But I'm not talking about free energy, I'm talking about using the energy of the earth to slingshot it out. Just like being on the end of a spinning whip you use the gravity of a partial fall to give you momentum followed by a burn out, like going downhill to pick up speed followed by gunning it to shoot up a hill.
What you're trying to do is increase an object's gravitational potential energy without expending any significant amount of chemical potential energy or kinetic energy. This is not consistent with the law of conservation of energy. It would be akin to getting a 100 lbs dumbbell on your roof without lifting it.
Here are some formulas. (M1 = mass of the Earth, M2 = mass of the satellite, r = altitude from center of Earth, v = speed of satellite, G = gravitational constant)
Gravitational potential energy = U = -G * M1 * M2 / r
Kinetic Energy = K = 1/2 * M2 * v^2
Chemical potential energy is going to equal what your fuel can give you (C)
So, you're trying to increase U from -57 MJ per kg of satellite to 0, while maintaining a non-zero K (insignificant compared to energy for U), and having almost no C to compensate. For comparison, think of a 1 kg iron ball released with a velocity of 1 m/s pointed toward the Earth from an incredible distance. When it hit the atmosphere it'd have nearly 60 MJ of energy from the conversion of the gravitational potential energy (0 to -60 MJ) into kinetic, so it's velocity would be about 11.4 km/sec. But the satellite doesn't have that much kinetic energy (and heck, the tangential velocity is the only thing that keeps it from falling toward the Earth in the same manner, so it's not exactly expendable).
Gravitational slingshots work in cases where a planet is moving relative to the spacecraft and the spacecraft gains twice the difference in velocity by slowing down the planet. The Earth is not moving relative to an orbiting satellite, so this technique will not help you.
If you really wanted to deorbit a satellite you'd need to supply energy. I suppose a sufficiently powerful laser could vaporize the Earth-facing side and the escaping gas might work to propel the satellite to a higher orbit, but I suspect it'd be completely vaporized (with the molecules still orbiting the Earth) long before it deorbited. But this is a risky procedure, as you'd probably just put the thing into some kind of crazy spin (think failed rocket launch) and create a ton of orbital debris.
All of these concepts tend to be covered in college level physics, so if this topic interests you I'd highly suggest checking it out. You obviously have been paying a lot of attention to the space program, but you've reached the level where you need to have a bit of a physics background to go much father. If we could deorbit satellites like you suggest that would be a great idea, but the laws of physics don't allow it. So, knock yourself out, gravity is covered very early in modern physics books (or free web resources), so it's not much of a time investment, and the non-Calculus based versions should make it easy to pick up even without a strong math background.
To escape a gravity well you need a certain amount of energy per mass. On Earth's surface, it's 60MJ/kg. When you get to orbit you are a bit further away (gravitational pull declines asymptotically) so you only need 57 MJ/kg. That's what you need to get out of the hole. This is conservation of Energy, so there are no cheats to get around it. Otherwise we could deorbit and reorbit objects for free energy. Satellites would need to carry twenty times more fuel to deorbit.
Adblock has a filter subscription called Antisocial that should work. ABE Filters with NoScript work nicely, even if you don't block scripts with it otherwise. NoScript can also do it through ABE:
Site facebook.com *.facebook.com facebook.net *.facebook.net fbcdn.com *.fbcdn.net fbcdn.net *.fbcdn.net
Accept from *.facebook.com
Accept from *.facebook.net
Accept from *.fbcdn.com
Accept from *.fbcdn.net
Deny
I also use ABE to restrict Google scripts in a futile attempt to keep them from knowing everything about me, but that's a more complex filter since there are legitimate non-tracking scripts they provide. Or at least I assumed those are non-tracking... Crap, now I'm going to have to figure out some redirection work around...
Ah yes, the Icarus birds. A tragic species, they often fly too high until the atmosphere is thin enough they asphyxiate. Thus, despite being able to fly twenty times faster than a peregrine falcon, they are in constant danger of extinction.
Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
That's been my experience exactly. Every PC I've owned has "died" from a HDD crash, usually sudden. The last SSD I had hit its erase limit in about two years (small SSD and I'm prone to reinstalling various OSes monthly). The lovely thing was that I could run a maintenance tool and see exactly how many erases were left on each cell (BTW the wear leveling was only 1% from mathematically perfect). This allowed a simple extrapolation down to the day some cells would start hitting their advertised capacity, although the drive held out overall a bit longer.
