While an extreme example you could use this as a test case in designing highly fuel efferent passenger planes. Just looks at it the same way some car company's look at formula one. It's a good to look at the bleeding edge then see how many of those new ideas we can passed onto your mass produced products.
I understand IANAL either so we are both working on beliefs. However, using GPL code which say adds say print to PDF functionality to a reasonably complex system has always seemed safe, but rereading that I wonder if it true.
If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.
It's hard to say what's separate works in this context. But, I asume it's close to the distinction between libraries and non-libraries.
PS: I am starting to see why people could fear using GPL code.
Your thinking of:
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License., calling unmodified GPL software
But if you use it as a liburay then it's easy to see that section: These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Makes it clear that as long as the scope of your project is outside of the scope of the GPL project your code is safe. AKA using a sort function from GPL code is fine but using OpenOffice to write a new wordprocesser is probably not ok.
IANAL but my understanding is that if you setup your code to use GPL software liburarys then you have not infected your software with the GPL code it's only when you edit the GPL software that it becomes infected.
So let's say you have a great AI software that needs to do some path finding. At some point you need to sort your data if you go.
AI Code...
AI Code...
GPL_SORT(XYZ);
AI Code...
Then all your AI code is fine. But if edit the GPL_SORT code then that's now GPL code. On the other hand if you released the GPL_SORT code then you can release GPL and non GPL vertions and as long as you don't take any code that somone wrote for your GPL vertion of GPL_SORT then you can keep both vertions mantained at the same time.
The basic trick is keep people from looking at the code that someone outside of your company wrote as long as your just calling a DLL or some such then your fine. (You can even include the files directly into your project just so long as you don't coppy that code to other points in your project after somone out side your company made chages to it.)
I don't think you understand the term "useful energy" as he meant it. Availability is of little use if it's not where you can put it to work. All the energy in crude oil is useless to move cars around unless you refine it. In much the same way that power plant's are useless to you if a tree fell onto the power line outside of your house.
Thus even though the net energy is the same before and after any given process Availability talks about how much of that energy could be used to do work and "useful energy" is talking about how much energy humans can use out of the system.
It's an educated guess. From what there saying the material absorbs most ambient light and only let's light pass though from the position of the projector.
Now when the projector is off it's going to put off a lot less light than the rest off the room which means the film is going to absorb most light that comes into contact with it which means it's going to be much darker than the rest of the room. Also if this effect was not enough to make it look black they're going to paint to projector black because it's going to be much more aesthetically pleasing to look at a black screen than the projector when it's off.
Anyway it's going to look like a mirror, that's pointing at the projector and has a dark film over it, when it's off. I just asume there goign to paint the projector black when it's off as that would look better than looking at the projector.
It's still doing fine as far as I can tell. And don't forget it's a Science link so there should not be all that much trafic still I wonder how long it's going to last.
When it's off you see a black film inside of two panes of clear glass so you can't see though it just the glass. What makes it cool is when it's on it looks like there is a "floating" immage in the middle of glass with no wires.
But if you get behind it the coolness factor drops a lot.
Ok, I understand your perspective that we should avoid complexity and design systems that get better and cheaper over time. The point I disagree with is the idea that boot strapping teck is ever going to get you to a system that uses scramjets. Where I disagree is I think low risk complexity is OK. Which is why I think we should have a goal of "good" target for the mid term vs. avoiding spending a lot on R&D.
For now I want to see rockets take up all cargo and have the space shuttle dock with anything heavy it needs to work with. Shure, it's a little more complex that way but I feel we should avoid using the shuttle for anything other than moving people back and forth from space. But we can send a lot of people into space at one time with the shuttle and if there is no cargo we can take a lot of supplies so we can leave them up there for a long mission. Something like 3-5 weeks with some people taken from / left on the ISS. Goal: Keep manned space flight costs down to 1 - 2 billion a year. And use the cheep rockets for cargo reducing costs as low as possible. Thus giving us a good window to make something that's much better than the shuttle. OK fine we can build a smaller version of the shuttle that does cooler landings (can't take as much weight back from orbit but get's to avoid a lot of heat shielding that way.) and can't take much cargo to space but that's a lot of R&D and I don't see a huge cost savings to make it worth it. We might as well just send people up via RUSSA but I can see the value of a few extended shuttle missions per year.
