> Actually, fixing global warming on earth is JUST as easy if not easier than any planitoid, > it just takes longer. We could "fix" it today simply by cutting emmisions and allowing the system to compensate.
Ha ha ha! No, that wouldn't work, because our present CO2 levels are already too high, leading to an equilibrium point we have not yet reached. We need to reduce CO2 levels, and that means carbon sequestration in something. You can plant more trees, which would mean replacing agricultural land somewhere (because most deforestation is caused by clearing land for crops, as in the Amazon). This is MUCH more difficult to do on a planetary scale than it is in a small environment. Remember, it takes longer, which is exactly my point: a month of overheating is an inconvenience, a decade is a catastrophe.
> Lets say there is a sudden solar flare which then heats your tube. Easy fix as you say flip the color. > all done....but wait one side was damaged by the same flare and didn't switch! You now have a massize > temperature differential which creates a small hurricane inside the tube. Even IF you manage to fix it > your entier food crop is destroyed and you starve. The real downside of a small environment is no lee way for error.
Cute scenario, but it's all wrong. A single solar flare will not appreciably change solar output. The reason we care about flares is the increased radiation levels they cause, not their heat, which is negligible compared to the rest of the sun.
But let's say we have a sudden increase in solar output. Due to the size of the sun, such changes are slow, so let's say we have a totally catastrophic 10% insolation increase in a single day. Unless the sun goes nova (which it is not large enough to do) I simply can not imagine a change even that steep. The planetoid has a 3e11 m2 cross section, so a 10% increase in heat gain means an extra 4e13W of power (at 1.4kW/m2 insolation at Earth orbit). The planetoid's shell weighs about 7e17kg (1e5 km3, iron at 7.8kg/L, with a heat capacity about 450 J/kgK (assuming a mostly iron composition, since Earth is mostly iron), giving the shell's heat capacity of 3e20 J/K. Because the shell is rotating, the heat will be distributed equally, and will have to travel through 100 meters of material before reaching the living space. To raise internal temperature by one degree would take 7e6 seconds, or about 81 days. This barely qualifies as an inconvenience.
You might also look at a more serious problem. Suppose the waste heat radiator completely failed and no heat could be radiated. This can't actually happen because the planetoid surface also radiates, and we would probably want to place the planetoid in an orbit where it is at a reasonable equilibrium in its natural state. But hey, you might want to be close to the sun to have more power or something. Anyway, say our heat imbalance above is increased tenfold to 4e14W. Then you'd have 8 days per degree. If we keep internal temperature at 20C, crops will not be seriously inconvenienced until 50C, eight months later. More than enough time to climb outside and paint the hull by hand.
As you can see, there is plenty of room for "error". Even for catastrophe.
> It would have been very easy to pick up and move if they wanted to but instead they > decided to fight for their homes and try and take their land with them...why do you > think space people will be any less stupid?
Perhaps they would not be. At worst, the problems of a country in a 1000km2 planetoid are no different than those of a country on Earth. I rather hope that by the time we have spread into space we'd know better than to create a powerful central government, which is the cause of most of these problems. The inherent decentralization of thousands of planetoids, all of which can be entirely self-sufficient for basic necessities, is alone a serious hindrance to government power.
> The feudal system grew out of a pure capitalism left at thte fall of the Rom
> A cycle DOES care how large it is. The larger, more complex the cycle the more places there are for slack in the system,
What you are trying to say here is that human impact would be more noticeable in a smaller system, which is true. But just that property makes the system easier to change. If your planetoid gets too hot from solar gain on the outer surface, just repaint it and you solve the problem. Fixing global warming on Earth is orders of magnitude more difficult.
Secondly, just because a cycle is larger, it is not necessarily more complex in any meaningful way. Take the carbon cycle, for instance. You have absorbers and releasers, vegetation and oceans on one end, animals, fires and bacteria on the other. The cycle is the same on Earth and in the planetoid and in the Biodome, the difference is mainly of scale and our current inability to accurately measure the size of each category. There is no "magic slack" anywhere.
> the larger the volume the more time you have to fix it before it starts reinforcing itself.
