I see that you're already aware that you just reinvented the space elevator:)
The nice thing is there is no "you need to support the weight of the rope" non-sense because with centripetal forces, it all equates out and the rope doesn't have to support its own weight.
While the space elevator is a really neat idea, the problem is that your rope unfortunately *does* need to carry its own weight. And for that you need a "rope" with some amazing properties, specifically immense tensile strength.
Carbon nanotubes theoretically have high enough tensile strength, but it's not yet possible to manufacture them in the quantities and with the properties required. If we do manage to construct a space elevator it will be a very cheap way to transport cargo into space, and it'll revolutionize human spacetravel. Sadly, initial cost and engineering feasibility will most likely keep it in the realm of science fiction for quite some time to come.
If the lottery on the other hand routinely discards lots of unsold tickets, then such plundering would hurt the lottery as they would pay out a disproportionately high amount of winnings against sold tickets.
It suddenly struck me that this is irrelevant, as you probably are unable to examine a significant portion of each batch before picking winning tickets. Oh well, bedtime for me:)
Of course, ripping off poor, uneducated people to fund public schools is also, in my opinion, ethically problematic.
Actually, assuming that the lottery sells all (or close to all) of each batch of tickets, they will get their proceeds no matter what. It's the other buyers who funds your gain, as they will win less. It may be more accurate to say that they'll lose even more:)
If the lottery on the other hand routinely discards lots of unsold tickets, then such plundering would hurt the lottery as they would pay out a disproportionately high amount of winnings against sold tickets.
Just zap a region of space with an aging gun, which causes that region of space to expand faster than the speed of light, and ride the bubble wherever you want to go.
Actually, a negative energy gun would do nicely. Oh, and you'd probably need some tachyons:)
I know people love to say this, but what does a manual transmission legitimately get you, other than a sore left leg and a very small increase in mileage?
There are actually a few other advantages: you get better control of force and rpm, which is important on slippery roads, especially going up steep hills. An experienced manual driver can climb a snowy driveway better than any automatic, even with anti-spin. An automatic will lag, and you need to be able to make split-second variations in force to the wheels. I always disable anti-spin even in a manual vehicle as I can do better myself. You achieve this by judicious use of the clutch and gas pedals in combination, but it does take experience:)
You get more precise control of engine rpm, this can lead to more comfortable driving, especially at high speeds. I've driven automatics plenty of times, and occasionally I find myself trying to nudge the automatic into shifting, usually it lags a second or two if it shifts at all.
You can also use the engine for braking. This is a small issue, but can be convenient if you live in an area with lots of mountains.
At the end of the day it comes down to personal preference. Where I live manual is the norm, and it's what I prefer. Many prefer automatics because of the convenience, I prefer increased control.
On a side note I used to drive a scooter (Vespa) all year round, with manual four-speed transmission and good tyres this is viable even if you get tons of snow in the winter as we do. A scooter with variable transmission is impossible to drive on snow and ice. This is similar to my first point, only a lot more accentuated on two wheels:)
I'd guess that a vast majority of people in the USA don't need these advantages, but I hope this partly answers your question:)
No I can't. Neither can anyone else outside the United States.
The "full episode" is restricted, but various sections, including the Greene interview, seems to be available to a wider audience. I watched this from Norway.
This is the problem with PayPal. They actually do send real emails to customers about their account. Because this is the only way they can contact their customers.
I got an email from them about my account being suspended because of "hacking attempts". I've gotten several, but this one seemed legit because they asked me to call them by looking up their customer service number on their site (no link). I did, and they requested that I faxed them some proof of residence at my address. I faxed them various utility bills, and eventually my account was activated again.
I don't remember the exact course of events, but the line of questions I got made me pretty confident that they really care about security.
It's so simple my mother can figure it out, and yet it foils scores of computer nerds who swear by a drop down menu.