But rockets only get so cheep. Which is why the next goal should be a cargo jet that can carry rockets or the next generation of the space shuttle on it back. Think of something that's close to a lifting wing but with a split tail that has 6 HUGE jets and can go to mach 3. Goal: we already have air planes that can take huge amounts of cargo at sub mach 1 speeds so we just need a system that can get to ram jet speeds and act as both a test bed for future development and a heavy duty work horse first stage to send stuff into space. Also R&D for this should be vary manageable my guess would be under 5 billion.
Next: we work on rocket systems that can launch from the back of this thing thus getting lower cost to orbit for intermediate loads at this point. At which point you build 4 or 5 of them as there cheaper than a shuttle to operate and should cost around 300mill or less to build. Goal: work out the bugs in this launch system while reducing cost's with out risking human lives.
After that build a scram jet system > rocket orbiter that can take small loads to orbit much cheaper than rockets can. But this is one-way and unmanned. Goal work out the bugs in this system with out risking human lives.
Ok finally make a ramjet / scramjet orbiter that can take 8 people to orbit for a 2 month stay and link up to ISS and then get back cheep. THIS IS NOT A CARGO SHIP and IT CAN"T TAKE MUCH WEIGHT BACK FROM ORBIT. Goal: a workhorse system for taking people to space cheaply for 30 years.
As a side note I think we should work on a remote controlled ION drive towing system for moving stuff out of LEO. It should never leave orbit and should be able to take 20+ loads from LEO to geosynchronous orbit over its lifetime. Goal: lower the cost of moving things to higher orbit and work out the bugs in ION drive systems for use in manned missions to the moon and beyond.
Ok at some point it might be worth it to make un unmanned cargo return ship that can take back all these scram jet engines we are sending to orbit but as they don't need to be fast it would be more like a parasol than a ship.
Now, I think that's a low risk path to space which may be somewhat complex is safe and should be fairly cheep. What about this would you change?
Personally I think there is no point in terraforming anything.
My guess is we are going to get fusion in 30 - 80 years and have energy costs drop to 1/10th what they are now within 80 years after that. At which point we start a few HUGE scale projects. Think underwater tunnel from Europe to the US. Freaking HUGE desalinization projects to create fresh water. But, instead trying to turn deserts into rainforests we are going to take the desert formerly known as the Amazon rain forest among others and turn it into green houses. Just think how many uneconomical projects will suddenly seem reasonable? In 300+ years I expect large chunks of the population to start living under water. But, terraforming is going to wait a long time after that.
PS: In the next 150 years I expect energy costs to drop to 1/10 what they are now the cost of getting to LEO to be 1/10 (or less) what it is now and most CPU's to be about 100,000+ times as fast as they are now ditto for HDD @ 10,000x. But most other costs should stay about the same (Ok Bandwidth should be 100,000x what we have now as well but most other costs will be the same aka Bread will cost about the same amount.)
What do you think we would do with those 3 changes in cost?
there are canals, we believe and water. If there is water...
is not a canals = water but canals might = water which is true.
The last bit about "If there is water, that means there is oxygen, If oxygen, that means we can breathe." is not as stupid as it sounds it just means if there is water you can make oxygen. 2xH20 > 2H2 + O2.
The bit about If "Oxygen we can breathe" is true as we can breate in 100% O2 air.
I think there trying to keep retail space for the game for as long as they can. Which will get more people to sign up than would go to the website and download the game aka not everyone has high speed net access and some people buy the game for there kids ect.
At the point where the can't sell it in most stores for 40+$ they may decide to have fewer users and allow the download option which will remove some users who would get it from the store but make them more money from people who are getting there 2nd copy of the game / using a friends CD's or whatever.
Thanks, I am not an engineer, but from what your saying someone made the design decision that the shuttle needed to be able to land with a lot of weight fast which means it's going to generate 50,000C air which means it needs to have rounded edges to create the cushion to avoid burning up.
What I had been wondering for a while is if you could build a craft that does the whole scramjet > rocket approach to orbit and then fly's back from orbit with a sleek aerodynamic approach which would seem to get rid of a lot of drag. It seemed like a shallow reentry should be possible with you super heating the leading edge of the wings and then radiating that heat from the rear of the wings. But, the need for the ability to land quickly and with a lot of weight means you always have to land quickly.
