The article just assumes that we all knew about radio waves having force, whereas I was laboring under the impression that they had none.
Photons do have force. In fact, probably the most viable concept for intersteller travel at close to the speed of light is a laser or microwave sail. (You shoot lasers or microwaves at a gossamer sail. This is actually better than antimatter for intersteller travel)
This P4 is has hyperthreading. It is like 2 virtual processors, at least for apps that support hyperthreading.
Dual processors also take advantage of apps that have hyperthreading. The P4 has a 25% increase in performance in hyperthreaded apps, while a dual athlon gets at least a 60% increase, usually much more than that.
So, if Apache supports huyperthreading (I'm sure it does) you would be much better off getting dual athlon XPs rather than this P4. It be much faster and cost the same or less. (BTW, get XPs instead of MPs. They are really the same thing)
I have two dual processor machines and they run at 3.2G's but I don't think they would fare all that well against a single processor machine running at 3.06G since not everything can use both and it doesn't seem like all that much uses both effectively.
Actually, the hyperthreading only helps in apps that support hyperthreading. Your dual processors are hyperthreaded. So any hyperthreading app that takes advantage of the P4 will also take advantage of your dual processor setup.
I imagine two different processors would be much better than 1 hyperthreaded processor.
Also, they only mention a 25% performance increase. Dual processors running hyperthreaded apps have at least a 60% performance increase. However, I bet this P4 would beat your machine in non-hyperthreaded apps.
I know where you could look for a higher rate of cancer with RF radiation: Do a study on people who maintain the large radio antennas and such. They are most likely exposed to relatively large amounts of radiation. Probably more than a cell phone.
The radioactive battery in a pacemaker has enough plutonium to poison 50,000 people. They are put through rigorous crash testing. Still, if you're faced with dying or having a nuclear power source implanted in your chest, you might opt for safe, clean, nuclear power....
I'm sorry but your'e completely wrong. Plutonium is no where near that deadly. Contrary to what Ralph Nader says, plutonium is not the deadliest substance on earth. Not even by a longshot.
Plutonium is actually one of the safer radioactive elements. Ordinary matter is so absorptive of radiation that plutonium's rays are stopped by a sheet of paper. It can be handled with your bare hands safely. It is not absorbed in the digestive tract so the problem with ingestion is radiation damage to the lining of the digestive tract. Its lethal oral dose is more than an aspirin in weight.
Inhaling plutonium is another story, as it remains in your lungs and irradiates you for a long time. But it is very difficult to make a plutonium aerosol, as it is a metal and is heavier than lead. At any rate, even if you could make an effective aerosol (impossible, almost) you would need huge amounts of plutonium to give people lethal doses over a fairly large area.
Say, if you dropped 10 kg of some sort of plutonium aerosol from a plane. (Nevermind where you get 10 kg of Pu) It is spread over an area 500 meters x 500 meters x 200 meters tall. That's 50 million cubic meters. Which would work out to.0002 grams per square meter! Far too little to cause a human any damage.
Neither am I, microwave radiation (802.11b to be specific), however miniscule (100mw), has to be bad for you when your exposed to it for 9+ hours a day.
MICROWAVE RADIATION IS NON IONIZING!!!! The reason that gamma rays and x rays are harmful is because they have enough energy to mess up your dna and such, which can potentially cause cancer and other problems. Microwave radiation has none of these problems. Microwaves have far less energy than optical light. They can't ionize anything.
The only way RF can cause damage is by overheating. But 15 mw of power from a WAP or a card isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.
Dude, many cellphones transmit at more than 5 watts. And they're right next to your brain when they're on.
Not even close to 5 watts. Most are less than a watt. Also, 5 watts of heat going to your brain is damn little. (That's all that RF frequency would do to your brain: Heat it. It has less energy, and therefore, less potential to mutate, than ordinary light)
Your body emits over 100 watts of heat. So I don't think 5 watts matters at all.
