Just fill a huge, thin balloon 1/50 full of hydrogen, and it will rise until the pressure is 1/50 that of sea level, and then start to leak, but probably keep on rising as long as the bag and stuff are lighter than the weight of that volume of air at 1/50atm. Hydrogen is always going to be 1/7 the density of air at any pressure, so it shouldn't be much of a problem to get a balloon into the upper stratrosphere and beyond.
Printers' retail packaging should prominently label how much of a ripoff the cartriges are, and how long they actually last. Most of them are deliberately made 1/4 full or worse so they run out quickly and people have to buy more. It's a great moneymaking scheme to exploit people who are too dumb to read Consumer Reports. I'm all for using knockoff cartriges. The companys claim it's on par with "stealing" mp3s? Bah humbug. I still get that robin hood feeling from uploading 3GB/day of stuff on Bearshare.
news flash: Most broadband services have theoretical peak downstream bandwidth of 1 megabit per second. Real speed is usually 50-60% of that. That means it will take 80s+ to download a 5MB page.
Not to nitpick here, but we're talking about compression strength here, not tensile strength.
Steel's strength to weight ratio is only good enough to ideally go about a mile up, unless you use a pyramid shape.
Synthetic diamond beams will probably never be a viable option, which leaves you with things like silicon-carbon compound crystals that are less than 1/10 as strong, and more dense, or even worse, that hypothetical carbon-nanotube composite material that is only 30 times stronger than steel and would be atrociously difficult to manufacture. IMO they should try using the carmon-silicon compound crystals instead (same structure as a daimond except every other atom is silicon instead, and 1/10 as strong which is like 100 times stronger than steel)
DRM is the digital equivalent of having to keep a drunk, rowdy police officer in your home 24/7 without a warrant. There are constitutional protections against that sort of thing.
I'm willing to bet $$$ it will never work
on
5595 Days and Counting
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· Score: -1, Interesting
Nothing has a good enough strength/weight ratio for that, plus you still have to accelerate to orbital velocity after the lift, unless they plan to build it all the way out to the distance of a geosynchronous orbit. That's 22,000 miles up. Nothing is strong enough to support that kind of weight. With today's best engineering, they haven't even managed to build a building 1/2 of a mile high.
Now, if anyone ever manages to mass-produce cheap synthetic diamond beams, this might be feasable. But right now it's ridiculous and any venture capitalist who gives them money would have to be borderline retarded.
...Disney sues them for violating their "Tron" trademark.
Come to think of it, one of these days I should get around to trademarking every possible 3- letter acronym that isn't already taken. I could extort gazillions of $$$ out of honest companies with that kind of IP-squatting.
This is just some linux zealot's pipe dream telling you people what you want to hear. If 40% of developers are focusing on linux, that's because there are so many gazillion different garage jobs calling themselves "linux developers". 99%+ of the real development $$$ is going towards Windows.
...in other news, a new study by the FDA revealed that 99.9% of pigs can not program computers, and 80% of people think bacon is tasty. PETA picketed to protest this "nazi-esque" survey.
Exactly. They shouldn't just assume thaty it's a pulsar and the time between pulses is how long it takes to rotate. There are plenty of other possible explanations, such as rapid changes of the direction of the jet relative to the rotational axis caused by small scale magnetic effects.
Some of the signals lasted less than two nanoseconds, meaning the originated from a volume no bigger than beach ball.
That is very presumptuous. There are ways to get around that. It would be possible for larger object to produce pulses much shorter than the time it would take light to travel the distance of its diameter. When a shockwave starts well below the surface of a sphere, and propagates uniformly along a fairly crisp expanding sphere, it could cause the surface to flare up briefly wherever it hits, and the radius of the affected area would expand faster than the speed of light because of the geometry of it. Something like that, only happening in a neutron star, could explain those kinds of pulses without the requirement that they occur in such a small volume.
This software looks great, but how do you visualize a beowulf cluster of Linux geeks in Soviet Russia discussing the death of *BSD and proclaiming that all of your OH- ions belong to them?
On second thought, maybe I don't want to visualize that...
It's a lot harder to write documentation that somebody else wrote and didn't document than to write documentation on your own code. Why not have developers start writing some decent documentation for a change...
umm, no, the speed of light is pretty constant, buddy. Sure, it's slightly slower the denser the material is. But the difference is negligible compared to the total travel time of the light, and that is only about half to one third of the total latency. Light can cover the equatorial circumference of the earth in 133ms, and most paths are much shorter than that despite the networking in jagged lines.
Slashdot Mirror
...They have a great busines plan! 1.) Work hard to develop something 2.) Give it away for free 3.) ???? 4.) Pay off credit cards!
Just fill a huge, thin balloon 1/50 full of hydrogen, and it will rise until the pressure is 1/50 that of sea level, and then start to leak, but probably keep on rising as long as the bag and stuff are lighter than the weight of that volume of air at 1/50atm. Hydrogen is always going to be 1/7 the density of air at any pressure, so it shouldn't be much of a problem to get a balloon into the upper stratrosphere and beyond.