The initial symptoms were Windows blue screening on boot (1,000,000 writes per boot, so no surprises there), so I quick formatted the disk and reinstalling thinking it was probably Windows sucking again. From there the drive lasted a couple more days and became completely read-only. I keep good backups so I didn't need to salvage anything, but even now I can throw it in a USB enclosure and get my data off of it.
Gravity at Earth's surface: 9.8 m/s^2
Gravity at ISS: 9.1 m/s^2
Satellites are still very much inside Earth's gravity well. They are not floating in space, they are constantly falling but their tangential velocity ensures they miss hitting the Earth.
It's probably more related to how hunter-gatherers led a pretty cushy lifestyle. Once someone develops farming, population densities increase dramatically, albeit at the cost of ~5 times more work (modern hunter-gatherers pushed into deserts spent ~10-20 hours/week gathering food, a farmer spends ~100 hours/week). A hunter-gatherer, OTOH, has less need for technology, and a lot fewer problems that need solving (permanent settlements, wars, transporting stockpiles, etc.).
The point of the documentary seems to be that propaganda from large corporations has made people think these are much larger problems then they actually are. People on both sides abuse the system. In the case of the coffee, the woman nearly died (Baux score of 95, with 140 being "comfort care only") with third degree burns to 6% of her body (16% burned total), and medical bills of $10,500 for her 8 day hospitalization, and over two years of treatment including skin graphs. Here is a picture of her burns, if you're still doubtful.
Well, this sounds almost exactly like BeOS's Negotiated Drag and Drop. I remember Leo Laporte doing an episode of (IIRC) The Screensavers where he showed the BeOS, and demonstrated this by dragging an unsaved piece of data between three or four applications and manipulating it in each. But, all I could easily find was this classic scene from a demo video demonstrating the concept between Tracker (the desktop application) and the Book application.
How does that work? I could kinda see it if you use their equipment, but many theses are pure products of the mind. A PhD student pays tuition, so it's not work for hire, and the student is certainly the main author. What claim could a university have over a thesis?
Apparently, someone thought the concept of files, folders, applications, and menus was too complicated for the 'average person'. Over the years, this idea has spawned countless variations of these concepts in an attempt to make them 'easier' for this hypothetical user. Ironically, the inconsistency and countless layers of abstraction made everything much harder.
Today, users aren't expected to know what any of that stuff is. The modern user isn't expected to understand what application they're using, or the difference between open or closed. Instead of discrete applications, the web browser is used for everything. Files fall way to the "cloud", the internet is the new OS, the address bar your command line. Javascript has become the new assembly language.
It's a marketer's dream, and an engineer's nightmare. Constantly changing everything breeds ignorance rather than increasing experience and sophistication. The tremendous complexity means we can see the web start to have the processing power of a 8086, and about a dozen abstracted layers from hardware, each with their own bugs. It probably won't be too much longer before computer science starts resembling biology, i.e. the dissecting and analysis of a complex system from the top down. Amusingly enough, Windows Vista contains about fourteen times more digital data than human DNA. OTOH, only 98% of DNA is 'junk', so it's probably not a fair comparison.
And what point does unmanned exploration have? You get better and better at making probes, but such things are highly specialized and there is less cross-over with other technologies. If we discover the composition of Neptune's atmosphere, for example, what significance does that hold? A few astronomers tweak some theories and if we're lucky we learn something about physics. If we discover an unusual star 20 light years away, pretty much the same thing happens. And if we advance technology in remote controlled mass spectroscopy and such, is there any major application on Earth?
Compare this with manned spaceflight. It advances manned aeronautics, life support systems, medical knowledge, building techniques, and other useful technologies. There's much more overlap because we make more devices for humans to use than remotely operated devices. Men walking on the moon was a good first step. Obviously they didn't do much, but neither did Sputnik. The point is to keep doing it so we get better at it. As for the cost, perhaps there's a correlation between landing on the moon, every kid wanting to be an astronaut, and enough funding for manned spaceflight, VS no obvious and major milestones (in a literal sense) in four decades and NASA struggling to convince people to fund them... By my estimation, we won't have any form of space program if it's not manned, for the exact same reason there are exceedingly few Science Fiction books about robots exploring space.
