Yeah... you might end up with some solution where you approach the ground at relatively low vertical velocity, but only with a mind-blowingly large horizontal velocity relative to the ground. Any way you slice it, you're converting a very, very large amount of potential energy into either kinetic energy or heat in the process of getting the thing to the bottom of Earth's gravity well.
If you're trying to do this without mechanical intervention, anyway. Maybe you could just strap some reaaaaaaaaally big parachutes to the thing.
I'd love to see the weather model following absorbing the orbital energy of a city-sized rock via atmospheric drag, by the way.
by your analysis every single satellite in geosynchronous orbit should fall to earth, and yet they do not
The OP was asking if it would be possible to land the comet on earth, intact and without damage to either body, by floating it down from orbit with some magic of relative velocities as both are orbiting the sun.
You could have saved your mod points by reading a little context;-)
I'm no a physicist, but I'm fairly certain that no matter where you place the thing in terms of the Earth's orbit, the second the Earth becomes the dominant gravitational force on the comet (as opposed to the sun) it switches from "two objects gently orbiting near each other" to "dropping a big fucking rock on the planet from 50,000 miles up".
Put another way, at some point the relative speed of the two has to reach zero, and at some point shortly after they would have to start moving toward each other. Eventually the only sensible frame of reference is that of the planet, and from that frame of reference you've got a hell of a lot of energy that's got to go somewhere very quickly.
The article you linked includes claims that he caught on to FBI surveillance because he noticed that the name on a piece of spam email was the same as a character in a movie he'd watched. That man is obviously unbalanced, and needs proper medical attention.
This is a great example of failure to apply the "you're just not that important" rule of paranoia.
"The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God."
--John Adams wrote this on June 28, 1813, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
I really hope you're not claiming that this is proof that Adams thought the nation was founded on Christianity. A thing being based on the same set of underlying principles as a religion does not by any stretch imply that the thing is based on the religion itself.
It's a shame more people don't make that type of critical distinction on both sides.
As far as "big government", I think at the very least a fair portion of the Democratic party is made up of those who want "big government" only in cases where it's really necessary. For example, I strongly believe that a major reason Obama won in the primary over Hillary is that his policies (at least at the time) were much more nuanced and pragmatic than hers. It was a while ago, so specifics escape me, but I did a fair bit of research, and remember her policies being very heavy-handed in the direction of the worst of "nanny state" liberalism, while Obama was for a mix of regulation and federal infrastructure where it made sense, but also in favor of allowing market solutions to function where possible.
In other words, I think there are a fair number of "the government should protect you from yourself" types mixed into the Democratic party, but there are also a number of people who are for a social safety net and civil rights for all minorities, but against nanny-state-ism and centralized control in places where it isn't really critical. I happen to think the Democratic party is more likely to deliver something near that view than the Republicans are, but that doesn't mean I support big government for its own sake.
In all seriousness, if you have a problem with this trend, produce something good and sell it in physical form. Or open a book store. Just because a lot of the culture is shifting this direction doesn't mean that one or two people with a vision can't start a movement in the other direction, if they can convince enough people.
Personally I don't see physical books vanishing anytime soon. Until they provide contracts equivalent to what you can do with paper books, libraries will still have a need for physical copies. And personally I prefer to buy things in hardcopy when they're anything that I expect to take seriously.
In all seriousness though, how many people really pass books down to their children anymore? Society's changed... physical tokens of personal expression aren't nearly what they once were, and I honestly think that's a good thing in the long run. Being less attached to hauling around physical delivery media like books and CDs also leads to less attachment to random things like cars and trinkets, and more emphasis on experiences and ideas. Even if Amazon does pull whatever random book you personally connect with (which is so unlikely to happen it's approaching impossible in the first place) that doesn't remove any of the impact the book had on your life. And on the other side, self-publishing an ebook may be the only way for someone who writes your favorite book ever to start a career.
Unless spending faster than GDP on infrastructure actually stimulates faster GDP growth in coming years.
Also because as much as you may like to simplify things, a country does not equal your household in terms of finances. Unless you can print money (legally) the analogy is completely useless.
My own gmail account got hacked a couple weeks ago by someone presumably from China (and I had a very complex, secure password), so it looks like I am probably going to abandon gmail as well myself, since they're rapidly becoming untrustable anymore. Too bad, it used to be a very good email account for me for many years until recently now that Google seems to have gone down the toilet with regard to security.
As far as I know, they're one of the only providers to offer two-factor authentication, which should vastly increase the security of your account over just a password...
If you don't like living with a social contract, you're free to move to one of the countries that doesn't have one. You're even free to try to change the nature of the social contract our nation has collectively agreed on, however it's completely unreasonable to call it extortion. This is what a majority of people agree on, or they would vote to change it. Just because it offends your own warped views of society doesn't mean it's unjust.
There is a reason why they don't take a salary. Taxes. They avoid a good number of taxes by not taking a salary.
