The GPS navigation signals are protected by encryption as strong as the guidance of the planes would be. It would be just as hard to deceive them about their position as it would be to just take them over. Not to mention that the planes will certainly have inertial navigation as well, which is immune to outside deception.
For putting something in orbit, the amount of weight matters more than the amount of mass because you're fighting against the same gravity that is producing the weight. My argument still stands. Steel would be an acceptable replacement for the usual metals when you're launching from the moon.
Nobody's going to read this, but giving tax breaks, by definition, doesn't cost anyone money. It stops the theft of earned money by an armed government. Oh well.
False Dichotomy alert!
There are many gradations between freewill gift and armed theft. Some of the points on that continuum are called taxation (depending on such factors as the amount of money required, the benefits to you funded by the taxation, how much you wish to be benefitted in those ways, etc.)
In general I agree with Libertarians, but many of them do not realize this important principle: The choice to live in a particular location is a choice to be a member of the community present in that location.
The main reason Al and Ti are used for satellites is they are strong like iron, but much much lighter. Lighter doesn't matter nearly as much when every weight is 1/6th of normal.
The problem with sending people who know that it's a one-way trip is that you'll only get volunteers who are severely messed up. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson gives an interesting explanation of this.
I too was disappointed by Yoda's duel. It was nice and pretty, and from an action-movie standpoint it was successful. However...
Yoda should have had enough control over the situation to force Dooku to bounce around trying to avoid getting skewered. I have no problem with Yoda being able to do what he did in the movie (my ally is the force and all that), but he shouldn't have had to.
That "absorb the evil lightning" trick he did was spot on though.
Actually I bet life would be a lot simpler without money. But one can only dream of such a life.
It's more like life would have to be a lot simpler without money. Because each person would have to directly barter their production for someone else's production, complexity would grow as N^2 where N is the number of different goods and services available. However, with a uniform currency the complexity only grows as N, allowing a much more complex market with many more goods and services available.
Actually it would take more energy to put something into the sun than it would to send it entirely out of the solar system. But that's neither here nor there.
We cant even build pyramids that amass as big as the real ones, but they did. According to that, who's more advanced?
Yes, we can. We haven't developed the specific technologies required because we don't consider huge solid stone buildings important. However, if we did consider it important, we could build such structures within a relatively short period of time. For example, the largest truck in the world has a carrying capacity of 330 tons. The stone blocks used to build the pyramids weigh between 2 and 15 tons each. We could easily design and build machines to construct pyramids if we wanted to.
The reason why the cold-war nuclear weapons treaties worked is because there were only two major nuclear powers at the time. Now many countries have nuclear weapons, with more gaining that capability all the time. There is simply too much incentive to be the defector from a many-party treaty of that kind. It's in our best interest to make sure that our ability to defend ourselves is not hobbled by treaties made with an entity which no longer exists.
alfredw said:
To be honest, I think it is beyond possibility. This, incidentally, also means that the First Law (conservation of energy) is true as well. If energy is perfectly conserved in an ideal system, the change in entropy is zero. If the 2nd law were false and the change in entropy could be less than zero, energy conservation would also have failed.
What you're saying here is that because A implies B therefore (not B) implies (not A). That is incorrect reasoning.
It's important to remember that conservation of energy is associated with the time symmetry of the universe. If that symmetry were ever broken, the law of conservation of energy would be broken as well. (We just don't know how to do that yet.)
Also, there is an interesting result in information theory. The Szilard engine (a one-particle heat engine) is capable of turning entropy into useful work. It is prevented from violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics because its memory capacity is finite (erasing memory must be associated with an increase in entropy). If infinite memory were available there would be no theoretical barrier to completely reversing entropy increase.
I agree with you. All discussion of technical topics shall forever after be reserved as the exclusive domain of those trained in the appropriate skills. Anyone daring to speak, or even think, about such technical subjects without permission from the Division for Ratifying All Technical Subjects Approval Board shall be considered a hostile trespasser on private intellectual property and treated accordingly. We must keep technical discussions safe for the experts. Their vast egos and towering pride might otherwise be irreparably harmed.
You are correct that large-force short-duration burns are not the only way to perform stationkeeping. I suspect that there are 3 reasons that ion propulsion has not been mentioned for the ISS:
(1) Ion propulsion was not mature when the ISS was being designed, so it wasn't included in the station design.
Good point. I imagine it would be pretty easy to add them on after the fact, but the people running the project likely have plenty of other problems to worry about besides replacing a system that already does an acceptable job (the current stationkeeping method).
