I am a vegetarian, but I still know that a good steak is medium rare, it should give as much as the spot on your nose between the bone and the tip. Cook it any longer and you have a fine hockey puck.

... the only winning move is not to play.

I can count the number of times my college's mail system has expirenced downtime since I've been here (full disclosure: Sophmore) on one hand. Every time it has happened, I got an email telling me about it at least 24 hours in advance.

That is far better than gmail's track record.

It only happens sometimes, but it could bring a university to a grinding halt. And give a LOT of people a very bad 2.5 hours.

Only if you choose to entirely ignore the effects of the rotational refrence frame. When you compare voltage to RPM you are silently multiplying by the demsionless unit radians.

More percisely, a flywheel stores power delivered to it torsionally, a spring (I assume you were talking about a linear spring) stores force applied to it in a constant direction (work) as energy.

Linear force ought to be thought of as DC, and torsional force, AC. An ideal capacitor will store energy (much like a Hookian spring) when a constant voltage DC (force) is applied to it. An inductor will store energy in the presesence of an AC source. (It is, of course, much more complicated then that, there are edge cases in which the difference between AC and DC is dificult to discern, such as wires long enough for the speed of electrical impulse to become meaningful, cases of magnetic resonance(ie transformers) etc.)

Flywheels look like capacitors, look like springs, look like inductors etc. because the nature of force and energy is reletavely constant. However when one uses vectors rather than scalers, it becomes clear that capacitors are springs, but not flywheels, and that inductors are flywheels, and not springs.

No it doesn't.

In economic terms if something can be copied without cost, then it must be ``sold'' to everyone for nothing.

Flat rate to consume for flat rate to produce makes very good common sense though. Which is better than economical sense any day; there is a very good reason economics is called the dismal science.

Yes, and a motor is an inductor. You can measure the size of the flywheel in Henries, I've done it before, obviously not with this particular product ...

The reason it's useful to think of it as an inductor is because it is a spinning magnet; some of its energy storage potential will come from the spinning mass, but some of it will also come from the spinning magnet. The energy that is stored because the flywheel is creating a magnetic field that changes with time should be thought of as arising from inductance, as it arises in an undeniably ``inductive'' way.

In that case, it is an inductor. A really really big inductor, that happens to store it's energy mechanicly.

The implication is that energy storage is determined by the product of the angular and magnetic moment, so it can store more energy at a given angular momentum than a purely mechanical flywheel. So perhaps the torsional effect is kept low enough that it doesn't affect handling.

The problem with gimbals is that you need 4 of them, and energy extraction is somewhat dificult.

Another solution is to use two flywheels that rotate in oppisite directions on the same shaft. This might be more able to produce the anti-roll effect you're looking for, energy could be transfered between the wheels to provide whatever angular force was necessary.

I am also not a MechE.

How could you possibly claim that Microsoft and the RIAA have had only positive effects throught their entire history?!

But can they be attached to sharks?

Exactly, it's a trap. First they lull us in with suggestions of sanity in copyright law, then they will turn the tables and say we will now monitor all data passing through your network so you can ``prove your innocence.'' Right.

Considerably easier if the ground is as small as it is on Pluto.

That's not flying, that's falling with style!