What general relativity does rule out is FTL that works the way the Millenium Falcon does.
Which is, uh, which way exactly? Yes, I'm pretty sure that general relativity rules out "rotoscoped streaky stars with a meter-long model of the ship bluescreened on top" as a way to travel between star systems.
Much fantasy could very well be explained through 'sufficiently advanced' technology. (A good example of is the Girl from Tomorrow books, where they wore a headband called a "transducer" which bestowed psychic powers. Soft sci-fi 20 years ago, but modern EEG processing could build something damn similar today.)
Contrariwise, much 'hard SF' (except possibly for the hardest of the hard) accepts one or two "gimmes" to make the story work. Take the Ringworld books, for example - apart from a few things (Tree-of-life, Scrith, General Products hulls, and time manipulation fields iirc) they stick pretty much with practical reality.
Sorry, you're correct. One of these things is not like the other ones, and all that.:P I do maintain that the German 'portal' and the Latin-based one probably (I couldn't find evidence either way) share a common ancestor.
BTW, my own pet peeve is about the limitation for moving aerodynamic components - i.e. the ban on under-body suction fans and the like used to increase down-force in old Lotuses. Now that was damn safety feature if I ever saw one, why'd they get rid of it? Never mind. I don't want to know.
The same reason they limit the wing area available now - that the cars were getting 'too fast' and drivers started dying left right and center. This happens every 10 years or so, and they add some arbitrary restriction ("no engines above 3L", "no forced induction", "no ram scoop", "no independent braking", "wet weather tyres in all races") to slow the cars down to the point where they stop jellifying one or more drivers every season. Fatal crashes are bad because they hurt sponsorship.
It's like there was a competition between two CPU manufacturers, and some governing body started saying stupid things like "you can only use single data rate RAM" and "no automatic speed step technology", instead of just saying "as long as it doesn't kill anyone you're OK".
I'm not sure if this still works, but I the major reason to spam jump and circle strafe while PvPing on a melee character (such as a warrior) was that the your velocity changes instantaneously when you land, causing the movement prediction code to break a little, making you appear to jump around crazily.
Yeah, the best bit was when people bugged out like this (it happened to me once) and then got reported for speed hacking (luckily this didn't happen to me) because the gryphons moved twice the speed of the fastest obtainable player mounts at the time.
There're also several reported cases early on where they banned people for "hacking" when bad lag caused them to appear to teleport.
While every player's computer is expected to run the shots/tanks physics engine AND render the display in real time, I've asked about server sanity checks and found that they'd be a major burden.
I've always heard that excuse too ("oh but the server will bog down if we do too much on it"). It's pants. Unless the server's entirely written in VBScript AND it's running on a 486, there should be no problems at all doing at least basic sanity checks. IMO it's just lazy programmers not wanting to bother with checks when "it works fine as is" until people start trying to cheat.
The golden rule of *any* client/server app with apps distributed to the world at large is never trust the client. Treat the client as hostile, because for all you know, it may be. That's more work, though, so most developers don't seem to bother.:/
That game was awesome! Turned into TrackMania, I think (or at least that's a very very similar, modernised game). I seem to recall the F1 car in Stunts had a problem where if you spun out above a certain speed it would shoot up in the air. Many good times with that game, I really should download TrackMania just to see if it's as good.:)
I somehow misread your sig as "Make an ugly gurl cute!"
And from the Spam folder of my gmail account - "You can wear tight tops and mini skirts again." Thanks, but I don't think anyone's EVER wanted to see me in a miniskirt.:P
I wonder how many years this regime has left in it. I mean, it can't last forever. They're pissing away all their money on that massive army, and living on handouts from the likes of China.
Are you talking about North Korea, or the USA?
Well, given that U.S. citizens show no evidence whatsoever of starving to death, I'm guessing that he means North Korea...
We only know they failed if we know what they were aiming at. If I were going to test an ICBM I sure as hell wouldn't aim it at Smallville. I'd peg some featureless spot, say in the middle of the Pacific ocean, and see if I could hit *that* accurately.
True, but I think the vet in question wants the actual box to last 15 years, so the tips above are useful too.
I'd just add that you should try to stay away from anything with electrolytic capacitors on it. They're usually the first thing to go - these days some motherboards are advertised as "no electro caps".
Let's say you populate your infrastructure with 1,000 2.4" SSD's with a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours. In theory, you can assume that you're going to have one drive fail every 1,000 hours.
Erm, no. For starters, drive failures aren't uniformly distributed between installation and some arbitrary end-of-life cutoff. All you can say in your example is that if you sum up the total life of each of those 1000 SSDs and then divide by 1000, you'll get ~1000000.
What the GP was saying was that the quoted MTBF was patently ridiculous. Most hard drives will die long before they're 10 years old, even in home usage let alone server drives that get pounded 24/7. 80 years is at least an order of magnitude too optimistic.
