Anybody can tinker, but try getting 'em ADOPTED
on
Open Source Law
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· Score: 1
Laws aren't like open source computer code that can be tinkered with by anybody with the proper knowhow.
But they CAN be! ANYBODY can tinker with them. Use the courts for a debugger. Petition an administrative body. Submit samples to a legislator (with or without wining-and-dining him). Write an initiative.
Laws are altered by a constitutionally defined procedure by the various branches of our government.
Precicely.
Anybody can WRITE them. Getting them ADOPTED is a whole 'nother story.
will this actualy generate enough speed/acceleration to fight against the gravity of surounding plants and the sun.
No - but neither will a rocket.
Instead of fighting it directly you ORBIT the sun, and use the sail at an angle (or a rocket) to pump up the orbit, until you're far enough from the sun that the attraction is negligible.
As for the planets - if you're not going to or from them (in which case you orbit THEM and use the sail to pump the orbits up or down) you can plot a course to use their orbital motion and gravitational attraction to give you an extra yank on your way - transferring some of their orbital momentum to the ship. (It will take a LOT of ships to steal enough momentum from, say, Jupiter to make a detectable difference in its orbit.)
Although im sure some crazy equations would be needed to solve such a thing, I would think not though.
You can figure the thrust from the momentum of the light very easily. From there it's the same math as a rocket - but simplified, since you're not constantly changing your ship's mass as you burn away the fuel.
It doesnt seem like a photon (an miniscule mass) accelerating into a large mirror could cause it to move the object, unless already in motion,
But the sun gives off a LOT of photons. B-)
Again it's just like a more typical heat engine using a gas as the working fluid (such as the one in your car): One gas molecule doesn't do very much to a half-pound piston hooked up to a piston rod, crankshaft, and VERY heavy flywheel. But there are a LOT of gas molecules zipping around in a cylinder full of burning fuel-air mixture.
but if it does keep it going how do the creators plan on making sure it stays 'on path'(not straying off course toword a ever nearing planet.
Compute the path just like any other spacecraft. Then measure the deviation from the desired path partway along the trip and tweak it for any errors. (Just as with a rocket ship, this is the famous "mid-course correction". If your destination is nearby you do it about halfway along your trip, because you're most efficient when you use half the trip to let the error grow before you measure it, then use the other half for the correction to take effect.
Once we it has gotten far out what exactly does it run from then.
By the time your so far away that there isn't enough light from the sun to be worth collecting, you're REALLY moving. And there's nothing else very large around for lightyears. Then you coast until you're near your destination.
The whole pushing the light sail toword the sun completely confused me, but im assuming that is how it would return.
Yep. That's how you stop - or actually manouver into a parking orbit.
But I really talked about it to show the equivalence to the flip side of a carnot-cycle heat engine - when the piston is compressing the fluid and transforming mechanical energy to heat energy in the workin fluid.
I do not at all understand how that would work though. Light pressue?
Yep.
Flying away from the sun the light pushes you, speeding you up and getting red-shifted (cooled and expanded) in the process.
Flying toward the sun the light still pushes you, but it is slowing you down and getting blue-shifted (heated and compressed) in the process.
But Gold's point is, solar sails would violate the Carnot condition. Carnot's analysis applies only to closed, cyclic engines. No one is proposing this as a closed, cyclic engine.
It is if you do round trips. B-)
By the way: The original article's argument could also be used to claim that hot gas can't push a piston which is covered with a REALLY good (i.e. perfect) thermal insulation, OR if the piston was at the same temperature as the gas, because the molecules would rebound with the same energy they had on approach. (Gas pressure? What's that?) In fact, an insulating coating on a piston improves the efficiency of a heat engine because it reduces the amount of heat that transfers between the gas and the piston without doing any work.
Interestingly, a perfect mirror in a light sail is EXACTLY equivalent to perfect insulation on the piston of a gas-based heat engine, while an imperfect mirror is similarly EXACTLY equivalent to a piston with a less-than-perfectly insulating surface.
[...] replacing my HP printer altogether was cheaper than buying ink cartridge refills. Compare, $25 for a B&W cartridge + $35 for a color cartridge = $60 total. Cost of that HP DeskJet on sale at Office Depot? $50, and you get an entirely new printer!
But WAIT! There's MORE!
You see, HP only HALF-FILLS the cartridges that come in a new printer. So that $50 printer only has $30, rather than $60, worth of ink. (Yes, there have been other consumer actions about that...)
Also: Some printers only come with a color cartridge. It will print B&W without it, but it will do it by mixing the three colors of ink from the color cartridge, emptying it very quickly. So if you don't add a black ink cartirdge you are back at the store in a week or two.
The whole range of Airbus planes (except for the A300/A310 series) are as fly-by-wire as can be. Joysticks in the cockpit, no linkage between the pilot and the wings.
