Now here is the kicker. If it's on a river the water isn't perfectly flat.
It depends on the amplitude of the waves. On each skip a random angle added or subtracted from the ideal 20 degrees. If this minimum of energy loss per skip around 20 degrees is relatively symmetrical you should still get the optimum at 20 degrees. For really high wave amplitudes you might hit the water at an angle that is too sharp and not skip at all so in those cases a shallower angle may be preferred.
Personally the 38 skip record sounds weird to me...... I've never counted...
Consider the possibilty that your estimate is incorrect. Even 25 skips looks like "a lot".
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Climatic Optimum of the early middle ages when temperatures werre warmer by 3 to 6 degrees and Vikings established their flourishing colonies in Greenland?
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Little Ice Age of 1645-1715 where temperatures were 2 to 4 degrees colder?
Not to mention that many scientists doubt the fact that there is any significant warming and claim that when the samples tainted by local city hot spots are removed there is nothing that registers above the noise.
...getting in touch with Asian suppliers who "are more than willing" to give you discounts,
Those Asian suppliers are obviously more than willing to meet Dell's ridiculous demans for lead times that force their suppliers to rent warehouses in Austin at their own expense, store large stocks at their own expense, have every product return by a customer -- even if it has nothing to do with that supplier's hardware -- counted against them and generally be treated like dirt, bullied around and periodically be bumped off the supplier list with no warning just "to keep them on their toes".
Dell knows how to use their massive buying power and that a Chinese factory will work at cost or below just to avoid firing their employees.
The idea is to use high-speed kites flying around in circles for wind turbines. Big, heavy towers are replaced by a tether and let the turbine operate at higher altitudes where winds are not slowed down by ground friction. I assume it would also reduce the chances of hitting birds...
Peter also discusses using this concept for a new type of aircraft, parachute or sail.
...And that is why we are likely to be using Deuterium-H3lium3 fusion, as it produces protons and no fast neutrons like D-D fusion.
Unfortunately, there is no way to stop some D-D reactions from occuring when you heat up the D-3He mixture. It's less energetically favorable, but it will happen.
from http://www.vmware.com/products/vmanage/vc_faqs.htm l:
What is VMotion technology?
VMotion technology lets you move running virtual machines from one physical ESX Server to another while maintaining continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity. VMotion is enabled by the ability to keep the entire state of an x86 Server in software, which then allows that state to be duplicated and shifted from server to server. VMotion leverages a shared storage infrastructure -- such as a storage area network -- to allow the state of the virtual machine to be moved from one physical system to another without requiring its data to be moved.
The real reason they don't want supersonic flight is because these planes consume more fuel (which makes up most of the ticket price). Experience has shown that people are not willing to pay much more for faster travel. If a supersonic technology was available that was actually cheaper I'm sure the scheduling issues could be resolved really quickly.
Sonic boom is a real issue in flight over land.
By the way, there is *no* law of nature which says that a supersonic vehicle must produce shockwaves. In fact, there is a sniper bullet shaped to generate no sonic boom. It relies on symmetry for eliminating shockwaves so it cannot produce any lift. A shockwave-free supersonic glider is impossible but a powered vehicle could theoretically use some of the engine power to simultaneously provide thrust, lift and shockwave elimination.
5,579,517 VFAT - short filenames + long filenames in consecutive directory entries. Seems to cover only the method of writing such files. A read-only vfat driver or a read-write driver that reads long filenames but only writes short ones seems ok. The current read-write vfat driver in Linux is theoretically in danger. So are cameras and other kinds of equipment using fat-formatted flash with long filenames,
5,745,902 An alternative method of implementing short + long filenames using B-trees. This does not appear to be the method actually used in VFAT. My guess would be that this is one of the alternatives Microsoft considered during the development of Windows 95 to handle long filenames. This patent does not appear to be relevant.
5,758,352 Continuation of the first patent. (Continuation means adding more claims, but they must be of things described in the original disclosure). This one also claims the medium while the original patent only claimed the method of writing to it. According to this there seems to be a basis for Microsoft's request for royalties on preformatted media, but only if it comes preloaded with data using long filenames. There is money in the removable flash media market and Microsoft is after it.
6,286,013 This one claims certain things about a long filename API. It seems very sloppily written and probably would not be enforcable in court. You *really* don't want to get in court against Microsoft, though.
No, the Bible measured in cubits. God measured in Planck Units. Using this set of units virtually all conversion constants disappear from the equations; Planck's constant, Gravity constant, Boltzmann constant, speed of light, etc are all equal to 1.
The ICANN is too new. It's still reeling from the bubble and exploring vast new realms of corruption and mismanagement. The ITU is an old, established organization that has already settled to an acceptable level of mediocrity. The amount of damage it can do is therefore quite limited.
