Price page is here but it looks like it's around $900.
Yeah, but these are retail pricing. If you're using the scopes for the classroom (and especially if you're purchasing them with a school PO), they should be willing to give you a really nice discount. Back when 1GB drives (the full-height 5.25inch 1Gig drives) were around $3,000, we were regularly getting them at 1/3 the retail price. That sort of discount would put this thing in the requestor's price range.
Death and taxes may be inevitable, but even those can sometimes be negotiated.
" This means that you can generally expect a top average speed of about half (best case) what a really fast glider can sustain."
Why? who said that you cannot deflate the balloon? it is a rigid airship design after all. Vent or compress all of the hydrogen/helium.
near zero speed while rising, full speed while falling. Average: about half the full glide speed.
Beyond that, they seem to be expecting a month of free lunches in their disign... For example, they intend to, at different part of the flight have the shells be both pressurized and at a partial vacuum. If you presume that the shells are 50 feet in diameter, and ribs every 5 feet, I'm calculating that each rib will need to hold about 1500 pounds of tensile and compressive stress at different times.
On the other hand, a 5foot thick, 50foot disc of helium only weighs about
5feet*(25feet)^2pi*
0.1787 kg/m^3
=>
110 pounds at 1 atmosphere (less at altitude)
(nb: units(1) is your friend)
so a 5PSI differential (1/3 atm) is only going to give you a gross 36 pounds, of lift differential, but at the cost of 150 feet of ribbing that needs to withstand ~1500 pounds of stress (in both directions)which means that the entire bracing structure has to weigh less than 4 ounces/foot of circumference. (this includes the added costs of airtighting the skin. and horizontal braces) to get any net buoyancy out of the process.
When you compare that to the buoyancy that you get just out of using helium (~640lb/cell) I don't see why they seriously consider the process.
Even after reading the article, I still think you're safe here.
The seem to be expecting some serious speeds here...
In their 'technology' section they claim to be expecting a first tetherless flight of about 100 MPH... Now, excuse me for being a sceptic, but the sea gliders are getting speeds of well under 10MPH,
balloons normally rise at speeds of only a couple of miles per hour, so the only way you could hope to get speeds in the two (much less three) digit range would be if you were to almost entirely deflate the balloons and just become a pure glider.
This means that you can generally expect a top average speed of about half (best case) what a really fast glider can sustain. (what's the world record for the fastest sustained glider flight?)
Of course, if they're ever built, the yo-yo traffic patterns of these things are gonna make them the bane of air controllers, and I can just see a queue of them sprialing above every thermal source in the area.
Another question I come up with is whether strengthening (and airtighting) the pontoons to survive any appreciable pressure differential would cause more weight then the boyance gains from that pressure differential?
For a technology company with grandiose plans, I see very few signs of them doing any serious engineering work.
I for one actually would rather have a rich politician only in that... can't be "bought".
Rich people tend to be rich because they like collecting money. I wouldn't bet my life that someone who ammassed a personal worth of $100M wouldn't sell his sister for a spare $2M.
Also: A borderline psychopath with millions of dollars doesn't have a conscience to vote by.
However, don't all linux distributions come with BASH?
No they don't. Some distributions (mostly linux- on- a- floppy and such) come with busybox, or other such mini-shells.
Truth of the matter is, for some special-purpose distributions, you don't really need a commandline shell at all... Just the turnkey application that the distribution is meant to run.
Maybe, but the power to turn the current two-party system into a multiparty-system rests in the hands of the two parties in power. Why on earth would they give any power away, ever?
That's part of why it's important to vote for 3rd party candidates. It encourages the Dems and Reps to consider something better than the current system if they can never figure out who's gonna win because of the 'spoiler' candidates.
Best case is, the 'spoiler' gets in and forces a change.
If everything was shut down, how come http://www.cithosting.com/ is still up and running? If all the equipment was taken, wouldn't the web page that's being shown on that site be gone...shouldn't it be hard to connect to anything on that site at all?
A $300 cheap desktop box could be bought from your corner computer store, and get you back online with a minimal web page in a couple of hours. That way, at least, you can inform your customers about what went wrong. Then, unless you've got a whackload of spare cash floating around, you're pretty much forced to wait until the FBI gives you your equipment back before you can bring most of your customers back up.
I don't know why your were modded down to -1, but I had the same thought.
When you see something modded at 0 or -1 with no reason, check the poster's history [[
OPTiX_iNC (691070) ]] , or click on the comment number [[
(#8372157) ]] for more info...
In this case, it looks like OPTiX_iNC has a history of being modded as troll. This may be because he likes to insert racist epithets into his comments.
