Reentry heat is caused by friction against the atmosphere when decelerating from *orbital* velocity (several miles per second). If you just lift an object up above the atmosphere and drop it straight down, it won't be going very fast (Mach 1.5, in her case) and there won't be much heat buildup.
Remember, it's not height that puts you in orbit, it's lateral speeds. Rockets lift above the atmosphere and then turn sideways for the major part of the boost. Haven't you seen those pictures of the shuttle rolling over and disappearing over the horizon?
(It would be entirely possible to land a space vehicle by cancelling your orbital speed above the atmosphere and dropping slowly straight through it. However, as to do this you'd need just as much delta-V as you would on launch, it's easier to use friction instead.)
You're forgetting that rock is opaque. UV would only sterilise the surface; and no-one's seriously suggesting that viable microbes would survive on the surface of meteroids anyway (when in space, vast differences is temparature and radiation; on reentry, it's washed in plasma; when on the ground, it'll be exposed to the probably highly acidic rain).
There are plenty of bacteria that live *in* rock. You can split stones open and see a coloured layer a few centimetres below the surface; that's them. These would survive meteoric reentry quite handily, and they're protected from all UV.
So I thought to put one and only one HTML page into my.plan file. And access it with a funky URL: http://hostname.tld:79/\ userid</I>
Alas, it doesn't work if your finger performs an identd lookup (like on my Debian system). It also only works if your web browser passes the space through unaltered; my Mozilla replaces it with %20. But a neat trick, nonetheless.
But for clandestine web servers... in most cases you need go no further than good ol' gopher, commonly known as the Web that Didn't Make It. All web browsers I've seen today support the gopher protocol; hardly anybody knows about it so your cable provider's HTTP-server detectors won't pick it up; it only supports plain text and menus, but hey, in most cases that's a bonus. Support your local gopher!
If you're talking about csound and structured music, don't forget the other formats. MP4 is the official one, but it doesn't seem to be taking off in any way; I think it's too complicated.
However one format that no-one's mentioned yet are the grand old tracking systems that originally started life on the Amiga. The latest formats (XM, IT) are astonishingly complex and you can do things in them that you've got no hope of with MIDI; and because each file is self-contained, complete with samples, the sound is completely platform independent. More software than you might think supports them thanks to the amazing Mikmod player library (XMMS and WinAmp will both play nearly all tracker files invisibly to the user). There's some decent music out there, too... alas, I don't have the bandwidth to export my monster MOD file collection, but people like Acumen, Warder and Rapture. Try Rapture's Aurora Borealis as a quick and rather impressive demonstration of what you can do with the format.
And there's lots of tracking software for Linux, too.
...and Rotary have got that far on an amount of money about equal to the interest on the cost overrun of NASA's X-33 project. Which I believe has just about got an engine design that may work.
Sigh. Anyone want to invest five million dollars in Rotary? That's all they need to complete the first prototype and do a manned launch. They'll probably give you a free trip up, too...
IMHO, that is what made the ending so sickening. To "rescue" the kids, the helicopter massacres hundreds of people, under the pretext that they "didn't really have lives", and were "only" Norms. In short, the murder of something different was justified -solely- because it was different. Sure, there was more compassion from the New Zealanders, but not so much that they spared any life that did not conform to their notion of the ideal.
Well, of course. This is largely the point. The children fight against intolerance and prejudice, and are finally rescued by people just like them --- who turn out to be no different. Read it again and watch the children's reaction to the massacre.
I expect any time now to hear that someone has introduced a virus that evolves in the sense that a genetic algorithm evolves a solution to a problem. The internet is large enough an e-ecosystem to support millions of copies of a virus, so even if the survival rate of the variants produced by breeding and mutation was very low, there might be enough survivors each generation to evolve into a truly dangerous virus.
Except it wouldn't. What's a good survival strategy for a virus? Not to be detected, of course. What's a good way not to be detected? Don't do any noticable harm.
An evolving virus (if it survived at all, real-world systems are rather brittle for a-life organisms to survive in the wild) would very quickly become very small, very prolific, and completely harmless.
