I believe they also designed it to withstand: launcher blows up and container lands on a train track where it is hit by a large freight train.
Sorry, but that just gives the greenies more ammo. Nuclear waste shouldn't be launched into space: there's an unacceptable risk of it derailing trains!
Right. You shut off the feed and the entire mass of the black hole is converted to energy at a rapidly increasing rate. Nobody's certain what happens when things get very small, but the best bet is apparently 'kaboom'.
A quick google <a href=http://library.thinkquest.org/C007571/english/advance/core4.htm?tqskip1=1&tqtime=0528>reveals</ a> that the luminosity of a black hole is given by (approximately)
3.568E32 L = -------- watts M^2
and that its life expectancy when not fed is
M^3 t = ---------- years 1.194E16
Now, what are we powering with this? 1.21 gigawatts (jigawatts?) for a timetravelling DeLorean, or 12.75 billion gigawatts (per second?) for the warp core of the Enterprise, which is presumably comparable in output to what the Romulans use.
So, for a DeLorean the black hole will mass 5.43E11 kilos, or fifty million tons or so. Personally, I'd go with a Mr Fusion. Should the mass beam fail, no problem... it'll be a long, long time before the hole blows up. Keeping hold of a hole that heavy would be difficult, though.
For the Enterprise the hole will mass 1.67E8 kilos... much more convenient to carry around, no wonder the Romulans found it so useful. Should it go unfed, it will convert that mass into energy in about forty million years.
OK, then, nobody's going to have black holes blowing up on them, unless they're running extremely low-mass holes for very, very high energy outputs. I concede that part. But I can't help but feel that this risk is even worse; a black hole detonation is a bad thing to be near, but at least it's over quickly. Leaving unseen spheres of annihilation to drift around the space lanes is a bloody hazard to shipping!
[i]Here's an question- since we put matter into the black hole and get out only
radiation as it dissipates (or so the theory goes) could we theoretically create
black-hole-driven power plants where we feed matter into black holes and harness
the energy as it escapes?[/i]
It would work, in principle - I believe the Romulans use it instead of more conventional dilithium-based antimatter reactors - but it would be a very, very dangerous system.
First of all you have to find a way of keeping hold of a black hole. OK, that can be done, you just give it an electric charge and then constrain it electromagnetically. Should these fields fail you have a serious problem.
Second, you have to keep feeding the black hole matter at the same rate you want Hawking energy out of it, to keep it in equilibrium. If you ease off on the input, the hole will decay away a little and the energy output will increase; if you put too much in the hole grows and the output decreases, so in principle you can tune your black hole reactor to get as much or as little power as you like.
But it's still horribly dangerous. A _safe_ reactor would be one which quietly shut down if you stopped fuelling it. What happens to your ship if you completely stop feeding this hole, for even a fraction of a second?
One zoom out and I'm looking at the entire Baghdad region. Another zoom out and I see all of Iraq, with forces dotted in the north and heavily clumped around the capital in the center. One more click and I'm looking at the entire sphere of Central Command, from the edge of Libya to Pakistan. I see forces in Turkey, and clustered in Iraq and Kuwait. I feel like a four-star general. I'm sitting in the Iraqi desert looking at troop movements across 25 countries.
Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me. That sort of information just should NOT be so easily available. Real-time updates on the entire strategic situation, available to regular goons on the front line? You'd better not bring that along when you go up against any opposition that actually fights; just let one of these things get captured and the whole plan's compromised.
Yes, and which of us still defecates in his own nest?
You obviously haven't used a public restroom in a while...
I suspect the point was that chimps _don't_ shit in their own nests, while we _do_. We should be applying for admission to the genus Pan, rather than them applying to join Homo.
Re:The quarter is hard enough
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
Now I've got the spelling pedantry out of the way... I prefer using the pound/2 pound coins over pound notes. I dunno why, but I didn't like the pound coins when they came in, now I hate pound notes. Luckily they've pretty much been phased out now, so there's no problem there.
What with inflation, I'm wondering how long it will be before we introduce a £5 coin. The fiver is still valuable enough to justify being a note, I think, but not by very much. I used my first euros last summer in Ireland, and the ?5 note is just annoying - if I was dictator, that one would be a coin, just because it's a nuisance.
Re:Yes but what about re-assigned IPs to new perso
on
Spam Blackhole Lists Redux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As far as I know, SPEWS don't bother with reeducation. That would jeopardise their anonymity.