Re:Materials haven't been demonstrated yet
on
Redirecting NASA
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· Score: 2
They've already produced a nanotube composite (about a month ago I believe) that is almost strong enough for a space elevator. Materials science progresses so fast, I'm sure we'd have a nanotube composite in another couple years that is plenty strong. (After all, 5 years ago they could only produce extremely small quantities of nanotubes. Look at where we are now.)
Re:Stop printing out stupid certificates...
on
Redirecting NASA
·
· Score: 2
I don't even want to know what they spend some of the rest of their money on. I like NASA and I think they should continue to exist... but sheesh.
Why are you bitching? You're the one that's getting obscene sums of money for framing their Janitor Achievement Awards.
Oh, also, you can reduce costs a lot by having cheap infrastructure. The shuttle has thousands of people working on it just to prepare for the occasional launch. If you reduced things by cutting it down to a team of mechanics checking the safety of the rocket, a few launch controllers, and some various other people, you could reduce launch costs even further.
If you only had 150 people working to launch a good sized rocked instead of 10,000, you would save a lot of money, obviously.
But typically most launchers only launch 5-10 times per year, so the flightrate isn't there right now- it would take 10 years to recoup the extra development cost, and then there is interest on top...
In contrast, a cheap expendable can be knocked out very cheaply, and at these launch rates it's a win to do that, alas.
On the other side of the coin, expendables also become very cheap if you launch frequently. (~1x per day or more) The way it is now, you only have a very few launches. For example, Arianes launch about every 3 weeks. You are not mass producing the rockets. It's like having your car built from scratch by a team of mechanics and machinists.
If you have a large amount of rockets being launched, you can have great cost savings through mass production,
I hope the Chinese are writing all of this down. ^_^
The Chinese are our best hope for human presence in space. Their space program isn't anemic and beauracratic like NASA. They have several very good (reliblility could use work) rockets such as the Long March series. They have sent unmanned dummy capsules into orbit.
The Chinese want to have a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and a continously manned moon base not long after that. I doubt they will have that accomplished by 2010, but they most likely will by 2015 or 2020.
Lets face it: NASA is not going to send humans out of low earth orbit any time soon. I have my doubts if we will be the first to Mars. It will probably be the chinese. The date for a Mars mission is always being pushed back. During the sixties, we figured we'd have a Mars mission before 1980. Then, we thought before 2000. Then it was pushed to around 2020. Now 2020 sounds wildly optimistic.
Re:I remember when it was the best...
on
Altavista Renewed
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Google hit the point where they decided that not losing money would be wise, and they've started to fill up on advertisements.
Google needs to make money. How do you think they pay for all of their bandwidth? Anyway, the only ads they have are unobtrusive text ads. That's great, considering that advertising everywhere else on the net is getting worse and worse every day, with popups and animated ads. I can't see how anyone can complain about Google's advertisements.
Also, Google will never get flashvertisements or anything of that sort. They know one of the main reasons people use their site is the clean interface with no annoying ads. They won't abandon that. They're making a very good profit just the way it is.
I hate the skinny column. Another thing that annoys me is how on many sites, they may have a white background with a dark blue or some such stripe running down. That makes it extremely hard to view the black text.
GRAMMAR AND SPELLING CHECK COMPLETE: 15 minutes 23 seconds 67 ms
Your syntax is abysmal. First of all, your first sentence should not be in all caps. One capitol letter at the beggining of the sentence is suffficiet. Also, when you give the time, that is a sentence fragment. May I suggest this:
"The grammar and spelling check is now complete. It took 15 minutes, 22 seconds, and 67 milliseconds."
If you managed to bring enough oxygen into your lungs to provide your bodily needs, the resulting difference in pressure would blow you up.
Provided the person exhales *before* being depressurized, one can be conscious for 10 seconds and live for several minutes. (The lack of oxygen,not the vacuum, kills you) However, if you don't exhale, your lungs will explode.
