Truly said. Because of Gecko Firefox (and all other Gecko-based browsers) cannot copy/paste styled text. This is a bug from many years back and one might think that WYSIWYG cut and paste would be a fundamental feature. I'm afraid that I have no faith in a company that lets such a flaw not only go unfixed but has had the audacity to insult many early reporters of this by not acknowledging the error.
As for Chrome, its absence from Linux and OS X is laughable. I could have cobbled together a version of it for OS X by now. Google is either writing Windows-only spaghetti code or has a not-so-honorable reason for disallowing other OSs.
As far as maintaining your data's integrity such that a retrieval program can have a shot at recovering it you have a few options. You can backup to a physical medium that is indestructible (within the timeframe and conditions you must decide yourself) or the medium can be meta-physically indestructible within the same conditions as above. This would appear to you as a black box since you do not need to concern yourself with the 'how' aspects of its implementation just the means of interfacing with it (physical and communication protocol) which would be done through any number of interfaces which as time progresses might change just as the definition and implementation of a "computer" may change.
Now we know that when we submit something to this black box it will be stored and as long as computers and computing don't change too drastically we be able to retrieve it at some future time. The black box portion of this could be in the form of a company that handles all of the details of looking to you like a black box as described for a reasonable fee but here you run into a problem. The company becomes a single point of failure that all of your data at risk. Perhaps governments could provide the black box duties but I, personally, have several problems with that option.
An alternative way of providing the black box functionality and eliminating the single-point-of-failure problem is to somehow, see that the open source community produces a multi-platform (easily migrated code is what we need here), distributed, well-designed and documented, open source, peer-to-peer, backup program. I know that the topic has been discussed here before but don't know the current status of any of the projects.
This would be a great project for the open source community as it would solve a problem that has been faced by anyone that deals with large amounts of data and doesn't have a fortune to spend keeping it retrievable let alone easily accessed and navigated. There are many products, both software and hardware, that provide or, at least, approach meeting the requirements of the overall solution.
I would check out Stanford's (http://www.stanford.edu/) free online courses (there are many other universities participating as well). These are available via iTunes (iTunes U podcasts) or your web browser. Examples are:
Stanford's Programming Methodology - Video -Series of lectures by Professor Mehran Shami for the Stanford Computer Science Department (CS106A). Professor Shami lectures on options and opportunities after his class.
Stanford's Machine Learning (CS229) - Video - Professor Andrew Ng lectures on linear regression, gradient descent, and normal equations and discusses how they relate to machine learning.
I like the classroom videos. You get to see the demos of principles, can skip around, take a nap (!) or whatever and still get the complete course. Many of the courses provide a means for asking questions as well.
I especially enjoyed the machine learning course as it is a mix of fundamentals and the scaling up of those fundamentals to actual work. I know you were looking for written material but for me this multimedia format is so much richer. I hope this helps you.
The one essential feature I found missing is the support for PowerPC machines. The reason given being one chunk of code is incompatible with the PPC compiler switch. Maybe in a few years, if Songbird is still around AND (I am able to afford a new machine OR someone makes their code processor independent) I'll give it a look.
As with Linux there is no DRM built into the operating system. This gives you at least 2 OSs (actually many more) that satisfy your no DRM and reasonable resource requirements. The thing that irks me about Microsoft is that they seem to have no moral, ethical, or other qualm with adding things to the OS that not only do not serve a need of the user but actually hinder them. Microsoft is in the business not to make great products or to lead with innovative ideas but to make more money. And, while this may be said of most businesses I've never done business with one that actually hindered the usefulness of a product in order to please 3rd parties so that they would be more comfortable continuing to cling to dinosaur business models. I also believe that the DRM is a kind of kickback to certain businesses so that they might help Microsoft get some of the advertising market money. Again, something that the end user likely does not have a use for but is forced to contend with along with all the detrimental side effects included.
Multicast could still be used if the requested start times were quantized to let's say 1 minute intervals. This would mean that you would at most be sending N streams where N is the total number of minutes from the real-time start of an event to the last time after the event start that content could be requested. This would mean also that the most time that a consumer would have to wait before their viewing content starts would be 1 minute. It's not real-time but it is probably close enough to it that most people would not care. It would also just be used during peak load times after which smaller quantums could be used and after that, real-time demands. I believe that hotel/motel movie service used to work in the same manner except with a quantized unit of 10 or 15 minutes.
