mmalluck

Actually I mention that.

That's not too hard to do... acceleration is the derivative of velocity, which is the derivative of displacement. To go backwards we integrate. We'll say were starting at 0 displacement and velocity, when time = 0 Acceleration = dt(Velocity) = 9.8 m/s^2 Velocity = dt(displacement) = 9.8 m/s^2 *t and .5c = 1.499*10^8 m/s so 1.499*10^8 m/s = 9.8 m/s^2 * t seconds This yields t equal to 15,295,918 seconds or 177 days. Doesn't sound too shabby, but this is considering we're going in a straight line. With circling the moon or any other body, you're going to have to trade off some of your forward acceleration for centripetal acceleration. Just for fun lets see how much distance we'd travel while speeding up to .5c. Displacement = 9.8 m/s^2 * t^2. For t = 15,295,918, we travel 2,292,858,053,134,695.2 meters or 2.292 billion kilometers. This is roughly the distance from the Sun to Uranus (2.8 billion km). You wouldn't want to accelerate too much faster than a g or two with a human crew, but you could fling as unmanned spacecraft out there many times faster. A proerperly designed satellite could probably survive an acceleration of 20Gs or more. With that acceleration (196m/s^2) you'd get up to .5c in only 8.85 days. The real trick here is being able to supply enough force for the mass to continue to accelerate.

Without a moon you would have a mass die-off of coastal plants and animals that depend on the tide to bring them food. There'd be fewer clams, barnicles, crabs and other ocean critters. The oceans would be a little higher, but nothing too drastic, probably something between high and low tide. Climate change is kinda hard to speculate on. If the mass of the moon was distributed in orbit around the earth, I imagine the axis wobble wouldn't be any worse than it is now.

Take all the rockets and fuel used to move your accelerator back into place and strap then to the ship instead. Ta da! No need for the mass driver. This will supply the same amount of thrust that our mass driver did, without the complexity of the mass driver. Yeah, launching stuff from the moon would be easier, but building a huge accelerator isn't cost effective. The cost of an ion engine is small. You need a gas to ionize and a high voltage source to ionize with. The amount of fuel used by an ion engine is miniscule compared to a standard rocket. Even if the weight of bringing your own fuel for an ion engine is prohibitve, there's no reason why you can't harvest some 'fuel' from a nebula your passing through. Just gather up whatever gasses are present and use them as your gas to ionize.

There's no way the system, as you describe, will not have some form of recoil. For every action there is an opposite and equal action acting on the system. The tunnel-o'-magnets flings the ship forward, conversely, the ship flings the tunnel-o'-magnets backwards. The tunnel may way many times more than the ship, so the speed of tunnel's travel will be smaller, but never the less it will still occur. The only way around the recoil issue would be to fling a mass equal to the ship in the opposite direction. Seems kinda wasteful. There's also the problem of once you've been launched, how do you manuver?, and more importantly, how do you slow back down? Since the launch apparatus is not part of your ship, you'll need to be 'caught' by another set magnets and astroids. I wouldn't want to be the first guy fired out of this thing only to find out there's nothing waiting to catch you on the other side.

As far as I know all new pentium and AMD chips have built in heat sensors. If the tempreture gets too hot, they throttle back the processor and the processor will survive. I've yet to see any virus that can do any quick physical damage to hardware. The only thing that comes close is some malware program that sets your screen refresh too high in hopes it fuxors your monitor. It may hurt your monitor, but a refresh rate being set too high is obvious (your screen looks all crappy or simply turns off) and it takes more than several seconds for the bad setting to hurt anything. Lemmie know when someone writes a virus that can rip the heatsinks off your cpu. Then I'll worry.

You could always dangle from your ankles.

I'd say that experiement comes far from proving 'distance healing'. It really should be done in a double blind manner. The placebo effect has been proven. I'd say that this experiment illistates that ones own brain waves can be altered through thought and concentration exercies.

Here's a trick to get them out of your playlist (i used this same trick to make sure none of the annoying tracks that program the iTrip came up on my playlist). Take your spoken word files and re-encode them as *.m4a files using iTunes. (Change your import settings to use "Apples lossless Encoder" and then import all your spoken word files). Next change the extentions on all your newly encoded files to *.m4b. Transfer them to your Ipod. The files will now show up on your audiobooks section and will be left out of the normally generated playlist. Hope that helps.

