insane_alien

Marketing. That and it comes preinstalled on 90% of prebuilt computers which is an artefact from the early days when it was miles and miles ahead of everything else. thats also why 95% of games are for windows too.

yeah, its an operating system but it does a LOT of things very badly. like the amount of system resources needed to get it to run(not run smoothly, just run). Although it has got better at some of the other things it used to do badly like being unstable.

i wonder if it would be practical to make a massive RTG out of it under ground so we can extract some energy from it.

yeah, but if you get the egg neutrally buoyant its still going to drift about, the foam just provides a little force to keep it roughly centred

no, its soft foam, it doesn't have to support the whole egg, just what buoyancy doesn't take care of.

CPL, the egg is held in the middle of the box by foam struts otherwise it would sit on the bottom and likely crack, the foam keeps it from touching the sides and the water allows it to be slowed don really really fast without breaking.

keep it in mineral oil, avoid exposure to air, clean it before you chuck it in and if you get a fire don't chuck water over it. pretty much common sense.

thats why i suggested a liquid filled box, it supports more of the shell allowing these crazy accelerations. it also works on humans a bit, though the brain can still get mashed on the inside of the skull.

well, theres the usual run of old people dying when it gets particularly cold in the UK. but anyway, global warming is predicted to shutdown the gulf stream and leave us UKers a lot colder than we are just now. i don't think its 20000 that die of cold every year in the UK but if the gulf stream shuts down then it definately will be higher.

well, hubble could probably see it but it would probably just register as a tiny tiny tiny tiny solar burp unless it was somewhere where there wer no stars at all. lasers would carry that far and theoretically forever.

ah yeah. bloody rules. ok, new idea, decapitate a fellow contender perform a trepanation(is that even a word?) and bury the egg in generous amounts of brain(if theres any there).

i was kind of assuming that materials were hard to come by and limited. water is just a handy incompressible fluid. but yeah, if you can get your hands on some gel or other viscous fluid then is good. As a side note, would cornstarch/water work, since its a non newtonian fluid? i'm not sure if it would but its an idea.

get a water tight box, put in some foam supports to hold the egg in the middle, fill to the top with water, put a lid on and bombs away. i've seen it work at 4 meters so 6 should be feasible. you might want to test it out first.

yes, it would be toxic but blood being transfused doesn't go through digestion like the blood going into your mouth through meats. the stomach breaks up the toxic molecules into smaller ones that aren't toxic. it should be safe. transfusion blood however gets IV'd straight into the blood stream so the toxic parts are free to go all over the body. this is the bad bit.

to lift 1000Kg by 1 meter would require at least ~9810J of energy NO MATTER what method of lifting is used whether it be brute force, a pully or soundwaves.

...and its where the sun don't shine.

copper wire is just Cu

thanks swansont, i already had a link to it further up the page.

okay, apart from inside a meta materials lab and a research budjet your not going to be able to get your hands on anything that can move a noticable distance when voltage is applied. and even then we are nowhere near complex 3-d models, we can make a height map and thats about it.

oops, yeah, uhh... i was hungover. besides 0.05c is damn fast.

weknowthewor, thats the isotope YT mentioned, it has since been proven to be radioactive and hence unstable.

you ever put a bit of paper or cloth just so one edge is just touching the water? you'll see it get damp above the water line, this is capilary action and is caused by surface tension.

The technical term is a von-neumann machine.

bluenoise is right. the energy released IS kinetic (and some gamma). a lot of the energy is imparted to the daughter products which sends them flying off at a good fraction of the speed of light. if you mean to impart the energy into a vehicle then look up the orion project.

uhh, the sun transmits on ALL wavelengths at ALL times it just happens to have peak transmitance in the visible spectrum.