I have wondered the same thing myself. Is it fear that is causing the U.S., U.K., and other "free" countries to self destruct? It is not as if these were societies without a history of self-examination. Artists, philosophers, and such are honored by monuments to remind us of the very freedoms and thinkers that helped establish those ideals. I'm afraid, not that some incomprehensible "bad people" are out to do me harm, but that the general population's response to random threats both real and imagined will destroy these countries and ideals that truly are worth fighting for, to the death if necessary, in order that they might be around to serve our children rather than control them. The government exists as a means of serving us by protecting us from foreign forces and smoothing conflict between internal entities -- not for us to serve the government. "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country?" Bullshit, I say! Never make the mistake that "your country" is the same as "We, the People." When you find yourself existing in order to serve the best interests of an instance of a government rather than the general population then it may already be too late to convert the pro-government minions away from the perversity they now maintain and mindlessly defend (and don't try and twist this into an insult to our troops. I'm not talking about our soldiers here, Okay!?}.
Is this late mid-life crisis or am I close to the truth? Vote, but more importantly, think. Maybe it can still change things for the better.
Another version and Gecko still does not support styled cut and paste between Firefox and OS X. I'll have to stick with Safari 4.0 until they get Gecko right or they abandon it as too cumbersome to repair.
I suppose Washington is often misquoted on this. With a little searching I found:
"And yet another bogus Washington quote:
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government"
The actual quote:
"A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly for military supplies."
---George Washington's First Annual Message to Congress (January 8, 1790)"
Don't worry. I'm sure we can trust them to guard this information with their lives. After all, they fought so hard against illegal wiretapping and then insisted that they should pay the full penalty of law for any breaches in that regard... Oops! I reserve the right to revise and consent to the inclusion of the above comment, that may or may not have been written by me depending upon whether I can remember it or not, in the record. I relinquish my remaining minutes to the next special interest group in line.
If the ice within the rings is non-renewable, in other words not being replenished from some source outside of the rings what is the upper limit on the time it would take for the clumps to sublimate away? If they are of cometary material origin and are like the comets we see, the ones that are outgassing at a tremendous rate what would be their life expectancy?
It seems to me that if this is a closed system that surely 4 billion years is plenty of time to have sublimated away any original ice. Perhaps instead the conditions at the ring positions are such that they are performing the opposite action.
Each ring area, containing dust and other non-volatile debris, may be acting as a kind of water vapor vacuum cleaner (no pun intended) where the microgravity and shading by debris is sufficient to condense any water vapor that the rings encounter in Saturn's (or any other similar body's) trip around the Sun. The dust could act as a seed to form the "hailstones" that eventually clump to form ever larger ice blobs.
Bodies like our Earth, lacking such debris rings, in our case due to our anomalous moon, would tend to condense such gasses on the planet's surface once it cooled to a certain point. This model might be expanded to explain the large belt of cometary material at the boundary of the solar system as this might have been the settling distance for water and material with even lower condensing temperatures.
Perhaps the entire primordial solar system passed through clouds of gasses such as the remnants of exploded stars many times in its formative days, accumulating the iron of our planet's core from stars that exploded after reaching the terminal stage where they were forming iron as the resulting product of the soon to self-destruct star's failing fusion process.
This theory leads to all sorts of new questions like where did hydrogen and oxygen come together to release energy and form water? Almost wish that I'd taken more chemistry! Anyways, I'd like to see responses to these (probably not new) ideas if anyone can spare the time.
Aplus.net has a wide range of plans. I would suggest the smallest business setup on a shared UNIX platform. I would also suggest having your domain(s) registration through a different company. This way should anything sour your relationship with the mail services, etc., you will not place your unique domain(s) in jeopardy should you have a financial showdown with the service provider. It's much harder to recover a lost domain name than to move to another service provider (can be done in an hour if you have site and database backups ready).
What are we going to have to do to see the results of research we have paid for with our tax dollars? Sign in with our SSNs as our user names and electronically sign a non-disclosure agreement?;)
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
Point is, managers manage people. You are there to code.. not them. The only technical details they need to do their job is: how long it will take, how many people can work on it efficiantly, what tasks are dependant on it, risks, and benifits.. and you are there to provide them with that info.
