With that kind of calculation, the distance away it is doesn't help make it easier. What matters is the time to impact. (So, an object X units away closing the distance at a rate of Y is just as hard to deflect as an object 2*X units away closing at a rate of 2*Y. In either case you have X/Y units of time in which to push it a distance equal to the radius of the earth, to get it aside. The push would be lateral to the velocity the object has, so all that matters to the calculation is the the time available. In fact the farther/faster object would be harder to deflect because we'd have to get the rockets set up while it's still waaay out there. The slower/nearer object would be easier to reach to get the push started on time.
The problem is that the necessary size of the explosion to push most of the mass of the projectile away so only the center of the cloud of exploded material hits is too large. Once you talk of an explosion of that size, you could also have used that much energy to just push *everything* aside. It takes less energy to push the whole mass to one side and make it miss than it does to blow most of it aside in *all* directions radially.
Even if the chunks are smaller, if they all still hit the earth, we're still screwed. It's still the same mass overall hitting the earth, still the same overall kinetic energy being added to the system, and the havoc that creates will still be large enough to doom us, just in a different way.
The problem with your post is you seem to be operating under the premise that there is some sort of a "list" of priorities such that if you can't simultaneously do good short term deeds and good long-term deeds. I don't accept that premise. Preventing killer asteriods is most definately a good deed on the long-term scale of things, even if the plan you come up with isn't needed until several generations later.
Asking people to prioritize their good deeds and not waste time on the ones low on the list is a bit like asking people to rank which members of their family they like the most, and not to waste time on those who don't score on the top of the list.
Then we'd run the risk that the "C" ship of telephone sanitizers and the like that were sent in a different direction from the rest would end up crashing into some other world and being the only remnant of humanity left, while the more high priority "A" and "B" ships end up not making it.
This is kind of a moot point. Given that any Planet Killing asteroid would kill the whole planet, any program that attempts to protect the northern hemisphere without covering the south as well would be kind of pointless.
The poster was probably referring to the detection stage, not the do-something-about-it stage. Some parts of the sky are only visible from one hemisphere or the other.
But I think the poster is mistaken about the risk because the most likely direction for an incoming dinasaur killer is from the "sides" of the earth, not the poles. - because that's in-line with the rotation of the objects in the solar system, which in turn is mostly in-line with the rotation of the objects in the Milky Way. An object coming in from the north or the south would either be from a very distant galaxy, or from something thrown "up" or "down" out of our own galaxy from an explosion or collision that is just now falling back into the plane of the galaxy.
If that asteroid is actually being successfully mined, as you mention, there will be strong reluctance to fling it out into orbit at a *possibe* impact threat while it is still here making *certain* money for someone. That's just the stupidity of human nature.
With a "nom de plume" you at least have a clear identifier to use to differentiate *this* particular anonymous author from *that* one. People can be fairly anonymous and still have a slashdot account where they just don't fill in much identifying data, or fill in obviously bogus identifying data. Slashdot nicknames are themselves already nom de plumes. I assure you that my real name is not really "Dunbar The Inept".
What anonymous coward accounts promote is the inability to detect any pattern of who tends to write what kinds of posts, so you can't figure out if, for example, all the troll posts you see are actually coming from only one or two individuals.
Even if you didn't know that Mark Twain == Samuel Clemens, you still could be able to tell from the Nom De Plume that Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Conneticutt Yankee in King Author's Court were all written by the same guy who wrote editorials like "The Innocents Abroad" and "Letters from the Earth".
"They used to do atmospheric tests" - Note the use of the phrase "used to". It's highly relevant here. We also "used to" have soldiers stationed a few miles away watch the explosions without proper protection. There's a lot of "used to"s in the history of nuclear bombs that aren't done anymore.
If we launched a nuke at an asteroid a million miles away (and yes it's possible), there would be no pollution here on earth.
Since that wasn't what the poster said, NO he wasn't being wrong. He merely stated the existence of the treaty. Which is real. (And stating that people have probably broken the treaty in no way makes the statement that the treaty exists a falsehood.)
And the comment about pollution was in reference to an orion spaceship (that propels itself by successive little nulclear explosions), not a nuclear weapon. Orion *would* pollute the earth because it would need to be exploding those nukes in the atmosphere to get lifted off the ground. If an orion could be BUILT in space and used only out of the atmosphere, then what you say would be true. But an orion would have to be rather massive, and so building one is space is nearly impossible with current technology and one built on earth would be too hard to lift out of the atmosphere via conventional rocketry. To get it into space we'd have to resort to using it's main nuke engine to do so.
