As I said, 63 GPa just barely supports its own weight, so any flaws that reduced the tensile strength below that would break it. But, it does indicate how tantalizingly close we are.
I have what's possibly the most wacky grip in active use. I lay the pen over my... err, whatever that joint past the knuckle is called... on the ring finger. The thumb and middle finger go over the pen and almost touch, and the index finger fits snugly in the angle behind them, lightly touching the middle finger and resting firmly against the thumb. The pinky is curled to almost touch the base of the thumb. The pinky edge of my hand rests on the writing surface. The only other person I know of who has the same grip is my father, and I have no idea if I learned the grip from him or if it's some sort of genetic abberation that makes the grip feel more natural.
However weird my grip is, I've been told I have rather legible penmanship for a guy. It's degenerated a bit since high school, and I can no longer write in cursive (I have what someone else called a celebrity signature), but even my fast scrawl isn't too hard for most people to puzzle out. The biggest problem others have is that my 9's apparently look like closed-top 4's, although I don't see it myself (my 4's are open-top, and my 9's are far too rounded).
That episode would be "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'". The words "bleeping alien" and the scene of Mulder's excited yet stone-faced whoop will be forever burned into my mind. Ah, for a return to the days when X-Files was a good show...
I still don't understand the original one, though. Can someone explain it?
There are two parts to the parody. The first is the parody of American McGee's game design proclivities, of taking an idea that's light-hearted (or, in the case of Alice, one normally thought of as such by the public) and turning it into something dark and sinister. The second part is a parody of corporate franchises and the phenomenon of whoring them for money past their sell-by date; just remove the "American McGee's" and add "... as you've never seen her before!", and presto, you have a parody ad that stands on its own just as easily.
According to this page (which I'm not sure how much to trust due to bias, but has similar figures to what some Googling turns up), carbon nanotubes buildable in the forseeable future have a theoretical tensile strength of 130 GPa (versus current laboratory nanotubes having a measured tensile strength that varies in the range of about 10 GPa to 60 GPa, according to Google) and have a density of 1300 kg/m^3 = 1.3E-3 g/mm^3 (or 1.3E-3 kg/m for a 1 mm^2 bundled nanotube cable, which is pretty close to your plugged-in value). Assuming all your equations are correct (I'm a little too fuzzy-headed right now to check in close detail, but they look perfectly fine from here), then the top end of what single carbon nanotube can do today is already near-or-barely-past the minimum tensile strength (about 63 GPa, which is both the bandied figure and what your own equations indicate after plugging in the new density) required to build a self-supporting orbiting cable. Individual nanotubes are a far cry from actual cables, but it's something to work with. If the 130 GPa figure is attainable, then the elevator should have a very respectable margin for payloads.
A hanging steel rod or fibre will break under its own weight already at a length of about 10 km. The article mentions that the carbon nanofibers are 30x stronger than steel, which means that you get 300 km.
Not sure if that particular figure is accurate, but it sounds ballparkish. The reason the numbers don't seem to add up is that the gravitational pull will drop off with altitude. At the geosync point, where most of the mass is, the cable will be weightless (as it is in orbit). At the bottom, the cable will weigh the usual 9.8 N/kg (and will have to support its own weight, of course). In between, gravity drops off rapidly (1/r^2) as the cable ascends, putting less and less tension on the rest of the cable and making the achievable length of self-supporting cable much greater than it would be in a uniform 1g environment.
I will stick with Stargate SG-1. I am currently watching seasons 5 and 6 at the same time.
Somewhat OT, but just so ya know, season 5 is widely regarded by most of SG-1 fandom as the weakest season of the series. Most people consider the two year period from mid-S1 to mid-S3 to be the strongest, although S4 had its moments and S6 is finally pulling itself out of the quagmire (hopefully to improve with the return of Michael Shanks as Daniel in S7). I'd strongly recommend catching repeats of the older eps next time Sci-Fi runs them, or buying the DVD box sets, rather than bothering with S5 reruns (just read the summaries on Gateworld instead, you're not missing much).
