You fine Ford. No, seriously. If you *don't* fine Ford, then they never have any personal stake in choosing better advertisers.
And Ford can't be joe-jobbed by some competitor... because Ford has to follow US law, which means they've got to keep their financial information for a certain length of time, which means it's right there in their own records that they hired Shady Advertizing Firm.
Ford can, of course, try to pass the damages on to S.A.F., or they can just eat the fine. The idea though is that fining Ford in this case would force change, because Ford stops paying spammers. And if S.A.F. is only a middleman, losing the business forces S.A.F. to stop using spammers too.
At the moment, there's zero accountability. There's no reason not to hire spammers. You can hire whoever you want and just look the other way, and you won't get in trouble, and chances are they're just a middleman and won't get in trouble either. For there to be change... get the instigator in trouble, and let the pain work its way through the system.
Re:Should have let them kill eachother
on
Flash Mob Gang Warfare
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem with that is that the stronger/smarter members would survive. Then we'd have stronger gangs that are better at killing... indeed, very Darwinistic. But also the exact opposite of what the rest of the law abiding community wants.
You're misinformed. We *don't* build new nuclear weapons. We don't build old nuclear weapons either. We've signed treaties against testing or selling any of the stuff too. The computer simulations are to see how the existing ones hold up as they age (rather than detonate one every once in a while to make sure the rest still work).
"Open Source fragmentation is a myth largely propagated a certain proprietary vendor's FUD campaign"
Yes. A certain vendor that did itself try to fork Java, and now has a competing product that is extremely similar to Java. If Java went GPL, this company would not hesitate to muck around with it, just because they can, and the company has a history of doing anything it can to 'win'.
"Successful open source projects simply do not fork."
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I would not expect Java to fork in the classic sense of the word (except the version that one particular company would make), but look at Linux as a whole; multiple distros out there, by companies, by individuals, by governments. That kind of "forking" alone would make it more difficult for WORA with Java; it'd increase the amount of tweaking neccessary. Every distro tweaking the JVM a little differently than the others... code then running great on some and flakey on others... well, maybe that's already true. Why make it worse, though?
And what about BSD? I'd call that successful, and it has most definitely forked. Even its forks have forked. BSD is totally forked!:) I could see the same easily happening with Java; different bright folks wanting to take it in different directions, without a leader, ending up disagreeing too strongly and going it alone. Would Sun and IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and so on always agree on the next level to take Java to? I doubt that.
For the record, I'm undecided about the opening-up of Java. I like the language, and it's the one I use the most. I'm not as against the idea as I may sound in this post.
Yes. These are examples of potentially dangerous things that are legal because the benefits outweigh the risk.
I argue that filesharing networks fall under the same category. At heart, they're a logical evolutionary addition to the internet.
- they get data from those who have it to those who want it.
- they create a counter force stretching the internet's structure to a web, as it was originally envisioned, instead of a hub and spoke network of corporate owned and government regulated servers.
-- in doing so, they increase network efficiency by spreading things out, utilizing available proccessing power, and maintaining the stability of the network as originally intended - routing around damage.
- for better or worse, they make it much, much harder for buearocrats and lawyers to cripple the system. This is arguably a Good Thing in the long term.
We should be talking about how to make it better, not about how to write a law to shut it down.
"Hitachi is clearly selling these drives to Apple at or near a loss, for whatever strange reason."
It's unlikely that they'd do this for a product that was almost guaranteed to sell in large volumes. It's probably the other way around - they're making a small profit on the iPod sales and a really big profit on the drives they sell seperately.
Yes, I agree. HardOCP should be completely responsible for the damage done.
Let's see, now to count up the damage...
Infinium's income before the article was posted, at which time they weren't offering any product for sale yet: $0 Infinium's income in the entire time since the article was posted, and to this day they aren't offering any product for sale yet: $0
I can see several ways in which this could be bad for all the rest of us (while not being all that good for China, either).
1 - mass civil disobedience, encouraged by the Chinese government looking the other way: China writes some code, and makes up the slack by pirating everything else. Everyone justifies the piracy by pointing at the government and saying "well, I'm not allowed to BUY it". The rest of the world ends up feeding China's growth but doesn't actually get any money.
