Not entirely true. Even a significantly underexposed picture can be adjusted accurately to the right position by statistical measures. Do this for 100,000 for them, sum them up, and you've got a result.
In the extreme case that atmospheric noise completely shadows an object, though, the Hubble telescope can show off the real advantage of looking directly through free space: no dispersion of light in vacuum.
Even in a new moon, perfectly clear winter night somewhere deep in Canada, the light from the brighter stars creates a certain level of glowing within the atmosphere itself that suffices to hide many astral objects' light completely, as far as statistics go.
On-site power production is a wonderful thing. It is wonderful in countries without reasonable power supply. It is wonderful in regions far off main power lines in vast countries like Australia, Canada, or the USA. It is totally pointless, on the other hand, in densly populated while highly developed countries like Germany or France, where there are main power lines everywhere.
As soon as a town grows to a certain size in a country like Canada or Australia, it will most certainly be connected to the power grid, as this option starts to pay off quite soon. On site power production, thus, is for wells, observatories, farms, etc. in mostly unpopulated areas.
But as soon as, say, two thousand people live at a place, the power grid, always a source of much more affordable energy, will replace any previous attemps of on-site production.
Unless, of course, such plants are highly subsidized, which is a necessary precondition for their erection anyway, and a perpetual premise for their persistance. Subsidization cancelled, any solar plant in competition with the grid will be shut down.
What is so totally ridiculous about this is that all the talk about megawatts boils down to a straight lie when it comes to wind and solar power. A 3000 MW nuclear power plant will deliver an average of more than 90 % of 3000 MW, that is, 2700 MW at least.
A 40 MW solar power plant will deliver an average of about 15 % of 40 MW at best, so we're talking about effectively 6 MW, thus only 10,000 households.
Besides, at night, when there is no sun and fewer wind, in a 100% renewable energy scenario, ALL power would come from reservoir power stations like the Hoover Dam, meaning that, as most of the water that goes down a dam has to be previously pumped up, the overall efficiency goes down to less than 50% of what could be achieved with theoretical day-and-night wind and solar power stations (because pumping it up costs a lot more than releasing it produces).
So, strictly speaking, we're talking of maybe a 3.5 MW power plant here. Great. How much will it cost, you say?
I'm not entirely sure why people always seem to think that if a country is relatively poor and underdeveloped as of now, and at the same time quickly catching up in some aspects, whereby of course profiting from the availability of cheap labor as a result of underdevelopment, it by some kind of necessity must overtake today's highly industrialized nations at some time in the near future.
Underdevelopment might be a momentary boost but has never been a guarantee for unlimited development, as, a some point in the process of catching up, it starts wearing off.
Afer all, underdevelopment is NOT an economic advantage.
By the way, back to the topic: When are the US going to build ordinary, economically sound, simple rockets again? The space shuttle is probably the most expensive tool in existance for bringing devices to an orbit, so where are the cheap, unmanned alternatives? Is the private sector going to take this part in the near future?
It is true that electron clouds form pretty much all of the visible universe, in so far as whatever we see, we do so as an effect of electron-electron interactions carried out by photons.
The solidity of solid ojects is due to electricity, too.
Mass and gravity are more or less the only non-electrical features things expose to us in everyday life.
Of course, in the cosmic scale, electric interactions rarely occur, due to the fact that planets and stuff, massive as they are, do not carry huge charges with them. (Or else our hair would be always standing straight up)
It may make sense that fines relate to the criminal's income.
But that doesn't mean in case of more severe criminal acts twice as rich people should be locked up twice as long for the same crime, does it?
This is NOT a very good point. A local flaw in the coating will allow the DEW to heaten up the layer beneath (e.g. made of aluminium). The heat thus generated will destroy all of the coating in the vicinity of the flaw, thus making the flaw bigger, thus allowing more heat to be generated in a larger area. You get the point. The area liberated from the coating should grow with t*t approx. Soon, it will be palm-sized.
physics: real coding an absolute necessity - C++,C
on
Do Kids Still Program?
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· Score: 1
In the hard sciences, real programmng is an absolute necessity.
I'm a physisist myself, and I've strongly been into all kinds of high-through-low-level programming since the age of 12. Many of my colleagues had not been coding before their studies - they learnt C and C++ and low-level-io and numeric computing the hard way - in two mandatory courses.
