Yeah, but the byproduct you are talking about is Plutonium. Plutonium is dangerous in that it can make nuclear weapons and it is incredibly toxic. In fact in wartime it might be more deadly to distribute it in a conventional bomb scattering it rather than as a nuclear weapon. There are good reasons for limiting the production of Plutonium. But alas, because of these breeder reactors there is enough plutonium in the world for any terrorist's plans. There really is no reason for such opposition to them anymore in the US and they should be employed.
A silicon wafer making company outside my home town uses 40 MW. I highly doubt that photovoltaic produces more than 10 KW. Obviously solar cells can not work in industrial situations. They are good for calculators and spacecraft that use low power (ones that go too far from the sun can't use it: i.e. Cassini) but hardly cost effective or even feasible to implement on the large scale that would be required to power industry.
Just an addition: What I meant by being far enough from the earth is that it would be past the magnetosphere (where any interplanetary probe will have to go anyways) so that the solar wind could have an effect, because the earth is shielded from the solar wind within the magnetosphere.
The solar wind will blow the fission product gasses out of the solar system once the probe is far enough from the earth. As far as breathing it if the engine was started near the earth: the diffusion through the atmosphere would likely reduce the radiation emitted by the fission products significantly (just like how in a commercial nuclear power plant the fuel assemblies are placed in a water tank until the fission products that were created in life decay to a reasonable amount). Its highly unlikely that even a fleet of these spacecraft would have any impact that could be observed. This is a viable technology and should be studied and deployed if it works.
To minimize the effects of multiple induction (a transmission line characteristic) all Slashdoters should twist the lines before bundling (obviously if you seperate the lines in groups of 4 or 5 it will have a minimal effect). If you look inside a serial cable (RS-232) you will notice that it is twisted for the same reason. Regardless, Slashdoters should know that without shielding they shouldn't leave an open case around their ham radio antenna -or- try to use these bundled cables to connect externally for a significant distance.
Actually it is pretty significant. If you consider that its travelling faster than roughly 330 m/s (a generally accepted value for the speed of sound in air without going into calculations), then it is travelling at 0.00011% the speed of light. At this rate it could travel from the nearest system to us in as little as 4.3 million years (given that the nearest system is about 4.7 light years away). It doesn't take a geologist or a cosmologist to understand that this is an incredibly small amount of time that an interstellar massive object could travel through space. While supernova fragments have been known to have many percentage point values of the speed of light, this *is* a neutron star.
Yes, i believe you are correct that our system is moving through the orbit around the center of the Milky Way faster than that. We circle the milky way once in about 250 million years is what I've been told. But I don't think that there would be such a fuss unless it was disjointed.
Do you remember the great Unix backdoor? In the early C compilers developed by Ken Thompson the compiler would recognize when 'logon' was being compiled and insert code so that Thompson could enter with his username and password any computer that had UNIX installed regardless of whether or not he had a valid account. This source could be removed from the compiler of course. But to recompile the compiler without it you had to use the compiler itself, which added the code again. Unless you are willing to write a compiler from assembly code you can't be sure that you are not running specially added code. I wouldn't wager a bet that gcc DOESN'T have this type of hack.
Java is dead? Not really. Java has been around for 4 years. It took C roughly 10 years to become accepted over FORTRAN in the percentage that Java is over the rest of all languages. FORTRAN is still taught to engineers! Java isn't dead. Just compare the growth of java to C++. Many people still refuse to touch C++ even though its 12 years old, supercedes C and makes things like serialization trivial from an applications programmer point of view. Java does the same but it also makes memory management and porting trivial. The reason that I think its not accepted as much as it could be is that it forces OOP on you. Not that OOP is a bad thing, but not all programmers can program OOP (its true!). It has something to do with the ability to abstract I believe, and many programmers like to think of things as one thing after another and what they will actually do, not where they came from. The languages I most commonly use are Java, C++, and Perl. If I want it to be secure, portable, and not spend alot of time thinking about it I use Java. If I want it to be fast I use C++. Really fast, assembly. For hacks and testing software I use Perl.
