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Everything posted by Shpaget
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What do you think of the upcoming Windows 10 update?
Shpaget replied to RocketScientist00's topic in The Lounge
So if you decide that Win10 is crap, you can't return to your legal copy of 7? -
It doesn't have to come overnight. Pass the legislation that new products need to have metric designation and over the next few months every product will be labeled in metric. You can allow manufacturers to use up their existing stock of imperial packaging. The cost is insignificant. Same with road signs. When they get worn out and are replaced, have them in dual system. In a few years all will be in dual markings. Next time they get worn out you can reduce the size of imperial print and increase the metric. In ten years, they will again need replacement. You can now have metric only. There is a very marginal cost difference.
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India did it.
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But when I'm drunk I might want to compare the density of my whiskey to the density of my porkchop without plonking the porkchop in my whiskey. Not seeing a purpose of a fence is certainly not good enough reason to take it down, but seeing a benefit in taking down the fence is certainly a good reason to think about doing it. Eh? Are you exactly one "personal height" high? Is your foot exactly one foot long? Not people, communication.
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It's the other way around. One second is however long it takes for 9,192,631,770 cesium thingies to occur. Why 9,192,631,770? It was calculated from Moon and Sun apparent motion. More on this here.
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I like to keep this page bookmarked for any breaking news concerning LHC.
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You take a flashlight in your right hand, turn it on and observe the light propagating from the light bulb. In your left hand you have a lump of cold cesium and once you feel it tick away those 9 and some billion times you make a note of how far the light traveled. Whatever the distance it traveled, you call it one meter. You don't need to know how long was the old definition of meter or second.
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No. Meter is defined as the Length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second (17th CGPM); while the second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.
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How is that a benefit? Or less arbitrary than metric? Why should somebody use one unit of mass for pork bellies and another one for liquor? Is there something inherently wrong with comparing a mass of one with a mass of another that you should want to separate them and make the comparison impossible without conversion? Why? Sure, but noting that somebody else is doing a stupid thing is not good enough reason to do the same stupid thing. That being said, aviation has (had) a fairly good reason to use feet for altitude. It just so happened to be developed mostly in US and as such inherited the imperial system in those facets. In modern times where all controlled traffic has onboard computers and autopilots it really doesn't matter what units an autopilot uses. For example, a flight level 200 is defined as 20 000 feet, but a computer can just as easily calculate it as 6 100 m. Or a convention can be changed. The decision to use imperial was arbitrary. ICAO could have picked either, but I suppose American lobby was more influential.
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Of course. Yeah, some may argue that all units and systems are arbitrary, but some are more arbitrary than others.
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Most definitely usability. One of my pet peeves is a pen that doesn't work properly, or needs substantial effort to make it start writing. I am willing to spend 5 or 10 times more than regular pens cost on a pen I know works from the moment you take it in your hand. Those promo pens that companies give away are usually unusable for my taste. That being said, another example was a wooden box I made recently. After assuring its usability I tried to make it as pretty as possible. However, prettification shall not interfere with functionality. I don't wear jewelry and don't want stuff just because they are rare. As an exception to this little rule of mine and one of the items I do very much wish I had is the mechanical calculator Curta. It is quite expensive, due to relative rarity, and is absolutely beautiful machine. In these modern times where you can buy a more powerful digital calculator for less than a McDonalds meal, spending $1000+ seems rather stupid, but I am fascinated by the mechanical engineering of the little thing. I most definitely do not need that calculator and the value I put on it is very low compared to price. Contrasting this low value / high price situation is the oscilloscope I bought which I consider to be high value / (relatively) low price (the low price must be the result of the oscilloscope not looking nearly as beautiful as the Curta:sticktongue:).