In any case, +6 moderation on this comment might do his karma some good. He should at least be posting at a base 0 for a little while.
___
and as for the late posting, I can see it being hard to get the word out when your servers are all in the hands of the FBI ( and your bank is looking for a real good explanation before they'll give you an extra loan ).
Dispatchers consider a 911 call with no voice at the other end to be a serious call. It could be somebody so sick that they can barely dial, or it could be somebody under SERIOUS threat --- unable to say precisely what's wrong.
If you go the the door after a 'no voice' 911 call and try to convince them that all is OK without a reasonable explanation of why the call took place, they do have the right to break down the door and make sure you're not holding somebody against their will (That question went to the Supreme Court of Canada).
Of course, this doesn't work if the police don't know where in the world, the call came from. That's why the FCC wants some sort of locator service so that if they get a 911 call on VOIP, they can still send emergency services to the site.
This camera captures 15 seconds of video... Card goes in, activate a 15 second video grab... that should be more than enough to catch the 4-6 digit code most people use. (usually 5 seconds or less). the 500MB card means that you could save a LOT of those videos...
The biggest thing seems to have been the size...Once they ripped it out of it's housing, the camera wasn't much bigger than the batteries.
At $1000 per setup, thay'd only have to catch 2 cards to get their money back. After that, the rest is profit.
While this research may show that Linux servers are over-represented in overt acts of hacking,
NO.
What this research says is that you actually have to work at breaking into a Linux system, wereas Windows is more open to automated attack methods. (I mean, why take the hard route?)
I'm sorry... If you're asking that question, then you must obviously be infra-red. This information is not avaialable at your security clearance. Any further attempted breach of your security level will result in immediate termination.
MAD magazine did a sendup of this idea (in movie theatres) about a generation or so ago. It's been tossed about many times and seems to have never been a hit.
If I want to smell something while playing a game, I can always just wait for my cat to crawl up on my lap and stick his butt in my face.
For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat/dev/rand (may need to try more than once)
No. You don't need to do it more than once, but you may need to wait a while.
Once, after 8 months of constant generation, I got almost the entire 3rd act of Hamlet, but it was missing a scene, so I had to throw it out.
I used the pattern of incomming spam to a friend's mail server to seed the random number generator. Now that spammers are using random words as filter fowls, I can even use the spams themselves.
If you want to help the project, send all of your spam to input@shapespearegenerator.com
Re:May have? May have?!?!
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
... Everything is "may have," or "could be," or "might be."
Well, if you'd like to walk over and verify it personally, be my guest.
This is, essentially the motto of Paranoia, but there's an extended (and illegal) version of that
The computer is your friend
The computer is your only friend
Trust the computer
Trust only the computer,
and remember: in all likelihood the computer wants you DEAD
Basically, every player starts out with 6 clones, a couple of mutant abilities and membership in a small handful of secret societies.
You (usually) start at one of the lowest security ranges (InfraRed) and your goal is to climb to the highest security range (Ultraviolet -> programmer) -- mostly by fixing the damage done by secret societies, commies and mutants.
Oh, and did I mention that exposure of either your mutant abilities or your secret society membership is cause for instant termination??
In any case, my favorite mission occured with a couple dozen of us playing at a science-fiction convention (Orycon, if I remember corectly). Within 45 minutes we had about 8 dead and another dozen or so seriously wounded.
Oh, and just to keep on subject:
SNOBOL is considered to be the parent of unix regexpressions and awk which led to Perl. Unfortunately, the children inherited a much castrated version of snobol's string manipulation capabilities which have only now been reasonably addressed in perl6.
If nothing else, I suggest that people interested in the history of pattern matching take a good look at snobol.
I haven't seen much of the new perl expressions lately, but they're gonna have to be pretty hot to beat what
SNOBOL (spitbol) used to do,
Spitbol could do things like:
stringtomatch "this is some text" skipto("(") $ pre_paren ( funcof(pre_paren)$parenmatch = replacement(parenpatch) )
In this case, the $ is an immediate assignment of the match from skipto("(") (roughly equivalent to/([^(]*)/ . ) funcof is then called with the newly assigned variable (pre_paren), and it's result is inserted as an expression to complete the match.
then whatever matched funcof(pre_paren) is replaced by the results of replacement(parenmatch)
skipto is a builtin, but funcof and replacement would have to be user-defined (and they can be defined on the fly).
Perl6 appears to have similar functionality, but (IMHO) I don't think it's going to be quite as nice as the SNOBOL syntax.
Unfortunately, I'm not good enough at compiler design to write my own spitbol interpreter, or I would.
