A space elevator can't just go to LEO, it's got to go all the way to geosynchronous orbit (42,000 kilometers up) and then past that for a counterweight.

If we only had to go to LEO, we'd probably have done it already.

Also, there are a ton of satellites in LEO, and most of them are likely to hit the tether at some point. It is just a matter of time (and not as much time as you'd think -- you'd probably have a near miss every couple weeks).

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

The airlines to hire people to keep the airplane's copy of all the charts up to date, but in almost every airline, the pilots are responsible for doing the updates on their own set, and everyone needs their own set. Every time a new update comes out, every pilot gets an envelope with a hundred or more loose leaf pages, and they have to locate the old copy of each in their chart book, tear out the old one, and insert the new one into the rings. It is really annoying and takes a long time.

Time spent preparing charts is not counted as duty time, so often times, pilots who have been busy or who have procrastinated will be up late the night before a trip updating all the approach plates so that they are legal to fly the next day.

With electronic flight bags, the airline still keeps paper copies in the cockpit, but the pilots use their electronic copies, and the updates involve touching an update button. With the Jeppessen product, all the specific company and aircraft specific manuals are also linked to your account, so if any procedures change, those are also updated within the app. It is very cool. Pilots should focus on flying, not collating. This is a huge step forward.

If your inner ear can distinguish the difference between a uniform field, aka an accelerating spaceship, and the curved field of a point source 6300000 meters away, I'll eat my hat.

I agree that the spinning case would probably feel a little wierd to most people. That's why I only suggested the first case as being indistinguishable.

Of course you could devise an experiment to tell the difference between the first case and earth, but the parent of the thread is talking about artificial gravity!!! I guarantee you I could devise an experiment to prove that the gravitation field inside of the starship entriprise or battlestar galactica does not have an identical curviture to that of the earth.

The point of having artificial gravity is not to decieve instruments, it's to keep those instruments from floating away from their labs!

artificial gravity is easy. Just keep the ship accellerating forward, or spinning around a convenient axis. The former case, of the accellerating frame should be indistiguishable from being in a uniform gravitational field.

I'm not affiliated with Supermicro in any way, but they have four 1U serverboards designed for the 12 core opterons, so that's 48 cores in a 1U server. I'm guessing that Supermicro is not the only vendor of quad opteron boards supporting the latest chips. There are most likely quite a few of these in use by real people. Anyone want to speak up?

I know from personal experience that the socket F opterons performed very poorly in an 8 way configuration compared to the previous generation (socket 940 gen). I ran multiple tests on dual core chips (885s, I think), back in 2006 or 7 where I'd get nearly double the performance in going from a quad configuration to an 8 way configuration, but with the socket F breed of chips, there was no performance boost at all, it was like the clock speed was being cut in half and all the threads took twice as long to complete. I saw this behavior again and again, and the motherboard manufacturer that I was testing the chips with told me that it was an issue with the chips themselves. I think this is the reason why 8-way opteron systems are very rare now.

This is a blatant misquote by the media. Prince was merely saying that IPv4 is over. Prince recently dropped all IPv4 support in his home network, and is excited to be making the switch from unhealthy decimal "numbers" (actually he said "octets") to long 128bit hexadecimal strings. WTF is wrong with the media.

The Internets are not deadz.

I mean, if 2.4Ghz has all these laws protecting us against observation, how about some laws that cover 660Thz. I want to be able to project information in blue and know that it's illegal for others to look at it.

...On the same day that another Apple iPhone goes missing? Yikes!

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

"In 2010 the volume of digital information created and duplicated in a year will reach 1.2 zettabytes, according to new data from IDC and EMC. The annual Digital Universe report is an effort to visualize the enormous amount of data being generated by our increasingly digital lives. The report's big numbers -- a zettabyte is roughly a million petabytes -- pose interesting questions about how the IT community will store and manage this firehose of data. Perhaps the biggest challenge isn't how much data we're creating -- it's all the copies of it. Seventy-five percent of all the data in the Digital Universe is a copy, according to IDC."

I'm not sure why the parent has a 5 Informative tag... The writer probably meant that the case couldn't be solved *analytically*.

An analytic, or closed form solution is where you derive a model that explains exactly what will happen in any situation. As far as orbital dynamics is concerned, this is only possible with a two body problem (and perhaps a few special cases of three body problems). When you can't solve a problem analytically, you turn to numeric methods. No matter how fast your computer is, it is not going to figure out an analytic solution for you for this kind of problem. If an exact analytic solution exists for an N body problem, it most certainly won't be discovered by some brute force method.

NASA has made numerical calculations for this flight (basically by iterating the forces involved at each point along the proposed path), and they know the result with a high degree of accuracy.

To save space, the library used a VARCHAR(16) for the full name, so every time George returned something, there was an buffer overflow, and the database had to be fixed by hand. Seems like twice, they just forgot.

Most websites think I was born on January 1, 1970. I figure it is just a convenient date for them.

Think about all the disk space that could be saved via compression, if everyone used this as their birthday on every website. We're doing them a favor!