Re:I hope the movie does not influence the game.
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Eidos Picks Up Conan MMOG
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If Conan was Howard's only character that had a large number of stories, or Howard only wrote sword and sorcery fiction, or Howard was a complete recluse, or Howard never tried to publish his stories but only recorded them, I would give some credence to the idea he believed Conan himself actually told the stories. As it is, I think at best it's an urban legend, at worst it's a marketing campaign Howard or someone else invented to boost sales.
It's a description of a certain kind of feeling. You sit in front of your computer (or typewriter or pen and paper) and the story and characters in your mind are so strong that the text seems to write itself. You can see the events you write flash in front of your eyes. You can feel the characters you write about standing behind you, telling their story. Of course you know they aren't really there, but it sure feels like they were. And when it feels like that to the writer, it feels like that to the reader too. That's why Howard's Conan is so popular.
It's the literature equivalent of the trance some coders can fall to, and it's the difference between those characters that can endure the test of time and those that can't: the enduring characters are those their writers imbued with a soul, so that they feel real to the writer and reader alike. A character that doesn't seem to talk to its writer is going to be little more than a puppet on strings; while you can still make very nice string puppet shows, the puppet cannot hold a candle to a real human, imagined or otherwise. Unless the puppet happens to be a Muppet, but then again, Muppets were arguable imbued by souls by their creator...
This got a bit metaphysical, but the point is that Howard was really quite serious and quite correct: Conan spoke to him. That is where the stories intensity and power comes from.
Why not ? Considering Greek tales about Zeus it would actually make a lot of sense for a few million demigods to be running around... But they'll still have to start by slaying or being slain by rats or chickens.
What do you mean "long ago"? If the light hasn't reached us yet then it's not in our past light cone and therefore it's not in our past.
Suppose we send a signal towards the supernova as soon as we see it explode. Suppose that there is an observer, a really though one, staying close to the supernova as it goes off, who measures the time difference between the supernova explosion and our signal. Suppose that, as soon as he receives our signal, he sends another signal, with this data encoded, towards us. Suppose also, for simplicity, that all observers are at rest relative to each other and the supernova (they aren't really - stars move relative to each other - but that movement is too slow to cause much problems for our experiment).
Now, since light travels at a constant speed, the observer got our signal halfway between us sending it and us receiving the reply. Since both we and him are at rest relative to each other and supernova, we don't get any time dilation, and can use simple math to calculate when the nova exploded. Simply substract the time difference told to us by the other observer from the midpoint between us sending him the signal and receiving a reply. We'll arrive at a point in time somewhere before we observed the nova; whether that point is in the "distant" past or "near" past is a value judgement.
Another way of looking at this is simply understanding that light moves at a finite speed; so, if we observe the light from a distant event, that light was emitted at the moment of the event and took a nonzero time to reach us, and so the event must have happened at a nonzero time in the past.
Haven't you ever heard: the further you look in space, the further back you look in time ?
Or just read the page you linked to. It talks about causal past and future. It doesn't claim that events that we cannot yet observe due to the limited speed of light haven't yet happened, only that we can't be affected by them yet - which is pretty self-obvious, if you think about it a bit.
The Sun could have blown up 4 minutes ago, but we wouldn't know for another 4. It still blew up 4 minutes ago, it simply takes another 4 until this can be observed by us. Of course it's unlikely that the Sun would blow up suddenly, but - hey, what's that ligNO CARRIER.
What do they teach in relativity class these days?
Not enough, apparently. Which is a great pity, since relativity deals with the basic structure of time and space and the very nature of reality itself. It's utterly fascinating stuff, completely different from endlessly memorizing formulas and using them to calculate how much tension some wire has - that's fine for engineers, but relativity is the "actually, you can build a time machine and warp drive" theory and quantum mechanics are the dreams stuff is made of; that is where physics education should start, to give the student the motivation to go through the grind, knowing where the basics will lead.
Since the engine wastes some energy per second, you should minimize the seconds in order to minimize the total waste. This was my original argument. But of course this particular optimization tip only holds for linear or better energy => force curves; an engine that requires four times the energy to output two times the force is quickly going to reduce energy waste from gravity into amounting to a rounding error.
I didn't think of it until after I'd posted, but that energy curve - F = sqr(E) - is the best possible for a rocket engine when reaction mass is kept invariable.
The impulse given by the engine is m * v, so given an invariable ejected reaction mass, you need to double the speed it is ejected at to double the impulse. However, the kinetic energy of the reaction mass (and therefore the absolute minimum energy that needs to be inputted into it to get it to that speed) is m * v * v, so in order to double the speed of the reaction mass, you need to quadruple the energy used to accelerate it.
So I guess a rocket really does have a finite optimum acceleration to reach orbit, above of which the energy required starts growing again, so my original argument was wrong:(.
Yes, there seems to be a bit of a confusion here:).
If you have a fully supporting ladder, you're kinda getting "infinite" force (or as much as the structure can hold) for free. But it isn't moving upwards, hence there is no way, so the energy (product of force and way) is zero.