And more than once they've crashed with loss of life and the fly-by-wire avionics has been blamed.
No, it IS a heat engine. But he's still wrong.
on
Solar Sailing and Physics
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The solar sail is a heat engine. But he's still wrong.
The basic claim is that the photon doesn't lose energy to a perfect mirror. But that's wrong. It neglects both the ACCELLERATION of the mirror due to the impact of the photon, and the red/blue shift of the photon when reflected from a mirror in motion relative to the observer.
It's easy to understand the lightsail/sun/photons system as a heat engine: The lightsail is the piston and the photons are the working fluid.
Just as with a piston, if the lightsail were held still (and the mirror were perfect or imperfect but at solar temperature) the photons would rebound without loss of energy. But the high photon-gas "pressure" on one side of the "piston" versus the near-vacuum (dark sky) on the other side means there is a force on the mirror. If not held it will accellerate.
Just as with a piston, no work is done on it until it starts to move - and the faster it moves the more work is done on it. But the faster it moves the more the light is red-shifted, i.e. the "gas is cooled", so the more rapidly work is done. Exactly what you expect in a piston engine.
You could also push the light sail toward the sun (as when decellerating at the far end of the trip). In this case the photons would be blue-shifted and the work from pushing the sail against light pressure would thus go into "heating" the photons - and the sun, if the sail was pointed properly so the "photon gas" hit the far end of the "cylinder" rather than escaping.
His analysis assumed the sail was unmoving and unaccellerating, which is just plain confused.
- The "cold" end of the heat engine is not the mirror, but the dark sky behind it.
- In the coordinate system of the center of mass, the "gas" of photons is "cooled" by the red-shift of the mirror as it moves away.
In heat-engine terms, the mirror is a piston, photons on the sun side are a gas, the lack of photons on the dark side is the lower (near-zero) ambient pressure behind the piston, and the red-shift is the cooling of the gas by expansion as it pushes the piston.
The mirror-piston accellerates as long as the pressure on one side is higher than on the other - which it is as long as it's below lightspeed, which it always is since it has rest mass. Terminal velocity is less than c becaue the "pressure drops" both from the blue-shift and from a loss of photon density due to the inverse-square law.
And replacing the mirror with a black object means the piston "leaks" the gas, reducing the force from it by a factor of two - exactly what you'd expect.
No problems with carnot. (You can even "heat the sun" a bit by pushing the mirror toward it, and create somewhat leaky "walls" to the "cylinder" by using a retro-reflector rather than a simple mirror.
A) If the customer shares his link with a neighbor WIHTOUT their help, 3) goes up and they don't get any extra money.
B) If the neighbor buys a line they get a new revenue stream, but all of the per-user costs are doubled. 1) is the bulk of their ongoing costs, while 2)is the bulk of their their one-time costs. 3) is miniscule, and the performance impact is mostly on the original customer (who expectes it).
The one about the performance impact being tiny and mostly on the original customer should have been attached to A).
Doesn't it seem counter-intuitive for them to offer this service? I mean, increasing the number of people on residential circuits without increasing the number of paying customers is just going to degrade the service for everyone. People are still going to do it behind the backs of ISP's, but they are actually promoting it.
Are you KIDDING me? It's GRAVY!
Consider the breakdown of their per-customer costs:
1) Pay the ILEC for the wire to each house.
2) Capital expense for the DSL modem/router/AP, plus install and setup.
3) Bandwidth costs on their backbone links.
4) Incremental costs on their internal infrastructure. (Disk space, backup time, need to buy bigger routers sooner,...)
5) Customer service & billing.
A) If the customer shares his link with a neighbor WIHTOUT their help, 3) goes up and they don't get any extra money.
B) If the neighbor buys a line they get a new revenue stream, but all of the per-user costs are doubled. 1) is the bulk of their ongoing costs, while 2)is the bulk of their their one-time costs. 3) is miniscule, and the performance impact is mostly on the original customer (who expectes it).
C) If the customer shares his link with the neighbor via the program, 3) goes up a tiny bit just like with A). 4) and 5 also double, but they're tiny compared to 1) and 2). And they GET AN EXTRA REVENUE STREAM. This is GRAVY! Two customers and no extra money out the door for last-mile infrastructure.
(Also: the original customer is typically a geek who serves as their first-line customer service department for the neighbor for free - while the neighbor is probably also enough of a geek that between the two of 'em they can fix most problems, so the customer service costs of the neighbor are probably lower than average.)
We're talking major money with negligible investment - so return on investment on the neighbor (who probably would have been "parasitizing" their infrastructure ANYWAY) is enormous compared to the wired customers.
And these people (no doubt geeks themselves) are clear-thinking enough to see this. So of COURSE they want to do it, and of COURSE they're willing to share the gravy with the guy who's providing them with a branch office for free, and willing to take a hit to his bandwidth in order to share.
