To sum it up, it doesn't matter whether something is subatomic or not, gravity acts the same. A chunk of matter consists of of subatomic particles after all, therefore all gravity it experiences is through the particles it consists of.
Another thing is that there are quite obvious examples of gravity playing an important part on non-solid matter: gas clouds and suns. Suns are created from collapsing clouds of hydrogen, helium and some heavier elements. Almost all of that exists as atomic or small molecular particles, not as even sand grain sized chunks.
Of course EM has a big influence on matter, but consider this: All clouds, once collapsing will continue to do so until radiation pressure stops them. That radiation is from nuclear fusion in stars. In our sun, gravity is strong enough to contract one mighty amount of matter strong enough to create 15 million Kelvin in its center to keep running a fusion core that converts millions of tons of mass into energy. There's no solid chunks of anything involved.
Yet another way to put it: Gravity is global; it only adds up. The other forces may be stronger, but they don't reach as far or cancel themselves out locally. So gravity is the only significant force on the galactic level.
You could try running ductwork from some power plant to some customer, but the air will be cooled enough to be useless by the time it gets there.
They transfer hot water (70C-110C) in insulated ducts to customers and the cooled down water back to the plant. And it's not like this is brand new technology.
Some numbers for Munich (year 2000): remote heat network of 555km (345 miles in Silly Units), number of house connections 8710, consumed heat power 4748GWh. 68% of heat comes from power plants, 32% from dedicated heat plants.
Making fast cars free of spoilers isn't easy. Audi tried with their TT (max. speed ~220km/h, I think), designing the whole car so that it gets enough downforce (the outer rear view mirrors are an important part of that design).
As it seems, they couldn't get it completely right. There were a number of accidents where TT drivers lost control while simply going straight on German highways (where else would you be allowed to drive as fast;-). Audi didn't explicitly take responsibility for that, but they do offer free upgrades for all TT owners which consist of a small spoiler and an electronic stability system and all new TTs come in that configuration already.
And for those thinking that going straight shouldn't cause any problems no matter how strong (or weak) the downforce is: It doesn't matter only if there is no wind and the highway is empty. If there are transversal winds, entering and leaving the wind shadow of large trucks at high speed needs some correction to stay on course and if the downforce is too weak you can lose grip altogether. At higher speeds (say, 150 km/h and above), even normal cars are dragging a quite large cones of air turbulences behind them. These can create asymmetrical forces on an overtaking car. Normally this would rock your car slightly, but if your car is to the limit aerodynamically as the TT seemed to be this can get dangerous.
I don't recall the actual length of visible light waves, but I think it's in non-microscopic units.
In addition to the other post I can say that it is by the very definition microscopic. A microscope uses light to sense the object and the ideal microscope can resolve details only down to the wavelength of light involved. Therefore the wavelength of visible light is at the end of the resolution range of a visible light microscope.
These days there are ultra hard types of reinforced concrete that are used instead of steel in newer skyscraper constructions. They are quite unsusceptible to large fires.
They tended to use helium back in those days. But the Hindenburg was German and flying in the times of the Nazi regime.
Apparantly Helium is also used for making explosives and therefore was not sold to Germany (dunno, which country was the primary source for Helium in those days?). Helium became scarce and was allocated for weapons, the zeppelins were filled with hydrogen instead.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but it's what I remember having read somewhere.
Assuming we could create the required electricity on board, electric motors could be used to power the fans in the current engines.
In the typical engine on large passenger planes 80% of the thrust is created by the large fan, only 20% comes from the jet itself. These may be old numbers, they always try to get more thrust on the fan since it makes the engine more fuel efficient and less noisy. Planes could fly with powered fans alone, if they would get upgraded a bit to replace the missing 20%.
Thank god for these developments, those 707s, 727s and 737-200s sure were a loud pain in the ass if you live near an airport. Fighter plane engines on the contrary put most of the air directly into the engine. They don't care about noise and less about fuel efficiency but much more about raw performance.
