Hawking will have his venerable voicebox replaced by one of Canadian manufacture, based on an amalgamation of Geddy Lee and Alex Trebek's voice, which automatically interjects "eh" every 8th word.
Meh, everybody's raising this possibility.... While it is a very real possibility, I think you're all missing the bigger picture here.
What do they make in Canada? Beer, Mounties, snow... oh, and the frikkin Canadarm! The chair is bound to receive upgrades based on this technology - probably a quadrupedal locomotion system and two massive manipulators, all Canadarm-based...
I was talking about Cambridge in the context of text adventure games... You know, 'cause Cambridge, MA is where Infocom started out and all... And someone said if I wasn't talking about England then I should be clear about it... And I was all like, well, we are talking text adventures here, right? So maybe it's reasonable to assume Cambridge, MA?
As it turns out, one of the original text adventures ("Adventure", IIRC) was written in Cambridge, England, so I got to be wrong twice in one discussion.:D Live and learn, eh?
Instead of putting it in to standard orbit around ether the Earth or the moon can we put it into a orbit where it orbits both? That way it could be used as a spaceship traveling between the earth and the moon. It could be refueled and resupplied as it pass around earth. It could then carry passengers to a moonbase or whatever is up there.
I'm not even real clear what you mean by an orbit that orbits both the Earth and Moon...
There are Lagrange points, of course, but I doubt you're thinking of those because while they are "orbits" people normally think of them as being stationary relative to the Earth-moon system...
If an orbit around the Earth is far enough out, it would circle the Moon, too - but that doesn't help you get to the Moon...
If the ISS was orbiting the moon+earth, it would always be going fast enough to get all the way to the moon. Any resupply ship would have to be going the same speed to make contact, which would mean that the resupply ship would also have to be capable of making it all the way to the moon. Which means that things wouldn't be any cheaper.
Just curious, wouldn't it only need to be able to go as fast as the ISS for a much shorter period of time? It seems like that would be cheaper than a vehicle that needed to go that fast all the way to the moon.
Are you joking? Am I gonna get a well-deserved "whoosh" for this reply?
If you're going the same direction and the same speed as something that's orbiting in such a way that it'll get to the moon, then you could climb inside and ride with it to the moon - or you could just chill out and get there on your own. Your speed would continue to match that of the orbiting station, because you would, in fact, be in the same orbit...
ID is not a theory. Please stop perverting that word. A "theory" is a scientific term for a model that is backed by evidence, has not been rejected by evidence, and is falsifiable.
ID is NOT backed by evidence and is NOT falsifiable, thus it is NOT a theory. It is a belief. Evolution can be proved wrong. ID cannot be.
While I think ID is total crap, it is potentially a valid theory. The premise of evolution is that speciation is caused by small, random genetic mutations that occasionally increase survivability. In order to "disprove" evolution, one would have to find evidence of instantaneous, large genetic mutations that are statistically improbable. This is exactly what the ID people argue. The problem with ID is that the evidence is really weak.
What do you think is more likely, A meteor that strikes the earth carrying the first bacteria, or heritability arising from natural chemical reactions? Is the meteor theory valid as a theory?
Bit of a correction first - what you stated is not the premise of evolution, it's merely one theory of how evolution could work. There are others, not all incompatible with each other.
Here's the thing which gets me about this whole thing - and I often find it hard to express this complaint clearly...
Science starts from the idea or observation that something did happen, must have happened, and attempts to find a solution that will fit the available evidence. There is life on Earth and we know it must have started somehow, and we assume there is a reasonable explanation for that.
Intelligent Design basically circumvents this. Rather than starting with "this must have happened, so there must be an explanation" it instead starts with its own premise and tries to substantiate it, mostly by tearing down competing theories. "Science can't sufficiently explain how this biological process could have come to be (never mind the fact that the previous statement may be false) therefore the development of life must have been guided by an intelligence."
I find this apparent negation of the basic model of the world's events disturbing - if things happen not because of an unknown cause-effect relationship but rather, because of an unknown intent of an unknown designer - if we make no assumptions that we can connect pieces of evidence and try to come up with a mechanical explanation that fits the facts, then what can we rely upon in this world?
I hope I've expressed my idea clearly. I have a lot of trouble trying to get this particular point across.
Well, God has to go through the pre-build procedure before He can just type "make"... The pre-build procedure has to set up the makefile to account to variances in the build environment and the environment being built - things like the desired value of pi, the speed of light, and the definitions of the basic units of the SI system....