It's called "Doing Well by Doing Good". Isn't it nice to see the invisible hand rewarding people for being nice? B-)
Most third world contries don't have the ifrastructure to manage stuff like this. So why do they make such laws to gouge anyone who tries to do something that would better the community[?]
Because they can. And because sometimes the decisionmakers don't believe their own interests will be served by enabling others to make money or have a freer life.
And THAT'S one of the BIG factors keeping many third-world countries dirt-poor.
They love to claim it's the nasty US government, corporate exploiters, opposition movements, or some other external factor doing it to them - and sometimes they have a point. But to a large extent many of them are doing it to themselves.
(Even when there IS an external factor, fixing THAT won't help if they've also cut their own tendons - while NOT cutting their tendons may let them outrun it.)
The anarchists Cookbook was published by a covert government organization and was intended to cause physical harm to any who tried to execute the plans included in it.
Regardelss of whether it was a deliberate hoax or simple incompetence, the recipies in it are indeed dangerous, and likely to blow up in your face (literally) if followed.
For instance: The nitroglycerine recipe completely ignores the temperature control (i.e. ice bath) necessary to keep the heat of the reaction from setting off the product - demolishing the lab AND splashing the remains with the nitric and sulphuric acid not yet consumed by the reaction.
This is Japan we're talking about. 24 or 25 frames per second.:)
But France uses PAL, don't they? And Japan uses NTSC.
That's why I said "thirtyISH" frames per second. Different standards, different frame rates. But they all have to be in that ballpark, because much slower and they don't fuse, while much faster and you're wasting bandwidth.
(Broadcast standard frame rates tend to be a rational-number multiple of the local power supply frequency to prevent jiggle from bad power supply filtering in older design sets. Crawling distortion is less obnoxious than rapid shimmy.)
Sorry to double-reply, but I just got through to the site. It looks like they cover this area:
Because reproduction of home TV channels happens in a private manner within the same family, the use of TVBrick to watch home TV channels is compatible with international Copyright Law.
So what they're saying is that, for EVERY "family" that wants to view, say, Japanese TV in france, you need a SEPARATE STREAM from a SEPARATE BRICK, from Japan to France, to send their SEPARATE COPY of the (re)digitized signal.
Do you have ANY IDEA what kind of bandwidth you're talking about here? This is a VIDEO signal we're talking about - 30ish pictures per second, and even a 640x480 image is worth almost eight million bits before compression. Potentially you can compress a lot. But even heroically compressed the streams are very large for any reasonable signal quality.
With every Japanese "family" member vacationing in France sending their own personal copy of a popular show, it doesn't take many "families" to completely saturate the fibers that can route signals from Japan to France. So you can bet that, if the described use isn't a violation of their carriers' terms-of-service now, it will be within a couple weeks after this usage pattern becomes established.
At that point, any use of the box will violate either copyright or the terms-of-service. Then (if they haven't already), the media conglomerates will go to court and say there's no legal use...
The only way to avoid the bandwidth crunch with multiple users is multicast - which explicitly violates the "family use" exception. This leads to the same situation that already lost in Canada (as already mentioned in a nearby post).
The recent mozilla and netscape browsers have been consistent in not working on a vanilla Red Hat 6.0 install, due to a Java runtime library install bug.
Did that get fixed in this release? Or are they still abandoning anyone who hasn't upgraded?
[There's not] much here except that there are many applications for linux. [] there are many applications for windows too [so] it's not [] a convincing article.
[] maybe [] the article wasn't meant to convince but [] to share a story of how easy it was to install linux. [] it did a poor job [of that] as well.
At [] least [he should have mentioned] some of the obvious advantages of linux over windows. [But] he doesn't even [define] 'dual boot'[, mention the] virus free [] environment[, or] define 'free' as both [] as in beer and as in speech.
I think you missed the point of the article.
What this article does is inform Windows users that Linux is SO ready for prime-time that a man who has built his carreer as a writer about Windows is ready to swtich. And to bet his carreer on it (because he can expect never to hear inside info from his usual channels again).
It does it succinctly - fitting the major points into the limited size of his column:
- Been a Windows carreerist/true believer for 20 years but faith shaken.
- Once tried Mac but went with Windows. (Therefore Linux is better than both.) Ditto OS/2.
- Know ALL the Windows versions so Linux beats 'em all. (MAJOR credentials established by now. This is not your high-school basement geek talking.)
- It's free.
- There's free support, too, including experts who will do the install and configuration for free.
- And advise you on making the choices that require expert knowlege to get started.
- There's no army of anti-piracy police to retroactively extract licensing fees and penalties for your free software.
- There IS an army of volunteers, bigger than Microsoft, who already wrote enough to do what you need, and are writing still more. As a result the mass of free software mushrooms.
- The free software means your machine is cheaper. (No built-in "Microsoft Tax" for the minimum needed to get it to run - plus the standard stuff they foist on you.)