And that's precisely the problem here on Earth. We have centuries to fix our resource depletion problems and that's just too long for people to understand. By the time we realize that something needs to be done, the problem will already snowball out of control. In a smaller environment the changes are more immediate and visible, helping people see why they need to take care of the environment now instead of in the next generation. Just like in your Sahara example:
> but with our greed and goats we over the last few thousand years finally got beyond the lands > ability to recouperate and thus the current dessert formed quickly. If it wasn't for the self > supporting and very large system of the earth, we would have made the planet unihabitable eons ago.
If it wasn't for the size of the Earth, people wouldn't have been able to just pick up and move every time the desert encroached. They would have had to do something about it. Take note, for instance, that nobody is doing anything about the Sahara even now.
> If it weren't for the size of the planet there would be no possible way we could > see the change and fix it before the planet turned into an oven.
If your planetoid turns into an oven, it will probably happen within a few days, maybe hours. Changing the surface color could be accomplished in seconds with liquid crystals or something. Time of disruption? A day or two. Will your plants and people suffer? Sure. Will they die? Of course not. Compare that with an overheated planet. Temperature will rise and stay there for centuries before you'll be able to do anything to change it. Plants will die and so will humans. For this reason alone, I'd take the planetoid any day.
> Countries are actually VERY easy to leave. I can leave this country today if I want.
I meant "leave permanently". Which is not easy to do. All the land is taken. You can't just go somewhere and be left alone. If we were in the space habitat stage, you could do exactly that. Go find an asteroid and build your own country.
> Do you really believe socialism is the route of all evil?
Absolutely. As someone said: "capitalism is an unequal distribution of wealth; socialism is an equal distribution of abject poverty." Wherever you have any hint of socialism, you will see an economic collapse. Look at the Soviet Union, which would be at absolute poverty if it wasn't for the oil and gas exports. Look at China before it started to move toward a more free market system; there were famines and poverty. And then look at the US, where each little step toward socialism had been accompanied by recessions. Look at Roosevelt's very socialist New Deal policies, which helped the Great Depression last far longer than it should have. Look at our present situation where the government budget consists of little more than socialist handouts, all of which are untouchable, locking us into perpetually high taxes and sky high deficits. This little r
> Societies fall. Once fallen without deposits of raw materials to build up from the species would de-evolve.
Well, consider that on Earth we no longer have easy access to most resources. The oil has been drilled, the coal and ores have been mined, so if our civilization were to decompose to its preindustrial state, it is quite possible that there would never be another civilization again. Right now we are not quite past the point of no return, I think; it is still possible, albeit at great cost to restart the mines, but in another hundred years it would probably not be.
> Allowing that Saudi Arabia is on average covered by one metre's thickness of sand, > we get a grain of sand about half a millimetre on a side.
I think that Saudi Arabians would be quite upset if their country was considered to be only one meter high:) If that were so, they'd need a visa to get out of bed every morning. There would also be countless issues of jurisdiction. Just which country's laws apply when your head is in one and legs in the other? And what about oil, which would suddenly fall outside the country's borders? In our world, a country is assumed to extend from the top of the atmosphere above it (~20km) down to the center of the Earth. The volume of Saudi Arabia then can be approximated by the volume of a cone section of the Earth with height of 6.4e6m and base area of 2e12 m2, which is Pi*A*h/3 = 1.3e19 m3. Dividing this by your 2.2e22 factor gives a volume of 6e-4 m3, or a cube 8cm on the side, which is still quite a bit larger than the grain of sand;)
> Chaos theory (as proven by the biodome) dictates that the larger the system the more stable.
Bullshit. Just because we have not yet been successful in creating a biodome, doesn't mean it is impossible. Stability was not the issue in the biodome; creating the material and energy cycles was. A cycle doesn't care how large it is. The important part is to create it right and it will keep working. (In addition I'll say that Chaos theory is also pure bullshit in itself).
> A small world will be subject to remarkable swings which would rapidly lead to > every single one being unihabitable without constant educated human intervention.
You mean like on Earth? We are disrupting the cycles with emissions, deforestation, and God knows what else. So we have global warming, soil erosion, and a multitude of other environmental problems. I would, in fact, argue that if the swings were faster, people would notice them before a catastrophe occurred. On Earth most just don't care since the destruction of the environment will probably not affect them significantly in their lifetime (or so they believe).