One's grasp of this sort of English is inversely proportional to one's preference for logic. According to crufty aspects of the English language, "inflammable" means the same as "flammable", and "Aren't you going to the store" is supposed to be asnwered as if the question was "Are you going to the store", which when you pull apart the contraction "aren't" into "are not", is the exact opposite question: "Are not you going to the store?", "Yes, I am not going to the store."
Not according to what happened in the Dimitri Skylarov case. Adobe's e-book encryption wasn't very hard to crack at all, and yet cracking it was still deemed a DMCA violation.
The flaw in the DMCA is precisely that it DOES allow terrible encryption techniques to count as a legal barrier. There is no definition of how cryptic something needs to be in order to actually be considered encryption under the law. This message itself is encoded into a stream of binary data using the code known as "ASCII". The way the DMCA is worded, even something like ASCII that everybody with a computer can read with built-in-software still could be thought of as encryption, since they give no minimum requirement for the effectiveness of the cryptographic technique.
This message is encoded in a cryptic scheme known as ASCII, that substitutes numbers for English letters, spaces, and punctuation. I don't wish anyone to view it and hereby declare it to be copyrighted to me with no privileges given to any other party to view the material that begins on the next line.
Hello.
There. If you were able to read the above line, you just broke the law under the DMCA. Who cares that ASCII isn't very good encryption because every Tom, Dick, and Harry has tons of software that renders it into human readable form. According to the DMCA, how widespread the decryption knowlege is is not relevant to the issue.
As long as the monopoly serves the Free Market, the consumer wins.
Only those conusmers conforming to the majority demographic win. If your needs aren't identical to the majority, and there is a monopoly producing only what that majority needs, you have no source to turn to. Your statement is similar to the ill-thought-out statement that "In a democracy, you get the government you deserve." No, you don't. You get the government the majority deserves. You might not be a member of that majority.
And I still like the idea that *nix considers this a necessity of any real OS and it comes WITH the OS anyway.
Only recently. It used to be that pkzip files were useless on unix because there was no available decoder at all, paid for or otherwise. tar/compress was the de-facto standard originally, mostly superceeded by tar/gzip now.
Java jar files are either zip OR tgz files. They are not always ZIP, although that is the default.
Re:A car handles slippery roads better
on
Landshark
·
· Score: 2
But when you lean into a turn on a bike, you have to keep turning to remain balanced, such that the force to the side that the lean provides balances exactly with the centripital force needed to effect the turn. If you were leaning for a turn, but you slip for a moment, than during the instant you were slipping, you were no longer turning but sliding in a linear direction. At that moment the centripital force is no longer needed and so instead of staying up while leaning over you just fall, same as you would if you tried leaning that far while forcibly holding the wheel straight.
Sliding the rear while under power works because it effectively keeps you turning. But when the wheels lose grip, it's not like you get to pick which one goes.
Whether a car is safer or not depends on the type of accident. If it's the sort where there's a chance to get away from the obstacle you are about to hit, the motorcycle is safer. But if it's the sort where you can't, or the sort where you don't see it coming because it's some other shmuck's fault, the car is safer because it's made to be squishy and crumple and thereby reduce the size of the decelleration impulse. On a motorcycle, it's your body that will be crumply and squishy to absorb the impact if you hit an immovable object. (Back in the '50s when cars were inflexible steel cages that didn't absorb much of the impact, it would have been a different story.)
A car handles slippery roads better
on
Landshark
·
· Score: 2
Good friction between tires and road is vital to a balancing two-wheeled vehicle. It is vital not just for turning and stopping, but also for simply keeping from falling over when going straight. The little subconsious adjustments you do to keep balance amount to a series of curves of very short duration and small magnitude. On a bike, if your tire slips for even just brief moment while trying to turn, your bike "lays down" and you have an accident. That is one small way in which a car is definately safer. On a car if you slip for a moment in a turn, you just end up going where you didn't want to (which could result in a crash, but isn't guaranteed to.)
The other thing the shuttle has going for it is the ability to carry a big payload. Yes, using the shuttle to launch a telecommunications satellite into orbit would be a waste of money - for much the same reason that using a 24-foot U-haul truck to go pick up milk from the store would be a waste of money.
