Perhaps this has already been mentioned, but can't the rioters just pour sand on the goo? I recall something like this (but sticky instead of slippery) was tried in Somalia, but the rioters poured sand on it and the high-tech barrier was useless. This goo might be useful in beating down unprepared protesters, but in a situation such as an embassy siege I don't think it'll do much good.
I understand the Marines found that the best form of crowd control was a laser designator. The guy with a big bright red dot on his forehead kept very still, and so did his buddies.
But most computers are embedded systems programmed in assembly language. How useful would the source code to your microwave oven be to you?
Actually, I know of at least one microwave oven I use a lot that I wish I could re-program. It's one of those ones where you're supposed to tell it how many grams of chicken you're cooking and it'll decide how long to cook etc. by itself. Completely useless, of course..
Wait - if you cut the cable at its base, wouldn't it actually lift and fly into space? Only the part between the ground and the break in the cable would fall down. So if some yutz flew an airliner into the base of the cable you'd have to reattach it - not pick up 36,000 km of it off the surface of the planet.
Of course, if you cut it higher up, or cut into a bunch of pieces then some of them would come crashing down...
Either way - the technology to build this thing is so outlandish that we shouldn't hold our collective breath.
You're right. "buyers" of labor power aren't allowed to form cartels and set prices like "sellers" can with unions.
But in the case of e.g. a large factory in a small town, the company is in effect the only (or at least largest) buyer of labor in town. As such the company already enjoys the benefits of a near-monopoly.
Like employers aren't sometimes driven out of business because they can't afford labor.
The difference with a large corporation is that if it goes out bankrupt the liability is limited; the repo man may come for the factory, but not the CEO's golden parachute.
Actually, if you think about it, the ideal market would allow the "winner" to pick over the corpse of the "loser" (cut to Darwinian image of the lion eating the antelope). As such when cororations lose it is right that they get broken up and eaten. The question is, is it morally acceptable to do the equivalent to actual human beings?
True. But the whole point of society doesn't have to be the bottom line. The problem with a purely capitalist society is that while it may maximize growth, it says nothing about distribution. I'm not saying capitalism is wrong, merely incomplete. It seems to me that a system which exploits its workers will tend to see resentments grow among the workers. Isn't it reasonable to think in the long run
that there can only be one of two outcomes: either some of the wealth thus generated has to be spread around (i.e. reduce the exploitation), or the resentment has to be suppressed by force (by "exploit" I mean that the person doing the work does not reap even a substantial fraction of the benefit from that work).
If you are easily replaceable, that's your own damn fault.
You are forgetting that the playng field is not level - one worker against a multi-million dollar company is not a fair fight.
Re:Big Bang, Black Holes, Quantum Computing, etc..
on
Black Holes Disputed
·
· Score: 2
Oh, puh-lease!
Modern physics is anything but "voodoo". In fact, the whole point of it is that it is open
to independent verification. You don't HAVE to be a "priest" to weigh in. What you DO have
to do is put in the intellectual effort to understand what has already been done; learn some
math, learn some physics, and nuclear chemistry - then you can examine the evidence for yourself.
Big Bang: take a simple spectrograph and a telescope (e.g. the Mt. Wilson 100-inch, which you can rent time on). Look at a sample of distant galaxies. Measure the wavelength of the hydrogen emission line (which is doppler shifted according to the relative velocity between the telescope and the galaxy); you'll see that the more distant the galaxy is, the faster it is receeding from you. Think about what that implies about the past. Certainly the simplest (if not the only) answer is that in the past the galaxies were closer to each other than they are now - ultimately at some point they would have to come from a single point.
It goes on and on - but the point I'm trying to make is that you shouln't treat modern physics as some kind of revealed religion. Instead, understand the evidence for and against the various theories - but also give the honest effort to learn the tools of modern science (above all math, but also physics, chemistry & astronomy).
If you don't then you're just spouting an uninformed opinion - and there are too many of those on/. already!
Oh, the nuclear phobia raises its head again... sigh.