2 - GPL black hole: code goes into China but code doesn't come out. What's to stop a desperate Chinese coder from "borrowing" a pile of downloaded source, making a few changes, and selling binaries within China? Nothing. The rest of the world ends up feeding China's growth with free code, and gets nothing in return. The Great Firewall of China might aggravate that even further - maybe insiders *want* to share their code with the rest of the world, but aren't allowed to?
3 - hmm. China's also making custom processors. What's to stop there from being a positive feedback loop here of Chinese code for Chinese chips driving Chinese chip sales in China, which drives Chinese code in China? Nothing - that may even be by design. This'd close off sales of both hardware and software to China even more. Good for China, bad for everyone else.
Like many other posters, though, I don't think China could get away with this, because of the WTO. They'd get hammered not only by the US, but also the EU, India, Japan, and anyone else who makes software that I'm forgetting.
"This technique, dubbed 'Earth-Orbit Synthesis', will be first used to study black holes in distant quasars, so don't expect spectacular wallpaper replacing images. "
Two words: Accretion disc.
Black holes themselves may be, well, *black*, but all the stuff swirling into them and/or being ejected from the poles glows nicely. And if that's the sort of thing making the quasar so bright, the images should be spectacular indeed. (note: it'll be a false-color image)
...but you should be expecting problems with a search for something as horribly generic as "motherboard review" anyway. If you search for something that *should* get millions of results, and you do in fact get millions of results, well, you asked for it:)
That's the sort of "problem" with only one solution: the user needs to narrow down the search himself. Continuing the mobo example, by supplying more... like processor architecture, manufacturer, and so on. To expect google to automagically do this FOR you is to defeat the purpose of a useful search engine - you're asking them to make all the choices for you. That's bound to make the wrong choices. Frequently. And it opens up a new way for shadier search engines to take money in exchange for adding bias into their results, or for random scammish web page designers to try to game the system.
The solution is basically what google already does: there's a "search within these results" box you can use to narrow down your search if you got a big pile of uselessly generic results. I suggest you use that.
I know, I know, this is slashdot, and people can't really be bothered to read the articles... but when someone actually links to something, I expect *them* to have read their own article!
"this too should form black holes. These will be about a million times smaller than the nucleus of an atom and will survive for barely an instant.
The physicist Stephen Hawking predicted in the 1970s that black holes would evaporate by radiating away their energy. For astrophysical black holes this is a very slow process, but extremely small black holes should last about as long as a snowflake in hell."
You can stop building that black hole shelter now:)
Oh, so you'll be able to get original Xboxen for nothing, too? So Microsoft will keep on selling them at a loss, forever? Wasn't the whole point of not putting a hard drive in the Xbox2 that it's too damn expensive?
I *do* play PS1 games on my PS2 - there are a bunch of old RPGs worth playing again once in a while - and I appreciate not having to pull my TV out to futz with the plugs. I've still got the PS1 somewhere, but the PS1 just doesn't fit into entertainment center slots the way a PS2 does. This will apply just as much to the Xbox1 fans - the Xbox is big and clunky and awkwardly shaped. There *will* be people who want to still play their old Xbox1 games - for example, all the people here who claim that Halo, Beach Volleyball, and a dozen other games never get old.
I can't remember where, but I saw a followup article on stem cell research recently, with one of those color-coded maps showing which countries allow it, which have banned it, and which haven't said anything yet. Turns out that it's verboten in most of Europe, too.
A google search on "stem cell map" got me http://mbbnet.umn.edu/scmap.html . That jives with what I'm remembering.
"And the ad tried to show that Microsoft Windows Server is 11-22% faster in '4 out of 5' workplace scenarios than Linux."
Hmm. 4 out of 5... that's 80%. But supposedly Microsoft has 90%+ of the market. So Microsoft just paid to run an ad urging over 10% of the market to leave them for Linux >:)
No, Microsoft made the first monetary offer. From a "legal" standpoint, that makes all the difference. He didn't approach them with a price - *they* approached him. In doing so, MS has mostly blown their chance at getting him under anti-squatting laws.
I can easily see the same things happening with digital information, too, though. The photos you restored were taken care of, unlike the many that weren't taken care of and have thus been lost over time. It's not much different with digital. Throw a hard drive, flash card, and cd-rs in a box and store them somewhere dry for 50 years. They may or may not work perfectly by then, but there'll be data recovery techniques that work well on them, just as there are photo recovery techniques that work today.