Do you know of any good books on some of the early designs of the early space shuttle and why they where scraped. I heard the air force got involved and added a whole lot of extra useless specifications, but I don't know the whole story.
PS: Parachuting from orbit sounds like one hell of a trip I wonder how long a ride that would take and how many people would want to sign up for the first trip... Hell, I think I might want to try that one out.
Hmm, 2 basic ideas first is a multi stage craft worth it well mostly that's a design usage but adding a scram jet phase adds a lot of value... The other idea of the size of the market, well I am not saying you cant get 1000 people a year to spend 200k to get to orbit for a few days what I am saying is recouping your cost's for R&D to build something that can get people to orbit for 200K and still leave you with profit is going to happen.
Back to the first idea there are basically two problems with using rockets to get into orbit.
First off they need to take there own oxidizer which means the energy density of there fuel is really low. (4H + 2O > 2H2O) in both cases but in one your weight it 4 * 1 + 2 * 16 vs. 4 * 1 + 0 * 16.
The second problem is you lose 1G of acceleration most of the flight because your using your rocket to offset gravity vs. getting your lift from wings.
When you run the numbers your weight savings from not using oxidizer to mach 15 is huge. And can easily offset the weight of 2 sets of engines. Just running a few quick numbers if the ship's launch weight is 90% fuel it's spends a little under 1/2 that weight to get to mach 15(ignoring things like drag and the fact that you expend more energy fighting gravity at mach 0 than mach 15 you start getting savings from being close to orbital velocity) if you drop oxidizer from that you end up with a craft that cut's out
30% of its weight from lost oxidizer and lost fuel to accelerate that oxidizer (you lose some efficiency because you need to accelerate the oxidizer you do use to (from the air) to your speed and other factors.) And you gain some of that back from an extra engine but you also get to drop a lot of the craft's structural support's as it does not need to withstand the weight of that much fuel.
Ok sorry I started to ramble on there but you really need to run simulators to find out what the best design is and how much weight you really save it but I think it's easy to justify the value of a scram jet system. (Once we have one that works...)
As to ion drives that's more for cargo than anything else but from the numbers I have seen tossed around it makes sense to leave several ion drive craft in orbit and have each rocket bring the reaction mass for there drive systems and then go either solar or nuclear for fuel. Anyway, this is more a guess than hard numbers but I am not trying to get you to spend any money so I am not going to spend the kind of time to build a convincing system. But, I am talking about a 3 stage to orbit craft which is not realy that complex vs existing sytems. That joins up with a final stage to move things around in orbit (Basicly a usefull space station.)
The last "hard" game I picked up was the puzzle game where you can rewind the sands of time, prince of pursha (SP?), and it barely lasted a weekend. (I read several revies and they all said it was "hard') It seems like most games these days have a lot of easy content and it feels more like watching a movie than playing a game. Which is just not worth the 50$ I spend just to play though them in a weekend. Take metroid Prime it was a great game I don't have a game cube so I was playing it on my sisters system when I was home for Christmas and while I did get stuck (huge boss near the end I could survive for like a half hour vs. it but I only had time to try him twice before I had to go home.) I was at like 80% done in less than 3 days. Now compare that to the first metroid, which I picked up after I got home a proceeded to have my ass handed to me for the first 4 hours of game, play. After I picked up the first energy tank I stopped dieing but man that game was HARD.
Try picking up some of the old Nintendo games and see how hard they are vs. the new crop of games coming out. Yea most FPS have an insane setting but for the most part games these days seem to be stuck on easy. (Then again I have years of gaming behind me and mad reflexes so I am willing to accept that part of this is me but I think most gamers my age are ready for harder games than I see out there.)
PS: I am realy just sick of spending 50$ for a game that only lasts a weekend if that.
Possibly - since there was nothing else to line it up with. The builders were stark illiterates, who probably couldn't count, let alone measure.
