I have this idea in my head about a space transportation system based around tethers, solar sails and aerobraking. There are a lot of tricks you could do once attached to an object like this. You could convert angular momentum from the object into linear momentum by letting the asteroid swing you around then releasing at the appropriate moment. You could do a slingshot by pushing off the asteroid then retracting the tether at the appropriate moment.
It could be a very hairy but profitable way to travel.
IF you land on it, it will continue to travel without fuel for propulsion for a VERY long time... that could be rather useful
It you match speeds with it you will continue to travel without fuel for propulsion indefinitely. Being docked to a rock will make no difference. The advantage of having the rock there is that you can mine it for resources and use it as a radiation shield. You could also push transfer momentum to it if you want to change your velocity.
With a thirty metre object you could almost snare it with a net. Then you would need a shock absorbing tether to match velocities. Given that materials for tethers are improving all the time, and that high tech space drives are not inventing themselves the way they do on star trek, I wonder if this could be a practical way to travel around the inner solar system
These bush fires move fast. It takes between five and ten minutes for the dangerous part of the fire to go past a stationary point. You wouldn't want to be inside anything made of metal because it has a high thermal conductivity, but a concrete structure with good thick walls should keep the heat out for long enough.
Having said that at least one expert has been in the media warning people against building ad-hoc fire bunkers. He rightly suggests they could be death traps. I have several friends who live in Kinglake. One of them lost his house. The other house survived. The owner of that house bought a bush block and he got upset when the owner cleared the house site before the sale. As a result there isn't much privacy but I suspect the clearing saved his house.
His neighbour down the road has a fire bunker. A lot of people in the area are visiting those people with measuring tapes and cameras.
I know somebody who used to work for the MFB. He used to complain about the CFA all the time. I got the impression that the various fire fighting organisations in the state don't get along at all.
I worked for Vic Roads for ten years and while I saw a lot of politics (particularly between Vic Roads and the police) it never got out of hand the way it seems to be happening within Connex and the fire authorities.
Yes but I do think that if we made less of a song and dance about forecast fire risk days, fewer arsonists would see the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
Its a good question. About a week ago there was an article in the paper here in Melbourne about a family who survived the fires in a concrete house. Building standards are going to change before new houses are built so I expect the situation to improve.
Some of the houses in the affected areas were as much as 100 years old. They were built when timber was the only material available. Later houses tended to be built the same way either because of tradition, or people wanting to build houses which fitted in with the historic designs.
I work with a guy who has a two story oiled timber house. On the day of the fire he was away from home with his family. When he finally got back a couple of days later he was surprised to find it still there. Another person I work with lost his home (and old farm house) in the fire and barely escaped. They actually drove one way into the fire, turned around and took the last clear road out of the area.
As for vegetation around houses home owners have been blaming local council regulations which prevent them from cutting down trees. One family were fined for removing a tree and later credited that act with saving their house.
...so it didn't cause the bushfires. Fires like this are normal. Suburbs sprawling into the bush are abnormal. Fifty or a hundred years from now it may be a different story.
The usability of a device has NOTHING to do with being able to skin it or apply themes. Usability is all about making the device simple for someone with limited knowledge or experience to use.
The usability of slashdot seems to be in decline, while the reliance on javascript increases. Now maybe there isn't really a causal relationship there, but correlation is enough for many people.
Intelligence got us into this mess and it will have to get us out. We can't just sit back and say "well thats nature for you". Otherwise there would be no wilderness left very soon.
The problem is that we could be causing this disease to spread. One reason which has been put forward is that frog researchers who go from country to country are spreading diseases. So saving frogs in this instance may be more a case of fixing the damage we have done.
Is there really no more need in the world for "trained men and women"?
There is, but most countries have their own trained people these days. If their training doesn't get applied the reasons are most likely political and the Peace Corps can't solve political problems on their own.
Researchers in a Florida laboratory are working with the most asic building blocks of life to try and understand how biology first arose on Earth â" and how it might appear on other planets.
Seriously, I know these pages are assembled by software from other sources but don't they have spell checking built into them? Lots of otherwise good news sources I read have stupid typos in their online versions. Right now firefox is underlining "asic" for me, pointing out the mistake. It seems like every second article has something like this. It just seems so easy to fix. I wonder why that isn't done.
Google have the same problem in Korea. The less is more design philosophy which works so well for google and apple in the west just doesn't work in Korea and Japan. Consumers there want more more more.
As a certified and accredited software engineer, I think it's time for Linux to be re-written in Javascript. The competition between Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari has resulted in incredibly fast Javascript interpreters, and if Axl Torvalds mandates a switch to JS, the kernel could automatically take advantage of these improvements. After all, the OS and the web are becoming one, and within 10 years all applications will be in the cloud, delivered via the raintubes.
That way Apple will never be able to block you from booting Linux on the iPhone.
The funny bit is that for all the effort Quebec and France put into promoting French, the Spanish language continues to spread across North America without any Government supported promotion at all.
Gold would actually make sense for a CD you wanted to last indefinitely, because gold is extremely non-reactive, and wouldn't oxidize.
I have a gold CD of Amarok by Mike Oldfield. Since I have it ripped I don't care so much about the condition of the gold but I think the life of the disk will be limited by the life of the plastic.
Slashdot Mirror
I have this idea in my head about a space transportation system based around tethers, solar sails and aerobraking. There are a lot of tricks you could do once attached to an object like this. You could convert angular momentum from the object into linear momentum by letting the asteroid swing you around then releasing at the appropriate moment. You could do a slingshot by pushing off the asteroid then retracting the tether at the appropriate moment.
It could be a very hairy but profitable way to travel.
That was me. Must have hit AC by mistake.
