Still, the fuel thing is... pesky. Is it possible to pick up material on the way somehow?
Why yest there is. Many years ago I read a paper about a ship designed to go to Alpha Centauri. From what I remember the project looked pretty do able. I can't find a copy of the paper online now but I did save it in a pdf and have it some where.
One of the things that has stuck with me for a number of years is how the author came up with a solution to the fuel problem. "Pellets" of fuel would be launched from the home system at speeds slightly slower than what the ship should be going when it catches up to the fuel pellet. The author called it an "acceleration trail" or something like that.
A link was provided in the original post. A unknown reader can do the research for themselves and make up their own mind.
Lets take you, an unimaginative slashdot poster with little understanding of the discussion at hand. Who says it can't be done. Yet can't or won't produce any evidence to back up his clam.
Then we have Freeman Dyson. Probably one of the most brilliant man alive. A world renown physicist and mathematician. A man who say not only is it possible, has done the math to back it up.
So, which of you two do you think we should go with? Yeah, I think we'll go with Freeman Dyson on this one.
As for Alpha Centauri , there is evidence of a earth size planet in the habitual zone of Alpha Centauri B. Taking the data from the reports I dropped it into Universal Sandbox and created a model of the system. I found it is possible for a planet to be in the habitual zone and have a stable orbit.
The name of the bank was Colonial and they are out of business now.
I think you missed what was happening. I did have the funds to cover the checks. She was doing some shit with the ledger to make it look like I didn't. She was stealing money.
Let me see if I can explain this better. I would sit down at the first of the month with my bills and make out checks for them. Naturally, I would date them the day I made them out. Then I would keep the bills and the checks together on my desk till I had the deposit to cover the check later that month. Then I would ether mail the check or drop it off.
There was always funds to cover the check before I mailed it. What she was doing was over riding the checking process and changing the date the check came in to match the date the check was written. That would make it look like there wasn't enough funds to cover the check.
I bet there is a lot of gold from old computers tossed into dumps
Yes, I remember going through the city dump when I was kid. I was a small town so there was basically no rules on what you could or couldn't dump there. One of the thing that I remember was the amount of copper there. Copper pipes and copper wire. So yeah, there is a lot of heavy metals in these old dumps.
Please take the time to read the linked to article. The part that proves you wrong is under Theoretical applications. Freeman Dyson, a man who is probably way smarter than both of us, clearly shows that a mission to Alpha Centauri is possible in just over 40 years with a Orion drive system at 10% light speed.
Since your argument seems to be based on the mass required to get a star ship up to the speed required. That being the mass of the fuel. There are plans that will work where the ship doesn't have to carry the fuel on board.
One of these plans is the send the fuel ahead of the ship. The fuel would be launched ahead of the ship. The ship as it accelerates would over take each fuel package. It is called a acceleration trail.
Another method would denseness with fuel and reaction mass all together. In system lasers, big honking lasers, would be used to push a starship to a star using a version of the solar sail plan.
I don't know. Back when the rumor came out that Apple might pony up their own chips I thought it would be a mistake. Now, with all intels issues with bugs, I think it might be a smart move for Apple to look into this. I read a report that Apple is about to become the first Trillion dollar company, go apple, so its not like they don't have the cash to waddle in this direction.
This was a long time ago, back when there several 680x0 computers. 680x0 being Motorola. The first Macs where based on the Motorola 680x0 chipset. They switched to powerpc when the motorola design couldn't go above 66mhz, I believe.
With that being said the 680x0 was a better design than the x86 chips at the time. To bad Motorola couldn't keep on the ball.
From what I understand is she was using the date the check was written on and not the date the check was presented.
My check writing habits made it easy for her. I would sit down and write my checks at the start of the month. Naturally I would date them with that date. Then as the bills came due and I had a deposit with enough funds to clear the check I would turn it in.
Well she would manually enter the checks with the date they where written and override any automatic process they had. So what would happen is they would show up in the system way before the deposits actually came in.
I guess she could get away with it at first because she was only doing it to a small number of checks but in my case I had a dozen or more checks get flagged for NSF in a single month. When I started asking questions and actually showed a manager at another branch the statements and the canceled check the bank manager of my bank was arrested an all my money was refunded.
I write, well print, 12 checks a year for my rent. The apartment complex will let me pay on line with a card but they charge a $15 "convenience" fee for it. Screw that. I just drop a check in the printer and hit print on quicken.
Small business also still write checks and some big business too. Lots of them.
By the way if you notice that I said quicken in my post. I would not advise people to say as far away from quicken as possible. It's a bug infested crap fest now owned by a unethical company that will advertise features on new releases while knowing they have no intention of providing those features.
