Hm. Not sure about using the Lagrange point. I'll have to think about that. Anyone smarter than me wanna do the math here?
Of course, on the moon, instead of a space elevator, you could accomplish the same thing much easier, and much cheaper, by using a spinning tether. We could do that with materials and construction technology that we have now. NASA's already experimented with tethers in space.
Basically, you put a big cable in orbit over the moon. Probably easiest if sticks up as much as it goes down, so you basically have two spokes of a wheel, opposite each other. (Or you could add more if you wanted to.) When it spins, the cable comes down almost all the way to the moon's surface. Since there's no atmosphere, there's no problem with reentry or drag or anything like that.
Do the calculations properly, and you can get it touching down at specific points around the moon (it doesn't even have to be an equatorial orbit). Add the right wobble to the cables and you get it to stay still for a minute or two at the ground point, for enough time for your robots to attach the shipping bin to it to pick up as it swings back up past orbit. Let go at the top and you flick it off in whatever direction you want to send whatever it is you're lifting off from the surface.
Cheaper to construct, maintain, and build in the first place than a space elevator would be all around. The hard part is negotiating the right-of-way for that much space:)
There is, in my mind, the possibility of a space elevator working on the moon, or other low gravity objects.
Actually, it would be easier to build one on Earth than on the moon.
One key component is that the center of mass must be in synchronous (geo- or otherwise) orbit. On Earth, you can do this, as our planet is spinning fast enough that you can stay fairly close and remain over the same spot. On the moon, which takes 28 of our days to make a single rotation, the ribbon would have to be so long that it would pass through the Earth.
I cannot for the life of me envision using a cable in the tens of thousands of miles in length were a single atom being out of place is enough to bring it down.
Why would you want to? There's nothing in any of the current proposed designs for a space elevator using anything in which "a single atom being out of place is enough to bring it down."
Place a material in space where there is no atmosphere to protect it from radiation, and I guarantee it will break down in one way or another.
Sure, eventually. But "eventually" could be decades. We've had stuff up there functioning for quite a while now. And the nice thing about the space elevator is that since it's in constant contact with the earth, it can be continuously inspected and maintained. Unlike, say, Mir, which still lasted for fifteen years with only occasional resupply and repair missions. Or the two rovers on Mars which are still going after four years with no direct repair at all.
I currently occasionally watch movies on any of: My DVD player, connected to a standard TV set My Linux desktop machine, when I'm in my home office My Windows laptop machine, while I'm traveling (sitting around in airports) My PDA, while I'm riding the train to work
My music-playing choices are even more varied. According to ??AA, every time I watch a movie on my PDA, I'm breaking the law, if I bought that movie on DVD.
Yeah, god forbid an underpaid teacher decides to concentrate on education and makes a hard to swallow decision to promote a little equilibrium.
How exactly do you consider NOT teaching a subject specifically because a teacher is afraid of offending the ignorant to be concentrating on education?
"Equilibrium"? What? Giving equal time to the uninformed? That's the role of TV news and radio talk shows, not of a teacher.
This is just like the whole nonsense with creationism in the U.S. So, 40% of people in the United States think that creationism is just as valid a scientific theory as evolution by natural selection. The answer to that is not to pander to them, but to educate them.
Reminds me of the following which has been rattling around in my head for the last few decades.
(I believe Isaac Asimov may be to blame for this)
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X
And when she is grown
My very own clone
She will be of the opposite sex
Clone, clone of my own
With the Y chromosome changed to X
And when we're alone
Since her mind is my own
She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.
Then your secretary would probably get it wrong too
No, your secretary would almost certainly get it right. Your secretary would know, from experience with you and the kind of work you do and the overall context of the letter whether the person you are dictating the letter to has recently analyzed something for you, or if you are applying for a job in a medical lab.
95% sounds good if you're not comparing it to a person. But 5% error rate is horrendous for business use. A secretary who missed one word out of every 20 would be fired after a few hours. A couple decades ago, when I temped for office work, I could transcribe about 80 wpm with close to 100% accuracy, and I was nowhere near the fastest.
If you got a letter from a business containing a typo on almost every line, would you do business with them?