Does MS actually market it as WinTone? If so I think its a little too close to being just a coincidence. Though the comparison Sun gave was sorta loose. Doesn't sound as if Sun and MS are really talking about the same thing, or if so it sounds as if Sun has a clearer idea of what it is. The MS WinTone piece sounds like typical marketing blather. Not that Sun was that far from it, but at least it makes sense from Suns part.
Set cron for 2 weeks for Sun to publically flame MS again.
I forget who to attribute this idea to but here it is in a condensed form:
You build a large city around black hole that is circular in cross-section from any particular reference around the black hole (or non existent for part-spheres). If your city is rigid enough it won't go crashing into the black hole. Now have people live in the city. Lots of trash. Fill up a cargo ship with the trash and undock it. Let the ship descend relatively close (for a ship of course) to the event horizon. At this point release all the trash (as in detaching 95% of your ship) and soar away. The important thing here is that you are travelling tangentally with the event horizon so that the trash drops off in an almost direct path to the black hole and your ship travels in an upward arc toward your space station. Once you recapture the energy of the ship (which will be VERY economical if I remember correctly) you shouldn't have too many power requirements for your city. You'll have to remember to bring in alot of materials to make alot of trash.
Here's a good phrase to remember considering matter and gravity: Space tells matter how to move, matter tells space how to curve.
I think a common misconception is that the matter still has to exist at the singularity. There is no requirement. Some may describe a black hole as a point in which a certain radius, no communication can exist outside thereof. But I think the best definition of a black hole would be the set of all points in which space-time converges instead of diverges. All that is needed is the point of convergence, in which a large mass initially created. Any point traveling within the even horizon has no choice but to hit the singularity. The more mass entering curves the point of convergance steeper, but, its not the mass that may or not exist that affects the further warping. Its the mass flowing down into the black hole. To go into further detail, gravity is bound to particles by the hypothetical particle called the graviton. Further there is a field called the Higgs field that affects only particles that gravitons may attach. The Higgs field could either rule out the graviton, the graviton it, they both might exist, or neither. But the interesting thing is that the Higgs fields seems to be a more-or-less overlay of spacetime that affects the warping of space-time. It also seems that the speed of light limitation is connected to the Higgs field. The three neutrinos for example, do not appear to be connected to the Higgs field. The photon does appear to be connected to the Higgs field but not to a graviton as a photon has no mass yet is affected by gravity.
I don't think Unixen is the popular plural form. Its usually referred to as Unix boxen. The Jargon file also lists VAXen which is more or less dervied from oxen being the plural of ox. The Jargon file also says that VAXen might have been influenced by 'vixen'. I think Unices is correct if you are referring to Unix distributions, but Unix boxen if you are referring to the boxes themselves.
One thing I do like about it is the ability to use multiple names per IP address. But this sort of kills the elegance of design of domains going from TLD, First level domain, and so on. But if I'm interpretting it correctly, it should kill alot of the refer jumps. I wonder what the speed difference is with the fact of concatenating packets into streams rather than placing 1 packet per 1 stream. I'd guess that for small servers it would be trivial but for large ones the change would be enormous.
Am I the only one who is bothered by the fact that it echoes your password, abeit with '*'. I do not think that it should be echoed for very very obvious reasons. I certainly hope that the normal login (perhaps with some alteration of xdm?) doesn't echo. This is definately a bad thing to have. I hope it gets fixed quick, or at least thought of as a bug.
From my calculations, a 20 kiloton bomb requires roughly 5 kg of fissile material (plutonium, ect) and 2 kg if you want to make it thermonuclear. Scale this up, its 3000 kg (deuterium+tritium) + 5 kg plutonium. I'm not a nuclear physicist but I'd guess that its unlikely you'd carry that in a suitcase. On a boat, sure. Of course this is forgetting all the activating explosives and machinery.
Nay, event horizon is correct. In cosmology the event horizon of a black hole isn't the 'collection of points of no return'. Its 'the collection of points in which event A is continuous' event A could be defined in this case as 'the curvature of spacetime converges instead of diverging'. Why its called an event horizon is because the observer gets to define the events however he feels. On the other hand, horizon stands for 'the boundary of' and is objective, unlike event horizon which is subjective.