To get back on-topic, gotta agree with you on Buffy. By the time the third season began, I didn't even recognize the show anymore.
I know we're out there, somewhere, but I think it just comes down to simple numbers. Actual geeks are rare enough in the wild (nevermind geeks who code -- Eris help you then) that filtering down to just gay geeks basically hits the noise floor in most areas without significant geek quotients. My native Wichita, KS is a prime example -- it's a city with 300k people that has a LUG of roughly 10 members. Online personals just don't seem to cut it in this state unless you're in Manhattan (K-State) or Lawrence (KU).
You're thinking of NetBEUI, which is basically NetBIOS over Ethernet and is deprecated by Microsoft. NetBIOS over TCP/IP is installed by default on both the 9x and NT families (dunno if XP's firewall blocks it by default, but I doubt it).
Regarding (3), if you were to follow the links at the very K5 article that you linked to, you would find that the Vorbis specification is complete and available now. In fact, the Xiph team finished the spec in time for the Vorbis 1.0 release, so the linked K5 article has been obsolete for quite some time now.
sure, but how high is the probability that you hit something when you are in outer space far away from the nearest star?
It's the Law of Large Numbers at work: take something that's rather improbable (say, the odds of finding a 1g pebble drifting about in 1 cubic meter of interstellar space) and give it lots of opportunities (the number of cubic meters the vehicle passes through to travel 4 light-years), and the probablility of the seemingly improbable thing happening at least once during the trip approaches 1. After all, we ARE talking about flying blindly through the Oort cloud.
Even disregarding the risk of a 1g pebble being somewhere in the path, even a 1g speck of dust would wreak havoc (lots of kinetic energy imparted on a small surface area -- hull breach, anyone?). Unfortunately, this fact makes safe space travel at such high speeds all but impossible, with the possible exception of using energy intensive methods (perhaps an electrostatic field) to repel microscopic debris in front of the bow.
and aren't those little pebbles fast enough by themselves to destroy any antenna a probe would need to transmit something back to earth from a distantce it would reach with such a speed?
The pebbles themselves aren't zipping around at 10% of the speed of light -- our hypothetical ship is. As the Voyager probes are traveling considerably slower than that (about 0.00006c according to the BBC article), they haven't explored a significant enough chunk of space to have encountered the Law of Large Numbers yet on this issue. If a Voyager probe were traveling straight to Alpha Centauri, it would take around 70,000 years to get there, and the probability of encountering said pebble (at much lower energy) would be precisely identical to the probability of our hypothetical ship being struck by said pebble (at about 1/10th of a kiloton) within its 43 year journey.
The problem isn't so much how much you hit; it's how much kinetic energy it has. Say that in your path is a small rock weighing 1 gram, and you're traveling at 0.10c. Without considering relativistic effects, which are rather small at 0.10c (gamma ~ 1.005), we can use the Newtonian equation of KE = 0.5 × m × v^2, giving a kinetic energy of 4.5×10^11 J. For comparison, that's roughly equal to 1 million trucks, each weighing 1000 kg (a metric ton) traveling at 28 m/s (about 60 MPH), all coming from one lonely little pebble in the way.
IIRC, two counter-rotating flywheels will cancel out linear motion, but any rotation causes the flywheels to violently jerk about. For instance, a mild right turn would make the CW flywheel veer into the turn but make the CCW flywheel veer away from it, placing a torque (Is that right? My kinetics are rusty) on the shared axis of rotation. Much simpler to make the flywheels stationary, pump the regenerated electricity back into the grid, then power the flywheels from the excess power.
Does XFree86 allow multiple instances of the server running on the same machine to share the hardware?
Yes, although it's a bit of a kludge. Get a terminal as a different user, then type "startx --:1" to start a new XFree86 session for that user on DISPLAY=:1. I believe you can keep upping the number to 63 (for a total of 64 displays) although there are many practical reasons not to do that.
