I decided to try my best to understand what's being proposed here. So I RTFA, then I read the linked articles, then I read the articles supporting those, essentially in an attempt to get to the underlying "proof" or "theory" on which this "new" proposal is built.
If you read TFA, you know that he just gave the presentation last weekend. The paper either hasn't been published yet, or it's based on one of these.
I am fairly certain that he could make it worse.
As a thought experiment, think of of Episode 7 and 8 with the addition of Jar Jar Binks and even more little children.
We've tried doing it this way for how many times now and when did it ever work?
Depends on what you mean by "work". The point of the war on drugs was never to reduce drug use but to give the Nixon administration and excuse to spy and arrest people.
They didn't use 8 scopes for 8 months. They spent 8 months waiting for all of them to have clear weather. If we had a decent moon base, it would have scope that never had to wait for clear weather, and could be combined with the ones on Earth to create "the largest telescope in the solar system".
L4 & L5 would be better spots for them. Putting anything on the moon as opposed to space is just added complication and cost until there are manufacturing factories on the moon.
How come there is this shade, weren't black holes supposed to even bend light, in which case stars somewhere behind the black hole would be visible instead of that shadow..?
Genuine question...
aRTee
That is much of what you are seeing. The ring you see in their photo is the accretion disk, but it is actually the back top and bottom of the accretion disk behind the black hole that shows up due to gravitational lensing. The actual accretion disk that is facing us is probably too dim to actually be seen as the hot part is being blocked by the cool, outer edge. The bright area of the ring is the side spinning towards us and the dim away from us. The accretion disk probably goes through the center of the shadow and the dim part between the two brighter spots. Perpendicular to that, you can see faint areas outside the black hole that are probably the jets. The black area is the shadow, basically, the area where light from behind is dragged into the black hole. This is 2.6 times the size of the actual black hole's event horizon. This is a very fuzzy image made from different pictures with a resolution of a bit smaller the size of the shadow we are seeing. That's what I've learned in the last half hour of watching you tube videos explaining what they expect to see and how to interpret it anyhow.
Can't they just vent sections of the station to vacuum to (semi-) sterilize things?
Wouldn't work. Not only that that probably wouldn't sterilize anything, but last time they did this test, they even found bacteria on the outside of the ISS.
It doesn't address any demonstratable problem. Any sort of voter fraud is being watched for any number of other ways and isn't showing up beyond a few odd cases and are being caught. Charging money for such IDs violates various poll taxes prohibited in the constitution because they have been abused. It places another barrier to getting people to vote. The only people who seem to want it are those that want barriers to prevent people from voting because they might vote differently.
We're not talking about the depression, we're talking about the 60s. Because until the 60s, things were actually improving for the average family in the US. From then on it went downhill.
That is sort of a different discussion. That the American income has stopped increasing as much as it should have is a commonly agreed upon topic although most people seem to move it to the 70's or 80's as the point it stops doing so. I'd still argue that it has increased as has the standard of living, and that it you wanted to play 1960's re-enactor according to the household data of the time, you could on today's salary.
You are on an enterprise version of Windows, in which case it is the enterprise administrator that is given almost full control, not the user.
Oh, you are not an enterprise administrator controlling a vast network of PCs, but just a normal user? No, you haven't got control yet. And you may never have control.
Totally agree. Don't think I'm in favor of the situation, just explaining it as how Microsoft has explained it to me.
In 1960s, an income of one worker could feed a family of 4, buy a house and a car.
In 1990s, an income of two workers cannot.
Yes, but if you were to compare the standard of living between the two, you'd probably find that a one income household could feed a family of 4 and buy a house and a car today at the same standard of living as a family in the 1960's. It's just that we expect so much more. The percentages of income that went to housing and food would probably be switched at 25% and 45% with clothes being 10% of the total income. The one thing that is different today, is that you would have a hard time finding a house as small as they would be buying in the 60's, which wouldn't be new and from previous decades and those two kids would be in the only other bedroom together till they left. Small house, one car, few appliances, no cable or internet, and the father gets bacon and eggs for breakfast and everybody else gets oatmeal because that's all the family could afford. Go back before the 60's and things just get worse. Start talking about what was called "middle class" lived in the great depression and it looks worse that how dystopian nightmares are in literature these days.
How about they change and allow the user FULL control over what updates they do or do not want?
You can have that and it is very simple as it has been with past versions, Microsoft will tell you to "simply have your Active Directory admin make the desired changes in the group policy for desired behavior." Things have been heading this way for several versions and things that used to be settings have been moved increasingly more into the control the Active Directory.
Windows 10 is a buggy, bloated mess, but the simple truth is that Microsoft still has the desktop OS market by the balls.
