Because even at 8km/h you can do serious damage. Must be why I have such a bad feeling about this one. Lately the hard landings have been the most successful ones.
Apparently, OpenSSL was using uninitialized memory as a source of randomness. Sounds bad to me. What if one OS initialises that memory to a known value? You might have an OS specific systematic vulnerability.
Zero chance. I'd even deem it unlikely that the original project survives for long. Telcos are missing out revenue when you communicate for free, the feds owe them one for the wiretapping thing, so I expect a law soon against this. Because of... because of... national security or whatever fits. Cell phones should be able to communicate point to point over 100 metres or so. For some reason no phone manufacturer has thought to introduce this feature.
Read this yesterday, still don't get it. Can omni directional wifi ever compete with a cell tower's coverage range? Cellular has the advantage of insanely cheap commoditized phones. But cellular base stations have to transmit at high power. Doing that attracts attention from authorities. Wireless mesh networks can be low power everywhere.
If there was life on Mars I think we would know by now. Life is adaptive and it tends to occupy all the available space. Telescopes hundreds of light years away would have no difficulty detecting life on Earth.
I just don't think we are going to find anything. I hope I am wrong.
"Terraform a planet? Someone has been reading too much sci-fi -- just try playing around with high school physics for about five minutes on exactly how much work would be required to lower an entire atmosphere one stinking degree, and then compare that to the power consumption of the human race." Air temperature over the US increased by two degrees C in the days after 9/11 because aircraft were grounded and unable to release particles into the air. More heat got to the ground as a result.
You can lower the temperature by reflecting heat away. You don't have to do the work yourself.
On the other hand, this would make remodeling MUCH easier:) Just hope your house doesn't get a virus while you're taking a shower. I have this vision of intelligent stacks of building materials ambushing homeless people in the middle of the night and building a home around them.
In the foreseeabe future building a house out of self-assembling robots will continue to be much much more expensive and resource-consuming than the regular way. The cost of labour is already a significant part of the price of a new house, and labour rates are rising everywhere in the developed world.
This boat is only 3.65 meters long - that's a mere twelve feet, which is smaller than many dingies I have sailed. Normally sailing craft have to be much bigger to withstand the ferocity of ocean winds and waves,which simply swamp craft of this size. So how can it possibly stay afloat for several months? Exactly like a submarine (or a shipping container).
I'm no expert on robotics, but surely building a house is surely far harder than crossing the Atlantic for a robot?
You should google around for fractal robots. Imagine lego blocks which are also robots. You broadcast a plan to the blocks, perhaps directly from a CAD desktop, and they self assemble into the intended object.
And yes, it is a little bit harder than crossing the Atlantic. But much more interesting (to me, anyway).
There has been a blimp operating in Melbourne for a couple of years. They do ambush marketing (is that the word?) at the football, cricket, commonwealth games, etc.
The theory is that air traffic regulations don't prevent them circulating around the MCG for three hours at a time, and this works to a point.
One day we had a lot of wind and the blimp got blown out over Port Philip bay with a TV crew on board. The news that day had a great show of these people being tossed around as if they were inside a clothes dryer for a couple of hours.
In other words, this study does not conflict with previous evidence that suggests talking with a passenger (who can see to shut up when necessary) makes little difference, but talking to someone on a mobile phone is disastrous for driver performance.
I avoid driving when on the phone, but talking to my sister is dangerous on the phone or not because she never shuts up.
Banning regular cell-phone talk in cars is not going to do much to improve safety.
But there is no doubt that viewing use of a mobile phone while driving in the same socially unacceptable light as driving while drunk or high should be a good thing for road safety in the long run. Whether the correct answer to this is to make new laws, or simply to run a public awareness campaign to tell people the facts (how many people have you seen on Slashdot claiming, probably quite sincerely, that they can drive just fine while using a phone?), is open to debate.
Where I live in Victoria, Australia insurance does not cover you if you are over the legal limit for alcohol. The though of writing off a rolls royce and having to buy a new one for he owner does have an impact.
It would also be a help if police could track down phone use after a crash, and charge the driver accordingly.
I think doing it on the second manned mission to any asteroid would be optimistic... I don't see why. Once you know what the asteroid is made of, and how it is constructed (rubble or solid rock?) it should be possible to build an engine of sorts.
Apollo astronauts installed mortars on the moon for seismic experiments. I don't recall that being too big a deal.
The way you put it, with relatively massive people inside a low mass rotating body, it is definitely unstable.
If your cylinder has a lot of mass then the moving objects inside it will not affect it to a great degree.
Alternatively you could use a tether to construct a very large spacecraft. If you are on a long cruise to (say) Mars you could separate two parts of the spacecraft and string a tether between them. Then spin both components against each other.
