Anyway it doesn't matter WHERE on earth you are, the moon is only VISIBLE (there happy???) in the sky an average of 50% of the time. Also it's a zillion miles away and the latency to it is very high. Therefore it's useless for normal every day communications. SO THERE!
Okay I'll agree with you whole heartedly that we need to distribute the human race to other celestial bodies to prevent the destruction of our species. Basic life instincts. We had/have technology to sustain life on the moon or mars, it's the getting back and forth that's really a bitch. Propulsion is THE limitation to more extensive space travel, but it's a technology which can be developed here on Earth. A Moon base won't help.
Uh, we can synthesize pretty much any chemicals we want. Plus we already have a pretty good idea of the Moon's geology, and I dont' think there's much there that could be turned into the futuristic superlight materials you dream of.
Why couldn't we have had humans living on the moon 20 years ago? Is there a technological reason? Afterall we could keep humans alive on the moon for a matter of days, all we'd have to do is launch frequent resupply missions and they'd be just dandy up there. Not really much different from the space station, except you get the added bonus of SOME gravity so maybe your bones won't complete decalicfy while you're up there. But there really are not pending technological obsticals to a moon base.
Now, weather a moon base is practical, usefull, or economically feasable is a whole another ball of wax, and the answers are probably all "no". What the hell are you going to do up there? I would like to have a ham radio linear transponder up there, but other than that what is the moon really good for? It can't be a RELIABLE communications satellite because it's only in the sky half the time and is very far away with a very high latency. It's got some rocks and minerals but nothing that would be worth flying back down to earth. Scientific research I suppose, but what could you do on the moon that you can't do on the space station for a lot less money, due to it being so much closer? Yea yea, a jumping off point for a Mars mission. See above, what is really the point to going to Mars? We still don't have the propulsion technology to make frequent Mars trips a practical reality.
One thing that could be a lucritive source of income for a moon base would be moon tourism. Perhaps the science could use it to fund itself, a la the russions and the space station.
IMO, before we even think about a moon base, we need to think long and hard about what the fuck we're going to do with it. Send more probes, shit send a thousand probes. Don't send big dumb expensive probes, send little cheap insectiod probes. Do the same to Mars. If there's something interesting there, we'll find it that way.
I know I know, if people said what I've said about the new world the US wouldn't be here. But the analagy with space is a little different. The "new world" was just another continent on earth. It had air, water, arible land, native people for which to enslave and abuse. Mars is a giant inhospitible desert with some frozen CO2 at the poles. Its possible we've overlooked something, but again it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to send probes.
If someone wants to squander their personal fortune on manned missions to Mars/Moon, go for it, but I'd rather my tax dollars be spent more efficiently.
This may be impractical now, but I'm counting on humanity discovering some new abundant source of power, such as Mr. Fusion, hopefully sooner than later. If energy weren't so hard to produce, a lot of technologies would immediately become feasable, or at least easier to research, like ion propulsion, anti-gravity devices, matter synthesis a la STTNG, teleportation, time travel, the list goes on. So anyway once we have Mr. Fusions then it shouldn't be any problem to dispose of all of our old nuke waste so go ahead and make more! Afterall we have a secure location in Yucca mountain to store it, right? Right? Oh, hmm... shit
Word. War is hell. Why is Vietnam so taboo? Korea was awful and we got MASH. WWII was terrible and we got Hogan's Heros, BF1942 et al. I'm not saying that war should be taken lightly, quite the opposite. Maybe it's just that Vietnam is still fresh in our minds, while we've forgotten about much of the repugnance of our earlier wars...
I'd argue that, instead of relying on grungy old men with ham radios,
I'm 24 and I've been a ham for 6 years. I may be grungy but I'm not old. Did I mention my 13 year old sister is studying for her ham license? Did I mention my 54 year old mother is also studying? Did I mention that I work with 3 other hams, all under 40?
that emergency personel should have access to ham radios.
Sure, and while were at it lets give fire hoses to EMTs and let Red Cross volunteers carry guns. Are you nuts? Giving ham radios to a bunch of untrained individuals would be like giving them to monkies. There's a REASON you have to get a license to operate a ham station. Most of the EMTs I've known have a hard time just figuring out how to use the squelch.
Of course there's NOTHING stopping any emergency personelle from getting their ham license, and in fact many do and then use ham radio very effectively, after they've learned the ropes. But you'd be hard pressed to convince every EMT and fire fighter in the country to add ham radio training to their already busy schedules. And why bother when you have a pool of active hams that can jump into any emergency situation at a moments notice? Why have EMTs fight fires? It does not make sense. Haveing dedicated ham radio operaters makes sense.
Maybe someone's beaten me to this (probably, haven't all the good ideas already been thought of?)