Bloated perhaps, but I haven't really run into bugs yet. Mostly it's just that they changed how to do everything, and then further hid half those things so that it takes twice as many clicks to get to what you are trying to get to, all for no good reason.
What was Google +? It was like Fakebook, except NOT from FakeBook.
Pretty much, and at the time of it going live Facebook had offended lots of people over something and they were looking for someplace else to go. It's big feature was the ability to organize you contacts in to groups and manage them that way. It was a feature that FB did not have at the time and even worked well with people who did not have G+ accounts as it worked off any email. However, it did not integrate with their calendar, and pretty much everybody using FB was using it to schedule, organize, and track events and group activities. Without that feature, it was DOA and everybody reverted back to using FB.
Guns are nothing like cars when it comes to defining thema tool. Actually the biggest tools are those making this argument in the first place.
Not really. There have plenty of cases in the US and other countries where guns were regulated. However, while homicides committed with a firearm did drop, the actual homicide rate does not. So, continuing the car analogy, as this is/., it's as if some people were killed with cars, so the banned cars, but everybody just started riding motorcycles and still ended up killing just as many people. What you do see with banning of guns is an increase in crime. Guns are a tool. They are not particularly effective in any case that is statistically relevant, but are in cases that are newsworthy. Banning them just makes people feel good about themselves and continue to ignore the underlaying issues. Americans are just murderous folks, and nobody cares about actually changing that.
The shortage of doctors in the US may be, in part, to blame for their long hours and burnout.
Listening to the residents that I support talk, it's a bit more complicated than that. There is both a shortage of doctors and a shortage of positions in the US. If you they wanted to move to a small town or even city, there is no shortage of demands for Attending physicians. Trouble is that most would rather go to the big city and work for a larger hospital, which have full staff. Add in a spouse who has some sort of profession also, perhaps also a doctor, and it makes it harder to relocate to a smaller population center. Then comes in the nighthawk centers that deal with things remotely for those rural hospitals as well as smaller urban ones that are cutting positions. Then you have clinics, for which many exist because of games the insurance companies are playing with getting them to compete with hospitals to drive down what they pay even farther. My experience may be slightly atypical as we are a research hospital so all the doctors including the residents are there for research which is handled at mostly the larger hospitals if just for needed data. Still, this is a conversation I have overheard many times over the years without even trying.
Presumably, the actual creatures wouldn't have to be there. It's not where the ship is, but the laser base that is shooting and collecting the lasers.
Complex equipment. Or any complex matter, including anything that we would call biological or artificial life or equipment would be completely crushed due to the gravitational forces 'long time' before reaching the distance of 50 times the diameter of the black hole... Think: 'molecules destroyed' kind of 'crushed'.
Quite possibly. However as Frank Lloyd Wright said when asked how his mile high building would actually support its own weight, "That's a problem for the engineers." This physicist has show that it is possible to leach this much energy off of a black hole in this manner, it's up to the engineers to make it actually work.
The novel part of this is that black holes could be used as large batteries of stored energy that could be drawn out in a short amount of time with an increase of whatever amount of energy you put into the process. The idea of using solar sails to travel has already been tested and could be used around our own sun in theory, however, the amount of energy we'd be able to extract is set by the energy output of the sun. A laser station collects energy from the sun or from black holes and then shoots a laser at the solar sails of the space ship which can maneuver and steer through various methods of bouncing those lasers between itself and detached solar sails. For all your other issues, as many architects have said about their proposed building plans: "that's an issue for the engineers." I think the bigger issue would be finding binary pair of black holes without accretion disks that would obstruct any laser sent to gather energy from the black hole.
Small thinking mistake in this hypothesis,... Which life forms - or complex matter of any kind - is able to survive the gravitational pull at a distance of only 50 times the radius of a black hole?
Presumably, the actual creatures wouldn't have to be there. It's not where the ship is, but the laser base that is shooting and collecting the lasers. I assume there is some diffraction effect on the laser around the black hole due to tidal forces that it needs to be that close to work as planned.
How about we just start by building rockets and exploring the solar system a little bit before we start thinking about using black holes to get around space?
The same method could be used by collecting solar energy from our sun and turning that into a laser to transmit momentum to a space craft. Some testing has already been done and probably already possible to some extent in theory. The black hole method here is novel because it offers a percentage profit of energy more than what you put into it in a short amount of time. Assuming, of course, you've solved the engineering issues of creating the necessary laser transmitters and collectors that can function at the power levels needed to make it profitable.