That sounds a little harsh I mean these people mined and transported HUGE freaking stones and then arranged them in a complex fashion. Which implies that they had fairly large groups spending years building something that lasts for 5000 years. They probably did not have a complex abstract written language but I think building something like that takes far more planning than your giving them credit for. OK they probably could not count to 100,000 and had no way to measure down to a 1/16 of an inch but they probably had a limited form of counting, measurement and even writing (even if that was just limited to marking the locations of where the stones go.)
OK, maybe the "aliens" did it or they used there "magic" / "telekinesis" powers to just make it show up... But, assuming there operating in the same world we are chances are they where keeping track of fairly complex astronomical events for 100's of years before they decided to build this.
There is a lot of stuff you can find out about the NSA but there is no way to know just how much computing power they have, but as for basic idea. They have around 50 ACRES or more of supercomputing floor space. They run there own fab creating custom CPU's. And they dropped off a 200CPU system to their museum because it got 3 years old and so was not worth keeping... So being conservative lets say they have around 10 200CPU systems per acre and 50 acres so that's around 100,000CPU's. So my guess is they have around the same computing power as the published list of the top 500. (As in within 1 order of magnitude.)
The problem with trying to get private enterprise to bring down the cost of entry into space is the huge upfront costs associated with building space ships. If you wanted to send a few million tons of stuff to geosynchronous orbit we might end up with a system that goes something like this.
Stage 1 standard jet to mach 1 - 3.
Stage 2 ramjet / scram jet to mach 15.
Stage 3 rocket to LEO / mach 22.
Stage 4 ION drive from LEO to geosynchronous orbit.
At which point the cost of getting to geosynchronous orbit would end up 1-10% of today's costs. BUT, nobody wants to send that much stuff into orbit. Which means there is no point in spending huge amounts of cash on R&D when you can just spend a few mill and get a rocket to send you to orbit and enough insurance to cover you incase of failure. Hell the space shuttle could easily send 20 people up on every trip (Minor change in the cargo hold would add space for that many people) but we just don't need to send vary many people into space at any one point in time.
I mean let's say you could send people into LEO for 3 days at 300k vs. 2 million per person do you really think all that many more people would go on the trip? And how many of those trips would it take to pay for 10billion in R&D.
I have been toying with the idea that you build a ION drive system that carries cargo back and forth from LEO to geosynchronous orbit for a while but I just don't see the need to move enough stuff up there to pay for that kind of R&D.
On the other hand I listen to the radio (NPR) more than I watch network TV so there could be more to it than Nostalgia.
Old games have vary difrent gameplay . Namely the old do this or die. Hell look at Halo vs Contra and you see a world of difrence in how much pure skill it takes to beat the game. In a 1 hit = death and X deaths = start over vs you can take lot's of hit's but X hit's = retry from last save.
The G5's memory bandwith is insane vs PC.
PC games are stuck with 32 bit CPU's vs G5 64 bit CPU.
The grapthics cards are basicly the same. (PC world has more but MAC's use the same hardware so it works out.)
They both use the same HDD, mice keybord ect.
So it looks like MAC wins for high end gaming they just don't have that many games.
I don't know if you read the first one but it says nothing about a recent worming trend.
The second one acnologes global worming but says the effects will be minimal.
Well as for the thurd the CATO institute is an openly biased organization. Expounding the virtues of "Individual Liberty, Limited Government, Free Markets and Pease" on the page you lined to. And even it uses the term "Observed global warming" thus acknowledging the existence of said effect. It also chooses the approach of limiting the how bad things are going to get vs. ignoring them altogether.
Now as a young person I can look forward to 50+ years of climate change and as such I want these isues adressed as aposed to the whole well well it's going to get hotter but I don't think it will get that bad.
I would much rather see a 1cent tax per gallion of fuel going to fustion and solar cell research than anything anyone else has said about the isue. Something as simple as all new buildings in the US must have at least 5000$ worth of solar cells on the roof would go a long way to fixing said problems before they become an isue. Hell, I look at it much the same way as investing in the US highway system some people say it would help so many things vs saying well things will get worse but we don't think it will get all that bad so let's just do nothing and hope things work out ok.
Slashdot Mirror
While an extreme example you could use this as a test case in designing highly fuel efferent passenger planes. Just looks at it the same way some car company's look at formula one. It's a good to look at the bleeding edge then see how many of those new ideas we can passed onto your mass produced products.
