You presume that any civilisation we find is on the same technological level as we are.
There is the possibility (probability perhaps) that a found civilisation is far in advance such that it might take 100 years for our message to rech them but when it does they engage thier ftl communication system and promptly tell us how to build our own if we don't have one by then already.
I'd agree with you that the chance of SETI being successful is probably slim, but it's not pointless, because there is *a* chance, and that's worth exploring.
You can't compare. This guy wants to make a living we presume, at 25c per person, it's gonna take say a couple thousand people every week minimum.
If he got a couple hundred thousand people a week then the price could be reduced significantly, but I doubt the willing-payers are there to justify less than 25c (even that's probably stretching).
Join a flying club, not a school or some fancy schmancy place but a real honest flying club out of a hanger, or caravan or small club rooms where you can shoot the breeze with like minded individuals, have someone there teach you to fly stick-n-rudder in an ultralight/microlight, or a Cub or something like that, and just generally free your mind of technical crap for an hour or two or three a week.
There's nothing better than looking down on the world from above, up at the sky from below, or at the runway on that first solo thinking "what the fsck was I thinking!".
Looks like Microsoft included the wright flyer in FS2004, but being a proud kiwi I have to chip in and remind them that it's generally accepted that Richard Pearse flew before the Wilbur & Orville.
While Richard himself denied this claim, he denied it based on his definition of flying, which for him meant being able to make a flight of several miles to the nearest town.
Regardless of who was first, Pearse had the superior and well before it's time design, a high wing monoplane, with elevators and ailerons.
A) Invading Iraq had nothing to do with lowering the price of Oil. If that's what they wanted, they'd just have let Iraq sell more oil, greater supply = lower price. If you _control_ the Oil however, you can keep the price high as long as you like.
B) Neither Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden are dead, that's plain to see (powerful people don't get caught out in a little war). The US (and UK, and AUS) gubmint couldn't give a shit where they are now either, they've got what they went there for, who cares where the scapegoat is.
I can forgive you your naievitey if you are American, you seem to be blinded half the time by your media, only telling you what you want to hear, and certainly not telling you wnat "they" don't want you to hear. Outside of the states, we get a much more objective picture of the real state of affairs.
If we really had obtained alien technology, why would we still pollute our ecosystem to get from A to B? You'd think we wouldn't need to burn fossils any more for transportation.
Do I REALLY have to explain this? Ok, I guess I do.
The answer is money....
let's say for sake of argument that through some means (alien or human) the government of the good ol' USA has discovered a way to provide free, portable energy, to everybody, in such a way as you can just, I dunno, point it at any machine and have it transfer the energy.
You can't REALLY believe that information would EVER be made public, it would positively CRUSH the US's enconomy. Nobody would want to buy fossil fuels any more, they just use one of this little devices.
And of course, if indeed the government happened across some alien technology, why should you think they can understand it even after 50 years? Any civilization with technology advanced enough to allow travel across interstellar distances is so far in advance of ourself that we could not begin to comprehend thier ideas let alone technology.
Hah, my plane, hah, yea, I wish buddy. I can't even afford to fly my clubs plane at the moment, let alone buy one of my own.
However, to answer your question. Like anything, the more you use your plane, the cheaper it is "per hour" to use it. Microlights/ultralights are self-maintained which reduces the costs.
Screw the piper, for 30gs you could get yourself a ready to fly Loehle P51 Mustang replica. Or if building's your thing then the airframe kit for the 5151 is only $10k (add engine, instruments).
I don't understand these people that spend BIG dollars on building a heavy-iron simulator, I could understand if they built a light plane sim if they have a disqualifying medical condition (like me, I'm insulin-dependant), but why do people have this fascination with flying LONG stretches, mostly over sea or so high that the sim-world is little more than a patchwork of colour, or even over cloud (mmm, interesting, white, white and more white). They might as well paint a wall and watch it dry!
Low and slow (or low and fast, which is pretty good too;-)) is where it's at, and in a Loehle, you look pretty damn hot too.
I used to do sim flying, but then I found microlights/ultralights (which I can fly even with my type-1 diabetes).