Food doesn't have sales tax in most parts of the US, unless it's from a restaurant. Heck, the government feeds an eighth of the adult population, so tax on food isn't really an issue. Nobody in the US should be going hungry, and in so far as I've seen the only ones that do are illegal immigrants or people who sell their groceries below cost for cash (and their children, which is sadly very common).
Landmines. Right now, they use a bare minimum of metal to evade metal detectors, so everything is mechanical. This would allow a processor and such to be in the mine so you could have it not detonate on friendlies, and deactivate itself/start beeping after a couple years. Heck, you could even have the mines networked so the whole field detonates simultaneously when it detects large number of troops are half-way across. I'm not sure if it's in the best interest of humanity to revisit this technology, but at least some of their tactical and humanitarian problems can be addressed.
It's a security theater. But obviously it's no fun to devise clever methods of evading security when your opponent in the cat-and-mouse-game is worse than Garfield.
Encase the superconductive shielding in aerogel or a similarly effective insulator, and use high-temperature superconductors. You should be able to get enough time out of that arrangement to make it past security, plus it's now thermally shielded (not cloaked).
But I doubt that's technically a problem. You see, the TSA categorizes substances by their phase of matter at room temperature. That's why they won't allow normal ice but dry ice is OK. Liquid nitrogen, helium, or hydrogen should be OK then, as they're all gases at room temperature. Unless the TSA is logically inconsistent... (Although I've got a nagging feeling that logic alone won't get you very far with the executive branch of government... Or the legislative... Fingers-crossed for the judicial...)
Fall back to regular HTTP then. There's no point in insecure HTTPS. Security is the "S" in these protocols and the sole reason for their existence. Someone who opts to use them has explicitly requested security, not compatibility, as most sites lack any form of SSL.
For most bugs, you're right. Convenience trumps most other things in software. Security is not one of them. Your users are trusting you to keep them safe. An insecure browsing session will eventually (quickly?) lead to money being stolen or civil rights activists being killed, that's why anyone puts up with the inconvenience of security in the first place.
Keep $20 in the phone's battery compartment for the odd merchant and ditch the wallet. Personally, I did this with a phone case that carries my credit card and it works quite well unless you're the type to carry three forms of identification, fifteen loyalty/credit cards, and a hundred dollars in small bills on you at all times. It's good safety measure as well, as the incentive to rob me is lower and my exposure in that event is less.
I was looking for a router a couple months ago with mostly the same requirements and settled on the BUFFALO WZR-HP-AG300H. I immediately installed OpenWRT, so I can't speak for the default firmware. Performance as an NAS is ~14 MB/s with Samba, ~5 Mbps on OpenVPN, and I've seen no dropping or stability issues.
Range isn't great, but that's probably more related to my area. 2.4 GHz is heavily congested here, but the range is slightly better than my old NETGEAR WGT 634U or PLANEX MZK-W04NU. 5 GHz is uncongested, but has inherently shorter range and with poor penetration. Either way, both signals manage to service my whole apartment without gaps from a central closet, which is better than the aforementioned two, but does not extend outside. Which is a bit odd, come to think of it... perhaps that lead paint notice when I moved in might have something to do with it...
There are two open issues in android regarding that. 11211 and 3748. Both are flagged medium priority and one & two years old respectively. But seriously, phones hold tons of private information and are frequently lost. Manual encryption of sensitive data is never going to work, with app developers strewing it everywhere (e.g. thumbnails), so OTFE of/data and/mnt/sdcard is the best solution.
Sadly, I suspect someone thinks users prefer convenience over security, so it'll likely be a while before we see these implemented by default. (Normally, I'd think users would prefer convenience, but with something like 1/8 losing their phones I think you could explain the danger fairly easily.)
We had to find an automated way to handle these sorts of issues so that the human engineers could focus on solving and preventing the larger, more complex outages.
Given how glitchy Facebook was in the past, I can't help but be reminded of this comic.
Now, although I enjoy Crichton's works, most are soft science fiction (harder than most though). The velociraptors were far more like Deinonychus antirrhopus (considered a species of Velociraptor by Crichton's primary source, though the dispute is even acknowledged by Alan Grant, oh, and no feathers have been found on this species), and a lot of cinematic liberty was taken in the movie and book. Most of it's not terribly important to the central theme, which is fairly common for his works. It's also rather common for people to not realize there is a theme to his books.