The one problem with snobol is that it was created before the idea of structured programming came along, so it is goto-structured... (although somebody then came up with ratbol which was essentially a preprocessor to provide RATional structure to snoBOL)
In my view, Eben Moglen's comments are along the lines of a bug fix proposition. He's not saying that the new Apache license ia bad, wrong and evil... just that it would appear to have likely unintended and unwanted effects (legal equivalent to bugs), and he is suggesting changes (but-fixes).
Better to fix the problem now, than to wait until an Open Source company gets 'owned' (possibly quit literally) by another, much less scrupulous company taking advantage of the bugs that Eben has noted.
Not only is he not dissing section 5 outright, but he's suggesting that the approach taken may be folded into future versions of the GPL. It's pretty hard to have a more friendly 'disagreement' than that.
Anybody who has to make it clear that, whatever they are, they're not a virus, is somebody that I'm gonna be very worried about installing their software.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but these are retail pricing. If you're using the scopes for the classroom (and especially if you're purchasing them with a school PO), they should be willing to give you a really nice discount. Back when 1GB drives (the full-height 5.25inch 1Gig drives) were around $3,000, we were regularly getting them at 1/3 the retail price. That sort of discount would put this thing in the requestor's price range.
Death and taxes may be inevitable, but even those can sometimes be negotiated.
Why? who said that you cannot deflate the balloon? it is a rigid airship design after all. Vent or compress all of the hydrogen/helium.
near zero speed while rising, full speed while falling. Average: about half the full glide speed.
Beyond that, they seem to be expecting a month of free lunches in their disign... For example, they intend to, at different part of the flight have the shells be both pressurized and at a partial vacuum. If you presume that the shells are 50 feet in diameter, and ribs every 5 feet, I'm calculating that each rib will need to hold about 1500 pounds of tensile and compressive stress at different times. On the other hand, a 5foot thick, 50foot disc of helium only weighs about
5feet*(25feet)^2pi* 0.1787 kg/m^3 => 110 pounds at 1 atmosphere (less at altitude)
(nb: units(1) is your friend)
so a 5PSI differential (1/3 atm) is only going to give you a gross 36 pounds, of lift differential, but at the cost of 150 feet of ribbing that needs to withstand ~1500 pounds of stress (in both directions)which means that the entire bracing structure has to weigh less than 4 ounces/foot of circumference. (this includes the added costs of airtighting the skin. and horizontal braces) to get any net buoyancy out of the process.
When you compare that to the buoyancy that you get just out of using helium (~640lb/cell) I don't see why they seriously consider the process.
The seem to be expecting some serious speeds here...
In their 'technology' section they claim to be expecting a first tetherless flight of about 100 MPH... Now, excuse me for being a sceptic, but the sea gliders are getting speeds of well under 10MPH,
balloons normally rise at speeds of only a couple of miles per hour, so the only way you could hope to get speeds in the two (much less three) digit range would be if you were to almost entirely deflate the balloons and just become a pure glider.
This means that you can generally expect a top average speed of about half (best case) what a really fast glider can sustain. (what's the world record for the fastest sustained glider flight?)
Of course, if they're ever built, the yo-yo traffic patterns of these things are gonna make them the bane of air controllers, and I can just see a queue of them sprialing above every thermal source in the area.
Another question I come up with is whether strengthening (and airtighting) the pontoons to survive any appreciable pressure differential would cause more weight then the boyance gains from that pressure differential?
For a technology company with grandiose plans, I see very few signs of them doing any serious engineering work.
What do you say to a person like that?
RIP (Rest In Pieces)
Rich people tend to be rich because they like collecting money. I wouldn't bet my life that someone who ammassed a personal worth of $100M wouldn't sell his sister for a spare $2M.
Also: A borderline psychopath with millions of dollars doesn't have a conscience to vote by.
No they don't. Some distributions (mostly linux- on- a- floppy and such) come with busybox, or other such mini-shells.
Truth of the matter is, for some special-purpose distributions, you don't really need a commandline shell at all... Just the turnkey application that the distribution is meant to run.
That's part of why it's important to vote for 3rd party candidates. It encourages the Dems and Reps to consider something better than the current system if they can never figure out who's gonna win because of the 'spoiler' candidates.
Best case is, the 'spoiler' gets in and forces a change.
A $300 cheap desktop box could be bought from your corner computer store, and get you back online with a minimal web page in a couple of hours. That way, at least, you can inform your customers about what went wrong. Then, unless you've got a whackload of spare cash floating around, you're pretty much forced to wait until the FBI gives you your equipment back before you can bring most of your customers back up.