Its easy to understand fission, because the uranium is like a battery, it stores the energy and slowly releases it, and its only a matter of converting that energy over, where as fusion we are trying to use enery to extract a lot of energy.
Not quite. What you describe is the radio isotope battery which is used on NASA's deep space probes (anything beyond Mars). However nuclear reactors don't sit there waiting for the Uranium to decay and use the little heat to create electricity.
Instead they induce fission in a chain reaction. So it has the same problem of sustainability and exhaustion, it's only a lot easier to handle. The energy creation (fission) is used to sustain more fission, and it can happen on its own (put enough Uranium of a good isotope mixture in one spot and it does its thing), so it is self-sustaining.
There is no controlled self-sustaining fusion without extreme pressure (like in a star's core), so the energy output has to be manually fed back to create the fusion environment. Creating that environment for 24/7 efficiently is the hard part. Advantage is of course that it can never melt down like a fission reactor since it can't work on its own.
Anyway, I believe (warning: second-hand info) that some states regard the MS EULA as not binding,
Here in Germany it is questionable if the EULA (that is, the text that you get after you bought the product) is binding at all. AFAICS it's the same for the US, the UCITA was introduced to change this and it's not in effect in a lot of states in the USA.
It takes two parties agreeing on a contract. The EULA does not have to be agreed to to use the software (that part is already covered by the buying contract, and this happened without the EULA even in sight). It's basically just intimidation which works quite well (see how many people fear it).
which is worrying to GPL users...
Why? Perhaps you're under the wrong impression the the GPL is a sort of EULA. It isn't. The EULA takes away rights you have when you received (bought) the software. The GPL gives you rights you didn't have when you received the software.
If you don't agree voluntarily to the EULA, it can't restrict you. If you don't agree voluntarily to the GPL, your loss, default copyright law kicks in with its restrictions.
So what you propose is to use lots of electric power to accelerate particles, and then turn the particles' kinetic energy into electricity. Why not just cut out the particles and use the electricity directly, since you have it anyway?
Yet the really insidious problem isn't money, it's time: People don't want to wait for public transit to arrive, and they don't want to cope with the fact that it doesn't go door-to-door like a private automobile.
Waiting isn't that much of a problem when it's 10 or 5 minute intervals in the city. Also cars may take you from A exactly to B, but the convenience is gone when you can't park your car anywhere near B.
But in the US it's a different matter. Cities aren't as dense: distances are larger, good coverage with public transit is harder, more parking space.
After the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide, there won't be anything left but rapidly nova'ing stars and vast stretches of burning gases.
Milky Way and Andromeda as a whole will collide, the stars themselves don't (maybe one or two pairs). True, a supernova in our neighbourhood might be pretty bad for live due to all the radiation, but it won't blow our solar system away. If we aren't in space with dense particle clouds, these bad ass stars won't be that near, they might still be dangerous however.
Re:SciFi transporter technology
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 1
At the quantum level, low energy means low precision of measurement. That's physics, not technology.
Re:SciFi transporter technology
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 1
gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear) and as such the interactions would be extraordinarily minute and the alterations to the particles position, K.E., etc... would also be minute,
Yep, and your measurement's precision would also be minute. You have a low resolution (since it's low energy) position measurement, and no real measurement of impulse.
Transporters won't ever work my measuring and duplicating. The only hope is to leave the quantum level alone at all times, like with the quantum teleportation of photons that was demonstrated.
One with a pad of entropic noise, one with the actual data, encrypted with this pad. As a sector is accessed on one, it is decrypted or encrypted using the noise.
Doesn't work. OTP is One Time Pad, disks are however random access and many sectors get rewritten. The rewrites would reuse the same pad in your design. Since we already established that overwritten data can be salvaged, an attacker can get two or more data strings encrypted with the same pad.