Definitely. If a plane crashes, it's obviously horrible for the passengers, but the danger to bystanders is minimal. A plane crash-- one caused by failure or error, not deliberate malice-- might kill a few people on the ground, and that would be terrible. But a catastrophic failure of an evacuated tube would have the force of a medium-sized bomb, and it would be spread out all through the city, the countryside, et cetera.
Actually, we're probably talking about a tube maybe 10 feet wide. It would implode, not explode, since the tube contains the vacuum. And it wouldn't do it with a whole lot of force, either. The craft inside of the tubes would easily be able to take a complete, catastrophic tube failure. Also, the tube doesn't just implode. It don't work that way. At the very worst, a leak could occur, ruining the vacuum and causing some delays. The leak would be patched and the air pumped out, and that's that.
However, this would most likely be made out of steel, so the joints would be welded anyway, which would eliminate the possiblity of leaks. At any rate, if it just imploded, it would be far less damage than a train derailment.
And cars are still much more dangerous.
That's a common misconception caused by the careless application of statistics. The total number of automobile fatalities per year is umpty-thousand. That sounds like a big number, even when you compare it to the total population. But when you look at the numbers another way, calculating an individual person's likelihood of being involved in a fatal automobile accident in his or her lifetime, the percentages come out very close to zero. That's why automobile liability insurance is still available, and affordable. Automotive transport is actually quite safe from an actuarial point of view.
Yes, I agree with you that cars aren't very dangerous, but you didn't explain why they are less dangeorous than this tube setup. A tube craft could have a reserve of high pressure oxygen if a leak occurs. (A leak would almost certainly involve a problem with the gasket, and would be quite small.)
I just really don't see how this could be dangerous at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The article just assumes that we all knew about radio waves having force, whereas I was laboring under the impression that they had none.
Photons do have force. In fact, probably the most viable concept for intersteller travel at close to the speed of light is a laser or microwave sail. (You shoot lasers or microwaves at a gossamer sail. This is actually better than antimatter for intersteller travel)
Here's a link. PU cannot poison you unless it is taken internally.
s C: prop1.org/2000/cassini/971005.htm+plutonium+alpha+ particles+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:KiDhhCg_zr
What is a power user?
It means you use a lot of electricity with your computer.
This P4 is has hyperthreading. It is like 2 virtual processors, at least for apps that support hyperthreading.
Dual processors also take advantage of apps that have hyperthreading. The P4 has a 25% increase in performance in hyperthreaded apps, while a dual athlon gets at least a 60% increase, usually much more than that.
So, if Apache supports huyperthreading (I'm sure it does) you would be much better off getting dual athlon XPs rather than this P4. It be much faster and cost the same or less. (BTW, get XPs instead of MPs. They are really the same thing)
I have two dual processor machines and they run at 3.2G's but I don't think they would fare all that well against a single processor machine running at 3.06G since not everything can use both and it doesn't seem like all that much uses both effectively.
Actually, the hyperthreading only helps in apps that support hyperthreading. Your dual processors are hyperthreaded. So any hyperthreading app that takes advantage of the P4 will also take advantage of your dual processor setup.
I imagine two different processors would be much better than 1 hyperthreaded processor.
Also, they only mention a 25% performance increase. Dual processors running hyperthreaded apps have at least a 60% performance increase. However, I bet this P4 would beat your machine in non-hyperthreaded apps.
I know where you could look for a higher rate of cancer with RF radiation: Do a study on people who maintain the large radio antennas and such. They are most likely exposed to relatively large amounts of radiation. Probably more than a cell phone.
All the manhattan project problems were caused by somehow inhaling the PU. The fact remains that PU only emits alpha particles.
Alpha particles are stopped by the skin's epidermis. You can't get poisoned by handling plutonium.
Alpha particles are slow and massive. They just can't penetrate. Don't believe the eco-whacko scare stories you hear.
The radioactive battery in a pacemaker has enough plutonium to poison 50,000 people. They are put through rigorous crash testing. Still, if you're faced with dying or having a nuclear power source implanted in your chest, you might opt for safe, clean, nuclear power....
.0002 grams per square meter! Far too little to cause a human any damage.
