mm22

Well this is one of the most original ideas i have ever heard, and it makes sense to a certain extent. As someone points out it might be hard to handle the huge magnetic field created but if that is only applied when needed... But the idea of extracting heat from deep within the Earth has implications far beyond its use to "lift buildings". It would be an almost inexhaustible energy source, whose potential is now being used in a tiny fraction by geothermal power plants that use the heat from inside the Earth in those region where the heat is available very near to the surface, for example in Iceland.Being able to use more of the internal heat of the Earth could be compared to being able to use more of the enormous amount of energy that the Sun radiates to us everyday. Between the two I would say using the Sun is still a better idea, I see less technological issues and well the Sun comes anyway as opposed to extracting heat from inside the Earth which we are not really supposed to mess up with. I think the effect of extracting heat on a large scale could be hard to predict and could potentially destabilize the Earth crust thus causing more earthquakes and the like.

I had totally forgotten about Encarta until I read this post... Encarta was one of the first CD-ROM I've got more than 10 years ago, the CD-ROM stopped being readable after sometime and at that time I couldn't afford a CD burner so that was it. After using the internet for a while the need to purchase encyclopedias or similar products became superfluous and I didn't even know there is an online version of Encarta, for sure I have never found anything linked to it. I opened it just now and well seeing the MSN logo puts me off already. With so much information out there there is little point having such a structured and mono-source piece of information. If you want information which is 100% reliable you go and look for it in the appropriate place, for example a library, the website of a company etc. The power of Wikipedia is to express the views and collect the knowledge of the online community around the world, as such it cannot possibly be fully consistent and accurate. But it is a great tool and resource if we know how to use it and we keep a critic eye when reading it.

Is all this an indication that the World Wide Web is not as international as its name and fame might suggest? Or maybe it is finally paying the price of being too "wild" before and big players (like YouTube and BBC) are starting to be willing to pay money and decrease their audience in order to do things properly and comply with local and international regulations. After all no other media can claim a reach as wide as the Web so it just seems strange for it to be "limited" but that is what normally happens with TV stations being localized to a certain area. Just now I am thinking about satellite TV which is I assume available worldwide or at least in an area covering multiple countries, provided you have the right equipment (dish, decoder etc.). How is the "confinement" carried out in this case? Is a decoder whose sale is only legal in certain countries the only form of copyright enforcement?

I actually found this video on YouTube citing 2 or 3 methods to get around the problem, some of them, like tor.de already mentioned in this post http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I haven't tried any of them yet, it is not a big issue to me... but using a proxy could have other advantages like increased anonymity, am I right?

I found a link to a YouTube video, described as "german party song", and tried to view it from Hong Kong. The message I got instead was "This video is not available in your country." (see attachment)As it is the first time I see this message in Hong Kong and I don't think the content is blocked by the central government (doesn't seem to have anything to do with the June 4th movement...) I guess there is some kind of copyright issue and certain content is only shown in certain regions.Is that so? I didn't know you could set that on YouTube.

Yes I think you are right, moderation and common sense are always a good thing. But what if the job-hopping follows a career path like for example narrowing down your job description and becoming more specialized in some area of your industry? I am just thinking sometimes your current company could not offer you the chance to develop your skills in one particular area in which you discover being more interested than others.

So ultimately how does open source compare with proprietary software? Is the disadvantage of not having an official support (or at least not a proper customer support) offset by the advantage of having potentially thousands of developers tweaking the code and fixing bugs?Surely if Google uses open source the reason must go beyond the price to pay for proprietary technology and should also be not only that of setting an example and believing in open source as a philosophy. It must be a real technological advantage.

I think they must be running several systems because it look like they run on different servers as well for different subdomains. But yes I also think especially Google uses some open source, so that they can customize it to their needs without bothering asking the software house and having to sort out copyright details. Surely they must develop a lot on their own too. I think the answer to these questions could be easily found if one bothered to read all the disclaimers / terms of use that come with Google or Yahoo's application. If open source software is used it should be mentioned there.