Nuclear technology is akin to fire - it gives us access to more energy than we can otherwise get. What we choose to do with that energy is where the problems arise. Remember, far more people were killed in fire-bombings than in the nuclear attacks, and many more workers have been killed in coal-mine explosions than were killed at Chernobyl.
Are you referring things like X-rays and cancer treatment? Nuclear technology is hardly needed for those applications; all you need is to dig out a radioactive rock from the ground and expose someone to it.
Wrong again. Most such cancer treatments use radioactive isotopes that are produced in a nuclear reactor. You can just "dig up a rock" and think you'll get enough of a dose to kill cancer.
Seriosly, stop with the "dark day for humanity" crap and think! Nuclear technology is like any other technology: it has risks and benefits, and a rational examination of those risks and benefits (without giving in to deep-rooted fears) shows that sooner or later nuclear technology will have to be a component of our future energy supply.
Of course, fusion power is preferable to fission, but one way or the other the choice is clear: if we want to maintain a modern society that supports the full population of the planet, nuclear power is the ticket.
The problem with your argument is one of physics. Let me explain: as long as the only energy that could be applied to the enemy came from muscle power there was almost no way to penetrate the armor of the time (except by storing up a lot of energy over time by using a crossbow). Thus armor made sense.
Once chemical energy (in the form of gunpowder) became available it was impossible to carry enough armor to withstand penetration. This holds for man-sized targets as well as for large things like tanks (most MBT's will not withstand a direct hit from another tank, or more tellingly, a hit from a man-portable anti-tank missle).
What this means is that anyone (even a single un-armored grunt) can carry enough high explosive to disable even the heaviest tank. An armored suit
doesn't solve this problem.
What is required for a return of full body armor is an advance in materials science. However, there are plausible physical arguments against this - having to do with the fact that both chemical energy (in explosives) and material strength (the determining factor in armor) are related to chemical bonds.
Don't forget that the radiation environment on the surface of Europa is far, far worse than anything that could be generated by the RTG (in one piece, or as dust) - enough to kill an unprotected human in minutes. This is perfectly natural and the result of the trapping of energetic particles by the Jovian magnetic field. A few pounds of plutonium are totally insignificant in this context.
The possibility of microbes from Earth surviving and contaminating Europa is more of an issue, but still a pretty remote possibility; as I said, the radiation environment that the Galileo probe has been immersed in for years now is at times a good deal more intense than what is used to sterilize e.g. food (and nowadays mail).
I don't think the spacecraft could be more sterile if we tried.
it's possible the 228 votes were one person hitting reload to see the current status, not attempting to vote, but rather attempting to view the resulting page.
A rather persistent fellow, don't you think? If something doesn't come up I usually give up after 3-4 tries. If Microsoft is paying emplyees to sit around and try to look at some stupid ZDNet poll 228 times then they are not an efficient outfit.
Actually, you can orbit the Moon. If you stay in a low enough orbit (less than a few 1000 km's) the
gravitational perturbation due to the Earth is small. HOWEVER, there is another source of gravitational
perturbation that will cause orbits to change in a few months: large concetrations of dense rock called
"mascons" (for "mass concentrations") formed from early lava flows. These have a large enough effect that
e.g. satellites left in lunar orbit during the Apollo program decayed and impacted the Moon within a year, as
I recall.
I don't want to nit-pick too much, becaue your basic point is right. However, there is a (complicated) coupling between ozone depletion and atmospheric temperatures. In fact, ozone depletion acts to REDUCE upper atmosphere temperatures. This has been used by opponents of CO2 emissions controls to argue along the lines: "see! satellite data shows no global warming". What they don't tell you is that satellites measure upper atmosphere temperature more than surface temperature, and hence are sensitive to the effect of ozone depletion. In actual fact there is a warming trend of surface temperatures...
The consequence of the "global warming" debate involves (if the leftists get their way) the removal of individual rights. The two are drastically different.
Individual rights to piss in everyones bath, as it were? The individual right to pollute, the individual right to dump crap in the air that makes life harder for everyone else? The individual right to help destroy Micronesia through sea-level rise? Where in the Constitution does it say you have the individual right to pay less than a buck for a gallon of gas?