You have a rack of pidgeon holes (chunks of memory), and you have some pieces of paper (pointer). You put a teddy bear in pidgeon hole 7, and on one of those bits of paper you write "7, Teddy Bear".
Now you can look at that bit of paper (called derefrencing) - it obviously doesn't have a teddy bear in it, but using it you can see that there is a Teddy Bear in pidgeon hole 7.
Lets make a new piece of paper, it says "10, Favorite Teddy Bear", who happens to be named Dana. But next week, Dana's left eye falls out and thus she is no longer your favourite, no problem all you have to do is take your piece of paper, cross out 10 and write in the pidgeon hole of your new favourite.
If you didn't have the paper (pointer), you would have one pidgeon hole actually labelled "Favourite" and then when your favourite changes you would have to pick up the old favourite, pick up the new favourite, put the new favourite in the old favourites hole and the old one in the new one's hole).
Lets say you want to store 2 teddy bear's, well, we just change the bit of paper to read "7:8, Teddy Bear", then we know that memory chunks 7 through 8 have teddy bears (or space for teddy bears).
Now lets say you have 2 teddy bears that are brothers, Joe is in 9 and Sam is in 10, on one piece of paper you write "10, Brother" and put it in with Joe, and you write "9, Brother" on another piece to go with Sam.
Now when you look at Sam, you can get his bit of paper and see that he has a brother and you can find him in 9.
If you have another bit of paper that you hold in your hand, with "9, Oldest Sibling" on it you can get both brothers by looking at your in hand paper to find Joe, then looking at the paper you found with Joe to find Sam. This is called a "linked list" because each item (Teddy Bear) had a pointer (paper) to the next item.
Now lets say you want to give the teddy bear to somebody to play with for a bit, all we have to do is photocopy our little bit of paper that says "7, Teddy Bear" to the person and they can go and get the Teddy Bear themselves, without pointers we would have had to actually go get the teddy bear and hand them this whole teddy bear (since the bear is made from gold, weighs 1/2 a ton and has to go by air to your friend at the top of Mount Everest - sending the bear itself is pretty expensive, but we can just put the pointer-paper in an email).
A pointer doesn't store "real" data, but it stores the address where data is stored, you can use the pointer to get to the data (and change it), you can change a pointer to point to a different piece of data, and that data could infact include a pointer to yet another piece of data.
Hmm, so you're saying that in infinite time, one can only do a finite number of things (as you say, if a monkey can do an infinite number of things, but could not do all of those things in infinite time, this must mean the monkey could only do a finite number of the infinite things)?
I don't see how this can be correct - infinite is infinite, there is no "large infinity" or "small infinity", if something has no end, it is infinite, if something is infinite it has no end.
If time has no end, there is no end to the number of things a monkey can do out of the endless set of possible things a monkey can do.
Thus - in infinite time, a monkey can do all of the infinite things it can do, IF IT WISHES TO DO SO.
Just because a monkey CAN do all the things it could possibly do, doesn't mean is WILL do all those things, it might spend infinity sitting on it's ass. So just because in infinite time a monkey CAN write shakespeare, doesn't mean it WILL.
To get rid of all those nasty weapons of mass destruction he had stockpiled, the missiles poised for strike, the chemicals ready to unleash and lets not forget all that Anthrax he used to fight off the invaders!
Just as well GWB did invade, because there was obviously no time to waste on diplomacy - Saddam was going to make a deathly first strike on the world any day.
You leftist green commie, how dare you suggest that GWB wants Iraq's oil, he's only there for the good of thier country ! And his country. Mostly his country.
The current shuttle is an inadequate poor solution to the problem for two reasons primarily (which are related) - COST and REUSABILITY.
The cost per kg for launching the shuttle is astronomical, far too expensive, far more expensive than is necessary, but using the current shuttle & booster design it's a cheap as it's gonna get.
And after every launch, so much has to be rebuilt/repaired that the reusability is pathetic, this also means that the turn-around time from launch to launch is absolutely hopeless.
Keeping the existing shuttle+booster design is a pointless waste of time, nothing can be done to solve the important problems that prevent the shuttle from being an economical, fast or efficient transportation device.
