Space elevators are a pie in the sky (or is that knife in the sky?) idea that won't work.
Remember what is required, first. The thing has to come reasonably close to the ground in order to be useful. And the center of mass has to be at geosynchronous orbit height, 100 km up. That's a huge amount of mass spread over a very large area. This incurs several problems:
Tidal forces of the Earth on the structure call for superstrong material. Side tidal forces from the moon require it to be flexible as well.
How do you build it? Not in place...
Imagine that thing towering over your neighborhood. Pretty scary. Now realize that it is going to be visible from much of the Earth's surface and add NIMBY into the equation.
The voltage potential from top to bottom is going to make this thing deadly deadly deadly without ultra-secure precautions.
I hope you don't work in software development or IT infrastructure. I'd hate to think that someone in such a vital position didn't know how to perform basic entropic security calculations or where to find the baseline data.
I like OSX. Pretty colors, funny sounds and perky design brightens
up my day and is well worth the extra cost. However, I simply can't
recommend its use due to fundamental security issues.
Let's take a purely mathematical approach. Entropy S = k ln W where W
is the mulitplicity of the configuration: W = N!/nl!nr!. Now, if we
let N be the number of OSX machines in existence with nl = number
that have been cracked and nr the number that haven't been (yet!), we
can plug in some numbers and find that the likelihood of break-in is
roughly 87.3%.
YMMV, obviously, but even in the case of simple home usage I don't
like to risk my data to such an insecure OS. That's why I stick to
Windows95 which, despite what some MS-bashers like to say, hasn't had
a single break-in attributable to design error ever.
GPS is actually a very simple concept. 18 geosynchronous satellites send signals to your device and measure the time it takes for it to bounce back. This data is collated and then a unique location is beamed back to you which is then decoded and used by the receiver. First year stuff, really.
What nobody seems to want to talk about is the fact that my location is being determined by satellites controlled by the government. Until now it hasn't been an issue because GPS units were anonymous (roughly--if you are the only one in, say, Montana then obviously they know that all the Montana requests are coming from you). However since 9/11 more and more manufacturers have been putting ID chips into their units which makes Big Brother loom large in my mind. How about yours?
In order for something so fundamental as trajectory calculation to be encoded in the brain, it would have to be there at the so-called "root level". Which means it needs to be laid down early on--like 100 million years ago at the latest . 100 million years ago the Earth's day was only about 18 hours long. So gravity would have been proportinally weaker (actually the centrifugal force would have been higher). So back when these supposed "gravity circuits" were being formed g would have been about 15.2 m/s^2.
As a teenager I was fascinated by anything robotic. This led me to a
study of the fundamentals of AI (Hofstadter, Lisp--the whole
schmeiel). But after two semesters I realized the whole field is
fooling itself. AI just won't work.
Biological neurons have been shown in the laboratory to grow new
connections based on information learned. In a robot, what possible
mechanism could guide such growth? Programming is the only answer,
but keep in mind that "programming" is just shorthand for "the
intelligence of the programmer". In other words, the AI itself isn't
self-contained, as it were.
There is no other way for "mental" activity to be guided, thus AI will
always be as unattainable as the Philosopher's Stone.
Remember what a black hole is--something so vastly dense that nothing can escape it's gravity, not even light. Then try to marry that with a theory that posits the gravititational force being carried along by "gravity particles" (gravitons)--it just won't go. How are the gravitons to escape?
The only way to explain this is to either decide that gravity is fundamentally different than the other 3 forces OR that black holes don't exist. Or both.
"...the CD included (and popped onto my hard drive, with prompting) a new Java runtime environment (Sun's standard JRE, version 1.3.1)..."
If I installed MS Office and found that it also installed Visual Studio without even warning, I'd start leaving horse heads in Gates' bed. So WTF is the above doing in the "good" part of the review?
...who don't refer to foreign companies by cozy little nicknames and have no idea what this is about, here's what I was able to dig up (note that it may note be acurate):
I-mode stands for "intellgent mode" or "intelligence mode". Phones with this feature are able to locate their callers within a 10 meter radius due to embedded processing that keeps track of your location at all times and periodically reports back to the cell tower for hand-off purposes.