I understand IANAL either so we are both working on beliefs. However, using GPL code which say adds say print to PDF functionality to a reasonably complex system has always seemed safe, but rereading that I wonder if it true.
If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.
It's hard to say what's separate works in this context. But, I asume it's close to the distinction between libraries and non-libraries.
PS: I am starting to see why people could fear using GPL code.
Your thinking of:
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License., calling unmodified GPL software
But if you use it as a liburay then it's easy to see that section:
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Makes it clear that as long as the scope of your project is outside of the scope of the GPL project your code is safe. AKA using a sort function from GPL code is fine but using OpenOffice to write a new wordprocesser is probably not ok.
Unless I am thinking of the LGPL vs the GPL...
IANAL but my understanding is that if you setup your code to use GPL software liburarys then you have not infected your software with the GPL code it's only when you edit the GPL software that it becomes infected.
So let's say you have a great AI software that needs to do some path finding. At some point you need to sort your data if you go.
AI Code...
AI Code...
GPL_SORT(XYZ);
AI Code...
Then all your AI code is fine. But if edit the GPL_SORT code then that's now GPL code. On the other hand if you released the GPL_SORT code then you can release GPL and non GPL vertions and as long as you don't take any code that somone wrote for your GPL vertion of GPL_SORT then you can keep both vertions mantained at the same time.
The basic trick is keep people from looking at the code that someone outside of your company wrote as long as your just calling a DLL or some such then your fine. (You can even include the files directly into your project just so long as you don't coppy that code to other points in your project after somone out side your company made chages to it.)
I don't think you understand the term "useful energy" as he meant it. Availability is of little use if it's not where you can put it to work. All the energy in crude oil is useless to move cars around unless you refine it. In much the same way that power plant's are useless to you if a tree fell onto the power line outside of your house.
Thus even though the net energy is the same before and after any given process Availability talks about how much of that energy could be used to do work and "useful energy" is talking about how much energy humans can use out of the system.
Hydrogen temperature increases as the gas expands.
Quick FYI: Temperature decreases as a gas expands. For a link to a High school level treatment click here.
It's an educated guess. From what there saying the material absorbs most ambient light and only let's light pass though from the position of the projector.
Now when the projector is off it's going to put off a lot less light than the rest off the room which means the film is going to absorb most light that comes into contact with it which means it's going to be much darker than the rest of the room. Also if this effect was not enough to make it look black they're going to paint to projector black because it's going to be much more aesthetically pleasing to look at a black screen than the projector when it's off.
Anyway it's going to look like a mirror, that's pointing at the projector and has a dark film over it, when it's off. I just asume there goign to paint the projector black when it's off as that would look better than looking at the projector.
It's still doing fine as far as I can tell. And don't forget it's a Science link so there should not be all that much trafic still I wonder how long it's going to last.
When it's off you see a black film inside of two panes of clear glass so you can't see though it just the glass. What makes it cool is when it's on it looks like there is a "floating" immage in the middle of glass with no wires.
But if you get behind it the coolness factor drops a lot.
Ok, I understand your perspective that we should avoid complexity and design systems that get better and cheaper over time. The point I disagree with is the idea that boot strapping teck is ever going to get you to a system that uses scramjets. Where I disagree is I think low risk complexity is OK. Which is why I think we should have a goal of "good" target for the mid term vs. avoiding spending a lot on R&D.
For now I want to see rockets take up all cargo and have the space shuttle dock with anything heavy it needs to work with. Shure, it's a little more complex that way but I feel we should avoid using the shuttle for anything other than moving people back and forth from space. But we can send a lot of people into space at one time with the shuttle and if there is no cargo we can take a lot of supplies so we can leave them up there for a long mission. Something like 3-5 weeks with some people taken from / left on the ISS. Goal: Keep manned space flight costs down to 1 - 2 billion a year. And use the cheep rockets for cargo reducing costs as low as possible. Thus giving us a good window to make something that's much better than the shuttle. OK fine we can build a smaller version of the shuttle that does cooler landings (can't take as much weight back from orbit but get's to avoid a lot of heat shielding that way.) and can't take much cargo to space but that's a lot of R&D and I don't see a huge cost savings to make it worth it. We might as well just send people up via RUSSA but I can see the value of a few extended shuttle missions per year.