My impression is that for the average experimental physisist, it takes some time to get used to the typical kind of a physisist's coding - that is, 90% C++ with device I/O and lots of number crunching, 10% LabView (for the simplemost of setups) - but having been mathematically educated the way we are, it's not at all hard to learn it.
Coding quality, of course, is an issue, and it still takes a few years to gain industrial strength coding skills. Luckily, we do C++ so much more often than Java, and C++ is the best and only true teacher among the languages;-) Java allows one to remain stupid forever, if one wants to, while C++ whips the guts out of you if after a few months you find out that the class design and encapsulation schemes you've built turn out to imply a dense network of code dependencies within that 26-MB-of-code project of yours, or in case you do someting similarily subtly stupid:-)
What I worry a lot more about, is the fact that among the people who graduate at computer sciences, a lot CANNOT quite well program C++ or C and never've used ioctl(). As I part-time work in the IT, I've heard oh, so many stories about people who just graduated in cs and have learned alot 'bout JAVA and excitingly complex things like XML, including (my brain starts smoking) XHTML and (heart beating faster) JAVASCRIPT and who think they're clever because they know something about ENTERPRISE BEANS and WEB SERVICES.
Those people 1st will implement everything in the slowest way in reach, that is, via an application server with JREE, and so all communication via SOAP/XML, and when you tell them that you need the lower three bits of that byte they'll look at you as though you were an ancient dinosaur trying to tempt them to practice the dark arts of magic evil beyond believe, and you will show them something like x & 0x07, and they will note it somewhere, and whenever they come to the situation of having to fetch only the lower three bits of something, they will search for that note, and they will, character by character, very slowly, frowningly, type exactly x & 007 or something similarily not-quite-the-same, and it will even work, because a 7 is a 7 even in the octal system.
And whenever you bring them to a point where it finally does make a difference whether or not one understands bits and bytes and the methematical operator |, they will again look at you as though you were something awfully disgusting, and they will tell you that it would be so more simple to do it with EnterPrise Beans and XML, and that you've probably never heard of thouse wonderful new magic bullets because you've been spending so much of your time with tha arcane arts of C and systems programming that you've become a nerd who simply doessn't care about their Enterprise Beans.
And it will be true, because you've tried that J2EE, as you've tried most other major hyped technologies, and you've found out that outside a very specific domain of problems where it's just-wonderful-because-so-well-supported, it is simply not the right tool, and you know that sometimes it's better to do it manually, binary and fast, because 900% overhead sometimes do make a difference.
And you will either fire the man, or you move him to the HTML/JavaScript department, in case you've got any, and you will do as more and more people do in the IT these days: hire either a graduated physicist or a student of physics who is a programming geek to do the coding job.
Similar failures in the third-level education system are the reason why you find physisist (and, of course mathematicians, electrical and communication engineers, chemistrists) in so many domains, like incurances, stock trading,..., and, of course, in the IT.
I've been rethinking this... In fact, what really looks bad on a hires tv set are analog tv and vhs.
I DO think a pal dvd (that was separately scanned and not scaled up from an ntsc source) looks slightly better than an ntsc dvd. 576 lines are more than 480.
But thew higher one goes up with resolution, the less important the difference becomes - especially when watching a movie from an typical distance, not when doing spreadsheets, face 3 feet from the screen.
I'm sure the step from ntsc 480 to hdtv 720 will make some difference for people in ntsc countries. For us europeans it's certeinly less of s step from 480 to 720.
And about the 1080 formats... When watching a movie from a typical distance, THIS should not make that much of difference. Think about it: digital cinemas nowadays often do 1080. The difference from 2160 is visible, but it still doesn't look like the cinema was broken or something... And I'm sure that at home the bis flat screen or projection will be relatively smaller than than the screen in a cinema, compared to the spectator's distance.
So if 1080 is almost good enogh for the cinema, I suppose 720 are in fact sufficient for at home.
And after half a minute one doesn't even notice that one is watching an ntsc 480 dvd.
But one clearly DOES notice when one is watching analog tv. That hurts enormously, especially because the poor quality creates an impossible challenge for EVERY de-interlacer. What analog tv transmission does to the picture cannot be repaired automatically and certainly not real-time. It would take a team of restorators who would decently repaint missing or too heavily distorted parts frame by frame, while trying to grasp the artist's original intent...