I'm not impressed. Every spot on this globe has been through dramatic climactic changes over geological time. At more than one point, Lake Vostok was swamplike, teeming with life.
But life surviving inhospitable environments is very different from life evolving in such places. Has anyone a theory that Europa was once warmer, with sufficient sunlight? Or maybe ejecta from Earth impactors has transported life elsewhere?
Who said life needed sunlight to evolve? The latest theories suggest that Terrestrial life evolved either at the ocean bottom, or beneath it. Check out the literature on subsea vents, and particularly the clumps of bacteria that get blown up out of them --- these originate from some unknown location beneath the surface, in temperatures in excess of 200 C.
And, interestingly, these conditions are pretty much the same as that at the bottom of Europa.
Actually, it's Titan, orbiting Saturn (unless I've got it confused with Triton) that's potentially the most interesting. It's atmosphere isn't in chemical equilibrium, and there's only one other planet with that property: Earth.
There's a really easy way for an ISP to protect itself against people using it to send spam: introduce a one or two second delay before accepting each message. This is insignificant to the normal user --- my mailer, exmh, takes about five seconds between my pressing `send' and control returning to me --- but would stop spammers dead. Two seconds per message means 30 per minute, less than two thousand per hour. It means that they can no longer blast thousands of messages into the server. If you like, you can also implement something that checks for, say, more than a few hundred messages in an hour and automatically disables email.
The effort needed to implement this is trivial.
(You would need a normal mail server to handle mailing lists, of course. But that's not a problem as mailing lists tend to be handled purely at the server end, without the messages been sent down the dial-up link.)
You mean you go to search engines because of the advertising? Bizarre. One of the reasons I use Google is because it doesn't have any advertising (and because of it's nice, clean interface and decent results; though I'm now starting to use alltheweb a lot). If they start cluttering things up with advertising, I'll probably look elsewhere, despite the fact that I'll mostly edit it out with Junkbuster.
I really hope this doesn't mean they're starting down the slippery slope which ends up in an interface as ugly as, say, DejaNews'. Google's incredibly minimalistic interface is part of the charm. It's fast and efficient (and gets excellent search results).
It's also really nice to see a search engine with no banner ads, they really get on my nerves (even though I don't see many, thanks to Junkbuster --- awesome program.
First off, any eventual settlement we put on the moon (or mars, etc.), will only aid in alleviating the effects of human population pressure on earth.
No, it wouldn't --- you can never relieve population pressure by expanding to new territory. You can't transfer people fast enough. There will always be orders of magnitude more people being born than you can ship to the lunar colonies.
You may be able to get resources that will help the situation back home --- but it wouldn't work as a population relief valve.
Second, in the case of the moon, it is already dead. What possible damage could we do that would make it any more dead?
Just because it's dead doesn't mean that it's worth preserving. Deserts are dead, too, mostly --- and we preserve those. There's no ecosystem, so it's a lot harder to make a mess (you don't have to worry about upsetting any kind of balance), but the counter to this is that any mess made on the surface is permanent. The Apollo hardware is still there. There are metal-lined craters from the hard-landed Luna probes, still there. If you strip-mine the surface of the moon, the scars will remain for millions of years.
That said, I do think that hard-landing Lunar Prospector is a good, if rather drastic, idea.
If you want to try it out without copying 300kB of data onto each of five floppies, which the original GEM installer requires, you can try my highly unofficial installer package which you can find at my GEM page.
This currently has a silly little bug which prevents it from running of MSDOS machines, only DRDOS ones (it's that = vs == thing in the batch language), which I will fix ASAP.
You may also find the source interesting if you like hairy batch files.
I still use it on my Pentium notebook. It's small, fast, sophisticated (it's multithreaded, object-oriented, has virtual memory, long filenames, is compact, you name it) and does exactly what I want it to. It comes with an excellent DTP package supporting outline fonts (rotatable and scalable), bitmap graphics (ditto), vector graphics (ditto), text frames (ditto), paragraph styling, tight wrapping of text around objects, and is blazingly fast... the entire program's 80kB. That's good programming. And this all runs in real mode, no 32-bit code in sight. I've never seen it use more than 4MB of memory, ever...