> Next the real estate you are describing per cylinder is larger than most countries.
The great thing about planetoids is that you can have them in any size you like.
> The US is remarkably stable but even we had a civil war within 100 years of formation > not to mention wars with other countries.
The problem with countries is that they are difficult to leave. The civil war wouldn't have happened if the southern states were able to just build another planetoid for themselves and tell Lincoln to go to Hell. Having lots of space is a great thing for liberty and stability, and space is very big indeed. Every political faction can have its own little world to govern and ruin as they like.
Hopefully, people will eventually realize that government is the cause of political instability and the sooner they get rid of it, the sooner they'll have world peace. Then they'll have to realize that socialism (in all its forms) is the cause of economic instability. And then we'll have a perfect civilization.
On Google, of course, you silly rabbit. A simple search shows many examples like this one. I have also read a book about one, called Rendezvous With Rama by Clarke.
I can understand that BBC doesn't know how to use a calculator, but a Slashdotter certainly ought to. Our galaxy is 50000 ly in radius, which comes out to 1.4e37 m2. Our solar system, taken to the orbit of Pluto, is 40 au in radius, or 2.8e24 m2. The ratio between the two is 5e12. Applied to the area of Saudi Arabia, which is 2e12 m2, we get 0.4 m2. That's a "grain" of sand 63cm on the side.
In the same place as we ought to bury the ridiculous custom of burying people - in the recycler. That said, if you want a graveyard in your backyard on the planetoid, nothing would prevent you from doing it. It will have soil, you know. In my calculations I assumed a 100m shell, which is far deeper than you'd ever dig on Earth.
> The post didn't say "from Mars and Venus". It said, "from Earth," a planet in which I have some ownership rights.
Naturally, your ownership rights will transfer to one of the planetoids we build from it. I said we could start with Mars and Venus, but I'd consider it desirable to eventually disassemble Earth as well.
In case you are wondering, living in the planetoid will not be any different than your present situation. You'll still have blue skies, rain and clouds, rivers and the sea. You'll be able to travel, around the world if you like, laze around on the beach, work at an office, fall in love, have children, eat hamburgers, skydive, sleep, and do all the other things you currently like to do. In fact, the only visible difference will be that the sun will be a line instead of a point (it's more efficient that way).
But do consider the advantages. There will be no global warming, no hurricanes, no solar flares, no droughts or bad crops. Electricity will be cheaper than dirt (deploying solar arrays in zero-g is trivial). You'll be able to get out to space easily and take advantage of interplanetary trade (the Earth's gravity well would make it prohibitively expensive) and zero-g manufacturing (which can make advanced materials cheap and plentiful). And, of course, you'll have the security of knowing that the world will last forever for billions of generations.
> Yeah, if you don't mind disassembling the whole planet.
Why should you mind? I'm not necessarily talking about disassembling Earth. We could start with Venus and Mars.
> The NIMBY people would be all over you and, frankly, I would join them on this one.
Why? The planetoids will not be anywhere near your back yard. In fact, if you stay on Earth, you don't even need to be aware of their existence. They'll be so far, you will not even be able to see them without a huge telescope. And it isn't like you have any particular use for Mars and Venus now. Both are uninhabitable, and while Mars might be terraformable, it is much easier to just plunk down a few beanstalks and turn it into a planetoid farm.
The question is whether we want to have any planets. From Earth, for example, you could construct 10000000 rotating hollow cylinders, 1000x1000km each, with reasonable gravity, perfect weather, safety from radiation, and sustainability for billions of years. The total usable area will be 1e11 square km, 196 times larger than the Earth. It is also portable and redundant, ensuring that the entire civilization is not wiped out by an asteroid. It can remain usable after the Sun burns out; you can install a fusion generator and mine Jupiter for fuel for a very very long time. So tell me again why we need a planet?
Then perhaps it would be better to mention Jupiter's 1.6E27 kg of hydrogen. Compared to those measly hydrocarbons on Titan, Jupiter is like an ocean to a raindrop.
