npts2020

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.

The real problem is there is no shortage of folks like that...

Why you just get them to install data centers and supply power, of course. 😉

Is an AI Trump possible? I would think just the logical inconsistencies would be difficult to replicate in a system dependent on logic...

What happens when the majority decides a minority, like Jews or transgender people, should just be rounded up and put to death?

Name me something unnameable... 😀

IMO it manifests itself in political discourse by a large number of people not even being able to accurately state what the representatives they elect stand for or discern how those peoples' actions affect them personally.

You also have to consider how little the average person reads, especially books and non-fiction. I know a fair number of people who haven't read a single book since getting out of school (some over 50 years ago) and a lot of them are proud of it. Unfortunately, I don't know how to change that.

IMO time travel is not likely to ever be possible because of the amount of energy required to rearrange the universe to a past (or future) configuration. Furthermore, that configuration will only be similar and not identical, kind of like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again where you would be fortunate to even find every atom of his being, much less reassemble it all in the manner identical to his former self. Also, the future is very much dependent on the past, every event has causation. If that is true, you couldn't have any "loops in time" because whatever time you are in is THE time and no other exists until you rearrange the universe again to be in a different time. That means the past can't be changed because as soon as you go back, it is no longer the past and you are now on a different path to a different future. As such, it seems trying to change the past to affect the future by going back is a waste of time (😀) when one could just go to whatever future is desired.

I'll have to listen to it. I prefer script over video because I can generally read much faster than speech so don't often bother with them. Plus I am not a big fan of YouTube but that's a whole other discussion.

I'm a little surprised he hasn't tried to change any map names to anything like lake trump or the gulf of trump...

I wonder if there is some way of giving it bogus or overloading it with information?

True, but that's the case with all research done by the military. Rockets weren't invented to take people to the moon or put satellites in orbit...