As (probably) opposed to your mother I've been (ab)using Excel for more than twelve years for a large variety of purposes, there are not many features I haven't used at one time or another. The ribbon hampers me, it doesn't foil me:)
If I haven't used a feature for three years I probably never knew the shortcut for it, but on previous versions I'd know where to look. It would also be a lot quicker to scan dropdown menus without all the 'helpful' icons. If I spend twelve seconds finding an arbitrary entry it is about ten seconds too long.
It's far slower to scan a mess of icons and text horizontally than to look for text vertically in text-only dropdown menus. Finding the 'search commands' plugin from MS labs was a help (if it was instant/dynamic and didn't place results horizontally it would be perfect (seriously, what is the fucking problem with placing obvious list items in... well, vertical lists?)). The fact that MS themselves felt the need to make this plugin available at all leaves me thinking that other power users as well find that the ribbon is a huge leap backwards.
It seems to me that the ribbon is aimed at people who don't know how to use Office in the first place, but I fail to see how it will help them all that much. For the rest of us it is a relatively minor annoyance, but one which seems quite unneccesary. In my experience novice users of for instance Excel have a lot more trouble understanding the concept of a spreadsheet than finding how to insert a sum formula once they do understand the concept.
The simplest way I found to get people like you to understand why is to ask you to count to 10, on your fingers if you need some help.
I've never met you, but I'd still wager a pint that I would beat you when it comes to doing arithmetics in my head (or whatever would be the right expression). I'm actually pretty good at that.
So you go: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Then I ask you to count 10 more, and you start the 2nd decade by, wait for it, 11 !!! It's the same for centuries.
No, I wouldn't go 1991, 1992 and so on. I would start at 1990, and restart at 2000. No fingers needed.
I disagree with you, but I think we could have an entertaining conversation at a party. For now, let's agree to disagree:)
Actually, the 20th century is January 1, 1901 to December 31, 2000. Likewise, the 19th century is 1801 to 1900.
Ok, I stand corrected on this fact, thanks for that! I still maintain that it doesn't make sense in common usage more than 2000 years after the off-by-one error was introduced, and where I live no one (including the media) use the terms this way. Especially jarring is the fact that the decades don't match up. All this seems messy, and it is a lot worse than having a shorter *first*/decade/century/millenium by convention, due to the missing year zero:)
The twentieth century was from 1901 to 2000. The 21st century is 2001 to 2100, the 3rd millenium (see how we count millenia starting with 1 as well) is 2001 to 3000. The same rules are used for years, centuries, millenia. They all start with 1.
So, according to you the 1900s != the twentieth century? 1900 is not part of it? I suppose that by "1901 to 2000" you mean 1900-01-01 up to and including 2000-12-31, or do your centuries only contain 99 years? Would you seriously claim that the eighties lasted until the end of 1990? If not, does decades not match up with centuries?
The modern calendar is just a convention most people agree to, as is the understanding of when a decade, century and millenium starts. That is, except for a few... OK, I'll restrict myself to use the term "extreme pedants", and that's generous, as pedants are usually technically right. You choose not to follow this convention, and make your own definition instead. That's up to you, but you understand what's really going on when "everyone else is wrong", don't you?
Perhaps another method would be to contact and reserve the tickets w/o paying, but required to be there in person or at least present a valid ID at the event to pick-up or simply gain entrance to the events.
I would like tickets to be personal, like they are on airlines. That would eliminate the scalpers. It would also eliminate the possibility for a group to sell surplus tickets at the entrance, but that's a small price to pay. At the latest concert I went to I got a ticket slightly cheaper than value from a guy outside, because a friend of his couldn't make it. I'd gladly relinquish that if it meant that the scalpers would be eliminated. To scalpers: FUCK YOU!
Why? Why is what the market will support the moral arbiter?
Setting that aside, there's a reason tickets like those are priced lower than what the venue could get for them. It's to create shortage.
You're wrong. The band and venue wants primarily as much people they can get attending, secondarily as much money as they can get (I work closely with people in the business). The scum from the article is skimming off the good work of the artist and the fans, this is in fact illegal where I live. Their goal is to create an artificial scarcity of tickets and sell theirs at a premium, thus fucking over the fans of the band. It has nothing to do with a free market. If you're a ticket scalper: FUCK YOU!
as long as the opportunity for profit exists, then there will be capitalists ready to take advantage of it. It doesn't really matter how strongly you make your anti-capitalist arguments, the reality of this will still be there.