In other words, no big, just a new application. I'm worried about privacy issues, though.
The temperature gradient exists within the conductor. You see, the heat energy moves so fast it is kind of "sucked along". More formally, infinitesimal energy dE moves from point dx with speed v, which leaves the differential temperature dT lower than the dx-deltaX, thus producing a gradient down which further energy can move.
You are wrong and they are right...but for the wrong reasons.
A high-efficiency heat conductor is one that acts quickly. In other words, when a fast moving atom/molecule hits it, the conductor responds more quickly in absorbing the thermal energy and transmitting it to the ambient environment. A 100% efficient conductor would transmit this energy so quickly that all fast moving atoms would come to a virtual standstill inside the container--in other words, absolute zero.
Practically speaking this never happens. Still, wrapping a really fast conductor around a soft drink will cool it off. But you still wouldn't want to do that because you couldn't pick up the glass--the outer surface is going to be hot.
....of radioactive information transfer between neutrinos and massless artifacts of a riemannian transform. And I can say that this article is very oversimplified where it is even right. For example, take this quote:
Throw a stone into a pool. Those are waves. Take an infinitesimally small arc segment from one of those waves and you have a wavelet, basically.
Totally double-talk that has nothing to do with the soliton basis for Wavelet Theory (WT).
As much as I'd like to believe in alien intelligence (and I do!) I
can't hold still for mathematical abuses such as the infamous Drake
Equation. To take one example:
One of the assumptions that Drake built in is that a signal of
sufficient strength can travel arbitrarily far. This simply isn't so.
Einstein himself showed nearly a century ago that spacetime is bent
back on itself in the presence of gravitational force. For an object
the size of a planet the effect is minor (except for the inhabitants,
ha ha) but even something as relatively puny as our sun can deflect a
beam of light measurably.
The point of this is that a signal will only propagate outwards until
the total mass behind it exceeds a critical value (the location of
this is called the "event horizon" in an analogy to black holes). At
that point its deflection will equal more than 90 degrees...i.e. it
will not go any farther from its point of origin.
Sending signals outward is useless unless we expect to find
intelligence within the tiny (universally speaking) sphere defined by
this event horizon. And, via symmetry, we can prove that listening
for signals from other solar systems is useless for the same reason.
The money spent on SETI would do better on something mathematically
possible, like NASA's attempts to create an anti-gravity device.
For people who talk all geeky, this site sure is scientifically illiterate. The heat of fusion (esp of water) vastly overpowers the specific heat of even something as large as a bridge. Wind could be a problem, though.
I gave a concrete example but "quickly" doesn't really factor in. P = E x t. Therefore E = P/t. In other words, if you take longer it will use the same amount of energy at a lower power. Still mighty expensive.
Keeping something from freezing requires exactly the same amount of energy as melting it. Exactly. This is obvious to anyone who has studied science or used an ice cube.p.
The waste produce is always heat. But it isn't always released near any ice. What about the sides and bottom of this road? What about patches of ice? What about transmission issues?
Lemme 'splain something to ya. When you have a process removing heat you've got to add heat at the same rate to keep the temperature the same. It doesn't matter if the water is already frozen or not if the temperature is below 0C the energy requirements are the same (modulo a little runoff, but in that case it must be raining so it isn't 0C anyway, not to mention 2 cm is an understatement).
Sounds like these guys have never studied thermodynamics. It takes 333kJ to melt a single kilogram of ice. To melt it in, say, 10 minutes (= 600 seconds) would require 555 watts. Not so bad? Consider the following: Conservatively estimate a bridge to be 10 meters wide by 250 meters long and having 2 centimeters of ice. That's 50 m^3 = 50,000 kg of ice. A mere 28 MegaWatts. Per ice storm. Per bridge. Assuming 100% efficiency. Oh yeah, no problem.
Please study a little science before you post stories from similarly unclued "visionaries".
He has a job that requires him to manually copy "thousands of CDs"? Get real. Any company that is putting out that much product can afford a $500 copying machine instead of paying, at minimum, $5.50/hr to some clueless punk.
Don't be ridiculous. If it was the air that created the effect, you'd see it even when the microwave was "empty" (i.e. full of air).