Without cheating and looking it up, I'd say that changes one of the colors to black on a Commodore 64. I think it's the background color, but it might be the border color.
I'm so anti-lefty-joystick that when playing arcade stand-up games it's actually easier for me to cross my arms so I can still use the controls the "right" way, despite the fact that this is awkward and uncomfortable, it's NOT as uncomfortable as using my off hand. (And don't give me that load about it being possible to train yourself to become ambidexterous. I've had my right arm broken on two seperate occasions, having to go "cold turkey" and do everything with my left hand 24/7 for a few months, and even after that I still found my right and and arm to be more dexterous immediately after the cast came off and the arm was still attrophied from the disuse.)
I do sympathise with you about the molded control stick, though. It is possible to make them handed-ness neutral, and they should, but they don't.
In the ideal world, the game manufacturer wouldn't dictate how you had to hold the controller. It would be designed so you could do it left or right handed. I'd like to see a game controller that separates the joystick from the buttons on two independant parts tha can be fitted together either way around. Better yet, allow them to work when detached from each other. That way you can hold your hands down at your sides and play.
"If you try to show us that our premises are total bullshit, we'll ignore you or worse, accuse you of piracy. The bullshit coming from our marketing departments is more believable to us than reality."
I'd phrase that more politely, but really, they don't deserve civility over this one.
They claim they know how many CD-Rs are purchased for the purpose of pirating music. I know that's bullshit unless they've got some kind of big brother infrastructure in place that can tell them what I did with the pack of 10 CD-R's I bought last week. Mostly I used them to transfer work back and forth to a home computer in a manner that's a lot faster than downloading.
They claim that anyone stating there are "multiple" CD players that cannot play their broken CD's is lying, despite the fact that they ALSO state they have to maintain a list of CD players that they know work.
I said it's not a perfect cutoff because it's impossible to build an audio filter to cut off precisely at 22050 Hz
Oh, I know about that, I just didn't understand what you were trying to say the first time around. By "it's not a perfect cutoff" I thought you were trying to say, "it's possible that some signals might work above that frequency", which isn't true. 22050 Hz is an the upper bound for *everything*, but only certain waveforms (rectangular pulses) can acheive it. Most complex waveforms you get in music will cut off at much less than 22050 Hz. How much depends on how good the listener is. For example, you might only be able to approximate a sine wave as a triangle wave if your resolution is so low that all you get is samples that go: up, middle, down, middle, up, middle, down, and so on. Many listeners won't be able to hear well enough at 11025 Hz (which is what gives you four samples per wave period) to differentiate between a 11025 Hz sine wave and a 11025 Hz triangle wave.
So, no there is no good point at which you can state that is the cutoff frequency, but you CAN be guaranteed that it is always less than or equal to 22050 Hz (which makes that figure still be a metacutoff of sorts - it's the cutoff for how big the cutoff can be.)
Slashdot Mirror
With that kind of calculation, the distance away it is doesn't help make it easier. What matters is the time to impact. (So, an object X units away closing the distance at a rate of Y is just as hard to deflect as an object 2*X units away closing at a rate of 2*Y. In either case you have X/Y units of time in which to push it a distance equal to the radius of the earth, to get it aside. The push would be lateral to the velocity the object has, so all that matters to the calculation is the the time available. In fact the farther/faster object would be harder to deflect because we'd have to get the rockets set up while it's still waaay out there. The slower/nearer object would be easier to reach to get the push started on time.
The problem is that the necessary size of the explosion to push most of the mass of the projectile away so only the center of the cloud of exploded material hits is too large. Once you talk of an explosion of that size, you could also have used that much energy to just push *everything* aside. It takes less energy to push the whole mass to one side and make it miss than it does to blow most of it aside in *all* directions radially.
Even if the chunks are smaller, if they all still hit the earth, we're still screwed. It's still the same mass overall hitting the earth, still the same overall kinetic energy being added to the system, and the havoc that creates will still be large enough to doom us, just in a different way.
The problem with your post is you seem to be operating under the premise that there is some sort of a "list" of priorities such that if you can't simultaneously do good short term deeds and good long-term deeds. I don't accept that premise. Preventing killer asteriods is most definately a good deed on the long-term scale of things, even if the plan you come up with isn't needed until several generations later.
Asking people to prioritize their good deeds and not waste time on the ones low on the list is a bit like asking people to rank which members of their family they like the most, and not to waste time on those who don't score on the top of the list.
