the building, especially in warmer climates where the ambient air might be at 40C to start with. Water is much more compact and it costs less to pump enough water past the computers to carry the heat. Especially if you have a source of free chilled water.
For Data Centres. If Google can run on 100 000 chips each consuming 200W to run its 1024 cores, rather than 25M chips, each consuming 100W with 4 cores it saves about 2GW plus a fortune in warehouse space etc.
It would help to know what country you are in. Police/social services/etc. are structured differently in different countries.
The 3 nanosecond pulses may be a factor. I don't think you can pulse a normal LED that fast. I think they also do need very precise aiming.
Let's see. first of all, it's entirely possible that some guy's personal world flooded, wiping out his neugbours and that he and his livestock escaped becase he happened to have a boat. Indeed, statistically, it must have happened often. I think the Epic of Gilgamesh has a somewhat similar event.
The solar wind is hydrogen nuclei, and going much faster than 33000 mph, but it's VERY VERY thin. I doubt the total amount impacting on the Earth's magnetic field in a year would be enough to raise sea levels a millimeter. Also, the same impacts will knock a certain amount of hydrogen off water molecules in the upper atmosphere and kick them off into space, so we lose as well as gaining.
I imagine they will build something along those lines. Lots of highly specialised cores that can do Floating Point really well if it carefully compiled for them; some switches for some fast short-range network protocol probably and a few general purpose cores to manage things. Maybe some field-programmable components so that you can customise the hardware for new applications. The current nVidia Tesla series achieves around 1GFLOP per Watt, and you can get 1 TFLOP, consuming 1 KW per U, (ignoring host processors and many other things), so they're looking at roughly a 50 fold improvement by designing for HPC from the ground up, rather than graphics first and HPC as a side-show. That, plus a couple of generations of Moore's law doesn't sound too improbable.
Basically correct, but people have seen the other side of the moon directly. Only about 30 people all told, but they have seen it.
The article does say that someone has proposed this as the best fit to the details of the observed data, while someone has proposed something else (a massive supernova of a star surrounded by carbon dust). Dozens of other possibilities probably got considered and rejected before making the article. If you read the actual scientific papers they will likely consider many more alternatives and explain in detail why they don't fit what's observed. They will also describe in detail
If you want the raw details you need to read the papers and be prepared for some maths (in which they work out which theories fit the data and which don't). The idea that pulsars are neutron stars, for instance, emerged over several years and was confirmed as the predictions it made about what kinds of patterns would, and wouldn't be seen in pulsar radiation panned out. Many other ideas fell by the wayside.
The real data is published and discussed, multiple interpretations are considered, but in scholarly articles, not in press releases.
and I never previously new there was a need for the circuit that dumps 10000 volts into the USB port unless disabled by the right software action.
Initially this is to connect disks to database engines and to push entire virtual machines onto servers to handle demand spikes and things like that. Later to handle the upstream end of pushing multiple HD video streams out from servers towards large numbers of clients.
Sure, but now you can fill the station wagon with 64GB flash drives or 2TB hard drives.
Except you can keep rotating for free, while constant acceleration using chemical (or even fission) power requires completely insane amounts of fuel.
Why? There are some problems to overcome, sure, but I don't see obvious show-stoppers.
That's what I thought, but apparently what happens is that the fragment shatters, and most of the pieces carry on at almost the same velocity, while just a few are significantly slowed. Essentially your impactor drills a hole through the fragment almost instantly, slowing down only the material actually excavated from the hole. Later, the shock waves propagate sideways through the fragment, shattering it.
Result, more orbiting fragments (albeit smaller ones).
I proposed something like this, but using something like snowflakes or small particles of dry ice instead of the foil, but it seems collisions at the speeds involved behave quite oddly and even "soft" targets can shatter pieces of debris into multiple smaller pieces mostly in pretty much the same orbit as the originals.
I wonder if some kind of magnetic drag could be devised? a big hoop of superconducting wire with a current in it that would slow down conducting debris that passed through it, but gently, so as to drop it into a more quickly decaying orbit.