While such a course of action may be appropriate for oil paintings that have been badly stored for 400 years, because there is no way around it, the smartest way for tv is not to distort the image in such way in the first place. The redundance reduced transmission scheme of digital terrestric or satellity tv transmission does wonders here... And the few compression artifacts that one will see when searching for them in terrestically transmitted digital tv don't do half as much of harm to the human received quality as vhs or analog tv.
Maybe one day movies will come out as double-sided disks in the u.s.a: ntsc one one side and pal on the other... for sets that can do pal, and as far as I know, almost every contemporary set can.
This way one would achieve an easy upgrade from 480 to 576 (1.2) which is about the same step as from 576 to 729 (1.25). Without a new player and set, that is...
Now that many people have bought, or are about to buy, relatively big lcd or plasma screens or projectors with a resolution that is not necessarily 1920x1080 or higher, but still definitely above x576 or, even worse in the us, x480, they will more and more find it nasty to watch, say THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY or 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY or whetever material that could be used to create meaningful digital 4k (4096x2160) or at least 2k (2048x1080) data, well, to watch it with an effective resolution of 640x480.
On a screen that SHOWS one the difference. Same thing was true for VHS. On a late 90s 25" CRT, it is VERY obvious how much cleaner stuff looks on dvd compared to VHS. And THAT was what killed the older format.
Honestly, if I could exchange all of my Kubrick films for 2k material, that is, 1920x1080 (1080p hdtv) in the case of bluray/hddvd, I would certainly be willing to pay for it again. In case, of course, I own a projector or hires flat tv, wich I certainly will soon, because it all has become quite affordable by now and will further go down during 2006...
One seems to forget that no real car will ever be steered by wire. It is a concept that simply doesn't work in practice. The reason is, to regain the safety of mechanical steering, four (4) independent actors with 2 x 2 indepentent power sources would be needed. This is not a thing that matters much in jet airplanes, simply because of their dimensions, but which is definitely impractical in a car. Even for Lorries, it's too much, also because it simply isn't necessary. The forces one has to handle when flying an A-329 are huge. But even a 35 ton Lorry could theoretically steered without servo support.
And luckily, whenever the servo fails, it remains steerable. Good old mechanics simply work and are the fundament of all technical security execept in computing.
Low tech rules.
P.S. the point here is, that without SBW, one couldn't practically use the steering wheel as an input device.
I've seen these things happen to a friend of mine. She was - though not everyday, and by someone she knew and who, I think, wasn't really dangerous - followed by a young man. He didn't follow her to her home, but he waited for her at other places.
Believe me, that was a frightening situation, because all of us couln't really say what would be next.
And now imagine such a stalker could at any time have known where she was - and if you know someone's customs, a very coarse grained position tells you everything. I mean, just imagine a weirdo watching your (in case yo are a nerd female) or your girlfirend's or sister's or mother's life from behind a monitor. And by weirdo I don't simply mean, a nerd. I mean the kind with the strange eyes who talk so slowly.
And for a single different point, instead of stalker, think of your boss...
If they don't connect it to the grid, but instead connect it to an underground capacitor which is connected to the wonder ramp, do you think the work, i.e. energy, i.e. cash, involved in such an action would be regained within a reasonable period of time?
I think that no, Sir, it won't.
The mass of each end every object does of course depend on it's relative velocity. Only its rest mass doesn't. The rest mass is the mass of an object, as measured within the same inertial system.
Don't you know anything about phyics?
In the inertial system of, e.g. the ramp, the car's mass will of course gain with it's speed. Only, the gain will not be THAT high. I suppose the mosquitos will make oh so much more of a difference...
They always do, you know. Sigh...
Slashdot Mirror
Not entirely true. Even a significantly underexposed picture can be adjusted accurately to the right position by statistical measures. Do this for 100,000 for them, sum them up, and you've got a result.
In the extreme case that atmospheric noise completely shadows an object, though, the Hubble telescope can show off the real advantage of looking directly through free space: no dispersion of light in vacuum.
Even in a new moon, perfectly clear winter night somewhere deep in Canada, the light from the brighter stars creates a certain level of glowing within the atmosphere itself that suffices to hide many astral objects' light completely, as far as statistics go.
On-site power production is a wonderful thing. It is wonderful in countries without reasonable power supply. It is wonderful in regions far off main power lines in vast countries like Australia, Canada, or the USA. It is totally pointless, on the other hand, in densly populated while highly developed countries like Germany or France, where there are main power lines everywhere.