To the best of anyone's knowledge, SPEWS' approach is this:
1) Set up spamtrap addresses, seed them on Web and USENET
2) Receive spam: complain to ISP.
a) If spam stops, stop.
a) If spam continues, blacklist.
3) If spam still continues, expand blacklist by stages until the entire ISP is blocked.
4) Keep blacklist in place until
a) the ISP notices its problem and stops the spam
b) the ISP goes out of business
c) the Universe undergoes a heat death
Note that this is a LOT better than the alternative, where every mail admin runs his own blacklist. Such lists are virtually impossible to get out of, because nobody has the time to check for removals. I believe that a great deal of what was once AGIS IP space is still blocked at many sites, and that block is a 4c 'heat death' type.
Because of black lists and a dial-up connection, I can not use my home server to send email to a friend of mine who uses earthlink or to subscribe to a number of SourceForge mailing lists.
Good, the dialup blacklists are working. You realise, I hope, how many spammers connect to a throwaway dialup, spam for a while from their own server, then disconnect and never use that account again, right? And you realise that the sensible response to this was simply to drop all email coming from servers on known dialups? The reasoning was that hardly anyone has a valid reason to run a mail server off a dialup; home users should go through the ISP's mail server. Mail from dialups can be considered spam and sent to/dev/null with negligible false positives.
Note also that the antispammers are not denying you any service you are entitled to. Your ISP is not blocking your mail; you dial up, you send your mail, you've had your service. The destination ISP has no obligation of any kind to accept it, and if its policy is to dump mail originating from dialups, then it can drop it. Unless, of course, you happen to have a contract for service with them too... do you?
As for web.de... type that name into a Google USENET search and see what group it's mentioned in most often. news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. Web.de is an abominable spam supporter and I'm not at all surprised people are dropping its mails. Remember, nobody is obliged to accept emails from anybody unless they have a contract saying otherwise. If someone finds that accepting mail is more trouble than it's worth, they'll pull the plug without any hesitation.
I've observed many exchanges between SPEWS staff and people complaining, and found the SPEWS people to be quite reasonable.
No you haven't. You've observed many exchanges between news.admin.net-abuse.email subscribers and people complaining, and found some of the nanae regulars to be quite reasonable. SPEWS speaks to nobody. I am not SPEWS. Nobody on nanae is SPEWS.
If anyone genuinely involved in SPEWS were to post openly on nanae, then they'd be sued within fifteen nanoseconds by irate spammers. Of course, some nanae posters already have been sued, but then the spammer in that case seems to think that SPAMHAUS is SPEWS, and that Shiksaa, Morely, Clifto and the cat are all part of the vast conspiracy led by Steve Linford, Joe Jared and Stave's brother in Italy, and that Steve lives in Britain in order to hide from the US law...
Re:Gotta love british humor
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's also worth noting that Lord Sainsbury of Turville has a personal connection with this issue. He's a spammer himself.
Re:I always wondered...
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Is it multiple copies from the same spammer, or is the "advertiser" (and I use that word loosly) using multiple spammer to send the same message?
Looks like the same one. The spam is always identical, the techniques for avoidance always the same... Obviously it's hard to be sure when everything these days comes via the Far East, but I reckon it's the same spammer trying to increase his visibility.
Re:The best parts
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called "corned beef" or something, but I have had enough of them.
Clueless humor, I suppose, but humor.
No, actually quite sharp humour. If you go back to the menu of what the Lords were discussing that day, they'd just had an interesting discussion about corned beef, in particular when tinned, and how it can injure people.
Link.
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, is the Minister aware that if, having taken off one end of the corned beef can with the twisty thing provided-assuming that you have not lost it-you then take a common, ordinary, household tin-opener and take off the other end, it is very easy to push the corned beef out of the tin without any danger to yourself?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: Yes, my Lords, I was aware of that, and I am very glad that that essential piece of information is passed round for the benefit of this House.
Re:Monty's House of Lords
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The HoL discussions are pretty odd from an American standpoint (Hey! It's rude to interrupt! So quit it with your booing and hissing and here-hereing!), but at least most of the house is present during the debates.
My bet is that the Lords are scared. They know perfectly well that Blair has an immense Commons majority and therefore could make mincemeat of them at a whim. He's already given them something of a bloody nose with the fairly limited reforms he's had so far. They face a near-absolute power that doesn't particularly like them.