But rockets only get so cheep. Which is why the next goal should be a cargo jet that can carry rockets or the next generation of the space shuttle on it back. Think of something that's close to a lifting wing but with a split tail that has 6 HUGE jets and can go to mach 3. Goal: we already have air planes that can take huge amounts of cargo at sub mach 1 speeds so we just need a system that can get to ram jet speeds and act as both a test bed for future development and a heavy duty work horse first stage to send stuff into space. Also R&D for this should be vary manageable my guess would be under 5 billion.
Next: we work on rocket systems that can launch from the back of this thing thus getting lower cost to orbit for intermediate loads at this point. At which point you build 4 or 5 of them as there cheaper than a shuttle to operate and should cost around 300mill or less to build. Goal: work out the bugs in this launch system while reducing cost's with out risking human lives.
After that build a scram jet system > rocket orbiter that can take small loads to orbit much cheaper than rockets can. But this is one-way and unmanned. Goal work out the bugs in this system with out risking human lives.
Ok finally make a ramjet / scramjet orbiter that can take 8 people to orbit for a 2 month stay and link up to ISS and then get back cheep. THIS IS NOT A CARGO SHIP and IT CAN"T TAKE MUCH WEIGHT BACK FROM ORBIT. Goal: a workhorse system for taking people to space cheaply for 30 years.
As a side note I think we should work on a remote controlled ION drive towing system for moving stuff out of LEO. It should never leave orbit and should be able to take 20+ loads from LEO to geosynchronous orbit over its lifetime. Goal: lower the cost of moving things to higher orbit and work out the bugs in ION drive systems for use in manned missions to the moon and beyond.
Ok at some point it might be worth it to make un unmanned cargo return ship that can take back all these scram jet engines we are sending to orbit but as they don't need to be fast it would be more like a parasol than a ship.
Now, I think that's a low risk path to space which may be somewhat complex is safe and should be fairly cheep. What about this would you change?
Personally I think there is no point in terraforming anything.
My guess is we are going to get fusion in 30 - 80 years and have energy costs drop to 1/10th what they are now within 80 years after that. At which point we start a few HUGE scale projects. Think underwater tunnel from Europe to the US. Freaking HUGE desalinization projects to create fresh water. But, instead trying to turn deserts into rainforests we are going to take the desert formerly known as the Amazon rain forest among others and turn it into green houses. Just think how many uneconomical projects will suddenly seem reasonable? In 300+ years I expect large chunks of the population to start living under water. But, terraforming is going to wait a long time after that.
PS: In the next 150 years I expect energy costs to drop to 1/10 what they are now the cost of getting to LEO to be 1/10 (or less) what it is now and most CPU's to be about 100,000+ times as fast as they are now ditto for HDD @ 10,000x. But most other costs should stay about the same (Ok Bandwidth should be 100,000x what we have now as well but most other costs will be the same aka Bread will cost about the same amount.)
What do you think we would do with those 3 changes in cost?
there are canals, we believe and water. If there is water...
is not a canals = water but canals might = water which is true.
The last bit about "If there is water, that means there is oxygen, If oxygen, that means we can breathe." is not as stupid as it sounds it just means if there is water you can make oxygen. 2xH20 > 2H2 + O2.
The bit about If "Oxygen we can breathe" is true as we can breate in 100% O2 air.
So it's not stupid as poorly worded.
Great sig.
I think there trying to keep retail space for the game for as long as they can. Which will get more people to sign up than would go to the website and download the game aka not everyone has high speed net access and some people buy the game for there kids ect.
At the point where the can't sell it in most stores for 40+$ they may decide to have fewer users and allow the download option which will remove some users who would get it from the store but make them more money from people who are getting there 2nd copy of the game / using a friends CD's or whatever.
Thanks, I am not an engineer, but from what your saying someone made the design decision that the shuttle needed to be able to land with a lot of weight fast which means it's going to generate 50,000C air which means it needs to have rounded edges to create the cushion to avoid burning up.
