Posts by dv

One question though...

What is wrong with going over the speed limit on a highway? Last time i checked, the speed of sound was considerably higher than that to allow the "thundering at 160 km/h" connotation. 200 km/h is nothing to sneer at in traffic, sure, but also very manageable in a modern car on a good highway. Which has been also noted in the article - the poor bloke managed to drive for quite a distance with no serious trouble (apart from sitting in a car from hell, going "over 9000" km/h, unable to stop or decelerate, just waiting to smash somewhere at high speed).

Just one thing...

"Oblast" means district in russian. So Amur Oblast district is something like "LCD display". Yes yes, aready going, just need to get my undertaker's jacket.

RE: colliding "velocities"

Actually, 900GeV is really right. GeV is not a velocity unit, it is an energy unit actually (equivalent to Joules after the division by elementary charge). When colliding head on, the energies of the particles would add up - it's the same as the car analogy, not using speed but rather kinetic energy (E = 1/2mv^2). So the mass as well as the velocity of the particle matter in these calculations. On the other hand, it's true that the velocities would add up only to the total possible by relativity velocity equations.

eV (electron-volts) are used for the unit because Joules are suitable for much bigger objects than elementary particles (18 orders of magnitude larger). Useful for car collisions and electricity consumption, but too large for single protons;-)

900GeV is only about 1.4 * 10^-7 Joules. For comparison, 9mm semi-auto pistol bullet has a muzzle energy of about 600 Joules, and a Porsche sports car doing 200km/h on a highway has a kinetic energy of about 0.5 Giga-Joules (or, in CERN-units, 3.2 * 10^15 TeV). Take that LHC:-)!

whoa whoa.....

Here's one for ya: exactly HOW do you actually access the internet to , ummm, i dunno, DOWNLOAD a bloody browser without the bloody browser? Or is it me and the "no-IE8" actually means that they just haven't put the shortcut on the desktop? I suppose I could use the classic telnet client tricks for something like "Lynx" emulation, or just try to input the address to the "address bar" of the "Windows Explorer".

@anon 11:43

You must be new here...

RE: just a question

The "flames and other symptoms" is really just air, bits of the projectile and chunks of the barrel turned into plasma and expanding through the barrel. The electromagnetic hell which occurs in the "barrel" at the time of shooting causes this. Ever saw an arc welder in action? Related principle, same effect, yet no gunpowder either. Try to imagine a 64GigaJoule arc welder, trying to weld two rails few cm apart, separated by an iron slug and held firmly in place by the gun harness, back together. In a few nanoseconds.

RE: How about this

"Everyone runs Torrents over uTP and then all ISP's can just throttle that (or block it completely) and that will kill off P2P without ISP's having to invest in vast sums of money for auto-traffic shapers."

Well, from the looks of it, uTP is nothing more than an application layer over UDP, good luck blocking that (along with all the VoIP, WoW, streaming and such).

Lemme see...

"... will be looking for signs of life... " by blasting the surveyed area with rocket exhaust, grinding and crushing some rocks and subsequently zapping anything that moves with a frikkin' laser? Ahh... those life-finding missions....

Also, equal protection under the law?

Have you ever seen anyone other than Rep viceprez candidate, who, having her email account hacked in, is being helped by various federal agencies in finding the perp? Some are more equal than others it seems.

RE: Not too good & others:

Follow these easy steps next time pls:

1) Read the frist!!1! paragraph and get outraged @ writer's ignorance.

2) Read the second paragraph and get ashamed of your own.

3) THEN post a comment.

4) Sit back and relax.

Not that easy

Short answer? First, you probably won't be able to run AutoCAD on Linux, and second, there's a linux version of Thunderbird, no hacks needed (at least not the extraordinary ones:-]). Visit the Mozilla Thunderbird download page http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/all.html and pick up the linux version. Be sure to have the requirements installed (GTK libs etc.).

As for the .exe problem, try wine. It's a fairly capable windows emulator for linux. You just *might* be able to run CAD on it, but i strongly doubt it. Another option is installing some kind of a virtual machine software (VMWare comes to mind), buy yourself a copy of Windows and install that on the virtual machine. But that kind of defeats the purpose of having linux in the first place...

RE: Big Al

Yes, I can see your pain, being in the middle of Prague and all... but I have disposed of this problem by using a "czech QWERTY" layout instead. So when switching to czech (being a programmer, I don't type accented symbols very much at all), I don't have to re-train my brain to the goddamn awful QWERTZ layout.

QWERTZ btw comes unto us from the beloved country of Germany, among other fantastic things like latex use in movies and big beautiful blonde women eating bratwursts. Meh. Mine's the zellow one with y's and z's all mixed up.

OK, couldn't resist: Why do you even smoke that shit?

I mean, is it really necessary to get wasted every Friday evening, and continue being FUBAR through the whole weekend? (and not just from skunk). Helluva lot of fun to have, certainly. Meh.

...mine's the DEA labelled one.

old tech, actually

I know of a project like this in late 90's, developed for czech army at CTU FEE Prague. They got to Mach 5 or so muzzle velocity, the supervising officer was VERY pleased, and decided to move the project to military development facility. The gun was able to fire about two times, before the "barrel" (two rails, actually - hence the "railgun" moniker:-)) fused together.

The "flame" (flash) is actually plasma emission, aka lightning; the gun works by two means - mainly Lorentz force induced by a spike current in the rails pulling the slug, and a plasma discharge (a small lightning, actually) induced by an artificial short circuit (very thin wire between the rails, which at the time of "firing" vaporizes instantly and induces a lightning arc) behind the slug.

It is called it "plasma cannon". And the tech is already nearing battlefield deployment, the USofA being the obvious technology leaders.