Of course, and I'm not arguing against this. I'm simply trying to say that this is completely useless when you're lifting something. In order to do that, you must first feed enough energy to your engine to overcome gravity (at which point the engine is supporting the weight entirely, and the ladder is not transmitting any force to the weight), and only the energy above this actually goes towards accelerating the thing upwards.
So, any engine working against gravity is going to waste some of the force it generates, and since it takes energy for an engine (as opposed to, say, a ladder) to generate force, there's some energy wasted each second the engine is operating - and the way to minimize this waste is to minimize the time the engine is working.
Consider an anology: You can hold a carrier bag on an outstretched arm. By doing so, you will natice that you are consuming energy. Your muscles need energy to help your body withstand the gravitational force. But it is essentially all wasted in heat.
You can however place it on a table and rest. The bag is still being suspended in it's hight, and the system isn't using any energy.
But that won't help you any when you are trying to lift the bag from the table. If you lift straight up, then just before the bag lifts, all of its weight is supported by your arm and none by the table. In other words, the table is only usefull when you're not lifting the bag - as soon as it's moving upwards, the table is not exerting any force whatsoever at the bag.
It's just a disadvantage of the system.
I'm trying to say that it is a disadvantage of every imaginable system that's actually capable of lifting anything.
But what you have to do is differntiate between force and energy. It's a common mistake to want to directly relate them, but you can for example have infinite force without any energy.
True. My whole argument rests on two assumptions:
An engine is a device that outputs force as a function of energy per time inputted into it (F=f(E/t).
Increasing the force output of an engine demands increasing the energy input (F2 > F1 => E2 > E1).
As long as these two hold, the engine in question will always waste a certain amount of energy per second when fighting against Earth's gravity since the engine has to output more force to the the same acceleration upwards than if there were no gravity since some of the force is nullified by Earth's gravity (sum of forces = engine's output - Earth's gravity). It's just vector math:).
Since the engine wastes some energy per second, you should minimize the seconds in order to minimize the total waste. This was my original argument. But of course this particular optimization tip only holds for linear or better energy => force curves; an engine that requires four times the energy to output two times the force is quickly going to reduce energy waste from gravity into amounting to a rounding error.
I think the mission should have prioritized irrefutable proof of their success. They could've accomplished this by leaving something behind that was visible from earth. Perhaps a larger flag or a beacon.
If you have a secure suspension in a space, you don't need energy to withstand the effect of gravity. If you hang something on a string from the ceiling, the object doesn't fall, and you're not using any energy to keep it in that state.
But neither is the object going to rise until the engine is generating a strong enough force to overcome gravity. There's a certain minimum current that must be fed to the engine before it starts lifting the object, and only the part of the current above this minimal current is actually converted into usefull work. This is true even if the lift has a brake (as most lifts do) to stop it from falling if such current is not supplied.
Think about when you're pumping air into a bicycle wheel. You have to use force to make the air flow inside the wheel, and the minimum force needed grows the higher the pressure in the tire. This is true regardless of the fact that most bicycle wheels have an air-filling mechanism that only lets air in, not out.
Or just hang a weight by a rope, as you suggested. Then try to rise it. You have to push every bit as hard as you would without the rope. Only the force that exceeds the force gravity causes to the weight actually serves to accelerate it; any below that is wasted, regardless of suspension.
I'm not arguing that suspending something requires energy; that is clearly not true, since the chair I'm sitting right now can keep me from falling to the door despite not having a built-in engine:). But I am arguing that the more Newtonseconds a given engine has to output, the more energy it needs; and, if we assume that the same delta-V for the same mass always needs the same amount of Newtonseconds, and that the delta-V required to gain a certain orbit is independent of the path taken to that orbit, then it is easy to show that the engine has to output more Newtonseconds the longer it needs to be fighting gravity, since fighting gravity takes a certain amount of Newtonseconds each second, and only output amount exceeding this goes towards delta-V; and the longer the ship fights gravity, the more Newtonseconds are extended towards that, and since it takes we need the same amount for delta-V, the amount grows.
In other words, the impulse the engine needs to give is: Delta-V * ships mass + Earth's gravity acceleration (which we can assume doesn't weaken significantly when going to LEO) * ships mass * time spent accelerating against Earth's gravity (as opposed to accelerating horizontally). And the higher the total impulse, the higher the fuel consumption.
Of course this is an oversimplification - the real rocket rises straight up and then starts to turn sideways and accelerate more and more horizontally, so you'd need to break the acceleration into components to calculate the total impulse needed in each possible path; but the basic idea stays the same: fighting gravity is expensive in terms of fuel.
To be pedantic, there are no inventions, only discoveries. Any machine you could possibly build works according to the laws of physics, and is therefore an inherent consequence of those laws; it is the inherent property of the universe itself that matter and energy arranged in certain patterns produce certain result. You didn't invent that pattern, you simply discovered it.
Wheel isn't an invention, since it is an inherent property of the universe that round objects roll easily, and someone only discovered that property. Fire isn't an invention, since it is an inherent property of the universe that certain substances begin releasing heat when heated together, and someone simply discovered that property. Etc ad nauseaum.
So, since there are no inventions, there naturally cannot be any inventions originating from India or anywhere else for that matter, making the original question meaningless. Happy now ?