What I had been wondering for a while is if you could build a craft that does the whole scramjet > rocket approach to orbit and then fly's back from orbit with a sleek aerodynamic approach which would seem to get rid of a lot of drag. It seemed like a shallow reentry should be possible with you super heating the leading edge of the wings and then radiating that heat from the rear of the wings. But, the need for the ability to land quickly and with a lot of weight means you always have to land quickly.
Do you know of any good books on some of the early designs of the early space shuttle and why they where scraped. I heard the air force got involved and added a whole lot of extra useless specifications, but I don't know the whole story.
PS: Parachuting from orbit sounds like one hell of a trip I wonder how long a ride that would take and how many people would want to sign up for the first trip... Hell, I think I might want to try that one out.
Hmm, 2 basic ideas first is a multi stage craft worth it well mostly that's a design usage but adding a scram jet phase adds a lot of value... The other idea of the size of the market, well I am not saying you cant get 1000 people a year to spend 200k to get to orbit for a few days what I am saying is recouping your cost's for R&D to build something that can get people to orbit for 200K and still leave you with profit is going to happen.
Back to the first idea there are basically two problems with using rockets to get into orbit.
First off they need to take there own oxidizer which means the energy density of there fuel is really low. (4H + 2O > 2H2O) in both cases but in one your weight it 4 * 1 + 2 * 16 vs. 4 * 1 + 0 * 16.
The second problem is you lose 1G of acceleration most of the flight because your using your rocket to offset gravity vs. getting your lift from wings.
When you run the numbers your weight savings from not using oxidizer to mach 15 is huge. And can easily offset the weight of 2 sets of engines. Just running a few quick numbers if the ship's launch weight is 90% fuel it's spends a little under 1/2 that weight to get to mach 15(ignoring things like drag and the fact that you expend more energy fighting gravity at mach 0 than mach 15 you start getting savings from being close to orbital velocity) if you drop oxidizer from that you end up with a craft that cut's out 30% of its weight from lost oxidizer and lost fuel to accelerate that oxidizer (you lose some efficiency because you need to accelerate the oxidizer you do use to (from the air) to your speed and other factors.) And you gain some of that back from an extra engine but you also get to drop a lot of the craft's structural support's as it does not need to withstand the weight of that much fuel.
Ok sorry I started to ramble on there but you really need to run simulators to find out what the best design is and how much weight you really save it but I think it's easy to justify the value of a scram jet system. (Once we have one that works...)
As to ion drives that's more for cargo than anything else but from the numbers I have seen tossed around it makes sense to leave several ion drive craft in orbit and have each rocket bring the reaction mass for there drive systems and then go either solar or nuclear for fuel.
Anyway, this is more a guess than hard numbers but I am not trying to get you to spend any money so I am not going to spend the kind of time to build a convincing system. But, I am talking about a 3 stage to orbit craft which is not realy that complex vs existing sytems. That joins up with a final stage to move things around in orbit (Basicly a usefull space station.)
I will look into them.
The last "hard" game I picked up was the puzzle game where you can rewind the sands of time, prince of pursha (SP?), and it barely lasted a weekend. (I read several revies and they all said it was "hard') It seems like most games these days have a lot of easy content and it feels more like watching a movie than playing a game. Which is just not worth the 50$ I spend just to play though them in a weekend. Take metroid Prime it was a great game I don't have a game cube so I was playing it on my sisters system when I was home for Christmas and while I did get stuck (huge boss near the end I could survive for like a half hour vs. it but I only had time to try him twice before I had to go home.) I was at like 80% done in less than 3 days. Now compare that to the first metroid, which I picked up after I got home a proceeded to have my ass handed to me for the first 4 hours of game, play. After I picked up the first energy tank I stopped dieing but man that game was HARD.
Try picking up some of the old Nintendo games and see how hard they are vs. the new crop of games coming out. Yea most FPS have an insane setting but for the most part games these days seem to be stuck on easy. (Then again I have years of gaming behind me and mad reflexes so I am willing to accept that part of this is me but I think most gamers my age are ready for harder games than I see out there.)
PS: I am realy just sick of spending 50$ for a game that only lasts a weekend if that.
Possibly - since there was nothing else to line it up with. The builders were stark illiterates, who probably couldn't count, let alone measure.
... But, assuming there operating in the same world we are chances are they where keeping track of fairly complex astronomical events for 100's of years before they decided to build this.