I have heard this statement made by company silverbacks many times and it it works as a bluff "most" of the time. It's the exceptional time that leadership, and knowledge of the details of the process required to build the "magic boxes" that we sell are found lacking in management all the way to to the top that can send a project into a death spiral. Management does not consist simply of addressing technical problems by shuffling "resources". Sometimes a direction must be chosen and those decisions require a little knowledge of everything involved in the task.
The above declarations like the of "Listen up! This is what you will believe regardless of the lack of any proof that I may have and the preponderance of your experience to the contrary!", is all posturing best left on the sports playing field where this "manager" first heard it.
A car analogy....hmmm. I haven't read the article but from the summary it sounds as if either the fuel pumps or a resonance between the engine and the stage itself is occurring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance . This would be like something on your dashboard, let's say a package, vibrating noisily when you reach particular engine rpms. At these points you are setting up a resonance between the package and the engine vibration. In a resonance situation you have several options to reduce the vibration problem but they boil down to doing two things, 1 - changing the resonance frequency so that they don't match or 2 - adding an element to absorb energy out of the vibrating objects.
For item 1 in the car analogy this could be done by changing the mass of the package or the coupling between the vibration and the package (this can be changed in varying the rigidity/springiness of its mechanical coupling to the vibration). Varying the mass of the package is easy, we just attach weights to it. Since we cannot remove weight from the package we are stuck with adding weight. This would typically change the package resonance frequency to lower fixed values. In the rocket this would be like adding unmovable dead weight.
For method 2 we want to draw energy away from the package. Perhaps we could attach a few speaker coils to the package such that when the package vibrates the coils move through their respective magnetic fields and generate current flow. We can take that current flow through a resistor and dump the energy as heat (or something else more clever possibly). This would reduce the amplitude of the vibrations but in the rocket might be difficult to implement.
Now that was for an automobile in the simplest case. In the rocket we have to look at the vibrations at points throughout the entire rocket. We don't want to shake pieces loose or vibrate our astronauts into jelly. During flight, the characteristics of the driving vibrations will change as thrust changes, pump speeds, tank levels change, and rates of fuel usage change, etc. What we end up with is a system that has many peaks (poles) and dips to almost zero when looked at as a function of frequency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_stability_criterion . That also varies with time.
A frequency domain model can be made of of the rocket at important points. To tame this vibrating monster ideally you would complement the frequency domain model of the vibrational driver with a system derived from the Nyquist stability criterion to get the behavior you want. In order to do that you will have to be able to create and move some poles and zeros of your own. That's where the all these weights and springs and adjustment motors come in. They are the tuning kit for the system.
Still sounds sort of kludgy doesn't it? Perhaps a more radical design philosophy perhaps custom making portions of the rocket to dynamically match differing payloads, engine modifications, etc. could work (and I'm sure there are designs like that in planning stages waiting for the right materials to come along or the right manufacturing technique to be developed but without an aggressive r&d budget, team, and plan more conventional designs are going to win out.
I believe that you've made an initial error that invalidates most of what you say later and that is the assumption that the uncanniness is a function. I have a feeling that it is more history dependent. There are many "y" values for any one "x" value. When a change in facial configuration occurs it is not just the end configuration that determines the uncanniness but more the transition (path) that had to take place in "y" to get us to any "x". For example, the showing of teeth. The showing of teeth is usually interpreted as a threat gesture in most of the land-based mammalian family yet humans typically take in other factors that led to the "tooth showing" such as a preceding joke or a blush.
I believe that people that tried Cuil early on will be much happier with the site now that it has had a few days to digest user query styles. I have noted a significant improvement in just two days. The number of hits have improved as has accuracy. Give them a chance to tweak things around a bit before laying the heavy criticism on them. Imagine if you were judged similarly on your first day at a new job. I'm usually lucky to find the coffee machines, break room, my boss's location, where I sit, the restrooms and the routes that connect them all.;-)
Most of us picked up from our early math classes that higher order problems have *many* solutions. We seem to too often focus on "what would be the best" (as if this is a one solution problem) when what we should be asking is what things can out-preform a hot wire in a glass bulb in terms of efficiency (power in/optical power out), nasty side effects of life-cycle at producing light, and "other factors". That other factors part is probably going to change the selection of which technology is "best" quite often.