You can't fix this design with normal disk usage. It would work with UDF or similar packet writing file systems where nothing gets overwritten but changes are appended (and use up new bits of the pad) instead. Once the disk is full, a snapshot of the fs has to be copied to a second disk with the same system and a new pad. Once that is full two, copy snapshot back to first with again a newly created pad.
The pad doesn't get destroyed, and somehow falls into enemy hands.
Then you've got a security leak, and encryption won't help you.
The pad does get destroyed, but the generator for the data on the pad falls into enemy hands, so they can derive the pad.
The pad must be truly random, else it is useless. If the pad can be derived from the generator you have a big problem.
Both the generator and the pad don't fall into enemy hands, but somehow the generation method is derived from patterns on the data drives, which do fall into enemy hands.
The contents of the data drive are just as random as the pad due to the XOR (obviously the empty drive has to be pre-encrypted to be "encrypted empty"), so this is equivalent to the previous point.
The generator will usually collect random bits from one or more physical noise sources (amplified transistor noise, radioactive decay,...) to create the pad. However the two disk approach won't work anyway, the reason for which I'll detail in another post.
Breathing in Plutonium dust is also a very bad idea - and where you handle Pu there's probably going to be some dust (2mg breathed in will kill you through cancer).
And after Pu emits alpha radiation it's gone, but what with the stuff that pops up instead? That's surely not stable already and will probably generate more dangerous radiation.
Yep, putting anti-matter into a storage ring wouldn't mean that it will stay there forever. But with a good enough vacuum you can keep it long enough so that you can use it. If in doubt, take an extra portion for safety.
At least anti-hydrogen was built, I don't know if they succeeded with heavier elements.
That still wouldn't solve any storage problems. It may be electrically neutral, but as soon as it comes to contact with a common atom, the electrons and positrons around the nucleus would annihilate and then the anti-matter nucleus would shoot straight at the matter nucleus and also be annihilated.
Re:They should produce it in SPACE, not on Earth
on
Antimatter Propulsion
·
· Score: 1
I don't know a lot about this, but I'd guess that the solar wind must contain some antiparticles as byproducts of fusion reactions.
Nothing gets out of sun's core fast, and that's where the fusion happens. Even the photons need about a million years until they reach the surface because of the dense gas. If there were any usable anti-particles created there, they wouldn't get far.
Actually the neutrinos get out without being slowed down, IIRC they are even anti-particles. But apart from their scientific value they are quite worthless.
Why are they referring to ISS as Space Station Alpha?
Because that's the name of the ISS. "International Space Station" is really just a description.
Seeing as how MIR was the first space station, wouldn't this be Space Station Beta?
Bullshit. Mir wasn't anywhere near the first space station. Besides, Alpha is a name, not a counting scheme. Mir is only one in a line of Russian space stations (Salyut 1, launched in 1971, to Salyut 7, launched 1982, abandoned 1986) and NASA had Skylab (launched 1973, abandoned 1974). That makes Alpha space station 10.
None of the earlier stations lasted as long as Mir however. We'll see how long Alpha will keep running.
What happens when the most probable output is not the correct one?
Then your algorithm/program is wrong, just like with conventional computers. From what I have gathered about quantum computing, the trick is to find an algorithm that will give the correct solution (or one of a set of correct solutions) with the propability 1 and 0 for all incorrect ones.
I'm probably a bit late with my reply but anyway...
Linux was originally a Minix clone.
Nope. Minix is an academic microkernel design, Linux is a monolithic kernel. These are already pretty fundamental differences.
I don't know if Linus actually used any Minix code
The Minix license was pretty strict. Linus would have been in a lot of legal trouble if Minix code were found in Linux back then.
Minix filesystem support still exists in some dark corners of the source tree
MS-DOS filesystem support also exists, but that doesn't mean Linux has anything to do with MS-DOS.