As soon as a town grows to a certain size in a country like Canada or Australia, it will most certainly be connected to the power grid, as this option starts to pay off quite soon. On site power production, thus, is for wells, observatories, farms, etc. in mostly unpopulated areas.
But as soon as, say, two thousand people live at a place, the power grid, always a source of much more affordable energy, will replace any previous attemps of on-site production.
Unless, of course, such plants are highly subsidized, which is a necessary precondition for their erection anyway, and a perpetual premise for their persistance. Subsidization cancelled, any solar plant in competition with the grid will be shut down.
What is so totally ridiculous about this is that all the talk about megawatts boils down to a straight lie when it comes to wind and solar power. A 3000 MW nuclear power plant will deliver an average of more than 90 % of 3000 MW, that is, 2700 MW at least.
A 40 MW solar power plant will deliver an average of about 15 % of 40 MW at best, so we're talking about effectively 6 MW, thus only 10,000 households.
Besides, at night, when there is no sun and fewer wind, in a 100% renewable energy scenario, ALL power would come from reservoir power stations like the Hoover Dam, meaning that, as most of the water that goes down a dam has to be previously pumped up, the overall efficiency goes down to less than 50% of what could be achieved with theoretical day-and-night wind and solar power stations (because pumping it up costs a lot more than releasing it produces).
So, strictly speaking, we're talking of maybe a 3.5 MW power plant here. Great. How much will it cost, you say?
well, THAT wopuld be some real cruel and pointless animal testing.
reminds me of the russian guy who transplanted some monkeys' heads to other monkeys' bodies, just to find out wether he could...
and please don't say it made sense because of this planet's discovery - that thing is 20 lyrs away.
I'm not entirely sure why people always seem to think that if a country is relatively poor and underdeveloped as of now, and at the same time quickly catching up in some aspects, whereby of course profiting from the availability of cheap labor as a result of underdevelopment, it by some kind of necessity must overtake today's highly industrialized nations at some time in the near future.
Underdevelopment might be a momentary boost but has never been a guarantee for unlimited development, as, a some point in the process of catching up, it starts wearing off.
Afer all, underdevelopment is NOT an economic advantage.
By the way, back to the topic: When are the US going to build ordinary, economically sound, simple rockets again? The space shuttle is probably the most expensive tool in existance for bringing devices to an orbit, so where are the cheap, unmanned alternatives? Is the private sector going to take this part in the near future?
Did anyone perceive difference in multimedia real time behavior between xp and vista on the same machine?
Wait a minute.
It is true that electron clouds form pretty much all of the visible universe, in so far as whatever we see, we do so as an effect of electron-electron interactions carried out by photons.
The solidity of solid ojects is due to electricity, too.
Mass and gravity are more or less the only non-electrical features things expose to us in everyday life.
Of course, in the cosmic scale, electric interactions rarely occur, due to the fact that planets and stuff, massive as they are, do not carry huge charges with them. (Or else our hair would be always standing straight up)
true, but in the case of those certain osses, any kind of dual processors, virtual or not, help significantly.
Could it be that W***o*s actually has one system queue per core?
Ash Kôr Kr'Ashnaz
AI Ash Kôr Kr'Fisikchkal
Ash Kôr Kr'Darbanak
Ash Kôr Kr'OS, Gûl, Thimbatuluk agh Burzum Ushi Krimpatul. Argh... The preview betrayed me, but now it's right
Ash Kôr Kr'Ashnaz AI Ash Kôr Kr'Fisikchkal Ash Kôr Kr'Darbanak Ash Kôr Kr'OS, Gûl, Thimbatuluk agh Burzum Ishi Krimpatul.
Ash Kôr Kr'Ashnaz AI Ash Kôr Kr'Fisikchkal Ash Kôr Kr'Darbanak Ash Kôr Kr'OS, Gûl, Thimbatuluk agh Burzum Ushi Krimpatul.
It may make sense that fines relate to the criminal's income. But that doesn't mean in case of more severe criminal acts twice as rich people should be locked up twice as long for the same crime, does it?
This is NOT a very good point. A local flaw in the coating will allow the DEW to heaten up the layer beneath (e.g. made of aluminium). The heat thus generated will destroy all of the coating in the vicinity of the flaw, thus making the flaw bigger, thus allowing more heat to be generated in a larger area. You get the point. The area liberated from the coating should grow with t*t approx. Soon, it will be palm-sized.
