Why would this craft not just use a long current carrying wire instead.
Actually, this is exactly the principle of the magsail: magnetic solar sail. You deploy a long wire loop on every side of the spacecraft, circulate a current in it, and it catches the Earth's or Sun's magnetic field to propel the spacecraft.
A spacecraft using this method of propulsion could even launch in complete silence from either Pole, if it had a sufficiently large coil and current. An alternative to the wire is to use ionized gas instead: as the distance from the magnetic field increases, the conducting loop of ionised gas extends and compensates the loss of "strength" of the magnetic wind perfectly by catching even more of it, so it gives a constant thrust.
Some people in NK are already down to eating grass/. I read the testimonies of a cartoonist who went there on a deal from his employer (TV company) to deliver instructions at a cartoon animation studio in Pyongyang: at one point he saw people munching on the grass. Salaries in this country are paid -if at all- directly in rice bags from international aid, when there is any available.
NK doesn't have enough human work time and resources devoted to growing enough vegetables and cereals for its people, because everyone is enlisted in the military for a decade minimum, spying on everyone, or stamping administrative papers for everything. They won't be able to breed more than a ridiculously low number of rabbits, because the regime simply does not want its people to be fed, it's part of how they keep control.
I suspect the real plan here is to make a publicity stunt where Kim Jong-Il announces that NK is so far ahead of every other country that it breeds bigger rabbits to feed all its people.
Anyone who gets caught with this method can just claim they knew it was from the RIAA. After all, if the RIAA puts it online and makes it a free download, they are effectively granting anyone the right to download the fake torrent legally.
Seriously, all this manages to do is determine whether the person is about to buy or not. In other words, it replicates the functionality of the shop itself.
Of course, the way the sentence is structured, all three claims are lumped together so that the sentence can be construed to mean that either the AOL letter confirms just the account ownership or that it confirms ownership AND downloading AND distributing. Such a sentence structure lets them give the wrong impression to the judge without saying anything that can be proven to be false (at worst, it can shown to be ambiguous). This gives an easy win if the Judge misunderstands and still allows them to claim that they didn't lie if they are caught-only that the sentence was misunderstood.
Seriously, this is exactly why lawyers and judge should debate in PROLOG, or any Turing complete programming language. Except Perl, it would make matters worse.
My test is: get three experts in the field of application of the patent, have them read the title of the patent. If any of them guesses the method employed in the patent, send the application to the bin.
On a more serious note, patents shouldn't be checked for "obviousness", they should be checked for ingenuity instead.
They mention that in the article: drivers apparently ignore an average of 70% of the signs, their point is that the presence and ignoring of these signs make driving unsafe because of the confusion that ensues.
So instead of trying to coerce everyone into making the plan works, they let each do their plan. And apparently, it works wonders in Drachten.
As a matter of fact, no, they were not capitalists, since they believed they had ruling moral authority that bypassed private ownership of production goods. Much like Communists and socialists.
can somebody "debunk" the results from the EPICA ice cores? You know, the ones that record CO2 levels for at least the past 650 kYears, and conclude that current CO2 levels are nearly 2 times higher than they have ever been over the last 8 ice ages?
OK, but how do the current CO2 levels compare with the hot periods of the past (instead of ice ages, since we are not currently in an ice age but rather a hot period) ?
And you think that'd stop the statemen from stealing your income, illegal or not ? In my country prostitutes have to pay taxes, even though prostitution is still illegal.
The only correct way to starve the government is to participate in Counter-economics. If you just stop using your money, the bank will use it in your place, whereas if you use your money outside of the scope of government, it won't profit from it.
According to this Figaro article, french living abroad have increased in number by 40.5% over the last decade, reching over 2 million. The proportion of engineers leaving the country to find a job has doubled. There are already over 300,000 french living in London, making it one of the largest french cities by comparison.
There is also this Time article dating from 2000 but which simply calls this emigration "the french exodus".
If you can read fench, then this french Senate report on emigration has a lot of numbers although it's from 1999. Its conclusions leave little doubt: - french emigration has accelerated a lot - this emigration concerns people with a high level of education, the number of french studying abroad has doubled in a decade - the number of french fleeing the ISF (taxation of high net worth) has increased dramatically though it only concerns a small fraction of this emigration - the number of french people staying abroad instead of coming back has tripled over the 16 years the study spans
In spite of this, though, there isn't the feeling of distrust that exists in the U.S. with regards to the government.