Use a superprecise (note precise, accuracy doesn't matter worth a damn) A/D converter and a thermister. A 128 bit A/D can be made quite cheaply on an IC if you don't care about accuracy or sample rate. Chop off several of the most significant bits. There you've got a nice big randseed. Feed that into your psuedorandom algorithm and update it frequently. Christ if that isn't random enough for you, you've got problems.
Then again, pseudo random algorithms can use quite a bit of CPU time. What volume of numbers are we looking at here? I suppse the CCD camera idea could probably generate a higher bandwidth of random numbers since it's actually generating the numbers, not just a randseed.
Not necessarily. One thing that we overlooked was the difference between static and dynamic friction. Static friction tends to be much greater than dynamic friction. When two bodies are stationary against each other, you've got static friction, EG a tire rolling down the road. Dynamic friction is when two bodies slide against each other, EG a tire skidding on the road. So since the friction between the tire and the road is usually static, it shouldn't really effect efficiency much since at the contact patch the tire is actually stationary relative to the road. However we know that the tire flexes and rubs against the road a little bit so more friction could possibly reduce efficiency slightly. Although cars tend to get worse efficiency on dirt roads, so I dunno. Of course with stickier roads, you could conceivably get away with a smaller contact patch by using harder tires, which would really improve efficiency. Harder tires == better mileage, due to lower rolling resistance. So I guess the real question is, how much of the energy lost in a tire is due to the edges of the contact patch rubbing the road, vs. the heat lost by the tire flexing as the patch rotates around it. I'm going to guess that since tires can last 50,000 miles, the effect of the contact patch friction is really negligable, and the flexing of the rubber as it rolls is the greatest source of loss. Hence a stickier road would not decrease efficiency, but you could use harder tires on it and increase your efficiency, although you would lower your friction coefficient somewhat, but it would probably be worth the trade off.
The color of asphalt is pretty interesting. It's always nice and black when they lay it down, because of the tar. But after 8 years or so, a lot of the asphalt they use in Vermont turns to a sort of dusty reddish brown color. It doesn't look so pronounced from the road, but from the top of the mountains looking down it strikes you as odd that it's such a light color. Must be the tar wears away and reveals the color of the gravel used to make it.
From http://www.hronline.com/forums/ohs/0109/msg00073.h tml
The coefficient of kinetic friction of rubber on rubber is listed in this
source as Natural rubber, vulcanised at 100m/min on rubber flooring or rubber tread vulcanisate, clean, - 1.16. That's pretty high!
That IS pretty DAMN high! The coefficient of friction of rubber on dry asphalt is around 0.6 or 0.7, which is already considered to be pretty high. So logically, adding rubber to asphalt would probably improve the coefficient of friction between the tires and the road, hence decreasing stopping distance and improving cornering.
I've had a real mixed bag of experiences with Sony products. My Sony monitor was a total piece of shit. Good tube, but shitty electronics. And my walkmans and discmans never seemed to last. On the other hand I've been very happy with my Sony VEGA TV. I think the thing I like best is the special 16:9 mode, where it compresses the scanlines vertically, so you can watch your movies in wide-screen mode without losing any vertical resolution. Pretty nifty.
I think it would be really cool to make doors out of fog. Presumably they'd still allow some air to flow through the doorway, and obviously sound could travel through, but they'd provide a bit more visual privacy than say bead curtains.
X Servs are servers and as such are designed for reliability, not bleeding edge speed.
Finally, YDL is a very good Linux distribution. It's like RedHat, but better, and has very good Mac hardware support. They're probably choosing Linux over OS-X because they don't want all the fluff that comes with OS-X, and Linux is free as in speach. These computers are destined to be tools, and good tools don't have unnecessary features.
I didn't mention how I had to delve into the USB subsystem source on several occasions to figure out how to get my driver to work right. A lot of it has been in flux recently, and many of the example drivers I was working from called deprecated functions and/or macros.
For part of my college senior project I developed a linux USB device driver. It wasn't too bad, working on it part time I went from nothing to something that I could probably release in about two weeks. It was the first real linux device driver or USB project I had ever worked on. Of course I kick ass daily.
Get your amateur radio license and join the local club(s), even if it's only for a few months they'd probably welcome you.
Since when does developing opensource projects require a lot of bandwidth? Just wget all the documentation you need and CVS the source and after that you shouldn't need much bandwidth.
Paintball is fun.
Bars & clubs are fine if you can find ones that have like-minded people. Maybe coffee shops and cyber-cafe's are more your speed.
Play music in the park or at open mics.
Read, watch TV, IM/IRC with your friends, surf the web (obviously). Try to get a hotel room or whatever where you can leech 802.11.