I believe EEPROMs use the same basic storage mechanism as Flash memory; the difference being that Flash can only be erased blockwise rather than bytewise, and consequently allows higher memory density due to fewer erase circuits. I know EEPROMs that I've used in the past have much lower erase limits than the numbers quoted for Flash these days - usually between 100 and 10,000 erase cycles.
I'd suggest having a few KB of flash ('index sector flash', ISF) set aside for storing the address of the current location of the index. When erased, the whole ISF would be zeroed, and every time the index is written to a new sector, the sector is appended to the ISF. The current location of the index is the last non-zero sector ID in the ISF. This way the ISF only needs erasing every few thousand writes, and the system scales easily to match the ISF lifetime to the wear-levelled life of the rest of the drive.
Oh, definitely, fuel should be limited to normal unleaded (or battery power). I sort of meant to imply with the "do as much research as you want" that materials engineering and soforth would not be included in the per-vehicle production cost, as long as they're not trying to present "one General Products F1 hull, sale price $1.00" as the result of their research (unless they can produce as many of such as the general public want to buy for $1, of course).
The limits that really annoy me are the technologically arbitrary ones like "the air intake must be 1/4 in sq" and "you may not have more than 4sqft (or whatever) of aerodynamic surface". That's like pacing with horses - sure, it slows them down but in the end it's just a retarded, artificially stupidified way to use available resources. I'd like to see rules that sculpt the sport into the ultimate R&D environment for road cars, instead of rules that divorce it further from on-road reality at every turn.
Sorry to hijack, but your mention of F1 and their stupid technical limitations really hit a nerve. That's my biggest pet hate about F1 - they keep trying to slow the cars down and make them safer by imposing arbitrary limits on various components. What they should do is impose a cost cap on the cars. Do as much research as you want, but the car itself has to be buildable for $100k. The next year, drop that to $80k. Eventually you have a vehicle that is at once the pinnacle of automotive excellence, and available for a decent price from a dealer, and better yet - the technology would be easily adaptable by passenger cars. Antilock brakes, seat belts, traction control, most technology in modern cars was developed for F1. If we could speed up the transition process then that would be the best thing possible for the automotive industry as a whole.
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What general relativity does rule out is FTL that works the way the Millenium Falcon does.
Which is, uh, which way exactly? Yes, I'm pretty sure that general relativity rules out "rotoscoped streaky stars with a meter-long model of the ship bluescreened on top" as a way to travel between star systems.
Much fantasy could very well be explained through 'sufficiently advanced' technology. (A good example of is the Girl from Tomorrow books, where they wore a headband called a "transducer" which bestowed psychic powers. Soft sci-fi 20 years ago, but modern EEG processing could build something damn similar today.)
Contrariwise, much 'hard SF' (except possibly for the hardest of the hard) accepts one or two "gimmes" to make the story work. Take the Ringworld books, for example - apart from a few things (Tree-of-life, Scrith, General Products hulls, and time manipulation fields iirc) they stick pretty much with practical reality.
Sorry, you're correct. One of these things is not like the other ones, and all that. :P I do maintain that the German 'portal' and the Latin-based one probably (I couldn't find evidence either way) share a common ancestor.
And I'm pretty sure portals existed before sci-fi.
Only in Latin-speaking (or derived languages such as German, French, Italian) countries. Nowadays we just call 'em "doors".
Well, that, and the phrase "I aint a half-bad lookin' ape!".
BTW, my own pet peeve is about the limitation for moving aerodynamic components - i.e. the ban on under-body suction fans and the like used to increase down-force in old Lotuses. Now that was damn safety feature if I ever saw one, why'd they get rid of it? Never mind. I don't want to know.
The same reason they limit the wing area available now - that the cars were getting 'too fast' and drivers started dying left right and center. This happens every 10 years or so, and they add some arbitrary restriction ("no engines above 3L", "no forced induction", "no ram scoop", "no independent braking", "wet weather tyres in all races") to slow the cars down to the point where they stop jellifying one or more drivers every season. Fatal crashes are bad because they hurt sponsorship.
It's like there was a competition between two CPU manufacturers, and some governing body started saying stupid things like "you can only use single data rate RAM" and "no automatic speed step technology", instead of just saying "as long as it doesn't kill anyone you're OK".
I'm not sure if this still works, but I the major reason to spam jump and circle strafe while PvPing on a melee character (such as a warrior) was that the your velocity changes instantaneously when you land, causing the movement prediction code to break a little, making you appear to jump around crazily.
Yeah, the best bit was when people bugged out like this (it happened to me once) and then got reported for speed hacking (luckily this didn't happen to me) because the gryphons moved twice the speed of the fastest obtainable player mounts at the time.
There're also several reported cases early on where they banned people for "hacking" when bad lag caused them to appear to teleport.
While every player's computer is expected to run the shots/tanks physics engine AND render the display in real time, I've asked about server sanity checks and found that they'd be a major burden.