With the declining quality of games released these days, I think I would make the following prediction: Spore will be the greatest game ever released, and it will be the last good game of any kind ever released. Flame if you like, but in a few years you'll know I am right.
>> In fact, a large number of CS majors apparently believe that everything can be >> implemented in a virtual machine and that both memory and [CPU] cycles are infinite. > > Good for them; Alan Turing believed it too.
And now it is a near reality. Memory and CPU cycles are abundant and do not play much role in slowing down today's programs. Incompetent programmers who don't know how to program IO, or how to make their code small, slow down today's programs. As for virtual machines, there is no reason why the Java VM couldn't be implemented in hardware. It is already partially implemented.
"PP242, please expedite your descent to 8000" "PP242, please expedite your descent to 8000" "PP242, please expedite your descent to 8000" "PP242, please expedite your descent to 8000" "PP242, please expedite your turn to 120" "PP242, please expedite your turn to 120" "PP242, please expedite your turn to 120"
I wonder if Microsoft plans to upgrade its ATC to not require 90 degree turns to make a one mile course correction. Or how about that wonderful scenario when you overshoot your waypoint and have to turn around and go back to it before the ATC will let you continue. Same for step climbing to cruise altitude. I don't fly real planes, so maybe real life ATC is just as anal, but man, it's a game; make it fun!
Hiring someone is not always an option. The boss might not give you money for it. You might be the boss and have no money since your company is so small you have no profits yet. Or maybe there just isn't anyone to hire in your backwoods little town. There are many reasons why you might have to do the design yourself and the original poster seems to have one.
I'd advise keeping things simple. If you are not a design guru, make your page with as little of it as possible. 98% content, 2% fluff is the best way to go when you are no good at fluff. Go to Home Depot; in the paint section you'll find a selection of free color scheme booklets. Use them. Minimize the number of pictures; use the company logo and as little else as possible. Absolutely no flash. This way you'll probably come up with something not too ugly. The customer comes to the site for the content anyway, and if fluff is all you sell, you don't deserve customers.
> "Beauty" and "Intution" are not in Linus's hands
They are! Except that Linus is not talking about applications. If you look at the quotes in the article you'll see that he is talking about the superiority of the Linux programming environment, not anything an average Joe is thinking about. As a programmer, I certainly agree that he is right; Linux is a far better development platform than Windows and MacOS. No, I'm not talking about KDE; I'm talking about the OS interface, the UNIX way, the filesystem API, and all that.
I don't leave negative feedback for sellers either. It just doesn't seem worth it. So the seller gets a negative feedback from me and his score goes from 99.99 to 99.98 positive, due to the sheer amount of feedback an active seller has. Then he leaves a negative feedback for me (tit-for-tat is standard practice), and my feedback score drops by one or two percent. Is that a good trade? Hell no! So I just leave a neutral if I'm really feeling vindictive. Sure you can argue that I would be helping others avoid a scammer, but I'd say the price of having a bad feedback rating is still higher than my desire to do that.
> Yep, you get to go around shouting to everyone about how you're "censored".
Since a censored post is, by definition, something you are not going to see, proving that there is no censorship by example is... is... Well, you said it best:
Pretty much everyone who uses them for fun:) You can get 2N3904s for 3c each, so it doesn't bother me if I accidentally let the smoke out of one. FETs are much more expensive, are easy to fry if you aren't extra careful to ground before touching, and are present in far fewer circuits you can find online. Then there's the fact that my old Horowitz and Hill only has one chapter on them and so I am just not as familiar with their properties. Eventually, when I'm a "God of circuit design", I'll probably use lots of FETs too, just like the big guys...
I don't get it. As far as I know, transistor Vbe is still around 0.7V. How do they build circuits when the supply voltage is less than that? I mean, how can you fit in resistors and stuff when you have no room to drop anything?
I didn't want to feel left out, so here's my list of games that don't work under Wine. And these aren't some obscure titles either; all are popular games that an average slashdotter loves.
Slashdot Mirror
> Actually, fixing global warming on earth is JUST as easy if not easier than any planitoid,
> it just takes longer. We could "fix" it today simply by cutting emmisions and allowing the system to compensate.