Linux was written and compiled on Minix (before it became self-contained), so it's only logical that it had support for the Minix filesystem format (which should be pretty well documented, given the academic nature of Minix). ext, xiafs and ext2 were only introduced to overcome the limitations of the Minix filesystem.
and Andy Tanenbaum knew about Linux quite early on
Linus at some time announced the existence of Linux on the Minix newsgroup. This was what started the long "Linux is obsolete" thread which is archived in a number of places.
Slashdot Mirror
[I'm not the AC, just to avoid confusion]
To sum it up, it doesn't matter whether something is subatomic or not, gravity acts the same. A chunk of matter consists of of subatomic particles after all, therefore all gravity it experiences is through the particles it consists of.
Another thing is that there are quite obvious examples of gravity playing an important part on non-solid matter: gas clouds and suns. Suns are created from collapsing clouds of hydrogen, helium and some heavier elements. Almost all of that exists as atomic or small molecular particles, not as even sand grain sized chunks.
Of course EM has a big influence on matter, but consider this: All clouds, once collapsing will continue to do so until radiation pressure stops them. That radiation is from nuclear fusion in stars. In our sun, gravity is strong enough to contract one mighty amount of matter strong enough to create 15 million Kelvin in its center to keep running a fusion core that converts millions of tons of mass into energy. There's no solid chunks of anything involved.
Yet another way to put it: Gravity is global; it only adds up. The other forces may be stronger, but they don't reach as far or cancel themselves out locally. So gravity is the only significant force on the galactic level.
You could try running ductwork from some power plant to some customer, but the air will be cooled enough to be useless by the time it gets there.
They transfer hot water (70C-110C) in insulated ducts to customers and the cooled down water back to the plant. And it's not like this is brand new technology.
Some numbers for Munich (year 2000): remote heat network of 555km (345 miles in Silly Units), number of house connections 8710, consumed heat power 4748GWh. 68% of heat comes from power plants, 32% from dedicated heat plants.
Making fast cars free of spoilers isn't easy. Audi tried with their TT (max. speed ~220km/h, I think), designing the whole car so that it gets enough downforce (the outer rear view mirrors are an important part of that design).
;-). Audi didn't explicitly take responsibility for that, but they do offer free upgrades for all TT owners which consist of a small spoiler and an electronic stability system and all new TTs come in that configuration already.
As it seems, they couldn't get it completely right. There were a number of accidents where TT drivers lost control while simply going straight on German highways (where else would you be allowed to drive as fast
And for those thinking that going straight shouldn't cause any problems no matter how strong (or weak) the downforce is: It doesn't matter only if there is no wind and the highway is empty. If there are transversal winds, entering and leaving the wind shadow of large trucks at high speed needs some correction to stay on course and if the downforce is too weak you can lose grip altogether. At higher speeds (say, 150 km/h and above), even normal cars are dragging a quite large cones of air turbulences behind them. These can create asymmetrical forces on an overtaking car. Normally this would rock your car slightly, but if your car is to the limit aerodynamically as the TT seemed to be this can get dangerous.
In addition to the other post I can say that it is by the very definition microscopic. A microscope uses light to sense the object and the ideal microscope can resolve details only down to the wavelength of light involved. Therefore the wavelength of visible light is at the end of the resolution range of a visible light microscope.
These days there are ultra hard types of reinforced concrete that are used instead of steel in newer skyscraper constructions. They are quite unsusceptible to large fires.
They tended to use helium back in those days. But the Hindenburg was German and flying in the times of the Nazi regime.
Apparantly Helium is also used for making explosives and therefore was not sold to Germany (dunno, which country was the primary source for Helium in those days?). Helium became scarce and was allocated for weapons, the zeppelins were filled with hydrogen instead.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but it's what I remember having read somewhere.
Assuming we could create the required electricity on board, electric motors could be used to power the fans in the current engines.