Slashdot Mirror
US CENTRIC? WTFRJSN? Oh right, trolling...
Anyway it doesn't matter WHERE on earth you are, the moon is only VISIBLE (there happy???) in the sky an average of 50% of the time. Also it's a zillion miles away and the latency to it is very high. Therefore it's useless for normal every day communications. SO THERE!
Okay I'll agree with you whole heartedly that we need to distribute the human race to other celestial bodies to prevent the destruction of our species. Basic life instincts. We had/have technology to sustain life on the moon or mars, it's the getting back and forth that's really a bitch. Propulsion is THE limitation to more extensive space travel, but it's a technology which can be developed here on Earth. A Moon base won't help.
Uh, we can synthesize pretty much any chemicals we want. Plus we already have a pretty good idea of the Moon's geology, and I dont' think there's much there that could be turned into the futuristic superlight materials you dream of.
Why couldn't we have had humans living on the moon 20 years ago? Is there a technological reason? Afterall we could keep humans alive on the moon for a matter of days, all we'd have to do is launch frequent resupply missions and they'd be just dandy up there. Not really much different from the space station, except you get the added bonus of SOME gravity so maybe your bones won't complete decalicfy while you're up there. But there really are not pending technological obsticals to a moon base.
Now, weather a moon base is practical, usefull, or economically feasable is a whole another ball of wax, and the answers are probably all "no". What the hell are you going to do up there? I would like to have a ham radio linear transponder up there, but other than that what is the moon really good for? It can't be a RELIABLE communications satellite because it's only in the sky half the time and is very far away with a very high latency. It's got some rocks and minerals but nothing that would be worth flying back down to earth. Scientific research I suppose, but what could you do on the moon that you can't do on the space station for a lot less money, due to it being so much closer? Yea yea, a jumping off point for a Mars mission. See above, what is really the point to going to Mars? We still don't have the propulsion technology to make frequent Mars trips a practical reality.
One thing that could be a lucritive source of income for a moon base would be moon tourism. Perhaps the science could use it to fund itself, a la the russions and the space station.
IMO, before we even think about a moon base, we need to think long and hard about what the fuck we're going to do with it. Send more probes, shit send a thousand probes. Don't send big dumb expensive probes, send little cheap insectiod probes. Do the same to Mars. If there's something interesting there, we'll find it that way.
I know I know, if people said what I've said about the new world the US wouldn't be here. But the analagy with space is a little different. The "new world" was just another continent on earth. It had air, water, arible land, native people for which to enslave and abuse. Mars is a giant inhospitible desert with some frozen CO2 at the poles. Its possible we've overlooked something, but again it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to send probes.
If someone wants to squander their personal fortune on manned missions to Mars/Moon, go for it, but I'd rather my tax dollars be spent more efficiently.
This may be impractical now, but I'm counting on humanity discovering some new abundant source of power, such as Mr. Fusion, hopefully sooner than later. If energy weren't so hard to produce, a lot of technologies would immediately become feasable, or at least easier to research, like ion propulsion, anti-gravity devices, matter synthesis a la STTNG, teleportation, time travel, the list goes on. So anyway once we have Mr. Fusions then it shouldn't be any problem to dispose of all of our old nuke waste so go ahead and make more! Afterall we have a secure location in Yucca mountain to store it, right? Right? Oh, hmm... shit
Word. War is hell. Why is Vietnam so taboo? Korea was awful and we got MASH. WWII was terrible and we got Hogan's Heros, BF1942 et al. I'm not saying that war should be taken lightly, quite the opposite. Maybe it's just that Vietnam is still fresh in our minds, while we've forgotten about much of the repugnance of our earlier wars...
Anything with "new" in it's name is doomed, because soon it's no longer new and then the name is contradictory.
Of course there's NOTHING stopping any emergency personelle from getting their ham license, and in fact many do and then use ham radio very effectively, after they've learned the ropes. But you'd be hard pressed to convince every EMT and fire fighter in the country to add ham radio training to their already busy schedules. And why bother when you have a pool of active hams that can jump into any emergency situation at a moments notice? Why have EMTs fight fires? It does not make sense. Haveing dedicated ham radio operaters makes sense.
We naturists have known for some time that pantsless is the way to go. No news to us.
popular thread ever.
Maybe someone's beaten me to this (probably, haven't all the good ideas already been thought of?)
Use a superprecise (note precise, accuracy doesn't matter worth a damn) A/D converter and a thermister. A 128 bit A/D can be made quite cheaply on an IC if you don't care about accuracy or sample rate. Chop off several of the most significant bits. There you've got a nice big randseed. Feed that into your psuedorandom algorithm and update it frequently. Christ if that isn't random enough for you, you've got problems.