Then we'd run the risk that the "C" ship of telephone sanitizers and the like that were sent in a different direction from the rest would end up crashing into some other world and being the only remnant of humanity left, while the more high priority "A" and "B" ships end up not making it.
The poster was probably referring to the detection stage, not the do-something-about-it stage. Some parts of the sky are only visible from one hemisphere or the other.
But I think the poster is mistaken about the risk because the most likely direction for an incoming dinasaur killer is from the "sides" of the earth, not the poles. - because that's in-line with the rotation of the objects in the solar system, which in turn is mostly in-line with the rotation of the objects in the Milky Way. An object coming in from the north or the south would either be from a very distant galaxy, or from something thrown "up" or "down" out of our own galaxy from an explosion or collision that is just now falling back into the plane of the galaxy.
If that asteroid is actually being successfully mined, as you mention, there will be strong reluctance to fling it out into orbit at a *possibe* impact threat while it is still here making *certain* money for someone. That's just the stupidity of human nature.
With a "nom de plume" you at least have a clear identifier to use to differentiate *this* particular anonymous author from *that* one. People can be fairly anonymous and still have a slashdot account where they just don't fill in much identifying data, or fill in obviously bogus identifying data. Slashdot nicknames are themselves already nom de plumes. I assure you that my real name is not really "Dunbar The Inept".
What anonymous coward accounts promote is the inability to detect any pattern of who tends to write what kinds of posts, so you can't figure out if, for example, all the troll posts you see are actually coming from only one or two individuals.
Even if you didn't know that Mark Twain == Samuel Clemens, you still could be able to tell from the Nom De Plume that Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Conneticutt Yankee in King Author's Court were all written by the same guy who wrote editorials like "The Innocents Abroad" and "Letters from the Earth".
"They used to do atmospheric tests" - Note the use of the phrase "used to". It's highly relevant here. We also "used to" have soldiers stationed a few miles away watch the explosions without proper protection. There's a lot of "used to"s in the history of nuclear bombs that aren't done anymore.
Since that wasn't what the poster said, NO he wasn't being wrong. He merely stated the existence of the treaty. Which is real. (And stating that people have probably broken the treaty in no way makes the statement that the treaty exists a falsehood.)
And the comment about pollution was in reference to an orion spaceship (that propels itself by successive little nulclear explosions), not a nuclear weapon. Orion *would* pollute the earth because it would need to be exploding those nukes in the atmosphere to get lifted off the ground. If an orion could be BUILT in space and used only out of the atmosphere, then what you say would be true. But an orion would have to be rather massive, and so building one is space is nearly impossible with current technology and one built on earth would be too hard to lift out of the atmosphere via conventional rocketry. To get it into space we'd have to resort to using it's main nuke engine to do so.
One's grasp of this sort of English is inversely proportional to one's preference for logic. According to crufty aspects of the English language, "inflammable" means the same as "flammable", and "Aren't you going to the store" is supposed to be asnwered as if the question was "Are you going to the store", which when you pull apart the contraction "aren't" into "are not", is the exact opposite question: "Are not you going to the store?", "Yes, I am not going to the store."
English is not very logical.
Protesting by not purchasing fails when you can't find out about the thing you object to until after the purchase.
Not according to what happened in the Dimitri Skylarov case. Adobe's e-book encryption wasn't very hard to crack at all, and yet cracking it was still deemed a DMCA violation.
The flaw in the DMCA is precisely that it DOES allow terrible encryption techniques to count as a legal barrier. There is no definition of how cryptic something needs to be in order to actually be considered encryption under the law. This message itself is encoded into a stream of binary data using the code known as "ASCII". The way the DMCA is worded, even something like ASCII that everybody with a computer can read with built-in-software still could be thought of as encryption, since they give no minimum requirement for the effectiveness of the cryptographic technique.
This message is encoded in a cryptic scheme known as ASCII, that substitutes numbers for English letters, spaces, and punctuation. I don't wish anyone to view it and hereby declare it to be copyrighted to me with no privileges given to any other party to view the material that begins on the next line.
Hello.
There. If you were able to read the above line, you just broke the law under the DMCA. Who cares that ASCII isn't very good encryption because every Tom, Dick, and Harry has tons of software that renders it into human readable form. According to the DMCA, how widespread the decryption knowlege is is not relevant to the issue.
Wonderful satire. A beautiful depiction of the attitude of that small-minded majority out there.