There are already imaging algorithms that'll zoom things today, and with resolutions going up and costs going down, our grandchildren will probably be getting a much larger volume of data from us than we're getting today from our own grandparents.
Bzzzt, you LOSE. There's no one on Mars to fight. It's an empty, dead, airless rock. There is no one there to displace, nothing there to damage. A colonization of Mars would be completely unique in human history.
On top of that, we don't have the capability to send enough people there for the colonists to fight much amongst themselves. Without a space elevator, we might be able to send 6 people towards Mars in a year where the orbits line up nicely, at a cost of maybe 20 billion dollars per person. Even if we *did* have a space elevator, the orbits won't magically change for us, and even if we sent a hundred people at a time it'd still cost billions per person to do. Those few who do arrive will be spending most of their time trying to survive.
On top of that, no one else has the capability to send anyone there at all. It's very hard to have a repeat of the wars of colonial powers competing for territory when there's only one colonial power.
Hmm. The old rocketry problem - you need reaction material to throw out the back end in order to push yourself, but then you need more reaction material to lift the reaction material itself - really makes useful travel between stars difficult.
Ion drives are better about that than rockets, but they still need fuel, so the problem is still there, just smaller. Given the very small acceleration of current ion drives, you'd want to be accelerating just over half the way there, then turn around and decelerate for the second half. (the deceleration will take less time because you'll mass less by then, having used about half your fuel). I'm not sure exactly how the math works out, but I think that cuts the useful range down to a couple light years at best. Another problem is that while chemical rockets burn all on their own, ion drives require electricity. You can't get enough electricity for free (solar) in between stars - you need to bring your own. This means going nuclear, but right now we can only get fission to work - and we can only get it to work for 50 years before replacing the fuel. That severely limits our range. Even if you could instantly accelerate to (and later decelerate from) a blistering 10 percent of lightspeed, you'd still only be able to go 5 light years.
The only workable solution we have right now is to cheat and not send any fuel with the probe at all - use a solar sail. Sit a massively overpowered laser here and fire it at the probe for as long as we can keep the laser running, and that underweight little unmanned probe will accelerate nicely. Of course it'll probably still take decades to get to even the closest neighboring star, and it'll be going so fast that the only way to slow down will be to turn the sail around and dive into the star and hope its direction is reversed before it gets too close:) (full disclosure: I'm stealing this concept from "The Mote In God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Good read.)
Alternately, we might be able to get a fusion pulse engine working, maybe even within the next decade. It works by getting the reaction up to high pressure and then venting all hot stuff out the back. In other words, it doesn't require a sustained reaction, but it requires one where we extract enough power from it to start the next cycle. We're super close to this already. This provides lots and lots of acceleration, and should be efficient enough to make sending out a probe worth the effort.
The communication is fairly easy - aim the signal right at our sun and send as usual - but due to the lightlag (several years!) it would mostly be one-way communication once the probe was more than a few years out. We'd be able to hear the probe - we'll just use a really big dish to pick up the signal - but the probe won't be able to hear us. The probe would have to be smart enough to do the whole mission without our help.
Hey, it's all relative. Being manhandled by a car lifter is part of the training system so that you can earn the right to be manhandled by a real jet engine while riding a flying pile of explosives:)
PC gaming still has something that assures its survival: mods, patches, and expansions.
1 - patches - if you can't patch your online console game, and it gets hacked, you're totally screwed. This is gradually being fixed by putting hard drives on consoles.
2 - expansions - again, something being gradually addressed by consoles adding hard drives. Still, expansions for console games so far rarely stray from the extremes - they're either very very small, or they're so huge that they cost as much as a new game.
3 - mods! User-created mods! The online gaming killer app! This is still the exclusive domain of the PC. Console makers still refuse to give the users this level of power, and if they *did* give us that much power, we'd start writing software for their systems and consoles would become equivalent to PCs.
Mods vastly increase the useful lifespan of a game by keeping the experience from stagnating. They add replay value, sometimes years of replay value (remember good old Teamfortress?).