Buddhism has an interesting viewpoint on issues like this.
You'll notice all kinds of gods in Buddhist iconography and mythology. If you're a Buddhist, you're not expected to believe in any of them. You can if you want, but belief isn't an end in itself. Belief is something that on its own is hard to maintain. You can't be expected to believe in something all the time.
It's this heavy burden of trying to believe in something all the time that is going to prompt the development of the Electric Monk...
This is just yet another way in which Google demonstrates that it is suffering from NIH syndrome. Instead of improving existing tools, they have to go off and re-invent all the bad mistakes of past, including non-relational databases, clunky binary encodings, and a bizarre non-POSIX filesystem.
What exactly is clunky about defining an encoding for variable-length integers? I mean, if you're looking at the example and just writing one integer, it does seem a bit ridiculous to start writing from the least-significant bit, seven bits at a time, with the high bit set on each byte except the last... It seems simpler to just say "here's a four-byte field representing an unsigned integer" and encode it in network byte order...
But you have to consider how that scales for certain cases. Maybe you'll find yourself working with a lot of data sets containing lots and lots of really small numbers, but a few large ones, too. You can serialize that more efficiently if you make it cheaper to write out small numbers, and only moderately more expensive to write out larger ones.
Unicode does roughly the same thing, IIRC. It's just sensible.
Binary encoding, none hierarchy based string list, and simple file serialization are all faster than XML. XML was created flexibility, commonality and human readability not speed. XSL, XQuery, and XPATH along with the DOM or SAX supply out of the box query, transformation, and manipulation capability.
The thing about "human readability" is that, just like any other binary file format (ASCII text is a binary encoding too, remember) it is not intrinsically human-readable, rather it relies upon a proper set of tools to make it human-readable.
The counter-argument here is that, while that's true enough, just about every tool in the world can read ASCII files, right? From Blender to Emacs to a simple paginator like "more"...
But except in simple cases that's not sufficient to actually work with the data. In XML for instance one would ideally like a structural representation of the data, the ability to hide a block at a time to streamline the display, etc. Or if editing you'd at least want simple validation features, maybe the ability to match opening tags with closing ones, etc... In theory you can work the data over in any text editor but in practice you would use something more specialized.
If the same specialization is made available for a compact binary format, then it'll be every bit as "human-readable" as an ASCII-encoded one.
Citizen of the Galaxy, Farmer in the Sky, Have Space Suit will Travel, Starman Jones - all by Heinlein. These are his juveniles and are all good stories, drama and action along with some moralizing about studying hard etc... I read them as a kid and was hooked. The Larry Niven short stories.
Moralizing? In a Heinlein book? No way! I can hardly believe it...
(For the uninitiated: Starship Troopers is about 10% action, 30% story, and 60% Heinlein using the novel as a soapbox for dubious political philosophy...)
Anyway, our local dial-up ISP ran a Unix shell host, including a C compiler. One day I decided to see if they'd patched their system for the F00F bug...
In hindsight, I would say, don't do things like that! It's really not a very good idea.
I think we've all been through the various domesday scenarios: Biosphere II probably being the most well known. I guess there's not much to say about them except remember to bring some extra oxygen...
I want my hoverboard, damnit! And a hover-conversion for my car, if I can afford it... So I'll be almost 40 by then - I'll just have to stay in shape...
Wasn't this a plot point in "Ghost in the Shell: Man-Machine Interface"? Somebody cloned a bunch of pigs with human DNA in them and used them as a secret brain bank connected to the net or something...
Slashdot Mirror
There's lots of movies with references to Waterloo, though they generally deal with this Napoleon guy, I guess he was a bigshot there.
Oh, yeah - like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure! I love waterslides!
Hawking will have his venerable voicebox replaced by one of Canadian manufacture, based on an amalgamation of Geddy Lee and Alex Trebek's voice, which automatically interjects "eh" every 8th word.
Meh, everybody's raising this possibility.... While it is a very real possibility, I think you're all missing the bigger picture here.
What do they make in Canada? Beer, Mounties, snow... oh, and the frikkin Canadarm! The chair is bound to receive upgrades based on this technology - probably a quadrupedal locomotion system and two massive manipulators, all Canadarm-based...
I got that wrong once...
I was talking about Cambridge in the context of text adventure games... You know, 'cause Cambridge, MA is where Infocom started out and all... And someone said if I wasn't talking about England then I should be clear about it... And I was all like, well, we are talking text adventures here, right? So maybe it's reasonable to assume Cambridge, MA?