Go to New Deal's home page for screenshots and a shareware downloadable version (fully working, but you only get one app --- the awsome DTP package mentioned above).
Slashdot Mirror
Reentry heat is caused by friction against the atmosphere when decelerating from *orbital* velocity (several miles per second). If you just lift an object up above the atmosphere and drop it straight down, it won't be going very fast (Mach 1.5, in her case) and there won't be much heat buildup.
Remember, it's not height that puts you in orbit, it's lateral speeds. Rockets lift above the atmosphere and then turn sideways for the major part of the boost. Haven't you seen those pictures of the shuttle rolling over and disappearing over the horizon?
(It would be entirely possible to land a space vehicle by cancelling your orbital speed above the atmosphere and dropping slowly straight through it. However, as to do this you'd need just as much delta-V as you would on launch, it's easier to use friction instead.)
You're forgetting that rock is opaque. UV would only sterilise the surface; and no-one's seriously suggesting that viable microbes would survive on the surface of meteroids anyway (when in space, vast differences is temparature and radiation; on reentry, it's washed in plasma; when on the ground, it'll be exposed to the probably highly acidic rain).
There are plenty of bacteria that live *in* rock. You can split stones open and see a coloured layer a few centimetres below the surface; that's them. These would survive meteoric reentry quite handily, and they're protected from all UV.
So I thought to put one and only one HTML page into my .plan file. And access it with a funky URL: http://hostname.tld:79/\ userid</I>
Alas, it doesn't work if your finger performs an identd lookup (like on my Debian system). It also only works if your web browser passes the space through unaltered; my Mozilla replaces it with %20. But a neat trick, nonetheless.
But for clandestine web servers... in most cases you need go no further than good ol' gopher, commonly known as the Web that Didn't Make It. All web browsers I've seen today support the gopher protocol; hardly anybody knows about it so your cable provider's HTTP-server detectors won't pick it up; it only supports plain text and menus, but hey, in most cases that's a bonus. Support your local gopher!
Um, Mr. Katz... Frankenstein was the *doctor's* name. The monster was simply called, Frankenstein's Monster. There's a very, very big difference.
However one format that no-one's mentioned yet are the grand old tracking systems that originally started life on the Amiga. The latest formats (XM, IT) are astonishingly complex and you can do things in them that you've got no hope of with MIDI; and because each file is self-contained, complete with samples, the sound is completely platform independent. More software than you might think supports them thanks to the amazing Mikmod player library (XMMS and WinAmp will both play nearly all tracker files invisibly to the user). There's some decent music out there, too... alas, I don't have the bandwidth to export my monster MOD file collection, but people like Acumen, Warder and Rapture. Try Rapture's Aurora Borealis as a quick and rather impressive demonstration of what you can do with the format.
And there's lots of tracking software for Linux, too.
Sigh. Anyone want to invest five million dollars in Rotary? That's all they need to complete the first prototype and do a manned launch. They'll probably give you a free trip up, too...
Well, of course. This is largely the point. The children fight against intolerance and prejudice, and are finally rescued by people just like them --- who turn out to be no different. Read it again and watch the children's reaction to the massacre.
solution to a problem. The internet is large enough an e-ecosystem to support millions of copies of a virus, so even if the survival
rate of the variants produced by breeding and mutation was very low, there might be enough survivors each generation to evolve
into a truly dangerous virus.
Except it wouldn't. What's a good survival strategy for a virus? Not to be detected, of course. What's a good way not to be detected? Don't do any noticable harm.
An evolving virus (if it survived at all, real-world systems are rather brittle for a-life organisms to survive in the wild) would very quickly become very small, very prolific, and completely harmless.
point, Lake Vostok was swamplike, teeming with life.