"My point is: doesn't attaching the engine to the wheel seem like the *most* logical choice in the first place? Why build complicated transmission mechanisms and a centralized engine in the first place? The reason, I think was to use only one big powerful engine to power all wheels (or two, incase of a 2 wheel drive) simultaneously. Since the engine is the single most expensive component of a vehicle, it made sense to use only one of them, especially so, because most of them have a very high space:power ratio."
That sounds about right. Gas engines are heavy, expensive, and complicated, and their performance doesn't scale well up or down. Having four engines means four times the expense, four transmissions that need to be synched to each other, four times the piping for the gasoline (or four tanks). All the baggage to make the engines work makes the weight increase even more, which makes the beast even less efficient. And all of that can fail in ways that can make the whole thing cease to function. Cheaper, lighter, and more reliable to have one engine and split its output.
The reason it's being done now is that the price/performance/complexity/weight with the electric motor is now good enough for this to be worthwhile.
Hmm. That looks like it'd be real useful for zipping around the solar system, until we can get the fusion equivalent to work.
I'm not so sure about actually using that to directly launch from the surface, though. While the exhaust is "clean" (not really radioactive or anything, it's just really hot hydrogen moving really fast), it'd be murder on the launch pad (more heat/thrust/whatever). Plus it'd be throwing lots of hot-but-unburned hydrogen out the back. If you've ever watched a video of a launch, you'll note it takes a while to overcome inertia and get moving upwards. With this design, that's time for the huge hot cloud of hydrogen to collect around the rocket and explode. Nasty! And one of these babies blowing up on the pad would dump all that fissing nuclear fuel all over the place.
Still, it might have potential as the *second* stage of a rocket - by the time the nuclear thrust kicks in, my list of problems goes away. And as a bonus, with a little more work you don't have to worry about electricity once you're up there. Heck, once you've expended the hydrogen and presumably calmed the reaction and switched to power generation, you could use that power to run an ion drive for a long coasting stretch. (this depends... if the fission drive is more efficient, it'd be better to just bring along more hydrogen for it).
Slashdot Mirror
You fine Ford. No, seriously. If you *don't* fine Ford, then they never have any personal stake in choosing better advertisers.
And Ford can't be joe-jobbed by some competitor... because Ford has to follow US law, which means they've got to keep their financial information for a certain length of time, which means it's right there in their own records that they hired Shady Advertizing Firm.
Ford can, of course, try to pass the damages on to S.A.F., or they can just eat the fine. The idea though is that fining Ford in this case would force change, because Ford stops paying spammers. And if S.A.F. is only a middleman, losing the business forces S.A.F. to stop using spammers too.
At the moment, there's zero accountability. There's no reason not to hire spammers. You can hire whoever you want and just look the other way, and you won't get in trouble, and chances are they're just a middleman and won't get in trouble either. For there to be change... get the instigator in trouble, and let the pain work its way through the system.
The problem with that is that the stronger/smarter members would survive. Then we'd have stronger gangs that are better at killing... indeed, very Darwinistic. But also the exact opposite of what the rest of the law abiding community wants.
You're misinformed. We *don't* build new nuclear weapons. We don't build old nuclear weapons either. We've signed treaties against testing or selling any of the stuff too. The computer simulations are to see how the existing ones hold up as they age (rather than detonate one every once in a while to make sure the rest still work).
"Open Source fragmentation is a myth largely propagated a certain proprietary vendor's FUD campaign"
:) I could see the same easily happening with Java; different bright folks wanting to take it in different directions, without a leader, ending up disagreeing too strongly and going it alone. Would Sun and IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and so on always agree on the next level to take Java to? I doubt that.
Yes. A certain vendor that did itself try to fork Java, and now has a competing product that is extremely similar to Java. If Java went GPL, this company would not hesitate to muck around with it, just because they can, and the company has a history of doing anything it can to 'win'.
"Successful open source projects simply do not fork."
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I would not expect Java to fork in the classic sense of the word (except the version that one particular company would make), but look at Linux as a whole; multiple distros out there, by companies, by individuals, by governments. That kind of "forking" alone would make it more difficult for WORA with Java; it'd increase the amount of tweaking neccessary. Every distro tweaking the JVM a little differently than the others... code then running great on some and flakey on others... well, maybe that's already true. Why make it worse, though?