Printers' retail packaging should prominently label how much of a ripoff the cartriges are, and how long they actually last. Most of them are deliberately made 1/4 full or worse so they run out quickly and people have to buy more. It's a great moneymaking scheme to exploit people who are too dumb to read Consumer Reports. I'm all for using knockoff cartriges. The companys claim it's on par with "stealing" mp3s? Bah humbug. I still get that robin hood feeling from uploading 3GB/day of stuff on Bearshare.
news flash: Most broadband services have theoretical peak downstream bandwidth of 1 megabit per second. Real speed is usually 50-60% of that. That means it will take 80s+ to download a 5MB page.
why don't they just focus on providing cheap DSL?
Not to nitpick here, but we're talking about compression strength here, not tensile strength. Steel's strength to weight ratio is only good enough to ideally go about a mile up, unless you use a pyramid shape. Synthetic diamond beams will probably never be a viable option, which leaves you with things like silicon-carbon compound crystals that are less than 1/10 as strong, and more dense, or even worse, that hypothetical carbon-nanotube composite material that is only 30 times stronger than steel and would be atrociously difficult to manufacture. IMO they should try using the carmon-silicon compound crystals instead (same structure as a daimond except every other atom is silicon instead, and 1/10 as strong which is like 100 times stronger than steel)
DRM is the digital equivalent of having to keep a drunk, rowdy police officer in your home 24/7 without a warrant. There are constitutional protections against that sort of thing.
Nothing has a good enough strength/weight ratio for that, plus you still have to accelerate to orbital velocity after the lift, unless they plan to build it all the way out to the distance of a geosynchronous orbit. That's 22,000 miles up. Nothing is strong enough to support that kind of weight. With today's best engineering, they haven't even managed to build a building 1/2 of a mile high.
Now, if anyone ever manages to mass-produce cheap synthetic diamond beams, this might be feasable. But right now it's ridiculous and any venture capitalist who gives them money would have to be borderline retarded.
Maybe somebody hacked the site to get a dirt-cheap iPac. Then again, who the hell would want one of those POSes except maybe his grandma?
...Disney sues them for violating their "Tron" trademark. Come to think of it, one of these days I should get around to trademarking every possible 3- letter acronym that isn't already taken. I could extort gazillions of $$$ out of honest companies with that kind of IP-squatting.
It's only a matter of time before they develop a vaccine for it.
from the name you'd think it's the sequel to OS X. Or would that be OS XI? I can't wait for OS XIII. Why the roman numerals?
This is just some linux zealot's pipe dream telling you people what you want to hear. If 40% of developers are focusing on linux, that's because there are so many gazillion different garage jobs calling themselves "linux developers". 99%+ of the real development $$$ is going towards Windows.
...in other news, a new study by the FDA revealed that 99.9% of pigs can not program computers, and 80% of people think bacon is tasty. PETA picketed to protest this "nazi-esque" survey.
Yeah, that ranks right up there with sorting my sock drawer or beating my head against the window.
Do you know how espensive that would be even if you got 50 miles to the gallon of whisky?
FreeBSD is for overgrown kids living in their parents' basement with nothing better to do.
Use a REAL operating system, like Windows XP.
Now that X11 resembles windows Steve Jobs will stop calling it "ten-eleven".
My Cerberus laptop has three!
first post?
Exactly. They shouldn't just assume thaty it's a pulsar and the time between pulses is how long it takes to rotate. There are plenty of other possible explanations, such as rapid changes of the direction of the jet relative to the rotational axis caused by small scale magnetic effects.
Some of the signals lasted less than two nanoseconds, meaning the originated from a volume no bigger than beach ball. That is very presumptuous. There are ways to get around that. It would be possible for larger object to produce pulses much shorter than the time it would take light to travel the distance of its diameter. When a shockwave starts well below the surface of a sphere, and propagates uniformly along a fairly crisp expanding sphere, it could cause the surface to flare up briefly wherever it hits, and the radius of the affected area would expand faster than the speed of light because of the geometry of it. Something like that, only happening in a neutron star, could explain those kinds of pulses without the requirement that they occur in such a small volume.
This software looks great, but how do you visualize a beowulf cluster of Linux geeks in Soviet Russia discussing the death of *BSD and proclaiming that all of your OH- ions belong to them?
On second thought, maybe I don't want to visualize that...
It's a lot harder to write documentation that somebody else wrote and didn't document than to write documentation on your own code. Why not have developers start writing some decent documentation for a change...
umm, no, the speed of light is pretty constant, buddy. Sure, it's slightly slower the denser the material is. But the difference is negligible compared to the total travel time of the light, and that is only about half to one third of the total latency. Light can cover the equatorial circumference of the earth in 133ms, and most paths are much shorter than that despite the networking in jagged lines.