When you see something modded at 0 or -1 with no reason, check the poster's history [[ OPTiX_iNC (691070) ]] , or click on the comment number [[ (#8372157) ]] for more info...
In this case, it looks like OPTiX_iNC has a history of being modded as troll. This may be because he likes to insert racist epithets into his comments.
In any case, +6 moderation on this comment might do his karma some good. He should at least be posting at a base 0 for a little while.
___
and as for the late posting, I can see it being hard to get the word out when your servers are all in the hands of the FBI ( and your bank is looking for a real good explanation before they'll give you an extra loan ).
If you go the the door after a 'no voice' 911 call and try to convince them that all is OK without a reasonable explanation of why the call took place, they do have the right to break down the door and make sure you're not holding somebody against their will (That question went to the Supreme Court of Canada).
Of course, this doesn't work if the police don't know where in the world, the call came from. That's why the FCC wants some sort of locator service so that if they get a 911 call on VOIP, they can still send emergency services to the site.
The biggest thing seems to have been the size...Once they ripped it out of it's housing, the camera wasn't much bigger than the batteries.
At $1000 per setup, thay'd only have to catch 2 cards to get their money back. After that, the rest is profit.
NO.
What this research says is that you actually have to work at breaking into a Linux system, wereas Windows is more open to automated attack methods. (I mean, why take the hard route?)
Ah, so that's why, I lost all of that money on my last trip!
Please take your happy pill.
If I want to smell something while playing a game, I can always just wait for my cat to crawl up on my lap and stick his butt in my face.
No. You don't need to do it more than once, but you may need to wait a while.
Once, after 8 months of constant generation, I got almost the entire 3rd act of Hamlet, but it was missing a scene, so I had to throw it out.
I used the pattern of incomming spam to a friend's mail server to seed the random number generator. Now that spammers are using random words as filter fowls, I can even use the spams themselves.
If you want to help the project, send all of your spam to input@shapespearegenerator.com
Well, if you'd like to walk over and verify it personally, be my guest.
- The computer is your friend
Basically, every player starts out with 6 clones, a couple of mutant abilities and membership in a small handful of secret societies.The computer is your only friend
Trust the computer
Trust only the computer,
and remember: in all likelihood the computer wants you DEAD
You (usually) start at one of the lowest security ranges (InfraRed) and your goal is to climb to the highest security range (Ultraviolet -> programmer) -- mostly by fixing the damage done by secret societies, commies and mutants.
Oh, and did I mention that exposure of either your mutant abilities or your secret society membership is cause for instant termination??
In any case, my favorite mission occured with a couple dozen of us playing at a science-fiction convention (Orycon, if I remember corectly). Within 45 minutes we had about 8 dead and another dozen or so seriously wounded.
We hadn't made it out of the briefing room.
Oh, and just to keep on subject:
SNOBOL is considered to be the parent of unix regexpressions and awk which led to Perl. Unfortunately, the children inherited a much castrated version of snobol's string manipulation capabilities which have only now been reasonably addressed in perl6.
If nothing else, I suggest that people interested in the history of pattern matching take a good look at snobol.
Spitbol could do things like:
- stringtomatch "this is some text" skipto("(") $ pre_paren ( funcof(pre_paren)$parenmatch = replacement(parenpatch) )
In this case, the $ is an immediate assignment of the match from skipto("(") (roughly equivalent tofuncof is then called with the newly assigned variable (pre_paren), and it's result is inserted as an expression to complete the match.
then whatever matched funcof(pre_paren) is replaced by the results of replacement(parenmatch)
skipto is a builtin, but funcof and replacement would have to be user-defined (and they can be defined on the fly).
Perl6 appears to have similar functionality, but (IMHO) I don't think it's going to be quite as nice as the SNOBOL syntax.
Unfortunately, I'm not good enough at compiler design to write my own spitbol interpreter, or I would.
The one problem with snobol is that it was created before the idea of structured programming came along, so it is goto-structured... (although somebody then came up with ratbol which was essentially a preprocessor to provide RATional structure to snoBOL)
Better to fix the problem now, than to wait until an Open Source company gets 'owned' (possibly quit literally) by another, much less scrupulous company taking advantage of the bugs that Eben has noted.
Not only is he not dissing section 5 outright, but he's suggesting that the approach taken may be folded into future versions of the GPL. It's pretty hard to have a more friendly 'disagreement' than that.
Alyson's just a hot-bod.
Anybody who has to make it clear that, whatever they are, they're not a virus, is somebody that I'm gonna be very worried about installing their software.
I'd go so far as to say eastern Canadian, but I wouldn't bet much more than lunch money on him being a maritimer.