And what about BSD? I'd call that successful, and it has most definitely forked. Even its forks have forked. BSD is totally forked!
For the record, I'm undecided about the opening-up of Java. I like the language, and it's the one I use the most. I'm not as against the idea as I may sound in this post.
"Make it shriek in a loud female voice if abused..."
Most of my friends would feel compelled to abuse it at least once, then, just to hear it.
NO. Because you'd need the money trail to prove the case... and the money trail leads back to YOU. Oops. Hope you like the view from your cell.
Yes. These are examples of potentially dangerous things that are legal because the benefits outweigh the risk.
I argue that filesharing networks fall under the same category. At heart, they're a logical evolutionary addition to the internet.
- they get data from those who have it to those who want it.
- they create a counter force stretching the internet's structure to a web, as it was originally envisioned, instead of a hub and spoke network of corporate owned and government regulated servers.
-- in doing so, they increase network efficiency by spreading things out, utilizing available proccessing power, and maintaining the stability of the network as originally intended - routing around damage.
- for better or worse, they make it much, much harder for buearocrats and lawyers to cripple the system. This is arguably a Good Thing in the long term.
We should be talking about how to make it better, not about how to write a law to shut it down.
"Hitachi is clearly selling these drives to Apple at or near a loss, for whatever strange reason."
It's unlikely that they'd do this for a product that was almost guaranteed to sell in large volumes. It's probably the other way around - they're making a small profit on the iPod sales and a really big profit on the drives they sell seperately.
Yes, I agree. HardOCP should be completely responsible for the damage done.
Let's see, now to count up the damage...
Infinium's income before the article was posted, at which time they weren't offering any product for sale yet: $0
Infinium's income in the entire time since the article was posted, and to this day they aren't offering any product for sale yet: $0
Hmm.
The thought of Microsoft trying to build a future game system around an S3 graphics chipset gives me fits of the snorting giggles >:)
I can see several ways in which this could be bad for all the rest of us (while not being all that good for China, either).
1 - mass civil disobedience, encouraged by the Chinese government looking the other way: China writes some code, and makes up the slack by pirating everything else. Everyone justifies the piracy by pointing at the government and saying "well, I'm not allowed to BUY it". The rest of the world ends up feeding China's growth but doesn't actually get any money.
2 - GPL black hole: code goes into China but code doesn't come out. What's to stop a desperate Chinese coder from "borrowing" a pile of downloaded source, making a few changes, and selling binaries within China? Nothing. The rest of the world ends up feeding China's growth with free code, and gets nothing in return. The Great Firewall of China might aggravate that even further - maybe insiders *want* to share their code with the rest of the world, but aren't allowed to?
3 - hmm. China's also making custom processors. What's to stop there from being a positive feedback loop here of Chinese code for Chinese chips driving Chinese chip sales in China, which drives Chinese code in China? Nothing - that may even be by design. This'd close off sales of both hardware and software to China even more. Good for China, bad for everyone else.
Like many other posters, though, I don't think China could get away with this, because of the WTO. They'd get hammered not only by the US, but also the EU, India, Japan, and anyone else who makes software that I'm forgetting.
"This technique, dubbed 'Earth-Orbit Synthesis', will be first used to study black holes in distant quasars, so don't expect spectacular wallpaper replacing images. "
Two words: Accretion disc.
Black holes themselves may be, well, *black*, but all the stuff swirling into them and/or being ejected from the poles glows nicely. And if that's the sort of thing making the quasar so bright, the images should be spectacular indeed. (note: it'll be a false-color image)
...but you should be expecting problems with a search for something as horribly generic as "motherboard review" anyway. If you search for something that *should* get millions of results, and you do in fact get millions of results, well, you asked for it :)
That's the sort of "problem" with only one solution: the user needs to narrow down the search himself. Continuing the mobo example, by supplying more... like processor architecture, manufacturer, and so on. To expect google to automagically do this FOR you is to defeat the purpose of a useful search engine - you're asking them to make all the choices for you. That's bound to make the wrong choices. Frequently. And it opens up a new way for shadier search engines to take money in exchange for adding bias into their results, or for random scammish web page designers to try to game the system.
The solution is basically what google already does: there's a "search within these results" box you can use to narrow down your search if you got a big pile of uselessly generic results. I suggest you use that.