Insane or not that guy managed to get hired from one company after another even though his CV clearly spoke of him not being a "loyal employee". So apparently there are companies out there ready to hire someone by just looking at his past job performances and considering how much they (the company) can benefit from this guy. They don't think he will go in less than a year time because they think they don't have to teach anything to this guy but just "exploit" him until he decides to leave, or they decide to let him go. Under the right circumstances I think the process is beneficial to both parties, I can think of enthusiasm as a leading force for the newly hired employee and yet another advantage for the employer. Can the same thing be done by all employees? I don't think so, at least not for all types of jobs, it would be interested to see which industry this guy was working in. But after all you have to look at your own good, and what you can learn from a job, then if your employer gives you enough reasons to stay with him you don't have any reason to leave. But if the only reason you stay for is loyalty or fear of change then you should look elsewhere.

Actually yes this would be a much better way to do the same thing, provided you can build a big enough wheel, and in fact I think this method has already being used. The whole idea here is being able to use some of the energy which is "freely" available by having an altitude difference between two tanks. Of course it is not "free" energy, but it is certainly a better way than transforming that mechanical energy (of the water) into some other form of energy, for example electricity. That would involve losses and create issues as to how to store it. I think here you are forgetting that the pipe on the way down can be (much) longer than the one on the up side, therefore the total volume (i.e. weight) of the water it can carry can be bigger than the volume in the up side of the pipe even if some water is pulled out at the top. But yes I cannot say for sure whether it will work or not, I so want to try it out now! Please if someone tries it first let us know

OK, so in its simplest form this system would transfer water from a higher tank (h2) to a lower one (h1). The pipe (or syphon) connecting the two tanks though raises up higher than both tanks (h3) during the trip. Now we wonder if it is possible to extract water from the highest point of the pipe (h3) without causing the flow in the pipe to stop. It is indeed an interesting question... now I fully understand the original idea. At first I would say that yes it is possible because for doing that we would only use part of the energy generated by the flow of water from h2 to h1 (which is what you explained in your previous post, i.e. 100kg of water ascending vs. 200kg descending). But, as stated by the original poster, if water goes out at the top of the pipe (h3) air must be allowed in in order to fill the space previously occupied by water. This air must be allowed down the pipe into the lower tank (h1). I could think of the same "solution" the original poster came up with, i.e. having a smaller section pipe in the descending part of the pipe so that water could continue its travel after some water has been spilled out. I don't know if theory and modeling alone could answer this question. I could imagine the laws of fluid dynamics are likely to be involved, when we think of how the water flow behaves when it is "punctured". In this case there might be different behaviors with different speeds and only experiments could say if this idea is viable or not.

jlhaslip, I set up sNews and that was really quick, only had some issue with some "version mismatch" on the website, as you suggest the forum is more up to date... so far I especially like the fact that by only spending a few minutes looking at the php I could get a feeling of how it works and fix a small problem I encountered because of the configuration of my local server. To be fair I should give Joomla a try as well so until then I cannot say one is better than the other, but surely sNews does the job of setting up a blog-type site very quickly and effectively.

As I understand the main idea in this design is to have the output tank of the syphon higher than the input tank, yet the output tank will fill because a lower pressure is maintained in the upper tank, thanks to a system of valves. If that is the case I believe it would be hard to empty the upper tank "into the holding tank which we require to fill" (as suran puts it) without letting the outside pressure (i.e. that of the holding tank) get into the output tank whom we intended to keep at a lower pressure so that the syphoning process could continue. Did I get the point? ps iGuest where was this idea originally posted?

it seems like the important thing is having abundant and (hopefully) good content, the look can be changed (almost) anytime...

Thank you everyone for your suggestions.I think I will try using sNews (which looks very promising) and Joomla (which I knew before) at this point and see where I can get with each of them, then I'll stick to the one that looks better to me... I will not consider Wordpress at this point as it looks a bit more main-stream and as zakaluka indicates could be more difficult to manage at the code level.rpgsearcherz I like the look of your blog, it's very neat and pretty much the style I like myself... I see you have already added the date on each post which is something you feel it's needed in this kind of website or else you find yourself wondering "is that stuff old or what?", of course you say you update it daily but first time visitors or random googlers are not necessarily aware of that... anyway that's for the other thread

I want to create a blog-style personal website and I would like to use a template to create it. These are my requirements: - I want to host my website (for example on Xisto), don't want to use a blogging service like blogger.com etc - I want full flexibility in customizing my blog and also the possibility of adding features, pages, sections, also of a non-blog nature (i.e. ordinary website) - I can use PHP so I would like the template to be built mainly using PHP and the code be editable - if possible no strings attached (I am ok with citing the source in the footer or showing a banner but no more than that) I see many people use WordPress for this kind of things, is that the best choice? any other suggestions? Thanks!