If you are looking for financial software for home I would recommend checking out Money Dance. It does everything a house hold needs. And bonus they have fully functional Linux versions as well as Windows.
I can't argue with anything you're saying. But I am 45 years old and have never balanced my checkbook in my life. I look at my bank statement, and if it looks right, I go on with life.
That's fine. But let me asked you this. How much money do you think you might have lost over all those years by not keep better track? Granted, its probably very low but it is still your money that has gone missing.
Errr yeah they do. Maybe they don't in America where you fetishize the credit industry and pay for your chewing gum using borrowed capital, but the vast majority of the rest of the world have up to date digital statements.
No they don't.. What happens to a payment when if the network is down? I doesn't go away, it gets stored till the network comes backup. Most of the time this is fairly quick. But what happens if it is a hardware issue of a holiday weekend and it takes a few days or even a week to get straighten out?
Well first of all the original post was that we would never find extraterrestrial life because we will never leave the solar system. I hope that my post response how incorrect that was. Nothing in ether post was anything said about a colony.
With that being said, I think your post has merit. At 10% the speed of light with a 80 year round trip time to Alpha Centari I believe we can assume that a ship going there will be a one way trip. It would be inhuman and waste full to spend such resources without the end goal of establishing a colony there.
I'm going to disagree with you with the technology to set up a colony. Launching a ship with on a 40 year voyage will clearly need to be a self sustaining colony on its own. Again we have that technology. We are capable of growing food stuff in a green house. With genetic modification we could even modify any plants we send to grow specifically in artificial environments. The reason so many colonies failed on Earth in the early days of colonization of America was because crops failed due to weather and other environmental factors. Growing food in a artificial environment will completely remove any chance from the growing environment.
Establishing a colony on Mars would use the same technology. In fact building a colony on Mars would be easier than building one on a starship. Most of the resources you need are already there. You have CO2, water, and soil. All just need to be processed for plants to grow. Again, we have the technology, we just don't have the economic resources to pull it off.
As for a colony in Antarctica. It would be cheaper to establish such a colony but I doubt it would be easier for it to be self sufficient as a Mars colony. Virtually all the resources that you need to sustain a colony in Antarctica are locked under 2 KM of ice. Virtually all raw materials for everything will need to be imported. Besides, we don't need colonies in Antarctica. We need to establish off world colonies soon as possible. You know, "having all our eggs in one basket", kind of thing.
Memes will not even change. Nobody that creates them, mostly teens and young adults give two shits about some EU law. An those that even know about it will simply ignore it.
Nuclear power to expensive, thank a hippie. Nuclear power not safe because we are using designs from 1960 and can't update them? Thank a hippie. Can't move nuclear waste from one site to be reprocessed? Thank a hippie.
I switched to trillian a long time ago after I started seeing ads in ICQ. I also still remember my icq number better than my telephone number. The android client handles icq quite well.
They finally tried to barf up a linux client for trillian a few years back but the windows client runs better on wine than it did.
I had a corrupt bank manager that would hold on to the checks I was writing. Then instead of cashing them in the order they came in. She would shuffle them around so some of the would get a NSF charge against them Of which she was getting a bonus for.
She was doing this for several accounts, got busted, and I think was arrested. I got all my money back for the fees but my point still stand. Do not blindly trust a bank.
Balancing a checkbook is easy but nobody under 40 does it anymore because it's pointless. The vast majority of transactions these days are digital and the balance of your account is available with a few clicks on your phone. Most millennials will only write a handful of checks in their lives. Gen Z will probably kill them for good.
No! This is the most stupidest thing I've read today. Yes, I realize I'm reading and posting to a 0 score but this thinking has to be corrected.
Balancing your checkbook is basic accounting 101. You don't use it just to keep track of how much money you spend. You use to make sure the bank hasn't committed a error on your statement, or that someone isn't stealing money from your account. Never trust what the bank tells you.
Not all transactions show up on a digital statement right away. Digital transactions first show up as a pending entry in your statement. Those are entries that have not cleared. Those pending transactions can vanish off your account in a few days only to come back as a cleared statement.
Checks on the other hand do not show up on your digital statement till they are cashed. For this to happen you are at the mercy of the person holding the check. They could hold that check for a few days or in some cases a few months.
You must keep track of your own money. Do not rely on the bank to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the ribbon system is it actually is better. People just need to get used to it and figure it out for themselves.
No we are not, but you are a idiot. I've tried to take the high road lately but this kind of talk is just imbecile.
I had a IHOP hamburger a few days ago. It was pretty good. Not sure I can say the same about intel graphics chips.
Still, the fuel thing is... pesky. Is it possible to pick up material on the way somehow?
