In a heliocentric, sun-fixed coordinate system, the Earth (and thus the LOC) move at about 30km/s which comes to about 108000 km/h - about 5 times faster than the Phoenix lander.
Then again, nobody is trying to land the thing on Mars.
All I am saying is I am having a hard time seeing why it is so much harder than it was in the 1970's when they landed the Viking missions, and it was the first time they ever touched down on the planet. Also, did I mention that both missions were successful...
If "success" is defined as "slam something, anything, into the ground somewhere, somehow, that can still send a couple pictures back afterwards". Sure. Phoenix, of course, weighs an order of magnitude more, has to hit a landing spot chosen from science reasons (and not for "make it easy on the lander" reasons) and carries sensitive scientific instrumentation that still has to be able to do quantitative chemistry analytical work after the landing.
...and suddenly the whole thing becomes a whole lot harder. Now you tell folks that they have to do it on a fraction of the budget of Viking and you've just made it riskier.
There are four dimensions to systems engineering and at most three of them are free. Once you decide to do something fast, good AND cheap, the fourth dimension, risk, will go wherever it damn well pleases.
[...] there are some legitimate reasons to attach very large files.
No, not really. Attaching a very large file to an email is an act of desperation, borne out of a lack of appropriate mechanisms to transport the information at hand. I think you might want to rethink your procedures.
So, the Soviet Union was a model of efficiency, you say?
In an attempt to get this even vaguely back on topic: who put the first satellite into LEO? Who put the first man into LEO?
And while I'm at it: How many people did the Russian government put into LEO total? How many people did the US government put into LEO total? And how many people has the oh-so-efficient private industry put into LEO so far? Big zero, eh? Wonder how that is...
...because you have to run absurd cross-sections of copper to transmit the requisite power. For your run-of-the-mill 15A circuit (that's 1650W in a 110V scenario) the code requires 14-gauge wiring IIRC and folks like myself recommend more like 12-gauge because it'll lose a bunch less over the lifetime of a house and if you ever want to upgrade to 25A you just have to switch the breaker and the installed wiring is already up to snuff.
That same 15A circuit yields you 180W on a 12V DC basis. So if you want to run the same 1650W you'd need some kind of pretty massive copper pipe as a conductor. Which is pretty expensive and actually quite wasteful when you think about it: why install lots of metal in your house so you can send a whole lot of low-energy electrons when a much smaller number of much higher-energy electrons will do the same work and require a whole lot less beefy cabling?
No, don't use a series resistor. If you did that, you'd be dropping most of the voltage over the resistor which means you'd be dissipating much more power as heat in the resistor than you'd get out in light from the LEDs.
If you want to run a LED of 110, put a small capacitor in series to shift the phase of the current against the voltage just enough to get the right power throughput. That way you're still getting voltage across a non-LED element, but you're not burning any power doing it.
But for a small scale system, the ability to tie in to the grid is essentially useless.
It is amusing how easy it is to spot people who have never actually thought about the matter by comments like these.
The purpose of grid-tie is to avoid having to futz around with batteries. Batteries need charge-controllers, they need to be serviced, they have a finite life-time and they're either over- or under-speced because no two weeks will ever have the precise same power.
So you used the grid as your battery. It's as simple as that. You over-produce in the afternoon (assuming solar -- maybe in the evening for wind)? Just feed it into the grid. You don't produce at all in the night? Just take it right back from the grid. Here in the pacific southwest, loads peak in the afternoon when everybody runs an AC - so the power company will be more than happy to receive your added input. And loads are lightest around 3am, so they'll be just as happy to "give you back" your electricity then. Actually they're giving you cheap power in exchange for expensive power -- but in return you don't have to think about batteries at all.
In addition, with a grid-tie you're as scalable and as granular as you want to. Got some bucks to spend on a Panel this week? Great, you're now producing 5.37% of your household's electricity over what you were doing before. Without having to run new circuits or worry what consumer in the house will run on 5.37% of your total consumption. Without the grid-tie, you either produce all the electricity your fridge needs or it'll die. Or you change plugs whenever it's cloudy.
First off, just about any company named E* isn't going to be a company worth doing business with. Didn't anybody learn anything from the dot-bomb bullshit just a few years ago?