How, then, can they save themselves? How can they stop Blair deciding to kick the whole lot of them out and install an elected or appointed second house? Answer: by appearing useful. If the Lords develop a reputation for being honest, for always turning up for debates, for standing up for the people rather than the corporations or the Americans once in a while... then Blair won't touch them, because that would be a disaster for him.
Personally, I think the Lords _should_ go, and be replaced with a proportionally-elected house, to complement the first-past-the-post Commons. But they're not all that bad as it is. That Hansard article was comedy gold:-)
Re:I always wondered...
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
b)They are spamming more because of black lists and the such.
This is it, probably. My 1998-vintage Hotmail account gets a veritable flood of spam, but MS recently had the filters improved and they cut out the vast majority. I don't know about false positives because what gets filtered is automatically binned, else I'd reach my storage limit in a couple of hours.
Of what gets through, most is from one penis spammer and one porno spammer. They each send the exact same spam several times a day. My guess is that in addition to the matter of filters, they realise that their spams are in competition with everyone else's spams. Nobody ever reads all their spam; at most, you'll glance at one or two then nuke the lot. So, the spammer's best means of making sure it's THEIR spam that gets read is - send many copies.
I might add - the reasons we can expect decay rates to be constant throughout the history of the Earth are gone into in more detail in the talk.origins Age of the Earth FAQ, to which the previous poster referred you, and which you obviously did not read (to be fair to you, neither did I until after I made that last post:-)
Well, one good reason is because if the underlying principles of nuclear physics had changed significantly over time, we'd notice the results in the stars. And you yourself admit that the stars are indeed as old as they seem - it's only the Earth you say is young, right?
What does this mean? Do you mean that they existed for zero time (impossible?), that their breakdown process lasted as long as their creation process (meaningless?), that as more amino acids were created an equal number broke down (not much of a criticism?)
My guess is that the experiment reached an equilibrium concentration of amino acids, and the creationists think that this is somehow a problem:-)
yeah, but what if the numbers on the lottery ticket you bought match last week's numbers, but not this week's numbers??
Then you've picked the wrong numbers.
Why is this so hard to understand? There are 49x48x47x46x45x44 = 110,068,347,520 possible strings of six lottery balls. Divide by 6! because the order in which they appear doesn't matter. That's 13,983,816 possible sets of lottery numbers. You have picked one of these. Therefore, your chance of winning the lottery on any given draw is one in 13,983,816.
Of those 13,983,816 possible combinations, one is this week's winner, another is last week's winner, another is next week's winner: in fact, every winning lottery draw in history was one of those 13,983,816. But that makes no difference at all. You know that one and only one combination will be the winner. You pick one, and if it's the right one, you win. That's all there is to it.
Only if nobody hears you. If they hear you, then it's a performance and you have to pay royalties. You might be safe if people hear you and don't enjoy it, though...
Slashdot Mirror
Your clock's an hour out. It's 12:10 BST.
The million pounds were won three years ago.
http://www.mathpuzzle.com/eternity.htmly /eternity.html#2
http://www.msoworld.com/mindzine/news/miscellan
Just this top one, the rest are the regular green.
Sorry, but that just gives the greenies more ammo. Nuclear waste shouldn't be launched into space: there's an unacceptable risk of it derailing trains!
Right. You shut off the feed and the entire mass of the black hole is converted to energy at a rapidly increasing rate. Nobody's certain what happens when things get very small, but the best bet is apparently 'kaboom'.
h /advance/core4.htm?tqskip1=1&tqtime=0528>reveals</ a> that the luminosity of a black hole is given by (approximately)
A quick google <a href=http://library.thinkquest.org/C007571/englis
3.568E32
L = -------- watts
M^2
and that its life expectancy when not fed is
M^3
t = ---------- years
1.194E16
Now, what are we powering with this? 1.21 gigawatts (jigawatts?) for a timetravelling DeLorean, or 12.75 billion gigawatts (per second?) for the warp core of the Enterprise, which is presumably comparable in output to what the Romulans use.
So, for a DeLorean the black hole will mass 5.43E11 kilos, or fifty million tons or so. Personally, I'd go with a Mr Fusion. Should the mass beam fail, no problem... it'll be a long, long time before the hole blows up. Keeping hold of a hole that heavy would be difficult, though.
For the Enterprise the hole will mass 1.67E8 kilos... much more convenient to carry around, no wonder the Romulans found it so useful. Should it go unfed, it will convert that mass into energy in about forty million years.
