The spinner is spinning as it orbits. The incoming cargo picks a point on the spinner that, at the time of arrival, has the same velocity at the object.
Thus, only the acceleration changes - and it is possible to "loosely" grab the cable and slid for a short distance, spreading the change of acceleration over a period of time and reducing the "jerk" (d^3S/dt^3, or da/dt) felt by the cargo.
But since it *is* cargo, not people, the jerk is not a problem.
Assuming the incoming cargo is moving faster than the spinner, the spinner gains energy and momentum - it starts spinning faster and it goes into a slightly higher orbit.
Make the mass of the spinner large with respect to the incoming cargo, and you can store a great deal of energy in the spinner.
To transfer to a different orbit, you adjust your position on the spinner (moving closer to or further away from the center of rotation) and wait for the appropriate time, then release. You may need to perform a circularizing burn to stablize your orbit, but the energy needed for that is less than the energy needed to do the whole change.
Of course, you can have multiple spinners in different orbits, and bounce from one to the other - think of Spidey going from building to building.
And in keeping with the "terribly useless overly specific domains that nobody needs", the next domains ICANN'T will be announcing are:
.bob
for people named Bob
.troll
For 99% of the/. readership's homepage
.linkfarm
For Googlewhacking
.lefty
For left-handed people's web pages
.cheese
For cheese-related sites
The idea of using the spinner is for cargo only - low energy transfers from lunar surface to LEO.
By using a spinner, you can save the energy from an incoming cargo as rotational kinetic energy in the spinner, rather than pissing it off as heat in an aerobraking maneuver.
You can then use the rotational energy to launch other items back out of Earth's gravity well.
The biggest arguement against using the moon as a base of operations is the delta-V required to get to the lunar surface from earth. But delta-V is only expensive when you have to expend non-reusable reaction mass (and the energy to drive it). When you use skyhooks of various forms (spinnners, beanstocks, etc.) your reaction mass is reusable (the reaction mass is the skyhook), and you can frequently reuse the energy from an incoming cargo - greatly reducing the costs.
True, a manned craft is still expensive as you don't want to follow the slower, lower energy paths - but if you can reduce the mass of the manned craft by shipping nonliving support mass (food and fuel) via slow orbits you can reduce the cost of the manned ship to a managable level.
Glossed over in the/. summary is the fact that the output of this process is not JUST LO2, but also titanium (and presumably aluminum) metal, as well.
So not only do you get air to breath, you get materials with which to build your base.
Set up a base running this process, add a Lunar beanstalk to L1, and you have a cheap source of material for building items in Earth orbit.
I wonder if adding a spinner (i.e. a cable in orbit, the ends of which do not terminate on any celestial body but instead are allowed to rotate freely) could be used to reduce the delta-V even furthur - use the lunar beanstalk to launch to earth orbit, rendezvousing with the spinner to get the delta-V to enter LEO, and storing the energy in the spinner to launch items later.
At over 300M, the XLive CD image is a bit chunky for what I'd want - an X server that I can have on my 256M USB memorystick.
I'd love to have a good X server, an SSH client that DOESN'T save things to the registry (unlike PuTTY), and perhaps FireFox so that when I visit relatives who run Windows I can SSH back home.
Has anybody else tried stripping this image down a bit? Between trying to get a software release cut at work and getting ready for a trip I'm a mite busy now.
inst (and its X frontend swmgr) are among the best software installation managers I've ever used.
Then your experience is vastly different than mine.
I have downloaded the updates from SGI. However, when I attempt to install them, inst wants to remove just about everything it can from my system - like the main software operating environment!
Yes, I have opened all the original disks as well as the updates - still swmgr wants to remove all sorts of things. Dependancy hell times 1E6!
I have an Indy that I picked up free, and the real problem is support.
I'd like to get a more up-to-date version of Irix on it, but going from the 6.5.0 disks that I have to the most current releases is a pain. A big pain. A pain that makes the most b0rk3d RPM install look like a hot bath with a supermodel.
I don't want a full support contract from SGI - for a 150MHz machine that would be a total waste of time and money.