I don't think you understand how taxes work. If you're given stock directly as compensation, you're taxed on the value as regular income. If you have a stock option to buy stock for cheap, you're taxed on the difference between purchase price and market price as regular income. Once you get the stock and hold it for over a year and sell it then yes, you pay capital gains rates on the growth, but you'd do that if you just went out and bought the stock directly.
Yes, they pay less taxes by not taking a cash salary. They also make less money. If the salary they would have made is shifted into stock, this is still taxed, unless they're flat-out lying to the IRS. The tax code is designed to catch shenanigans like this, and more often than not it's pretty good at it.
Get some fucking perspective. Your privileged, pampered ass has NO CLUE about just how good you have it. If you truly and honestly believe government and taxes are useless and provide nothing, there are plenty of places you can go where you can enjoy a tax free existence and a remarkably short life span.
But then how would he find time to look brooding and deep at the corner coffee shop while reading Ayn Rand novels? Your plan just doesn't make any SENSE, man!
Additionally, the pensions of government employees was paid for in part by paying them less while they were actually working. If you were to remove the benefits, most government employees are paid pretty poorly and would likely have trouble hiring.
I love this current meme of how GM and now state governments are being brought down by "parasitic workers" who expect the company to actually make good on things that were a condition of employment which the company / state government agreed to. No honor among thieves.
I think the worst offenders are the hedge funds that just engage in high-volume, low-latency arbitrage. I really have a hard time buying that they contribute anything to the investment market in terms of what becomes available for "productive" companies to borrow against. As you get back toward more stable long-term investment banks things tend to drift back toward what you're saying, and I'm not denying that those types of things are really necessary.
I have the impression that the engineering people getting sucked up by the industry tend to go more toward the hedge fund side of things, though.
Yes, companies need access to capital. No, micro-trading hedge funds that operate on 5 minute arbitrage to extract money from the system do NOT provide this.
Yes, but there's fascinating work elsewhere too. And when you're done, you've built a system that does something, as opposed to shuffling money around. I realize that everything comes back to money if you're going to get paid, but most other places have a layer of "actual product" in between their work and the money it generates, and that product has some intrinsic value in itself. My sincere feeling is that working in Finance, you miss out on creating a tangible product that's useful to people outside your 20-person company.
They also compete against software firms like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. I'm definitely on the side that sees a distinct lack of value in making money through pushing money around, as opposed to making money by actually creating new things. Especially after some stuff I heard from a friend who left Microsoft to work at a NYC hedge fund. It's all micro-trades and arbitrage, so you can't even make an argument about it being "investments that support other companies" like some people try to do when you point out that finance doesn't create anything.
If you're replacing cable tv ONLY with piracy and not even occasionally buying a dvd or two, you kind of are a bad guy. If the only way to get content was ad-supported I might be with you, but there are plenty of legitimate ways to support the content you enjoy without dealing with ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and actually it DOES fall to earth, it just keeps missing. BAM!
Yeah... you might end up with some solution where you approach the ground at relatively low vertical velocity, but only with a mind-blowingly large horizontal velocity relative to the ground. Any way you slice it, you're converting a very, very large amount of potential energy into either kinetic energy or heat in the process of getting the thing to the bottom of Earth's gravity well.
If you're trying to do this without mechanical intervention, anyway. Maybe you could just strap some reaaaaaaaaally big parachutes to the thing.
I'd love to see the weather model following absorbing the orbital energy of a city-sized rock via atmospheric drag, by the way.
Read the OP. That's not even remotely what they were suggesting.
The OP was asking if it would be possible to land the comet on earth, intact and without damage to either body, by floating it down from orbit with some magic of relative velocities as both are orbiting the sun.
;-)
You could have saved your mod points by reading a little context
I'm no a physicist, but I'm fairly certain that no matter where you place the thing in terms of the Earth's orbit, the second the Earth becomes the dominant gravitational force on the comet (as opposed to the sun) it switches from "two objects gently orbiting near each other" to "dropping a big fucking rock on the planet from 50,000 miles up".
Put another way, at some point the relative speed of the two has to reach zero, and at some point shortly after they would have to start moving toward each other. Eventually the only sensible frame of reference is that of the planet, and from that frame of reference you've got a hell of a lot of energy that's got to go somewhere very quickly.
The article you linked includes claims that he caught on to FBI surveillance because he noticed that the name on a piece of spam email was the same as a character in a movie he'd watched. That man is obviously unbalanced, and needs proper medical attention.
This is a great example of failure to apply the "you're just not that important" rule of paranoia.
At which point undetectable encryption methods like stenography become a lot more interesting...
I live in WA and I've never heard of this until now... that's incredibly disturbing. Smells like a court case waiting to happen.
I really hope you're not claiming that this is proof that Adams thought the nation was founded on Christianity. A thing being based on the same set of underlying principles as a religion does not by any stretch imply that the thing is based on the religion itself.
It's a shame more people don't make that type of critical distinction on both sides.