In the hard sciences, real programmng is an absolute necessity.
;-) Java allows one to remain stupid forever, if one wants to, while C++ whips the guts out of you if after a few months you find out that the class design and encapsulation schemes you've built turn out to imply a dense network of code dependencies within that 26-MB-of-code project of yours, or in case you do someting similarily subtly stupid :-)
..., and, of course, in the IT.
I'm a physisist myself, and I've strongly been into all kinds of high-through-low-level programming since the age of 12. Many of my colleagues had not been coding before their studies - they learnt C and C++ and low-level-io and numeric computing the hard way - in two mandatory courses.
My impression is that for the average experimental physisist, it takes some time to get used to the typical kind of a physisist's coding - that is, 90% C++ with device I/O and lots of number crunching, 10% LabView (for the simplemost of setups) - but having been mathematically educated the way we are, it's not at all hard to learn it.
Coding quality, of course, is an issue, and it still takes a few years to gain industrial strength coding skills. Luckily, we do C++ so much more often than Java, and C++ is the best and only true teacher among the languages
What I worry a lot more about, is the fact that among the people who graduate at computer sciences, a lot CANNOT quite well program C++ or C and never've used ioctl(). As I part-time work in the IT, I've heard oh, so many stories about people who just graduated in cs and have learned alot 'bout JAVA and excitingly complex things like XML, including (my brain starts smoking) XHTML and (heart beating faster) JAVASCRIPT and who think they're clever because they know something about ENTERPRISE BEANS and WEB SERVICES.
Those people 1st will implement everything in the slowest way in reach, that is, via an application server with JREE, and so all communication via SOAP/XML, and when you tell them that you need the lower three bits of that byte they'll look at you as though you were an ancient dinosaur trying to tempt them to practice the dark arts of magic evil beyond believe, and you will show them something like x & 0x07, and they will note it somewhere, and whenever they come to the situation of having to fetch only the lower three bits of something, they will search for that note, and they will, character by character, very slowly, frowningly, type exactly x & 007 or something similarily not-quite-the-same, and it will even work, because a 7 is a 7 even in the octal system.
And whenever you bring them to a point where it finally does make a difference whether or not one understands bits and bytes and the methematical operator |, they will again look at you as though you were something awfully disgusting, and they will tell you that it would be so more simple to do it with EnterPrise Beans and XML, and that you've probably never heard of thouse wonderful new magic bullets because you've been spending so much of your time with tha arcane arts of C and systems programming that you've become a nerd who simply doessn't care about their Enterprise Beans.
And it will be true, because you've tried that J2EE, as you've tried most other major hyped technologies, and you've found out that outside a very specific domain of problems where it's just-wonderful-because-so-well-supported, it is simply not the right tool, and you know that sometimes it's better to do it manually, binary and fast, because 900% overhead sometimes do make a difference.
And you will either fire the man, or you move him to the HTML/JavaScript department, in case you've got any, and you will do as more and more people do in the IT these days: hire either a graduated physicist or a student of physics who is a programming geek to do the coding job.
Similar failures in the third-level education system are the reason why you find physisist (and, of course mathematicians, electrical and communication engineers, chemistrists) in so many domains, like incurances, stock trading,
It's all harmless, as long as the job they're trying out is something like astronaut or race car driver...
I've been rethinking this... In fact, what really looks bad on a hires tv set are analog tv and vhs.
I DO think a pal dvd (that was separately scanned and not scaled up from an ntsc source) looks slightly better than an ntsc dvd. 576 lines are more than 480.
But thew higher one goes up with resolution, the less important the difference becomes - especially when watching a movie from an typical distance, not when doing spreadsheets, face 3 feet from the screen.
I'm sure the step from ntsc 480 to hdtv 720 will make some difference for people in ntsc countries. For us europeans it's certeinly less of s step from 480 to 720.
And about the 1080 formats... When watching a movie from a typical distance, THIS should not make that much of difference. Think about it: digital cinemas nowadays often do 1080. The difference from 2160 is visible, but it still doesn't look like the cinema was broken or something... And I'm sure that at home the bis flat screen or projection will be relatively smaller than than the screen in a cinema, compared to the spectator's distance.
So if 1080 is almost good enogh for the cinema, I suppose 720 are in fact sufficient for at home.
And after half a minute one doesn't even notice that one is watching an ntsc 480 dvd.