Is it just me or does this site seem a bit, well, scummy ? I mean, he's gota ton of audio books online, you can download them singly for free at 8kbps (yikes), not only does it cost you a heap for better versions but he'll charge you $2 just to zip them up, hell, it'll cost you $200 just to get them put on the mp3 player he's selling. He wants libraries, schools etc to give him free advertising.
The licence agreement prohibits redistribution of even the free versions, and cites the DMCA, and I'm willing to bet if he pays the narrators at all it's a pittance.
Just seems all a little antislashdot (that's a new word, you can use it if you like:-)) to me.
The problem is though the arcane command names, and the availablility of information about - what commands are available and what they can do. Sure we've got the man pages (and the info system, I hate that klunky thing though), but they don't really help so much if you don't know the command name in the first place. We shouldn't have to do a web-search to find the name of something to do a job when it's already available.
Case in point... I've been using various unix & linux systems for the last 7 years both as my primary desktop machine and also at Uni. In that time I have never (not that I remember) come across xargs - until I read your post, and I have had situations where that would have been useful but I've solved with a perl script or suchlike. And I'm no noob to the command line, I can pipeline quite acceptably.
The problem isn't a lack of features, or feature overload, it's knowing what features are there in the first place. Even then - that's not going to help... the user wants to 'Search all files in dir D for the string "car", and save the result as a text file.', not 'build and execute command lines from standard input' (man xargs), how does the use know that using this, in conjunction with that, will solve the problem.
That is my main bone with Un*x systems in general - you shouldn't need to know about grep, xargs, redirection and pipelining to simply search for a file.
Err, it's just the same as any other number system
on
Eleventy What?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Err, are not the names we give numbers independant of any notational system? i.e
The number we have given the name two and is written as "2" in decimal, in binary is written 10, but it's still called two, just the notation changed. In hexadecimal, the number we call sixteen is written 10, but it's still called sixteen.
Of course if you want say a number in a specific notation you'll need to not only spell it out but also state the system so as to avoid ambiguity ("the number `one-zero' in binary notation") as using the number's name implies the use of the decimal notation.
If you ask somebody to write down some numbers, and you read them out as "one, two, three, four", the subject should be perfectly able to use the binary notational system to write them down as "01, 10, 11, 100", they've recorded the numbers you spake correctly.
I have to me too. Often times when I'm coding, I'll get somebody interrupt me with a question, converstaion usually goes like this...
"Hey, can you answer a quick question" "Sure" "blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah, blah (1 minute of blah). So what do you think ?" "Uh, sorry, I lost you at blah, you'll have to repeat the question."
HTML is a MARKUP language, not a programming language, it teaches nothing of programming only of markup. If you combine it, from the start, with something like ColdFusion, PHP or ASP that would be a good place to start, but HTML on it's own has no potential for teaching programming.
Slashdot Mirror
You want HTMLArea - http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/
You presume that any civilisation we find is on the same technological level as we are.
There is the possibility (probability perhaps) that a found civilisation is far in advance such that it might take 100 years for our message to rech them but when it does they engage thier ftl communication system and promptly tell us how to build our own if we don't have one by then already.
I'd agree with you that the chance of SETI being successful is probably slim, but it's not pointless, because there is *a* chance, and that's worth exploring.
gnuplot ?
You can't compare. This guy wants to make a living we presume, at 25c per person, it's gonna take say a couple thousand people every week minimum.
If he got a couple hundred thousand people a week then the price could be reduced significantly, but I doubt the willing-payers are there to justify less than 25c (even that's probably stretching).
This is a Pom-Pom
Go recreational flying!
Join a flying club, not a school or some fancy schmancy place but a real honest flying club out of a hanger, or caravan or small club rooms where you can shoot the breeze with like minded individuals, have someone there teach you to fly stick-n-rudder in an ultralight/microlight, or a Cub or something like that, and just generally free your mind of technical crap for an hour or two or three a week.
There's nothing better than looking down on the world from above, up at the sky from below, or at the runway on that first solo thinking "what the fsck was I thinking!".