- It LOOKS LIKE WINDOWS - so much that you can dig right in without a tough retraining. You're ALREADY over the hard part of the leraning curve.
- The hard part is getting it configured. But these experts hold regular festivals where they'll do this FOR you. For free.
- Even if it's HARD on your particular machine due to SPECIAL PROBLEMS. And they get it done in a couple hours.
- They'll set up so you can ALSO use your machine with Windows - until you're weaned, or if there's something Linux won't do yet that you need. (And yes he DID explain dual-boot.)
- But it turns out the Linux distribution has LOTS of stuff already on it - for free - add-ons that would cost you an arm and a leg in Windows. (Implied: Enough that you might not need the dual-boot training wheels for long.) And MULTIPLE TYPES of the major components (like user interface and browser). So you don't have to commit to one, and buy it untested. And it's fun to test drive the sedan/sports car/luxury car/SUV version of each until you find the one that fits your lifestyle.
So what he's done is ENABLE Windows users: It's free, quick-to-get, fun, powerful, opens a vast world to you, doesn't cut you off from your current stuff, and YOU CAN DO IT. So why are you waiting?
And he does it in what - about four column inches? Astounding. (Took me about as much text just to deconstruct and SUMMARIZE all he did.)
Yes some of the points you make are missing. But they're the points EVERYONE makes, over and over. There's no need for Barton to hammer on them one more time, when there's other points - and a complete coherent argument - that need to be made.
Especially since anybody following Barton's advice will immediately be hooked up with his local Linux community, where plenty of other people will bring them up repeatedly.
This column could be a major breakthrough in the general adoption of Linux by the home users (which will creat
To appeal to the common man they Linux has to be something there are already aware of and as much as I hate to say it copying the Windows interface, or at least a similar style is needed.
Given that the windows look started out by creating a graphic interface on top of MS-DOS which "looked like Macintosh", I'd say that Microsoft agrees with you.
Yes there are differences. And some of them are REALLY significant. But windowing systems are far more similar to each other than any of them are to a command-line interface. Don't be surprised by comments like that from other Windows users trying a Linux distribution for the first time.
And starting them out on a windowing system that is a close match - in detail - to the one they're used to is a great way to ease them over the transition. Once they've learned the differences in the underlying utilities and paradigms, they can explore other graphic interfaces at their leisure.
Work is being done on using carbon nanorods to store hydrogen (amongst others by the Renewable Energies Research Lab in Golden, CO).
That wouldn't be singly-bonded carbon nanorods, would it? Storing two hydrogens per carbon and an extra hydrogen on each end?
Maybe some really short ones? Like two carbons (ethane), three (propane), four (butane), five (pentane), six (hexane), seven (heptane), eight (octane), nine (nonane), etc.? Or even chains SO short they have only one carbon (methane)?
That would be really easy to handle, using the current infrastructure. Mixes of chains averaging around 7 or 8 in length would be liquid at normal environmental termpartures, yet have a high envough vapor pressure for easy ignition. They could be used with unconverted gasoline engines and distributed with the current infrastructure with little, if any, modification. (You could even rate their performance in an engine by comparing it with that of a mix of pure 8 and 7 carbon nanorod liquids. Give it a number - like the percentage by weight of 8-carbon rod carriers in the mixture. Call it an "octane" rating after the fully-loaded 8-carbon rods.)
Meanwhile, fully-loaded three- and four-carbon carriers, or mixes averaging about there, would be liquid under slight pressure but vaporize quickly when the pressure was relieved. They could be handled by the LP gas infrastructure, again with little or no modification. And the one- and two-carbon carriers would be gas even under significant pressure and could be handled in the natural-gas pipeline system.
So, this virus has no payload. It does basically nothing except spreading, and, how sweeet of him, it will stop spreading on July 14th. [...] why would [...] virus writers suddenly become so nice ?
Looks to me like a dry run. (Actually, at least five of them so far over the last couple weeks.)
Maybe a single or small-group virus developer getting his skill set together before doing whatever he's setting up to do.
Another pissibility is an infowar group gearing up. I'd expect them to do their development in isolation - though it might leak, producing symptoms like these. But somewhere before the main attack they might also try a few probes, to see what the reaction is. In this case I'd expect either a main attack within the next couple months or nothing further beyond perhaps a couple more self-limiting probes. (Once you've exposed your weapon people will be working on defenses. So it's a use it early or lose it situation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Laws aren't like open source computer code that can be tinkered with by anybody with the proper knowhow.
But they CAN be! ANYBODY can tinker with them. Use the courts for a debugger. Petition an administrative body. Submit samples to a legislator (with or without wining-and-dining him). Write an initiative.
Laws are altered by a constitutionally defined procedure by the various branches of our government.
Precicely.