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Why don't we look at the existing anti satellite weapons? In the 1950s US did a test where they "intercepted" a satellite in LEO. The missile passed 4 km from the sat which, according to wikipedia is enough to disable it with a nuke. More recently (2007), China successfully performed a destruction of a sat in a 860 km polar orbit with a kinetic projectile in a head on collision. I must say that is pretty impressive. Granted, that particular satellite didn't try to evade the collision and was a sitting duck, if being a tiny target and moving at thousands of km per second can be called being a sitting duck, impressive still.
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Yep. You as tech support/fixmybrokenpcguy are supposed to act professionally when dealing with private data you have access to while fixing a machine. Refusing such a repeat customer because you don't like the same .... he likes is not only unprofessional, but it may actually be illegal, depending on where you live.
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Light is not instantaneous, but it's a lot faster than spaceships. In such a scenario a probe would be a few light seconds away at the most. Knowing the signal delay, you can easily compute the position of the enemy with a known and small margin of error. There would be no surprise. Burning to change orbit is slow, ships take time to move around. Also all this does not deal with the problem of how does the second ship come to the other side of the planet without being detected/shot at.
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The first ship doesn't launch the probes? One probe just 30° ahead or behind on a similar orbit around the star will get rid of almost all usable blind spots behind that star.
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I don't get it. So what if your computer had some malware? It's not your fault. You did not put it there. In fact you should go back to school and tell that media center person that their insufficiently protected device has put you and your privacy at risk, then sue them for all the trauma you are experiencing due to your personal info potentially being available to an unknown party. Once you reap the millions they owe you, send me a check to 25%.
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Yes, planets are a very good camouflage, however, how do you get behind a planet without being spotted in the first place? Depending on a planet you hide behind, you'll need to pick your orbit carefully. [doing math now] If I'm not wrong, for Mercury and Venus, such an orbit would require a period of 365 days. For Venus that would be about 2 000 000 km orbit. For outer planets, L2 would suffice. That is terribly far away and would likely be spotted by some probe on a completely unrelated mission. If you somehow manage to do it and are safely hidden behind a planet, what are you going to do there? Being behind a planet hides you well from whatever is on the other side, but also puts you in a very useless place to observe (or attack) the thing that you are hiding from. Sure you can. You can never hope to achieve the same power output over a significant portion of the sky as your engines are producing. If you had that kind of power source at your disposal, you would not try to hide. You would incinerate entire planets, not play hide and seek. Also, ND filters.
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You can't achieve 360° stealth since a stealthy ship has to radiate waste heat in some direction, I guess it should be away from the enemy. So the non stealth party only has to send a bunch of probes in various directions, highly elliptical and/or polar or retrograde orbits. A stealthy ship still has to radiate waste heat and will eventually be detected by at least some of the probes.
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Ballons as the first stage of a launch? It's being attempted.
Shpaget replied to vger's topic in The Lounge
Taipei 101 is engineered to take sway into account, by having a 660 ton lump of steel at the top. How would you counter the sway? -
Ballons as the first stage of a launch? It's being attempted.
Shpaget replied to vger's topic in The Lounge
Even large structures are susceptible to wind. Agreed, a professional launch system would have means to cancel that motion, but at what cost and by how much would that system reduce the capacity of the launch vehicle? -
Ballons as the first stage of a launch? It's being attempted.
Shpaget replied to vger's topic in The Lounge
It's not just a balloon. Have you ever seen a video footage from a high altitude balloon? The payload, in this case a camera, is usually spinning and swinging uncontrolled (my guess is due to wind shears). You need to stabilize the launch platform and cancel that motion somehow. Dealing with rotation is relatively easy, but swinging will cause the engineers some headache. -
Ballons as the first stage of a launch? It's being attempted.
Shpaget replied to vger's topic in The Lounge
It's not a question of whether there are some savings, it's about how much and if it's worth the loss in capacity and increased complexity. -
Ballons as the first stage of a launch? It's being attempted.
Shpaget replied to vger's topic in The Lounge
Eve != Earth -
I used to have a whole bunch of guppies, but over the years they died off. I don't have a tank any more.