For the French, the government is THEM, and everyone gets up and shouts when there is something they don't like
Surely you must be living in a parallel-universe France, instead of the one I've been living in for a quarter century. Defiance regarding the state is rampant, there are whole cities out of reach of the police power, people distrust the government with a passion. In fact being critical of the executive powers is the national sport here. Yet there is a constant obsession with politics, which I think is symptomatic of a country fast sinking into fascism (be it of the collectivist or corporatist kind), where people are paralysed into believing salvation can only come from the very same people they loathe and curse at everyday. It's simply not healthy at all, it's like a pervasive mental disease that permeates everything, from friendships to work relations and even down to simple shopping interactions.
And there also is a fact that anyone considering moving to France should consider: french people are emigrating fast, at a rate of 100,000 to 200,000 each year, and it has been going like this for years already (2+ million people left the country, compare this with Cuba). This is the most massive exodus this country has ever known since the French Revolution ! There are reasons behind this continuous stream of people, reasons for fleeing this country.
I wouldn't trade that in for a higher salary unless I actually needed that money.
Wow, way to miss the point !
What is making the GP cringe is that (s)he has no choice of whether working more or earning more, no say in how things like health, job, leisure and such are prioritized at all, no freedom in conducting life.
And before someone says some stupid shit about all tokamaks are going away for fusion research because z-pinches generate such hot plasmas...
Oh, well, tokamaks are going away, but not because of z-pinch being more reliable, simpler and cheaper for initiating fusion reactions, no, it's because tokamaks cannot sustain fusion reactions for more than seconds because of the intense cooling caused by braking radiation of heavy ions ripped off their inner walls.
Since you say you're involved with the ITER project, can I ask one thing that I have never seen answered about it ? Here: how do the ITER people plan to fight the intense Bremsstrahlung cooling of the plasma due to heavy ions being ripped off the walls of the reactor ? AFAIK this cooling makes sustainable fusion in a Tokamak impossible.
I, for one, would not be surprised at all if the test was entirely bogus, in the sense that it did not use the EAST reactor, or DT fusion, or happened at all the way they said it has. There's also a good chance they beat ITER to sustainable fusion, and not using magnetic confinement madness.
Fast-rewind back to last year, and this announcement of Sandia, and report by Haines, that the pinch machine was reliably making plasmas at billions of degrees.
Starting to connect dots already ? How do you make an H bomb go boom ? With an A bomb that initiates a Li-H fusion. That means having to refine Uranium, which is extremely tedious and costly, and highly visible, having a lower power limit of 300 KT, and leaving radioactive dirt behind every explosion. With a Z-pinch detonator, there's no lower power limit, you can have H bombs of any size, leaving no radioactive dirt, and you don't need fancy material that fall under international scrutiny. The billions of degrees it reaches means it can initiate Li-H fusion, or B11-H fusion, which can also be used for power generation much more safely than currently envisioned methods, for example by feeding a Li-H ions spike into the steel plasma, using MHD for controlling the input, and for generating power on the output.
The Chinese and Russians have been building such Z-pinch fusion igniters since the original Sandia announcement, and so have the US, AFAIK. It shouldn't take very long before the first traces of all this start to emerge, until official confirmations.
Microsoft's monopoly is fighting against itself: newer versions of Windows are finding themselves to be in the "striving competition" position, trying to steal marketshare from older versions. This phenomenon can only amplify with Microsoft's inability to innovate. This is the end of the monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would this craft not just use a long current carrying wire instead.
Actually, this is exactly the principle of the magsail: magnetic solar sail. You deploy a long wire loop on every side of the spacecraft, circulate a current in it, and it catches the Earth's or Sun's magnetic field to propel the spacecraft.
A spacecraft using this method of propulsion could even launch in complete silence from either Pole, if it had a sufficiently large coil and current. An alternative to the wire is to use ionized gas instead: as the distance from the magnetic field increases, the conducting loop of ionised gas extends and compensates the loss of "strength" of the magnetic wind perfectly by catching even more of it, so it gives a constant thrust.