BTW, have some basic respect for the dead, even if you disagree with him or don't care for his works. Save your jokes for people who are alive or committed serious crimes in life.
Slashdot Mirror
But I'm not talking about free energy, I'm talking about using the energy of the earth to slingshot it out. Just like being on the end of a spinning whip you use the gravity of a partial fall to give you momentum followed by a burn out, like going downhill to pick up speed followed by gunning it to shoot up a hill.
What you're trying to do is increase an object's gravitational potential energy without expending any significant amount of chemical potential energy or kinetic energy. This is not consistent with the law of conservation of energy. It would be akin to getting a 100 lbs dumbbell on your roof without lifting it.
Here are some formulas. (M1 = mass of the Earth, M2 = mass of the satellite, r = altitude from center of Earth, v = speed of satellite, G = gravitational constant)
Gravitational potential energy = U = -G * M1 * M2 / r
Kinetic Energy = K = 1/2 * M2 * v^2
Chemical potential energy is going to equal what your fuel can give you (C)
So, you're trying to increase U from -57 MJ per kg of satellite to 0, while maintaining a non-zero K (insignificant compared to energy for U), and having almost no C to compensate. For comparison, think of a 1 kg iron ball released with a velocity of 1 m/s pointed toward the Earth from an incredible distance. When it hit the atmosphere it'd have nearly 60 MJ of energy from the conversion of the gravitational potential energy (0 to -60 MJ) into kinetic, so it's velocity would be about 11.4 km/sec. But the satellite doesn't have that much kinetic energy (and heck, the tangential velocity is the only thing that keeps it from falling toward the Earth in the same manner, so it's not exactly expendable).
Gravitational slingshots work in cases where a planet is moving relative to the spacecraft and the spacecraft gains twice the difference in velocity by slowing down the planet. The Earth is not moving relative to an orbiting satellite, so this technique will not help you.
If you really wanted to deorbit a satellite you'd need to supply energy. I suppose a sufficiently powerful laser could vaporize the Earth-facing side and the escaping gas might work to propel the satellite to a higher orbit, but I suspect it'd be completely vaporized (with the molecules still orbiting the Earth) long before it deorbited. But this is a risky procedure, as you'd probably just put the thing into some kind of crazy spin (think failed rocket launch) and create a ton of orbital debris.
All of these concepts tend to be covered in college level physics, so if this topic interests you I'd highly suggest checking it out. You obviously have been paying a lot of attention to the space program, but you've reached the level where you need to have a bit of a physics background to go much father. If we could deorbit satellites like you suggest that would be a great idea, but the laws of physics don't allow it. So, knock yourself out, gravity is covered very early in modern physics books (or free web resources), so it's not much of a time investment, and the non-Calculus based versions should make it easy to pick up even without a strong math background.
To escape a gravity well you need a certain amount of energy per mass. On Earth's surface, it's 60MJ/kg. When you get to orbit you are a bit further away (gravitational pull declines asymptotically) so you only need 57 MJ/kg. That's what you need to get out of the hole. This is conservation of Energy, so there are no cheats to get around it. Otherwise we could deorbit and reorbit objects for free energy. Satellites would need to carry twenty times more fuel to deorbit.
I also use ABE to restrict Google scripts in a futile attempt to keep them from knowing everything about me, but that's a more complex filter since there are legitimate non-tracking scripts they provide. Or at least I assumed those are non-tracking... Crap, now I'm going to have to figure out some redirection work around...
Ah yes, the Icarus birds. A tragic species, they often fly too high until the atmosphere is thin enough they asphyxiate. Thus, despite being able to fly twenty times faster than a peregrine falcon, they are in constant danger of extinction.
Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
That's been my experience exactly. Every PC I've owned has "died" from a HDD crash, usually sudden. The last SSD I had hit its erase limit in about two years (small SSD and I'm prone to reinstalling various OSes monthly). The lovely thing was that I could run a maintenance tool and see exactly how many erases were left on each cell (BTW the wear leveling was only 1% from mathematically perfect). This allowed a simple extrapolation down to the day some cells would start hitting their advertised capacity, although the drive held out overall a bit longer.
The initial symptoms were Windows blue screening on boot (1,000,000 writes per boot, so no surprises there), so I quick formatted the disk and reinstalling thinking it was probably Windows sucking again. From there the drive lasted a couple more days and became completely read-only. I keep good backups so I didn't need to salvage anything, but even now I can throw it in a USB enclosure and get my data off of it.