I thought a RAM Drive worked the other way round, that is using the RAM (physical fast access memory on the motherboard) as if it were a hard disk. In this way a program, like Firefox, can be started "from the RAM" and thus run much faster, provided there is enough RAM available. Nevertheless what you report is a useful tip to run programs faster.

that link doesn't work for me either... anyway I was wondering what do we mean by "fast" when talking about a browser? does it run faster on the local computer (i.e. memory, disk usage) or does it use the available bandwidth more effectively so that our pages can be displayed faster? I suppose it is a combination of both, but then why don't the Mozilla guys do it in that way in the first place? any potential pitfall?

We are talking about quantum physics... of course Wikipedia is not the best way to "understand the truth behind it" Most concepts go beyond anyone's reach and the maths required to analyse them surely requires more than an article on a scientific journal to be understood. Having said so I think Wikipedia is a good way to meter how popular/known a theorem is and how much discussion has been going on around it. That is what I wanted to find out when I checked it out and that is all I have time for right now... although these are very fascinating topics and one could spend years of serious studying in order to grasp a little understanding and, probably, be caught into their net. On the other hand if we are only interested in hearing an example of how this theorem could impact the "real world" I think what truefusion reports serves the purpose... very interesting indeed!

Yes our privacy is really breached everyday despite all the disclaimers and reassuring Terms of Service. See what Google Earth

Interesting post because it made me aware of this somehow fascinating theorem I had never heard of before. As I read on wikipedia it is surrounded by controversy and many experiments have been setup in order to prove/disprove it but without a definite answer. I am not sure though I can relate what you are saying (basically things in the future affecting those in the past) to the theorem itself as enunciated on wikipedia ("No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.") but I am certainly not an expert of quantum physics and we know quantum physics does not follow "common-sense" so anything can come out of it. Are you really reporting everything that physicist says? It'd be nice if you could explain it a bit more into detail

Nobody can really define such thing as "absolute speed", although some people (i.e. Einstein) gave some insight into it. But it is possible to travel at 0mph with reference to a relative reference system, such as the Earth, which is what the original question is about, as I understand it.

Good idea to do it on the Moon, it certainly poses less atmospheric problems. But the Moon does spin around its own axis, just its spinning period happens to be the same as its revolution period around the Earth, that is why we always see the same face of the Moon. @ darasen: sure if we change the frame of reference we can always find one about whom the ball does not stop... I think the original question was "Does the ball come to a stop with reference to the Earth?"

to be precise it will not come down exactly in the same path because of the Earth rotation beneath it... when the object is launched it has the same horizontal speed as the Earth (tangential component of the Earth spin), we launch it vertically so now it'll have a vertical component as well, assuming no friction/wind/etc the horizontal component of the velocity will stay unchanged while only the vertical component will be subjected to gravity as already explained. Now, when the object reaches a certain height it will still be moving horizontally with the same speed it had on the surface, but since its distance from the center of the Earth has now increased it would need a higher horizontal (tangential) speed in order to maintain the same angular position it occupied on the surface. Being the speed lower than that the object will move a bit "backwards" and will land in a slightly different position from that it was originally launched from. Of course all of the above effect is completely negligible if the object is launched only a few meters high, but we are talking about theory

So if I get it right I can only connect the computer to the internet once and use Synaptic package manager to download all the packages I want without installing them. That sounds not too bad thanks! (to Ash-Bash: it's not a matter of wireless/ethernet, it's just that at the location where I want to use ubuntu I have no internet connection whatsoever... I can though bring the computer, an old laptop, within internet reach but I don't want to do that every time I find out I need a specific package, so if I can download most of the packages I will possibly need in one or two sessions I am happy enough...)