Ha ha ha! No, that wouldn't work, because our present CO2 levels are already too high, leading to an equilibrium point we have not yet reached. We need to reduce CO2 levels, and that means carbon sequestration in something. You can plant more trees, which would mean replacing agricultural land somewhere (because most deforestation is caused by clearing land for crops, as in the Amazon). This is MUCH more difficult to do on a planetary scale than it is in a small environment. Remember, it takes longer, which is exactly my point: a month of overheating is an inconvenience, a decade is a catastrophe.
> Lets say there is a sudden solar flare which then heats your tube. Easy fix as you say flip the color.
> all done....but wait one side was damaged by the same flare and didn't switch! You now have a massize
> temperature differential which creates a small hurricane inside the tube. Even IF you manage to fix it
> your entier food crop is destroyed and you starve. The real downside of a small environment is no lee way for error.
Cute scenario, but it's all wrong. A single solar flare will not appreciably change solar output. The reason we care about flares is the increased radiation levels they cause, not their heat, which is negligible compared to the rest of the sun.
But let's say we have a sudden increase in solar output. Due to the size of the sun, such changes are slow, so let's say we have a totally catastrophic 10% insolation increase in a single day. Unless the sun goes nova (which it is not large enough to do) I simply can not imagine a change even that steep. The planetoid has a 3e11 m2 cross section, so a 10% increase in heat gain means an extra 4e13W of power (at 1.4kW/m2 insolation at Earth orbit). The planetoid's shell weighs about 7e17kg (1e5 km3, iron at 7.8kg/L, with a heat capacity about 450 J/kgK (assuming a mostly iron composition, since Earth is mostly iron), giving the shell's heat capacity of 3e20 J/K. Because the shell is rotating, the heat will be distributed equally, and will have to travel through 100 meters of material before reaching the living space. To raise internal temperature by one degree would take 7e6 seconds, or about 81 days. This barely qualifies as an inconvenience.
You might also look at a more serious problem. Suppose the waste heat radiator completely failed and no heat could be radiated. This can't actually happen because the planetoid surface also radiates, and we would probably want to place the planetoid in an orbit where it is at a reasonable equilibrium in its natural state. But hey, you might want to be close to the sun to have more power or something. Anyway, say our heat imbalance above is increased tenfold to 4e14W. Then you'd have 8 days per degree. If we keep internal temperature at 20C, crops will not be seriously inconvenienced until 50C, eight months later. More than enough time to climb outside and paint the hull by hand.
As you can see, there is plenty of room for "error". Even for catastrophe.
> It would have been very easy to pick up and move if they wanted to but instead they
> decided to fight for their homes and try and take their land with them...why do you
> think space people will be any less stupid?
Perhaps they would not be. At worst, the problems of a country in a 1000km2 planetoid are no different than those of a country on Earth. I rather hope that by the time we have spread into space we'd know better than to create a powerful central government, which is the cause of most of these problems. The inherent decentralization of thousands of planetoids, all of which can be entirely self-sufficient for basic necessities, is alone a serious hindrance to government power.
> The feudal system grew out of a pure capitalism left at thte fall of the Rom
> A cycle DOES care how large it is. The larger, more complex the cycle the more places there are for slack in the system,
What you are trying to say here is that human impact would be more noticeable in a smaller system, which is true. But just that property makes the system easier to change. If your planetoid gets too hot from solar gain on the outer surface, just repaint it and you solve the problem. Fixing global warming on Earth is orders of magnitude more difficult.
Secondly, just because a cycle is larger, it is not necessarily more complex in any meaningful way. Take the carbon cycle, for instance. You have absorbers and releasers, vegetation and oceans on one end, animals, fires and bacteria on the other. The cycle is the same on Earth and in the planetoid and in the Biodome, the difference is mainly of scale and our current inability to accurately measure the size of each category. There is no "magic slack" anywhere.
> the larger the volume the more time you have to fix it before it starts reinforcing itself.