What's happening here is something like this: You bring along enormous tankers, and you empty all the ground tanks in every gas station. Then you sell gas from your tankers at a premium right outside the gas station. You've provided nothing of value, but you create an artificial scarcity in order to skim money off of other's work. Additionally you deprive people of the possibility to see a band live at the price which the band and venue agreed would be reasonable. This is very much a scam, in fact it is illegal where I live (fortunately I don't live in the land of the free and the brave). Also, to all scalpers, let me give you a heartfelt FUCK YOU.
Going through all that effort is a pretty clear demonstration they wanted the ticket more than other people who were not as highly motivated.
You obviously don't give a fuck about music. If you did, you'd be pretty pissed off by people who deprived you of a chance to see your favorite band live in order to make a quick buck. There is a reason why even the big ticket vendors put barriers in place to prevent this sort of behaviour.
If your idea of a free market is "burn all the competition's first aid kits if there is a hurricane, and sell your own at a premium", this is pretty much it. If you're a scalper: FUCK YOU
aargh. so, since I just finished _accidentally_ moderating the comment redundant, can someone explain how you change your moderation when you click on the wrong drop down item ?
Posting a comment in a story will invalidate any moderations you've made in that story. So, congratulations, you did it:)
I believe this is mentioned in the FAQ. The points you used in this story are lost, though.
Unfortunately, there is a large population of humans who have no skills beyond what are characterized here as boring, silly tasks, nor much inclination to step up and learn how to be more productive.
And strangely, this description coincides with the characteristics of sport fans I know. They will probably be content with whatever they're fed. No, I am not a fan of sports. Mod me to oblivion.
I can not get ordinary people to use Linux. The usually exclamation is "Get this crap off my computer so I can use it." not even able to comprehend that they are using a Live CD which won't alter their system.
If it booted and acted like windows, properly worked with all their important files, properly imported emails from outlook, properly worked with the keyboard shortcuts of their windows system then I might have a chance to go on to showing them how to customize it and activate advance features. As it is there is no chance, "It doesn't work"
Don't forget games, which is the only *real* problem they would probably have.
I experience the same as you when I suggest Linux to people with a box in need of a new OS. My gf is happy with Ubuntu, but others won't even give it a try. Linux would most likely cover all their needs, and the UI is just a little different, not worse. Going from Windows to Linux is probably as easy as going from Windows to OSX.
It's a genius strategy from MS to make Windows so easily available. Everyone gets it "free" with a new computer, and when you want to upgrade it's trivial to pirate it. People want what they're already familiar with, flaws and all. I don't give Windows to anyone, but if they ask me I don't spread FUD about pirated copies. It's actually a lot easier to run a pirated copy than to try to keep your computer "validated" through hardware upgrades and whatnot.
If people actually had to *pay* to use Windows (apart from the MS tax) that probably would have created more interest in other alternatives, Linux among them.
So it should have been made much more clear that this is about down wind. OK. mentioned later, but who reads that far in a summery.
Summery what? I also didn't read far enough in the inane post above, and provided a not-so-inane comment from my point of view. Punish me as you see fit.
They have been going faster than windspeed for years.
Upon seeing the title I browser-searched for "surfers" and found this post. Traveling at higher-than-windspeed is trivial if you go perpendicular to the wind. From reading TFA it seems they go faster than the wind *going directly downwind*, that's quite a feat.
Slashdot Mirror
I see that you're already aware that you just reinvented the space elevator :)
The nice thing is there is no "you need to support the weight of the rope" non-sense because with centripetal forces, it all equates out and the rope doesn't have to support its own weight.
While the space elevator is a really neat idea, the problem is that your rope unfortunately *does* need to carry its own weight. And for that you need a "rope" with some amazing properties, specifically immense tensile strength.