How about realizing that by polluting you are taking away the individual right to breathe clean air? How about realizing that by burning every drop of oil on the planet you are taking away the "individual rights" of future generations ?
Why is it so hard for some people to grasp that burning nonrenewable resources like petroleum is like driving through the desert in a car with half a tank of gas and NO gas stations ahead. Wouldn't it be wise to start thinking about alternatives?
Can somebody explain to me how this is supposed to
save money? We're not talking about competition - unless NASA sold half the Shuttles to one company and half to the other and proceeded to buy launches from the cheapest one.
What will ACTUALLY happen is that NASA will be giving away a monopoly on manned space access to a consortium of large companies, with little or no incentive for anyone to save money. If by fiat it is decided that money has to be saved, the only way to do that is buy reducing staff. I think it is clear that the Shuttle is not a safe system to run and maintain shorthanded (about 4 years ago they cut people, then had to rehire when they almost lost a Shuttle, on Eileen Collins' flight as I recall.)
Pivate enterprise and competition works fine when there are many customers and a lot of potential profit (and thus many interested companies). Manned spaceflight is not that kind of animal (yet), and you are fooling yourself if you think it is. Sure, manned spaceflight is a must on the long term for species survival, and as such warrants investment by government. BUT, at present there is little profit to be made by private companies (how many millionare space nuts are there, really?), especially if they are saddled with the Shuttle.
The only result from privatising the Shuttle further will be a dead crew and a dead program, brought on by overzealous cost cutting. And don't forget, its much easier to kill a private program ("It wasn't profitable") than a government one (which annoys senators and congressmen).
BEFORE we decide to go to Mars, or the Moon, or anywhere else for that matter we have to figure out how to get to low Earth orbit for less than $20,000 per kg. It's as simple as that. There is no known resource that is valuable enough to justify the truly astronomical cost of getting to orbit. Until we get launch costs down by 1-2 orders of magnitude space will just be an increasingly marginalized pipe dream. Deal with it.
Goldin's great success was getting the Origins program started (searching for extra-solar Earths among other things), and his biggest failure was failing to get the X-33/X-34 programs to work. Origins provided a truly inspiring goal, and had X-33 worked we could have had a viable space program. Now we are facing limited budgets, a space station that we can't afford to keep in orbit, and an administration that really couldn't care less about the space program.
Of course, Stephen Hawking said it best just a few days ago - unless we get a substantial presence off-planet we will sooner or later face extinction as a species.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand the Marines found that the best form of crowd control was a laser designator. The guy with a big bright red dot on his forehead kept very still, and so did his buddies.
Actually, I know of at least one microwave oven I use a lot that I wish I could re-program. It's one of those ones where you're supposed to tell it how many grams of chicken you're cooking and it'll decide how long to cook etc. by itself. Completely useless, of course..
Of course, if you cut it higher up, or cut into a bunch of pieces then some of them would come crashing down...
Either way - the technology to build this thing is so outlandish that we shouldn't hold our collective breath.
Assume high Reynolds number flow (it'll be travelling more than a few cm/s), so the drag force on a sphere of radius r, velocity v is roughly:
F_d = 0.5 * C_d * rho * v^2 * pi*r^2
where C_d is the drag coefficient (~0.5), and rho is air density (~0.001 g/cc)
Assume a hollow sphere (i.e. a fuel tank) of thickness T, radius r. The gravity force on it will be:
F_g = 4 * pi * r^2 * T * rho_t * g
where rho_t is the density of titanium (4.5 g/cc), and g is the Earths' gravitational acceleration 9.8 m/s^2. Balance the two and solve for v:
v = sqrt(8*pi*T*rho_t*g / C_d*rho)
For a typical tank size (e.g.a helium pressurant tank, pick r = 10 cm, T = 1 cm) and we get v ~ 150 m/s (450 ft/s)
Yes, it would give you a headache is you were hit by it.
Count me lucky, too. Om man nu kan kalla det tur.
How do "know* something is real that's never been demonstrated?
