His demonstration thruster produces 35 micronewtons.
35 micronewtons /.0005467722 Km/s^2 = 64 milligrams, so if we were using this to power a marscraft with the mass of the acetominophen contained in a single extra strength tylenol tablet, it would be more than 10x too heavy. Of course they said it could be scaled up, but that's a heckuvalot of scaling.
I doubt the smallesst possible manned Mars vehicle could be less than 1,000kg. That's a scaling factor of 15.6 million. I can jump over 3 feet on the trampoline in my back yard, which translates to a maximum velocity of 4.23 m/s. If I scale that up by 15.6 million, I would be launching myself at 66,000,000 m/s, far exceeding escape velocity, and reaching Mars under my own power in under 30 minutes.
"Humor. It is a difficult concept. It is not logical."
Nevertheless, the moderation system of this forum may serve to alert you to the utilization of humor, as posts utilizing it are often accompanied by a "Funny" indicator. In such cases, correction of fact can generally be assumed unnecessary, as said facts will likely have been intentionally misstated as a means of producing said humor.
Okay, thought about it. Yes, it is pretty laughable that the US Military has to now go to a judge before spying on a suspected member of a foreign terrorist organization. As goofy an inept as that makes us look, I still want to make fun of China. China's problem isn't exactly goofiness.
$180? Dude, YOU'RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT. Until other countries get some lawyers who know how to properly sue multinational corporations, America's supremacy in the world will never be challenged.
The problem is, how much are you practically able to express these things publicly? Recent events have shown that to be rapidly eroding in America.
Such as what? What are you not able to express publicly in America?
A guarantee you that somewhere in America right now someone is standing on some street corner with a megaphone (covered in and-written cardboard signs probably) shouting that Bush did 9/11, that he's a war criminal, and should be tried and found guilty of treason. And if the police are doing anything, they're protecting him from the more sensible people who would like to smack him around.
Hyperbole is one thing, but when it becomes a paranoid fantasy-land where all statements are absurdities, it just takes us that much further from having rational debate and therefore rational policy.
Just to put this into perspective, the pair of Mars rovers cost NASA $820 million. Granted you're only expected to send one and it's only to the moon, NASA does already have the infrastructure & experienced personel to do this. Even an 1/8 of that cost is 3 times the prize money.
Add the requirements of a 500 meter 'rove' and hi def 'Mooncast' and I think you're looking at too much risk for any person--possibly any company.
A 500 meter rove and a hi-def mooncast? You mean like I could do by rigging a golf cart with a couple-hundred-dollar hi-def camera and remote-control steering? They've had more far more difficult builds than that on Monster Garage. The Mars rovers have some VERY high end equipment which would not be necessary here. An innovative person could do it for 30 mil. The question is if any such innovative people have the 30 mil to start with and if they'd risk it.
Lastly, not all public key crypto is shafted, only things that rely on factorisation as a problem. ECC will be quite safe until (if?) somebody develops a quantum algorithm for discrete logs.
Factoring and discrete logs are codependent on each other being hard problems. Either one can solve the other. I'm not familiar enough with ECC to know if being able to solve regular discrete logs necessary breaks it; but if so, then factoring breaks it too.
RSA uses primes. This leaves the ones that don't: HFE, NTRU, ECC, XTR, Paillier, ElGamal,....
XTR and ElGamal rely on the discrete logarithm problem. If factoring becomes easy, then the discrete logarithm problem becomes easy as well. Not sure about the other ones.
I know plenty of people who worked harder but got no where mostly due to things out of their control.
Important lesson for left-wingers: It's not about how hard you work. It's about what you actually accomplish.
Google didn't succeed because the worked harder than altavista and yahoo. The succeeded because they had a better, more innovative product. Hard work is usually required, but it is only one ingredient. While luck is sometimes an ingredient too, luck isn't what made google better than the other search engines.
the 9/11 hijackers did a pretty good job blending in to their surroundings, and only certain aspects of their behavior (e.g. riding in a jumbo jet flight simulator and telling an instructor they only wanted to learn how to fly it, not land it) marked them as suspect. Whould surveillance have tipped anyone off? Sure... if anyone had actually known where they were.
The guy that they convicted of abetting the 9/11 hijackers -- I forget his name. They wanted to spy on him, but it was mostly hunch, not enough for a warrant. If they had been able to eavesdrop, they very likely could have gotten enough of a heads-up to stop it.
Pay attention people, this is your Constitional rights that they are messing with here. Write your Congresscritter. Write the newspapers. E-mail Robin Meade. Do whatever it takes to let them know that you don't want your Constitutionally-protected rights taken away from you.