Thank you for injecting some intelligence in here. Sound economics are as rare in Slashdot as sensible IT decisions are in accounting.
Of course not, all good libertarians know that the correct axis is "authority / liberty".
Similarly, all good Discordians know that the correct axis is "Entropic / Disentropic".
Some people in NK are already down to eating grass/. I read the testimonies of a cartoonist who went there on a deal from his employer (TV company) to deliver instructions at a cartoon animation studio in Pyongyang: at one point he saw people munching on the grass. Salaries in this country are paid -if at all- directly in rice bags from international aid, when there is any available.
NK doesn't have enough human work time and resources devoted to growing enough vegetables and cereals for its people, because everyone is enlisted in the military for a decade minimum, spying on everyone, or stamping administrative papers for everything. They won't be able to breed more than a ridiculously low number of rabbits, because the regime simply does not want its people to be fed, it's part of how they keep control.
I suspect the real plan here is to make a publicity stunt where Kim Jong-Il announces that NK is so far ahead of every other country that it breeds bigger rabbits to feed all its people.
Anyone who gets caught with this method can just claim they knew it was from the RIAA. After all, if the RIAA puts it online and makes it a free download, they are effectively granting anyone the right to download the fake torrent legally.
What for ?
Seriously, all this manages to do is determine whether the person is about to buy or not. In other words, it replicates the functionality of the shop itself.
Of course, the way the sentence is structured, all three claims are lumped together so that the sentence can be construed to mean that either the AOL letter confirms just the account ownership or that it confirms ownership AND downloading AND distributing. Such a sentence structure lets them give the wrong impression to the judge without saying anything that can be proven to be false (at worst, it can shown to be ambiguous). This gives an easy win if the Judge misunderstands and still allows them to claim that they didn't lie if they are caught-only that the sentence was misunderstood.
Seriously, this is exactly why lawyers and judge should debate in PROLOG, or any Turing complete programming language. Except Perl, it would make matters worse.
My test is: get three experts in the field of application of the patent, have them read the title of the patent. If any of them guesses the method employed in the patent, send the application to the bin.
On a more serious note, patents shouldn't be checked for "obviousness", they should be checked for ingenuity instead.
They mention that in the article: drivers apparently ignore an average of 70% of the signs, their point is that the presence and ignoring of these signs make driving unsafe because of the confusion that ensues.
So instead of trying to coerce everyone into making the plan works, they let each do their plan. And apparently, it works wonders in Drachten.
As a matter of fact, no, they were not capitalists, since they believed they had ruling moral authority that bypassed private ownership of production goods. Much like Communists and socialists.
can somebody "debunk" the results from the EPICA ice cores? You know, the ones that record CO2 levels for at least the past 650 kYears, and conclude that current CO2 levels are nearly 2 times higher than they have ever been over the last 8 ice ages?
OK, but how do the current CO2 levels compare with the hot periods of the past (instead of ice ages, since we are not currently in an ice age but rather a hot period) ?
You forgot to mention that water vapour has 80 times the greenhouse effect of CO2.
The last really big dip in temperature happened just after the
Black Death when approx. one third of humanity died.
Liar.
The Black Death killed one fourth of european population. That's a FAR CRY from "a third of humanity".
And you think that'd stop the statemen from stealing your income, illegal or not ? In my country prostitutes have to pay taxes, even though prostitution is still illegal.
"Give to Ceaser what is Ceasers."
I do not think this means what you think it means. There might be his head and name on the coin, it does not make it his. All tax is theft, and is a sin.
Nonsense.
The only correct way to starve the government is to participate in Counter-economics. If you just stop using your money, the bank will use it in your place, whereas if you use your money outside of the scope of government, it won't profit from it.
According to this Figaro article, french living abroad have increased in number by 40.5% over the last decade, reching over 2 million. The proportion of engineers leaving the country to find a job has doubled. There are already over 300,000 french living in London, making it one of the largest french cities by comparison.
There is also this Time article dating from 2000 but which simply calls this emigration "the french exodus".
If you can read fench, then this french Senate report on emigration has a lot of numbers although it's from 1999. Its conclusions leave little doubt:
- french emigration has accelerated a lot
- this emigration concerns people with a high level of education, the number of french studying abroad has doubled in a decade
- the number of french fleeing the ISF (taxation of high net worth) has increased dramatically though it only concerns a small fraction of this emigration
- the number of french people staying abroad instead of coming back has tripled over the 16 years the study spans
In spite of this, though, there isn't the feeling of distrust that exists in the U.S. with regards to the government.