Carbon nanotubes theoretically have high enough tensile strength, but it's not yet possible to manufacture them in the quantities and with the properties required. If we do manage to construct a space elevator it will be a very cheap way to transport cargo into space, and it'll revolutionize human spacetravel. Sadly, initial cost and engineering feasibility will most likely keep it in the realm of science fiction for quite some time to come.
If the lottery on the other hand routinely discards lots of unsold tickets, then such plundering would hurt the lottery as they would pay out a disproportionately high amount of winnings against sold tickets.
It suddenly struck me that this is irrelevant, as you probably are unable to examine a significant portion of each batch before picking winning tickets. Oh well, bedtime for me :)
Of course, ripping off poor, uneducated people to fund public schools is also, in my opinion, ethically problematic.
Actually, assuming that the lottery sells all (or close to all) of each batch of tickets, they will get their proceeds no matter what. It's the other buyers who funds your gain, as they will win less. It may be more accurate to say that they'll lose even more :)
If the lottery on the other hand routinely discards lots of unsold tickets, then such plundering would hurt the lottery as they would pay out a disproportionately high amount of winnings against sold tickets.
If our universe has lower limits on size and duration, so must there be upper limits.
Why?
You can't call a line infinite if you've found one end of it.
Imagine a line which extends the earth's axis. It starts at 0 meters at the north pole and ends when you run out of natural numbers.
Anyway, FTFA:
If you can measure the curvature of the Universe, you can then place limits on how big it must be.
The curvature is what they tried to estimate from data. They concluded that the curvature is probably zero, which implies an infinite universe.
Basically this means an acceptable method of FTL without involving worholes is to create a local space expansion wave to surf on :)
Depending on your definition of what's acceptable, yes :)
Just zap a region of space with an aging gun, which causes that region of space to expand faster than the speed of light, and ride the bubble wherever you want to go.
Actually, a negative energy gun would do nicely. Oh, and you'd probably need some tachyons :)
I know people love to say this, but what does a manual transmission legitimately get you, other than a sore left leg and a very small increase in mileage?
There are actually a few other advantages: you get better control of force and rpm, which is important on slippery roads, especially going up steep hills. An experienced manual driver can climb a snowy driveway better than any automatic, even with anti-spin. An automatic will lag, and you need to be able to make split-second variations in force to the wheels. I always disable anti-spin even in a manual vehicle as I can do better myself. You achieve this by judicious use of the clutch and gas pedals in combination, but it does take experience :)
You get more precise control of engine rpm, this can lead to more comfortable driving, especially at high speeds. I've driven automatics plenty of times, and occasionally I find myself trying to nudge the automatic into shifting, usually it lags a second or two if it shifts at all.
You can also use the engine for braking. This is a small issue, but can be convenient if you live in an area with lots of mountains.
At the end of the day it comes down to personal preference. Where I live manual is the norm, and it's what I prefer. Many prefer automatics because of the convenience, I prefer increased control.
On a side note I used to drive a scooter (Vespa) all year round, with manual four-speed transmission and good tyres this is viable even if you get tons of snow in the winter as we do. A scooter with variable transmission is impossible to drive on snow and ice. This is similar to my first point, only a lot more accentuated on two wheels :)
I'd guess that a vast majority of people in the USA don't need these advantages, but I hope this partly answers your question :)
No I can't. Neither can anyone else outside the United States.
The "full episode" is restricted, but various sections, including the Greene interview, seems to be available to a wider audience. I watched this from Norway.
Here you go, direct link to the interview.
This is the problem with PayPal. They actually do send real emails to customers about their account. Because this is the only way they can contact their customers.
I got an email from them about my account being suspended because of "hacking attempts". I've gotten several, but this one seemed legit because they asked me to call them by looking up their customer service number on their site (no link). I did, and they requested that I faxed them some proof of residence at my address. I faxed them various utility bills, and eventually my account was activated again.
I don't remember the exact course of events, but the line of questions I got made me pretty confident that they really care about security.
It's so simple my mother can figure it out, and yet it foils scores of computer nerds who swear by a drop down menu.