As it turns out, one of the original text adventures ("Adventure", IIRC) was written in Cambridge, England, so I got to be wrong twice in one discussion. :D Live and learn, eh?
Count on the ACs. We're the only ones left on /. who know what's going on.
P.S. The song is "Mr. Horrible", not "Dr. Horrible".
Hey, the song was released like 18 years ago. Mr. Horrible went to med school since then...
Funny thing...after the dvds of Buffy have been sitting on my shelf for over a year, my sister in law comes over and we start on the 6th season....
Once More with Feeling was awesome...and a problem child considering it plays in at an hour and 5 minutes....it got cut on reruns.
Maybe... But Alyson Hannigan, lovely as she may be, has absolutely no business in a musical of any kind... Just, ouch, man, seriously...
"I'm going to punch you in the face!" (laughter)
Instead of putting it in to standard orbit around ether the Earth or the moon can we put it into a orbit where it orbits both? That way it could be used as a spaceship traveling between the earth and the moon. It could be refueled and resupplied as it pass around earth. It could then carry passengers to a moonbase or whatever is up there.
I'm not even real clear what you mean by an orbit that orbits both the Earth and Moon...
There are Lagrange points, of course, but I doubt you're thinking of those because while they are "orbits" people normally think of them as being stationary relative to the Earth-moon system...
If an orbit around the Earth is far enough out, it would circle the Moon, too - but that doesn't help you get to the Moon...
If the ISS was orbiting the moon+earth, it would always be going fast enough to get all the way to the moon. Any resupply ship would have to be going the same speed to make contact, which would mean that the resupply ship would also have to be capable of making it all the way to the moon. Which means that things wouldn't be any cheaper.
Just curious, wouldn't it only need to be able to go as fast as the ISS for a much shorter period of time? It seems like that would be cheaper than a vehicle that needed to go that fast all the way to the moon.
Are you joking? Am I gonna get a well-deserved "whoosh" for this reply?
If you're going the same direction and the same speed as something that's orbiting in such a way that it'll get to the moon, then you could climb inside and ride with it to the moon - or you could just chill out and get there on your own. Your speed would continue to match that of the orbiting station, because you would, in fact, be in the same orbit...
the idea was to make talk radio accessible to def people.
Like Mos Def and Def Leppard?
I've still not sure what I'm going to do with 20 copies of "Enterprise" that I've been recording on the SciFi channel though.
Delete them?
and for good measure permanently over-write the bits they were stored on with several hundred million repetitions of "NEVER AGAIN"...
ID is not a theory. Please stop perverting that word. A "theory" is a scientific term for a model that is backed by evidence, has not been rejected by evidence, and is falsifiable.
ID is NOT backed by evidence and is NOT falsifiable, thus it is NOT a theory. It is a belief. Evolution can be proved wrong. ID cannot be.
While I think ID is total crap, it is potentially a valid theory. The premise of evolution is that speciation is caused by small, random genetic mutations that occasionally increase survivability. In order to "disprove" evolution, one would have to find evidence of instantaneous, large genetic mutations that are statistically improbable. This is exactly what the ID people argue. The problem with ID is that the evidence is really weak.
What do you think is more likely, A meteor that strikes the earth carrying the first bacteria, or heritability arising from natural chemical reactions? Is the meteor theory valid as a theory?
Bit of a correction first - what you stated is not the premise of evolution, it's merely one theory of how evolution could work. There are others, not all incompatible with each other.
Here's the thing which gets me about this whole thing - and I often find it hard to express this complaint clearly...
Science starts from the idea or observation that something did happen, must have happened, and attempts to find a solution that will fit the available evidence. There is life on Earth and we know it must have started somehow, and we assume there is a reasonable explanation for that.
Intelligent Design basically circumvents this. Rather than starting with "this must have happened, so there must be an explanation" it instead starts with its own premise and tries to substantiate it, mostly by tearing down competing theories. "Science can't sufficiently explain how this biological process could have come to be (never mind the fact that the previous statement may be false) therefore the development of life must have been guided by an intelligence."
I find this apparent negation of the basic model of the world's events disturbing - if things happen not because of an unknown cause-effect relationship but rather, because of an unknown intent of an unknown designer - if we make no assumptions that we can connect pieces of evidence and try to come up with a mechanical explanation that fits the facts, then what can we rely upon in this world?
I hope I've expressed my idea clearly. I have a lot of trouble trying to get this particular point across.