It opens the display on a new Virtual Console (VC); on most distros, the first 6 VCs are reserved for text logins, leaving VC 7 for XFree86:0 to start. Each new XFree instance opens a new VC, and you can switch VCs using Ctrl-Alt-Fx (where x is the VC number). So, with two users logged in on a typical distro, Ctrl-Alt-F7 and Ctrl-Alt-F8 will switch between the users.
I have to admit, I was a bit shocked at first when I looked at Sen. Biden's profile on OpenSecrets. I was fully expecting him to be in the pocket of the movie industry, but that's at piddly #12 on his list of 2002 supporters. So, who made #1 on the contributions list? It certainly wasn't who I was expecting.
I've read (quite possibly here originally, although it might've been elsewhere) that the Maya discovered the precession of the Earth's axis, and they designed their calendar so that it would end on the year when the Earth's tilt is such that a particular feature of the Milky Way would be aligned with the path of the Sun through the sky. The speculation on the religious significance was that they believed it would signify the rebirth of the universe and the dawn of the next age of the world.
Yes, butter is actually OK to eat, but margarine is not - obviously, if we all realize there is a difference between good and bad fats, why do so many people use margarine?
Actually, butter might not be as bad as margarine, but it's still very bad stuff for your cardiovascular health. A good rule of thumb is, if it's solid at room temperature, it will probably be solid in your arteries as well.
Them's megabits per second, Mb/s. If you can find me ATA/133 that does 133 megabytes per second, I'll pay just about any price you can name.
Actually, no, it really is MB/s (megabytes per second). No drive can actually sustain that speed, of course, but the buffer can use it. To use WD's famed drive with an 8MB buffer as an example, the buffer completely empties in about 60 milliseconds. To think... just a little bigger, and you could load ALL of Doom 1 in less than 1/10 of a second (if it were already in the read-ahead buffer, of course).
Re:we all know what a disaster Freon was... try ag
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 1
Where in the hell do you think the chlorine from cfc's comes from? The earth, it all the same stuff, other than a hadfull of atoms made in cyclotrons and the few million obliterated in nuclear explosions we have not created/destroyed any elements.
No. Fucking. Duh. However, the vast majority of chlorine used in industry comes from a natural source that is (a) always found as a solid or in aqueous solution, and (b) very inert. This source is NaCl. The commercial process used to create nearly all industrial chlorine is to take NaCl(aq), a.k.a. brine, and electrolyse it into HCl and NaOH, thus releasing it from its inert state and allowing chlorine-containing compounds with higher enthalpy to be produced. Persistent gaseous suspensions of NaCl are unheard of outside the very bottom of the troposphere, since it gets rained out rapidly, and there isn't exactly an abundance of ocean water pouring directly into the stratosphere. Use some freakin' common sense, man.
As I said because of the semi-stable configuration of cfc's they have a larger effect than their numbers would otherwise suggest but they are still dwarfed by naturally occouring phenomena. Oh yes and since the spotlight has moved off the ozone whole over antarctica the whole has healed over 85%.
Your facts are 10 years out of date.
Youhavebeenmislead. To quote Section 3 of the faqs.org link:
During the years 1978-1987 the hole grew, both in depth (total ozone
loss in a column) and in area. This growth was not monotonic but
seemed to oscillate with a two-year period (perhaps connected with the
"quasibiennial oscillation" of the stratospheric winds.) The hole
shrank dramatically in 1988 but in 1989-1991 was as large as in 1987,
and in 1992-95 was larger still. In 1987 and 1989-95 it covered
the entire Antarctic continent and part of the surrounding ocean.
Substances such as R12 and R134 do not have the detremental effect.
Actually, R12 is even worse. Both R-12 (CCl2F2) and R-22 (CHClF2) contain chlorine, and the reason chlorine catalyzes the destruction of ozone but fluorine does not is that fluorine doesn't readily bond with large numbers of oxygen radicals but chlorine forms ClO4 without so much as yawning.