Oh, wait, were you trying to be serious?
Only those conusmers conforming to the majority demographic win. If your needs aren't identical to the majority, and there is a monopoly producing only what that majority needs, you have no source to turn to. Your statement is similar to the ill-thought-out statement that "In a democracy, you get the government you deserve." No, you don't. You get the government the majority deserves. You might not be a member of that majority.
Only recently. It used to be that pkzip files were useless on unix because there was no available decoder at all, paid for or otherwise. tar/compress was the de-facto standard originally, mostly superceeded by tar/gzip now.
Java jar files are either zip OR tgz files. They are not always ZIP, although that is the default.
But when you lean into a turn on a bike, you have to keep turning to remain balanced, such that the force to the side that the lean provides balances exactly with the centripital force needed to effect the turn. If you were leaning for a turn, but you slip for a moment, than during the instant you were slipping, you were no longer turning but sliding in a linear direction. At that moment the centripital force is no longer needed and so instead of staying up while leaning over you just fall, same as you would if you tried leaning that far while forcibly holding the wheel straight.
Sliding the rear while under power works because it effectively keeps you turning. But when the wheels lose grip, it's not like you get to pick which one goes.
Whether a car is safer or not depends on the type of accident. If it's the sort where there's a chance to get away from the obstacle you are about to hit, the motorcycle is safer. But if it's the sort where you can't, or the sort where you don't see it coming because it's some other shmuck's fault, the car is safer because it's made to be squishy and crumple and thereby reduce the size of the decelleration impulse. On a motorcycle, it's your body that will be crumply and squishy to absorb the impact if you hit an immovable object. (Back in the '50s when cars were inflexible steel cages that didn't absorb much of the impact, it would have been a different story.)
Good friction between tires and road is vital to a balancing two-wheeled vehicle. It is vital not just for turning and stopping, but also for simply keeping from falling over when going straight. The little subconsious adjustments you do to keep balance amount to a series of curves of very short duration and small magnitude. On a bike, if your tire slips for even just brief moment while trying to turn, your bike "lays down" and you have an accident. That is one small way in which a car is definately safer. On a car if you slip for a moment in a turn, you just end up going where you didn't want to (which could result in a crash, but isn't guaranteed to.)
The other thing the shuttle has going for it is the ability to carry a big payload. Yes, using the shuttle to launch a telecommunications satellite into orbit would be a waste of money - for much the same reason that using a 24-foot U-haul truck to go pick up milk from the store would be a waste of money.
POKE 65495,0
READY?
Without cheating and looking it up, I'd say that changes one of the colors to black on a Commodore 64. I think it's the background color, but it might be the border color.
I'm so anti-lefty-joystick that when playing arcade stand-up games it's actually easier for me to cross my arms so I can still use the controls the "right" way, despite the fact that this is awkward and uncomfortable, it's NOT as uncomfortable as using my off hand. (And don't give me that load about it being possible to train yourself to become ambidexterous. I've had my right arm broken on two seperate occasions, having to go "cold turkey" and do everything with my left hand 24/7 for a few months, and even after that I still found my right and and arm to be more dexterous immediately after the cast came off and the arm was still attrophied from the disuse.)
I do sympathise with you about the molded control stick, though. It is possible to make them handed-ness neutral, and they should, but they don't.
In the ideal world, the game manufacturer wouldn't dictate how you had to hold the controller. It would be designed so you could do it left or right handed. I'd like to see a game controller that separates the joystick from the buttons on two independant parts tha can be fitted together either
way around. Better yet, allow them to work when detached from each other. That way you can hold your hands down at your sides and play.
Summary of the reply from EMI Germany:
"If you try to show us that our premises are total bullshit, we'll ignore you or worse, accuse you of piracy. The bullshit coming from our marketing departments is more believable to us than reality."
I'd phrase that more politely, but really, they don't deserve civility over this one.
They claim they know how many CD-Rs are purchased for the purpose of pirating music. I know that's bullshit unless they've got some kind of big brother infrastructure in place that can tell them what I did with the pack of 10 CD-R's I bought last week. Mostly I used them to transfer work back and forth to a home computer in a manner that's a lot faster than downloading.
They claim that anyone stating there are "multiple" CD players that cannot play their broken CD's is lying, despite the fact that they ALSO state they have to maintain a list of CD players that they know work.
So now "open source community" is synonomous with "pear shaped nerd". Who's the idiot again?