Yeah, like eBay. Look how those have tanked. Clearly not something anybody should ever have invested in. Or Electronic Arts.
Not to mention many pre dot-com companies from Edison through Eastman to Exxon.
I think one thing people learned in the dot-com era (or maybe not) is that investment strategies should look at something more than just the first letter of a company name?
I'm saying it's morally wrong for a company to take photos of someone else's clearly marked private property [...]
Are we looking at the same pictures? Because I did not see any kind of mark anywhere that there was a private property starting somewhere. If you can't be bothered to put up a little sign that says "this is my driveway" then how do you expect people to know that it is?
Especially if you're suing to remove images from the web that would tell people that this is a private driveway.
But if your house is on a private road, and the photographer took a picture of your house from your private property then that would be a problem.
Have you seen the pictures? If that road is private, then they sure did a good job hiding that fact. If I was driving a car in the area, I wouldn't know that this was a private road either. At no point did I see a sign to the effect of "this is our property line" or any such thing. As a car driver in the area I would've driven up right to the house where I would've noticed "oh, this is a private driveway, not a through-street. Oops. Let me turn around and get back to the real road." And if there was a camera on the top of my car, I would have taken pictures already at that point.
Hiding the fact that this is private property and then trying to extort money from folks who happen to stumble onto it is called entrapment if I understand the legalese right...
Welcome to the internet. To spare yourself (and us others) some headache, here's a hint that they apparently haven't told you in middle school yet: There's one and only one authority that can define terms in the English language: the total body of English speakers. Words mean what they're used to describe; they mean what people intend them to mean when they utter them and how they can be expected to be understood when nothing else is said. If you're unclear on the meaning of a word or phrase, feel free to look it up in a dictionary -- for that's the very intent of a dictionary: to serve as a list of ways in which you can expect a term to be understood when nothing else is said.
On the internet we have this additional simple tool: the search engine. If you aren't clear how someone might have meant a word or phrase, you can just enter it into google and scan the first page (or couple pages, if you're unsure) of snippets and it should give you a pretty good picture how a phrase is generally used, i.e. understood, i,.e, meant.
For example you could check out http://www.google.com/search?q="proton+lifetime" where you would find that the term is used easily and casually by physicists as synonymous with "half life" or "average life span". As I type this, the first three hits yield "current best estimates of proton lifetime", "If the proton lifetime is indeed 10**30 years", and "they predict a significantly shorter proton lifetime" which makes it pretty clear that the term "lifetime" has nothing to do with "being alive", as much as you'd like to redefine it to do so.
And if you were to look up http://www.google.com/search?q="lifetime+of+the+universe" You would encounter amidst speculations to the eventual total lifetime of the universe such phrases as "Have the masses of molecules changed during the lifetime of the Universe?" or "We live inside a spherical shell of 'Observable Universe' which has radius equal to the lifetime of the Universe" together with a couple hits to an article by Gott et. al. that aren't clear from the snippet but do indeed reference the time that the universe has existed so far -- which should alert you to the fact that the term "lifetime of the universe" is just as casually and easily used to count the number of years since the big bang as the phrase "proton lifetime" is used to refer to the average life time of the proton.
Then again, it is quite obvious that clarity of communication is not in the least your goal here -- you're just here to insult people who are orders of magnitude superior to you. So you may as well ignore the above, as you were going to do anyways.
Isn't it true that a black hole the size of a proton will evaporate (hawking radiation) at exactly the same rate as a proton decays?
No, it isn't. Protons are stable as best as anybody can tell -- if their life time is finite, then it is many orders of magnitude longer than the life time of the universe. While the Hawking-life time of a proton-mass black hole is miniscule (they evaporate faster, the less mass they have).
Urgh - thanks for the link. There's so much wackyness in there, I don't even know where to begin.
They note, for example, that the machine rates closer to the average than any one of the humans. Which of course was the task given to the machine: to find an average. Which of course was NOT the task given to any of the human raters. They were supposed to find their own rating, not what they thought the average of the other raters would find.
And now comes the fun question: what fraction of the original 30 images do you suppose were of black women? And what does this tell us about any algorithm that rates anything on "beauty"? And about the programmers?
Hint - outside r>6370km nothing changes if you take the mass of the earth to be concentrated in a point at r=0. Go from there and discard numbers with r6370km. Makes the math a lot easier.