What I'd *love* would be a way to get a set of current disks for, say US$30, with the disclaimer "You are on your own. Don't call us, we won't call you."
I've been looking at putting Linux on it, just to have a bit more "support" on the machine. Now that the video subsystem is a bit better supported I may just do that.
THis could be a very good thing, as the GPS system needs an upgrade anyway.
Currently, the US is looking at possibly beginning deployment of a GPS V2.0 system, which would use the advances in technology that have occured since the system was first designed to improve the accuracy of the system - higher chip rates, better decoders, more accurate clocks on the birds themselves, and so on. The goal is to have a system that would provide centimeter accuracy to civilian receivers, and even better to military grade gear (it's not overkill, rather it is extra margin against degradation - having your accuracy degrade by an order of magnitude is not such a big deal when your accuracy is three orders of magnitude greater than you need.)
Should the Europeans deploy a system of modern design - preferably a system that is designed to be right at the hoary edge of what is feasible today - they could reap the benefits of modern technology.
They are working on per-site permissions for Javascript in the Multizilla extensions.
What I find comical about the responses to my post is how completely most of the nay-sayers missed the central thrust of the post, which was not "ALL JAVASCRIPT BAD", but "NEEDLESS Javascript bad" (it was even in the title of the post for cat's sake!) - as in, Javascript is a good tool and should be used WHERE APPROPRIATE, and not elsewhere, just as this post uses bold, italic, and all-caps where appropriate, but the whole stinking post isn't bold-italic-allcaps.
This all boils down to a Javascript vulnerability.
If web masters would stop NEEDLESSLY using Javascript to do things like open new windows, and would use it ONLY when there is no way using HTML to accomplish the same goal, then people would not need to have Javascript active all the time, and the impact of exploits like this would be greatly reduced.
If, instead of using <a href="#" onclick="foo"> or <a href="javascript(foo)"> type constructs, web designers would use <a target="_blank" href="something.html" onclick="javascript(stuff)"> type constructs, then if the user HAS Javascript active, then the web master can micromanage the newly created window. If not, then the user STILL gets a new window, just not one that the web master can remove all the chrome from.
Seriously - when was the last time you heard of an exploit that used straight HTML? All of the recent exploits in ALL browsers, IE included, have been in either Javascript or Active-X, not in the core HTML rendering.
Just press Ctrl-L and type the location. Quite easy, isn't it?
No, because that requires me to know the WHOLE PATH AND FILENAME.
I cannot say "Look, I know it is in/foo/var/baz, but I do not know the name. Give me a damn file selector, then let ME type in/foo/var/baz, and then SHOW ME WHAT IS IN THAT DIRECTORY."
Again, your post is a great example of what is WRONG with the current GNOME developer's mindset - "Gosh I am so smart that I know how you want to use your computer, and I don't even NEED to ask you your opinion, because we all know it's wrong anyway."
And where, in the dialog, does it tell me about that?
For all the Gnome guys seem to love these human interface guidelines, they seem to forget the single biggest item when making a GUI:
Any item the user is to be able to manipulate should be represented on the UI
Every time they fail to follow that, and every time they get called on it, they come up with some "Well, just press CTRL-ALT-META-LSHIFT-Q to enable that".
So a user is to pour over the documentation, reading every bit of it to find all these key combinations that are NOT indicated on the UI itself.
And this, somehow, is going to make it easier for the non-31337 user to use...
Hear Hear - I hate not being able to type the damn path where I know the file is.
This especially bites when using automounted directories, as the directory I want to go to WON'T EXIST until I try to go to it - thus there IS no entry to click on in the new Gnome File Selector.
I'd submitted this gem to/., but they obviously felt it wasn't news.
A lady in El Paso gets a telemarketing call. She says no, repeatedly. Telemarketer ignores her, repeatedly. She hangs up, forcefully.
She later gets a letter saying:
Jill Beyer,
Before you are rude to another telemarketer, you should keep in mind that he or she has your phone number and your address.
Many of them live in your own state and most don't give a (expletive)!
So, Ms. Beyer, the next time a telemarketer calls and you don't want to be bothered, a simple "not interested" will do.