Re:we all know what a disaster Freon was... try ag
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 1
Also, freon and its sister chemicals only accounted for a very small percentage of the free chlorine radicals in the upper atmosphere. In fact one volcanic eruption in south america in the early 90's spewed about 10 times as much chlorine into the upper atmosphere as all the industrial chemicals user in human history! Now because of its stable configuration freon has a disproportionate effect, but it is still estimated by some scientists that volcanic activity has had 2 orders of magnitude more impact on the ozone layer than human activity during the period since industrial revolution.
That's quite possibly a red herring, since the chlorine injected into the stratosphere by vulcanism is essentially accounted for on Earth's "books", whereas the chlorine added by CFCs is a new "expense" to the ozone system. We could still be putting the ozone layer "out of business" by the nickel and dime.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said, 63 GPa just barely supports its own weight, so any flaws that reduced the tensile strength below that would break it. But, it does indicate how tantalizingly close we are.
The elevator becomes feasible at around 130GPa, so there is a little ways to go yet. It is only a matter of time now.
Actually, myself and another poster re-derived the minimum tensile strength for a space elevator the last time the subject came up. The figure for a minimal self-supporting space elevator that barely supports its own weight is about 63 GPa, and everything past that is gravy, so we're even closer than your numbers suggest.
I have what's possibly the most wacky grip in active use. I lay the pen over my... err, whatever that joint past the knuckle is called... on the ring finger. The thumb and middle finger go over the pen and almost touch, and the index finger fits snugly in the angle behind them, lightly touching the middle finger and resting firmly against the thumb. The pinky is curled to almost touch the base of the thumb. The pinky edge of my hand rests on the writing surface. The only other person I know of who has the same grip is my father, and I have no idea if I learned the grip from him or if it's some sort of genetic abberation that makes the grip feel more natural.
However weird my grip is, I've been told I have rather legible penmanship for a guy. It's degenerated a bit since high school, and I can no longer write in cursive (I have what someone else called a celebrity signature), but even my fast scrawl isn't too hard for most people to puzzle out. The biggest problem others have is that my 9's apparently look like closed-top 4's, although I don't see it myself (my 4's are open-top, and my 9's are far too rounded).
That episode would be "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'". The words "bleeping alien" and the scene of Mulder's excited yet stone-faced whoop will be forever burned into my mind. Ah, for a return to the days when X-Files was a good show...
Only 4 will be released online. There are 9 total, and they are/will be available on DVD as a set.
There are two parts to the parody. The first is the parody of American McGee's game design proclivities, of taking an idea that's light-hearted (or, in the case of Alice, one normally thought of as such by the public) and turning it into something dark and sinister. The second part is a parody of corporate franchises and the phenomenon of whoring them for money past their sell-by date; just remove the "American McGee's" and add "... as you've never seen her before!", and presto, you have a parody ad that stands on its own just as easily.
According to this page (which I'm not sure how much to trust due to bias, but has similar figures to what some Googling turns up), carbon nanotubes buildable in the forseeable future have a theoretical tensile strength of 130 GPa (versus current laboratory nanotubes having a measured tensile strength that varies in the range of about 10 GPa to 60 GPa, according to Google) and have a density of 1300 kg/m^3 = 1.3E-3 g/mm^3 (or 1.3E-3 kg/m for a 1 mm^2 bundled nanotube cable, which is pretty close to your plugged-in value). Assuming all your equations are correct (I'm a little too fuzzy-headed right now to check in close detail, but they look perfectly fine from here), then the top end of what single carbon nanotube can do today is already near-or-barely-past the minimum tensile strength (about 63 GPa, which is both the bandied figure and what your own equations indicate after plugging in the new density) required to build a self-supporting orbiting cable. Individual nanotubes are a far cry from actual cables, but it's something to work with. If the 130 GPa figure is attainable, then the elevator should have a very respectable margin for payloads.
Not sure if that particular figure is accurate, but it sounds ballparkish. The reason the numbers don't seem to add up is that the gravitational pull will drop off with altitude. At the geosync point, where most of the mass is, the cable will be weightless (as it is in orbit). At the bottom, the cable will weigh the usual 9.8 N/kg (and will have to support its own weight, of course). In between, gravity drops off rapidly (1/r^2) as the cable ascends, putting less and less tension on the rest of the cable and making the achievable length of self-supporting cable much greater than it would be in a uniform 1g environment.