Airplane design is all about the lifting capability of a wing moving in the atmosphere; this effect was never observed (or researched) on a sailing ship just because a ship is the last place in the world you'd like to do such an experiment on.
Actually, the sails of a ship that's travelling across or onto a wind are essentially wings. They are simply angled so that the lift that they generate has a positive component vector that points to the bow of the ship. The ship has such a shape that it moves more easily forward than sideways, so that component becomes dominant in ships movement, even if it is not the strongest of the force vectors affecting the ship.
Personally, I don't really care if we all get smacked disastrously by some rogue asteroid and don't have a human legacy space colony to carry on the tradition.
But I care very much that we, as a species, have several colonized terraformed worlds to escape to and that I, as a person, have a spaceship that can take me there, thus keeping this mortal coil of my from living up to the adjective for a while longer.
The romantic notions of "reaching for the stars" and populating other extraterrestrial worlds via space travel are pipe dreams from sci-fi enthusiasts who yearn for a better reality.
It is a sad day when "who yearn for a better reality" is a description used as an insult.
According to Wikipedia, the number zero, negative numbers and binary and decimal number systems are Indian inventions. You might have heard of them sometimes;).
According to this page, sugar (extracting it from sugarcane, to be exact) and cotton were also invented (found ?) in India.
Not that I don't like a good curry. And I love Basmati rice.
With laser-based ion thrusters, the mass of rocket does not change (noticably), so there is no advantage to buring off the fuel earier. In that case, so long as the rocket is going up, it does not matter at what speed:)
Yes, it does. You need to burn a certain amount of fuel each second just to counter the effects of gravity. This means that the longer you spend going to orbit, the more fuel you waste on fighting gravity. Basically, the rocket is using fuel constantly just to keep from falling back to Earth; the longer it takes to gain orbit, the more fuel is wasted.
Suppose you had a space elevator with a perfect electric engine, 100% efficient, and the system had no friction whatsoever. In order to lift the carriage, you feed current to the engine. Since Earth's gravity is dragging the carriage downwards, you need to feed a certain amount of current just to keep it from falling; only the power over this actually lifts the carriage. Since the system is perfect, the energy needed to lift the carriage to orbital height is potential energy difference of the carriage between starting height and ending height plus the current that was used just to keep the carriage from falling. The potential energy difference does not depend on how long the journey took, but the anti-falling energy does - the longer you take, the more energy you end up using.
So any spacecraft rising perpendicular to a gravity field (as opposed to moving from one orbit to another by changing orbital speed) is better off reaching orbit as fast as possible, from the energy efficiency standpoint.
In an airless world, such as the Moon, you could solve the problem by building a maglev track circling the equator, and then accelerating the vessel into orbital speed on the track, after which it could rise its orbit with perfect energy efficiency; but on Earth atmospheric drag makes this impossible.
What was the point of Columbus sailing to the new world? To walk on land similar to the land that he left behind?
To find a quicker sea route to China and other eastern countries to help trade with them. Finding America was a completely unintended and unanticipated side effect.
Oh Lord, he we go again... Anytime there is a space story on/. that involves tax payer cash we ALWAYS get the "can't we spend this money on the poor" trolls out.
I find the "Private industry does it so much better" and "The poor deserve to starve to death because they are not rich" trolls more annoying, but maybe that's just me.
Throwing cash at the poor is NOT a solution. We've been doing it for years and years but still that wealth gap continues to grow. Do you want for us to just feed the poor money until they're rich? They already have tons of opportunity that isn't being used. It's a problem of human nature and society, not available resources. Giving more money to the poor is not going to solve this problem, motivating people to elevate themselves will.
It is almost impossible to get rid of the poor, for the simple reason that being poor means having significantly less money than the average (or median or whatever statistical value you consider most important). The only way to avoid this would be to ensure that everyone has the exact same amount of money regardless of occupation, but I doubt many would go along with it.
So no, poverty is not a solvable problem. However, what can be solved are the effects of poverty on the poor individual, namely:
Starving to death because you can't afford food.
Dying of treatable diseases because you can't afford treatment and are weak from lack of food.
Not being able to improve your situation because you can't afford education.
Throwing money at the poor won't stop them from being poor, but it will stop them from starving to death and it will allow any talented persons amongst them to improve their lot and contribute to society.
Apart from this, welfare allows even the poor to have a reasonably comfortable life. Yes, comfortable. Why not ? The main factor that contributes to your comfort is the thousands of years worth of technological and social progress that brought to you the computer you're using to read this very message, not to mention medicine, agriculture, mass production, etc. You did nothing to earn any of it, since it happened long before you were even born. Yet you benefit from it anyway, despite having not earned it - so why shouldn't the poor benefit from it as well ?
That's something I've noticed amongst opponents of welfare: they state that the poor aren't entitled to things they haven't earned, and then they go back to enjoying the fruits of all those thousands of years of progress they did nothing to earn. Pretty bloody hypocritical, that.
So tell me, with the trillions we've given to the poor versus the billions spent via NASA which has had a better return? Life long welfare victims breeding more welfare victims versus Tang?