Then again, pseudo random algorithms can use quite a bit of CPU time. What volume of numbers are we looking at here? I suppse the CCD camera idea could probably generate a higher bandwidth of random numbers since it's actually generating the numbers, not just a randseed.
So when do the bolts of lightning cause the robots to become adorible artificially intelligent friendly meddling do gooders?
Why is the FSF, a forerunner of innovation, using an weak and insecure hash algorithm like MD5? Why not SHA1, which is considered to be strong?
Not necessarily. One thing that we overlooked was the difference between static and dynamic friction. Static friction tends to be much greater than dynamic friction. When two bodies are stationary against each other, you've got static friction, EG a tire rolling down the road. Dynamic friction is when two bodies slide against each other, EG a tire skidding on the road. So since the friction between the tire and the road is usually static, it shouldn't really effect efficiency much since at the contact patch the tire is actually stationary relative to the road. However we know that the tire flexes and rubs against the road a little bit so more friction could possibly reduce efficiency slightly. Although cars tend to get worse efficiency on dirt roads, so I dunno. Of course with stickier roads, you could conceivably get away with a smaller contact patch by using harder tires, which would really improve efficiency. Harder tires == better mileage, due to lower rolling resistance. So I guess the real question is, how much of the energy lost in a tire is due to the edges of the contact patch rubbing the road, vs. the heat lost by the tire flexing as the patch rotates around it. I'm going to guess that since tires can last 50,000 miles, the effect of the contact patch friction is really negligable, and the flexing of the rubber as it rolls is the greatest source of loss. Hence a stickier road would not decrease efficiency, but you could use harder tires on it and increase your efficiency, although you would lower your friction coefficient somewhat, but it would probably be worth the trade off.
The color of asphalt is pretty interesting. It's always nice and black when they lay it down, because of the tar. But after 8 years or so, a lot of the asphalt they use in Vermont turns to a sort of dusty reddish brown color. It doesn't look so pronounced from the road, but from the top of the mountains looking down it strikes you as odd that it's such a light color. Must be the tar wears away and reveals the color of the gravel used to make it.
That IS pretty DAMN high! The coefficient of friction of rubber on dry asphalt is around 0.6 or 0.7, which is already considered to be pretty high. So logically, adding rubber to asphalt would probably improve the coefficient of friction between the tires and the road, hence decreasing stopping distance and improving cornering.
Physics is the study of everything.
Yeah Sam n' Max was THE best Lucas Arts game and anybody who disagrees has coleslaw in their brain :)
I'm really looking forward to the new one... It better not suck.
I've had a real mixed bag of experiences with Sony products. My Sony monitor was a total piece of shit. Good tube, but shitty electronics. And my walkmans and discmans never seemed to last. On the other hand I've been very happy with my Sony VEGA TV. I think the thing I like best is the special 16:9 mode, where it compresses the scanlines vertically, so you can watch your movies in wide-screen mode without losing any vertical resolution. Pretty nifty.
I think it would be really cool to make doors out of fog. Presumably they'd still allow some air to flow through the doorway, and obviously sound could travel through, but they'd provide a bit more visual privacy than say bead curtains.
X Servs are rackable
X Servs are servers and as such are designed for reliability, not bleeding edge speed .
Finally, YDL is a very good Linux distribution. It's like RedHat, but better, and has very good Mac hardware support. They're probably choosing Linux over OS-X because they don't want all the fluff that comes with OS-X, and Linux is free as in speach. These computers are destined to be tools, and good tools don't have unnecessary features.
Dam, you suck. Dam.
I didn't mention how I had to delve into the USB subsystem source on several occasions to figure out how to get my driver to work right. A lot of it has been in flux recently, and many of the example drivers I was working from called deprecated functions and/or macros.
Don't forget, the source is the documentation.
Goatee == EVIL
Like, from the NEGAVERSE
For part of my college senior project I developed a linux USB device driver. It wasn't too bad, working on it part time I went from nothing to something that I could probably release in about two weeks. It was the first real linux device driver or USB project I had ever worked on. Of course I kick ass daily.
- Do some warchalking with your PocketPC/Zaurus
- Get your amateur radio license and join the local club(s), even if it's only for a few months they'd probably welcome you.
- Since when does developing opensource projects require a lot of bandwidth? Just wget all the documentation you need and CVS the source and after that you shouldn't need much bandwidth.
- Paintball is fun.
- Bars & clubs are fine if you can find ones that have like-minded people. Maybe coffee shops and cyber-cafe's are more your speed.
- Play music in the park or at open mics.
- Read, watch TV, IM/IRC with your friends, surf the web (obviously). Try to get a hotel room or whatever where you can leech 802.11.
- Get a part time job on the side.
Hope this helps!