Your son or daughter or next-door neighbor's daughter could very well be a telemarketer. A handicapped, wheelchair-bound person could be a telemarketer. A biker or ex-con is more likely to be a telemarketer. You really, really shouldn't (expletive) with them!
As they say in the telemarketing industry, "Have a good day Ms. Beyer!"
So, we have:
Television stations prohibiting us from recording shows (via the broadcast bit)
TV execs saying "skipping commercials is theft"
Telemarketers threatening those who will not listen to their pitches.
Adware companies fighting over who can infest your computer.
Drive-by installs of adware
OK, I move that we commit all advertisers to institutions for the criminally insane, right now.
I am confused - given that all the files are accessible via the file system, could you not find the Easter eggs by simply manually playing the files one by one?
What would be so hard about simply having a *gasp* text file saying "CD Such-and-such, play file FOO111.VOB time offset 12:34.56 for this egg".
Then you could have programs to parse that file and do the dirty work if you cannot do it yourself.
Given the number of receiving and transmitting antennas, it would sound like they are using a variant of BLAST - this is a technique that uses multipath to enhance the signal - think of it as doing spatial-domain multiplexing. By using multiple antennas, and using the multipath time difference on the signal, they are able to discriminate signals in the same band of frequecies based upon the physical location of the antennas.
However, the odds that this will fit "in your pocket" as the story poster said are pretty slim - the physical seperation of the antennas would tend to preclude that.
Too many people regard email, blog posts, and other forms of electronic communications are being exempt from the normal rules of writing.
It is one thing to use IM-speak when you are using a phone or other limited-input capability device, but when you have a full keyboard, use full words and complete sentences, please!
I often wonder about the future - much of what we know of the past is from the letters people exchanged and saved (back when getting a letter across the country or across the ocean took weeks such letters were treasured). Now, we dash off an email, it gets read, and it gets deleted. Gmail aside, I wonder how this will affect the future's view of this era.
Slashdot Mirror
The spinner is spinning as it orbits. The incoming cargo picks a point on the spinner that, at the time of arrival, has the same velocity at the object.
Thus, only the acceleration changes - and it is possible to "loosely" grab the cable and slid for a short distance, spreading the change of acceleration over a period of time and reducing the "jerk" (d^3S/dt^3, or da/dt) felt by the cargo.
But since it *is* cargo, not people, the jerk is not a problem.
Assuming the incoming cargo is moving faster than the spinner, the spinner gains energy and momentum - it starts spinning faster and it goes into a slightly higher orbit.
Make the mass of the spinner large with respect to the incoming cargo, and you can store a great deal of energy in the spinner.
To transfer to a different orbit, you adjust your position on the spinner (moving closer to or further away from the center of rotation) and wait for the appropriate time, then release. You may need to perform a circularizing burn to stablize your orbit, but the energy needed for that is less than the energy needed to do the whole change.
Of course, you can have multiple spinners in different orbits, and bounce from one to the other - think of Spidey going from building to building.
And in keeping with the "terribly useless overly specific domains that nobody needs", the next domains ICANN'T will be announcing are: /. readership's homepage
.linkfarm
For Googlewhacking
.lefty
For left-handed people's web pages
.cheese
For cheese-related sites
.bob for people named Bob .troll For 99% of the
The idea of using the spinner is for cargo only - low energy transfers from lunar surface to LEO.
By using a spinner, you can save the energy from an incoming cargo as rotational kinetic energy in the spinner, rather than pissing it off as heat in an aerobraking maneuver.
You can then use the rotational energy to launch other items back out of Earth's gravity well.
The biggest arguement against using the moon as a base of operations is the delta-V required to get to the lunar surface from earth. But delta-V is only expensive when you have to expend non-reusable reaction mass (and the energy to drive it). When you use skyhooks of various forms (spinnners, beanstocks, etc.) your reaction mass is reusable (the reaction mass is the skyhook), and you can frequently reuse the energy from an incoming cargo - greatly reducing the costs.
True, a manned craft is still expensive as you don't want to follow the slower, lower energy paths - but if you can reduce the mass of the manned craft by shipping nonliving support mass (food and fuel) via slow orbits you can reduce the cost of the manned ship to a managable level.