Why don't the IDers slip in a different spin:
~/god# make
~/god# ./big-bang
** universe created
** planet Earth instantiated
** animal life evolving
** humans emerging ...
Well, God has to go through the pre-build procedure before He can just type "make"... The pre-build procedure has to set up the makefile to account to variances in the build environment and the environment being built - things like the desired value of pi, the speed of light, and the definitions of the basic units of the SI system....
Buddhism has an interesting viewpoint on issues like this.
You'll notice all kinds of gods in Buddhist iconography and mythology. If you're a Buddhist, you're not expected to believe in any of them. You can if you want, but belief isn't an end in itself. Belief is something that on its own is hard to maintain. You can't be expected to believe in something all the time.
It's this heavy burden of trying to believe in something all the time that is going to prompt the development of the Electric Monk...
So its a new Web 2.0-esque masturbation party where people can chat with avatars, instead of on AIM or god forbid, calling them on the phone.
Do you have a lawn, and if so, any particular thoughts on where I should be in relation to it?
This is just yet another way in which Google demonstrates that it is suffering from NIH syndrome. Instead of improving existing tools, they have to go off and re-invent all the bad mistakes of past, including non-relational databases, clunky binary encodings, and a bizarre non-POSIX filesystem.
What exactly is clunky about defining an encoding for variable-length integers? I mean, if you're looking at the example and just writing one integer, it does seem a bit ridiculous to start writing from the least-significant bit, seven bits at a time, with the high bit set on each byte except the last... It seems simpler to just say "here's a four-byte field representing an unsigned integer" and encode it in network byte order...
But you have to consider how that scales for certain cases. Maybe you'll find yourself working with a lot of data sets containing lots and lots of really small numbers, but a few large ones, too. You can serialize that more efficiently if you make it cheaper to write out small numbers, and only moderately more expensive to write out larger ones.
Unicode does roughly the same thing, IIRC. It's just sensible.
Binary encoding, none hierarchy based string list,
and simple file serialization are all faster than XML.
XML was created flexibility, commonality and human readability not speed. XSL, XQuery, and XPATH along with the DOM or SAX supply out of the box query, transformation, and manipulation capability.
The thing about "human readability" is that, just like any other binary file format (ASCII text is a binary encoding too, remember) it is not intrinsically human-readable, rather it relies upon a proper set of tools to make it human-readable.
The counter-argument here is that, while that's true enough, just about every tool in the world can read ASCII files, right? From Blender to Emacs to a simple paginator like "more"...
But except in simple cases that's not sufficient to actually work with the data. In XML for instance one would ideally like a structural representation of the data, the ability to hide a block at a time to streamline the display, etc. Or if editing you'd at least want simple validation features, maybe the ability to match opening tags with closing ones, etc... In theory you can work the data over in any text editor but in practice you would use something more specialized.
If the same specialization is made available for a compact binary format, then it'll be every bit as "human-readable" as an ASCII-encoded one.
Uh, no. Google officially deems perl unmaintainable, and its internal use is completely verboten.
That is so cool...
Citizen of the Galaxy, Farmer in the Sky, Have Space Suit will Travel, Starman Jones - all by Heinlein. These are his juveniles and are all good stories, drama and action along with some moralizing about studying hard etc ... I read them as a kid and was hooked. The Larry Niven short stories.
Moralizing? In a Heinlein book? No way! I can hardly believe it...
(For the uninitiated: Starship Troopers is about 10% action, 30% story, and 60% Heinlein using the novel as a soapbox for dubious political philosophy...)
Yeah, funny story about that, actually...
Mind you, I was a dumb kid at the time...
Anyway, our local dial-up ISP ran a Unix shell host, including a C compiler. One day I decided to see if they'd patched their system for the F00F bug...
In hindsight, I would say, don't do things like that! It's really not a very good idea.
Larrabee is also the only agent dumber than Max...
I think we've all been through the various domesday scenarios: Biosphere II probably being the most well known. I guess there's not much to say about them except remember to bring some extra oxygen...
You know, I can't claim to know everything about this case, but I think there's a fair chance that Hans really was the killer all along!
I want my hoverboard, damnit! And a hover-conversion for my car, if I can afford it... So I'll be almost 40 by then - I'll just have to stay in shape...
Britain == Island of Dr. Moroe?
Moreau.
Wasn't this a plot point in "Ghost in the Shell: Man-Machine Interface"? Somebody cloned a bunch of pigs with human DNA in them and used them as a secret brain bank connected to the net or something...