I've always heard that excuse too ("oh but the server will bog down if we do too much on it"). It's pants. Unless the server's entirely written in VBScript AND it's running on a 486, there should be no problems at all doing at least basic sanity checks. IMO it's just lazy programmers not wanting to bother with checks when "it works fine as is" until people start trying to cheat.
:/
The golden rule of *any* client/server app with apps distributed to the world at large is never trust the client. Treat the client as hostile, because for all you know, it may be. That's more work, though, so most developers don't seem to bother.
That game was awesome! Turned into TrackMania, I think (or at least that's a very very similar, modernised game). I seem to recall the F1 car in Stunts had a problem where if you spun out above a certain speed it would shoot up in the air. Many good times with that game, I really should download TrackMania just to see if it's as good. :)
I somehow misread your sig as "Make an ugly gurl cute!"
:P
And from the Spam folder of my gmail account - "You can wear tight tops and mini skirts again." Thanks, but I don't think anyone's EVER wanted to see me in a miniskirt.
"How to attract men with large breasts"
I dunno... be female and hang out in Games Workshop? :P
Better than it was, though, innit? :P
Are you talking about North Korea, or the USA?
Well, given that U.S. citizens show no evidence whatsoever of starving to death, I'm guessing that he means North Korea...
Disclaimer: I lived in Korea.
So wait, are you being infolmative or was that just govelment plopaganda? :P
Ah, but he keeps busy. Do you have ANY F**KING IDEA how busy he is?
If he had a magic button right now that would nuke the US, do you think he'd even hesitate before pressing it?
Of course he would! A guy's gotta get his cognac somewhere...
Fail.
We only know they failed if we know what they were aiming at. If I were going to test an ICBM I sure as hell wouldn't aim it at Smallville. I'd peg some featureless spot, say in the middle of the Pacific ocean, and see if I could hit *that* accurately.
... has toray raunched a grorious missire!
True, but I think the vet in question wants the actual box to last 15 years, so the tips above are useful too.
I'd just add that you should try to stay away from anything with electrolytic capacitors on it. They're usually the first thing to go - these days some motherboards are advertised as "no electro caps".
Let's say you populate your infrastructure with 1,000 2.4" SSD's with a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours. In theory, you can assume that you're going to have one drive fail every 1,000 hours.
Erm, no. For starters, drive failures aren't uniformly distributed between installation and some arbitrary end-of-life cutoff. All you can say in your example is that if you sum up the total life of each of those 1000 SSDs and then divide by 1000, you'll get ~1000000.
What the GP was saying was that the quoted MTBF was patently ridiculous. Most hard drives will die long before they're 10 years old, even in home usage let alone server drives that get pounded 24/7. 80 years is at least an order of magnitude too optimistic.
I believe EEPROMs use the same basic storage mechanism as Flash memory; the difference being that Flash can only be erased blockwise rather than bytewise, and consequently allows higher memory density due to fewer erase circuits. I know EEPROMs that I've used in the past have much lower erase limits than the numbers quoted for Flash these days - usually between 100 and 10,000 erase cycles.
I'd suggest having a few KB of flash ('index sector flash', ISF) set aside for storing the address of the current location of the index. When erased, the whole ISF would be zeroed, and every time the index is written to a new sector, the sector is appended to the ISF. The current location of the index is the last non-zero sector ID in the ISF. This way the ISF only needs erasing every few thousand writes, and the system scales easily to match the ISF lifetime to the wear-levelled life of the rest of the drive.
They decided to change the meaning of the legal boilerplate, without, however, changing the words used in the document.
Wha? I'm obviously not a lawyer but that sounds pretty strange.
Oh, definitely, fuel should be limited to normal unleaded (or battery power). I sort of meant to imply with the "do as much research as you want" that materials engineering and soforth would not be included in the per-vehicle production cost, as long as they're not trying to present "one General Products F1 hull, sale price $1.00" as the result of their research (unless they can produce as many of such as the general public want to buy for $1, of course).
The limits that really annoy me are the technologically arbitrary ones like "the air intake must be 1/4 in sq" and "you may not have more than 4sqft (or whatever) of aerodynamic surface". That's like pacing with horses - sure, it slows them down but in the end it's just a retarded, artificially stupidified way to use available resources. I'd like to see rules that sculpt the sport into the ultimate R&D environment for road cars, instead of rules that divorce it further from on-road reality at every turn.
Sorry to hijack, but your mention of F1 and their stupid technical limitations really hit a nerve. That's my biggest pet hate about F1 - they keep trying to slow the cars down and make them safer by imposing arbitrary limits on various components. What they should do is impose a cost cap on the cars. Do as much research as you want, but the car itself has to be buildable for $100k. The next year, drop that to $80k. Eventually you have a vehicle that is at once the pinnacle of automotive excellence, and available for a decent price from a dealer, and better yet - the technology would be easily adaptable by passenger cars. Antilock brakes, seat belts, traction control, most technology in modern cars was developed for F1. If we could speed up the transition process then that would be the best thing possible for the automotive industry as a whole.
African or American nanoscale foam?