1. How long does it take light to circle the black hole of choice?
2. How are they planning to brake?
3. Do they plan to visit only blackholes, or is there a way to visit star systems inbetween too? Because once you stop (by some means) to look around, you're no longer near any black holes, so you're stuck.
1) Taking an arbitrary diameter of a large black hole multiply by 50, compare to the speed of light, and you get an answer of less than half a second.
2) The location near the black hole would presumably just be the point for the laser station. It would not only shoot a laser around the black hole to gain energy, but also shoot a laser at the ships solar sails to give it momentum. That laser would have a range much greater than 50 times the diameter of a black hole. Then you can do all sorts of tricks by bouncing the light between mirrors. The typical way to break would be for the ship to detach part of its solar sail and send it ahead faster in a similar fashion of bouncing transmitted light between them, which would slow down the ship.
3) Again, presumably, the location next to the black hole is just for the power plant so to speak. The momentum transmitting lasers that interact with the space craft would presumably have an interstellar range.
Note, the same thing could be done with normal solar energy collection base station around any star shooting lasers at a ship's solar sails. Presumably, the black hole just offers much more energy in a shorter amount of time.
Probably a much more viable objection to this plan would be that the black holes are probably surrounded by some sort of accretion disk that would probably obstruct the path of the laser, but also make being that close to a black hole somewhat...interesting. So, what we're really looking for is a binary pair of naked black holes.
The only way to maintain stick and rudder skills is to fly stick and rudder, and really, that's stupidly easy to do in the US and Canada - you literally get to the airport and fly - no permits, no flight plans (within limits), and other than fuel, no taxes to just punch holes in the sky.
Well, you're forgetting the price of the plane. Even rent is pretty expensive. It's one of the reasons they are looking at a dearth of pilots to replace those retiring soon. Too few pilots with enough hours to take over. Even military pilots are becoming fewer in number. If you can own or rent a plane to get enough hours, then you're already making more money than you would as a pilot. The US has tons of pilots but very few with the hours needed to get jobs. Sport skydivers often have people flying for free as the dropzone owns the plane and the skydivers pay for the fuel, and there are enough pilots (or wanna be pilots) out there that want more hours to do it for free on the weekends.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like this one.
I decided to try my best to understand what's being proposed here. So I RTFA, then I read the linked articles, then I read the articles supporting those, essentially in an attempt to get to the underlying "proof" or "theory" on which this "new" proposal is built.
If you read TFA, you know that he just gave the presentation last weekend. The paper either hasn't been published yet, or it's based on one of these.
I am fairly certain that he could make it worse. As a thought experiment, think of of Episode 7 and 8 with the addition of Jar Jar Binks and even more little children.
They're called Ewoks.
We've tried doing it this way for how many times now and when did it ever work?
Depends on what you mean by "work". The point of the war on drugs was never to reduce drug use but to give the Nixon administration and excuse to spy and arrest people.
They didn't use 8 scopes for 8 months. They spent 8 months waiting for all of them to have clear weather. If we had a decent moon base, it would have scope that never had to wait for clear weather, and could be combined with the ones on Earth to create "the largest telescope in the solar system".
L4 & L5 would be better spots for them. Putting anything on the moon as opposed to space is just added complication and cost until there are manufacturing factories on the moon.
After looking at the picture it took everything I had not to make a goatse joke. :)
The Register could not resist in their reporting and made that joke for you.
How come there is this shade, weren't black holes supposed to even bend light, in which case stars somewhere behind the black hole would be visible instead of that shadow..?
Genuine question... aRTee
That is much of what you are seeing. The ring you see in their photo is the accretion disk, but it is actually the back top and bottom of the accretion disk behind the black hole that shows up due to gravitational lensing. The actual accretion disk that is facing us is probably too dim to actually be seen as the hot part is being blocked by the cool, outer edge. The bright area of the ring is the side spinning towards us and the dim away from us. The accretion disk probably goes through the center of the shadow and the dim part between the two brighter spots. Perpendicular to that, you can see faint areas outside the black hole that are probably the jets. The black area is the shadow, basically, the area where light from behind is dragged into the black hole. This is 2.6 times the size of the actual black hole's event horizon. This is a very fuzzy image made from different pictures with a resolution of a bit smaller the size of the shadow we are seeing. That's what I've learned in the last half hour of watching you tube videos explaining what they expect to see and how to interpret it anyhow.
Can't they just vent sections of the station to vacuum to (semi-) sterilize things?
Wouldn't work. Not only that that probably wouldn't sterilize anything, but last time they did this test, they even found bacteria on the outside of the ISS.
I really dont understand opposition to voter id.