As (probably) opposed to your mother I've been (ab)using Excel for more than twelve years for a large variety of purposes, there are not many features I haven't used at one time or another. The ribbon hampers me, it doesn't foil me :)
If I haven't used a feature for three years I probably never knew the shortcut for it, but on previous versions I'd know where to look. It would also be a lot quicker to scan dropdown menus without all the 'helpful' icons. If I spend twelve seconds finding an arbitrary entry it is about ten seconds too long.
It's far slower to scan a mess of icons and text horizontally than to look for text vertically in text-only dropdown menus. Finding the 'search commands' plugin from MS labs was a help (if it was instant/dynamic and didn't place results horizontally it would be perfect (seriously, what is the fucking problem with placing obvious list items in... well, vertical lists?)). The fact that MS themselves felt the need to make this plugin available at all leaves me thinking that other power users as well find that the ribbon is a huge leap backwards.
It seems to me that the ribbon is aimed at people who don't know how to use Office in the first place, but I fail to see how it will help them all that much. For the rest of us it is a relatively minor annoyance, but one which seems quite unneccesary. In my experience novice users of for instance Excel have a lot more trouble understanding the concept of a spreadsheet than finding how to insert a sum formula once they do understand the concept.
I always thought the American spelling of whisky was silly, but this is getting ridiculous.
I believe you mean the Irish spelling, as far as I know the U.S. produce nothing that's worthy of the name :)
Rye and corn indeed...
The simplest way I found to get people like you to understand why is to ask you to count to 10, on your fingers if you need some help.
I've never met you, but I'd still wager a pint that I would beat you when it comes to doing arithmetics in my head (or whatever would be the right expression). I'm actually pretty good at that.
So you go: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Then I ask you to count 10 more, and you start the 2nd decade by, wait for it, 11 !!! It's the same for centuries.
No, I wouldn't go 1991, 1992 and so on. I would start at 1990, and restart at 2000. No fingers needed.
I disagree with you, but I think we could have an entertaining conversation at a party. For now, let's agree to disagree :)
Actually, the 20th century is January 1, 1901 to December 31, 2000. Likewise, the 19th century is 1801 to 1900.
Ok, I stand corrected on this fact, thanks for that! I still maintain that it doesn't make sense in common usage more than 2000 years after the off-by-one error was introduced, and where I live no one (including the media) use the terms this way. Especially jarring is the fact that the decades don't match up. All this seems messy, and it is a lot worse than having a shorter *first* /decade/century/millenium by convention, due to the missing year zero :)
The twentieth century was from 1901 to 2000. The 21st century is 2001 to 2100, the 3rd millenium (see how we count millenia starting with 1 as well) is 2001 to 3000. The same rules are used for years, centuries, millenia. They all start with 1.
So, according to you the 1900s != the twentieth century? 1900 is not part of it? I suppose that by "1901 to 2000" you mean 1900-01-01 up to and including 2000-12-31, or do your centuries only contain 99 years? Would you seriously claim that the eighties lasted until the end of 1990? If not, does decades not match up with centuries?
The modern calendar is just a convention most people agree to, as is the understanding of when a decade, century and millenium starts. That is, except for a few... OK, I'll restrict myself to use the term "extreme pedants", and that's generous, as pedants are usually technically right. You choose not to follow this convention, and make your own definition instead. That's up to you, but you understand what's really going on when "everyone else is wrong", don't you?
Perhaps another method would be to contact and reserve the tickets w/o paying, but required to be there in person or at least present a valid ID at the event to pick-up or simply gain entrance to the events.
I would like tickets to be personal, like they are on airlines. That would eliminate the scalpers. It would also eliminate the possibility for a group to sell surplus tickets at the entrance, but that's a small price to pay. At the latest concert I went to I got a ticket slightly cheaper than value from a guy outside, because a friend of his couldn't make it. I'd gladly relinquish that if it meant that the scalpers would be eliminated. To scalpers: FUCK YOU!
Why? Why is what the market will support the moral arbiter?
Setting that aside, there's a reason tickets like those are priced lower than what the venue could get for them. It's to create shortage.
