Just turning the asteroid into pieces wont work, the pieces will still come in the same direction.
You could install a device which picks up rocks and throws them in a pretermined direction. Thats probably about the most energy efficent way to change the orbit of an asteroid.
The phoenix lander on Mars is already capable of doing something like that, though not very well.
I guess the big question is, with all the weaponry we have lying around, why bet on one? I say machine gun nuke the thing to kind of coral it away from us. Send em up 2 or 3 at a time. One to divert the asteroid and the other two to slow/vaporize the mess the first one made. The wiki says we have somewhere around 10,000 in the US alone, so if an asteroid comes, lite it up!
But what if your nuke doesn't make it and destroys the only bridge out of town?
I think we've got the 'getting it up there' part figured out already...
Not if your payload includes a million ton pusher plate. The only way we could launch an orion would be to fly it as a pulse rocket directly from the ground. Which is how it was done in Footfall.
Its actually a good point. Our own radio communications have gone from narrow band (amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, sidebands with supressed carrier etc) to broadband (time division multiplexing, frequency hopping, etc) during the life of the SETI project.
We got the idea that aliens will send a signal with a wide bandwidth over a short time, because we are doing that too.
Yes I do it through an SSH tunnel from a remote linux box running rdesktop. The tunnel is configured with gSTM and it terminates at my in house server. From there normal RDP traffic goes to our CAD workstation which runs windows.
Its a way of remotely accessing the CAD system when away from home with a laptop.
The first thing I ever did when I was on a system with 'mc' was to add
alias mc mv
into my ~/.tcshrc - One loose keytap and suddenly my whole terminal exploded with weird stuff happening. It was even worse when you're on dialup over a 9600 baud line to a unix box at the university.
[insert deity] I loathed that program, if only for its name.
Simon
It wouldn't be so bad if it was easy to get out of. The other one I hate is dc because I sometimes type it instead of cd.
Yeah, it's really too bad about Dell and other sites which bury their Linux computers. I think to date the most light of day Linux has seen is possibly the gPC when it was sold at Walmart, and the Asus EEE PC, even though sadly the EEE PC still has yet to show up in any of the major stores. I had Best Buy tell me I wouldn't see it because they were a Microsoft-only shop.:P
The eeePC is all over the place here in Australia. I made a point of buying mine from a place which would otherwise not have taken a punt on a linux system.
Brittleness refers to the way it fails. A brittle material will break all at once (glass) while a more ductile material (steel) will deform.
I know a couple of people who have cracked aluminum bike frames, both above average riders. The frames are most likely designed for average riders.
I have heard it said that you don't want to use aluminum handlebars because they do come under a lot of stress and you don't want them to fail all at once.
Aluminum is more brittle than steel. I know a few people who have broken them. Bike frames are generally made as light as they can be for the expected use but some people get a lot more use out of them.
It just puts into perspective that there needs to be a risk benefit standard. Now if they said there was a one in a million chance of making a black hole the size of a basketball then I'd be saying it wasn't worth the risk.
As a reasonably modern person you would expect to benefit from advances made by research into physics. That is why the risk might be acceptable to you. Somebody who has a different lifestyle might have a different perspective on this.
there's that chance says that there is zero chance of it lasting more than a few milliseconds.
Nobody really knows what happens to microscopic black holes. There is no experimental evidence.
Systems which detect the way your eyes are pointing might be good for controlling input focus. That is about the only practical advance I can see coming.
I used to be involved in running the control room for our state road authority. The voice switch had a touch screen interface but it was absolutely terrible for RSI.
UI consultants advised us that the input surface needs to be flat to the desk so we had custom keyboards made up.
There are sound reasons beyond screen space for breaking long lines.
Why isn't the editor automatically (optionally) wrapping lines to your window size, while also maintaining the proper indentation of that wrapped line? Any decent editor should allow you to set it to wrap at an arbitrary column number regardless of windows size, as well.
Putting line breaks into text for anything other than signaling the end of a paragraph/statement is very 1980s.
If editors could put braces where the reader expects them to be we wouldn't be reading this whole discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Just turning the asteroid into pieces wont work, the pieces will still come in the same direction.
You could install a device which picks up rocks and throws them in a pretermined direction. Thats probably about the most energy efficent way to change the orbit of an asteroid.
The phoenix lander on Mars is already capable of doing something like that, though not very well.
I guess the big question is, with all the weaponry we have lying around, why bet on one? I say machine gun nuke the thing to kind of coral it away from us. Send em up 2 or 3 at a time. One to divert the asteroid and the other two to slow/vaporize the mess the first one made. The wiki says we have somewhere around 10,000 in the US alone, so if an asteroid comes, lite it up!
But what if your nuke doesn't make it and destroys the only bridge out of town?
I think we've got the 'getting it up there' part figured out already...