Anybody can WRITE them. Getting them ADOPTED is a whole 'nother story.
will this actualy generate enough speed/acceleration to fight against the gravity of surounding plants and the sun.
No - but neither will a rocket.
Instead of fighting it directly you ORBIT the sun, and use the sail at an angle (or a rocket) to pump up the orbit, until you're far enough from the sun that the attraction is negligible.
As for the planets - if you're not going to or from them (in which case you orbit THEM and use the sail to pump the orbits up or down) you can plot a course to use their orbital motion and gravitational attraction to give you an extra yank on your way - transferring some of their orbital momentum to the ship. (It will take a LOT of ships to steal enough momentum from, say, Jupiter to make a detectable difference in its orbit.)
Although im sure some crazy equations would be needed to solve such a thing, I would think not though.
You can figure the thrust from the momentum of the light very easily. From there it's the same math as a rocket - but simplified, since you're not constantly changing your ship's mass as you burn away the fuel.
It doesnt seem like a photon (an miniscule mass) accelerating into a large mirror could cause it to move the object, unless already in motion,
But the sun gives off a LOT of photons. B-)
Again it's just like a more typical heat engine using a gas as the working fluid (such as the one in your car): One gas molecule doesn't do very much to a half-pound piston hooked up to a piston rod, crankshaft, and VERY heavy flywheel. But there are a LOT of gas molecules zipping around in a cylinder full of burning fuel-air mixture.
but if it does keep it going how do the creators plan on making sure it stays 'on path'(not straying off course toword a ever nearing planet.
Compute the path just like any other spacecraft. Then measure the deviation from the desired path partway along the trip and tweak it for any errors. (Just as with a rocket ship, this is the famous "mid-course correction". If your destination is nearby you do it about halfway along your trip, because you're most efficient when you use half the trip to let the error grow before you measure it, then use the other half for the correction to take effect.
Once we it has gotten far out what exactly does it run from then.
By the time your so far away that there isn't enough light from the sun to be worth collecting, you're REALLY moving. And there's nothing else very large around for lightyears. Then you coast until you're near your destination.
The whole pushing the light sail toword the sun completely confused me, but im assuming that is how it would return.
Yep. That's how you stop - or actually manouver into a parking orbit.
But I really talked about it to show the equivalence to the flip side of a carnot-cycle heat engine - when the piston is compressing the fluid and transforming mechanical energy to heat energy in the workin fluid.
I do not at all understand how that would work though. Light pressue?
Yep.
Flying away from the sun the light pushes you, speeding you up and getting red-shifted (cooled and expanded) in the process.
Flying toward the sun the light still pushes you, but it is slowing you down and getting blue-shifted (heated and compressed) in the process.
But Gold's point is, solar sails would violate the Carnot condition. Carnot's analysis applies only to closed, cyclic engines. No one is proposing this as a closed, cyclic engine.
It is if you do round trips. B-)
By the way: The original article's argument could also be used to claim that hot gas can't push a piston which is covered with a REALLY good (i.e. perfect) thermal insulation, OR if the piston was at the same temperature as the gas, because the molecules would rebound with the same energy they had on approach. (Gas pressure? What's that?) In fact, an insulating coating on a piston improves the efficiency of a heat engine because it reduces the amount of heat that transfers between the gas and the piston without doing any work.
Interestingly, a perfect mirror in a light sail is EXACTLY equivalent to perfect insulation on the piston of a gas-based heat engine, while an imperfect mirror is similarly EXACTLY equivalent to a piston with a less-than-perfectly insulating surface.
By the way: Did you know that Bucky Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) and/or his did invented those tiles?
[...] replacing my HP printer altogether was cheaper than buying ink cartridge refills. Compare, $25 for a B&W cartridge + $35 for a color cartridge = $60 total. Cost of that HP DeskJet on sale at Office Depot? $50, and you get an entirely new printer!
But WAIT! There's MORE!
You see, HP only HALF-FILLS the cartridges that come in a new printer. So that $50 printer only has $30, rather than $60, worth of ink. (Yes, there have been other consumer actions about that...)
Also: Some printers only come with a color cartridge. It will print B&W without it, but it will do it by mixing the three colors of ink from the color cartridge, emptying it very quickly. So if you don't add a black ink cartirdge you are back at the store in a week or two.
The whole range of Airbus planes (except for the A300/A310 series) are as fly-by-wire as can be. Joysticks in the cockpit, no linkage between the pilot and the wings.
And more than once they've crashed with loss of life and the fly-by-wire avionics has been blamed.
The solar sail is a heat engine. But he's still wrong.
The basic claim is that the photon doesn't lose energy to a perfect mirror. But that's wrong. It neglects both the ACCELLERATION of the mirror due to the impact of the photon, and the red/blue shift of the photon when reflected from a mirror in motion relative to the observer.
It's easy to understand the lightsail/sun/photons system as a heat engine: The lightsail is the piston and the photons are the working fluid.