OK, instead of a cable, picture it as a rigid structure like a modern communications satellite. And instead of attached to the Earth, the center of gravity of the structure is in geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of 35,786 km. It doesn't matter if the structure is 10m tall or 71,572m tall, if it's center of gravity is in geosynchronous orbit the whole structure is in that orbit.
False. Its center of gravity is in geosync orbit. If the structure is extended reaching below and above geosync, then you have points that are moving "too fast" and "too slow" for their orbital altitudes. Other way 'round: picture a point on your structure closest to earth. What force keeps it going at the same angular velocity as the geosync matter above it? What would happen immediately if it were disconnected? Where does the additional force come from? You're incurring net forces at the lowest point that point at a non-zero angle from your tower. At the top of the structure you're incurring net-forces at the opposite angle. These combine to turn your whole tower around its center of gravity. If one end is attached to the grount, this will simply lead to a winding-up of rope around the planet.
Just because you don't understand the physics and can't visualize it with strings and rocks doesn't mean that it is impossible. The idea of a space elevator has been around since the 1950s and the physics concerning the mechanics of it are quite basic.
Let me submit that you are the one here who doesn't understand the physics. The other dude at least was willing to give the math a try. The idea has been debunked for as long as it's been around - and I agree the physics is quite simple which makes it so disheartening how many people fail at it.
Less sense, actually. Trans-continental conveyors are at least technically possible. A space elevator violates basic physics, as people with more than two brain cells can easily see for themselves. One brief google brings up for example this post from 1995 which should give you all you need.
That's not an answer, that's another question, with plenty of unspecified assumptions which would let you come up with almost any answer you want. Lots of people have worked it out under various assumptions, and you get an answer requiring a cable with strength between 60-120 GPa. Scientists have measured carbon nanotube filaments which have a tensile strength in that range. We can't build an assembly (cable) that strong yet, but I wouldn't call that "violating laws of physics".
Requiring research beyond our current knowledge and capability is not the same as "impossible". The most you can say is that it's not possible within the current limits of materials known to materials science. Why don't you link to a *proof* that no material can have a higher tensile strength than carbon nanotubes, and a *proof* that it not possible to bond carbon nanotubes so that an assembly has >50% of the strength of the filament.
Because I am not completely mentally retarded, that's why.
NO cable can be used for a space elevator, period. The concept itself violates basic physics. Materials don't matter. A cable attached to the earth will wind up around the earth NO MATTER how long, how strong, how shaped. You hold a piece of string with a weight at the other end and you need a certain minimum angular velocity if you want to spin that around you. If you go too slow, the rope will simply wind up around you NO MATTER what material you use.
You are fighting straw men with all your carbon tube gibberish. Nobody is arguing with the materials side of this because it is completely besides the point. As you could see yourself if you were capable of performing simple algebra.
Any articles about space elevators should be part of the "Sci-Fi" or "humor" section. Space elevators make as much sense as trans-continental conveyor belts.
Less sense, actually. Trans-continental conveyors are at least technically possible. A space elevator violates basic physics, as people with more than two brain cells can easily see for themselves. One brief google brings up for example this post from 1995 which should give you all you need.
Last I checked (1999 or there abouts), there were 535 members of congress, of which 29 had been accused of spousal abuse, 7 had been arrested of fraud, 19 had been accused of writing bad checks, 117 had bankrupted at least two businesses, 3 had been arrested for assault, 71 couldn't get a credit card due to bad credit, 14 had been arrested on drug-related charges, 8 had been arrested for shoplifting, 21 were defendants in then-ongoing lawsuits. In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving.
After all, in this society, once you're a criminal, you're permanently low class, you can't make up for it.
Sure looks to me as if we're quite happy to give people another chance.
I doubt that it's ever about the medium itself (addicted to TCP/IP, UDP, and so on).
I admit that I'm addicted to inserting ethernet plugs into RJ45 jacks. I just love the satisfying little 'click' they make. I'm going through a pack (of patch cables) a day now and it's starting to interfere with my work and my social life. The chicks really get freaked out when they see me lovingly insert one of these plugs a couple hundred times.
