The white side reflects light, the black side absorbs it...
Once you reach the same temperature as your surroundings, you'll radiate as many photons as you absorb on the black side, and not go anywhere. If there's any anisotropy in the surrounding radiation field, you can use that to move around (but that's just called a solar sail for the common dipole case).
A better idea would be a mirror sail that transmits light on one face, and reflects it on the other.
The 2nd law says no. I could make a box out of your one-way mirror (note that real "one-way" mirrors are something else entirely) material (all reflecting surfaces inward) and concentrate energy arbitrarily.
If you assume that only most of, say, a 1000 light year journey takes place at 0.5c (so the trip will take 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years, assuming some clever sort of acceleration is worked out), the rest frame (the planet you launched from) will only be experiencing time about 15% faster than the ship, so only 2,300, or 3,450, or 4,600 years will have passed by the time you get to the other planet (or so).
That's still too long. The sensible way to measure velocities is in the frame of the source and destination (which might as well be in one frame when we're talking about SR), so you can calculate the travel times in that frame directly by dividing the distance by the velocity. The only weirdness is the amount of time observed by the travelers, which is smaller than that observed by the endpoints, but not because the latter amount is increased beyond what Newton would expect.
Therefore, although we measure distance in light years, it doesn't lead to twice the duration if we traveled at half the speed of light. In fact, as we approached relativistic speeds, the duration within our frame of reference would stay the same, but from an external point of view, our speed has not actually reached such a velocity.
Um, what? If it's 500 ly away, and something goes there at c/2, it takes 1000 years. What else could a speed of "half of lightspeed" possibly mean? Even relativity isn't so weird as to change that.
Therefore, we would perceive the time to travel to a nearby star as shorter than the value arrived at by a simple ratio applied to c. Likewise, the actual time passed on the target planet will have been many times longer by the time we get there such that we cannot assume that millions of years haven't passed since we first set out from our own home planet.
You're right that the passengers on the trip would experience less proper time than the observers on Earth (I believe this is really due to the acceleration involved, although it can be calculated using SR). But the time as measured by clocks on Earth and the destination will still be the one millennium you would expect from Newtonian physics. (What would surprise Newton is the anomalously large energy required to get to that speed, and the bizarre view out the window had by the travellers.)
You work for thieving criminals. There are specific requirement for someone to be salaried exempt. [...] Also, to be salaried exempt, there cannot be any specific expectation on what hours your work. Only details on what you must get done. The moment they care what hours you work, you are hourly.
Unfortunately, they can care about hours. I can't find the real Opinion Letter online, but here's a pretty official site that calls it out (look for "1993").
Fixing a bug by changing the source code and then recompiling it is creating a derivative work. [...] A few years ago, we had access to the Windows (NT/2000) source code but it's still not legal for me to fix their bugs and then install it on my computer.
Fortunately, the utility of doing what you want with (and within) your own computing equipment has been recognized. (This is no more legal advice than your comment was, of course.)
We read Jack London's "To Build a Fire in 2nd Grade". 2nd grade for crying out loud!
I'm sure that most students would totally support learning how "To Build a Fire in 2nd Grade". And if so, it makes sense that they read it while in 2nd (or 1st) grade, so that it's not already too late to apply what they learn.
Totally serious question: do you guys really use emacs (or even vi, etc) to write code rather than a modern Studio/IDE?
Yes. The typical reasons (aside from Luddite tendencies and comfort) include
Some people have been using such editors for longer than the modern IDEs have existed, and so are so good with them that it would take a very long time to recoup the investment of switching (if we even take as given that there will be a lasting net benefit).
Blackmail is already illegal.
Unfortunately, one of blackmail's strong points is that the victim is often unwilling to complain about it, because you can release the information faster than you can be arrested. (Even with clever cops, a dead-man's switch in the cloud to post whatever incriminating information will be hard to discover and stop in time.)
I wonder, Europium being quite heavy and with radioactive isotopes, what pressure till you reach critical mass?
What makes you think that europium has a critical mass in the first place? It's actually considered a detriment to (controlled) nuclear reactions. Everything has radioactive isotopes, but very few have fissionable isotopes. And europium is lighter than, say, gold anyway.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