For the French, the government is THEM, and everyone gets up and shouts when there is something they don't like
Surely you must be living in a parallel-universe France, instead of the one I've been living in for a quarter century. Defiance regarding the state is rampant, there are whole cities out of reach of the police power, people distrust the government with a passion. In fact being critical of the executive powers is the national sport here. Yet there is a constant obsession with politics, which I think is symptomatic of a country fast sinking into fascism (be it of the collectivist or corporatist kind), where people are paralysed into believing salvation can only come from the very same people they loathe and curse at everyday. It's simply not healthy at all, it's like a pervasive mental disease that permeates everything, from friendships to work relations and even down to simple shopping interactions.
And there also is a fact that anyone considering moving to France should consider: french people are emigrating fast, at a rate of 100,000 to 200,000 each year, and it has been going like this for years already (2+ million people left the country, compare this with Cuba). This is the most massive exodus this country has ever known since the French Revolution ! There are reasons behind this continuous stream of people, reasons for fleeing this country.
I wouldn't trade that in for a higher salary unless I actually needed that money.
Wow, way to miss the point !
What is making the GP cringe is that (s)he has no choice of whether working more or earning more, no say in how things like health, job, leisure and such are prioritized at all, no freedom in conducting life.
Welfare - L$ supplemental income for people who can't script well enough to support themselves.
You grossly misspelt "who can't script well enough to buy themselves digital, virtual luxuries." AFAIK your avatar needs not eat.
Tax is theft, always has been, always will be.
And before someone says some stupid shit about all tokamaks are going away for fusion research because z-pinches generate such hot plasmas...
Oh, well, tokamaks are going away, but not because of z-pinch being more reliable, simpler and cheaper for initiating fusion reactions, no, it's because tokamaks cannot sustain fusion reactions for more than seconds because of the intense cooling caused by braking radiation of heavy ions ripped off their inner walls.
Since you say you're involved with the ITER project, can I ask one thing that I have never seen answered about it ? Here: how do the ITER people plan to fight the intense Bremsstrahlung cooling of the plasma due to heavy ions being ripped off the walls of the reactor ? AFAIK this cooling makes sustainable fusion in a Tokamak impossible.
I, for one, would not be surprised at all if the test was entirely bogus, in the sense that it did not use the EAST reactor, or DT fusion, or happened at all the way they said it has. There's also a good chance they beat ITER to sustainable fusion, and not using magnetic confinement madness.
Fast-rewind back to last year, and this announcement of Sandia, and report by Haines, that the pinch machine was reliably making plasmas at billions of degrees.
Around the same date as when the experiments were going on, the congress votes billions of dollars of funding for a project to replace existing nuclear warheads with "safer" ones. Hu-uh. I've heard more than one rumor of the Sandia guys placing a Li-H target in the machine for a free test while they were verifying their results. Wanna bet they had confirmation of fusion, just like last time ?
Starting to connect dots already ? How do you make an H bomb go boom ? With an A bomb that initiates a Li-H fusion. That means having to refine Uranium, which is extremely tedious and costly, and highly visible, having a lower power limit of 300 KT, and leaving radioactive dirt behind every explosion. With a Z-pinch detonator, there's no lower power limit, you can have H bombs of any size, leaving no radioactive dirt, and you don't need fancy material that fall under international scrutiny. The billions of degrees it reaches means it can initiate Li-H fusion, or B11-H fusion, which can also be used for power generation much more safely than currently envisioned methods, for example by feeding a Li-H ions spike into the steel plasma, using MHD for controlling the input, and for generating power on the output.
The Chinese and Russians have been building such Z-pinch fusion igniters since the original Sandia announcement, and so have the US, AFAIK. It shouldn't take very long before the first traces of all this start to emerge, until official confirmations.
Microsoft's monopoly is fighting against itself: newer versions of Windows are finding themselves to be in the "striving competition" position, trying to steal marketshare from older versions. This phenomenon can only amplify with Microsoft's inability to innovate. This is the end of the monopoly.