Judicial oversight of spying is not a "constitutional right." To the degree that the spying is for military intelligence rather than criminal prosecution, the ABSENCE of judicial oversight is a "constitutional right."
Doesn't fair use mean you don't pay for content? Where is all this money coming from?
People that (for example) buy computers and DVD burners and software and tons of blank media to copy movies and music. People that buy iPods to play tracks from the CDs they buy. Etc etc.
While that's what/. thinks of as fair use, I don't get the impression that that sort of thing, or profits that removed from actual fair use, were counted. Fair use profits would include every newspaper, news broadcast, news webpage, places like amazon, which rely on user reviews, any kind of art or entertainment reviews, Google, and all other search engines, which excerpt pages in the results, any kind of discussion board, where people are free to excerpt each other's posts as well as web pages and other copyrighted text, etc., etc.
Price software reasonably; if the market is large, price low. If small, price higher.
How about you price it based on it's value, not the size of the market?
Same thing. Value of software = price of software * paying users.
If the value of the software is a million bucks you can either have one customer who pays a million bucks, or a hundred thousand customers who pay $10.
I'm using their bits, eh? Well, they're using my CPU with all their annoying flash ads.
This gives me a great idea. Instead of an ad-based model, web pages could have a bit of javascript that does some processing for the host for however long you're looking at the page. They can then rent out the processing power of the computers looking at their web pages to distributed computing problems, like cracking encryption keys, SETI-like scientific searches, etc.
Eavesdropping isn't going to remain a practical technique.
That may be true. But it will be a practical technique for a long time. Personally, I see nothing in the 4th amendment that is intended to limit non-intrusive searches, such as eavesdropping. Outlawing encryption would be a clear violation of the 4th Amendment. However, whether or not it's a "good thing" I don't see anything unconstitutional about eavesdropping or "warrantless wiretapping."
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." --Benjamin Franklin (disputed, possibly Richard Jackson)
How does the government not listening to Al Qaeda's phone calls translate into Liberty for you? Or for that matter, "Essential Liberty"? Even if the government was listening to YOU, to make sure you weren't Al Qaeda, it wouldn't really have anything to do with LIBERTY, much less ESSENTIAL LIBERTY, only privacy. Even if by some contortion of logic, listening to Al Qaeda is the sacrifice of essential liberty of Americans, the ability to spy on the enemy is absolutely essential for any military operation, thus to the existence of the military itself, and therefore the country itself. So the existence of spying does not "purchase a little temporary safety," it purchases our ability to exist as an independent country, rather than as a protectorate of some other country who actually has the balls to spy on enemies.
People should stop using that quote for spurious purposes, and rather than legitimate goals, like its original intent -- the justification for arming the populace.
And if you read the Bill of Rights, it doesn't have any provisions limiting it to apply only to Americans. It is prohibitions on what the government may do, and they don't have national restrictions, they apply to the actions of the government.
Nor is there so much as a syllable in the Constitution that prohibits the military from spying on the enemy. Nor would anyone have signed it if there had been.
imho old persons become conservative just because of decline of cognitive functions due to old age.
You really think cognitive functions decline by age 30? Liberals become conservatives as they age, because their thinking becomes more nuanced, and they accumulate information about the world and how it works.
One thing you might want to think about is what you're more interested in photographing... planets or deep space objects like galaxies and nebulae. That will inform the type of telescope your money will be best spent on.
Naw, France is our friend now, since the election. This is just good old-fashioned negotiations. Soon there will be a dozen more satellites we deny the existence of.
Slashdot Mirror
His demonstration thruster produces 35 micronewtons.
.0005467722 Km/s^2 = 64 milligrams, so if we were using this to power a marscraft with the mass of the acetominophen contained in a single extra strength tylenol tablet, it would be more than 10x too heavy. Of course they said it could be scaled up, but that's a heckuvalot of scaling.
35 micronewtons /
I doubt the smallesst possible manned Mars vehicle could be less than 1,000kg. That's a scaling factor of 15.6 million. I can jump over 3 feet on the trampoline in my back yard, which translates to a maximum velocity of 4.23 m/s. If I scale that up by 15.6 million, I would be launching myself at 66,000,000 m/s, far exceeding escape velocity, and reaching Mars under my own power in under 30 minutes.
If they're not weighing it, how are they measuring its mass?
"Humor. It is a difficult concept. It is not logical."
Nevertheless, the moderation system of this forum may serve to alert you to the utilization of humor, as posts utilizing it are often accompanied by a "Funny" indicator. In such cases, correction of fact can generally be assumed unnecessary, as said facts will likely have been intentionally misstated as a means of producing said humor.
And how exactly is it managing to lose mass without losing weight?