Glossed over in the /. summary is the fact that the output of this process is not JUST LO2, but also titanium (and presumably aluminum) metal, as well.
So not only do you get air to breath, you get materials with which to build your base.
Set up a base running this process, add a Lunar beanstalk to L1, and you have a cheap source of material for building items in Earth orbit.
I wonder if adding a spinner (i.e. a cable in orbit, the ends of which do not terminate on any celestial body but instead are allowed to rotate freely) could be used to reduce the delta-V even furthur - use the lunar beanstalk to launch to earth orbit, rendezvousing with the spinner to get the delta-V to enter LEO, and storing the energy in the spinner to launch items later.
At over 300M, the XLive CD image is a bit chunky for what I'd want - an X server that I can have on my 256M USB memorystick.
I'd love to have a good X server, an SSH client that DOESN'T save things to the registry (unlike PuTTY), and perhaps FireFox so that when I visit relatives who run Windows I can SSH back home.
Has anybody else tried stripping this image down a bit? Between trying to get a software release cut at work and getting ready for a trip I'm a mite busy now.
Then your experience is vastly different than mine.
I have downloaded the updates from SGI. However, when I attempt to install them, inst wants to remove just about everything it can from my system - like the main software operating environment!
Yes, I have opened all the original disks as well as the updates - still swmgr wants to remove all sorts of things. Dependancy hell times 1E6!
I would KILL for Synaptic+APT on the system.
I have an Indy that I picked up free, and the real problem is support.
I'd like to get a more up-to-date version of Irix on it, but going from the 6.5.0 disks that I have to the most current releases is a pain. A big pain. A pain that makes the most b0rk3d RPM install look like a hot bath with a supermodel.
I don't want a full support contract from SGI - for a 150MHz machine that would be a total waste of time and money.
What I'd *love* would be a way to get a set of current disks for, say US$30, with the disclaimer "You are on your own. Don't call us, we won't call you."
I've been looking at putting Linux on it, just to have a bit more "support" on the machine. Now that the video subsystem is a bit better supported I may just do that.
THis could be a very good thing, as the GPS system needs an upgrade anyway.
Currently, the US is looking at possibly beginning deployment of a GPS V2.0 system, which would use the advances in technology that have occured since the system was first designed to improve the accuracy of the system - higher chip rates, better decoders, more accurate clocks on the birds themselves, and so on. The goal is to have a system that would provide centimeter accuracy to civilian receivers, and even better to military grade gear (it's not overkill, rather it is extra margin against degradation - having your accuracy degrade by an order of magnitude is not such a big deal when your accuracy is three orders of magnitude greater than you need.)
Should the Europeans deploy a system of modern design - preferably a system that is designed to be right at the hoary edge of what is feasible today - they could reap the benefits of modern technology.
And maybe they could do a sequal to Highlander.
Wouldn't Gene have made an excellent Doctor?
I've long felt that Willy Wonka was a renegade Timelord.
Look at the facts:
Goes to places nobody else has been, or even heard of.
Has access to technologies beyond everybody else's.
And you cannot tell me the WonkaVator wasn't just a modified Type 40 TT capsule.
We need to go to the "toe test".
Thus, you can patent "A device for playing back recorded movies...." since you can drop that on your toe.
You cannot patent "A method for playing back recorded movies..." as you cannot drop "a method" on your toe.
They are working on per-site permissions for Javascript in the Multizilla extensions.
What I find comical about the responses to my post is how completely most of the nay-sayers missed the central thrust of the post, which was not "ALL JAVASCRIPT BAD", but " NEEDLESS Javascript bad" (it was even in the title of the post for cat's sake!) - as in, Javascript is a good tool and should be used WHERE APPROPRIATE, and not elsewhere, just as this post uses bold, italic, and all-caps where appropriate, but the whole stinking post isn't bold-italic-allcaps.
This all boils down to a Javascript vulnerability.
If web masters would stop NEEDLESSLY using Javascript to do things like open new windows, and would use it ONLY when there is no way using HTML to accomplish the same goal, then people would not need to have Javascript active all the time, and the impact of exploits like this would be greatly reduced.