The real reason peeps acts so funny in the nuker is that microwaves act on the dipoles of electrons. Most things are electrically neutral--the dipoles of the electrons and protons cancel out. But peeps are easy to create a charge on and if you subsequently microwave them--watch out!
What makes you think they failed? The rockets pictured never flew real missions--they were there to misdirect 1950's America. The real missions, of which Gargarin was only one, actually landed on the dark side of the moon but because it was a few days later than "The Eagle" landed they didn't publicize it. Would you?
Not surprising that most of you don't know this I suppose. They don't teach Lysenko's radical reforumation of Mendelism (aka genetics) either.
...that don't obsessively read trade rags, I found a snippet explaining what this is:
Until now hardrives have been limited to a master and a slave on a single controller. The Serial ATA standard allows you to connect more than two in a daisy chain similar to SCSI.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next Slashbot, but let's get the facts before we post frontpage Slashrants. It says, and I quote:
We [microsoft] were told by the Apache group that it would support multiple digest protocols. The MS Digestion protocol just hasn't been implemented by Apache yet.
In other words, like the libXML problem we all remember from last year, this is Apache's fault.
500 million billion tons? Let's go metric because that is easier. 200 m thick by 3250 km square = 6.5e11 m^3. Ice is about 1/3 the density of water which is 1000 kg/m^3, so we are talking about ~2.2e9kg. Just 2.2 billion kg.
For comparison, how much water is in Lake Titicaca? About 9 trillion kg. Over a thousand times as much. And how much would global sea levels rise if Titicaca drained into the ocean? Negligible.
It seems as though Slashdot has expanded from making wild-eyed, tinfoil-hatted claims about technology and privacy to making wild-eyed, tinfoil-hatted and non-mathematical claims about the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember what is required, first. The thing has to come reasonably close to the ground in order to be useful. And the center of mass has to be at geosynchronous orbit height, 100 km up. That's a huge amount of mass spread over a very large area. This incurs several problems:
I hope you don't work in software development or IT infrastructure. I'd hate to think that someone in such a vital position didn't know how to perform basic entropic security calculations or where to find the baseline data.
Let's take a purely mathematical approach. Entropy S = k ln W where W is the mulitplicity of the configuration: W = N!/nl!nr!. Now, if we let N be the number of OSX machines in existence with nl = number that have been cracked and nr the number that haven't been (yet!), we can plug in some numbers and find that the likelihood of break-in is roughly 87.3%.
YMMV, obviously, but even in the case of simple home usage I don't like to risk my data to such an insecure OS. That's why I stick to Windows95 which, despite what some MS-bashers like to say, hasn't had a single break-in attributable to design error ever.
What nobody seems to want to talk about is the fact that my location is being determined by satellites controlled by the government. Until now it hasn't been an issue because GPS units were anonymous (roughly--if you are the only one in, say, Montana then obviously they know that all the Montana requests are coming from you). However since 9/11 more and more manufacturers have been putting ID chips into their units which makes Big Brother loom large in my mind. How about yours?
In order for something so fundamental as trajectory calculation to be encoded in the brain, it would have to be there at the so-called "root level". Which means it needs to be laid down early on--like 100 million years ago at the latest . 100 million years ago the Earth's day was only about 18 hours long. So gravity would have been proportinally weaker (actually the centrifugal force would have been higher). So back when these supposed "gravity circuits" were being formed g would have been about 15.2 m/s^2.
Biological neurons have been shown in the laboratory to grow new connections based on information learned. In a robot, what possible mechanism could guide such growth? Programming is the only answer, but keep in mind that "programming" is just shorthand for "the intelligence of the programmer". In other words, the AI itself isn't self-contained, as it were.
There is no other way for "mental" activity to be guided, thus AI will always be as unattainable as the Philosopher's Stone.
The only way to explain this is to either decide that gravity is fundamentally different than the other 3 forces OR that black holes don't exist. Or both.
If I installed MS Office and found that it also installed Visual Studio without even warning, I'd start leaving horse heads in Gates' bed. So WTF is the above doing in the "good" part of the review?