Our world offers many challenges other than first order linear. Don't forget those non-linear and probabilistic ones as well. As old-style resources run low and leave us to deal with their end-products I think that we are going to have to not limit ourselves in looking for solutions. Sorry for the mini-lecture.;p
For the moon project, ship up some epoxy, aluminum vacuum deposition equipment, and materials to build spinning pan. Mix the epoxy, pour in spin pan, spin until sets. Buff surface. Allow spinning shelter to go to vacuum and sputter on a few layers of aluminum and you have a cheap, low-mass mirror. Tilt as you wish on lunar surface. Make more, create arrays. Have neighborhood mirror-making parties!;)
For atmospheres, go to military and pry some of that "Star Wars" developed phase-conjugate mirror technology they came up with for tracking and higher energy laser use for shooting down incoming nuclear warheads. How's that sound?
"But frankly, I'd rather see them use Tor [eff.org], maybe with some optimizations for latency-critical operations."
I'll have to take some time and look at Tor. Frankly, I was surprised when I first learned (many years ago) that basically everything on the internet is sent in the clear. I would have thought that the first thing after the net left the world of academia that there would have been an outcry from businesses, etc. for a secure point-point connection with untraceable anonymity.
As things stand someone or a group of interested parties could sit and monitor traffic from business rivals getting the lowdown on who is talking with who and getting full transcripts of emails, etc. I would think the SEC would be interested, at a minimum.
I doubt that VPNs are set up on such a dynamic basis in business but then again knowing the fact that they are being created in specific instances would be good clues that "something important is going on between these two companies."
This is something that the government and especially the military *must* have already addressed. Who is watching our national security communications and why has it not resulted in a major disaster or two due to leakage? Maybe it has already? I think just taking a look at what the military does inside and outside of the battle zone should give some ideas that might be adoptable for private use. Maybe I am just ignorant here and our national security plans are done with the same carelessness as this administration seems to handle its emails.
I, personally, would like to have all of my communications protected from the time they leave the box until they arrive on the other. This would happen without *anyone* knowing that information was exchanged and certainly not knowing the content type either.
So if the legislative branch were to be able to issue partisan "do not speak/discuss/acknowledge existence of" as has been the case with the executive branch, how would this help us, The People? To me, it seems as if the politicians are not even pretending to be working in our best interests anymore.
It seems that the "importance hierarchy" has become a directed graph of personal convenience: Personal->Party->Personal->Party-supporting citizens->dirt->whale shit->other noisy citizens->citizens->the dispossessed.
Slashdot Mirror
As for Chrome, its absence from Linux and OS X is laughable. I could have cobbled together a version of it for OS X by now. Google is either writing Windows-only spaghetti code or has a not-so-honorable reason for disallowing other OSs.
Any idea when any version will be released for OS X?
As far as maintaining your data's integrity such that a retrieval program can have a shot at recovering it you have a few options. You can backup to a physical medium that is indestructible (within the timeframe and conditions you must decide yourself) or the medium can be meta-physically indestructible within the same conditions as above. This would appear to you as a black box since you do not need to concern yourself with the 'how' aspects of its implementation just the means of interfacing with it (physical and communication protocol) which would be done through any number of interfaces which as time progresses might change just as the definition and implementation of a "computer" may change.
Now we know that when we submit something to this black box it will be stored and as long as computers and computing don't change too drastically we be able to retrieve it at some future time. The black box portion of this could be in the form of a company that handles all of the details of looking to you like a black box as described for a reasonable fee but here you run into a problem. The company becomes a single point of failure that all of your data at risk. Perhaps governments could provide the black box duties but I, personally, have several problems with that option.
An alternative way of providing the black box functionality and eliminating the single-point-of-failure problem is to somehow, see that the open source community produces a multi-platform (easily migrated code is what we need here), distributed, well-designed and documented, open source, peer-to-peer, backup program. I know that the topic has been discussed here before but don't know the current status of any of the projects.
This would be a great project for the open source community as it would solve a problem that has been faced by anyone that deals with large amounts of data and doesn't have a fortune to spend keeping it retrievable let alone easily accessed and navigated. There are many products, both software and hardware, that provide or, at least, approach meeting the requirements of the overall solution.
I would check out Stanford's (http://www.stanford.edu/) free online courses (there are many other universities participating as well). These are available via iTunes (iTunes U podcasts) or your web browser. Examples are:
Stanford's Programming Methodology - Video -Series of lectures by Professor Mehran Shami for the Stanford Computer Science Department (CS106A). Professor Shami lectures on options and opportunities after his class.
Stanford's Machine Learning (CS229) - Video - Professor Andrew Ng lectures on linear regression, gradient descent, and normal equations and discusses how they relate to machine learning.