I will stick with Stargate SG-1. I am currently watching seasons 5 and 6 at the same time.
Somewhat OT, but just so ya know, season 5 is widely regarded by most of SG-1 fandom as the weakest season of the series. Most people consider the two year period from mid-S1 to mid-S3 to be the strongest, although S4 had its moments and S6 is finally pulling itself out of the quagmire (hopefully to improve with the return of Michael Shanks as Daniel in S7). I'd strongly recommend catching repeats of the older eps next time Sci-Fi runs them, or buying the DVD box sets, rather than bothering with S5 reruns (just read the summaries on Gateworld instead, you're not missing much).
To get back on-topic, gotta agree with you on Buffy. By the time the third season began, I didn't even recognize the show anymore.
I know we're out there, somewhere, but I think it just comes down to simple numbers. Actual geeks are rare enough in the wild (nevermind geeks who code -- Eris help you then) that filtering down to just gay geeks basically hits the noise floor in most areas without significant geek quotients. My native Wichita, KS is a prime example -- it's a city with 300k people that has a LUG of roughly 10 members. Online personals just don't seem to cut it in this state unless you're in Manhattan (K-State) or Lawrence (KU).
You're thinking of NetBEUI, which is basically NetBIOS over Ethernet and is deprecated by Microsoft. NetBIOS over TCP/IP is installed by default on both the 9x and NT families (dunno if XP's firewall blocks it by default, but I doubt it).
We have a 300-pound gorilla on one side of the scale. Many of us are joining together on the other, to reach that necessary balance.
In other news, the 800-pound gorilla was unavailable for comment.
Regarding (3), if you were to follow the links at the very K5 article that you linked to, you would find that the Vorbis specification is complete and available now. In fact, the Xiph team finished the spec in time for the Vorbis 1.0 release, so the linked K5 article has been obsolete for quite some time now.
sure, but how high is the probability that you hit something when you are in outer space far away from the nearest star?
It's the Law of Large Numbers at work: take something that's rather improbable (say, the odds of finding a 1g pebble drifting about in 1 cubic meter of interstellar space) and give it lots of opportunities (the number of cubic meters the vehicle passes through to travel 4 light-years), and the probablility of the seemingly improbable thing happening at least once during the trip approaches 1. After all, we ARE talking about flying blindly through the Oort cloud.
Even disregarding the risk of a 1g pebble being somewhere in the path, even a 1g speck of dust would wreak havoc (lots of kinetic energy imparted on a small surface area -- hull breach, anyone?). Unfortunately, this fact makes safe space travel at such high speeds all but impossible, with the possible exception of using energy intensive methods (perhaps an electrostatic field) to repel microscopic debris in front of the bow.
and aren't those little pebbles fast enough by themselves to destroy any antenna a probe would need to transmit something back to earth from a distantce it would reach with such a speed?
The pebbles themselves aren't zipping around at 10% of the speed of light -- our hypothetical ship is. As the Voyager probes are traveling considerably slower than that (about 0.00006c according to the BBC article), they haven't explored a significant enough chunk of space to have encountered the Law of Large Numbers yet on this issue. If a Voyager probe were traveling straight to Alpha Centauri, it would take around 70,000 years to get there, and the probability of encountering said pebble (at much lower energy) would be precisely identical to the probability of our hypothetical ship being struck by said pebble (at about 1/10th of a kiloton) within its 43 year journey.
The problem isn't so much how much you hit; it's how much kinetic energy it has. Say that in your path is a small rock weighing 1 gram, and you're traveling at 0.10c. Without considering relativistic effects, which are rather small at 0.10c (gamma ~ 1.005), we can use the Newtonian equation of KE = 0.5 × m × v^2, giving a kinetic energy of 4.5×10^11 J. For comparison, that's roughly equal to 1 million trucks, each weighing 1000 kg (a metric ton) traveling at 28 m/s (about 60 MPH), all coming from one lonely little pebble in the way.