That sounds a little harsh I mean these people mined and transported HUGE freaking stones and then arranged them in a complex fashion. Which implies that they had fairly large groups spending years building something that lasts for 5000 years. They probably did not have a complex abstract written language but I think building something like that takes far more planning than your giving them credit for. OK they probably could not count to 100,000 and had no way to measure down to a 1/16 of an inch but they probably had a limited form of counting, measurement and even writing (even if that was just limited to marking the locations of where the stones go.)
OK, maybe the "aliens" did it or they used there "magic" / "telekinesis" powers to just make it show up
There is a lot of stuff you can find out about the NSA but there is no way to know just how much computing power they have, but as for basic idea. They have around 50 ACRES or more of supercomputing floor space. They run there own fab creating custom CPU's. And they dropped off a 200CPU system to their museum because it got 3 years old and so was not worth keeping... So being conservative lets say they have around 10 200CPU systems per acre and 50 acres so that's around 100,000CPU's. So my guess is they have around the same computing power as the published list of the top 500. (As in within 1 order of magnitude.)
Nuclear power is still solar energy just not from our sun.
Yea, that was a cool system but that's from 2001 do you know how thangs are going right now?
The problem with trying to get private enterprise to bring down the cost of entry into space is the huge upfront costs associated with building space ships. If you wanted to send a few million tons of stuff to geosynchronous orbit we might end up with a system that goes something like this.
Stage 1 standard jet to mach 1 - 3.
Stage 2 ramjet / scram jet to mach 15.
Stage 3 rocket to LEO / mach 22.
Stage 4 ION drive from LEO to geosynchronous orbit.
At which point the cost of getting to geosynchronous orbit would end up 1-10% of today's costs. BUT, nobody wants to send that much stuff into orbit. Which means there is no point in spending huge amounts of cash on R&D when you can just spend a few mill and get a rocket to send you to orbit and enough insurance to cover you incase of failure. Hell the space shuttle could easily send 20 people up on every trip (Minor change in the cargo hold would add space for that many people) but we just don't need to send vary many people into space at any one point in time.
I mean let's say you could send people into LEO for 3 days at 300k vs. 2 million per person do you really think all that many more people would go on the trip? And how many of those trips would it take to pay for 10billion in R&D.
I have been toying with the idea that you build a ION drive system that carries cargo back and forth from LEO to geosynchronous orbit for a while but I just don't see the need to move enough stuff up there to pay for that kind of R&D.
On the other hand I listen to the radio (NPR) more than I watch network TV so there could be more to it than Nostalgia.
Old games have vary difrent gameplay . Namely the old do this or die. Hell look at Halo vs Contra and you see a world of difrence in how much pure skill it takes to beat the game. In a 1 hit = death and X deaths = start over vs you can take lot's of hit's but X hit's = retry from last save.
The G5's memory bandwith is insane vs PC.
PC games are stuck with 32 bit CPU's vs G5 64 bit CPU.
The grapthics cards are basicly the same. (PC world has more but MAC's use the same hardware so it works out.)
They both use the same HDD, mice keybord ect.
So it looks like MAC wins for high end gaming they just don't have that many games.
I don't know if you read the first one but it says nothing about a recent worming trend.
The second one acnologes global worming but says the effects will be minimal.
Well as for the thurd the CATO institute is an openly biased organization. Expounding the virtues of "Individual Liberty, Limited Government, Free Markets and Pease" on the page you lined to. And even it uses the term "Observed global warming" thus acknowledging the existence of said effect. It also chooses the approach of limiting the how bad things are going to get vs. ignoring them altogether.
Now as a young person I can look forward to 50+ years of climate change and as such I want these isues adressed as aposed to the whole well well it's going to get hotter but I don't think it will get that bad.
I would much rather see a 1cent tax per gallion of fuel going to fustion and solar cell research than anything anyone else has said about the isue. Something as simple as all new buildings in the US must have at least 5000$ worth of solar cells on the roof would go a long way to fixing said problems before they become an isue. Hell, I look at it much the same way as investing in the US highway system some people say it would help so many things vs saying well things will get worse but we don't think it will get all that bad so let's just do nothing and hope things work out ok.