In the typical engine on large passenger planes 80% of the thrust is created by the large fan, only 20% comes from the jet itself. These may be old numbers, they always try to get more thrust on the fan since it makes the engine more fuel efficient and less noisy. Planes could fly with powered fans alone, if they would get upgraded a bit to replace the missing 20%.
Thank god for these developments, those 707s, 727s and 737-200s sure were a loud pain in the ass if you live near an airport. Fighter plane engines on the contrary put most of the air directly into the engine. They don't care about noise and less about fuel efficiency but much more about raw performance.
Not quite. What you describe is the radio isotope battery which is used on NASA's deep space probes (anything beyond Mars). However nuclear reactors don't sit there waiting for the Uranium to decay and use the little heat to create electricity.
Instead they induce fission in a chain reaction. So it has the same problem of sustainability and exhaustion, it's only a lot easier to handle. The energy creation (fission) is used to sustain more fission, and it can happen on its own (put enough Uranium of a good isotope mixture in one spot and it does its thing), so it is self-sustaining.
There is no controlled self-sustaining fusion without extreme pressure (like in a star's core), so the energy output has to be manually fed back to create the fusion environment. Creating that environment for 24/7 efficiently is the hard part. Advantage is of course that it can never melt down like a fission reactor since it can't work on its own.
Here in Germany it is questionable if the EULA (that is, the text that you get after you bought the product) is binding at all. AFAICS it's the same for the US, the UCITA was introduced to change this and it's not in effect in a lot of states in the USA.
It takes two parties agreeing on a contract. The EULA does not have to be agreed to to use the software (that part is already covered by the buying contract, and this happened without the EULA even in sight). It's basically just intimidation which works quite well (see how many people fear it).
which is worrying to GPL users...
Why? Perhaps you're under the wrong impression the the GPL is a sort of EULA. It isn't. The EULA takes away rights you have when you received (bought) the software. The GPL gives you rights you didn't have when you received the software.
If you don't agree voluntarily to the EULA, it can't restrict you. If you don't agree voluntarily to the GPL, your loss, default copyright law kicks in with its restrictions.
Of course, IANAL and stuff.
Yes, but the structure required to maintain a volume of vacuum against surrounding air pressure is going to weigh a lot.
So what you propose is to use lots of electric power to accelerate particles, and then turn the particles' kinetic energy into electricity. Why not just cut out the particles and use the electricity directly, since you have it anyway?
Waiting isn't that much of a problem when it's 10 or 5 minute intervals in the city. Also cars may take you from A exactly to B, but the convenience is gone when you can't park your car anywhere near B.
But in the US it's a different matter. Cities aren't as dense: distances are larger, good coverage with public transit is harder, more parking space.
Milky Way and Andromeda as a whole will collide, the stars themselves don't (maybe one or two pairs). True, a supernova in our neighbourhood might be pretty bad for live due to all the radiation, but it won't blow our solar system away. If we aren't in space with dense particle clouds, these bad ass stars won't be that near, they might still be dangerous however.
At the quantum level, low energy means low precision of measurement. That's physics, not technology.
gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear) and as such the interactions would be extraordinarily minute and the alterations to the particles position, K.E., etc... would also be minute,
Yep, and your measurement's precision would also be minute. You have a low resolution (since it's low energy) position measurement, and no real measurement of impulse.
Transporters won't ever work my measuring and duplicating. The only hope is to leave the quantum level alone at all times, like with the quantum teleportation of photons that was demonstrated.
One with a pad of entropic noise, one with the actual data, encrypted with this pad. As a sector is accessed on one, it is decrypted or encrypted using the noise.
Doesn't work. OTP is One Time Pad, disks are however random access and many sectors get rewritten. The rewrites would reuse the same pad in your design. Since we already established that overwritten data can be salvaged, an attacker can get two or more data strings encrypted with the same pad.