I like this design, but I hope it doesn't cause the VR-drunkenness syndrome experienced when people get off of working with VR units. Obviously this is much different, but it might cause a person to be woozy afterwards, especially if they adapted it to large screens instead of handhelds.
I'm not sure I completely believe the reason. Maybe its just an excuse so that they don't have to do something stupid. Like coding the IE 4.0 DOM for one. I don't think its because of time. Time shouldn't be such a bother in the case of mozilla. So I don't really think you can say they are going to release it unfinished. It will be very well finished, and it will luckily lack the bad DOM's that are a waste of time. Perhaps its a so-called 'market-leverage' act. Who knows, but if it is, its for a good reason.
I should have understood that this AC doesn't understand the possessive tense. Linux doesn't inherit instability because GNOME is unstable. You are indicating that Linux is unstable. The only thing that could mark Linux being unstable is a kernel panic. Just because GNOME runs on a Redhat Linux system doesn't mean that the Redhat system or that the Linux kernel is unstable.
Its always interesting to listen to Linux users who when they don't completely understand something in an argument will say "Well, the common user will think..." instead of "The technical reason is...".
Its also interesting how AC's (convientiently) forget the sarcasm in any post. AC you are a fscking idiot if you think that an OS inherits the instability of a user program, albeit a window manager, desktop environment.
Some points:
1. Yes, exactly... not an argument 2. RH doesn't inherit the instability of GNOME. You don't have to run a window manager, and if you do, so what. 3. What uptime are you talking about? System uptime or window manager uptime? Compared to system uptime, wm uptime is trivial. You don't need a GUI up to run httpd, samba, ect. Perhaps its convienient, but its not as if you need to reboot your system because the wm pukes. As a server, it matters little. On a workstation it can be a pain in the ass, but is NOT a Linux or Redhat stability problem. 4. Linux is stable, GNOME is not. 5. New user, common users.. its just a cop-out to any real intelligent statement that you might make. If Redhat pisses you of by including GNOME, pick up a different distribution or download KDE, or something else. In my opinion GNOME is still beta quality software (even by non-opensource people) and should never have reached 1.0 before stability was fixed.
AC, do me a favor and look up the word inheritance in a dictionary. Yes, and then tell me how you decided that Linux inherits all of GNOME's bugs. It'll be amusing to see your answer. Yes, amusing.
Somehow I doubt that GNOME is causing kernel panics. Perhaps GNOME is unstable but who in the hell defined GNOME==Linux? And how the hell did RedHat make GNOME unstable? Perhaps I don't understand or perhaps you are just full of shit.
I don't know the height the satellite is above the moon so I don't know the speed exactly. I would guess that orbiter is at least 50-100 miles above the surface and is probably travelling from 7-15,000 km/hr. Does this sound right? Perhaps slower, but it is most definately traveling many thousands of km/hr. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere (a trace atmosphere) so you won't have to worry about a terminal velocity. We probably only need the ice to be up 5 miles or so. With the low gravity of the moon, I think that its a realistic chance. The hardest part is probably finding the correct crater to drop the satellite into.
Its highly highly highly unlikely that a satellite would ever strike another (except in polar or geostationary orbit). But what isn't unlikely is that the orbit will eventually degrade and the satellite will 'land' somewhere on the moon. Since its going to hit eventually its a good idea that we tell it where.
You of course are assuming that we might eventually plan to fix this planet. Unlikely. I would rather have that we used this planet before we discard it. Whats the use to humanity, if we move on of course, to leave Earth sitting along with all its mineral resources? With Von Neuman's mathematical discovery of the von Neumann engine and advances in nanomachinery we might find that it will be relatively easy to mine the Earth to oblivion. It may be a virus-like idea, but who says thats not the future of humanity anyways. Terraform Mars? Unlikely, I say that it will probably be mined first. But why not? There's more life to exploration of the galaxy (or further) than to sit watching your field and hoping that a comet won't fall out of the sky.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but the byproduct you are talking about is Plutonium. Plutonium is dangerous in that it can make nuclear weapons and it is incredibly toxic. In fact in wartime it might be more deadly to distribute it in a conventional bomb scattering it rather than as a nuclear weapon. There are good reasons for limiting the production of Plutonium. But alas, because of these breeder reactors there is enough plutonium in the world for any terrorist's plans. There really is no reason for such opposition to them anymore in the US and they should be employed.