(2) While XIPS engines are used for stationkeeping GEO based comm satellites, the perturbing forces on LEO based space station like ISS are likely to be much larger. While I haven't done the calculations, I'd bet that means you would need a lot of XIPS engines - each one sucking down 4.5kW of power. Power is probably at a premium on the ISS, since they still don't have a whole lot of solar array area up there (and increasing the solar array area is likely to increase the drag force you are trying to counteract with your XIPS).
After making my previous post I did some rough calculations and came to the following conclusions:
At the station's current mass (~120 Mg), about 3 continuously-firing 165 mN XIPS thrusters, at a combined power requirement of 13.5 kW, would be required to keep ISS in its orbit. At its completed mass (~450 Mg) about 10 would be required, using a total of 45 kW. That comes to 40% of the station's total energy budget of 110 kW (I'm not sure if that 110 kW is for the current or completed station though).
In other words, you wouldn't need many of the motors, but they'd suck all of your power, so they're not a viable solution for ISS as designed.
(3) Ion engines tend to produce a much less focused thruster plume than a chemical thruster. If your are constantly firing lots of thrusters that have unfocused plumes, you're going to end up with a big cloud of Xenon all around the station. It's likely to interfere with experiments and observations, and , and generally get in the way.
My guess is that because the xenon exhaust is being launched into a lower-energy orbit than the station it would combine with the rest of the atmosphere, and wouldn't cause a problem. The electric field from the motors might cause problems with experiments, but I don't know enough about either to say for sure.
A previous post mentioned problems with microgravity experiments. Using XIPS for stationkeeping could actually be better for such experiments because it would remove the tiny acceleration due to atmospheric drag.
Just because we currently use large-force short-duration burns to maintain ISS orbit doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. Perhaps we can get someone trained in orbital mechanics to comment on the amount of energy being lost due to friction with the atmosphere? The ISS has a lot more area to mount motors on and has a lot more power available to run them. If the motors ran constantly, how many would be needed?
Flow control is great and everything, but the sort of transmission the article is referring to is only really useful for multicast. (It's too bad they didn't actually mention that...)
The problem with using flow control for multicast is that if your transmission has 5000 recipients, and they are all sending you flow control messages, you could easily get more upstream data coming at you than you are trying to send.
This sort of protocol needs to have an anti-multicast flow control method. In other words, the routers have to gather flow control messages and send a digest of them to their upstream router. That would enable the routers themselves to understand what's going on and participate in controlling congestion. And incidentally, the source of the transmission would only get as much flow control information as if it were talking to a single recipient.
That's actually not true. Windows 95 supports as much RAM as your system can use. The rumor that it only supports 64M got started because many machines that ran win95 had the Intel TX chipset on the motherboard, and it couldn't cache more than the first 64M of RAM. Since win95 allocates memory from the top down, having more than 64M means that the slow, uncached memory gets used first. And since common software at that time didn't usually use more than 64M of memory, having 128M would actually make nearly all of your memory accesses uncached.
So, the problem was actually that Intel cut corners when making the TX chipset (possibly reducing the size of the tag ram to cut costs) and win95's behavior, though not a problem on a properly designed computer, reacted badly with the low cost hardware at that time.
I think the idea is that if you can find a phenomenon which converts ordinary matter into tachyon matter, you wind up going faster than the speed of light without ever having traveled _at_ the speed of light (which is excluded for particles having rest mass).
What I've always found interesting is that according to relativity, going backwards in time is equivalent to traveling faster than light, but according to quantum mechanics, going backwards in time is equivalent to being made of antimatter. Weird, eh?
Lord McCarthy and his cronies wounded the United States in a severe and lasting way. Even now, many citizens of the US are unable to objectively weigh the costs and benefits of communism and socialism. Opposition to those ideas has become a conditioned reflex, thus limiting our options when considering how we should run our country.
Thanks to your attitude, someday in the future we will forget who discovered the mathematical description of gravity. And thanks to your attitude, knowledge of science will decay and will ultimately cause the downfall of galactic society.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPS navigation signals are protected by encryption as strong as the guidance of the planes would be. It would be just as hard to deceive them about their position as it would be to just take them over. Not to mention that the planes will certainly have inertial navigation as well, which is immune to outside deception.
For putting something in orbit, the amount of weight matters more than the amount of mass because you're fighting against the same gravity that is producing the weight. My argument still stands. Steel would be an acceptable replacement for the usual metals when you're launching from the moon.