I like the classroom videos. You get to see the demos of principles, can skip around, take a nap (!) or whatever and still get the complete course. Many of the courses provide a means for asking questions as well.
I especially enjoyed the machine learning course as it is a mix of fundamentals and the scaling up of those fundamentals to actual work. I know you were looking for written material but for me this multimedia format is so much richer. I hope this helps you.
The one essential feature I found missing is the support for PowerPC machines. The reason given being one chunk of code is incompatible with the PPC compiler switch. Maybe in a few years, if Songbird is still around AND (I am able to afford a new machine OR someone makes their code processor independent) I'll give it a look.
As with Linux there is no DRM built into the operating system. This gives you at least 2 OSs (actually many more) that satisfy your no DRM and reasonable resource requirements. The thing that irks me about Microsoft is that they seem to have no moral, ethical, or other qualm with adding things to the OS that not only do not serve a need of the user but actually hinder them. Microsoft is in the business not to make great products or to lead with innovative ideas but to make more money. And, while this may be said of most businesses I've never done business with one that actually hindered the usefulness of a product in order to please 3rd parties so that they would be more comfortable continuing to cling to dinosaur business models. I also believe that the DRM is a kind of kickback to certain businesses so that they might help Microsoft get some of the advertising market money. Again, something that the end user likely does not have a use for but is forced to contend with along with all the detrimental side effects included.
Multicast could still be used if the requested start times were quantized to let's say 1 minute intervals. This would mean that you would at most be sending N streams where N is the total number of minutes from the real-time start of an event to the last time after the event start that content could be requested. This would mean also that the most time that a consumer would have to wait before their viewing content starts would be 1 minute. It's not real-time but it is probably close enough to it that most people would not care. It would also just be used during peak load times after which smaller quantums could be used and after that, real-time demands. I believe that hotel/motel movie service used to work in the same manner except with a quantized unit of 10 or 15 minutes.
Embrace, entangle, eviscerate
I have wondered the same thing myself. Is it fear that is causing the U.S., U.K., and other "free" countries to self destruct? It is not as if these were societies without a history of self-examination. Artists, philosophers, and such are honored by monuments to remind us of the very freedoms and thinkers that helped establish those ideals. I'm afraid, not that some incomprehensible "bad people" are out to do me harm, but that the general population's response to random threats both real and imagined will destroy these countries and ideals that truly are worth fighting for, to the death if necessary, in order that they might be around to serve our children rather than control them. The government exists as a means of serving us by protecting us from foreign forces and smoothing conflict between internal entities -- not for us to serve the government. "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country?" Bullshit, I say! Never make the mistake that "your country" is the same as "We, the People." When you find yourself existing in order to serve the best interests of an instance of a government rather than the general population then it may already be too late to convert the pro-government minions away from the perversity they now maintain and mindlessly defend (and don't try and twist this into an insult to our troops. I'm not talking about our soldiers here, Okay!?}.
Is this late mid-life crisis or am I close to the truth? Vote, but more importantly, think. Maybe it can still change things for the better.
Another version and Gecko still does not support styled cut and paste between Firefox and OS X. I'll have to stick with Safari 4.0 until they get Gecko right or they abandon it as too cumbersome to repair.
I suppose Washington is often misquoted on this. With a little searching I found:
"And yet another bogus Washington quote:
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government"
The actual quote:
"A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly for military supplies."
---George Washington's First Annual Message to Congress (January 8, 1790)"
Don't worry. I'm sure we can trust them to guard this information with their lives. After all, they fought so hard against illegal wiretapping and then insisted that they should pay the full penalty of law for any breaches in that regard... Oops! I reserve the right to revise and consent to the inclusion of the above comment, that may or may not have been written by me depending upon whether I can remember it or not, in the record. I relinquish my remaining minutes to the next special interest group in line.
If the ice within the rings is non-renewable, in other words not being replenished from some source outside of the rings what is the upper limit on the time it would take for the clumps to sublimate away? If they are of cometary material origin and are like the comets we see, the ones that are outgassing at a tremendous rate what would be their life expectancy?
It seems to me that if this is a closed system that surely 4 billion years is plenty of time to have sublimated away any original ice. Perhaps instead the conditions at the ring positions are such that they are performing the opposite action.