A silicon wafer making company outside my home town uses 40 MW. I highly doubt that photovoltaic produces more than 10 KW. Obviously solar cells can not work in industrial situations. They are good for calculators and spacecraft that use low power (ones that go too far from the sun can't use it: i.e. Cassini) but hardly cost effective or even feasible to implement on the large scale that would be required to power industry.
Just an addition: What I meant by being far enough from the earth is that it would be past the magnetosphere (where any interplanetary probe will have to go anyways) so that the solar wind could have an effect, because the earth is shielded from the solar wind within the magnetosphere.
The solar wind will blow the fission product gasses out of the solar system once the probe is far enough from the earth. As far as breathing it if the engine was started near the earth: the diffusion through the atmosphere would likely reduce the radiation emitted by the fission products significantly (just like how in a commercial nuclear power plant the fuel assemblies are placed in a water tank until the fission products that were created in life decay to a reasonable amount). Its highly unlikely that even a fleet of these spacecraft would have any impact that could be observed. This is a viable technology and should be studied and deployed if it works.
To minimize the effects of multiple induction (a transmission line characteristic) all Slashdoters should twist the lines before bundling (obviously if you seperate the lines in groups of 4 or 5 it will have a minimal effect). If you look inside a serial cable (RS-232) you will notice that it is twisted for the same reason. Regardless, Slashdoters should know that without shielding they shouldn't leave an open case around their ham radio antenna -or- try to use these bundled cables to connect externally for a significant distance.
Actually it is pretty significant. If you consider that its travelling faster than roughly 330 m/s (a generally accepted value for the speed of sound in air without going into calculations), then it is travelling at 0.00011% the speed of light. At this rate it could travel from the nearest system to us in as little as 4.3 million years (given that the nearest system is about 4.7 light years away). It doesn't take a geologist or a cosmologist to understand that this is an incredibly small amount of time that an interstellar massive object could travel through space. While supernova fragments have been known to have many percentage point values of the speed of light, this *is* a neutron star.
Yes, i believe you are correct that our system is moving through the orbit around the center of the Milky Way faster than that. We circle the milky way once in about 250 million years is what I've been told. But I don't think that there would be such a fuss unless it was disjointed.
This isn't really true. CE comes with the dreamcast but its not as if MS is giving it away. You are still paying for the WinCE even if it is bundled.
Do you remember the great Unix backdoor? In the early C compilers developed by Ken Thompson the compiler would recognize when 'logon' was being compiled and insert code so that Thompson could enter with his username and password any computer that had UNIX installed regardless of whether or not he had a valid account. This source could be removed from the compiler of course. But to recompile the compiler without it you had to use the compiler itself, which added the code again. Unless you are willing to write a compiler from assembly code you can't be sure that you are not running specially added code. I wouldn't wager a bet that gcc DOESN'T have this type of hack.
Java is dead? Not really. Java has been around for 4 years. It took C roughly 10 years to become accepted over FORTRAN in the percentage that Java is over the rest of all languages. FORTRAN is still taught to engineers! Java isn't dead. Just compare the growth of java to C++. Many people still refuse to touch C++ even though its 12 years old, supercedes C and makes things like serialization trivial from an applications programmer point of view. Java does the same but it also makes memory management and porting trivial. The reason that I think its not accepted as much as it could be is that it forces OOP on you. Not that OOP is a bad thing, but not all programmers can program OOP (its true!). It has something to do with the ability to abstract I believe, and many programmers like to think of things as one thing after another and what they will actually do, not where they came from. The languages I most commonly use are Java, C++, and Perl. If I want it to be secure, portable, and not spend alot of time thinking about it I use Java. If I want it to be fast I use C++. Really fast, assembly. For hacks and testing software I use Perl.
I figure Java is just as dead as Perl or C++.