False Dichotomy alert! There are many gradations between freewill gift and armed theft. Some of the points on that continuum are called taxation (depending on such factors as the amount of money required, the benefits to you funded by the taxation, how much you wish to be benefitted in those ways, etc.)
In general I agree with Libertarians, but many of them do not realize this important principle: The choice to live in a particular location is a choice to be a member of the community present in that location.
The main reason Al and Ti are used for satellites is they are strong like iron, but much much lighter. Lighter doesn't matter nearly as much when every weight is 1/6th of normal.
The problem with sending people who know that it's a one-way trip is that you'll only get volunteers who are severely messed up. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson gives an interesting explanation of this.
I too was disappointed by Yoda's duel. It was nice and pretty, and from an action-movie standpoint it was successful. However...
Yoda should have had enough control over the situation to force Dooku to bounce around trying to avoid getting skewered. I have no problem with Yoda being able to do what he did in the movie (my ally is the force and all that), but he shouldn't have had to.
That "absorb the evil lightning" trick he did was spot on though.
It's more like life would have to be a lot simpler without money. Because each person would have to directly barter their production for someone else's production, complexity would grow as N^2 where N is the number of different goods and services available. However, with a uniform currency the complexity only grows as N, allowing a much more complex market with many more goods and services available.
Sure we can. Even better: launch it into the sun.
Actually it would take more energy to put something into the sun than it would to send it entirely out of the solar system. But that's neither here nor there.
Yes, we can. We haven't developed the specific technologies required because we don't consider huge solid stone buildings important. However, if we did consider it important, we could build such structures within a relatively short period of time. For example, the largest truck in the world has a carrying capacity of 330 tons. The stone blocks used to build the pyramids weigh between 2 and 15 tons each. We could easily design and build machines to construct pyramids if we wanted to.
Oh! So that's why Richard Stallman has never developed any software.
Oh, wait...
The reason why the cold-war nuclear weapons treaties worked is because there were only two major nuclear powers at the time. Now many countries have nuclear weapons, with more gaining that capability all the time. There is simply too much incentive to be the defector from a many-party treaty of that kind. It's in our best interest to make sure that our ability to defend ourselves is not hobbled by treaties made with an entity which no longer exists.
To be honest, I think it is beyond possibility. This, incidentally, also means that the First Law (conservation of energy) is true as well. If energy is perfectly conserved in an ideal system, the change in entropy is zero. If the 2nd law were false and the change in entropy could be less than zero, energy conservation would also have failed.
What you're saying here is that because A implies B therefore (not B) implies (not A). That is incorrect reasoning.
It's important to remember that conservation of energy is associated with the time symmetry of the universe. If that symmetry were ever broken, the law of conservation of energy would be broken as well. (We just don't know how to do that yet.)
Also, there is an interesting result in information theory. The Szilard engine (a one-particle heat engine) is capable of turning entropy into useful work. It is prevented from violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics because its memory capacity is finite (erasing memory must be associated with an increase in entropy). If infinite memory were available there would be no theoretical barrier to completely reversing entropy increase.
I agree with you. All discussion of technical topics shall forever after be reserved as the exclusive domain of those trained in the appropriate skills. Anyone daring to speak, or even think, about such technical subjects without permission from the Division for Ratifying All Technical Subjects Approval Board shall be considered a hostile trespasser on private intellectual property and treated accordingly. We must keep technical discussions safe for the experts. Their vast egos and towering pride might otherwise be irreparably harmed.
You are correct that large-force short-duration burns are not the only way to perform stationkeeping. I suspect that there are 3 reasons that ion propulsion has not been mentioned for the ISS:
(1) Ion propulsion was not mature when the ISS was being designed, so it wasn't included in the station design.
Good point. I imagine it would be pretty easy to add them on after the fact, but the people running the project likely have plenty of other problems to worry about besides replacing a system that already does an acceptable job (the current stationkeeping method).
(2) While XIPS engines are used for stationkeeping GEO based comm satellites, the perturbing forces on LEO based space station like ISS are likely to be much larger. While I haven't done the calculations, I'd bet that means you would need a lot of XIPS engines - each one sucking down 4.5kW of power. Power is probably at a premium on the ISS, since they still don't have a whole lot of solar array area up there (and increasing the solar array area is likely to increase the drag force you are trying to counteract with your XIPS).