Just as with a piston, if the lightsail were held still (and the mirror were perfect or imperfect but at solar temperature) the photons would rebound without loss of energy. But the high photon-gas "pressure" on one side of the "piston" versus the near-vacuum (dark sky) on the other side means there is a force on the mirror. If not held it will accellerate.
Just as with a piston, no work is done on it until it starts to move - and the faster it moves the more work is done on it. But the faster it moves the more the light is red-shifted, i.e. the "gas is cooled", so the more rapidly work is done. Exactly what you expect in a piston engine.
You could also push the light sail toward the sun (as when decellerating at the far end of the trip). In this case the photons would be blue-shifted and the work from pushing the sail against light pressure would thus go into "heating" the photons - and the sun, if the sail was pointed properly so the "photon gas" hit the far end of the "cylinder" rather than escaping.
His analysis assumed the sail was unmoving and unaccellerating, which is just plain confused.
He misses two points:
- The "cold" end of the heat engine is not the mirror, but the dark sky behind it.
- In the coordinate system of the center of mass, the "gas" of photons is "cooled" by the red-shift of the mirror as it moves away.
In heat-engine terms, the mirror is a piston, photons on the sun side are a gas, the lack of photons on the dark side is the lower (near-zero) ambient pressure behind the piston, and the red-shift is the cooling of the gas by expansion as it pushes the piston.
The mirror-piston accellerates as long as the pressure on one side is higher than on the other - which it is as long as it's below lightspeed, which it always is since it has rest mass. Terminal velocity is less than c becaue the "pressure drops" both from the blue-shift and from a loss of photon density due to the inverse-square law.
And replacing the mirror with a black object means the piston "leaks" the gas, reducing the force from it by a factor of two - exactly what you'd expect.
No problems with carnot. (You can even "heat the sun" a bit by pushing the mirror toward it, and create somewhat leaky "walls" to the "cylinder" by using a retro-reflector rather than a simple mirror.
B-)
A) If the customer shares his link with a neighbor WIHTOUT their help, 3) goes up and they don't get any extra money.
B) If the neighbor buys a line they get a new revenue stream, but all of the per-user costs are doubled. 1) is the bulk of their ongoing costs, while 2)is the bulk of their their one-time costs. 3) is miniscule, and the performance impact is mostly on the original customer (who expectes it).
The one about the performance impact being tiny and mostly on the original customer should have been attached to A).
Doesn't it seem counter-intuitive for them to offer this service? I mean, increasing the number of people on residential circuits without increasing the number of paying customers is just going to degrade the service for everyone. People are still going to do it behind the backs of ISP's, but they are actually promoting it.
...)
Are you KIDDING me? It's GRAVY!
Consider the breakdown of their per-customer costs:
1) Pay the ILEC for the wire to each house.
2) Capital expense for the DSL modem/router/AP, plus install and setup.
3) Bandwidth costs on their backbone links.
4) Incremental costs on their internal infrastructure. (Disk space, backup time, need to buy bigger routers sooner,
5) Customer service & billing.
A) If the customer shares his link with a neighbor WIHTOUT their help, 3) goes up and they don't get any extra money.
B) If the neighbor buys a line they get a new revenue stream, but all of the per-user costs are doubled. 1) is the bulk of their ongoing costs, while 2)is the bulk of their their one-time costs. 3) is miniscule, and the performance impact is mostly on the original customer (who expectes it).
C) If the customer shares his link with the neighbor via the program, 3) goes up a tiny bit just like with A). 4) and 5 also double, but they're tiny compared to 1) and 2). And they GET AN EXTRA REVENUE STREAM. This is GRAVY! Two customers and no extra money out the door for last-mile infrastructure.
(Also: the original customer is typically a geek who serves as their first-line customer service department for the neighbor for free - while the neighbor is probably also enough of a geek that between the two of 'em they can fix most problems, so the customer service costs of the neighbor are probably lower than average.)
We're talking major money with negligible investment - so return on investment on the neighbor (who probably would have been "parasitizing" their infrastructure ANYWAY) is enormous compared to the wired customers.
And these people (no doubt geeks themselves) are clear-thinking enough to see this. So of COURSE they want to do it, and of COURSE they're willing to share the gravy with the guy who's providing them with a branch office for free, and willing to take a hit to his bandwidth in order to share.
It's called "Doing Well by Doing Good". Isn't it nice to see the invisible hand rewarding people for being nice? B-)
Most third world contries don't have the ifrastructure to manage stuff like this. So why do they make such laws to gouge anyone who tries to do something that would better the community[?]
Because they can. And because sometimes the decisionmakers don't believe their own interests will be served by enabling others to make money or have a freer life.
And THAT'S one of the BIG factors keeping many third-world countries dirt-poor.