Gravity at Earth's surface: 9.8 m/s^2
Gravity at ISS: 9.1 m/s^2
Satellites are still very much inside Earth's gravity well. They are not floating in space, they are constantly falling but their tangential velocity ensures they miss hitting the Earth.
Without a VPN:
IOW, an ISP has little incentive to stand-up for user rights, whereas that's a VPN's major selling point.
It's probably more related to how hunter-gatherers led a pretty cushy lifestyle. Once someone develops farming, population densities increase dramatically, albeit at the cost of ~5 times more work (modern hunter-gatherers pushed into deserts spent ~10-20 hours/week gathering food, a farmer spends ~100 hours/week). A hunter-gatherer, OTOH, has less need for technology, and a lot fewer problems that need solving (permanent settlements, wars, transporting stockpiles, etc.).
The point of the documentary seems to be that propaganda from large corporations has made people think these are much larger problems then they actually are. People on both sides abuse the system. In the case of the coffee, the woman nearly died (Baux score of 95, with 140 being "comfort care only") with third degree burns to 6% of her body (16% burned total), and medical bills of $10,500 for her 8 day hospitalization, and over two years of treatment including skin graphs. Here is a picture of her burns, if you're still doubtful.
Well, this sounds almost exactly like BeOS's Negotiated Drag and Drop. I remember Leo Laporte doing an episode of (IIRC) The Screensavers where he showed the BeOS, and demonstrated this by dragging an unsaved piece of data between three or four applications and manipulating it in each. But, all I could easily find was this classic scene from a demo video demonstrating the concept between Tracker (the desktop application) and the Book application.
How does that work? I could kinda see it if you use their equipment, but many theses are pure products of the mind. A PhD student pays tuition, so it's not work for hire, and the student is certainly the main author. What claim could a university have over a thesis?
Apparently, someone thought the concept of files, folders, applications, and menus was too complicated for the 'average person'. Over the years, this idea has spawned countless variations of these concepts in an attempt to make them 'easier' for this hypothetical user. Ironically, the inconsistency and countless layers of abstraction made everything much harder.
Today, users aren't expected to know what any of that stuff is. The modern user isn't expected to understand what application they're using, or the difference between open or closed. Instead of discrete applications, the web browser is used for everything. Files fall way to the "cloud", the internet is the new OS, the address bar your command line. Javascript has become the new assembly language.
It's a marketer's dream, and an engineer's nightmare. Constantly changing everything breeds ignorance rather than increasing experience and sophistication. The tremendous complexity means we can see the web start to have the processing power of a 8086, and about a dozen abstracted layers from hardware, each with their own bugs. It probably won't be too much longer before computer science starts resembling biology, i.e. the dissecting and analysis of a complex system from the top down. Amusingly enough, Windows Vista contains about fourteen times more digital data than human DNA. OTOH, only 98% of DNA is 'junk', so it's probably not a fair comparison.
And what point does unmanned exploration have? You get better and better at making probes, but such things are highly specialized and there is less cross-over with other technologies. If we discover the composition of Neptune's atmosphere, for example, what significance does that hold? A few astronomers tweak some theories and if we're lucky we learn something about physics. If we discover an unusual star 20 light years away, pretty much the same thing happens. And if we advance technology in remote controlled mass spectroscopy and such, is there any major application on Earth?
Compare this with manned spaceflight. It advances manned aeronautics, life support systems, medical knowledge, building techniques, and other useful technologies. There's much more overlap because we make more devices for humans to use than remotely operated devices. Men walking on the moon was a good first step. Obviously they didn't do much, but neither did Sputnik. The point is to keep doing it so we get better at it. As for the cost, perhaps there's a correlation between landing on the moon, every kid wanting to be an astronaut, and enough funding for manned spaceflight, VS no obvious and major milestones (in a literal sense) in four decades and NASA struggling to convince people to fund them... By my estimation, we won't have any form of space program if it's not manned, for the exact same reason there are exceedingly few Science Fiction books about robots exploring space.
Food doesn't have sales tax in most parts of the US, unless it's from a restaurant. Heck, the government feeds an eighth of the adult population, so tax on food isn't really an issue. Nobody in the US should be going hungry, and in so far as I've seen the only ones that do are illegal immigrants or people who sell their groceries below cost for cash (and their children, which is sadly very common).