OK, then, nobody's going to have black holes blowing up on them, unless they're running extremely low-mass holes for very, very high energy outputs. I concede that part. But I can't help but feel that this risk is even worse; a black hole detonation is a bad thing to be near, but at least it's over quickly. Leaving unseen spheres of annihilation to drift around the space lanes is a bloody hazard to shipping!
[i]Here's an question- since we put matter into the black hole and get out only radiation as it dissipates (or so the theory goes) could we theoretically create black-hole-driven power plants where we feed matter into black holes and harness the energy as it escapes?[/i] It would work, in principle - I believe the Romulans use it instead of more conventional dilithium-based antimatter reactors - but it would be a very, very dangerous system. First of all you have to find a way of keeping hold of a black hole. OK, that can be done, you just give it an electric charge and then constrain it electromagnetically. Should these fields fail you have a serious problem. Second, you have to keep feeding the black hole matter at the same rate you want Hawking energy out of it, to keep it in equilibrium. If you ease off on the input, the hole will decay away a little and the energy output will increase; if you put too much in the hole grows and the output decreases, so in principle you can tune your black hole reactor to get as much or as little power as you like. But it's still horribly dangerous. A _safe_ reactor would be one which quietly shut down if you stopped fuelling it. What happens to your ship if you completely stop feeding this hole, for even a fraction of a second?
The thing is, if I were to tell you that he did nothing of the sort, then that would be a spoiler in itself...
Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me. That sort of information just should NOT be so easily available. Real-time updates on the entire strategic situation, available to regular goons on the front line? You'd better not bring that along when you go up against any opposition that actually fights; just let one of these things get captured and the whole plan's compromised.
You obviously haven't used a public restroom in a while...
I suspect the point was that chimps _don't_ shit in their own nests, while we _do_. We should be applying for admission to the genus Pan, rather than them applying to join Homo.
Quite right. Ogg's a witch. Vorbis is a priest.
Now I've got the spelling pedantry out of the way... I prefer using the pound/2 pound coins over pound notes. I dunno why, but I didn't like the pound coins when they came in, now I hate pound notes. Luckily they've pretty much been phased out now, so there's no problem there. What with inflation, I'm wondering how long it will be before we introduce a £5 coin. The fiver is still valuable enough to justify being a note, I think, but not by very much. I used my first euros last summer in Ireland, and the ?5 note is just annoying - if I was dictator, that one would be a coin, just because it's a nuisance.
To the best of anyone's knowledge, SPEWS' approach is this:
1) Set up spamtrap addresses, seed them on Web and USENET
2) Receive spam: complain to ISP.
a) If spam stops, stop.
a) If spam continues, blacklist.
3) If spam still continues, expand blacklist by stages until the entire ISP is blocked.
4) Keep blacklist in place until
a) the ISP notices its problem and stops the spam
b) the ISP goes out of business
c) the Universe undergoes a heat death
Note that this is a LOT better than the alternative, where every mail admin runs his own blacklist. Such lists are virtually impossible to get out of, because nobody has the time to check for removals. I believe that a great deal of what was once AGIS IP space is still blocked at many sites, and that block is a 4c 'heat death' type.
Good, the dialup blacklists are working. You realise, I hope, how many spammers connect to a throwaway dialup, spam for a while from their own server, then disconnect and never use that account again, right? And you realise that the sensible response to this was simply to drop all email coming from servers on known dialups? The reasoning was that hardly anyone has a valid reason to run a mail server off a dialup; home users should go through the ISP's mail server. Mail from dialups can be considered spam and sent to /dev/null with negligible false positives.
Note also that the antispammers are not denying you any service you are entitled to. Your ISP is not blocking your mail; you dial up, you send your mail, you've had your service. The destination ISP has no obligation of any kind to accept it, and if its policy is to dump mail originating from dialups, then it can drop it. Unless, of course, you happen to have a contract for service with them too... do you?
As for web.de... type that name into a Google USENET search and see what group it's mentioned in most often. news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. Web.de is an abominable spam supporter and I'm not at all surprised people are dropping its mails. Remember, nobody is obliged to accept emails from anybody unless they have a contract saying otherwise. If someone finds that accepting mail is more trouble than it's worth, they'll pull the plug without any hesitation.
I've observed many exchanges between SPEWS staff and people complaining, and found the SPEWS people to be quite reasonable.