They love to claim it's the nasty US government, corporate exploiters, opposition movements, or some other external factor doing it to them - and sometimes they have a point. But to a large extent many of them are doing it to themselves.
(Even when there IS an external factor, fixing THAT won't help if they've also cut their own tendons - while NOT cutting their tendons may let them outrun it.)
The anarchists Cookbook was published by a covert government organization and was intended to cause physical harm to any who tried to execute the plans included in it.
Regardelss of whether it was a deliberate hoax or simple incompetence, the recipies in it are indeed dangerous, and likely to blow up in your face (literally) if followed.
For instance: The nitroglycerine recipe completely ignores the temperature control (i.e. ice bath) necessary to keep the heat of the reaction from setting off the product - demolishing the lab AND splashing the remains with the nitric and sulphuric acid not yet consumed by the reaction.
Don't try thiose recipes at home, kiddies.
It uses METHanol?
Leak or vent even a little of that onto/into the user and he could go blind.
Even WITHOUT surfing porn sites. B-(
This is Japan we're talking about. 24 or 25 frames per second. :)
But France uses PAL, don't they? And Japan uses NTSC.
That's why I said "thirtyISH" frames per second. Different standards, different frame rates. But they all have to be in that ballpark, because much slower and they don't fuse, while much faster and you're wasting bandwidth.
(Broadcast standard frame rates tend to be a rational-number multiple of the local power supply frequency to prevent jiggle from bad power supply filtering in older design sets. Crawling distortion is less obnoxious than rapid shimmy.)
So what they're saying is that, for EVERY "family" that wants to view, say, Japanese TV in france, you need a SEPARATE STREAM from a SEPARATE BRICK, from Japan to France, to send their SEPARATE COPY of the (re)digitized signal.
Do you have ANY IDEA what kind of bandwidth you're talking about here? This is a VIDEO signal we're talking about - 30ish pictures per second, and even a 640x480 image is worth almost eight million bits before compression. Potentially you can compress a lot. But even heroically compressed the streams are very large for any reasonable signal quality.
With every Japanese "family" member vacationing in France sending their own personal copy of a popular show, it doesn't take many "families" to completely saturate the fibers that can route signals from Japan to France. So you can bet that, if the described use isn't a violation of their carriers' terms-of-service now, it will be within a couple weeks after this usage pattern becomes established.
At that point, any use of the box will violate either copyright or the terms-of-service. Then (if they haven't already), the media conglomerates will go to court and say there's no legal use...
The only way to avoid the bandwidth crunch with multiple users is multicast - which explicitly violates the "family use" exception. This leads to the same situation that already lost in Canada (as already mentioned in a nearby post).
The recent mozilla and netscape browsers have been consistent in not working on a vanilla Red Hat 6.0 install, due to a Java runtime library install bug.
Did that get fixed in this release? Or are they still abandoning anyone who hasn't upgraded?
My post occurred on Sunday June 29, @10:39PM. The copy occurred at 10:54.
Not only that, but the one change made in the cut-and-paste was to incorporate your signline as part of the post.
I'd say your countersuit wins on the evidence. B-)
I want to persoanlly thank the EU parlement - for crippling their own software industry and thus eliminating a competitive threat to that of the US.
Now if only India, Asia, South America, and Africa would do the same.
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It's like protective tarrifs. "If you keep shooting off your own feet we'll have to retaliate by shooting off ours. So there!"
Ha! I caught both AMD-references in your post right there! ;)
Interesting - since I didn't intend to make them. B-)
(Must be subliminals from working with the guy who managed the K6 project...)
[There's not] much here except that there are many applications for linux. [] there are many applications for windows too [so] it's not [] a convincing article.
[] maybe [] the article wasn't meant to convince but [] to share a story of how easy it was to install linux. [] it did a poor job [of that] as well.
At [] least [he should have mentioned] some of the obvious advantages of linux over windows. [But] he doesn't even [define] 'dual boot'[, mention the] virus free [] environment[, or] define 'free' as both [] as in beer and as in speech.
I think you missed the point of the article.
What this article does is inform Windows users that Linux is SO ready for prime-time that a man who has built his carreer as a writer about Windows is ready to swtich. And to bet his carreer on it (because he can expect never to hear inside info from his usual channels again).
It does it succinctly - fitting the major points into the limited size of his column:
- Been a Windows carreerist/true believer for 20 years but faith shaken.
- Once tried Mac but went with Windows. (Therefore Linux is better than both.) Ditto OS/2.
- Know ALL the Windows versions so Linux beats 'em all. (MAJOR credentials established by now. This is not your high-school basement geek talking.)
- It's free.
- There's free support, too, including experts who will do the install and configuration for free.
- And advise you on making the choices that require expert knowlege to get started.
- There's no army of anti-piracy police to retroactively extract licensing fees and penalties for your free software.