Each ring area, containing dust and other non-volatile debris, may be acting as a kind of water vapor vacuum cleaner (no pun intended) where the microgravity and shading by debris is sufficient to condense any water vapor that the rings encounter in Saturn's (or any other similar body's) trip around the Sun. The dust could act as a seed to form the "hailstones" that eventually clump to form ever larger ice blobs.
Bodies like our Earth, lacking such debris rings, in our case due to our anomalous moon, would tend to condense such gasses on the planet's surface once it cooled to a certain point. This model might be expanded to explain the large belt of cometary material at the boundary of the solar system as this might have been the settling distance for water and material with even lower condensing temperatures.
Perhaps the entire primordial solar system passed through clouds of gasses such as the remnants of exploded stars many times in its formative days, accumulating the iron of our planet's core from stars that exploded after reaching the terminal stage where they were forming iron as the resulting product of the soon to self-destruct star's failing fusion process.
This theory leads to all sorts of new questions like where did hydrogen and oxygen come together to release energy and form water? Almost wish that I'd taken more chemistry! Anyways, I'd like to see responses to these (probably not new) ideas if anyone can spare the time.
Aplus.net has a wide range of plans. I would suggest the smallest business setup on a shared UNIX platform. I would also suggest having your domain(s) registration through a different company. This way should anything sour your relationship with the mail services, etc., you will not place your unique domain(s) in jeopardy should you have a financial showdown with the service provider. It's much harder to recover a lost domain name than to move to another service provider (can be done in an hour if you have site and database backups ready).
What are we going to have to do to see the results of research we have paid for with our tax dollars? Sign in with our SSNs as our user names and electronically sign a non-disclosure agreement? ;)
Point is, managers manage people. You are there to code.. not them. The only technical details they need to do their job is: how long it will take, how many people can work on it efficiantly, what tasks are dependant on it, risks, and benifits.. and you are there to provide them with that info.
I have heard this statement made by company silverbacks many times and it it works as a bluff "most" of the time. It's the exceptional time that leadership, and knowledge of the details of the process required to build the "magic boxes" that we sell are found lacking in management all the way to to the top that can send a project into a death spiral. Management does not consist simply of addressing technical problems by shuffling "resources". Sometimes a direction must be chosen and those decisions require a little knowledge of everything involved in the task.
The above declarations like the of "Listen up! This is what you will believe regardless of the lack of any proof that I may have and the preponderance of your experience to the contrary!", is all posturing best left on the sports playing field where this "manager" first heard it.
A car analogy....hmmm. I haven't read the article but from the summary it sounds as if either the fuel pumps or a resonance between the engine and the stage itself is occurring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance . This would be like something on your dashboard, let's say a package, vibrating noisily when you reach particular engine rpms. At these points you are setting up a resonance between the package and the engine vibration. In a resonance situation you have several options to reduce the vibration problem but they boil down to doing two things, 1 - changing the resonance frequency so that they don't match or 2 - adding an element to absorb energy out of the vibrating objects.
For item 1 in the car analogy this could be done by changing the mass of the package or the coupling between the vibration and the package (this can be changed in varying the rigidity/springiness of its mechanical coupling to the vibration). Varying the mass of the package is easy, we just attach weights to it. Since we cannot remove weight from the package we are stuck with adding weight. This would typically change the package resonance frequency to lower fixed values. In the rocket this would be like adding unmovable dead weight.
For method 2 we want to draw energy away from the package. Perhaps we could attach a few speaker coils to the package such that when the package vibrates the coils move through their respective magnetic fields and generate current flow. We can take that current flow through a resistor and dump the energy as heat (or something else more clever possibly). This would reduce the amplitude of the vibrations but in the rocket might be difficult to implement.
Now that was for an automobile in the simplest case. In the rocket we have to look at the vibrations at points throughout the entire rocket. We don't want to shake pieces loose or vibrate our astronauts into jelly. During flight, the characteristics of the driving vibrations will change as thrust changes, pump speeds, tank levels change, and rates of fuel usage change, etc. What we end up with is a system that has many peaks (poles) and dips to almost zero when looked at as a function of frequency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_stability_criterion . That also varies with time.