The module with the people inside isn't going to change its mass when the people move around. It will be very stable.
a mass drive throwing bits of asteroid, or a high performance solar-electric ion drive, for example. To do that you need a sample of the asteroid, so you know what kind of reaction mass you are dealing with. I think it would be possible to install the engine on the second close pass, assuming a good examination on the first pass.
It would be awesome, don't get me wrong.. I actually think this is The Way To Go [TM] and I'm surprised to even see this being studied but NASA is not planning to send a manned mission to an asteroid, not now, not in 20 years time.. maybe *after* Mars is done but as I doubt NASA will have anything to do with that, I'm thinking they won't have anything to do with going to an asteroid either. Plans were made to do it with Apollo, in the 1970's but then the Shuttle came along and the US confined themselves to low earth orbit.
Their new capsule design is basically Apollo again so the old plans are on the table. An asteroid mission is a stepping stone to missions to the planets. It is shorter, but interesting all the same.
The asteroids are a likely resource for Earth. Planets are only of use to us for colonisation or science. There is no way to export from Mars to Earth for example, but water could be exported from asteroids to the moon.
TYou already mentioned the first problem: Size. "Just make it big enough" isn't a very good answer when you realize that the ISS has a "living volume" of about 425 m^3 - that's a large appartment, no a spaceship like you see in the movies. This was proposed for the Apollo LM and CM. Run a tether between them and use the RCS to spin them up. The LM (being lighter) gets 1G and the CM gets 1/4 G.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a job for ATM
...when strategically placed can deal with that.
That was Dragons egg by Robert Forward. A great book.
See also Rocheworld by the same author.
If there was life on Mars I think we would know by now. Life is adaptive and it tends to occupy all the available space. Telescopes hundreds of light years away would have no difficulty detecting life on Earth.
I just don't think we are going to find anything. I hope I am wrong.
You can lower the temperature by reflecting heat away. You don't have to do the work yourself.
I'm no expert on robotics, but surely building a house is surely far harder than crossing the Atlantic for a robot?
You should google around for fractal robots. Imagine lego blocks which are also robots. You broadcast a plan to the blocks, perhaps directly from a CAD desktop, and they self assemble into the intended object.And yes, it is a little bit harder than crossing the Atlantic. But much more interesting (to me, anyway).
Coming soon. A new perspective from google street view.
Hey! didn't they have that on Blade Runner?
There has been a blimp operating in Melbourne for a couple of years. They do ambush marketing (is that the word?) at the football, cricket, commonwealth games, etc.
The theory is that air traffic regulations don't prevent them circulating around the MCG for three hours at a time, and this works to a point.
One day we had a lot of wind and the blimp got blown out over Port Philip bay with a TV crew on board. The news that day had a great show of these people being tossed around as if they were inside a clothes dryer for a couple of hours.
In other words, this study does not conflict with previous evidence that suggests talking with a passenger (who can see to shut up when necessary) makes little difference, but talking to someone on a mobile phone is disastrous for driver performance.
I avoid driving when on the phone, but talking to my sister is dangerous on the phone or not because she never shuts up.Banning regular cell-phone talk in cars is not going to do much to improve safety.
But there is no doubt that viewing use of a mobile phone while driving in the same socially unacceptable light as driving while drunk or high should be a good thing for road safety in the long run. Whether the correct answer to this is to make new laws, or simply to run a public awareness campaign to tell people the facts (how many people have you seen on Slashdot claiming, probably quite sincerely, that they can drive just fine while using a phone?), is open to debate.
Where I live in Victoria, Australia insurance does not cover you if you are over the legal limit for alcohol. The though of writing off a rolls royce and having to buy a new one for he owner does have an impact.It would also be a help if police could track down phone use after a crash, and charge the driver accordingly.
Cycle commuting through inner urban Melbourne (Australia) I often see people who are apparently meeting up with someone.
To find their destination they call the person they are meeting with and drive while listening to instructions.
This has long been a problem for aircraft pilots, but they are trained to deal with the communication problem: aviate, navigate, then communicate.
Apollo astronauts installed mortars on the moon for seismic experiments. I don't recall that being too big a deal.
The way you put it, with relatively massive people inside a low mass rotating body, it is definitely unstable.
If your cylinder has a lot of mass then the moving objects inside it will not affect it to a great degree.
Alternatively you could use a tether to construct a very large spacecraft. If you are on a long cruise to (say) Mars you could separate two parts of the spacecraft and string a tether between them. Then spin both components against each other.
The module with the people inside isn't going to change its mass when the people move around. It will be very stable.
Their new capsule design is basically Apollo again so the old plans are on the table. An asteroid mission is a stepping stone to missions to the planets. It is shorter, but interesting all the same.
The asteroids are a likely resource for Earth. Planets are only of use to us for colonisation or science. There is no way to export from Mars to Earth for example, but water could be exported from asteroids to the moon.
This is a great idea. I can't wait to watch.
You don't need to build a huge space station.