(Did you ever notice that it's called a "Jack" even though it's the female side of the connector? Shouldn't it be called "Jill"? Is there something homosexual going one here somewhere? Ah, who cares as long as I can insert these little buggers. 'click'. Ohhh - that was a good one.)
addictedly yours
IC
--
Repeal 802.11! Throw off the shackles of oppressive wifi!
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Yes, it is.
It's Apple,MacOS IS Linux. One certain, well set-up, nicely-tuned, pretty version of Linux.
Welcome to the 21st century.
and will be becuase Linux lacks quite a few things that everyday people require.What is it that macs lack that everyday people require?
In a heliocentric, sun-fixed coordinate system, the Earth (and thus the LOC) move at about 30km/s which comes to about 108000 km/h - about 5 times faster than the Phoenix lander.
Then again, nobody is trying to land the thing on Mars.
If "success" is defined as "slam something, anything, into the ground somewhere, somehow, that can still send a couple pictures back afterwards". Sure. Phoenix, of course, weighs an order of magnitude more, has to hit a landing spot chosen from science reasons (and not for "make it easy on the lander" reasons) and carries sensitive scientific instrumentation that still has to be able to do quantitative chemistry analytical work after the landing.
...and suddenly the whole thing becomes a whole lot harder. Now you tell folks that they have to do it on a fraction of the budget of Viking and you've just made it riskier.
There are four dimensions to systems engineering and at most three of them are free. Once you decide to do something fast, good AND cheap, the fourth dimension, risk, will go wherever it damn well pleases.
you've probably seen it by now, but just in case you haven't: just about 40 attempts
No, not really. Attaching a very large file to an email is an act of desperation, borne out of a lack of appropriate mechanisms to transport the information at hand. I think you might want to rethink your procedures.
In an attempt to get this even vaguely back on topic: who put the first satellite into LEO? Who put the first man into LEO?
And while I'm at it: How many people did the Russian government put into LEO total? How many people did the US government put into LEO total? And how many people has the oh-so-efficient private industry put into LEO so far? Big zero, eh? Wonder how that is...
Why call it "legacy"? Why not call a being as good as (or even better than) yourself that you brought into being a ... "descendant"?
Our probes are packets of metal and silicates born of a planet made of metal and silicates by going though the intermediate step of biological life...
...because you have to run absurd cross-sections of copper to transmit the requisite power. For your run-of-the-mill 15A circuit (that's 1650W in a 110V scenario) the code requires 14-gauge wiring IIRC and folks like myself recommend more like 12-gauge because it'll lose a bunch less over the lifetime of a house and if you ever want to upgrade to 25A you just have to switch the breaker and the installed wiring is already up to snuff.
That same 15A circuit yields you 180W on a 12V DC basis. So if you want to run the same 1650W you'd need some kind of pretty massive copper pipe as a conductor. Which is pretty expensive and actually quite wasteful when you think about it: why install lots of metal in your house so you can send a whole lot of low-energy electrons when a much smaller number of much higher-energy electrons will do the same work and require a whole lot less beefy cabling?
But why use LEDs for lighting at all? Fluorescent lights are at least as efficient, a lot cheaper, and already exist as house-lighting applications...
No, don't use a series resistor. If you did that, you'd be dropping most of the voltage over the resistor which means you'd be dissipating much more power as heat in the resistor than you'd get out in light from the LEDs.
If you want to run a LED of 110, put a small capacitor in series to shift the phase of the current against the voltage just enough to get the right power throughput. That way you're still getting voltage across a non-LED element, but you're not burning any power doing it.
It is amusing how easy it is to spot people who have never actually thought about the matter by comments like these.
The purpose of grid-tie is to avoid having to futz around with batteries. Batteries need charge-controllers, they need to be serviced, they have a finite life-time and they're either over- or under-speced because no two weeks will ever have the precise same power.
So you used the grid as your battery. It's as simple as that. You over-produce in the afternoon (assuming solar -- maybe in the evening for wind)? Just feed it into the grid. You don't produce at all in the night? Just take it right back from the grid. Here in the pacific southwest, loads peak in the afternoon when everybody runs an AC - so the power company will be more than happy to receive your added input. And loads are lightest around 3am, so they'll be just as happy to "give you back" your electricity then. Actually they're giving you cheap power in exchange for expensive power -- but in return you don't have to think about batteries at all.