And that's precisely the problem here on Earth. We have centuries to fix our resource depletion problems and that's just too long for people to understand. By the time we realize that something needs to be done, the problem will already snowball out of control. In a smaller environment the changes are more immediate and visible, helping people see why they need to take care of the environment now instead of in the next generation. Just like in your Sahara example:
> but with our greed and goats we over the last few thousand years finally got beyond the lands
> ability to recouperate and thus the current dessert formed quickly. If it wasn't for the self
> supporting and very large system of the earth, we would have made the planet unihabitable eons ago.
If it wasn't for the size of the Earth, people wouldn't have been able to just pick up and move every time the desert encroached. They would have had to do something about it. Take note, for instance, that nobody is doing anything about the Sahara even now.
> If it weren't for the size of the planet there would be no possible way we could
> see the change and fix it before the planet turned into an oven.
If your planetoid turns into an oven, it will probably happen within a few days, maybe hours. Changing the surface color could be accomplished in seconds with liquid crystals or something. Time of disruption? A day or two. Will your plants and people suffer? Sure. Will they die? Of course not. Compare that with an overheated planet. Temperature will rise and stay there for centuries before you'll be able to do anything to change it. Plants will die and so will humans. For this reason alone, I'd take the planetoid any day.
> Countries are actually VERY easy to leave. I can leave this country today if I want.
I meant "leave permanently". Which is not easy to do. All the land is taken. You can't just go somewhere and be left alone. If we were in the space habitat stage, you could do exactly that. Go find an asteroid and build your own country.
> Do you really believe socialism is the route of all evil?
Absolutely. As someone said: "capitalism is an unequal distribution of wealth; socialism is an equal distribution of abject poverty." Wherever you have any hint of socialism, you will see an economic collapse. Look at the Soviet Union, which would be at absolute poverty if it wasn't for the oil and gas exports. Look at China before it started to move toward a more free market system; there were famines and poverty. And then look at the US, where each little step toward socialism had been accompanied by recessions. Look at Roosevelt's very socialist New Deal policies, which helped the Great Depression last far longer than it should have. Look at our present situation where the government budget consists of little more than socialist handouts, all of which are untouchable, locking us into perpetually high taxes and sky high deficits. This little r
> Societies fall. Once fallen without deposits of raw materials to build up from the species would de-evolve.
Well, consider that on Earth we no longer have easy access to most resources. The oil has been drilled, the coal and ores have been mined, so if our civilization were to decompose to its preindustrial state, it is quite possible that there would never be another civilization again. Right now we are not quite past the point of no return, I think; it is still possible, albeit at great cost to restart the mines, but in another hundred years it would probably not be.
Sorry, remove the Pi. That should be 2e-4 m3, or a cube 6cm on the side.
> Allowing that Saudi Arabia is on average covered by one metre's thickness of sand,
:) If that were so, they'd need a visa to get out of bed every morning. There would also be countless issues of jurisdiction. Just which country's laws apply when your head is in one and legs in the other? And what about oil, which would suddenly fall outside the country's borders? In our world, a country is assumed to extend from the top of the atmosphere above it (~20km) down to the center of the Earth. The volume of Saudi Arabia then can be approximated by the volume of a cone section of the Earth with height of 6.4e6m and base area of 2e12 m2, which is Pi*A*h/3 = 1.3e19 m3. Dividing this by your 2.2e22 factor gives a volume of 6e-4 m3, or a cube 8cm on the side, which is still quite a bit larger than the grain of sand ;)
> we get a grain of sand about half a millimetre on a side.
I think that Saudi Arabians would be quite upset if their country was considered to be only one meter high
> Chaos theory (as proven by the biodome) dictates that the larger the system the more stable.
Bullshit. Just because we have not yet been successful in creating a biodome, doesn't mean it is impossible. Stability was not the issue in the biodome; creating the material and energy cycles was. A cycle doesn't care how large it is. The important part is to create it right and it will keep working. (In addition I'll say that Chaos theory is also pure bullshit in itself).
> A small world will be subject to remarkable swings which would rapidly lead to
> every single one being unihabitable without constant educated human intervention.
You mean like on Earth? We are disrupting the cycles with emissions, deforestation, and God knows what else. So we have global warming, soil erosion, and a multitude of other environmental problems. I would, in fact, argue that if the swings were faster, people would notice them before a catastrophe occurred. On Earth most just don't care since the destruction of the environment will probably not affect them significantly in their lifetime (or so they believe).