XCOR is developing a commercial suborbital "space tourism" vehicle callex Xerus.
Yes, there are a couple of X's in the previous sentence but X-prize is not one of them. XCOR is not running for the X-prize. The Xerus mission profile is, however, similar to that of the X-Prize.
What happens when the corporate backers of UserLinux decide that bills can't be met and they have to concentrate on an enterprise version?
My guess is that the UserLinux corporate backers are large IT *users*, not developers like Red Hat. If that is the case they don't need to make any profit on it - they want to save money by using it themselves.
Get a few big companies with hundreds of thousands of PC seats and each company's share of the investment to develop this kind of desktop distribution starts to look small compared to what they spent just on handling the latest MS virus.
Anyhow, can we at least agree this whole thing is science fiction and that there are far cheaper ways of generating power than this plan?
If by "science fiction" you mean "something which currently exists only in imagination but is firmly based on current scientific and engineering knowledge" then I heartily agree to call this science fiction.
Controlled, sustainable fusion energy, for example, could be called "science fiction" under the much looser definition of "something which currently exists only in imagination and is based on current scientific knowledge plus some extra assumptions and wishful thinking".
As far as price, I agree that the up-front costs until we see the first megawatt will be huge. But in the long term it may prove far cheaper than any alternative proposed until now which does not involve some breakthrough physics.
It all depends on whether you believe that an industrial infrastructure can be developed and sustained on the moon using mostly local resources. If such an infrastructure can cross a certain critical mass we get nearly free non-polluting energy forever. Is it worth trying?
I don't argue that this is possible, but the power loss from such a setup would be unacceptable. Remember that the moon is 250,000 miles away from the earth...There will be some major divergence of the radio beam on the way here.
Please read the actual plan. It proposes to scatter the solar power stations on a region tens to hundreds of kilometers wide on the moon, acting as a huge phased array. The microwave transmitters at these stations will be locked onto a common reference frequency and phase and amplitude modulated to create multiple steerable beams.
This is actually the part of the system whose feasibility is under the least amount of doubt. It's not exactly easy but we've been doing phased array radars for decades and the accuracy required to do this from the moon to the Earth is no greater than that achieved on the GPS system. Yes, we can focus on a target 400 meters across on the Earth's surface or in orbit and track it with high accuracy. A microwave mirror will reflect this focused beam with very small losses.
and it's also true that on the moon's spin makes it such that one side is always facing the sun
Ummm... no. There is no "dark side of the moon". One side of the moon is always facing the Earth (not the sun). The moon has a "day" approximately one month in length. Two weeks light. Two weeks darkness (read the actual plan to see how to handle that).
The group backs a first-things-first approach, namely the building of satellite power stations in Earth orbit.
Yeah, first build a huge satellite that needs to be hauled to orbit at absurd launch cost per lb, forcing you to optimize it for weight rather than cost and reliability. Yeah, that makes sense.
Power satellites were abandoned because the economics don't make sense, even with the most optimistic reductions in launch costs.
A manufacturing plant sent from Earth should produce thousands of times its own weight of solar panels on the moon. And as long as it uses local resources, who cares about weight or overall efficiency? Just keep it simple and cheap.
Relay satellites will not work. Yes, I read the bit about the relay satellites, but that's ridiculous.
The relay satellites are microwave mirrors. They just need to be steered to the correct angle to reflect the beam to the receiver. The surface of such a mirror can be 99% vacuum - a mesh with holes smaller than the wavelength.
Wouldn't it be easier just to build a massive solar array HERE ON EARTH??
To meet global power requirements you'll need to cover a significant portion of the Earth's surface and keep it all in good maintenance in the presence of rain, dust, hail, winds, corrosion, condensation, birds, lightning, ground erosion, vegetation, earthquakes and, of course, people.
On the moon even the lightest self-supporting structure will just stand there for hundreds or thousands of years. Other than micrometeorites causing some erosion at a predictable rate nothing happens there.
Is the NASA curator of the moon rocks brought back by Apollo. He'd better know what resources are in moon rocks. He also spent the last 20 years figuring out what they can be used to produce using other moon resources such as hard vacuum and plentiful solar energy. Low gravity and having no clouds, dust or wind also helps build lightweight structures and with minimal maintenance.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to register and get it in a few weeks by mail.
Now here is the kicker. If it's on a river the water isn't perfectly flat.
... I've never counted...
It depends on the amplitude of the waves. On each skip a random angle added or subtracted from the ideal 20 degrees. If this minimum of energy loss per skip around 20 degrees is relatively symmetrical you should still get the optimum at 20 degrees. For really high wave amplitudes you might hit the water at an angle that is too sharp and not skip at all so in those cases a shallower angle may be preferred.
Personally the 38 skip record sounds weird to me...