Landmines. Right now, they use a bare minimum of metal to evade metal detectors, so everything is mechanical. This would allow a processor and such to be in the mine so you could have it not detonate on friendlies, and deactivate itself/start beeping after a couple years. Heck, you could even have the mines networked so the whole field detonates simultaneously when it detects large number of troops are half-way across. I'm not sure if it's in the best interest of humanity to revisit this technology, but at least some of their tactical and humanitarian problems can be addressed.
It's a security theater. But obviously it's no fun to devise clever methods of evading security when your opponent in the cat-and-mouse-game is worse than Garfield.
Encase the superconductive shielding in aerogel or a similarly effective insulator, and use high-temperature superconductors. You should be able to get enough time out of that arrangement to make it past security, plus it's now thermally shielded (not cloaked).
But I doubt that's technically a problem. You see, the TSA categorizes substances by their phase of matter at room temperature. That's why they won't allow normal ice but dry ice is OK. Liquid nitrogen, helium, or hydrogen should be OK then, as they're all gases at room temperature. Unless the TSA is logically inconsistent... (Although I've got a nagging feeling that logic alone won't get you very far with the executive branch of government... Or the legislative... Fingers-crossed for the judicial...)
Fall back to regular HTTP then. There's no point in insecure HTTPS. Security is the "S" in these protocols and the sole reason for their existence. Someone who opts to use them has explicitly requested security, not compatibility, as most sites lack any form of SSL.
For most bugs, you're right. Convenience trumps most other things in software. Security is not one of them. Your users are trusting you to keep them safe. An insecure browsing session will eventually (quickly?) lead to money being stolen or civil rights activists being killed, that's why anyone puts up with the inconvenience of security in the first place.
Keep $20 in the phone's battery compartment for the odd merchant and ditch the wallet. Personally, I did this with a phone case that carries my credit card and it works quite well unless you're the type to carry three forms of identification, fifteen loyalty/credit cards, and a hundred dollars in small bills on you at all times. It's good safety measure as well, as the incentive to rob me is lower and my exposure in that event is less.
On a slightly less serious note...
I was looking for a router a couple months ago with mostly the same requirements and settled on the BUFFALO WZR-HP-AG300H. I immediately installed OpenWRT, so I can't speak for the default firmware. Performance as an NAS is ~14 MB/s with Samba, ~5 Mbps on OpenVPN, and I've seen no dropping or stability issues.
Range isn't great, but that's probably more related to my area. 2.4 GHz is heavily congested here, but the range is slightly better than my old NETGEAR WGT 634U or PLANEX MZK-W04NU. 5 GHz is uncongested, but has inherently shorter range and with poor penetration. Either way, both signals manage to service my whole apartment without gaps from a central closet, which is better than the aforementioned two, but does not extend outside. Which is a bit odd, come to think of it... perhaps that lead paint notice when I moved in might have something to do with it...
There are two open issues in android regarding that. 11211 and 3748. Both are flagged medium priority and one & two years old respectively. But seriously, phones hold tons of private information and are frequently lost. Manual encryption of sensitive data is never going to work, with app developers strewing it everywhere (e.g. thumbnails), so OTFE of /data and /mnt/sdcard is the best solution.
Sadly, I suspect someone thinks users prefer convenience over security, so it'll likely be a while before we see these implemented by default. (Normally, I'd think users would prefer convenience, but with something like 1/8 losing their phones I think you could explain the danger fairly easily.)
Then we all sit and contemplate why we let patents last for as long as they do. Besides, it seems like corporate insanity is more common anyway.
We had to find an automated way to handle these sorts of issues so that the human engineers could focus on solving and preventing the larger, more complex outages.
Given how glitchy Facebook was in the past, I can't help but be reminded of this comic.
Now, although I enjoy Crichton's works, most are soft science fiction (harder than most though). The velociraptors were far more like Deinonychus antirrhopus (considered a species of Velociraptor by Crichton's primary source, though the dispute is even acknowledged by Alan Grant, oh, and no feathers have been found on this species), and a lot of cinematic liberty was taken in the movie and book. Most of it's not terribly important to the central theme, which is fairly common for his works. It's also rather common for people to not realize there is a theme to his books.
BTW, have some basic respect for the dead, even if you disagree with him or don't care for his works. Save your jokes for people who are alive or committed serious crimes in life.