If, instead of using <a href="#" onclick="foo"> or <a href="javascript(foo)"> type constructs, web designers would use <a target="_blank" href="something.html" onclick="javascript(stuff)"> type constructs, then if the user HAS Javascript active, then the web master can micromanage the newly created window. If not, then the user STILL gets a new window, just not one that the web master can remove all the chrome from.
Seriously - when was the last time you heard of an exploit that used straight HTML? All of the recent exploits in ALL browsers, IE included, have been in either Javascript or Active-X, not in the core HTML rendering.
There is a REASON for that.
No, because that requires me to know the WHOLE PATH AND FILENAME.
I cannot say "Look, I know it is in
Again, your post is a great example of what is WRONG with the current GNOME developer's mindset - "Gosh I am so smart that I know how you want to use your computer, and I don't even NEED to ask you your opinion, because we all know it's wrong anyway."
And where, in the dialog, does it tell me about that?
For all the Gnome guys seem to love these human interface guidelines, they seem to forget the single biggest item when making a GUI:
Any item the user is to be able to manipulate should be represented on the UI
Every time they fail to follow that, and every time they get called on it, they come up with some "Well, just press CTRL-ALT-META-LSHIFT-Q to enable that".
So a user is to pour over the documentation, reading every bit of it to find all these key combinations that are NOT indicated on the UI itself.
And this, somehow, is going to make it easier for the non-31337 user to use...
Other than the fact that a scammer not associated with the telemarketer would not have known she was rude to a telemarketer.
And for the fact that unlike a scam, there is no clear way this letter profits the sender unless he is a telemarketer.
Hear Hear - I hate not being able to type the damn path where I know the file is.
This especially bites when using automounted directories, as the directory I want to go to WON'T EXIST until I try to go to it - thus there IS no entry to click on in the new Gnome File Selector.
A lady in El Paso gets a telemarketing call. She says no, repeatedly. Telemarketer ignores her, repeatedly. She hangs up, forcefully.
She later gets a letter saying:
So, we have:
OK, I move that we commit all advertisers to institutions for the criminally insane, right now.
Any seconds?
I am confused - given that all the files are accessible via the file system, could you not find the Easter eggs by simply manually playing the files one by one?
What would be so hard about simply having a *gasp* text file saying "CD Such-and-such, play file FOO111.VOB time offset 12:34.56 for this egg".
Then you could have programs to parse that file and do the dirty work if you cannot do it yourself.
Given the number of receiving and transmitting antennas, it would sound like they are using a variant of BLAST - this is a technique that uses multipath to enhance the signal - think of it as doing spatial-domain multiplexing. By using multiple antennas, and using the multipath time difference on the signal, they are able to discriminate signals in the same band of frequecies based upon the physical location of the antennas.
However, the odds that this will fit "in your pocket" as the story poster said are pretty slim - the physical seperation of the antennas would tend to preclude that.
Too many people regard email, blog posts, and other forms of electronic communications are being exempt from the normal rules of writing.
It is one thing to use IM-speak when you are using a phone or other limited-input capability device, but when you have a full keyboard, use full words and complete sentences, please!
I often wonder about the future - much of what we know of the past is from the letters people exchanged and saved (back when getting a letter across the country or across the ocean took weeks such letters were treasured). Now, we dash off an email, it gets read, and it gets deleted. Gmail aside, I wonder how this will affect the future's view of this era.
No Nuke War?
No Illuminati?
No Hackers?
I pronounce you all BLASPHEMERS and revoke your geek status, ALL OF YOU!
And after all, who can forget doing combinations?
"OK, I'll see your Bavarian Gnomes, and I'll sic Skippy on your servers at No Such Agency!"
OK, I get:
WWYD - What Would You Do?
STFU - Shut the fuck up
DWYT - Do what you're told
But what is STFD?
Really, instead of the squared-off pig logo, this is one of the few times the old SPAM can logo would have been correct.
And I too congratulate Hormel for their attitude on this - they really have taken the appropriation of their trademark pretty damn well.
Most companies would have hired kneecappers to hunt down the Python troop for what they've done.