I'm sorry but your'e completely wrong. Plutonium is no where near that deadly. Contrary to what Ralph Nader says, plutonium is not the deadliest substance on earth. Not even by a longshot.
Plutonium is actually one of the safer radioactive elements. Ordinary matter is so absorptive of radiation that plutonium's rays are stopped by a sheet of paper. It can be handled with your bare hands safely. It is not absorbed in the digestive tract so the problem with ingestion is radiation damage to the lining of the digestive tract. Its lethal oral dose is more than an aspirin in weight.
Inhaling plutonium is another story, as it remains in your lungs and irradiates you for a long time. But it is very difficult to make a plutonium aerosol, as it is a metal and is heavier than lead. At any rate, even if you could make an effective aerosol (impossible, almost) you would need huge amounts of plutonium to give people lethal doses over a fairly large area.
Say, if you dropped 10 kg of some sort of plutonium aerosol from a plane. (Nevermind where you get 10 kg of Pu) It is spread over an area 500 meters x 500 meters x 200 meters tall. That's 50 million cubic meters. Which would work out to
Neither am I, microwave radiation (802.11b to be specific), however miniscule (100mw), has to be bad for you when your exposed to it for 9+ hours a day.
MICROWAVE RADIATION IS NON IONIZING!!!! The reason that gamma rays and x rays are harmful is because they have enough energy to mess up your dna and such, which can potentially cause cancer and other problems. Microwave radiation has none of these problems. Microwaves have far less energy than optical light. They can't ionize anything.
The only way RF can cause damage is by overheating. But 15 mw of power from a WAP or a card isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.
Dude, many cellphones transmit at more than 5 watts. And they're right next to your brain when they're on.
Not even close to 5 watts. Most are less than a watt. Also, 5 watts of heat going to your brain is damn little. (That's all that RF frequency would do to your brain: Heat it. It has less energy, and therefore, less potential to mutate, than ordinary light)
Your body emits over 100 watts of heat. So I don't think 5 watts matters at all.
They've already produced a nanotube composite (about a month ago I believe) that is almost strong enough for a space elevator. Materials science progresses so fast, I'm sure we'd have a nanotube composite in another couple years that is plenty strong. (After all, 5 years ago they could only produce extremely small quantities of nanotubes. Look at where we are now.)
I don't even want to know what they spend some of the rest of their money on. I like NASA and I think they should continue to exist... but sheesh.
Why are you bitching? You're the one that's getting obscene sums of money for framing their Janitor Achievement Awards.
Oh, also, you can reduce costs a lot by having cheap infrastructure. The shuttle has thousands of people working on it just to prepare for the occasional launch. If you reduced things by cutting it down to a team of mechanics checking the safety of the rocket, a few launch controllers, and some various other people, you could reduce launch costs even further.
If you only had 150 people working to launch a good sized rocked instead of 10,000, you would save a lot of money, obviously.
But typically most launchers only launch 5-10 times per year, so the flightrate isn't there right now- it would take 10 years to recoup the extra development cost, and then there is interest on top...
In contrast, a cheap expendable can be knocked out very cheaply, and at these launch rates it's a win to do that, alas.
On the other side of the coin, expendables also become very cheap if you launch frequently. (~1x per day or more) The way it is now, you only have a very few launches. For example, Arianes launch about every 3 weeks. You are not mass producing the rockets. It's like having your car built from scratch by a team of mechanics and machinists.
If you have a large amount of rockets being launched, you can have great cost savings through mass production,
I hope the Chinese are writing all of this down. ^_^
The Chinese are our best hope for human presence in space. Their space program isn't anemic and beauracratic like NASA. They have several very good (reliblility could use work) rockets such as the Long March series. They have sent unmanned dummy capsules into orbit.
The Chinese want to have a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and a continously manned moon base not long after that. I doubt they will have that accomplished by 2010, but they most likely will by 2015 or 2020.