If you are going to be living with the person, then the fair housing act does not apply to you.
So, if you're actually looking for a roommate, then you can discriminate based on any criteria you want, including age, sexual preference, race, religion, hobbies, whether they'll sleep with you or not, etc.
The judge did not rule that they cannot ask about such things. The ruling was simply about Safe Harbor status. That is, since the information was required from the person looking for housing, and a landlord used it to find a tenant, and was found to have discriminated based on information furnished to them by roommates.com, then roommates.com could be found to be complicit in the discrimination. They could avoid this by making such fields optional, or by only passing along protected information to owners who will be sharing living space.
At least, that's my take from the article. I'm not a lawyer either, but I've been involved in a few court cases involving landlord/tenant law.
Hm. Since the image was on his own server, he can't be charged with any kind of computer hacking crimes. Though I suppose it is possible for McCaine to sue for defamation or some such. Davidson *did* change the image with the intent of making it seem like McCaine was endorsing a position he does not endorse. Malicious intent may not be that easy to prove, though. It's obviously a joke, not a serious attempt to fool anyone. Any lawsuit would hinge on the plaintiff trying to prove that McCaine's followers really are stupid enough to believe that it was legitimate. Fox news failed at this strategy when they sued Al Franken for his "Lies and the Lying Liars..." book, and they had a much better case.
However, Davidson also has a good basis for a counter-suit. McCaine's site did steal his bandwidth and use his templates without giving credit, both of which are clearly spelled out as against the terms of service for using the template.
People post on YouTube because it's the "cool" place to post your videos
Not necessarily true. I post my videos on youtube because it's the only place to post them.
If NBC creates a site that's free and easy to use, so I can upload my videos easily, without giving rights to them to NBC, and if people can watch them through a link in my blog without being interrupted by ads, then I'll be just as likely to use NBC, regardless of who else is doing it.
I haven't done a study, but I'd bet a substantial number of people feel exactly the same way.
I do remember Tom Baker using a gun at one point. Well, sort of. (The episode involved a carnivorous alien plant, on earth, and a bunch of mind-controlled humans. Does that narrow it down much?)
"Doctor! You can't take them all on yourself!" "Of course I can! I have a pistol!"
I don't think he actually *fired* it at any point, though...
Dr. Who switched to color before I did. It wasn't until I got to college that I found out that Tom Baker's episodes weren't black-and-white.
Torchwood is *excellent*! Though, completely different from Dr. Who. It's set in the same world, and stars Captain Jack, but the only other crossover element is that the Tardis sound makes a couple of guest appearances in the last episode. If Sci-Fi has any plans on picking up Torchwood, they're being very quiet about it. Even if they did, they'd edit it quite a bit. (You can say/show things on British TV that Americans are too uptight for.)
The opposite's actually true in my case. I recently turned 40, and I've purchased more CDs in the last couple of years than I did between the ages of 18-30.
Partly that's because I make more money now, but it's also because I've found more music I'm interested in. I wasn't interested in most top-40 stuff even when I was the appropriate age, but it was hard to find any alternatives. The smaller record stores would stock it, but without listening to it ahead of time, it was hard to tell what it was.
Nowadays, with the internet, someone can mention a song, or post a link to their blog, I can usually listen to it online, or download a couple of songs from the artist's web site within minutes. I'll listen to it and if I like it I'll pick up the CDs if I run across them, or order them online.
But, yeah, if I was limited to the songs ClearChannel was being paid to sell, I wouldn't be buying new CDs either. I suspect, when the labels say things like CD sales are down 20%, they mean sales of *their* CDs are down. Little to none of what I buy comes from major labels, though. (And, as far as I can tell (since I just treat the CD as the distribution medium, and actually listen to the ripped mp3's), none of it has DRM.)
Actually, the Maya calendar is pretty well understood now. And it is quite accurate, amazingly so, given its time. But it's not quite as accurate as the to-the-microsecond calendar that we use today.
And it doesn't "end" on December 21, 2012 any more than our calendar "ended" on December 31, 00. If they'd kept it for another thousand years, they were more than capable of adding another digit to it.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words:
They say 2+2 is 4.
We say it's 18.
So, obviously, it must be somewhere around 11?