But life surviving inhospitable environments is very different from life evolving in such places. Has anyone a theory that Europa
was once warmer, with sufficient sunlight? Or maybe ejecta from Earth impactors has transported life elsewhere?
Who said life needed sunlight to evolve? The latest theories suggest that Terrestrial life evolved either at the ocean bottom, or beneath it. Check out the literature on subsea vents, and particularly the clumps of bacteria that get blown up out of them --- these originate from some unknown location beneath the surface, in temperatures in excess of 200 C.
And, interestingly, these conditions are pretty much the same as that at the bottom of Europa.
Actually, it's Titan, orbiting Saturn (unless I've got it confused with Triton) that's potentially the most interesting. It's atmosphere isn't in chemical equilibrium, and there's only one other planet with that property: Earth.
There's a really easy way for an ISP to protect itself against people using it to send spam: introduce a one or two second delay before accepting each message. This is insignificant to the normal user --- my mailer, exmh, takes about five seconds between my pressing `send' and control returning to me --- but would stop spammers dead. Two seconds per message means 30 per minute, less than two thousand per hour. It means that they can no longer blast thousands of messages into the server. If you like, you can also implement something that checks for, say, more than a few hundred messages in an hour and automatically disables email.
The effort needed to implement this is trivial.
(You would need a normal mail server to handle mailing lists, of course. But that's not a problem as mailing lists tend to be handled purely at the server end, without the messages been sent down the dial-up link.)
Advertising is what brings us these sites.
You mean you go to search engines because of the advertising? Bizarre. One of the reasons I use Google is because it doesn't have any advertising (and because of it's nice, clean interface and decent results; though I'm now starting to use alltheweb a lot). If they start cluttering things up with advertising, I'll probably look elsewhere, despite the fact that I'll mostly edit it out with Junkbuster.
wired.com has a rather funny interview with Rob Malda:
s /story/20483.html?wnpg=all
http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/busines
It's awesomely spaced out. Well worth reading.
It's also really nice to see a search engine with no banner ads, they really get on my nerves (even though I don't see many, thanks to Junkbuster --- awesome program.
No, it wouldn't --- you can never relieve population pressure by expanding to new territory. You can't transfer people fast enough. There will always be orders of magnitude more people being born than you can ship to the lunar colonies.
You may be able to get resources that will help the situation back home --- but it wouldn't work as a population relief valve.
Second, in the case of the moon, it is already dead. What possible damage could we do that would make it any more dead?
Just because it's dead doesn't mean that it's worth preserving. Deserts are dead, too, mostly --- and we preserve those. There's no ecosystem, so it's a lot harder to make a mess (you don't have to worry about upsetting any kind of balance), but the counter to this is that any mess made on the surface is permanent. The Apollo hardware is still there. There are metal-lined craters from the hard-landed Luna probes, still there. If you strip-mine the surface of the moon, the scars will remain for millions of years.
That said, I do think that hard-landing Lunar Prospector is a good, if rather drastic, idea.
If you want to try it out without copying 300kB of data onto each of five floppies, which the original GEM installer requires, you can try my highly unofficial installer package which you can find at my GEM page.
This currently has a silly little bug which prevents it from running of MSDOS machines, only DRDOS ones (it's that = vs == thing in the batch language), which I will fix ASAP.
You may also find the source interesting if you like hairy batch files.
GEM is scarily fast on my P90...
I still use it on my Pentium notebook. It's small, fast, sophisticated (it's multithreaded, object-oriented, has virtual memory, long filenames, is compact, you name it) and does exactly what I want it to. It comes with an excellent DTP package supporting outline fonts (rotatable and scalable), bitmap graphics (ditto), vector graphics (ditto), text frames (ditto), paragraph styling, tight wrapping of text around objects, and is blazingly fast... the entire program's 80kB. That's good programming. And this all runs in real mode, no 32-bit code in sight. I've never seen it use more than 4MB of memory, ever...
Go to New Deal's home page for screenshots and a shareware downloadable version (fully working, but you only get one app --- the awsome DTP package mentioned above).