Here's another way to look at it: I would say emotion exists in creatures with the ability to reason, all other creatures are given instict. Emotion is the product of animal instinct in a more evolved brain. It's how a creature that can reason can explain some of it's own irrational tendancies.

No, it's part of the software and has to be turned off on every computer you want to plug your ipod into. This in fact makes things suck more because you can't turn off autosync until an ipod is connected to the computer. As soon as you connect up your ipod to turn off autosync *poof!* away goes your stuff. Again, I'd go with a different ipod mannager like the winamp plugin, ml_pod, because it doesn't have any of the engineered limitations that iTunes does.

I imagine that tunnel-o-magnets would have a pretty wicked recoil. That's not something you'd like to have to deal with. An Ion engin, which has been developed, can also be considered a mass driver and is simpler to boot. You send electrons wizzing off the back of your engine at speeds close to the speed of light. The electron flies off one way, your ship flys off the other. Sure it might take you forever to get up to any considerable speed, but the top speed of such an engine can be measured as fractions of c. No other propulson that physically exist can claim that.

Just turn off Autosync and you can plug your player into any computer without worry. It sucks that you can't turn it off on the ipod shuffle. They don't advertise that fact, but that's the number one reason I didn't get the shuffle and went for a 20gig one instead. Autosync is the "feature" included to make the RIAA happy.

Maybe you're smelling the sweet smell of plant decomposition. I know water will cause bateria and fungi to kick it into high-gear. It would depend on the material being broken down and the type of bateria/fungi that's growing. Think of it as the difference between the smell generated by leaf-clutter vs. that of a freshly fertilized field. Which one do you think smells better after rain?

huh? Sounds like iTunes crippling to me. Stuff like that makes me angry. I use the winamp ipod plugin (ml_ipod) . You can dump whatever song you want back out onto your hard drive. It'll even parse the names into whatever you want. I really like that. If you use winamp to sync your ipod, you can not use iTunes. iTunes is a bastard and a poorly coded bastard at that. If it sees that another computer/program has modified your library, it goes beserk, wipes the ipod, and reloads all the songs it thinks should be there. If you don't use iTunes to sync the ipod automaticly, you're okay. The best way to fix that is to turn off the autostart feature for iTunes. No iTunes. No problem.

I know lightning contributes a mixture of nitrogen and ozone compounds to that rain smell. Even without a remarkable amount of lightning that smell still persist, so it may be more than lightning that contributes to it.

You'd have one of the same fundamental problems here as the do with solar cells: Light is made of several different wavelengths. It's for this reason solar cells will never have an efficency above 30% or so.

I found this and thought I'd share. I reminds me of some of the theads/posts/people we've seen here. Just to site my source, I stole these from yahoo. The comic is called, appropriately enough, Non Sequitur. I hope I gave you a good chuckle.

You're going to have to find yourself another transformer. There's no way around that. The transformer doesn't care how many bridge rectifiers you drop the voltage across. The voltage across the output of the transformer will still add up to 26vac and the maximum output current will still be 15A. The only way to trade excess voltage for more current is through a transformer AFAIK.

Use google with the searchterm define:xxxxxxx Or you could look these up on wikipedia

Lets not forget that Oxytocin works on both male and female physiology. Spraying yourself with lots of the stuff could lead to all kinds of weirdness.... It would make you just as trusting as the women you are tending to attract. Wikipedia also states, "In males, oxytocin is said to facilitate sperm transport in ejaculation", so maybe it would make you ultra-viril as well?

Has anyone actually seen a glass platter? What drives are they in? I know I've taken apart more than my fair share of hardrives; new, old, or otherwise, and never come across a glass platter. They're all aluminum. I think it's just a manufacturing-legend. I like the 5.25" old apple hardrives. They have some of the largest rare-earth-cobalt magnets I've come across.

my bad. I knew it was 8 something or another.

By your definition, my keychain is probably one of the smallest nuclear reactors. It's a plastic & glass vial filled with tritum gas and a coating of phosphor. The tritum decays (fission), releases electrons, and generates light (energy). The power output is minisucle, but it's nuclear power never the less. Maybe you should clearify your definition.