Hm. Not sure about using the Lagrange point. I'll have to think about that. Anyone smarter than me wanna do the math here?
:)
Of course, on the moon, instead of a space elevator, you could accomplish the same thing much easier, and much cheaper, by using a spinning tether. We could do that with materials and construction technology that we have now. NASA's already experimented with tethers in space.
Basically, you put a big cable in orbit over the moon. Probably easiest if sticks up as much as it goes down, so you basically have two spokes of a wheel, opposite each other. (Or you could add more if you wanted to.) When it spins, the cable comes down almost all the way to the moon's surface. Since there's no atmosphere, there's no problem with reentry or drag or anything like that.
Do the calculations properly, and you can get it touching down at specific points around the moon (it doesn't even have to be an equatorial orbit). Add the right wobble to the cables and you get it to stay still for a minute or two at the ground point, for enough time for your robots to attach the shipping bin to it to pick up as it swings back up past orbit. Let go at the top and you flick it off in whatever direction you want to send whatever it is you're lifting off from the surface.
Cheaper to construct, maintain, and build in the first place than a space elevator would be all around. The hard part is negotiating the right-of-way for that much space
Actually, it would be easier to build one on Earth than on the moon.
One key component is that the center of mass must be in synchronous (geo- or otherwise) orbit. On Earth, you can do this, as our planet is spinning fast enough that you can stay fairly close and remain over the same spot. On the moon, which takes 28 of our days to make a single rotation, the ribbon would have to be so long that it would pass through the Earth.
It's not just backups.
I currently occasionally watch movies on any of:
My DVD player, connected to a standard TV set
My Linux desktop machine, when I'm in my home office
My Windows laptop machine, while I'm traveling (sitting around in airports)
My PDA, while I'm riding the train to work
My music-playing choices are even more varied. According to ??AA, every time I watch a movie on my PDA, I'm breaking the law, if I bought that movie on DVD.
How exactly do you consider NOT teaching a subject specifically because a teacher is afraid of offending the ignorant to be concentrating on education?
"Equilibrium"? What? Giving equal time to the uninformed? That's the role of TV news and radio talk shows, not of a teacher.
This is just like the whole nonsense with creationism in the U.S. So, 40% of people in the United States think that creationism is just as valid a scientific theory as evolution by natural selection. The answer to that is not to pander to them, but to educate them.
(I believe Isaac Asimov may be to blame for this)
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X
And when she is grown
My very own clone
She will be of the opposite sex
Clone, clone of my own
With the Y chromosome changed to X
And when we're alone
Since her mind is my own
She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.
(Yeah, I didn't need all that karma anyway...
So you're saying they can see you when you're sleeping? And they know when you're awake??
95% sounds good if you're not comparing it to a person. But 5% error rate is horrendous for business use. A secretary who missed one word out of every 20 would be fired after a few hours. A couple decades ago, when I temped for office work, I could transcribe about 80 wpm with close to 100% accuracy, and I was nowhere near the fastest.
If you got a letter from a business containing a typo on almost every line, would you do business with them?
Actually, the law is realistic in this case.
If you are going to be living with the person, then the fair housing act does not apply to you.
So, if you're actually looking for a roommate, then you can discriminate based on any criteria you want, including age, sexual preference, race, religion, hobbies, whether they'll sleep with you or not, etc.
The judge did not rule that they cannot ask about such things. The ruling was simply about Safe Harbor status. That is, since the information was required from the person looking for housing, and a landlord used it to find a tenant, and was found to have discriminated based on information furnished to them by roommates.com, then roommates.com could be found to be complicit in the discrimination. They could avoid this by making such fields optional, or by only passing along protected information to owners who will be sharing living space.
At least, that's my take from the article. I'm not a lawyer either, but I've been involved in a few court cases involving landlord/tenant law.
Uhhh... You probably want to do that in the opposite order.
Does the 64kb memory expansion card also include the lower-case add-on?
I kinda do.
Thanks,
Mr. O-
"orchestrating the press" could be the very definition of the PR department's job.
Orchestrating the press "with the control of a puppet master" just means they're very very good at it.