> Next the real estate you are describing per cylinder is larger than most countries.
The great thing about planetoids is that you can have them in any size you like.
> The US is remarkably stable but even we had a civil war within 100 years of formation
> not to mention wars with other countries.
The problem with countries is that they are difficult to leave. The civil war wouldn't have happened if the southern states were able to just build another planetoid for themselves and tell Lincoln to go to Hell. Having lots of space is a great thing for liberty and stability, and space is very big indeed. Every political faction can have its own little world to govern and ruin as they like.
Hopefully, people will eventually realize that government is the cause of political instability and the sooner they get rid of it, the sooner they'll have world peace. Then they'll have to realize that socialism (in all its forms) is the cause of economic instability. And then we'll have a perfect civilization.
> Where can I read the details of the design?
On Google, of course, you silly rabbit. A simple search shows many examples like this one. I have also read a book about one, called Rendezvous With Rama by Clarke.
I can understand that BBC doesn't know how to use a calculator, but a Slashdotter certainly ought to. Our galaxy is 50000 ly in radius, which comes out to 1.4e37 m2. Our solar system, taken to the orbit of Pluto, is 40 au in radius, or 2.8e24 m2. The ratio between the two is 5e12. Applied to the area of Saudi Arabia, which is 2e12 m2, we get 0.4 m2. That's a "grain" of sand 63cm on the side.
> Where are they going to bury you?
In the same place as we ought to bury the ridiculous custom of burying people - in the recycler. That said, if you want a graveyard in your backyard on the planetoid, nothing would prevent you from doing it. It will have soil, you know. In my calculations I assumed a 100m shell, which is far deeper than you'd ever dig on Earth.
> The post didn't say "from Mars and Venus". It said, "from Earth," a planet in which I have some ownership rights.
Naturally, your ownership rights will transfer to one of the planetoids we build from it. I said we could start with Mars and Venus, but I'd consider it desirable to eventually disassemble Earth as well.
In case you are wondering, living in the planetoid will not be any different than your present situation. You'll still have blue skies, rain and clouds, rivers and the sea. You'll be able to travel, around the world if you like, laze around on the beach, work at an office, fall in love, have children, eat hamburgers, skydive, sleep, and do all the other things you currently like to do. In fact, the only visible difference will be that the sun will be a line instead of a point (it's more efficient that way).
But do consider the advantages. There will be no global warming, no hurricanes, no solar flares, no droughts or bad crops. Electricity will be cheaper than dirt (deploying solar arrays in zero-g is trivial). You'll be able to get out to space easily and take advantage of interplanetary trade (the Earth's gravity well would make it prohibitively expensive) and zero-g manufacturing (which can make advanced materials cheap and plentiful). And, of course, you'll have the security of knowing that the world will last forever for billions of generations.
> Yeah, if you don't mind disassembling the whole planet.
Why should you mind? I'm not necessarily talking about disassembling Earth. We could start with Venus and Mars.
> The NIMBY people would be all over you and, frankly, I would join them on this one.
Why? The planetoids will not be anywhere near your back yard. In fact, if you stay on Earth, you don't even need to be aware of their existence. They'll be so far, you will not even be able to see them without a huge telescope. And it isn't like you have any particular use for Mars and Venus now. Both are uninhabitable, and while Mars might be terraformable, it is much easier to just plunk down a few beanstalks and turn it into a planetoid farm.
The question is whether we want to have any planets. From Earth, for example, you could construct 10000000 rotating hollow cylinders, 1000x1000km each, with reasonable gravity, perfect weather, safety from radiation, and sustainability for billions of years. The total usable area will be 1e11 square km, 196 times larger than the Earth. It is also portable and redundant, ensuring that the entire civilization is not wiped out by an asteroid. It can remain usable after the Sun burns out; you can install a fusion generator and mine Jupiter for fuel for a very very long time. So tell me again why we need a planet?
Dude, all you have to do is find your car!
Then perhaps it would be better to mention Jupiter's 1.6E27 kg of hydrogen. Compared to those measly hydrocarbons on Titan, Jupiter is like an ocean to a raindrop.