Why yest there is. Many years ago I read a paper about a ship designed to go to Alpha Centauri. From what I remember the project looked pretty do able. I can't find a copy of the paper online now but I did save it in a pdf and have it some where.
One of the things that has stuck with me for a number of years is how the author came up with a solution to the fuel problem. "Pellets" of fuel would be launched from the home system at speeds slightly slower than what the ship should be going when it catches up to the fuel pellet. The author called it an "acceleration trail" or something like that.
A link was provided in the original post. A unknown reader can do the research for themselves and make up their own mind.
Lets take you, an unimaginative slashdot poster with little understanding of the discussion at hand. Who says it can't be done. Yet can't or won't produce any evidence to back up his clam.
Then we have Freeman Dyson. Probably one of the most brilliant man alive. A world renown physicist and mathematician. A man who say not only is it possible, has done the math to back it up.
So, which of you two do you think we should go with? Yeah, I think we'll go with Freeman Dyson on this one.
As for Alpha Centauri , there is evidence of a earth size planet in the habitual zone of Alpha Centauri B. Taking the data from the reports I dropped it into Universal Sandbox and created a model of the system. I found it is possible for a planet to be in the habitual zone and have a stable orbit.
The name of the bank was Colonial and they are out of business now.
I think you missed what was happening. I did have the funds to cover the checks. She was doing some shit with the ledger to make it look like I didn't. She was stealing money.
Let me see if I can explain this better. I would sit down at the first of the month with my bills and make out checks for them. Naturally, I would date them the day I made them out. Then I would keep the bills and the checks together on my desk till I had the deposit to cover the check later that month. Then I would ether mail the check or drop it off.
There was always funds to cover the check before I mailed it. What she was doing was over riding the checking process and changing the date the check came in to match the date the check was written. That would make it look like there wasn't enough funds to cover the check.
I'm back to posting at +3 now. Whatever.
I bet there is a lot of gold from old computers tossed into dumps
Yes, I remember going through the city dump when I was kid. I was a small town so there was basically no rules on what you could or couldn't dump there. One of the thing that I remember was the amount of copper there. Copper pipes and copper wire. So yeah, there is a lot of heavy metals in these old dumps.
I'm thinking one day there will be a booming mining industry at many city dumps.
Ring Ring .. here is your wake up call.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Please take the time to read the linked to article. The part that proves you wrong is under Theoretical applications. Freeman Dyson, a man who is probably way smarter than both of us, clearly shows that a mission to Alpha Centauri is possible in just over 40 years with a Orion drive system at 10% light speed.
Since your argument seems to be based on the mass required to get a star ship up to the speed required. That being the mass of the fuel. There are plans that will work where the ship doesn't have to carry the fuel on board.
One of these plans is the send the fuel ahead of the ship. The fuel would be launched ahead of the ship. The ship as it accelerates would over take each fuel package. It is called a acceleration trail.
Another method would denseness with fuel and reaction mass all together. In system lasers, big honking lasers, would be used to push a starship to a star using a version of the solar sail plan.
I don't know. Back when the rumor came out that Apple might pony up their own chips I thought it would be a mistake. Now, with all intels issues with bugs, I think it might be a smart move for Apple to look into this. I read a report that Apple is about to become the first Trillion dollar company, go apple, so its not like they don't have the cash to waddle in this direction.
This was a long time ago, back when there several 680x0 computers. 680x0 being Motorola. The first Macs where based on the Motorola 680x0 chipset. They switched to powerpc when the motorola design couldn't go above 66mhz, I believe.
With that being said the 680x0 was a better design than the x86 chips at the time. To bad Motorola couldn't keep on the ball.
Hey. Look at that. I'm posting at +2 again. Someone finally noticed I have been posting at +3 and fixed it. Good job :)
From what I understand is she was using the date the check was written on and not the date the check was presented.
My check writing habits made it easy for her. I would sit down and write my checks at the start of the month. Naturally I would date them with that date. Then as the bills came due and I had a deposit with enough funds to clear the check I would turn it in.
Well she would manually enter the checks with the date they where written and override any automatic process they had. So what would happen is they would show up in the system way before the deposits actually came in.
I guess she could get away with it at first because she was only doing it to a small number of checks but in my case I had a dozen or more checks get flagged for NSF in a single month. When I started asking questions and actually showed a manager at another branch the statements and the canceled check the bank manager of my bank was arrested an all my money was refunded.
I write, well print, 12 checks a year for my rent. The apartment complex will let me pay on line with a card but they charge a $15 "convenience" fee for it. Screw that. I just drop a check in the printer and hit print on quicken.
Small business also still write checks and some big business too. Lots of them.