Okay, thought about it. Yes, it is pretty laughable that the US Military has to now go to a judge before spying on a suspected member of a foreign terrorist organization. As goofy an inept as that makes us look, I still want to make fun of China. China's problem isn't exactly goofiness.
$180? Dude, YOU'RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT. Until other countries get some lawyers who know how to properly sue multinational corporations, America's supremacy in the world will never be challenged.
Such as what? What are you not able to express publicly in America?
A guarantee you that somewhere in America right now someone is standing on some street corner with a megaphone (covered in and-written cardboard signs probably) shouting that Bush did 9/11, that he's a war criminal, and should be tried and found guilty of treason. And if the police are doing anything, they're protecting him from the more sensible people who would like to smack him around.
Hyperbole is one thing, but when it becomes a paranoid fantasy-land where all statements are absurdities, it just takes us that much further from having rational debate and therefore rational policy.
A 500 meter rove and a hi-def mooncast? You mean like I could do by rigging a golf cart with a couple-hundred-dollar hi-def camera and remote-control steering? They've had more far more difficult builds than that on Monster Garage. The Mars rovers have some VERY high end equipment which would not be necessary here. An innovative person could do it for 30 mil. The question is if any such innovative people have the 30 mil to start with and if they'd risk it.
Factoring and discrete logs are codependent on each other being hard problems. Either one can solve the other. I'm not familiar enough with ECC to know if being able to solve regular discrete logs necessary breaks it; but if so, then factoring breaks it too.
XTR and ElGamal rely on the discrete logarithm problem. If factoring becomes easy, then the discrete logarithm problem becomes easy as well. Not sure about the other ones.
Important lesson for left-wingers: It's not about how hard you work. It's about what you actually accomplish.
Google didn't succeed because the worked harder than altavista and yahoo. The succeeded because they had a better, more innovative product. Hard work is usually required, but it is only one ingredient. While luck is sometimes an ingredient too, luck isn't what made google better than the other search engines.
The guy that they convicted of abetting the 9/11 hijackers -- I forget his name. They wanted to spy on him, but it was mostly hunch, not enough for a warrant. If they had been able to eavesdrop, they very likely could have gotten enough of a heads-up to stop it.
Judicial oversight of spying is not a "constitutional right." To the degree that the spying is for military intelligence rather than criminal prosecution, the ABSENCE of judicial oversight is a "constitutional right."
While that's what
Get a clue. The EU might as well be officially atheist. It's more like knowledge leads to the questioning of "science" and "history".
Same thing. Value of software = price of software * paying users.
If the value of the software is a million bucks you can either have one customer who pays a million bucks, or a hundred thousand customers who pay $10.
An American liberal (and likely /. poster) is arrested simply for being liberal and owning an axe.
This gives me a great idea. Instead of an ad-based model, web pages could have a bit of javascript that does some processing for the host for however long you're looking at the page. They can then rent out the processing power of the computers looking at their web pages to distributed computing problems, like cracking encryption keys, SETI-like scientific searches, etc.
That may be true. But it will be a practical technique for a long time. Personally, I see nothing in the 4th amendment that is intended to limit non-intrusive searches, such as eavesdropping. Outlawing encryption would be a clear violation of the 4th Amendment. However, whether or not it's a "good thing" I don't see anything unconstitutional about eavesdropping or "warrantless wiretapping."
How does the government not listening to Al Qaeda's phone calls translate into Liberty for you? Or for that matter, "Essential Liberty"? Even if the government was listening to YOU, to make sure you weren't Al Qaeda, it wouldn't really have anything to do with LIBERTY, much less ESSENTIAL LIBERTY, only privacy. Even if by some contortion of logic, listening to Al Qaeda is the sacrifice of essential liberty of Americans, the ability to spy on the enemy is absolutely essential for any military operation, thus to the existence of the military itself, and therefore the country itself. So the existence of spying does not "purchase a little temporary safety," it purchases our ability to exist as an independent country, rather than as a protectorate of some other country who actually has the balls to spy on enemies.
People should stop using that quote for spurious purposes, and rather than legitimate goals, like its original intent -- the justification for arming the populace.
Nor is there so much as a syllable in the Constitution that prohibits the military from spying on the enemy. Nor would anyone have signed it if there had been.
Not all liberals are sexual deviants, bit is true that most sexual deviants are liberals.
You really think cognitive functions decline by age 30? Liberals become conservatives as they age, because their thinking becomes more nuanced, and they accumulate information about the world and how it works.
One thing you might want to think about is what you're more interested in photographing... planets or deep space objects like galaxies and nebulae. That will inform the type of telescope your money will be best spent on.
Naw, France is our friend now, since the election. This is just good old-fashioned negotiations. Soon there will be a dozen more satellites we deny the existence of.