Which is worse, the (quite) small risk of limited danger from a nuclear accident (I know Chernoble affected alot of the planet, but it's effects have been relatively limited, and are fading with time), or pumping the air full of chemicals and gases that are impossible to contain, affect the entire planet and cannot be gotten rid of?
Nuclear wast can be contained, it can be stored in containers that withstand impacts of hundreds of miles an hour. Try doing that with several million tons of CO2.
I'm not saying that nuclear is the answer, but it's better than most of the alternatives.
First rule of system security - No system is ever 100% secure. It's easier to find a fault in something than to prevent it, because you have to find it first. The only way to find the holes is to have competitions like this where people have to tell you how they did the crack. This is what OSS is all about, having an army of people looking for problems.
I can't remember the exact details of the argument
It probably went something like this
Any two objects held apart from each other posses potential energy governed by the strength of the field and the distance. If the force was repulsive the efective distance the objects could travel would be infinite rather than finite (as it is with normal gravity) thus the potential energy in the bodies would be infinite. Since the force between two objects never reaches zero they would constantly repel each other, with increasing amounts of the infinite potential energy being converted to kinetic. The result, everything traveling at speeds infinitly close to light speed.
Of course that is only for gravity. God knows what would happen at the quantum level for forces in reverse.
Was that last bit serious? (I'm not a physics student if you couldn't tell) Sounds like something I read in NS some time ago about a guy who had resolved the universe down to information theory and reakoned that everything was to do with wormholes (explained entanglement and quantum randomness and everything else to boot).
The bomb actually spun backwards so that when it hit the dam it's angular momentum would make it roll down the dam and deep under water, detonating near the base using a pressure sensor.
You obviously havn't seen a Nokia Comunicator. The screen is about the same size as a medium sized mobile/small pda. The phone splits in half and opens up like a psion. V.nifty.
The MILLIONS of UK tellys arn't useless. You get a FREE dig-decoder box, plug it into your telly (via the scart) and bobs your uncle one digital telly.
Sometimes it's good to make a leap and leave the old standards behind, you just have to provide a stop-gap to give people time to change.
Fahrenheit is based on blood. When it was first devised 100f was the temperature of human blood, but when better thermometers were invented they scale was found to be wrong (hence blood temp is around 98.5deg f). I think this is correct. Not sure what o deg.f is, mabey the freezing point of blood. Any medical students out there?
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but it is something like that.
The Imperial system is useful. Before the decimal point was generally understood and when times tables were more readily taught,maths was done in fractions. The imperial system was designed so that you could do the sums in your head. Though for some reason the Yanks don't seem to use stone, everyone quotes weight in pounds (?)
I don't know if it will ever get to the US, but another programme worht watching was Project X, it was a series all about Bletchley park et al. really in depth (about six programmes).
Good point though is that while Turing was important to breaking the code it was very much a team effort, the man who was probably most important was Tommy Flowers the phone engineer who designed the machiens and got them to work so well.
They had copmputers from the start, human ones, who simply did the same logical task all day. much like the original "Computers" who were people who worked out log tables etc by hand. It was their falibility that sparked Babbage to design his engines (I think I have that right, please correct me if I'm wrong).
Nice to see that at least US TV can get history right, even if holywood can't:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes!
Which is worse, the (quite) small risk of limited danger from a nuclear accident (I know Chernoble affected alot of the planet, but it's effects have been relatively limited, and are fading with time), or pumping the air full of chemicals and gases that are impossible to contain, affect the entire planet and cannot be gotten rid of?
Nuclear wast can be contained, it can be stored in containers that withstand impacts of hundreds of miles an hour. Try doing that with several million tons of CO2.
I'm not saying that nuclear is the answer, but it's better than most of the alternatives.
First rule of system security - No system is ever 100% secure. It's easier to find a fault in something than to prevent it, because you have to find it first. The only way to find the holes is to have competitions like this where people have to tell you how they did the crack. This is what OSS is all about, having an army of people looking for problems.
I can't remember the exact details of the argument
It probably went something like this
Any two objects held apart from each other posses potential energy governed by the strength of the field and the distance. If the force was repulsive the efective distance the objects could travel would be infinite rather than finite (as it is with normal gravity) thus the potential energy in the bodies would be infinite. Since the force between two objects never reaches zero they would constantly repel each other, with increasing amounts of the infinite potential energy being converted to kinetic. The result, everything traveling at speeds infinitly close to light speed.
Of course that is only for gravity. God knows what would happen at the quantum level for forces in reverse.
Was that last bit serious? (I'm not a physics student if you couldn't tell) Sounds like something I read in NS some time ago about a guy who had resolved the universe down to information theory and reakoned that everything was to do with wormholes (explained entanglement and quantum randomness and everything else to boot).
Aparently P10 has discovered a new planetoid http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_4 60000/460095.stm
No mention of id's in this one. mabey Reuters just getting the wrong end of the stick
http://www.theregister.co.uk/990927-000012.html
The bomb actually spun backwards so that when it hit the dam it's angular momentum would make it roll down the dam and deep under water, detonating near the base using a pressure sensor.
Nice pic btw
... and voice controlled
You obviously havn't seen a Nokia Comunicator. The screen is about the same size as a medium sized mobile/small pda. The phone splits in half and opens up like a psion. V.nifty.
The MILLIONS of UK tellys arn't useless. You get a FREE dig-decoder box, plug it into your telly (via the scart) and bobs your uncle one digital telly.
Sometimes it's good to make a leap and leave the old standards behind, you just have to provide a stop-gap to give people time to change.
Fahrenheit is based on blood. When it was first devised 100f was the temperature of human blood, but when better thermometers were invented they scale was found to be wrong (hence blood temp is around 98.5deg f). I think this is correct. Not sure what o deg.f is, mabey the freezing point of blood. Any medical students out there?
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but it is something like that.
The Imperial system is useful. Before the decimal point was generally understood and when times tables were more readily taught,maths was done in fractions. The imperial system was designed so that you could do the sums in your head. Though for some reason the Yanks don't seem to use stone, everyone quotes weight in pounds (?)
It's a sad fact that history is written by the winners, and the smaller/less noisy players tend to get overlooked.
Thanks for the info, it's always nice to have history set straight. Shame holywood doesn't seem to aqree (chip on my shoulder, never!).
I don't know if it will ever get to the US, but another programme worht watching was Project X, it was a series all about Bletchley park et al. really in depth (about six programmes).
:-)
Good point though is that while Turing was important to breaking the code it was very much a team effort, the man who was probably most important was Tommy Flowers the phone engineer who designed the machiens and got them to work so well.
They had copmputers from the start, human ones, who simply did the same logical task all day. much like the original "Computers" who were people who worked out log tables etc by hand. It was their falibility that sparked Babbage to design his engines (I think I have that right, please correct me if I'm wrong).
Nice to see that at least US TV can get history right, even if holywood can't