Consider the possibilty that your estimate is incorrect. Even 25 skips looks like "a lot".
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Climatic Optimum of the early middle ages when temperatures werre warmer by 3 to 6 degrees and Vikings established their flourishing colonies in Greenland?
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Little Ice Age of 1645-1715 where temperatures were 2 to 4 degrees colder?
Not to mention that many scientists doubt the fact that there is any significant warming and claim that when the samples tainted by local city hot spots are removed there is nothing that registers above the noise.
...getting in touch with Asian suppliers who "are more than willing" to give you discounts,
Those Asian suppliers are obviously more than willing to meet Dell's ridiculous demans for lead times that force their suppliers to rent warehouses in Austin at their own expense, store large stocks at their own expense, have every product return by a customer -- even if it has nothing to do with that supplier's hardware -- counted against them and generally be treated like dirt, bullied around and periodically be bumped off the supplier list with no warning just "to keep them on their toes".
Dell knows how to use their massive buying power and that a Chinese factory will work at cost or below just to avoid firing their employees.
Peter Lynn made an interesting proposal in this usenet posting.
The idea is to use high-speed kites flying around in circles for wind turbines. Big, heavy towers are replaced by a tether and let the turbine operate at higher altitudes where winds are not slowed down by ground friction. I assume it would also reduce the chances of hitting birds...
Peter also discusses using this concept for a new type of aircraft, parachute or sail.
There really needs to be stronger international enforcement on these scams.
Education wil be much more effective than enforcement. Get the Hallmark Channel to produce a drama about a 419 victim.
...And that is why we are likely to be using Deuterium-H3lium3 fusion, as it produces protons and no fast neutrons like D-D fusion.
Unfortunately, there is no way to stop some D-D reactions from occuring when you heat up the D-3He mixture. It's less energetically favorable, but it will happen.
from http://www.vmware.com/products/vmanage/vc_faqs.htm l:
What is VMotion technology?
VMotion technology lets you move running virtual machines from one physical ESX Server to another while maintaining continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity. VMotion is enabled by the ability to keep the entire state of an x86 Server in software, which then allows that state to be duplicated and shifted from server to server. VMotion leverages a shared storage infrastructure -- such as a storage area network -- to allow the state of the virtual machine to be moved from one physical system to another without requiring its data to be moved.
Yup. That sounds like EMC to me.
The real reason they don't want supersonic flight is because these planes consume more fuel (which makes up most of the ticket price). Experience has shown that people are not willing to pay much more for faster travel. If a supersonic technology was available that was actually cheaper I'm sure the scheduling issues could be resolved really quickly.
Sonic boom is a real issue in flight over land.
By the way, there is *no* law of nature which says that a supersonic vehicle must produce shockwaves. In fact, there is a sniper bullet shaped to generate no sonic boom. It relies on symmetry for eliminating shockwaves so it cannot produce any lift. A shockwave-free supersonic glider is impossible but a powered vehicle could theoretically use some of the engine power to simultaneously provide thrust, lift and shockwave elimination.
United States Patent Application
20020027173 Apparatus and method for circular vortex air flow material grinding
To download it as a pdf document try pat2pdf
#include
5,579,517
VFAT - short filenames + long filenames in consecutive directory entries. Seems to cover only the method of writing such files. A read-only vfat driver or a read-write driver that reads long filenames but only writes short ones seems ok. The current read-write vfat driver in Linux is theoretically in danger. So are cameras and other kinds of equipment using fat-formatted flash with long filenames,
5,745,902
An alternative method of implementing short + long filenames using B-trees. This does not appear to be the method actually used in VFAT. My guess would be that this is one of the alternatives Microsoft considered during the development of Windows 95 to handle long filenames. This patent does not appear to be relevant.
5,758,352
Continuation of the first patent. (Continuation means adding more claims, but they must be of things described in the original disclosure). This one also claims the medium while the original patent only claimed the method of writing to it. According to this there seems to be a basis for Microsoft's request for royalties on preformatted media, but only if it comes preloaded with data using long filenames. There is money in the removable flash media market and Microsoft is after it.
6,286,013
This one claims certain things about a long filename API. It seems very sloppily written and probably would not be enforcable in court. You *really* don't want to get in court against Microsoft, though.
God measured in cubits.
No, the Bible measured in cubits. God measured in Planck Units. Using this set of units virtually all conversion constants disappear from the equations; Planck's constant, Gravity constant, Boltzmann constant, speed of light, etc are all equal to 1.
You can bet the Chinese would be looking to shoot down the GPS system if they got into a war.
There may be no need to shoot them down - there might already be a miniature parasite satellite attached to them, just waiting a signal...
For now though, this Embrio is still in utero-no working model yet exists.
Imaginary vehicles don't have a stopping distance.