By the way if you notice that I said quicken in my post. I would not advise people to say as far away from quicken as possible. It's a bug infested crap fest now owned by a unethical company that will advertise features on new releases while knowing they have no intention of providing those features.
If you are looking for financial software for home I would recommend checking out Money Dance. It does everything a house hold needs. And bonus they have fully functional Linux versions as well as Windows.
I can't argue with anything you're saying. But I am 45 years old and have never balanced my checkbook in my life. I look at my bank statement, and if it looks right, I go on with life.
That's fine. But let me asked you this. How much money do you think you might have lost over all those years by not keep better track? Granted, its probably very low but it is still your money that has gone missing.
Errr yeah they do. Maybe they don't in America where you fetishize the credit industry and pay for your chewing gum using borrowed capital, but the vast majority of the rest of the world have up to date digital statements.
No they don't.. What happens to a payment when if the network is down? I doesn't go away, it gets stored till the network comes backup. Most of the time this is fairly quick. But what happens if it is a hardware issue of a holiday weekend and it takes a few days or even a week to get straighten out?
Well first of all the original post was that we would never find extraterrestrial life because we will never leave the solar system. I hope that my post response how incorrect that was. Nothing in ether post was anything said about a colony.
With that being said, I think your post has merit. At 10% the speed of light with a 80 year round trip time to Alpha Centari I believe we can assume that a ship going there will be a one way trip. It would be inhuman and waste full to spend such resources without the end goal of establishing a colony there.
I'm going to disagree with you with the technology to set up a colony. Launching a ship with on a 40 year voyage will clearly need to be a self sustaining colony on its own. Again we have that technology. We are capable of growing food stuff in a green house. With genetic modification we could even modify any plants we send to grow specifically in artificial environments. The reason so many colonies failed on Earth in the early days of colonization of America was because crops failed due to weather and other environmental factors. Growing food in a artificial environment will completely remove any chance from the growing environment.
Establishing a colony on Mars would use the same technology. In fact building a colony on Mars would be easier than building one on a starship. Most of the resources you need are already there. You have CO2, water, and soil. All just need to be processed for plants to grow. Again, we have the technology, we just don't have the economic resources to pull it off.
As for a colony in Antarctica. It would be cheaper to establish such a colony but I doubt it would be easier for it to be self sufficient as a Mars colony. Virtually all the resources that you need to sustain a colony in Antarctica are locked under 2 KM of ice. Virtually all raw materials for everything will need to be imported. Besides, we don't need colonies in Antarctica. We need to establish off world colonies soon as possible. You know, "having all our eggs in one basket", kind of thing.
Memes will not even change. Nobody that creates them, mostly teens and young adults give two shits about some EU law. An those that even know about it will simply ignore it.
Nuclear power to expensive, thank a hippie. Nuclear power not safe because we are using designs from 1960 and can't update them? Thank a hippie. Can't move nuclear waste from one site to be reprocessed? Thank a hippie.
I switched to trillian a long time ago after I started seeing ads in ICQ. I also still remember my icq number better than my telephone number. The android client handles icq quite well.
They finally tried to barf up a linux client for trillian a few years back but the windows client runs better on wine than it did.
An again, where is the proof?
You really that dumb or do you actually believe that Pence would be better than Trump?
I had a corrupt bank manager that would hold on to the checks I was writing. Then instead of cashing them in the order they came in. She would shuffle them around so some of the would get a NSF charge against them Of which she was getting a bonus for.
She was doing this for several accounts, got busted, and I think was arrested. I got all my money back for the fees but my point still stand. Do not blindly trust a bank.
Balancing a checkbook is easy but nobody under 40 does it anymore because it's pointless. The vast majority of transactions these days are digital and the balance of your account is available with a few clicks on your phone. Most millennials will only write a handful of checks in their lives. Gen Z will probably kill them for good.
No! This is the most stupidest thing I've read today. Yes, I realize I'm reading and posting to a 0 score but this thinking has to be corrected.
Balancing your checkbook is basic accounting 101. You don't use it just to keep track of how much money you spend. You use to make sure the bank hasn't committed a error on your statement, or that someone isn't stealing money from your account. Never trust what the bank tells you.
Not all transactions show up on a digital statement right away. Digital transactions first show up as a pending entry in your statement. Those are entries that have not cleared. Those pending transactions can vanish off your account in a few days only to come back as a cleared statement.
Checks on the other hand do not show up on your digital statement till they are cashed. For this to happen you are at the mercy of the person holding the check. They could hold that check for a few days or in some cases a few months.
You must keep track of your own money. Do not rely on the bank to do this.
I see proper manners also escapes so many people now days.
Crap. My hand bump mouse button when it was on submit before I finished.
If it does fall down it will be a disaster of Biblical proportions.