IF you land on it, it will continue to travel without fuel for propulsion for a VERY long time... that could be rather useful
It you match speeds with it you will continue to travel without fuel for propulsion indefinitely. Being docked to a rock will make no difference. The advantage of having the rock there is that you can mine it for resources and use it as a radiation shield. You could also push transfer momentum to it if you want to change your velocity.
In those few hours it will be greater than 13th magnitude it's velocity will change by about 1km/s or ~30000km/h from the force of the earth alone.
Most of which it will give back on the way out. So what is the net velocity change for the earth encounter?
With a thirty metre object you could almost snare it with a net. Then you would need a shock absorbing tether to match velocities. Given that materials for tethers are improving all the time, and that high tech space drives are not inventing themselves the way they do on star trek, I wonder if this could be a practical way to travel around the inner solar system
These bush fires move fast. It takes between five and ten minutes for the dangerous part of the fire to go past a stationary point. You wouldn't want to be inside anything made of metal because it has a high thermal conductivity, but a concrete structure with good thick walls should keep the heat out for long enough.
Having said that at least one expert has been in the media warning people against building ad-hoc fire bunkers. He rightly suggests they could be death traps. I have several friends who live in Kinglake. One of them lost his house. The other house survived. The owner of that house bought a bush block and he got upset when the owner cleared the house site before the sale. As a result there isn't much privacy but I suspect the clearing saved his house.
His neighbour down the road has a fire bunker. A lot of people in the area are visiting those people with measuring tapes and cameras.
1. The failure to control the fuel load using prescribed burns.
Where population density is low you can back burn on vacant land. No problem.
Where population density is high (ie, inner city) fire is less of a problem.
On the urban fringe (like Kinglake) there is no room to back burn, but there is still enough fuel around to keep a fire going.
I know somebody who used to work for the MFB. He used to complain about the CFA all the time. I got the impression that the various fire fighting organisations in the state don't get along at all.
I worked for Vic Roads for ten years and while I saw a lot of politics (particularly between Vic Roads and the police) it never got out of hand the way it seems to be happening within Connex and the fire authorities.
There will always be arsonists,
Yes but I do think that if we made less of a song and dance about forecast fire risk days, fewer arsonists would see the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
Its a good question. About a week ago there was an article in the paper here in Melbourne about a family who survived the fires in a concrete house. Building standards are going to change before new houses are built so I expect the situation to improve.
Some of the houses in the affected areas were as much as 100 years old. They were built when timber was the only material available. Later houses tended to be built the same way either because of tradition, or people wanting to build houses which fitted in with the historic designs.
I work with a guy who has a two story oiled timber house. On the day of the fire he was away from home with his family. When he finally got back a couple of days later he was surprised to find it still there. Another person I work with lost his home (and old farm house) in the fire and barely escaped. They actually drove one way into the fire, turned around and took the last clear road out of the area.
As for vegetation around houses home owners have been blaming local council regulations which prevent them from cutting down trees. One family were fined for removing a tree and later credited that act with saving their house.
...so it didn't cause the bushfires. Fires like this are normal. Suburbs sprawling into the bush are abnormal. Fifty or a hundred years from now it may be a different story.
The usability of a device has NOTHING to do with being able to skin it or apply themes. Usability is all about making the device simple for someone with limited knowledge or experience to use.
The usability of slashdot seems to be in decline, while the reliance on javascript increases. Now maybe there isn't really a causal relationship there, but correlation is enough for many people.
Intelligence got us into this mess and it will have to get us out. We can't just sit back and say "well thats nature for you". Otherwise there would be no wilderness left very soon.
The problem is that we could be causing this disease to spread. One reason which has been put forward is that frog researchers who go from country to country are spreading diseases. So saving frogs in this instance may be more a case of fixing the damage we have done.
Is there really no more need in the world for "trained men and women"?
There is, but most countries have their own trained people these days. If their training doesn't get applied the reasons are most likely political and the Peace Corps can't solve political problems on their own.
...if you could run nmap and sshnuke while logged on at the terminal.
But don't real hackers use IP addresses?
I didn't realize that life could be built from blocks of Application Specific Integrated Circuits. Hmmmm.
Actually that is how I always expected New Life to come about.
Might be easier to move to a new planet.
Researchers in a Florida laboratory are working with the most asic building blocks of life to try and understand how biology first arose on Earth â" and how it might appear on other planets.
Seriously, I know these pages are assembled by software from other sources but don't they have spell checking built into them? Lots of otherwise good news sources I read have stupid typos in their online versions. Right now firefox is underlining "asic" for me, pointing out the mistake. It seems like every second article has something like this. It just seems so easy to fix. I wonder why that isn't done.
Google have the same problem in Korea. The less is more design philosophy which works so well for google and apple in the west just doesn't work in Korea and Japan. Consumers there want more more more.
As a certified and accredited software engineer, I think it's time for Linux to be re-written in Javascript. The competition between Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari has resulted in incredibly fast Javascript interpreters, and if Axl Torvalds mandates a switch to JS, the kernel could automatically take advantage of these improvements. After all, the OS and the web are becoming one, and within 10 years all applications will be in the cloud, delivered via the raintubes.
That way Apple will never be able to block you from booting Linux on the iPhone.
The funny bit is that for all the effort Quebec and France put into promoting French, the Spanish language continues to spread across North America without any Government supported promotion at all.
You can use high intensity laser diodes in engines instead of spark plugs.
You know, thats actually a pretty good idea and I can think of many ways in which it could be better.
Gold would actually make sense for a CD you wanted to last indefinitely, because gold is extremely non-reactive, and wouldn't oxidize.
I have a gold CD of Amarok by Mike Oldfield. Since I have it ripped I don't care so much about the condition of the gold but I think the life of the disk will be limited by the life of the plastic.