After making my previous post I did some rough calculations and came to the following conclusions:
At the station's current mass (~120 Mg), about 3 continuously-firing 165 mN XIPS thrusters, at a combined power requirement of 13.5 kW, would be required to keep ISS in its orbit. At its completed mass (~450 Mg) about 10 would be required, using a total of 45 kW. That comes to 40% of the station's total energy budget of 110 kW (I'm not sure if that 110 kW is for the current or completed station though).
In other words, you wouldn't need many of the motors, but they'd suck all of your power, so they're not a viable solution for ISS as designed.
(3) Ion engines tend to produce a much less focused thruster plume than a chemical thruster. If your are constantly firing lots of thrusters that have unfocused plumes, you're going to end up with a big cloud of Xenon all around the station. It's likely to interfere with experiments and observations, and , and generally get in the way.
My guess is that because the xenon exhaust is being launched into a lower-energy orbit than the station it would combine with the rest of the atmosphere, and wouldn't cause a problem. The electric field from the motors might cause problems with experiments, but I don't know enough about either to say for sure.
A previous post mentioned problems with microgravity experiments. Using XIPS for stationkeeping could actually be better for such experiments because it would remove the tiny acceleration due to atmospheric drag.
Just because we currently use large-force short-duration burns to maintain ISS orbit doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. Perhaps we can get someone trained in orbital mechanics to comment on the amount of energy being lost due to friction with the atmosphere? The ISS has a lot more area to mount motors on and has a lot more power available to run them. If the motors ran constantly, how many would be needed?
You just pulled a Bill Gates. Factoring primes is easy if you know they're primes:
problem: factor prime number P
answer: P
I think what you meant is factoring composite numbers made by multiplying two large primes. Not as succint, but a lot more accurate.
I believe you misspelled "consumer".
Hope that helps.
Have a nice day.
Flow control is great and everything, but the sort of transmission the article is referring to is only really useful for multicast. (It's too bad they didn't actually mention that...)
The problem with using flow control for multicast is that if your transmission has 5000 recipients, and they are all sending you flow control messages, you could easily get more upstream data coming at you than you are trying to send.
This sort of protocol needs to have an anti-multicast flow control method. In other words, the routers have to gather flow control messages and send a digest of them to their upstream router. That would enable the routers themselves to understand what's going on and participate in controlling congestion. And incidentally, the source of the transmission would only get as much flow control information as if it were talking to a single recipient.
That's actually not true. Windows 95 supports as much RAM as your system can use. The rumor that it only supports 64M got started because many machines that ran win95 had the Intel TX chipset on the motherboard, and it couldn't cache more than the first 64M of RAM. Since win95 allocates memory from the top down, having more than 64M means that the slow, uncached memory gets used first. And since common software at that time didn't usually use more than 64M of memory, having 128M would actually make nearly all of your memory accesses uncached.
So, the problem was actually that Intel cut corners when making the TX chipset (possibly reducing the size of the tag ram to cut costs) and win95's behavior, though not a problem on a properly designed computer, reacted badly with the low cost hardware at that time.
I think the idea is that if you can find a phenomenon which converts ordinary matter into tachyon matter, you wind up going faster than the speed of light without ever having traveled _at_ the speed of light (which is excluded for particles having rest mass).
What I've always found interesting is that according to relativity, going backwards in time is equivalent to traveling faster than light, but according to quantum mechanics, going backwards in time is equivalent to being made of antimatter. Weird, eh?
Hmm. Let's do a bit o' math here: .75 Mpixel
.75 Mpixel = 85.33 bits/pixel
.95 Mpixel
.95 Mpixel = 67.42 bits/pixel
1024 * 768 = 786432 pixels =
8 Mbyte * 8 bits/byte = 64 Mbit
64 Mbit /
1152 * 864 = 995328 =
64 Mbit /
I just hate it when my color depth is limited to 67 bits per pixel because I set my resolution too high.
Lord McCarthy and his cronies wounded the United States in a severe and lasting way. Even now, many citizens of the US are unable to objectively weigh the costs and benefits of communism and socialism. Opposition to those ideas has become a conditioned reflex, thus limiting our options when considering how we should run our country.
You Have Been Trolled
Hope This Helps
Have a Nice Day
Thanks to your attitude, someday in the future we will forget who discovered the mathematical description of gravity. And thanks to your attitude, knowledge of science will decay and will ultimately cause the downfall of galactic society.
I hope you're happy.
http://www.congress.org/