npts2020

I don't see a Ringworld as being very practical. It seems to me anything as hard as "scrith" (the base material of Ringworld) would shatter if an object hit it hard enough to knock the whole thing out of orbit. However, as others point out there are lots of stories dealing with time travel, perpetual motion, and accelerating mass beyond the speed of light, in addition to materials that don't exist.

A long way to walk, for sure, but when the next closest galaxy is around 25,000 light years away and one like Andromeda is around 2.5 million LY, it doesn't seem so far. Even the closest star to the sun 4.5 LY. There is actually only around 1,000 (according to google, anyway) stars as close as that one. Pretty interesting how they eliminated other possibilities.

Once you put realistic numbers in the formulae for how much energy is required to get any object up to speed and maintain it, you will find you are using more energy to do so than you gain from having done it. If there were zero losses from friction, wind resistance, etc. you could break even but that is not the universe we live in...

To begin with, speed is only a part of all of the potential energy of an object at any given time. What is the terminal velocity of your ball for a given incline? You need to know this in order to calculate how much energy you will need to add to get it up to and maintain your desired speed of 88 mps. Another question is what is generating the piezoelectric effect? If it is your ball, that will significantly increase the amount of energy required to maintain speed. The final point is, now that you have your ball at the end of this contraption, how much energy is required to put it back to the top?

From the CNN show "Have I Got News for You"----How can we keep Donald Trump from misusing taxpayer money? Hide it under the Constitution, he will never find it there.

Wasn't concern for the suffering of the condemned the reason for invention of the guillotine?

Have braking systems gotten worse? I had one of the first Prius hybrids made and I couldn't distinguish any difference between that car and any of the other cars I ever drove so far as brakes went. IMO it probably has to do with cues, especially audible ones, when changing speeds. I wonder if they looked at highway vs city driving?

That's the whole point, though, you have to keep adding energy and if you do the calculations for all of it using truly measured numbers, the amount added will end up being more than you get out at the end. Don't forget in the calculations you have to account for energy used to get the ball to the top of the incline to begin with.

Kinda like pushing a ball down these steps...

Not socialist at all. IMO the ACA should have been called the "health care and insurance industry profits assurance act" ( it was originally designed by the Heritage Foundation). There was never any intent to cover all citizens. When the Obama administration was writing the legislation, they invited something like 300 people and groups to give input, not a single one was a universal care advocate. This caused a number of people to speak out, so 2 single payer advocates were invited. Meanwhile, here we are more than 15 years later with the main benefit of "Obamacare" being those with preexisting conditions, a good thing to be sure, but seemingly could have been achieved with a less expensive, less complicated, more focused and universal system. I have heard of "concepts of plans" to fix health care but have yet to see much in the way of actual proposals from Democrats or Republicans. In regards to the OP, I don't see how anyone who is not a pacifist can condemn the killer when humanity has seemed to agree that violence is the ultimate solution to a given problem...

Ya, but I would think if there was any question about anything like that it would have been done onshore first. The real reason was because calculators were still pretty expensive and students being low man on the totem pole, so to speak, made us a low priority. Was interesting to see some guys (no women in the nuclear program back then) carrying calculators and some with slide rules. It would probably take me a while to figure out how to use it again but it is a pretty ingenious device and definitely takes some knowledge to use.

I was in the last class at the navy's nuclear power school to have to use a slide rule c1977. Of course, the entire fleet had been using calculators for well over a decade by then...

Welcome to the human race. Nobody understands everything, all any of us can do is make an attempt. Whether the universe came from "nothing" or if it has "always" been here, has been a debate amongst philosophers and cosmologists for centuries. Having read philosophical treatises by at least a couple dozen authors, I don't know how you could prove it one way or the other. However, being an engineer by training and therefore a strong believer in thermodynamics, I tend toward the "always been there" belief.

What else would you expect from one of the most successful entities in a completely unethical system?

This can't be correct, can it? there are plenty of things that have DNA which few people would argue are conscious, mushrooms and bacteria come to mind. Also, isn't the last part one of the strengths of humans? It seems to me, overcominging the programmed past and imagining something new based on lived experience is what has gotten us to where we are.