I-mode stands for "intellgent mode" or "intelligence mode". Phones with this feature are able to locate their callers within a 10 meter radius due to embedded processing that keeps track of your location at all times and periodically reports back to the cell tower for hand-off purposes.
In other words, no big, just a new application. I'm worried about privacy issues, though.
This is basic first year stuff.
A high-efficiency heat conductor is one that acts quickly. In other words, when a fast moving atom/molecule hits it, the conductor responds more quickly in absorbing the thermal energy and transmitting it to the ambient environment. A 100% efficient conductor would transmit this energy so quickly that all fast moving atoms would come to a virtual standstill inside the container--in other words, absolute zero.
Practically speaking this never happens. Still, wrapping a really fast conductor around a soft drink will cool it off. But you still wouldn't want to do that because you couldn't pick up the glass--the outer surface is going to be hot.
No, I think the BS you already have will do nicely. "IT consultant" my ass.
Throw a stone into a pool. Those are waves. Take an infinitesimally small arc segment from one of those waves and you have a wavelet, basically.
Totally double-talk that has nothing to do with the soliton basis for Wavelet Theory (WT).
I have a newsletter regarding this idea if you would like to subscribe.
One of the assumptions that Drake built in is that a signal of sufficient strength can travel arbitrarily far. This simply isn't so. Einstein himself showed nearly a century ago that spacetime is bent back on itself in the presence of gravitational force. For an object the size of a planet the effect is minor (except for the inhabitants, ha ha) but even something as relatively puny as our sun can deflect a beam of light measurably.
The point of this is that a signal will only propagate outwards until the total mass behind it exceeds a critical value (the location of this is called the "event horizon" in an analogy to black holes). At that point its deflection will equal more than 90 degrees...i.e. it will not go any farther from its point of origin.
Sending signals outward is useless unless we expect to find intelligence within the tiny (universally speaking) sphere defined by this event horizon. And, via symmetry, we can prove that listening for signals from other solar systems is useless for the same reason. The money spent on SETI would do better on something mathematically possible, like NASA's attempts to create an anti-gravity device.
For people who talk all geeky, this site sure is scientifically illiterate. The heat of fusion (esp of water) vastly overpowers the specific heat of even something as large as a bridge. Wind could be a problem, though.
Keeping something from freezing requires exactly the same amount of energy as melting it. Exactly. This is obvious to anyone who has studied science or used an ice cube.p. The waste produce is always heat. But it isn't always released near any ice. What about the sides and bottom of this road? What about patches of ice? What about transmission issues?
Lemme 'splain something to ya. When you have a process removing heat you've got to add heat at the same rate to keep the temperature the same. It doesn't matter if the water is already frozen or not if the temperature is below 0C the energy requirements are the same (modulo a little runoff, but in that case it must be raining so it isn't 0C anyway, not to mention 2 cm is an understatement).
Please study a little science before you post stories from similarly unclued "visionaries".
He has a job that requires him to manually copy "thousands of CDs"? Get real. Any company that is putting out that much product can afford a $500 copying machine instead of paying, at minimum, $5.50/hr to some clueless punk.
The real reason peeps acts so funny in the nuker is that microwaves act on the dipoles of electrons. Most things are electrically neutral--the dipoles of the electrons and protons cancel out. But peeps are easy to create a charge on and if you subsequently microwave them--watch out!
Not surprising that most of you don't know this I suppose. They don't teach Lysenko's radical reforumation of Mendelism (aka genetics) either.
Until now hardrives have been limited to a master and a slave on a single controller. The Serial ATA standard allows you to connect more than two in a daisy chain similar to SCSI.
Hope that clears things up, it did for me.
We [microsoft] were told by the Apache group that it would support multiple digest protocols. The MS Digestion protocol just hasn't been implemented by Apache yet.
In other words, like the libXML problem we all remember from last year, this is Apache's fault.
For comparison, how much water is in Lake Titicaca? About 9 trillion kg. Over a thousand times as much. And how much would global sea levels rise if Titicaca drained into the ocean? Negligible.
It seems as though Slashdot has expanded from making wild-eyed, tinfoil-hatted claims about technology and privacy to making wild-eyed, tinfoil-hatted and non-mathematical claims about the environment.