Does MS actually market it as WinTone? If so I think its a little too close to being just a coincidence. Though the comparison Sun gave was sorta loose. Doesn't sound as if Sun and MS are really talking about the same thing, or if so it sounds as if Sun has a clearer idea of what it is. The MS WinTone piece sounds like typical marketing blather. Not that Sun was that far from it, but at least it makes sense from Suns part.
Set cron for 2 weeks for Sun to publically flame MS again.
I forget who to attribute this idea to but here it is in a condensed form:
You build a large city around black hole that is circular in cross-section from any particular reference around the black hole (or non existent for part-spheres). If your city is rigid enough it won't go crashing into the black hole. Now have people live in the city. Lots of trash. Fill up a cargo ship with the trash and undock it. Let the ship descend relatively close (for a ship of course) to the event horizon. At this point release all the trash (as in detaching 95% of your ship) and soar away. The important thing here is that you are travelling tangentally with the event horizon so that the trash drops off in an almost direct path to the black hole and your ship travels in an upward arc toward your space station. Once you recapture the energy of the ship (which will be VERY economical if I remember correctly) you shouldn't have too many power requirements for your city. You'll have to remember to bring in alot of materials to make alot of trash.
Here's a good phrase to remember considering matter and gravity: Space tells matter how to move, matter tells space how to curve.
I think a common misconception is that the matter still has to exist at the singularity. There is no requirement. Some may describe a black hole as a point in which a certain radius, no communication can exist outside thereof. But I think the best definition of a black hole would be the set of all points in which space-time converges instead of diverges. All that is needed is the point of convergence, in which a large mass initially created. Any point traveling within the even horizon has no choice but to hit the singularity. The more mass entering curves the point of convergance steeper, but, its not the mass that may or not exist that affects the further warping. Its the mass flowing down into the black hole. To go into further detail, gravity is bound to particles by the hypothetical particle called the graviton. Further there is a field called the Higgs field that affects only particles that gravitons may attach. The Higgs field could either rule out the graviton, the graviton it, they both might exist, or neither. But the interesting thing is that the Higgs fields seems to be a more-or-less overlay of spacetime that affects the warping of space-time. It also seems that the speed of light limitation is connected to the Higgs field. The three neutrinos for example, do not appear to be connected to the Higgs field. The photon does appear to be connected to the Higgs field but not to a graviton as a photon has no mass yet is affected by gravity.
I don't think Unixen is the popular plural form. Its usually referred to as Unix boxen. The Jargon file also lists VAXen which is more or less dervied from oxen being the plural of ox. The Jargon file also says that VAXen might have been influenced by 'vixen'. I think Unices is correct if you are referring to Unix distributions, but Unix boxen if you are referring to the boxes themselves.
One thing I do like about it is the ability to use multiple names per IP address. But this sort of kills the elegance of design of domains going from TLD, First level domain, and so on. But if I'm interpretting it correctly, it should kill alot of the refer jumps. I wonder what the speed difference is with the fact of concatenating packets into streams rather than placing 1 packet per 1 stream. I'd guess that for small servers it would be trivial but for large ones the change would be enormous.
Nay, for two reasons:
1. On UNIX systems telneting and trying to log in as root will not work
2. Telnet has security measures and can be disabled by the server at will.
Am I the only one who is bothered by the fact that it echoes your password, abeit with '*'. I do not think that it should be echoed for very very obvious reasons. I certainly hope that the normal login (perhaps with some alteration of xdm?) doesn't echo. This is definately a bad thing to have. I hope it gets fixed quick, or at least thought of as a bug.
eeye released this on June 8th, 1999. Thats 4 "a day or two's". And the advisory does say that MS was notified on the 8th.
From my calculations, a 20 kiloton bomb requires roughly 5 kg of fissile material (plutonium, ect) and 2 kg if you want to make it thermonuclear. Scale this up, its 3000 kg (deuterium+tritium) + 5 kg plutonium. I'm not a nuclear physicist but I'd guess that its unlikely you'd carry that in a suitcase. On a boat, sure. Of course this is forgetting all the activating explosives and machinery.