Zero-point energy has a very testable hypothesis: the Casimir effect. Which has been demonstrated. Check this article or this one .
But in the case of e.g. a large factory in a small town, the company is in effect the only (or at least largest) buyer of labor in town. As such the company already enjoys the benefits of a near-monopoly.
Like employers aren't sometimes driven out of business because they can't afford labor.
The difference with a large corporation is that if it goes out bankrupt the liability is limited; the repo man may come for the factory, but not the CEO's golden parachute.
Actually, if you think about it, the ideal market would allow the "winner" to pick over the corpse of the "loser" (cut to Darwinian image of the lion eating the antelope). As such when cororations lose it is right that they get broken up and eaten. The question is, is it morally acceptable to do the equivalent to actual human beings?
True. But the whole point of society doesn't have to be the bottom line. The problem with a purely capitalist society is that while it may maximize growth, it says nothing about distribution. I'm not saying capitalism is wrong, merely incomplete. It seems to me that a system which exploits its workers will tend to see resentments grow among the workers. Isn't it reasonable to think in the long run that there can only be one of two outcomes: either some of the wealth thus generated has to be spread around (i.e. reduce the exploitation), or the resentment has to be suppressed by force (by "exploit" I mean that the person doing the work does not reap even a substantial fraction of the benefit from that work).
If you are easily replaceable, that's your own damn fault.
You are forgetting that the playng field is not level - one worker against a multi-million dollar company is not a fair fight.
Modern physics is anything but "voodoo". In fact, the whole point of it is that it is open to independent verification. You don't HAVE to be a "priest" to weigh in. What you DO have to do is put in the intellectual effort to understand what has already been done; learn some math, learn some physics, and nuclear chemistry - then you can examine the evidence for yourself.
Big Bang: take a simple spectrograph and a telescope (e.g. the Mt. Wilson 100-inch, which you can rent time on). Look at a sample of distant galaxies. Measure the wavelength of the hydrogen emission line (which is doppler shifted according to the relative velocity between the telescope and the galaxy); you'll see that the more distant the galaxy is, the faster it is receeding from you. Think about what that implies about the past. Certainly the simplest (if not the only) answer is that in the past the galaxies were closer to each other than they are now - ultimately at some point they would have to come from a single point.
It goes on and on - but the point I'm trying to make is that you shouln't treat modern physics as some kind of revealed religion. Instead, understand the evidence for and against the various theories - but also give the honest effort to learn the tools of modern science (above all math, but also physics, chemistry & astronomy).
If you don't then you're just spouting an uninformed opinion - and there are too many of those on /. already!
Nuclear technology is akin to fire - it gives us access to more energy than we can otherwise get. What we choose to do with that energy is where the problems arise. Remember, far more people were killed in fire-bombings than in the nuclear attacks, and many more workers have been killed in coal-mine explosions than were killed at Chernobyl.
Are you referring things like X-rays and cancer treatment? Nuclear technology is hardly needed for those applications; all you need is to dig out a radioactive rock from the ground and expose someone to it.
Wrong again. Most such cancer treatments use radioactive isotopes that are produced in a nuclear reactor. You can just "dig up a rock" and think you'll get enough of a dose to kill cancer.
Seriosly, stop with the "dark day for humanity" crap and think! Nuclear technology is like any other technology: it has risks and benefits, and a rational examination of those risks and benefits (without giving in to deep-rooted fears) shows that sooner or later nuclear technology will have to be a component of our future energy supply. Of course, fusion power is preferable to fission, but one way or the other the choice is clear: if we want to maintain a modern society that supports the full population of the planet, nuclear power is the ticket.
Once chemical energy (in the form of gunpowder) became available it was impossible to carry enough armor to withstand penetration. This holds for man-sized targets as well as for large things like tanks (most MBT's will not withstand a direct hit from another tank, or more tellingly, a hit from a man-portable anti-tank missle).
What this means is that anyone (even a single un-armored grunt) can carry enough high explosive to disable even the heaviest tank. An armored suit doesn't solve this problem.