I find your choice of words fascinating. Someone is kept from starving to death, and this makes him a victim ?
I choose Tang.
A soft drink is more important to you than your fellow human beings ? And people wonder why atrocities keep on happening...
I imagine even small towns would have a designated delivery port where lunar cargo could be dropped with the accuracy of a smart-bomb... cheaper and faster than a cargo ship from China.
So, what you're saying is that a moonbase allows you to smart-bomb every city on Earth cheaply ? That's not the Moon, that's the Death Star !
Even assuming a person's computer is 100% protected, someone could still piggyback on their connection to do various illegal things involving the internet, as well as things that will get the **AA to drag YOU to court.
But... If I let anyone use my access point, with no discrimination whatsoever, am I not a common carrier and thus not responsible for their actions ? And if not, then what additional steps would that require ?
Is that what this is really about - make sure that everyone uses the Internet from some traceable IP ? And, of course, it effectively kills mesh networking, or at least makes it much harder to set up and a mesh, by the virtue of avoiding backbones, would make it a lot harder for the Government to spy on you...
Or they could always run p2p apps full blast and slow your connection to a crawl.
You could, of course, use traffick shaping to give your own priority and only let them use what's left.
This is a stupid analogy. Substitute the word "criminals" for terrorists and you have a similar argument.
Yes. You do. That's my point. Your argument is stupid. It essentially justifies terrorism. In fact Hezbollah could use it to justify any further terror strikes.
No one's forcing anyone to be a terrorist or a criminal. Hezbollah wants to destroy the Israelis just because they exist.
Since I don't belong to Hezbollah, I don't know their motives in depth. I won't take your word for them, since you are rather obviously biased. They don't matter, either, since the subject here is your claim that it's okay to kill civilians.
The problem with Hezbollah isn't that Israel doesn't like them or the Lebanese people; it's that Hezbollah has pledged to destroy Israel, and continually commits acts towards that goal. If someone's life goal is to kill you, the only thing you can do to protect yourself is to kill them first.
Please reread my comment. I didn't comment on killing Hezbollah fighters, I commented on your claim that it's acceptable to kill civilians. I simply fail to see why randomly killing noncombatants - commonly known as terrorism - suddenly becomes acceptable when it's a government of some country doing it.
Don't be an idiot. Israel never said god was on their side, and their moves are not religiously motivated like Hezbollah's.
Don't be ignorant. The whole reason Israel was founded where it was is that the judes believe it's their Promised Land, given to them by God. Whether the Israel government actually states this out loud is irrelevant; it's the reason why the country is where it is, and why so many judes have migrated there.
It's really simple: Hezbollah simply won't leave them alone, so they're taking preemptive action to destroy them. Is this really that hard for you to understand?
Well, Israel cannot destroy Hezbollah, and even if it could, another organization would rise in its place. Only thing the bombardment is doing is ensuring that the local terror organizations have no shortage of people who have lost their loved ones to Israeli strikes and are willing to take revenge, even if it kills them. And when they do, Israel will then avenge those strikes, and the cycle will continue. Neither side is capable of destroying the other and winning the conflict, so it goes on as long as there's people on either side willing to shed blood - theirs or anyone elses - for their cause.
Is this really that hard for you to understand ?
As for atrocities, it's Hezbollah that is actively targetting civilians. Israel is targetting Hezbollah only. The problem is that Hezbollah is integrated with the civilian population, so it's impossible to not have any collateral damage.
I'm sure it will warm the cold dead hearts of the civilians killed as collateral damage to know that Israel had no ill will towards them and was actually targeting someone who happened to live in the same city. But how do you plan on explaining it to them - corpses have some notable problems in understanding speech, on the account of having no functional neurons ?
But I guess you're one of the ones who thinks Israel should just give up and die.
No, I'm one of those who think that murdering civilians is wrong, whether you are Hezbollah or the Army of Israel.
Does IBM share it's legal strategies with it's sysadmins?
Sure, after all the Evil Overlord list says: "I will hire one hopelessly stupid and incompetent lieutenant, but make sure that he is full of misinformation when I send him to capture the hero."
Now, while SCO certainly leaves a lot to be desired for their moral character, they do take on far greater odds than your average dragonslayer armed with a toothpick -1, so I guess they're close enough. Or would this particular lieutenant be here to misinform Slashdot ?-)
Copyright law is already about 100 years longer than what most people would consider a reasonable "limited time". DRM attempts to remove the monopoly limit entirely.
Copyright lasts as long as Disney does. Not 10 years, not 100 years, not 1000 years. It gets extended each time Mickey Mouse comes close to falling to public domain. Face it: copyright term is infinite.
I don't blame the companies. I have a well known name in the type of software I put out and I've generally put out my works at lower than the 'professional' packages -- without protection. Who's work do I find on eBay? Mine or the big guy? I'm more likely to get ripped than the big guy because I only charged $30 for my stuff where the other guy is selling theirs for $130 -- I've heard pirates tell me that its not like its that big of a deal because its not 'professional' software (and the only difference is the price).
Are you related to the troll who always posts here complaining how his CD store is doing so badly because of piracy ? Is that why you don't reveal your "well known name" ?