As far as "big government", I think at the very least a fair portion of the Democratic party is made up of those who want "big government" only in cases where it's really necessary. For example, I strongly believe that a major reason Obama won in the primary over Hillary is that his policies (at least at the time) were much more nuanced and pragmatic than hers. It was a while ago, so specifics escape me, but I did a fair bit of research, and remember her policies being very heavy-handed in the direction of the worst of "nanny state" liberalism, while Obama was for a mix of regulation and federal infrastructure where it made sense, but also in favor of allowing market solutions to function where possible.
In other words, I think there are a fair number of "the government should protect you from yourself" types mixed into the Democratic party, but there are also a number of people who are for a social safety net and civil rights for all minorities, but against nanny-state-ism and centralized control in places where it isn't really critical. I happen to think the Democratic party is more likely to deliver something near that view than the Republicans are, but that doesn't mean I support big government for its own sake.
In all seriousness, if you have a problem with this trend, produce something good and sell it in physical form. Or open a book store. Just because a lot of the culture is shifting this direction doesn't mean that one or two people with a vision can't start a movement in the other direction, if they can convince enough people.
Personally I don't see physical books vanishing anytime soon. Until they provide contracts equivalent to what you can do with paper books, libraries will still have a need for physical copies. And personally I prefer to buy things in hardcopy when they're anything that I expect to take seriously.
In all seriousness though, how many people really pass books down to their children anymore? Society's changed... physical tokens of personal expression aren't nearly what they once were, and I honestly think that's a good thing in the long run. Being less attached to hauling around physical delivery media like books and CDs also leads to less attachment to random things like cars and trinkets, and more emphasis on experiences and ideas. Even if Amazon does pull whatever random book you personally connect with (which is so unlikely to happen it's approaching impossible in the first place) that doesn't remove any of the impact the book had on your life. And on the other side, self-publishing an ebook may be the only way for someone who writes your favorite book ever to start a career.
Unless spending faster than GDP on infrastructure actually stimulates faster GDP growth in coming years.
Also because as much as you may like to simplify things, a country does not equal your household in terms of finances. Unless you can print money (legally) the analogy is completely useless.
As far as I know, they're one of the only providers to offer two-factor authentication, which should vastly increase the security of your account over just a password...
Call me crazy, but I thought you had to confirm ownership of a phone before you could forward calls to it in Google Voice...
If you don't like living with a social contract, you're free to move to one of the countries that doesn't have one. You're even free to try to change the nature of the social contract our nation has collectively agreed on, however it's completely unreasonable to call it extortion. This is what a majority of people agree on, or they would vote to change it. Just because it offends your own warped views of society doesn't mean it's unjust.
I don't think you understand how taxes work. If you're given stock directly as compensation, you're taxed on the value as regular income. If you have a stock option to buy stock for cheap, you're taxed on the difference between purchase price and market price as regular income. Once you get the stock and hold it for over a year and sell it then yes, you pay capital gains rates on the growth, but you'd do that if you just went out and bought the stock directly.
Yes, they pay less taxes by not taking a cash salary. They also make less money. If the salary they would have made is shifted into stock, this is still taxed, unless they're flat-out lying to the IRS. The tax code is designed to catch shenanigans like this, and more often than not it's pretty good at it.
But then how would he find time to look brooding and deep at the corner coffee shop while reading Ayn Rand novels? Your plan just doesn't make any SENSE, man!
I love this current meme of how GM and now state governments are being brought down by "parasitic workers" who expect the company to actually make good on things that were a condition of employment which the company / state government agreed to. No honor among thieves.
This comment right here is why Slashdot needs a "Like" button.
Yes, at 25. And yes, I speak from personal experience.
I think the worst offenders are the hedge funds that just engage in high-volume, low-latency arbitrage. I really have a hard time buying that they contribute anything to the investment market in terms of what becomes available for "productive" companies to borrow against. As you get back toward more stable long-term investment banks things tend to drift back toward what you're saying, and I'm not denying that those types of things are really necessary.
I have the impression that the engineering people getting sucked up by the industry tend to go more toward the hedge fund side of things, though.
Yes, companies need access to capital. No, micro-trading hedge funds that operate on 5 minute arbitrage to extract money from the system do NOT provide this.
Yes, but there's fascinating work elsewhere too. And when you're done, you've built a system that does something, as opposed to shuffling money around. I realize that everything comes back to money if you're going to get paid, but most other places have a layer of "actual product" in between their work and the money it generates, and that product has some intrinsic value in itself. My sincere feeling is that working in Finance, you miss out on creating a tangible product that's useful to people outside your 20-person company.
They also compete against software firms like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. I'm definitely on the side that sees a distinct lack of value in making money through pushing money around, as opposed to making money by actually creating new things. Especially after some stuff I heard from a friend who left Microsoft to work at a NYC hedge fund. It's all micro-trades and arbitrage, so you can't even make an argument about it being "investments that support other companies" like some people try to do when you point out that finance doesn't create anything.
If you're replacing cable tv ONLY with piracy and not even occasionally buying a dvd or two, you kind of are a bad guy. If the only way to get content was ad-supported I might be with you, but there are plenty of legitimate ways to support the content you enjoy without dealing with ads.