What is required for a return of full body armor is an advance in materials science. However, there are plausible physical arguments against this - having to do with the fact that both chemical energy (in explosives) and material strength (the determining factor in armor) are related to chemical bonds.
The possibility of microbes from Earth surviving and contaminating Europa is more of an issue, but still a pretty remote possibility; as I said, the radiation environment that the Galileo probe has been immersed in for years now is at times a good deal more intense than what is used to sterilize e.g. food (and nowadays mail). I don't think the spacecraft could be more sterile if we tried.
A rather persistent fellow, don't you think? If something doesn't come up I usually give up after 3-4 tries. If Microsoft is paying emplyees to sit around and try to look at some stupid ZDNet poll 228 times then they are not an efficient outfit.
Uh, no. GL 229B was discovered by T. Nakajima and a group at Caltech. Check out this link
Actually, you can orbit the Moon. If you stay in a low enough orbit (less than a few 1000 km's) the
gravitational perturbation due to the Earth is small. HOWEVER, there is another source of gravitational
perturbation that will cause orbits to change in a few months: large concetrations of dense rock called
"mascons" (for "mass concentrations") formed from early lava flows. These have a large enough effect that
e.g. satellites left in lunar orbit during the Apollo program decayed and impacted the Moon within a year, as
I recall.
I don't want to nit-pick too much, becaue your basic point is right. However, there is a (complicated) coupling between ozone depletion and atmospheric temperatures. In fact, ozone depletion acts to REDUCE upper atmosphere temperatures. This has been used by opponents of CO2 emissions controls to argue along the lines: "see! satellite data shows no global warming". What they don't tell you is that satellites measure upper atmosphere temperature more than surface temperature, and hence are sensitive to the effect of ozone depletion. In actual fact there is a warming trend of surface temperatures...
Individual rights to piss in everyones bath, as it were? The individual right to pollute, the individual right to dump crap in the air that makes life harder for everyone else? The individual right to help destroy Micronesia through sea-level rise? Where in the Constitution does it say you have the individual right to pay less than a buck for a gallon of gas?
How about realizing that by polluting you are taking away the individual right to breathe clean air? How about realizing that by burning every drop of oil on the planet you are taking away the "individual rights" of future generations ?
Why is it so hard for some people to grasp that burning nonrenewable resources like petroleum is like driving through the desert in a car with half a tank of gas and NO gas stations ahead. Wouldn't it be wise to start thinking about alternatives?
What will ACTUALLY happen is that NASA will be giving away a monopoly on manned space access to a consortium of large companies, with little or no incentive for anyone to save money. If by fiat it is decided that money has to be saved, the only way to do that is buy reducing staff. I think it is clear that the Shuttle is not a safe system to run and maintain shorthanded (about 4 years ago they cut people, then had to rehire when they almost lost a Shuttle, on Eileen Collins' flight as I recall.)
Pivate enterprise and competition works fine when there are many customers and a lot of potential profit (and thus many interested companies). Manned spaceflight is not that kind of animal (yet), and you are fooling yourself if you think it is. Sure, manned spaceflight is a must on the long term for species survival, and as such warrants investment by government. BUT, at present there is little profit to be made by private companies (how many millionare space nuts are there, really?), especially if they are saddled with the Shuttle.
The only result from privatising the Shuttle further will be a dead crew and a dead program, brought on by overzealous cost cutting. And don't forget, its much easier to kill a private program ("It wasn't profitable") than a government one (which annoys senators and congressmen).
Goldin's great success was getting the Origins program started (searching for extra-solar Earths among other things), and his biggest failure was failing to get the X-33/X-34 programs to work. Origins provided a truly inspiring goal, and had X-33 worked we could have had a viable space program. Now we are facing limited budgets, a space station that we can't afford to keep in orbit, and an administration that really couldn't care less about the space program.
Of course, Stephen Hawking said it best just a few days ago - unless we get a substantial presence off-planet we will sooner or later face extinction as a species.
Didn't Mars Climate Orbiter already demonstrate aerocapture? (Apologies to the JPL folks..)