No you haven't. You've observed many exchanges between news.admin.net-abuse.email subscribers and people complaining, and found some of the nanae regulars to be quite reasonable. SPEWS speaks to nobody. I am not SPEWS. Nobody on nanae is SPEWS.
If anyone genuinely involved in SPEWS were to post openly on nanae, then they'd be sued within fifteen nanoseconds by irate spammers. Of course, some nanae posters already have been sued, but then the spammer in that case seems to think that SPAMHAUS is SPEWS, and that Shiksaa, Morely, Clifto and the cat are all part of the vast conspiracy led by Steve Linford, Joe Jared and Stave's brother in Italy, and that Steve lives in Britain in order to hide from the US law...
Reg article
USENET thread.
Looks like the same one. The spam is always identical, the techniques for avoidance always the same... Obviously it's hard to be sure when everything these days comes via the Far East, but I reckon it's the same spammer trying to increase his visibility.
Clueless humor, I suppose, but humor.
No, actually quite sharp humour. If you go back to the menu of what the Lords were discussing that day, they'd just had an interesting discussion about corned beef, in particular when tinned, and how it can injure people. Link.
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, is the Minister aware that if, having taken off one end of the corned beef can with the twisty thing provided-assuming that you have not lost it-you then take a common, ordinary, household tin-opener and take off the other end, it is very easy to push the corned beef out of the tin without any danger to yourself?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: Yes, my Lords, I was aware of that, and I am very glad that that essential piece of information is passed round for the benefit of this House.
My bet is that the Lords are scared. They know perfectly well that Blair has an immense Commons majority and therefore could make mincemeat of them at a whim. He's already given them something of a bloody nose with the fairly limited reforms he's had so far. They face a near-absolute power that doesn't particularly like them.
How, then, can they save themselves? How can they stop Blair deciding to kick the whole lot of them out and install an elected or appointed second house? Answer: by appearing useful. If the Lords develop a reputation for being honest, for always turning up for debates, for standing up for the people rather than the corporations or the Americans once in a while... then Blair won't touch them, because that would be a disaster for him.
Personally, I think the Lords _should_ go, and be replaced with a proportionally-elected house, to complement the first-past-the-post Commons. But they're not all that bad as it is. That Hansard article was comedy gold :-)
This is it, probably. My 1998-vintage Hotmail account gets a veritable flood of spam, but MS recently had the filters improved and they cut out the vast majority. I don't know about false positives because what gets filtered is automatically binned, else I'd reach my storage limit in a couple of hours.
Of what gets through, most is from one penis spammer and one porno spammer. They each send the exact same spam several times a day. My guess is that in addition to the matter of filters, they realise that their spams are in competition with everyone else's spams. Nobody ever reads all their spam; at most, you'll glance at one or two then nuke the lot. So, the spammer's best means of making sure it's THEIR spam that gets read is - send many copies.
I might add - the reasons we can expect decay rates to be constant throughout the history of the Earth are gone into in more detail in the talk.origins Age of the Earth FAQ, to which the previous poster referred you, and which you obviously did not read (to be fair to you, neither did I until after I made that last post :-)
Well, one good reason is because if the underlying principles of nuclear physics had changed significantly over time, we'd notice the results in the stars. And you yourself admit that the stars are indeed as old as they seem - it's only the Earth you say is young, right?
What does this mean? Do you mean that they existed for zero time (impossible?), that their breakdown process lasted as long as their creation process (meaningless?), that as more amino acids were created an equal number broke down (not much of a criticism?)
My guess is that the experiment reached an equilibrium concentration of amino acids, and the creationists think that this is somehow a problem :-)
Then you've picked the wrong numbers.
Why is this so hard to understand? There are 49x48x47x46x45x44 = 110,068,347,520 possible strings of six lottery balls. Divide by 6! because the order in which they appear doesn't matter. That's 13,983,816 possible sets of lottery numbers. You have picked one of these. Therefore, your chance of winning the lottery on any given draw is one in 13,983,816.
Of those 13,983,816 possible combinations, one is this week's winner, another is last week's winner, another is next week's winner: in fact, every winning lottery draw in history was one of those 13,983,816. But that makes no difference at all. You know that one and only one combination will be the winner. You pick one, and if it's the right one, you win. That's all there is to it.
Given the size of the US, the path would have to be curved. Going in a straight line would leave you somewhere in the vicinity of the space station.
Only if nobody hears you. If they hear you, then it's a performance and you have to pay royalties. You might be safe if people hear you and don't enjoy it, though...