If it weren't for the whole crowd screaming Software Piracy Is Not Theft,
It isn't. It's copyright infringement. They have nothing common, aside from being both illegal.
but until a maturity comes over software users, I'm totally pro-DRM.
Contrary to what you may think, "maturity" does not mean conforming to your or copyright cartels viewpoint.
A failed market is one that is so inefficient it's no longer doing what it's supposed to do.
Low prices are the mark of an efficient, not inefficient, market. A market where you can get anything you want for free is 100% efficient and a complete success.
Copyright and DRM are nasty hacks around the limitations of the market,
Copyright is a legalized monopoly, where only a certain person is entitled to produce something. It is not a hack to make the market work, it is a hack to keep the market from working, which exists since certain individuals can get more money by enforcing artificial and arbitrary restrictions on the free flow of information and have bribed various governmental entities to pass laws on their favor and against the best interests of the populace.
and they improve its efficiency enough that people can be full time musicians/authors/movie-directors/game-developers/ whatever.
If I build a house, I'm paid for it once. If I record a song, I'm paid for it again and again and again.
There were authors before copyright existed. They had patrons who paid them to write or compose or whatever, since the author was good enough that the patrons wanted to get more of his works. But I guess you have to actually be good at what you do to get people to pay in advance, which explains why the current musicians would starve without copyright, as they claim.
The so-called "hackers" who want to eliminate DRM for philosophical reasons would do better to engage in some economic R&D. If there was something like the market but which worked in the presence of infinite supply, nobody would care about DRM. It wouldn't be worth the (considerable) cost, effort and risk. But so far nobody figured out a better way to pay for content creation than a hacked-up market.
Suppose you remove copyright laws. Suppose that this leads to no one or almost no one paying for content anymore - it it doesn't lead to this, then it has no effect. What happens ?
Well, the commercially produced stuff stops being produced, of course. There's still the amateur stuff that people make for fame or for fun. Is that enough to satisfy the demand for new content ?
If it is, then fine - the demand is satisfied. The writers and such who aren't good enough to get people to pay them to write more or continue their series are simply going to get another job.
If it isn't, then again fine - there's demand, so people will start filling it. A director might get funding for a new movie from prepayments (which works fine to filter out bad directors), from either the viewers or from Wal-Mart which figures that it needs something to fill the DVD isle - what, did you think that people would stop buying movies in convenient no-hassle no-wait format just because they could get the same stuff for free by searching the Net ? Of course you'd need to start with cheap movies to build a reputation - amateur movie scene come to mind.
So, as I see it, content creation market would work just fine, in fact better than it does now, without copyright. People create from the joy of creation, and for fame; if that's not enough to satisfy the demand, then there are the pre-payment, patronage and voluntary donation systems that work fine without copyright. And if it is enough to satisfy the demand, then all copyright ever did was help parasites to fleece the public.
Either way, abolishing the copyright would make the world a better place.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a description of a certain kind of feeling. You sit in front of your computer (or typewriter or pen and paper) and the story and characters in your mind are so strong that the text seems to write itself. You can see the events you write flash in front of your eyes. You can feel the characters you write about standing behind you, telling their story. Of course you know they aren't really there, but it sure feels like they were. And when it feels like that to the writer, it feels like that to the reader too. That's why Howard's Conan is so popular.
It's the literature equivalent of the trance some coders can fall to, and it's the difference between those characters that can endure the test of time and those that can't: the enduring characters are those their writers imbued with a soul, so that they feel real to the writer and reader alike. A character that doesn't seem to talk to its writer is going to be little more than a puppet on strings; while you can still make very nice string puppet shows, the puppet cannot hold a candle to a real human, imagined or otherwise. Unless the puppet happens to be a Muppet, but then again, Muppets were arguable imbued by souls by their creator...
This got a bit metaphysical, but the point is that Howard was really quite serious and quite correct: Conan spoke to him. That is where the stories intensity and power comes from.
Why not ? Considering Greek tales about Zeus it would actually make a lot of sense for a few million demigods to be running around... But they'll still have to start by slaying or being slain by rats or chickens.
In my experience, the non-native English speakers usually have better grammar and spelling than native ones, because they pay more attention to them.
Consider the difference between these two true statements about your post:
Number 1 is flamebait, number 2 is not. Both are also true. Flamebait is about not being civil, not about being wrong.
Suppose we send a signal towards the supernova as soon as we see it explode. Suppose that there is an observer, a really though one, staying close to the supernova as it goes off, who measures the time difference between the supernova explosion and our signal. Suppose that, as soon as he receives our signal, he sends another signal, with this data encoded, towards us. Suppose also, for simplicity, that all observers are at rest relative to each other and the supernova (they aren't really - stars move relative to each other - but that movement is too slow to cause much problems for our experiment).
Now, since light travels at a constant speed, the observer got our signal halfway between us sending it and us receiving the reply. Since both we and him are at rest relative to each other and supernova, we don't get any time dilation, and can use simple math to calculate when the nova exploded. Simply substract the time difference told to us by the other observer from the midpoint between us sending him the signal and receiving a reply. We'll arrive at a point in time somewhere before we observed the nova; whether that point is in the "distant" past or "near" past is a value judgement.