Nay, event horizon is correct. In cosmology the event horizon of a black hole isn't the 'collection of points of no return'. Its 'the collection of points in which event A is continuous' event A could be defined in this case as 'the curvature of spacetime converges instead of diverging'. Why its called an event horizon is because the observer gets to define the events however he feels. On the other hand, horizon stands for 'the boundary of' and is objective, unlike event horizon which is subjective.
I like this design, but I hope it doesn't cause the VR-drunkenness syndrome experienced when people get off of working with VR units. Obviously this is much different, but it might cause a person to be woozy afterwards, especially if they adapted it to large screens instead of handhelds.
I'm not sure I completely believe the reason. Maybe its just an excuse so that they don't have to do something stupid. Like coding the IE 4.0 DOM for one. I don't think its because of time. Time shouldn't be such a bother in the case of mozilla. So I don't really think you can say they are going to release it unfinished. It will be very well finished, and it will luckily lack the bad DOM's that are a waste of time. Perhaps its a so-called 'market-leverage' act. Who knows, but if it is, its for a good reason.
I should have understood that this AC doesn't understand the possessive tense. Linux doesn't inherit instability because GNOME is unstable. You are indicating that Linux is unstable. The only thing that could mark Linux being unstable is a kernel panic. Just because GNOME runs on a Redhat Linux system doesn't mean that the Redhat system or that the Linux kernel is unstable.
Its always interesting to listen to Linux users who when they don't completely understand something in an argument will say "Well, the common user will think..." instead of "The technical reason is...".
Its also interesting how AC's (convientiently) forget the sarcasm in any post. AC you are a fscking idiot if you think that an OS inherits the instability of a user program, albeit a window manager, desktop environment.
Some points:
1. Yes, exactly... not an argument
2. RH doesn't inherit the instability of GNOME. You don't have to run a window manager, and if you do, so what.
3. What uptime are you talking about? System uptime or window manager uptime? Compared to system uptime, wm uptime is trivial. You don't need a GUI up to run httpd, samba, ect. Perhaps its convienient, but its not as if you need to reboot your system because the wm pukes. As a server, it matters little. On a workstation it can be a pain in the ass, but is NOT a Linux or Redhat stability problem.
4. Linux is stable, GNOME is not.
5. New user, common users.. its just a cop-out to any real intelligent statement that you might make. If Redhat pisses you of by including GNOME, pick up a different distribution or download KDE, or something else. In my opinion GNOME is still beta quality software (even by non-opensource people) and should never have reached 1.0 before stability was fixed.
AC, do me a favor and look up the word inheritance in a dictionary. Yes, and then tell me how you decided that Linux inherits all of GNOME's bugs. It'll be amusing to see your answer. Yes, amusing.
Somehow I doubt that GNOME is causing kernel panics. Perhaps GNOME is unstable but who in the hell defined GNOME==Linux? And how the hell did RedHat make GNOME unstable? Perhaps I don't understand or perhaps you are just full of shit.
I don't know the height the satellite is above the moon so I don't know the speed exactly. I would guess that orbiter is at least 50-100 miles above the surface and is probably travelling from 7-15,000 km/hr. Does this sound right? Perhaps slower, but it is most definately traveling many thousands of km/hr. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere (a trace atmosphere) so you won't have to worry about a terminal velocity. We probably only need the ice to be up 5 miles or so. With the low gravity of the moon, I think that its a realistic chance. The hardest part is probably finding the correct crater to drop the satellite into.
Its highly highly highly unlikely that a satellite would ever strike another (except in polar or geostationary orbit). But what isn't unlikely is that the orbit will eventually degrade and the satellite will 'land' somewhere on the moon. Since its going to hit eventually its a good idea that we tell it where.
You of course are assuming that we might eventually plan to fix this planet. Unlikely. I would rather have that we used this planet before we discard it. Whats the use to humanity, if we move on of course, to leave Earth sitting along with all its mineral resources? With Von Neuman's mathematical discovery of the von Neumann engine and advances in nanomachinery we might find that it will be relatively easy to mine the Earth to oblivion. It may be a virus-like idea, but who says thats not the future of humanity anyways. Terraform Mars? Unlikely, I say that it will probably be mined first. But why not? There's more life to exploration of the galaxy (or further) than to sit watching your field and hoping that a comet won't fall out of the sky.