Mod Parent UP!!!!

I've seen this first hand! It's insane!

well then we need to do some research on making smaller electrons

Back of envelope calculation shows me they're saying there's a 1 in 3000 chance of some person getting hit somewhere. Or am I holding it wrong?

I know all about this moon.

10 years ago I typed somewhere on the net, and I could probably find it if I tried really hard, that the way things were going, pretty soon someone would require a breathalizer wired into the ignition of a car to make it start after have a DWI. Lots of folks told me I was full of sh*t and it would never happen. Our culture has changed so much in the last decade that now having an interlock seems like a good thing to do to lots of people. Hardly anyone can remember that only 10 years ago almost no one at all would have supported this.

Now my new prediction. In 10 years ALL cars will require breath testing before it will start. I'll try to remember that I put it on slashdot... but will I still be able to search for anonymous postings then? Probably not. I guess that's my second prediction for the next 10 years.

In 1988 or so I had a Pontiac Fiero that when you turned the cruise control on (just switching immediately when switching from "off" to "on"), the gas pedal would pin itself to the floor and the engine would go WIDE OPEN. Now this was easily and immediately remedied by switching the cruise control off again, but it DID HAPPEN TO ME. Electronic devices screw up constantly. Did you ever used and old MIDI instrument, that when it crashed all the data outputs would just start throwing data like crazy and all the notes would play at max volume continuously? Older musicians know this was common.

Also, I read that the reports of sudden acceleration in Toyotas have ONLY come from cars with U.S. made ECUs, and NEVER with Japanese made ECUs... I somehow doubt that all of the people supposedly "faking" look at their ECU first before determining whether to make a false claim.

Do I know for certain whether or not this is a real problem? No. But when electronics lock up, and they do all the time, anything can happen.

I was very wary when they started taking away accelerator cables, as I understand electronics all too well and prefer to never trust them with my life -- Airbus prefers to differ in their opinion, so I try to always use Boeing. And I will certainly NEVER BUY A CAR WITH FLY BY WIRE STEERING!!!!!!!!

when i was a kid, there were three channels, black and white tv only & they sucked, no kids watched more than 1 hr tv a day, if that.

so we played. outside. all the time. there was no such thing as crime, it simply didn't happen in our town (not one murder in 250+ years... until recently of course)

so there was this pond (the pond is gone, it's now a forced housing development for low income minorities to be integrated into towns deemed "too white" by an NJ judge), and a tree over it with a branch maybe 75 feet over the water, & so we were wondering, how in the world can we get a rope up there so we can swing over the pond and jump in from the rope (we were all about 9-12 years old). the tree was unclimbable (we were all very good at tree climbing -- how many kids have the upper body strength today to climb trees?)

It took us two days to figure it out, but that rope was still there until the low income housing developers came in and cut down the forest, filled in the pond, and put the stream that fed it into underground pipes. i leave it as an exercise to your imagination how we did it -- suffice to say we would have all been put into psychological counseling and put on meds for YEARS if some kids tried the same thing today. we had so much fun swinging into the pond!

Our culture is 100% the opposite of what it was 50 years ago. Everything socially then that was accepted as normal and right is now abnormal and wrong, and visa versa. How anyone can expect this country to continue to go upward, when the culture that was driving us to the stars is now, by design and intention, completely the opposite of the society that was capable of doing that?

Now certainly, back then, the culture SUCKED for a lot of people. It sucked if you were gay, and probably sucked if you were black too (although black families stayed together then), so it is probably better for a lot of previously marginalized groups now because of the changes we made. But those changes were made, and cannot be undone. There were choices we made as a society - that inclusiveness was better than achievement, than elimination of risk was better than solving a problem, etc, etc -- thousands of choices, many of them now hard coded into law.

It has been interesting to watch it all.

Now THAT is interesting!!!

I wonder if a smaller telescope could detect say, sodium or mercury vapor lamp spectral emissions on the dark side of a planet...

Oh wow. Thanks to all of you for all of the calculations. I see the problem now.

ATLAST is interesting, it will detect "signatures" of life. That's not what I'm talking about, I'm thinking something that could look at a planet 100 light years away and photograph "people" (!) walking around on the streets? Can somebody calculate how big it would have to be? Say it's 500 meters... well then let's just build a 500 meter scope of some sort and put it on the moon, or wherever. It would be the greatest technological challenge of all time maybe, but with the greatest rewards of knowledge of all time too!

I've been wondering for twenty years at least: how big a telescope do we need to build, in space, or on the dark side of the moon, or even on earth, to see cities on an earthlike planet somewhere out there?

And why are we not building one instead of wasting all the money on welfare, manned space exploration of a our mostly dead solar system, and more missiles so we can blow this place earth up even more times than we already can (I think we destroy the earth up to 6 times now?)

The main problem with our space program is that for 100 years we've been stuck with the rocket equation and 2% at best payloads. Ion engines give a little more hope for an interstellar probe someday...

If we found some more living earths out there, maybe our best and brightest might expend their brainpower on coming up with a better engine for space travel, rather than investment banking and law.

So how big a telescope do we need? Let's start building it!

spending $2mil on a car gives the audi/vw folks a return on their tech investment, and they can roll that back into more r&d. lots of that tech eventually makes it down to the next gen vw. some of you are incredibly short sighted for supposed tech fans

I saw the setup in the winter of late 1986. It was deep (many levels) under the physics department's machine shop, deep underground, at the University of Maryland & you had to go down several ladders to get there. It was hanging from the ceiling, big giant (I thought hollow, but apparently solid) cylinders of what looked like aluminum, hanging from thin wires. Does anyone know if it is still there?