You're wrong. The band and venue wants primarily as much people they can get attending, secondarily as much money as they can get (I work closely with people in the business). The scum from the article is skimming off the good work of the artist and the fans, this is in fact illegal where I live. Their goal is to create an artificial scarcity of tickets and sell theirs at a premium, thus fucking over the fans of the band. It has nothing to do with a free market. If you're a ticket scalper: FUCK YOU!
+1 insightful if I were not just out of mod points. Brilliant!
as long as the opportunity for profit exists, then there will be capitalists ready to take advantage of it. It doesn't really matter how strongly you make your anti-capitalist arguments, the reality of this will still be there.
What's happening here is something like this: You bring along enormous tankers, and you empty all the ground tanks in every gas station. Then you sell gas from your tankers at a premium right outside the gas station. You've provided nothing of value, but you create an artificial scarcity in order to skim money off of other's work. Additionally you deprive people of the possibility to see a band live at the price which the band and venue agreed would be reasonable. This is very much a scam, in fact it is illegal where I live (fortunately I don't live in the land of the free and the brave). Also, to all scalpers, let me give you a heartfelt FUCK YOU.
Going through all that effort is a pretty clear demonstration they wanted the ticket more than other people who were not as highly motivated.
You obviously don't give a fuck about music. If you did, you'd be pretty pissed off by people who deprived you of a chance to see your favorite band live in order to make a quick buck. There is a reason why even the big ticket vendors put barriers in place to prevent this sort of behaviour.
If your idea of a free market is "burn all the competition's first aid kits if there is a hurricane, and sell your own at a premium", this is pretty much it. If you're a scalper: FUCK YOU
aargh. so, since I just finished _accidentally_ moderating the comment redundant, can someone explain how you change your moderation when you click on the wrong drop down item ?
Posting a comment in a story will invalidate any moderations you've made in that story. So, congratulations, you did it :)
I believe this is mentioned in the FAQ. The points you used in this story are lost, though.
Unfortunately, there is a large population of humans who have no skills beyond what are characterized here as boring, silly tasks, nor much inclination to step up and learn how to be more productive.
And strangely, this description coincides with the characteristics of sport fans I know. They will probably be content with whatever they're fed. No, I am not a fan of sports. Mod me to oblivion.
I can not get ordinary people to use Linux. The usually exclamation is "Get this crap off my computer so I can use it." not even able to comprehend that they are using a Live CD which won't alter their system.
If it booted and acted like windows, properly worked with all their important files, properly imported emails from outlook, properly worked with the keyboard shortcuts of their windows system then I might have a chance to go on to showing them how to customize it and activate advance features. As it is there is no chance, "It doesn't work"
Don't forget games, which is the only *real* problem they would probably have.
I experience the same as you when I suggest Linux to people with a box in need of a new OS. My gf is happy with Ubuntu, but others won't even give it a try. Linux would most likely cover all their needs, and the UI is just a little different, not worse. Going from Windows to Linux is probably as easy as going from Windows to OSX.
It's a genius strategy from MS to make Windows so easily available. Everyone gets it "free" with a new computer, and when you want to upgrade it's trivial to pirate it. People want what they're already familiar with, flaws and all. I don't give Windows to anyone, but if they ask me I don't spread FUD about pirated copies. It's actually a lot easier to run a pirated copy than to try to keep your computer "validated" through hardware upgrades and whatnot.
If people actually had to *pay* to use Windows (apart from the MS tax) that probably would have created more interest in other alternatives, Linux among them.
So it should have been made much more clear that this is about down wind. OK. mentioned later, but who reads that far in a summery.
Summery what? I also didn't read far enough in the inane post above, and provided a not-so-inane comment from my point of view. Punish me as you see fit.
Directly downwind. No windsurfer/sailboat/whatever can do that.
They have been going faster than windspeed for years.
Upon seeing the title I browser-searched for "surfers" and found this post. Traveling at higher-than-windspeed is trivial if you go perpendicular to the wind. From reading TFA it seems they go faster than the wind *going directly downwind*, that's quite a feat.