I know, I know, this is slashdot, and people can't really be bothered to read the articles... but when someone actually links to something, I expect *them* to have read their own article!
:)
"this too should form black holes. These will be about a million times smaller than the nucleus of an atom and will survive for barely an instant.
The physicist Stephen Hawking predicted in the 1970s that black holes would evaporate by radiating away their energy. For astrophysical black holes this is a very slow process, but extremely small black holes should last about as long as a snowflake in hell."
You can stop building that black hole shelter now
Oh, so you'll be able to get original Xboxen for nothing, too? So Microsoft will keep on selling them at a loss, forever? Wasn't the whole point of not putting a hard drive in the Xbox2 that it's too damn expensive?
I *do* play PS1 games on my PS2 - there are a bunch of old RPGs worth playing again once in a while - and I appreciate not having to pull my TV out to futz with the plugs. I've still got the PS1 somewhere, but the PS1 just doesn't fit into entertainment center slots the way a PS2 does. This will apply just as much to the Xbox1 fans - the Xbox is big and clunky and awkwardly shaped. There *will* be people who want to still play their old Xbox1 games - for example, all the people here who claim that Halo, Beach Volleyball, and a dozen other games never get old.
I can't remember where, but I saw a followup article on stem cell research recently, with one of those color-coded maps showing which countries allow it, which have banned it, and which haven't said anything yet. Turns out that it's verboten in most of Europe, too.
A google search on "stem cell map" got me http://mbbnet.umn.edu/scmap.html . That jives with what I'm remembering.
"And the ad tried to show that Microsoft Windows Server is 11-22% faster in '4 out of 5' workplace scenarios than Linux."
Hmm. 4 out of 5... that's 80%. But supposedly Microsoft has 90%+ of the market. So Microsoft just paid to run an ad urging over 10% of the market to leave them for Linux >:)
No, Microsoft made the first monetary offer. From a "legal" standpoint, that makes all the difference. He didn't approach them with a price - *they* approached him. In doing so, MS has mostly blown their chance at getting him under anti-squatting laws.
I can easily see the same things happening with digital information, too, though. The photos you restored were taken care of, unlike the many that weren't taken care of and have thus been lost over time. It's not much different with digital. Throw a hard drive, flash card, and cd-rs in a box and store them somewhere dry for 50 years. They may or may not work perfectly by then, but there'll be data recovery techniques that work well on them, just as there are photo recovery techniques that work today.
There are already imaging algorithms that'll zoom things today, and with resolutions going up and costs going down, our grandchildren will probably be getting a much larger volume of data from us than we're getting today from our own grandparents.
Bzzzt, you LOSE. There's no one on Mars to fight. It's an empty, dead, airless rock. There is no one there to displace, nothing there to damage. A colonization of Mars would be completely unique in human history.
On top of that, we don't have the capability to send enough people there for the colonists to fight much amongst themselves. Without a space elevator, we might be able to send 6 people towards Mars in a year where the orbits line up nicely, at a cost of maybe 20 billion dollars per person. Even if we *did* have a space elevator, the orbits won't magically change for us, and even if we sent a hundred people at a time it'd still cost billions per person to do. Those few who do arrive will be spending most of their time trying to survive.
On top of that, no one else has the capability to send anyone there at all. It's very hard to have a repeat of the wars of colonial powers competing for territory when there's only one colonial power.
Hmm. The old rocketry problem - you need reaction material to throw out the back end in order to push yourself, but then you need more reaction material to lift the reaction material itself - really makes useful travel between stars difficult.
:) (full disclosure: I'm stealing this concept from "The Mote In God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Good read.)
Ion drives are better about that than rockets, but they still need fuel, so the problem is still there, just smaller. Given the very small acceleration of current ion drives, you'd want to be accelerating just over half the way there, then turn around and decelerate for the second half. (the deceleration will take less time because you'll mass less by then, having used about half your fuel). I'm not sure exactly how the math works out, but I think that cuts the useful range down to a couple light years at best. Another problem is that while chemical rockets burn all on their own, ion drives require electricity. You can't get enough electricity for free (solar) in between stars - you need to bring your own. This means going nuclear, but right now we can only get fission to work - and we can only get it to work for 50 years before replacing the fuel. That severely limits our range. Even if you could instantly accelerate to (and later decelerate from) a blistering 10 percent of lightspeed, you'd still only be able to go 5 light years.