With the declining quality of games released these days, I think I would make the following prediction: Spore will be the greatest game ever released, and it will be the last good game of any kind ever released. Flame if you like, but in a few years you'll know I am right.
>> In fact, a large number of CS majors apparently believe that everything can be
>> implemented in a virtual machine and that both memory and [CPU] cycles are infinite.
>
> Good for them; Alan Turing believed it too.
And now it is a near reality. Memory and CPU cycles are abundant and do not play much role in slowing down today's programs. Incompetent programmers who don't know how to program IO, or how to make their code small, slow down today's programs. As for virtual machines, there is no reason why the Java VM couldn't be implemented in hardware. It is already partially implemented.
"PP242, please expedite your descent to 8000"
"PP242, please expedite your descent to 8000"
"PP242, please expedite your descent to 8000"
"PP242, please expedite your descent to 8000"
"PP242, please expedite your turn to 120"
"PP242, please expedite your turn to 120"
"PP242, please expedite your turn to 120"
I wonder if Microsoft plans to upgrade its ATC to not require 90 degree turns to make a one mile course correction. Or how about that wonderful scenario when you overshoot your waypoint and have to turn around and go back to it before the ATC will let you continue. Same for step climbing to cruise altitude. I don't fly real planes, so maybe real life ATC is just as anal, but man, it's a game; make it fun!
Hiring someone is not always an option. The boss might not give you money for it. You might be the boss and have no money since your company is so small you have no profits yet. Or maybe there just isn't anyone to hire in your backwoods little town. There are many reasons why you might have to do the design yourself and the original poster seems to have one.
I'd advise keeping things simple. If you are not a design guru, make your page with as little of it as possible. 98% content, 2% fluff is the best way to go when you are no good at fluff. Go to Home Depot; in the paint section you'll find a selection of free color scheme booklets. Use them. Minimize the number of pictures; use the company logo and as little else as possible. Absolutely no flash. This way you'll probably come up with something not too ugly. The customer comes to the site for the content anyway, and if fluff is all you sell, you don't deserve customers.
> "Beauty" and "Intution" are not in Linus's hands
They are! Except that Linus is not talking about applications. If you look at the quotes in the article you'll see that he is talking about the superiority of the Linux programming environment, not anything an average Joe is thinking about. As a programmer, I certainly agree that he is right; Linux is a far better development platform than Windows and MacOS. No, I'm not talking about KDE; I'm talking about the OS interface, the UNIX way, the filesystem API, and all that.
I don't leave negative feedback for sellers either. It just doesn't seem worth it. So the seller gets a negative feedback from me and his score goes from 99.99 to 99.98 positive, due to the sheer amount of feedback an active seller has. Then he leaves a negative feedback for me (tit-for-tat is standard practice), and my feedback score drops by one or two percent. Is that a good trade? Hell no! So I just leave a neutral if I'm really feeling vindictive. Sure you can argue that I would be helping others avoid a scammer, but I'd say the price of having a bad feedback rating is still higher than my desire to do that.
> Yep, you get to go around shouting to everyone about how you're "censored".
Since a censored post is, by definition, something you are not going to see, proving that there is no censorship by example is... is... Well, you said it best:
> You are an idiot.
> who the hell still uses BJT's?!?!?!?!?
:) You can get 2N3904s for 3c each, so it doesn't bother me if I accidentally let the smoke out of one. FETs are much more expensive, are easy to fry if you aren't extra careful to ground before touching, and are present in far fewer circuits you can find online. Then there's the fact that my old Horowitz and Hill only has one chapter on them and so I am just not as familiar with their properties. Eventually, when I'm a "God of circuit design", I'll probably use lots of FETs too, just like the big guys...
Pretty much everyone who uses them for fun
I don't get it. As far as I know, transistor Vbe is still around 0.7V. How do they build circuits when the supply voltage is less than that? I mean, how can you fit in resistors and stuff when you have no room to drop anything?
I didn't want to feel left out, so here's my list of games that don't work under Wine. And these aren't some obscure titles either; all are popular games that an average slashdotter loves.
So, if this thing lands in my back yard, can I at least sell it to China for a million bucks?