A frequency domain model can be made of of the rocket at important points. To tame this vibrating monster ideally you would complement the frequency domain model of the vibrational driver with a system derived from the Nyquist stability criterion to get the behavior you want. In order to do that you will have to be able to create and move some poles and zeros of your own. That's where the all these weights and springs and adjustment motors come in. They are the tuning kit for the system. Still sounds sort of kludgy doesn't it? Perhaps a more radical design philosophy perhaps custom making portions of the rocket to dynamically match differing payloads, engine modifications, etc. could work (and I'm sure there are designs like that in planning stages waiting for the right materials to come along or the right manufacturing technique to be developed but without an aggressive r&d budget, team, and plan more conventional designs are going to win out.
I believe that you've made an initial error that invalidates most of what you say later and that is the assumption that the uncanniness is a function. I have a feeling that it is more history dependent. There are many "y" values for any one "x" value. When a change in facial configuration occurs it is not just the end configuration that determines the uncanniness but more the transition (path) that had to take place in "y" to get us to any "x". For example, the showing of teeth. The showing of teeth is usually interpreted as a threat gesture in most of the land-based mammalian family yet humans typically take in other factors that led to the "tooth showing" such as a preceding joke or a blush.
Just a thought...
Someone please mod Lumpy up. This is the only meaningful information that I have read on this subject in the last 15 minutes!
I believe that people that tried Cuil early on will be much happier with the site now that it has had a few days to digest user query styles. I have noted a significant improvement in just two days. The number of hits have improved as has accuracy. Give them a chance to tweak things around a bit before laying the heavy criticism on them. Imagine if you were judged similarly on your first day at a new job. I'm usually lucky to find the coffee machines, break room, my boss's location, where I sit, the restrooms and the routes that connect them all. ;-)
Most of us picked up from our early math classes that higher order problems have *many* solutions. We seem to too often focus on "what would be the best" (as if this is a one solution problem) when what we should be asking is what things can out-preform a hot wire in a glass bulb in terms of efficiency (power in/optical power out), nasty side effects of life-cycle at producing light, and "other factors". That other factors part is probably going to change the selection of which technology is "best" quite often.
;p
Our world offers many challenges other than first order linear. Don't forget those non-linear and probabilistic ones as well. As old-style resources run low and leave us to deal with their end-products I think that we are going to have to not limit ourselves in looking for solutions. Sorry for the mini-lecture.
007, Q is going to be upset about this one!
For the moon project, ship up some epoxy, aluminum vacuum deposition equipment, and materials to build spinning pan. Mix the epoxy, pour in spin pan, spin until sets. Buff surface. Allow spinning shelter to go to vacuum and sputter on a few layers of aluminum and you have a cheap, low-mass mirror. Tilt as you wish on lunar surface. Make more, create arrays. Have neighborhood mirror-making parties! ;)
For atmospheres, go to military and pry some of that "Star Wars" developed phase-conjugate mirror technology they came up with for tracking and higher energy laser use for shooting down incoming nuclear warheads. How's that sound?
"But frankly, I'd rather see them use Tor [eff.org], maybe with some optimizations for latency-critical operations."
I'll have to take some time and look at Tor. Frankly, I was surprised when I first learned (many years ago) that basically everything on the internet is sent in the clear. I would have thought that the first thing after the net left the world of academia that there would have been an outcry from businesses, etc. for a secure point-point connection with untraceable anonymity.
As things stand someone or a group of interested parties could sit and monitor traffic from business rivals getting the lowdown on who is talking with who and getting full transcripts of emails, etc. I would think the SEC would be interested, at a minimum.
I doubt that VPNs are set up on such a dynamic basis in business but then again knowing the fact that they are being created in specific instances would be good clues that "something important is going on between these two companies."
This is something that the government and especially the military *must* have already addressed. Who is watching our national security communications and why has it not resulted in a major disaster or two due to leakage? Maybe it has already?
I think just taking a look at what the military does inside and outside of the battle zone should give some ideas that might be adoptable for private use. Maybe I am just ignorant here and our national security plans are done with the same carelessness as this administration seems to handle its emails.
I, personally, would like to have all of my communications protected from the time they leave the box until they arrive on the other. This would happen without *anyone* knowing that information was exchanged and certainly not knowing the content type either.
So if the legislative branch were to be able to issue partisan "do not speak/discuss/acknowledge existence of" as has been the case with the executive branch, how would this help us, The People? To me, it seems as if the politicians are not even pretending to be working in our best interests anymore.
It seems that the "importance hierarchy" has become a directed graph of personal convenience:
Personal->Party->Personal->Party-supporting citizens->dirt->whale shit->other noisy citizens->citizens->the dispossessed.
Mod this post +1 Tired of It All.