Another way of looking at this is simply understanding that light moves at a finite speed; so, if we observe the light from a distant event, that light was emitted at the moment of the event and took a nonzero time to reach us, and so the event must have happened at a nonzero time in the past.
Haven't you ever heard: the further you look in space, the further back you look in time ?
Or just read the page you linked to. It talks about causal past and future. It doesn't claim that events that we cannot yet observe due to the limited speed of light haven't yet happened, only that we can't be affected by them yet - which is pretty self-obvious, if you think about it a bit.
The Sun could have blown up 4 minutes ago, but we wouldn't know for another 4. It still blew up 4 minutes ago, it simply takes another 4 until this can be observed by us. Of course it's unlikely that the Sun would blow up suddenly, but - hey, what's that ligNO CARRIER.
Not enough, apparently. Which is a great pity, since relativity deals with the basic structure of time and space and the very nature of reality itself. It's utterly fascinating stuff, completely different from endlessly memorizing formulas and using them to calculate how much tension some wire has - that's fine for engineers, but relativity is the "actually, you can build a time machine and warp drive" theory and quantum mechanics are the dreams stuff is made of; that is where physics education should start, to give the student the motivation to go through the grind, knowing where the basics will lead.
I didn't think of it until after I'd posted, but that energy curve - F = sqr(E) - is the best possible for a rocket engine when reaction mass is kept invariable.
The impulse given by the engine is m * v, so given an invariable ejected reaction mass, you need to double the speed it is ejected at to double the impulse. However, the kinetic energy of the reaction mass (and therefore the absolute minimum energy that needs to be inputted into it to get it to that speed) is m * v * v, so in order to double the speed of the reaction mass, you need to quadruple the energy used to accelerate it.
So I guess a rocket really does have a finite optimum acceleration to reach orbit, above of which the energy required starts growing again, so my original argument was wrong :(.
Yes, there seems to be a bit of a confusion here :).
Of course, and I'm not arguing against this. I'm simply trying to say that this is completely useless when you're lifting something. In order to do that, you must first feed enough energy to your engine to overcome gravity (at which point the engine is supporting the weight entirely, and the ladder is not transmitting any force to the weight), and only the energy above this actually goes towards accelerating the thing upwards.
So, any engine working against gravity is going to waste some of the force it generates, and since it takes energy for an engine (as opposed to, say, a ladder) to generate force, there's some energy wasted each second the engine is operating - and the way to minimize this waste is to minimize the time the engine is working.
But that won't help you any when you are trying to lift the bag from the table. If you lift straight up, then just before the bag lifts, all of its weight is supported by your arm and none by the table. In other words, the table is only usefull when you're not lifting the bag - as soon as it's moving upwards, the table is not exerting any force whatsoever at the bag.
I'm trying to say that it is a disadvantage of every imaginable system that's actually capable of lifting anything.
True. My whole argument rests on two assumptions:
As long as these two hold, the engine in question will always waste a certain amount of energy per second when fighting against Earth's gravity since the engine has to output more force to the the same acceleration upwards than if there were no gravity since some of the force is nullified by Earth's gravity (sum of forces = engine's output - Earth's gravity). It's just vector math :).
Since the engine wastes some energy per second, you should minimize the seconds in order to minimize the total waste. This was my original argument. But of course this particular optimization tip only holds for linear or better energy => force curves; an engine that requires four times the energy to output two times the force is quickly going to reduce energy waste from gravity into amounting to a rounding error.
They did.
But neither is the object going to rise until the engine is generating a strong enough force to overcome gravity. There's a certain minimum current that must be fed to the engine before it starts lifting the object, and only the part of the current above this minimal current is actually converted into usefull work. This is true even if the lift has a brake (as most lifts do) to stop it from falling if such current is not supplied.
Think about when you're pumping air into a bicycle wheel. You have to use force to make the air flow inside the wheel, and the minimum force needed grows the higher the pressure in the tire. This is true regardless of the fact that most bicycle wheels have an air-filling mechanism that only lets air in, not out.
Or just hang a weight by a rope, as you suggested. Then try to rise it. You have to push every bit as hard as you would without the rope. Only the force that exceeds the force gravity causes to the weight actually serves to accelerate it; any below that is wasted, regardless of suspension.
I'm not arguing that suspending something requires energy; that is clearly not true, since the chair I'm sitting right now can keep me from falling to the door despite not having a built-in engine :). But I am arguing that the more Newtonseconds a given engine has to output, the more energy it needs; and, if we assume that the same delta-V for the same mass always needs the same amount of Newtonseconds, and that the delta-V required to gain a certain orbit is independent of the path taken to that orbit, then it is easy to show that the engine has to output more Newtonseconds the longer it needs to be fighting gravity, since fighting gravity takes a certain amount of Newtonseconds each second, and only output amount exceeding this goes towards delta-V; and the longer the ship fights gravity, the more Newtonseconds are extended towards that, and since it takes we need the same amount for delta-V, the amount grows.