In addition, with a grid-tie you're as scalable and as granular as you want to. Got some bucks to spend on a Panel this week? Great, you're now producing 5.37% of your household's electricity over what you were doing before. Without having to run new circuits or worry what consumer in the house will run on 5.37% of your total consumption. Without the grid-tie, you either produce all the electricity your fridge needs or it'll die. Or you change plugs whenever it's cloudy.
Yeah, like eBay. Look how those have tanked. Clearly not something anybody should ever have invested in. Or Electronic Arts.
Not to mention many pre dot-com companies from Edison through Eastman to Exxon.
I think one thing people learned in the dot-com era (or maybe not) is that investment strategies should look at something more than just the first letter of a company name?
If writing letters to your congressman changed anything, it would be illegal.
Are we looking at the same pictures? Because I did not see any kind of mark anywhere that there was a private property starting somewhere. If you can't be bothered to put up a little sign that says "this is my driveway" then how do you expect people to know that it is?
Especially if you're suing to remove images from the web that would tell people that this is a private driveway.
Have you seen the pictures? If that road is private, then they sure did a good job hiding that fact. If I was driving a car in the area, I wouldn't know that this was a private road either. At no point did I see a sign to the effect of "this is our property line" or any such thing. As a car driver in the area I would've driven up right to the house where I would've noticed "oh, this is a private driveway, not a through-street. Oops. Let me turn around and get back to the real road." And if there was a camera on the top of my car, I would have taken pictures already at that point.
Hiding the fact that this is private property and then trying to extort money from folks who happen to stumble onto it is called entrapment if I understand the legalese right...
Welcome to the internet. To spare yourself (and us others) some headache, here's a hint that they apparently haven't told you in middle school yet: There's one and only one authority that can define terms in the English language: the total body of English speakers. Words mean what they're used to describe; they mean what people intend them to mean when they utter them and how they can be expected to be understood when nothing else is said. If you're unclear on the meaning of a word or phrase, feel free to look it up in a dictionary -- for that's the very intent of a dictionary: to serve as a list of ways in which you can expect a term to be understood when nothing else is said.
On the internet we have this additional simple tool: the search engine. If you aren't clear how someone might have meant a word or phrase, you can just enter it into google and scan the first page (or couple pages, if you're unsure) of snippets and it should give you a pretty good picture how a phrase is generally used, i.e. understood, i,.e, meant.
For example you could check out
http://www.google.com/search?q="proton+lifetime"
where you would find that the term is used easily and casually by physicists as synonymous with "half life" or "average life span". As I type this, the first three hits yield "current best estimates of proton lifetime", "If the proton lifetime is indeed 10**30 years", and "they predict a significantly shorter proton lifetime" which makes it pretty clear that the term "lifetime" has nothing to do with "being alive", as much as you'd like to redefine it to do so.
And if you were to look up
http://www.google.com/search?q="lifetime+of+the+universe"
You would encounter amidst speculations to the eventual total lifetime of the universe such phrases as "Have the masses of molecules changed during the lifetime of the Universe?" or "We live inside a spherical shell of 'Observable Universe' which has radius equal to the lifetime of the Universe" together with a couple hits to an article by Gott et. al. that aren't clear from the snippet but do indeed reference the time that the universe has existed so far -- which should alert you to the fact that the term "lifetime of the universe" is just as casually and easily used to count the number of years since the big bang as the phrase "proton lifetime" is used to refer to the average life time of the proton.
Then again, it is quite obvious that clarity of communication is not in the least your goal here -- you're just here to insult people who are orders of magnitude superior to you. So you may as well ignore the above, as you were going to do anyways.
No, I don't jest.
Then again, nobody said a word about "the end of the universe".
Your reading comprehension needs work.
No, it isn't. Protons are stable as best as anybody can tell -- if their life time is finite, then it is many orders of magnitude longer than the life time of the universe. While the Hawking-life time of a proton-mass black hole is miniscule (they evaporate faster, the less mass they have).
Urgh - thanks for the link. There's so much wackyness in there, I don't even know where to begin.
They note, for example, that the machine rates closer to the average than any one of the humans. Which of course was the task given to the machine: to find an average. Which of course was NOT the task given to any of the human raters. They were supposed to find their own rating, not what they thought the average of the other raters would find.