*drool* I loved that game. Raul Julia's voiceovers absolutely rocked; it's a shame he's dead now.
"The Maaahmuushka!"
"Hit Cousin It!"
"No, no, NO! Get the EXTRA BALL!"
And, of course, the ever-classic:
(Thunderclaps) "Now you've done it." (10 seconds of whirring, ever-increasing rumble) (Three loud clanks as balls are violently ejected into play)
IIRC, two counter-rotating flywheels will cancel out linear motion, but any rotation causes the flywheels to violently jerk about. For instance, a mild right turn would make the CW flywheel veer into the turn but make the CCW flywheel veer away from it, placing a torque (Is that right? My kinetics are rusty) on the shared axis of rotation. Much simpler to make the flywheels stationary, pump the regenerated electricity back into the grid, then power the flywheels from the excess power.
Yes, although it's a bit of a kludge. Get a terminal as a different user, then type "startx -- :1" to start a new XFree86 session for that user on DISPLAY=:1. I believe you can keep upping the number to 63 (for a total of 64 displays) although there are many practical reasons not to do that.
It opens the display on a new Virtual Console (VC); on most distros, the first 6 VCs are reserved for text logins, leaving VC 7 for XFree86 :0 to start. Each new XFree instance opens a new VC, and you can switch VCs using Ctrl-Alt-Fx (where x is the VC number). So, with two users logged in on a typical distro, Ctrl-Alt-F7 and Ctrl-Alt-F8 will switch between the users.
I have to admit, I was a bit shocked at first when I looked at Sen. Biden's profile on OpenSecrets. I was fully expecting him to be in the pocket of the movie industry, but that's at piddly #12 on his list of 2002 supporters. So, who made #1 on the contributions list? It certainly wasn't who I was expecting.
Lawyers.
Hmmm....
I've read (quite possibly here originally, although it might've been elsewhere) that the Maya discovered the precession of the Earth's axis, and they designed their calendar so that it would end on the year when the Earth's tilt is such that a particular feature of the Milky Way would be aligned with the path of the Sun through the sky. The speculation on the religious significance was that they believed it would signify the rebirth of the universe and the dawn of the next age of the world.
Actually, butter might not be as bad as margarine, but it's still very bad stuff for your cardiovascular health. A good rule of thumb is, if it's solid at room temperature, it will probably be solid in your arteries as well.
Actually, no, it really is MB/s (megabytes per second). No drive can actually sustain that speed, of course, but the buffer can use it. To use WD's famed drive with an 8MB buffer as an example, the buffer completely empties in about 60 milliseconds. To think... just a little bigger, and you could load ALL of Doom 1 in less than 1/10 of a second (if it were already in the read-ahead buffer, of course).
No. Fucking. Duh. However, the vast majority of chlorine used in industry comes from a natural source that is (a) always found as a solid or in aqueous solution, and (b) very inert. This source is NaCl. The commercial process used to create nearly all industrial chlorine is to take NaCl(aq), a.k.a. brine, and electrolyse it into HCl and NaOH, thus releasing it from its inert state and allowing chlorine-containing compounds with higher enthalpy to be produced. Persistent gaseous suspensions of NaCl are unheard of outside the very bottom of the troposphere, since it gets rained out rapidly, and there isn't exactly an abundance of ocean water pouring directly into the stratosphere. Use some freakin' common sense, man.
Your facts are 10 years out of date. You have been mislead. To quote Section 3 of the faqs.org link:
Actually, R12 is even worse. Both R-12 (CCl2F2) and R-22 (CHClF2) contain chlorine, and the reason chlorine catalyzes the destruction of ozone but fluorine does not is that fluorine doesn't readily bond with large numbers of oxygen radicals but chlorine forms ClO4 without so much as yawning.
That's quite possibly a red herring, since the chlorine injected into the stratosphere by vulcanism is essentially accounted for on Earth's "books", whereas the chlorine added by CFCs is a new "expense" to the ozone system. We could still be putting the ozone layer "out of business" by the nickel and dime.