- There IS an army of volunteers, bigger than Microsoft, who already wrote enough to do what you need, and are writing still more. As a result the mass of free software mushrooms.
- The free software means your machine is cheaper. (No built-in "Microsoft Tax" for the minimum needed to get it to run - plus the standard stuff they foist on you.)
- It LOOKS LIKE WINDOWS - so much that you can dig right in without a tough retraining. You're ALREADY over the hard part of the leraning curve.
- The hard part is getting it configured. But these experts hold regular festivals where they'll do this FOR you. For free.
- Even if it's HARD on your particular machine due to SPECIAL PROBLEMS. And they get it done in a couple hours.
- They'll set up so you can ALSO use your machine with Windows - until you're weaned, or if there's something Linux won't do yet that you need. (And yes he DID explain dual-boot.)
- But it turns out the Linux distribution has LOTS of stuff already on it - for free - add-ons that would cost you an arm and a leg in Windows. (Implied: Enough that you might not need the dual-boot training wheels for long.) And MULTIPLE TYPES of the major components (like user interface and browser). So you don't have to commit to one, and buy it untested. And it's fun to test drive the sedan/sports car/luxury car/SUV version of each until you find the one that fits your lifestyle.
So what he's done is ENABLE Windows users: It's free, quick-to-get, fun, powerful, opens a vast world to you, doesn't cut you off from your current stuff, and YOU CAN DO IT. So why are you waiting?
And he does it in what - about four column inches? Astounding. (Took me about as much text just to deconstruct and SUMMARIZE all he did.)
Yes some of the points you make are missing. But they're the points EVERYONE makes, over and over. There's no need for Barton to hammer on them one more time, when there's other points - and a complete coherent argument - that need to be made.
Especially since anybody following Barton's advice will immediately be hooked up with his local Linux community, where plenty of other people will bring them up repeatedly.
This column could be a major breakthrough in the general adoption of Linux by the home users (which will creat
To appeal to the common man they Linux has to be something there are already aware of and as much as I hate to say it copying the Windows interface, or at least a similar style is needed.
Given that the windows look started out by creating a graphic interface on top of MS-DOS which "looked like Macintosh", I'd say that Microsoft agrees with you.
Yes there are differences. And some of them are REALLY significant. But windowing systems are far more similar to each other than any of them are to a command-line interface. Don't be surprised by comments like that from other Windows users trying a Linux distribution for the first time.
And starting them out on a windowing system that is a close match - in detail - to the one they're used to is a great way to ease them over the transition. Once they've learned the differences in the underlying utilities and paradigms, they can explore other graphic interfaces at their leisure.
Matter-antimatter reactions give you 100% of the mass converted into energy. Gamma ray energy, that is.
Unlike fusion, where a BUNCH of it comes out as neutrinos, which are very hard to catch.
Work is being done on using carbon nanorods to store hydrogen (amongst others by the Renewable Energies Research Lab in Golden, CO).
That wouldn't be singly-bonded carbon nanorods, would it? Storing two hydrogens per carbon and an extra hydrogen on each end?
Maybe some really short ones? Like two carbons (ethane), three (propane), four (butane), five (pentane), six (hexane), seven (heptane), eight (octane), nine (nonane), etc.? Or even chains SO short they have only one carbon (methane)?
That would be really easy to handle, using the current infrastructure. Mixes of chains averaging around 7 or 8 in length would be liquid at normal environmental termpartures, yet have a high envough vapor pressure for easy ignition. They could be used with unconverted gasoline engines and distributed with the current infrastructure with little, if any, modification. (You could even rate their performance in an engine by comparing it with that of a mix of pure 8 and 7 carbon nanorod liquids. Give it a number - like the percentage by weight of 8-carbon rod carriers in the mixture. Call it an "octane" rating after the fully-loaded 8-carbon rods.)
Meanwhile, fully-loaded three- and four-carbon carriers, or mixes averaging about there, would be liquid under slight pressure but vaporize quickly when the pressure was relieved. They could be handled by the LP gas infrastructure, again with little or no modification. And the one- and two-carbon carriers would be gas even under significant pressure and could be handled in the natural-gas pipeline system.
A great idea!
B-)
So, this virus has no payload. It does basically nothing except spreading, and, how sweeet of him, it will stop spreading on July 14th. [...] why would [...] virus writers suddenly become so nice ?
Looks to me like a dry run. (Actually, at least five of them so far over the last couple weeks.)
Maybe a single or small-group virus developer getting his skill set together before doing whatever he's setting up to do.
Another pissibility is an infowar group gearing up. I'd expect them to do their development in isolation - though it might leak, producing symptoms like these. But somewhere before the main attack they might also try a few probes, to see what the reaction is. In this case I'd expect either a main attack within the next couple months or nothing further beyond perhaps a couple more self-limiting probes. (Once you've exposed your weapon people will be working on defenses. So it's a use it early or lose it situation.)