Lets face it: NASA is not going to send humans out of low earth orbit any time soon. I have my doubts if we will be the first to Mars. It will probably be the chinese. The date for a Mars mission is always being pushed back. During the sixties, we figured we'd have a Mars mission before 1980. Then, we thought before 2000. Then it was pushed to around 2020. Now 2020 sounds wildly optimistic.
Google hit the point where they decided that not losing money would be wise, and they've started to fill up on advertisements.
Google needs to make money. How do you think they pay for all of their bandwidth? Anyway, the only ads they have are unobtrusive text ads. That's great, considering that advertising everywhere else on the net is getting worse and worse every day, with popups and animated ads. I can't see how anyone can complain about Google's advertisements.
Also, Google will never get flashvertisements or anything of that sort. They know one of the main reasons people use their site is the clean interface with no annoying ads. They won't abandon that. They're making a very good profit just the way it is.
I hate the skinny column. Another thing that annoys me is how on many sites, they may have a white background with a dark blue or some such stripe running down. That makes it extremely hard to view the black text.
Hmm. Please tell me more. I couldn't find anything on google. Sounds very interesting. Could save me a lot of money.
Yeah but blue led's are the coolest per mcd of brightness.
Red and green LED's look tacky. Remind me of those old calculators.
I get my tan from my blacklight cold cathodes in my case. ;-)
Do not trust the shover robot. Shoving is the answer. We are here to protect you.
PAK CHOOIE UNF. GREATINGS 7.
GRAMMAR AND SPELLING CHECK COMPLETE: 15 minutes 23 seconds 67 ms
Your syntax is abysmal. First of all, your first sentence should not be in all caps. One capitol letter at the beggining of the sentence is suffficiet. Also, when you give the time, that is a sentence fragment. May I suggest this:
"The grammar and spelling check is now complete. It took 15 minutes, 22 seconds, and 67 milliseconds."
I've been thinking of shelling out the big bucks for a 23" widescreen 1200x1900 Sony lcd. One more excuse to get it. ;-)
If you managed to bring enough oxygen into your lungs to provide your bodily needs, the resulting difference in pressure would blow you up.
Provided the person exhales *before* being depressurized, one can be conscious for 10 seconds and live for several minutes. (The lack of oxygen,not the vacuum, kills you) However, if you don't exhale, your lungs will explode.
Twirlip, actually you're completely wrong.
More dangerous than flying?
Definitely. If a plane crashes, it's obviously horrible for the passengers, but the danger to bystanders is minimal. A plane crash-- one caused by failure or error, not deliberate malice-- might kill a few people on the ground, and that would be terrible. But a catastrophic failure of an evacuated tube would have the force of a medium-sized bomb, and it would be spread out all through the city, the countryside, et cetera.
Actually, we're probably talking about a tube maybe 10 feet wide. It would implode, not explode, since the tube contains the vacuum. And it wouldn't do it with a whole lot of force, either. The craft inside of the tubes would easily be able to take a complete, catastrophic tube failure. Also, the tube doesn't just implode. It don't work that way. At the very worst, a leak could occur, ruining the vacuum and causing some delays. The leak would be patched and the air pumped out, and that's that.
However, this would most likely be made out of steel, so the joints would be welded anyway, which would eliminate the possiblity of leaks. At any rate, if it just imploded, it would be far less damage than a train derailment.
And cars are still much more dangerous.
That's a common misconception caused by the careless application of statistics. The total number of automobile fatalities per year is umpty-thousand. That sounds like a big number, even when you compare it to the total population. But when you look at the numbers another way, calculating an individual person's likelihood of being involved in a fatal automobile accident in his or her lifetime, the percentages come out very close to zero. That's why automobile liability insurance is still available, and affordable. Automotive transport is actually quite safe from an actuarial point of view.
Yes, I agree with you that cars aren't very dangerous, but you didn't explain why they are less dangeorous than this tube setup. A tube craft could have a reserve of high pressure oxygen if a leak occurs. (A leak would almost certainly involve a problem with the gasket, and would be quite small.)
I just really don't see how this could be dangerous at all.