And now comes the fun question: what fraction of the original 30 images do you suppose were of black women? And what does this tell us about any algorithm that rates anything on "beauty"? And about the programmers?
Hint - outside r>6370km nothing changes if you take the mass of the earth to be concentrated in a point at r=0. Go from there and discard numbers with r6370km. Makes the math a lot easier.
False. Its center of gravity is in geosync orbit. If the structure is extended reaching below and above geosync, then you have points that are moving "too fast" and "too slow" for their orbital altitudes. Other way 'round: picture a point on your structure closest to earth. What force keeps it going at the same angular velocity as the geosync matter above it? What would happen immediately if it were disconnected? Where does the additional force come from? You're incurring net forces at the lowest point that point at a non-zero angle from your tower. At the top of the structure you're incurring net-forces at the opposite angle. These combine to turn your whole tower around its center of gravity. If one end is attached to the grount, this will simply lead to a winding-up of rope around the planet.
Just because you don't understand the physics and can't visualize it with strings and rocks doesn't mean that it is impossible. The idea of a space elevator has been around since the 1950s and the physics concerning the mechanics of it are quite basic.Let me submit that you are the one here who doesn't understand the physics. The other dude at least was willing to give the math a try. The idea has been debunked for as long as it's been around - and I agree the physics is quite simple which makes it so disheartening how many people fail at it.
Less sense, actually. Trans-continental conveyors are at least technically possible. A space elevator violates basic physics, as people with more than two brain cells can easily see for themselves. One brief google brings up for example this post from 1995 which should give you all you need.
That's not an answer, that's another question, with plenty of unspecified assumptions which would let you come up with almost any answer you want. Lots of people have worked it out under various assumptions, and you get an answer requiring a cable with strength between 60-120 GPa. Scientists have measured carbon nanotube filaments which have a tensile strength in that range. We can't build an assembly (cable) that strong yet, but I wouldn't call that "violating laws of physics".Requiring research beyond our current knowledge and capability is not the same as "impossible". The most you can say is that it's not possible within the current limits of materials known to materials science. Why don't you link to a *proof* that no material can have a higher tensile strength than carbon nanotubes, and a *proof* that it not possible to bond carbon nanotubes so that an assembly has >50% of the strength of the filament.
Because I am not completely mentally retarded, that's why.
NO cable can be used for a space elevator, period. The concept itself violates basic physics. Materials don't matter. A cable attached to the earth will wind up around the earth NO MATTER how long, how strong, how shaped. You hold a piece of string with a weight at the other end and you need a certain minimum angular velocity if you want to spin that around you. If you go too slow, the rope will simply wind up around you NO MATTER what material you use.
You are fighting straw men with all your carbon tube gibberish. Nobody is arguing with the materials side of this because it is completely besides the point. As you could see yourself if you were capable of performing simple algebra.
Less sense, actually. Trans-continental conveyors are at least technically possible. A space elevator violates basic physics, as people with more than two brain cells can easily see for themselves. One brief google brings up for example this post from 1995 which should give you all you need.
Last I checked (1999 or there abouts), there were 535 members of congress, of which 29 had been accused of spousal abuse, 7 had been arrested of fraud, 19 had been accused of writing bad checks, 117 had bankrupted at least two businesses, 3 had been arrested for assault, 71 couldn't get a credit card due to bad credit, 14 had been arrested on drug-related charges, 8 had been arrested for shoplifting, 21 were defendants in then-ongoing lawsuits. In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving.
After all, in this society, once you're a criminal, you're permanently low class, you can't make up for it.Sure looks to me as if we're quite happy to give people another chance.
I admit that I'm addicted to inserting ethernet plugs into RJ45 jacks. I just love the satisfying little 'click' they make. I'm going through a pack (of patch cables) a day now and it's starting to interfere with my work and my social life. The chicks really get freaked out when they see me lovingly insert one of these plugs a couple hundred times.
(Did you ever notice that it's called a "Jack" even though it's the female side of the connector? Shouldn't it be called "Jill"? Is there something homosexual going one here somewhere? Ah, who cares as long as I can insert these little buggers. 'click'. Ohhh - that was a good one.)
addictedly yours
IC
--
Repeal 802.11! Throw off the shackles of oppressive wifi!