It doesn't address any demonstratable problem. Any sort of voter fraud is being watched for any number of other ways and isn't showing up beyond a few odd cases and are being caught. Charging money for such IDs violates various poll taxes prohibited in the constitution because they have been abused. It places another barrier to getting people to vote. The only people who seem to want it are those that want barriers to prevent people from voting because they might vote differently.
We're not talking about the depression, we're talking about the 60s. Because until the 60s, things were actually improving for the average family in the US. From then on it went downhill.
That is sort of a different discussion. That the American income has stopped increasing as much as it should have is a commonly agreed upon topic although most people seem to move it to the 70's or 80's as the point it stops doing so. I'd still argue that it has increased as has the standard of living, and that it you wanted to play 1960's re-enactor according to the household data of the time, you could on today's salary.
You are on an enterprise version of Windows, in which case it is the enterprise administrator that is given almost full control, not the user.
Oh, you are not an enterprise administrator controlling a vast network of PCs, but just a normal user? No, you haven't got control yet. And you may never have control.
Totally agree. Don't think I'm in favor of the situation, just explaining it as how Microsoft has explained it to me.
In 1960s, an income of one worker could feed a family of 4, buy a house and a car. In 1990s, an income of two workers cannot.
Yes, but if you were to compare the standard of living between the two, you'd probably find that a one income household could feed a family of 4 and buy a house and a car today at the same standard of living as a family in the 1960's. It's just that we expect so much more. The percentages of income that went to housing and food would probably be switched at 25% and 45% with clothes being 10% of the total income. The one thing that is different today, is that you would have a hard time finding a house as small as they would be buying in the 60's, which wouldn't be new and from previous decades and those two kids would be in the only other bedroom together till they left. Small house, one car, few appliances, no cable or internet, and the father gets bacon and eggs for breakfast and everybody else gets oatmeal because that's all the family could afford. Go back before the 60's and things just get worse. Start talking about what was called "middle class" lived in the great depression and it looks worse that how dystopian nightmares are in literature these days.
How about they change and allow the user FULL control over what updates they do or do not want?
You can have that and it is very simple as it has been with past versions, Microsoft will tell you to "simply have your Active Directory admin make the desired changes in the group policy for desired behavior." Things have been heading this way for several versions and things that used to be settings have been moved increasingly more into the control the Active Directory.
The only thing the US credit score affects is your ability to borrow money in all it's many forms.
Credit scores are checked for things like rental applications, security clearances, and job applications.>/p>
Windows 10 is a buggy, bloated mess, but the simple truth is that Microsoft still has the desktop OS market by the balls.
Bloated perhaps, but I haven't really run into bugs yet. Mostly it's just that they changed how to do everything, and then further hid half those things so that it takes twice as many clicks to get to what you are trying to get to, all for no good reason.
What was Google +? It was like Fakebook, except NOT from FakeBook.
Pretty much, and at the time of it going live Facebook had offended lots of people over something and they were looking for someplace else to go. It's big feature was the ability to organize you contacts in to groups and manage them that way. It was a feature that FB did not have at the time and even worked well with people who did not have G+ accounts as it worked off any email. However, it did not integrate with their calendar, and pretty much everybody using FB was using it to schedule, organize, and track events and group activities. Without that feature, it was DOA and everybody reverted back to using FB.
Guns are nothing like cars when it comes to defining thema tool. Actually the biggest tools are those making this argument in the first place.
Not really. There have plenty of cases in the US and other countries where guns were regulated. However, while homicides committed with a firearm did drop, the actual homicide rate does not. So, continuing the car analogy, as this is /., it's as if some people were killed with cars, so the banned cars, but everybody just started riding motorcycles and still ended up killing just as many people. What you do see with banning of guns is an increase in crime. Guns are a tool. They are not particularly effective in any case that is statistically relevant, but are in cases that are newsworthy. Banning them just makes people feel good about themselves and continue to ignore the underlaying issues. Americans are just murderous folks, and nobody cares about actually changing that.
The shortage of doctors in the US may be, in part, to blame for their long hours and burnout.
Listening to the residents that I support talk, it's a bit more complicated than that. There is both a shortage of doctors and a shortage of positions in the US. If you they wanted to move to a small town or even city, there is no shortage of demands for Attending physicians. Trouble is that most would rather go to the big city and work for a larger hospital, which have full staff. Add in a spouse who has some sort of profession also, perhaps also a doctor, and it makes it harder to relocate to a smaller population center. Then comes in the nighthawk centers that deal with things remotely for those rural hospitals as well as smaller urban ones that are cutting positions. Then you have clinics, for which many exist because of games the insurance companies are playing with getting them to compete with hospitals to drive down what they pay even farther. My experience may be slightly atypical as we are a research hospital so all the doctors including the residents are there for research which is handled at mostly the larger hospitals if just for needed data. Still, this is a conversation I have overheard many times over the years without even trying.
apparently one of the few groups of foreigners ever to do so.
