Rich People: Get us off this rock. As a disciple of Robert Heinlien I feel obliged to point out that no matter how many people we ship off the planet the population on Earth will continue to grow until every square metre looks like South Korea, ie, smothered with human beings.
This problem isn't going to go away. Maybe our engineering will get better but that will be a two edged sword.
Yes we have plenty of nukes. But rockets that can propel something out of Earth's orbit are in very short supply. This finding suggests to me that by placing small masses in the path of this object on each close approach we would have quite a bit of control over its trajectory.
That said, a lot of the death toll in 2004 was caused by lack of warning, which certainly won't be an issue in the event of an impact, so I suppose that it will balance out somewhat. Yes but if we find out in advance that a place like India or Saudi Arabia is going to be hit then there will be hell to pay.
First off... how does a 200,000,000,000 tonne asteroid (200,000,000,000,000 kg) travelling at any substantial inter-planetary speed be deflected by a satellite travelling at 3070 m/s and at most wieghing 10,000kg?
It gets deflected by a small degree, but because this object makes close approaches to large objects like Earth, small impulses can have their affect amplified.
This object is in an orbit which resonates with our own orbit. It is certain to continue close approaches with Earth until either (1) it hits us or (2) is thrown into a totally different orbit, most likely as a result of a very close approach.
Yeah - in other circumstances, we might have done just that. But these were the nice guys down the hall, and we wanted to find out what was going on. I really meant it was the network administrator at the other company who overreacted. By the time it got to you helping out was the right way to go.
Of course he was silly to be using FTP, which is an insecure POS.
Not only that, but the part in question (a component of the guidance system) was intended to update the rocket's position while on the pad, not after launch. The flight trajectory on the earlier model Arianes were such that it didn't matter, it wouldn't overflow anyway. Not so on the Ariane V. The stupid bit was that the component which caused the problem wrote an exception trace to the same stream which its numeric output normally went to. A c program in the same situation might have written a bit of crap to the stream or segfaulted. It was the massive exception trace which crashed the spacecraft.
...an improved version of his earlier design for a mechanical digital calculator. It weighs in at two tons more than the Difference Engine built in 1991 at London's Science Museum.
Well - there goes Moore's Law then, I guess. Although, this was invented in the century before Moore himself was.
Being a Microsoft product it has to have one extra ton of DRM and another ton of UI tweaks.
I would have just blocked the host in PF and called it a day. These days the "person" doing the dictionary search is more likely to be a worm in a PC in Korea.
... you'll loose your job.... Can we all agree to just turn it into "luse" as the past-tense verb form of "to lose"?. No because that is what lusers do.
You aren't going to vote into the election then, going by the fact you hate reptiles. It won't make any difference because everybody votes for the lizards, in case the wrong lizard gets in.
The other way it could go is to use semiballistic transport. You would build something like a space shuttle. The engines would burn for a couple of minutes and accelerate you to 5 km/s. You would get about 30 minutes of free fall followed by aerobraking and landing at your destination. It is perfectly feasible, just horribly expensive.
And ever so slightly uncomfortable for the passengers, doing that just isn't feasible or realistic. What about infants, children, the elderly etc? Hell, my aunt pukes up on even the littlest bumps on amusement park rides and she's in her 40's.
My six year old son would love it but I agree that elderly aunts pose a few problems.
It would actually make more sense to design a passenger liner that would "hop" into space to cross vast distances in the upper stratosphere and then fly down to land like a subsonic jetliner. The problem is that going ballistic is almost as hard as going to orbit. I think it is 5 km/s to go half way around the earth and 7 km/s to reach orbit. That little hop is actually going to cost you 70% as much as going to orbit.
Its worth noting however, that Concorde, while a program failure, was quite profitable for British Airways in operation - at some points it was BAs most profitable area of operations across its entire business.