RD3D? It is anything like R2D2?
The ICANN is too new. It's still reeling from the bubble and exploring vast new realms of corruption and mismanagement. The ITU is an old, established organization that has already settled to an acceptable level of mediocrity. The amount of damage it can do is therefore quite limited.
Patent No. 5,443,036: Method for Exercising a Cat
how would you react to the community creating a freely-distributale RHEL variant?
Someone's already doing a "white box" version of RHEL. He asked not to post a link on slashdot as the beta ISOs are hosted on a pretty narrow pipe.
XCOR is developing a commercial suborbital "space tourism" vehicle callex Xerus.
Yes, there are a couple of X's in the previous sentence but X-prize is not one of them. XCOR is not running for the X-prize. The Xerus mission profile is, however, similar to that of the X-Prize.
What happens when the corporate backers of UserLinux decide that bills can't be met and they have to concentrate on an enterprise version?
My guess is that the UserLinux corporate backers are large IT *users*, not developers like Red Hat. If that is the case they don't need to make any profit on it - they want to save money by using it themselves.
Get a few big companies with hundreds of thousands of PC seats and each company's share of the investment to develop this kind of desktop distribution starts to look small compared to what they spent just on handling the latest MS virus.
Anyhow, can we at least agree this whole thing is science fiction and that there are far cheaper ways of generating power than this plan?
If by "science fiction" you mean "something which currently exists only in imagination but is firmly based on current scientific and engineering knowledge" then I heartily agree to call this science fiction.
Controlled, sustainable fusion energy, for example, could be called "science fiction" under the much looser definition of "something which currently exists only in imagination and is based on current scientific knowledge plus some extra assumptions and wishful thinking".
As far as price, I agree that the up-front costs until we see the first megawatt will be huge. But in the long term it may prove far cheaper than any alternative proposed until now which does not involve some breakthrough physics.
It all depends on whether you believe that an industrial infrastructure can be developed and sustained on the moon using mostly local resources. If such an infrastructure can cross a certain critical mass we get nearly free non-polluting energy forever. Is it worth trying?
I don't argue that this is possible, but the power loss from such a setup would be unacceptable. Remember that the moon is 250,000 miles away from the earth...There will be some major divergence of the radio beam on the way here.
Please read the actual plan. It proposes to scatter the solar power stations on a region tens to hundreds of kilometers wide on the moon, acting as a huge phased array. The microwave transmitters at these stations will be locked onto a common reference frequency and phase and amplitude modulated to create multiple steerable beams.
This is actually the part of the system whose feasibility is under the least amount of doubt. It's not exactly easy but we've been doing phased array radars for decades and the accuracy required to do this from the moon to the Earth is no greater than that achieved on the GPS system. Yes, we can focus on a target 400 meters across on the Earth's surface or in orbit and track it with high accuracy. A microwave mirror will reflect this focused beam with very small losses.
and it's also true that on the moon's spin makes it such that one side is always facing the sun
Ummm... no. There is no "dark side of the moon". One side of the moon is always facing the Earth (not the sun). The moon has a "day" approximately one month in length. Two weeks light. Two weeks darkness (read the actual plan to see how to handle that).
The group backs a first-things-first approach, namely the building of satellite power stations in Earth orbit.
Yeah, first build a huge satellite that needs to be hauled to orbit at absurd launch cost per lb, forcing you to optimize it for weight rather than cost and reliability. Yeah, that makes sense.
Power satellites were abandoned because the economics don't make sense, even with the most optimistic reductions in launch costs.
A manufacturing plant sent from Earth should produce thousands of times its own weight of solar panels on the moon. And as long as it uses local resources, who cares about weight or overall efficiency? Just keep it simple and cheap.
Relay satellites will not work. Yes, I read the bit about the relay satellites, but that's ridiculous.
The relay satellites are microwave mirrors. They just need to be steered to the correct angle to reflect the beam to the receiver. The surface of such a mirror can be 99% vacuum - a mesh with holes smaller than the wavelength.
Wouldn't it be easier just to build a massive solar array HERE ON EARTH??
To meet global power requirements you'll need to cover a significant portion of the Earth's surface and keep it all in good maintenance in the presence of rain, dust, hail, winds, corrosion, condensation, birds, lightning, ground erosion, vegetation, earthquakes and, of course, people.
On the moon even the lightest self-supporting structure will just stand there for hundreds or thousands of years. Other than micrometeorites causing some erosion at a predictable rate nothing happens there.
Is the NASA curator of the moon rocks brought back by Apollo. He'd better know what resources are in moon rocks. He also spent the last 20 years figuring out what they can be used to produce using other moon resources such as hard vacuum and plentiful solar energy. Low gravity and having no clouds, dust or wind also helps build lightweight structures and with minimal maintenance.