In other words, the impulse the engine needs to give is: Delta-V * ships mass + Earth's gravity acceleration (which we can assume doesn't weaken significantly when going to LEO) * ships mass * time spent accelerating against Earth's gravity (as opposed to accelerating horizontally). And the higher the total impulse, the higher the fuel consumption.
Of course this is an oversimplification - the real rocket rises straight up and then starts to turn sideways and accelerate more and more horizontally, so you'd need to break the acceleration into components to calculate the total impulse needed in each possible path; but the basic idea stays the same: fighting gravity is expensive in terms of fuel.
To be pedantic, there are no inventions, only discoveries. Any machine you could possibly build works according to the laws of physics, and is therefore an inherent consequence of those laws; it is the inherent property of the universe itself that matter and energy arranged in certain patterns produce certain result. You didn't invent that pattern, you simply discovered it.
Wheel isn't an invention, since it is an inherent property of the universe that round objects roll easily, and someone only discovered that property. Fire isn't an invention, since it is an inherent property of the universe that certain substances begin releasing heat when heated together, and someone simply discovered that property. Etc ad nauseaum.
So, since there are no inventions, there naturally cannot be any inventions originating from India or anywhere else for that matter, making the original question meaningless. Happy now ?
Actually, the sails of a ship that's travelling across or onto a wind are essentially wings. They are simply angled so that the lift that they generate has a positive component vector that points to the bow of the ship. The ship has such a shape that it moves more easily forward than sideways, so that component becomes dominant in ships movement, even if it is not the strongest of the force vectors affecting the ship.
But I care very much that we, as a species, have several colonized terraformed worlds to escape to and that I, as a person, have a spaceship that can take me there, thus keeping this mortal coil of my from living up to the adjective for a while longer.
It is a sad day when "who yearn for a better reality" is a description used as an insult.
According to Wikipedia, the number zero, negative numbers and binary and decimal number systems are Indian inventions. You might have heard of them sometimes ;).
According to this page, sugar (extracting it from sugarcane, to be exact) and cotton were also invented (found ?) in India.
Indeed.
Yes, it does. You need to burn a certain amount of fuel each second just to counter the effects of gravity. This means that the longer you spend going to orbit, the more fuel you waste on fighting gravity. Basically, the rocket is using fuel constantly just to keep from falling back to Earth; the longer it takes to gain orbit, the more fuel is wasted.
Suppose you had a space elevator with a perfect electric engine, 100% efficient, and the system had no friction whatsoever. In order to lift the carriage, you feed current to the engine. Since Earth's gravity is dragging the carriage downwards, you need to feed a certain amount of current just to keep it from falling; only the power over this actually lifts the carriage. Since the system is perfect, the energy needed to lift the carriage to orbital height is potential energy difference of the carriage between starting height and ending height plus the current that was used just to keep the carriage from falling. The potential energy difference does not depend on how long the journey took, but the anti-falling energy does - the longer you take, the more energy you end up using.
So any spacecraft rising perpendicular to a gravity field (as opposed to moving from one orbit to another by changing orbital speed) is better off reaching orbit as fast as possible, from the energy efficiency standpoint.
In an airless world, such as the Moon, you could solve the problem by building a maglev track circling the equator, and then accelerating the vessel into orbital speed on the track, after which it could rise its orbit with perfect energy efficiency; but on Earth atmospheric drag makes this impossible.
Hey, if at first you don't succeed, claim that whatever you have already done was the goal in the first place and say "Mission accomplished".
To find a quicker sea route to China and other eastern countries to help trade with them. Finding America was a completely unintended and unanticipated side effect.
I find the "Private industry does it so much better" and "The poor deserve to starve to death because they are not rich" trolls more annoying, but maybe that's just me.
It is almost impossible to get rid of the poor, for the simple reason that being poor means having significantly less money than the average (or median or whatever statistical value you consider most important). The only way to avoid this would be to ensure that everyone has the exact same amount of money regardless of occupation, but I doubt many would go along with it.
So no, poverty is not a solvable problem. However, what can be solved are the effects of poverty on the poor individual, namely:
Throwing money at the poor won't stop them from being poor, but it will stop them from starving to death and it will allow any talented persons amongst them to improve their lot and contribute to society.
Apart from this, welfare allows even the poor to have a reasonably comfortable life. Yes, comfortable. Why not ? The main factor that contributes to your comfort is the thousands of years worth of technological and social progress that brought to you the computer you're using to read this very message, not to mention medicine, agriculture, mass production, etc. You did nothing to earn any of it, since it happened long before you were even born. Yet you benefit from it anyway, despite having not earned it - so why shouldn't the poor benefit from it as well ?
That's something I've noticed amongst opponents of welfare: they state that the poor aren't entitled to things they haven't earned, and then they go back to enjoying the fruits of all those thousands of years of progress they did nothing to earn. Pretty bloody hypocritical, that.
I find your choice of words fascinating. Someone is kept from starving to death, and this makes him a victim ?
A soft drink is more important to you than your fellow human beings ? And people wonder why atrocities keep on happening...
So, what you're saying is that a moonbase allows you to smart-bomb every city on Earth cheaply ? That's not the Moon, that's the Death Star !