But one clearly DOES notice when one is watching analog tv. That hurts enormously, especially because the poor quality creates an impossible challenge for EVERY de-interlacer. What analog tv transmission does to the picture cannot be repaired automatically and certainly not real-time. It would take a team of restorators who would decently repaint missing or too heavily distorted parts frame by frame, while trying to grasp the artist's original intent...
While such a course of action may be appropriate for oil paintings that have been badly stored for 400 years, because there is no way around it, the smartest way for tv is not to distort the image in such way in the first place. The redundance reduced transmission scheme of digital terrestric or satellity tv transmission does wonders here... And the few compression artifacts that one will see when searching for them in terrestically transmitted digital tv don't do half as much of harm to the human received quality as vhs or analog tv.
Maybe one day movies will come out as double-sided disks in the u.s.a: ntsc one one side and pal on the other... for sets that can do pal, and as far as I know, almost every contemporary set can.
This way one would achieve an easy upgrade from 480 to 576 (1.2) which is about the same step as from 576 to 729 (1.25). Without a new player and set, that is...
anyway,
have a nice day.
Now that many people have bought, or are about to buy, relatively big lcd or plasma screens or projectors with a resolution that is not necessarily 1920x1080 or higher, but still definitely above x576 or, even worse in the us, x480, they will more and more find it nasty to watch, say THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY or 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY or whetever material that could be used to create meaningful digital 4k (4096x2160) or at least 2k (2048x1080) data, well, to watch it with an effective resolution of 640x480.
/hddvd, I would certainly be willing to pay for it again. In case, of course, I own a projector or hires flat tv, wich I certainly will soon, because it all has become quite affordable by now and will further go down during 2006...
On a screen that SHOWS one the difference. Same thing was true for VHS. On a late 90s 25" CRT, it is VERY obvious how much cleaner stuff looks on dvd compared to VHS. And THAT was what killed the older format.
Honestly, if I could exchange all of my Kubrick films for 2k material, that is, 1920x1080 (1080p hdtv) in the case of bluray
--~~~~ (oops, didn't work)
and a nice day to all of yers.
not technical security, but safety, of course.
and i should finally get used to using html tags for formatting...
One seems to forget that no real car will ever be steered by wire. It is a concept that simply doesn't work in practice. The reason is, to regain the safety of mechanical steering, four (4) independent actors with 2 x 2 indepentent power sources would be needed. This is not a thing that matters much in jet airplanes, simply because of their dimensions, but which is definitely impractical in a car. Even for Lorries, it's too much, also because it simply isn't necessary. The forces one has to handle when flying an A-329 are huge. But even a 35 ton Lorry could theoretically steered without servo support. And luckily, whenever the servo fails, it remains steerable. Good old mechanics simply work and are the fundament of all technical security execept in computing. Low tech rules. P.S. the point here is, that without SBW, one couldn't practically use the steering wheel as an input device.
Right you are :-)
I so fully agree. Truly a Friend of Mine Thou Art!
I've seen these things happen to a friend of mine. She was - though not everyday, and by someone she knew and who, I think, wasn't really dangerous - followed by a young man. He didn't follow her to her home, but he waited for her at other places.
Believe me, that was a frightening situation, because all of us couln't really say what would be next.
And now imagine such a stalker could at any time have known where she was - and if you know someone's customs, a very coarse grained position tells you everything. I mean, just imagine a weirdo watching your (in case yo are a nerd female) or your girlfirend's or sister's or mother's life from behind a monitor. And by weirdo I don't simply mean, a nerd. I mean the kind with the strange eyes who talk so slowly.
And for a single different point, instead of stalker, think of your boss...
The imaginary England of the 1980s where the book is staged, is a frighteningly precise image of the soviet union in the thirties.
If they don't connect it to the grid, but instead connect it to an underground capacitor which is connected to the wonder ramp, do you think the work, i.e. energy, i.e. cash, involved in such an action would be regained within a reasonable period of time?
I think that no, Sir, it won't.
The mass of each end every object does of course depend on it's relative velocity. Only its rest mass doesn't. The rest mass is the mass of an object, as measured within the same inertial system.
Don't you know anything about phyics?
In the inertial system of, e.g. the ramp, the car's mass will of course gain with it's speed. Only, the gain will not be THAT high. I suppose the mosquitos will make oh so much more of a difference...
They always do, you know. Sigh...
rain and fog panels, maybe. the first of which might actually work...