Yeah but not everybody can base a business on shuttling mega rich people between London and New York at mach 2.
explain to me what issues are there for which in 2008 we still have to resort to sub-sonic air flights? I wonder that sometimes (and I also wonder on Concorde's failure for the same reason)
Yes, somewhat OT, but it's been bugging me for a while. Supersonic flight uses a lot more fuel than subsonic flight. If the cost of keeping an airplane in the air rises to the point where the time saved by going supersonic is worth the additional cost of fuel then airliners will be built which travel faster than sound.
The other way it could go is to use semiballistic transport. You would build something like a space shuttle. The engines would burn for a couple of minutes and accelerate you to 5 km/s. You would get about 30 minutes of free fall followed by aerobraking and landing at your destination. It is perfectly feasible, just horribly expensive.
Odd that the same home PC at the time, running Linux, had no trouble at all enforcing it.
Then I said it wrong. Please let me rephrase: "In the era of Windows 95, home PCs weren't considered to have enough CPU and RAM to enforce proper privilege separation while running a graphical user interface." Or did you manage to usefully run X11 on a 486 PC with 8 MB of RAM?
No that doesn't make sense either. How about "windows was never meant to be networked so multi user protection wasn't built in from the start"
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This problem isn't going to go away. Maybe our engineering will get better but that will be a two edged sword.
It gets deflected by a small degree, but because this object makes close approaches to large objects like Earth, small impulses can have their affect amplified.First off... how does a 200,000,000,000 tonne asteroid (200,000,000,000,000 kg) travelling at any substantial inter-planetary speed be deflected by a satellite travelling at 3070 m/s and at most wieghing 10,000kg?
This object is in an orbit which resonates with our own orbit. It is certain to continue close approaches with Earth until either (1) it hits us or (2) is thrown into a totally different orbit, most likely as a result of a very close approach.
Of course he was silly to be using FTP, which is an insecure POS.
Yes. AdaCore now provide a closed source Eclipse plugin.
Pretty much all there is for Ada development these days. But now there is this "press a button and hey presto" ada to java converter going around...
...an improved version of his earlier design for a mechanical digital calculator. It weighs in at two tons more than the Difference Engine built in 1991 at London's Science Museum.Well - there goes Moore's Law then, I guess. Although, this was invented in the century before Moore himself was.
Being a Microsoft product it has to have one extra ton of DRM and another ton of UI tweaks.I would have just blocked the host in PF and called it a day. These days the "person" doing the dictionary search is more likely to be a worm in a PC in Korea.
... you'll loose your job.More than enough, I am sure. Yes I had to google that.
Yes I heard it made a lot of people very unhappy.
And ever so slightly uncomfortable for the passengers, doing that just isn't feasible or realistic. What about infants, children, the elderly etc? Hell, my aunt pukes up on even the littlest bumps on amusement park rides and she's in her 40's.
My six year old son would love it but I agree that elderly aunts pose a few problems.
Yeah but not everybody can base a business on shuttling mega rich people between London and New York at mach 2.
Yes, somewhat OT, but it's been bugging me for a while. Supersonic flight uses a lot more fuel than subsonic flight. If the cost of keeping an airplane in the air rises to the point where the time saved by going supersonic is worth the additional cost of fuel then airliners will be built which travel faster than sound.
The other way it could go is to use semiballistic transport. You would build something like a space shuttle. The engines would burn for a couple of minutes and accelerate you to 5 km/s. You would get about 30 minutes of free fall followed by aerobraking and landing at your destination. It is perfectly feasible, just horribly expensive.
There are more air planes in the sea than submarines in the sky.
Why? What do the Rutans have to do with the B787?
Then I said it wrong. Please let me rephrase: "In the era of Windows 95, home PCs weren't considered to have enough CPU and RAM to enforce proper privilege separation while running a graphical user interface." Or did you manage to usefully run X11 on a 486 PC with 8 MB of RAM?
No that doesn't make sense either. How about "windows was never meant to be networked so multi user protection wasn't built in from the start"