The only workable solution we have right now is to cheat and not send any fuel with the probe at all - use a solar sail. Sit a massively overpowered laser here and fire it at the probe for as long as we can keep the laser running, and that underweight little unmanned probe will accelerate nicely. Of course it'll probably still take decades to get to even the closest neighboring star, and it'll be going so fast that the only way to slow down will be to turn the sail around and dive into the star and hope its direction is reversed before it gets too close
Alternately, we might be able to get a fusion pulse engine working, maybe even within the next decade. It works by getting the reaction up to high pressure and then venting all hot stuff out the back. In other words, it doesn't require a sustained reaction, but it requires one where we extract enough power from it to start the next cycle. We're super close to this already. This provides lots and lots of acceleration, and should be efficient enough to make sending out a probe worth the effort.
The communication is fairly easy - aim the signal right at our sun and send as usual - but due to the lightlag (several years!) it would mostly be one-way communication once the probe was more than a few years out. We'd be able to hear the probe - we'll just use a really big dish to pick up the signal - but the probe won't be able to hear us. The probe would have to be smart enough to do the whole mission without our help.
Hey, it's all relative. Being manhandled by a car lifter is part of the training system so that you can earn the right to be manhandled by a real jet engine while riding a flying pile of explosives :)
PC gaming still has something that assures its survival: mods, patches, and expansions.
1 - patches - if you can't patch your online console game, and it gets hacked, you're totally screwed. This is gradually being fixed by putting hard drives on consoles.
2 - expansions - again, something being gradually addressed by consoles adding hard drives. Still, expansions for console games so far rarely stray from the extremes - they're either very very small, or they're so huge that they cost as much as a new game.
3 - mods! User-created mods! The online gaming killer app! This is still the exclusive domain of the PC. Console makers still refuse to give the users this level of power, and if they *did* give us that much power, we'd start writing software for their systems and consoles would become equivalent to PCs.
Mods vastly increase the useful lifespan of a game by keeping the experience from stagnating. They add replay value, sometimes years of replay value (remember good old Teamfortress?).
"My point is: doesn't attaching the engine to the wheel seem like the *most* logical choice in the first place? Why build complicated transmission mechanisms and a centralized engine in the first place? The reason, I think was to use only one big powerful engine to power all wheels (or two, incase of a 2 wheel drive) simultaneously. Since the engine is the single most expensive component of a vehicle, it made sense to use only one of them, especially so, because most of them have a very high space:power ratio."
That sounds about right. Gas engines are heavy, expensive, and complicated, and their performance doesn't scale well up or down. Having four engines means four times the expense, four transmissions that need to be synched to each other, four times the piping for the gasoline (or four tanks). All the baggage to make the engines work makes the weight increase even more, which makes the beast even less efficient. And all of that can fail in ways that can make the whole thing cease to function. Cheaper, lighter, and more reliable to have one engine and split its output.
The reason it's being done now is that the price/performance/complexity/weight with the electric motor is now good enough for this to be worthwhile.
Hmm. That looks like it'd be real useful for zipping around the solar system, until we can get the fusion equivalent to work.
I'm not so sure about actually using that to directly launch from the surface, though. While the exhaust is "clean" (not really radioactive or anything, it's just really hot hydrogen moving really fast), it'd be murder on the launch pad (more heat/thrust/whatever). Plus it'd be throwing lots of hot-but-unburned hydrogen out the back. If you've ever watched a video of a launch, you'll note it takes a while to overcome inertia and get moving upwards. With this design, that's time for the huge hot cloud of hydrogen to collect around the rocket and explode. Nasty! And one of these babies blowing up on the pad would dump all that fissing nuclear fuel all over the place.
Still, it might have potential as the *second* stage of a rocket - by the time the nuclear thrust kicks in, my list of problems goes away. And as a bonus, with a little more work you don't have to worry about electricity once you're up there. Heck, once you've expended the hydrogen and presumably calmed the reaction and switched to power generation, you could use that power to run an ion drive for a long coasting stretch. (this depends... if the fission drive is more efficient, it'd be better to just bring along more hydrogen for it).