Still trying to get rid of those damn Normans!
Presumably, the actual creatures wouldn't have to be there. It's not where the ship is, but the laser base that is shooting and collecting the lasers.
Complex equipment. Or any complex matter, including anything that we would call biological or artificial life or equipment would be completely crushed due to the gravitational forces 'long time' before reaching the distance of 50 times the diameter of the black hole... Think: 'molecules destroyed' kind of 'crushed'.
Quite possibly. However as Frank Lloyd Wright said when asked how his mile high building would actually support its own weight, "That's a problem for the engineers." This physicist has show that it is possible to leach this much energy off of a black hole in this manner, it's up to the engineers to make it actually work.
The novel part of this is that black holes could be used as large batteries of stored energy that could be drawn out in a short amount of time with an increase of whatever amount of energy you put into the process. The idea of using solar sails to travel has already been tested and could be used around our own sun in theory, however, the amount of energy we'd be able to extract is set by the energy output of the sun. A laser station collects energy from the sun or from black holes and then shoots a laser at the solar sails of the space ship which can maneuver and steer through various methods of bouncing those lasers between itself and detached solar sails. For all your other issues, as many architects have said about their proposed building plans: "that's an issue for the engineers." I think the bigger issue would be finding binary pair of black holes without accretion disks that would obstruct any laser sent to gather energy from the black hole.
Small thinking mistake in this hypothesis,... Which life forms - or complex matter of any kind - is able to survive the gravitational pull at a distance of only 50 times the radius of a black hole?
Presumably, the actual creatures wouldn't have to be there. It's not where the ship is, but the laser base that is shooting and collecting the lasers. I assume there is some diffraction effect on the laser around the black hole due to tidal forces that it needs to be that close to work as planned.
How about we just start by building rockets and exploring the solar system a little bit before we start thinking about using black holes to get around space?
The same method could be used by collecting solar energy from our sun and turning that into a laser to transmit momentum to a space craft. Some testing has already been done and probably already possible to some extent in theory. The black hole method here is novel because it offers a percentage profit of energy more than what you put into it in a short amount of time. Assuming, of course, you've solved the engineering issues of creating the necessary laser transmitters and collectors that can function at the power levels needed to make it profitable.
1. How long does it take light to circle the black hole of choice? 2. How are they planning to brake? 3. Do they plan to visit only blackholes, or is there a way to visit star systems inbetween too? Because once you stop (by some means) to look around, you're no longer near any black holes, so you're stuck.
1) Taking an arbitrary diameter of a large black hole multiply by 50, compare to the speed of light, and you get an answer of less than half a second.
...interesting. So, what we're really looking for is a binary pair of naked black holes.
2) The location near the black hole would presumably just be the point for the laser station. It would not only shoot a laser around the black hole to gain energy, but also shoot a laser at the ships solar sails to give it momentum. That laser would have a range much greater than 50 times the diameter of a black hole. Then you can do all sorts of tricks by bouncing the light between mirrors. The typical way to break would be for the ship to detach part of its solar sail and send it ahead faster in a similar fashion of bouncing transmitted light between them, which would slow down the ship.
3) Again, presumably, the location next to the black hole is just for the power plant so to speak. The momentum transmitting lasers that interact with the space craft would presumably have an interstellar range.
Note, the same thing could be done with normal solar energy collection base station around any star shooting lasers at a ship's solar sails. Presumably, the black hole just offers much more energy in a shorter amount of time.
Probably a much more viable objection to this plan would be that the black holes are probably surrounded by some sort of accretion disk that would probably obstruct the path of the laser, but also make being that close to a black hole somewhat
The only way to maintain stick and rudder skills is to fly stick and rudder, and really, that's stupidly easy to do in the US and Canada - you literally get to the airport and fly - no permits, no flight plans (within limits), and other than fuel, no taxes to just punch holes in the sky.
Well, you're forgetting the price of the plane. Even rent is pretty expensive. It's one of the reasons they are looking at a dearth of pilots to replace those retiring soon. Too few pilots with enough hours to take over. Even military pilots are becoming fewer in number. If you can own or rent a plane to get enough hours, then you're already making more money than you would as a pilot. The US has tons of pilots but very few with the hours needed to get jobs. Sport skydivers often have people flying for free as the dropzone owns the plane and the skydivers pay for the fuel, and there are enough pilots (or wanna be pilots) out there that want more hours to do it for free on the weekends.