I agree with the GP. Nothing sinister here, just someone at Microsoft who happens to be excellent at their job. (Well, we knew *somebody* had to be.)
Hm. Since the image was on his own server, he can't be charged with any kind of computer hacking crimes. Though I suppose it is possible for McCaine to sue for defamation or some such. Davidson *did* change the image with the intent of making it seem like McCaine was endorsing a position he does not endorse. Malicious intent may not be that easy to prove, though. It's obviously a joke, not a serious attempt to fool anyone. Any lawsuit would hinge on the plaintiff trying to prove that McCaine's followers really are stupid enough to believe that it was legitimate. Fox news failed at this strategy when they sued Al Franken for his "Lies and the Lying Liars..." book, and they had a much better case.
However, Davidson also has a good basis for a counter-suit. McCaine's site did steal his bandwidth and use his templates without giving credit, both of which are clearly spelled out as against the terms of service for using the template.
Not necessarily true. I post my videos on youtube because it's the only place to post them.
If NBC creates a site that's free and easy to use, so I can upload my videos easily, without giving rights to them to NBC, and if people can watch them through a link in my blog without being interrupted by ads, then I'll be just as likely to use NBC, regardless of who else is doing it.
I haven't done a study, but I'd bet a substantial number of people feel exactly the same way.
Or froogle.
I legally purchased my copy of XP-64 for $80, which is considerably below the MSRP of $299. I just had to wait a week for it to arrive.
Ah!
I never got that that was actually the Doctor's hand.
Hm. Interesting.
I haven't noticed, no. But I'm only about halfway through season 3.
You mean they have actually switched to saying "fuck" instead of (or in addition to?) "frak"?
For the love of Baltar... why??
(I still miss Feldercarb, too!)
When did the new Doctor use a gun?
I do remember Tom Baker using a gun at one point. Well, sort of. (The episode involved a carnivorous alien plant, on earth, and a bunch of mind-controlled humans. Does that narrow it down much?)
"Doctor! You can't take them all on yourself!"
"Of course I can! I have a pistol!"
I don't think he actually *fired* it at any point, though...
What is ku, and why is he running it as root?
Dr. Who switched to color before I did. It wasn't until I got to college that I found out that Tom Baker's episodes weren't black-and-white.
Torchwood is *excellent*! Though, completely different from Dr. Who. It's set in the same world, and stars Captain Jack, but the only other crossover element is that the Tardis sound makes a couple of guest appearances in the last episode. If Sci-Fi has any plans on picking up Torchwood, they're being very quiet about it. Even if they did, they'd edit it quite a bit. (You can say/show things on British TV that Americans are too uptight for.)
The opposite's actually true in my case. I recently turned 40, and I've purchased more CDs in the last couple of years than I did between the ages of 18-30.
Partly that's because I make more money now, but it's also because I've found more music I'm interested in. I wasn't interested in most top-40 stuff even when I was the appropriate age, but it was hard to find any alternatives. The smaller record stores would stock it, but without listening to it ahead of time, it was hard to tell what it was.
Nowadays, with the internet, someone can mention a song, or post a link to their blog, I can usually listen to it online, or download a couple of songs from the artist's web site within minutes. I'll listen to it and if I like it I'll pick up the CDs if I run across them, or order them online.
But, yeah, if I was limited to the songs ClearChannel was being paid to sell, I wouldn't be buying new CDs either. I suspect, when the labels say things like CD sales are down 20%, they mean sales of *their* CDs are down. Little to none of what I buy comes from major labels, though. (And, as far as I can tell (since I just treat the CD as the distribution medium, and actually listen to the ripped mp3's), none of it has DRM.)
Actually, the Maya calendar is pretty well understood now.
And it is quite accurate, amazingly so, given its time. But it's not quite as accurate as the to-the-microsecond calendar that we use today.
And it doesn't "end" on December 21, 2012 any more than our calendar "ended" on December 31, 00. If they'd kept it for another thousand years, they were more than capable of adding another digit to it.
And what's Jose Padilla in prison for, again?
Or Mike Hawash?
Damn, man, it'll be the end of an era.
I mean, NOW whose flag are we gonna sew onto our backpacks when we're spending a summer travelling across Europe?