Not if your payload includes a million ton pusher plate. The only way we could launch an orion would be to fly it as a pulse rocket directly from the ground. Which is how it was done in Footfall.
God was knockin and he wanted in bad...
That's how it goes when they send a vibrator to do a mans job. Anyway, are the exploring that hole they found a while back?
Oh come on!
You can send 1000 vibrators for the price of one man.
Vibrators always do what they are told.
Vibrators never get tired...
Its actually a good point. Our own radio communications have gone from narrow band (amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, sidebands with supressed carrier etc) to broadband (time division multiplexing, frequency hopping, etc) during the life of the SETI project.
We got the idea that aliens will send a signal with a wide bandwidth over a short time, because we are doing that too.
One more step to the last invention man ever need make... hooker bot. (mine would be a Buffy Bot, but that's just personal preference)
She would have to be cooled with liquid nitrogen, running all those GPUs.
Besides, /can/ you pipe RA over ssh?
Yes I do it through an SSH tunnel from a remote linux box running rdesktop. The tunnel is configured with gSTM and it terminates at my in house server. From there normal RDP traffic goes to our CAD workstation which runs windows.
Its a way of remotely accessing the CAD system when away from home with a laptop.
Of course this patent isn't just about file systems but also displaying other objects eg the control panel. OS/2 v2 did this in '91 or so.
I wonder if the mac had something like that in the early 80s.
The first thing I ever did when I was on a system with 'mc' was to add
alias mc mv
into my ~/.tcshrc - One loose keytap and suddenly my whole terminal exploded with weird stuff happening. It was even worse when you're on dialup over a 9600 baud line to a unix box at the university.
[insert deity] I loathed that program, if only for its name.
Simon
It wouldn't be so bad if it was easy to get out of. The other one I hate is dc because I sometimes type it instead of cd.
I really like this image showing the rover tracks leading back to the Apollo 14 Lunar Module "Antares".
Apollo 14 didn't have a rover. Those tracks would have been made by the MET (Modular Equipment Transporter).
The LRV was first flown on Apollo 15 and IMHO was about 1000 times more effective than working without a rover.
Banning their IP or username will probably be seen as an act of aggression
But if you drop their packets in pf (or similar) they may think you have gone for good.
That might block a few totally stupid trolls but I think most would wise up to it.
So run slashcode.
Yeah, it's really too bad about Dell and other sites which bury their Linux computers. I think to date the most light of day Linux has seen is possibly the gPC when it was sold at Walmart, and the Asus EEE PC, even though sadly the EEE PC still has yet to show up in any of the major stores. I had Best Buy tell me I wouldn't see it because they were a Microsoft-only shop. :P
The eeePC is all over the place here in Australia. I made a point of buying mine from a place which would otherwise not have taken a punt on a linux system.
Brittleness refers to the way it fails. A brittle material will break all at once (glass) while a more ductile material (steel) will deform.
I know a couple of people who have cracked aluminum bike frames, both above average riders. The frames are most likely designed for average riders.
I have heard it said that you don't want to use aluminum handlebars because they do come under a lot of stress and you don't want them to fail all at once.
Yeah, this kind of gun is an accident just waiting to happen.
So much for "don't point your gun at something you don't intend to kill."
Like this?
Aluminum is more brittle than steel. I know a few people who have broken them. Bike frames are generally made as light as they can be for the expected use but some people get a lot more use out of them.
My steel frames are 10 and 20 years old.
Lately a lot of people have been saying distributed when they mean centralised.
But on the other hand, you can keep using steel pretty much forever. My old steel bike frames will outlive me. I can't say that for my aluminum ones.
It just puts into perspective that there needs to be a risk benefit standard. Now if they said there was a one in a million chance of making a black hole the size of a basketball then I'd be saying it wasn't worth the risk.
As a reasonably modern person you would expect to benefit from advances made by research into physics. That is why the risk might be acceptable to you. Somebody who has a different lifestyle might have a different perspective on this.
there's that chance says that there is zero chance of it lasting more than a few milliseconds.
Nobody really knows what happens to microscopic black holes. There is no experimental evidence.
Actually I thought DEC just got chewed up and spat out.
I can recall getting DEC licence paks in envelopes, and reasonably sized boxes of CDs. I don't recall anything excessive at all.
Systems which detect the way your eyes are pointing might be good for controlling input focus. That is about the only practical advance I can see coming.
UI consultants advised us that the input surface needs to be flat to the desk so we had custom keyboards made up.
Hopefully this can be one religious war that will actually end.
Not likely.
Why isn't the editor automatically (optionally) wrapping lines to your window size, while also maintaining the proper indentation of that wrapped line? Any decent editor should allow you to set it to wrap at an arbitrary column number regardless of windows size, as well.
Putting line breaks into text for anything other than signaling the end of a paragraph/statement is very 1980s.
If editors could put braces where the reader expects them to be we wouldn't be reading this whole discussion.