But... If I let anyone use my access point, with no discrimination whatsoever, am I not a common carrier and thus not responsible for their actions ? And if not, then what additional steps would that require ?
Is that what this is really about - make sure that everyone uses the Internet from some traceable IP ? And, of course, it effectively kills mesh networking, or at least makes it much harder to set up and a mesh, by the virtue of avoiding backbones, would make it a lot harder for the Government to spy on you...
You could, of course, use traffick shaping to give your own priority and only let them use what's left.
Yes. You do. That's my point. Your argument is stupid. It essentially justifies terrorism. In fact Hezbollah could use it to justify any further terror strikes.
Since I don't belong to Hezbollah, I don't know their motives in depth. I won't take your word for them, since you are rather obviously biased. They don't matter, either, since the subject here is your claim that it's okay to kill civilians.
Please reread my comment. I didn't comment on killing Hezbollah fighters, I commented on your claim that it's acceptable to kill civilians. I simply fail to see why randomly killing noncombatants - commonly known as terrorism - suddenly becomes acceptable when it's a government of some country doing it.
Don't be ignorant. The whole reason Israel was founded where it was is that the judes believe it's their Promised Land, given to them by God. Whether the Israel government actually states this out loud is irrelevant; it's the reason why the country is where it is, and why so many judes have migrated there.
Well, Israel cannot destroy Hezbollah, and even if it could, another organization would rise in its place. Only thing the bombardment is doing is ensuring that the local terror organizations have no shortage of people who have lost their loved ones to Israeli strikes and are willing to take revenge, even if it kills them. And when they do, Israel will then avenge those strikes, and the cycle will continue. Neither side is capable of destroying the other and winning the conflict, so it goes on as long as there's people on either side willing to shed blood - theirs or anyone elses - for their cause.
Is this really that hard for you to understand ?
I'm sure it will warm the cold dead hearts of the civilians killed as collateral damage to know that Israel had no ill will towards them and was actually targeting someone who happened to live in the same city. But how do you plan on explaining it to them - corpses have some notable problems in understanding speech, on the account of having no functional neurons ?
No, I'm one of those who think that murdering civilians is wrong, whether you are Hezbollah or the Army of Israel.
Quake 2 Java uses OpenGL and runs fine on my 1GHz machine.
Sure, after all the Evil Overlord list says: "I will hire one hopelessly stupid and incompetent lieutenant, but make sure that he is full of misinformation when I send him to capture the hero."
Now, while SCO certainly leaves a lot to be desired for their moral character, they do take on far greater odds than your average dragonslayer armed with a toothpick -1, so I guess they're close enough. Or would this particular lieutenant be here to misinform Slashdot ?-)
Copyright lasts as long as Disney does. Not 10 years, not 100 years, not 1000 years. It gets extended each time Mickey Mouse comes close to falling to public domain. Face it: copyright term is infinite.
Are you related to the troll who always posts here complaining how his CD store is doing so badly because of piracy ? Is that why you don't reveal your "well known name" ?
It isn't. It's copyright infringement. They have nothing common, aside from being both illegal.
Contrary to what you may think, "maturity" does not mean conforming to your or copyright cartels viewpoint.
Low prices are the mark of an efficient, not inefficient, market. A market where you can get anything you want for free is 100% efficient and a complete success.
Copyright is a legalized monopoly, where only a certain person is entitled to produce something. It is not a hack to make the market work, it is a hack to keep the market from working, which exists since certain individuals can get more money by enforcing artificial and arbitrary restrictions on the free flow of information and have bribed various governmental entities to pass laws on their favor and against the best interests of the populace.
If I build a house, I'm paid for it once. If I record a song, I'm paid for it again and again and again.
There were authors before copyright existed. They had patrons who paid them to write or compose or whatever, since the author was good enough that the patrons wanted to get more of his works. But I guess you have to actually be good at what you do to get people to pay in advance, which explains why the current musicians would starve without copyright, as they claim.
Suppose you remove copyright laws. Suppose that this leads to no one or almost no one paying for content anymore - it it doesn't lead to this, then it has no effect. What happens ?
Well, the commercially produced stuff stops being produced, of course. There's still the amateur stuff that people make for fame or for fun. Is that enough to satisfy the demand for new content ?
If it is, then fine - the demand is satisfied. The writers and such who aren't good enough to get people to pay them to write more or continue their series are simply going to get another job.
If it isn't, then again fine - there's demand, so people will start filling it. A director might get funding for a new movie from prepayments (which works fine to filter out bad directors), from either the viewers or from Wal-Mart which figures that it needs something to fill the DVD isle - what, did you think that people would stop buying movies in convenient no-hassle no-wait format just because they could get the same stuff for free by searching the Net ? Of course you'd need to start with cheap movies to build a reputation - amateur movie scene come to mind.
So, as I see it, content creation market would work just fine, in fact better than it does now, without copyright. People create from the joy of creation, and for fame; if that's not enough to satisfy the demand, then there are the pre-payment, patronage and voluntary donation systems that work fine without copyright. And if it is enough to satisfy the demand, then all copyright ever did was help parasites to fleece the public.
Either way, abolishing the copyright would make the world a better place.