You can't fix this design with normal disk usage. It would work with UDF or similar packet writing file systems where nothing gets overwritten but changes are appended (and use up new bits of the pad) instead. Once the disk is full, a snapshot of the fs has to be copied to a second disk with the same system and a new pad. Once that is full two, copy snapshot back to first with again a newly created pad.
The pad doesn't get destroyed, and somehow falls into enemy hands.
Then you've got a security leak, and encryption won't help you.
The pad does get destroyed, but the generator for the data on the pad falls into enemy hands, so they can derive the pad.
The pad must be truly random, else it is useless. If the pad can be derived from the generator you have a big problem.
Both the generator and the pad don't fall into enemy hands, but somehow the generation method is derived from patterns on the data drives, which do fall into enemy hands.
The contents of the data drive are just as random as the pad due to the XOR (obviously the empty drive has to be pre-encrypted to be "encrypted empty"), so this is equivalent to the previous point.
The generator will usually collect random bits from one or more physical noise sources (amplified transistor noise, radioactive decay, ...) to create the pad. However the two disk approach won't work anyway, the reason for which I'll detail in another post.
Breathing in Plutonium dust is also a very bad idea - and where you handle Pu there's probably going to be some dust (2mg breathed in will kill you through cancer).
And after Pu emits alpha radiation it's gone, but what with the stuff that pops up instead? That's surely not stable already and will probably generate more dangerous radiation.
Yep, putting anti-matter into a storage ring wouldn't mean that it will stay there forever. But with a good enough vacuum you can keep it long enough so that you can use it. If in doubt, take an extra portion for safety.
At least anti-hydrogen was built, I don't know if they succeeded with heavier elements.
That still wouldn't solve any storage problems. It may be electrically neutral, but as soon as it comes to contact with a common atom, the electrons and positrons around the nucleus would annihilate and then the anti-matter nucleus would shoot straight at the matter nucleus and also be annihilated.
Nothing gets out of sun's core fast, and that's where the fusion happens. Even the photons need about a million years until they reach the surface because of the dense gas. If there were any usable anti-particles created there, they wouldn't get far.
Actually the neutrinos get out without being slowed down, IIRC they are even anti-particles. But apart from their scientific value they are quite worthless.
Because that's the name of the ISS. "International Space Station" is really just a description.
Seeing as how MIR was the first space station, wouldn't this be Space Station Beta?
Bullshit. Mir wasn't anywhere near the first space station. Besides, Alpha is a name, not a counting scheme. Mir is only one in a line of Russian space stations (Salyut 1, launched in 1971, to Salyut 7, launched 1982, abandoned 1986) and NASA had Skylab (launched 1973, abandoned 1974). That makes Alpha space station 10.
None of the earlier stations lasted as long as Mir however. We'll see how long Alpha will keep running.
Then your algorithm/program is wrong, just like with conventional computers. From what I have gathered about quantum computing, the trick is to find an algorithm that will give the correct solution (or one of a set of correct solutions) with the propability 1 and 0 for all incorrect ones.
You surely must have meant "3 solitaire years".
I'm probably a bit late with my reply but anyway...
Linux was originally a Minix clone.
Nope. Minix is an academic microkernel design, Linux is a monolithic kernel. These are already pretty fundamental differences.
I don't know if Linus actually used any Minix code
The Minix license was pretty strict. Linus would have been in a lot of legal trouble if Minix code were found in Linux back then.
Minix filesystem support still exists in some dark corners of the source tree
MS-DOS filesystem support also exists, but that doesn't mean Linux has anything to do with MS-DOS. Linux was written and compiled on Minix (before it became self-contained), so it's only logical that it had support for the Minix filesystem format (which should be pretty well documented, given the academic nature of Minix). ext, xiafs and ext2 were only introduced to overcome the limitations of the Minix filesystem.
and Andy Tanenbaum knew about Linux quite early on
Linus at some time announced the existence of Linux on the Minix newsgroup. This was what started the long "Linux is obsolete" thread which is archived in a number of places.