Looks like Microsoft included the wright flyer in FS2004, but being a proud kiwi I have to chip in and remind them that it's generally accepted that Richard Pearse flew before the Wilbur & Orville.
While Richard himself denied this claim, he denied it based on his definition of flying, which for him meant being able to make a flight of several miles to the nearest town.
Regardless of who was first, Pearse had the superior and well before it's time design, a high wing monoplane, with elevators and ailerons.
http://chrisbrady.itgo.com/pearse/pearse.htm
A) Invading Iraq had nothing to do with lowering the price of Oil. If that's what they wanted, they'd just have let Iraq sell more oil, greater supply = lower price. If you _control_ the Oil however, you can keep the price high as long as you like.
B) Neither Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden are dead, that's plain to see (powerful people don't get caught out in a little war). The US (and UK, and AUS) gubmint couldn't give a shit where they are now either, they've got what they went there for, who cares where the scapegoat is.
I can forgive you your naievitey if you are American, you seem to be blinded half the time by your media, only telling you what you want to hear, and certainly not telling you wnat "they" don't want you to hear. Outside of the states, we get a much more objective picture of the real state of affairs.
Do I REALLY have to explain this? Ok, I guess I do.
The answer is money....
let's say for sake of argument that through some means (alien or human) the government of the good ol' USA has discovered a way to provide free, portable energy, to everybody, in such a way as you can just, I dunno, point it at any machine and have it transfer the energy.
You can't REALLY believe that information would EVER be made public, it would positively CRUSH the US's enconomy. Nobody would want to buy fossil fuels any more, they just use one of this little devices.
And of course, if indeed the government happened across some alien technology, why should you think they can understand it even after 50 years? Any civilization with technology advanced enough to allow travel across interstellar distances is so far in advance of ourself that we could not begin to comprehend thier ideas let alone technology.
Hah, my plane, hah, yea, I wish buddy. I can't even afford to fly my clubs plane at the moment, let alone buy one of my own.
However, to answer your question. Like anything, the more you use your plane, the cheaper it is "per hour" to use it. Microlights/ultralights are self-maintained which reduces the costs.
I don't understand these people that spend BIG dollars on building a heavy-iron simulator, I could understand if they built a light plane sim if they have a disqualifying medical condition (like me, I'm insulin-dependant), but why do people have this fascination with flying LONG stretches, mostly over sea or so high that the sim-world is little more than a patchwork of colour, or even over cloud (mmm, interesting, white, white and more white). They might as well paint a wall and watch it dry!
Low and slow (or low and fast, which is pretty good too ;-)) is where it's at, and in a Loehle, you look pretty damn hot too.
I used to do sim flying, but then I found microlights/ultralights (which I can fly even with my type-1 diabetes).
An analogy can help...
You have a rack of pidgeon holes (chunks of memory), and you have some pieces of paper (pointer). You put a teddy bear in pidgeon hole 7, and on one of those bits of paper you write "7, Teddy Bear".
Now you can look at that bit of paper (called derefrencing) - it obviously doesn't have a teddy bear in it, but using it you can see that there is a Teddy Bear in pidgeon hole 7.
Lets make a new piece of paper, it says "10, Favorite Teddy Bear", who happens to be named Dana. But next week, Dana's left eye falls out and thus she is no longer your favourite, no problem all you have to do is take your piece of paper, cross out 10 and write in the pidgeon hole of your new favourite.
If you didn't have the paper (pointer), you would have one pidgeon hole actually labelled "Favourite" and then when your favourite changes you would have to pick up the old favourite, pick up the new favourite, put the new favourite in the old favourites hole and the old one in the new one's hole).
Lets say you want to store 2 teddy bear's, well, we just change the bit of paper to read "7:8, Teddy Bear", then we know that memory chunks 7 through 8 have teddy bears (or space for teddy bears).
Now lets say you have 2 teddy bears that are brothers, Joe is in 9 and Sam is in 10, on one piece of paper you write "10, Brother" and put it in with Joe, and you write "9, Brother" on another piece to go with Sam.
Now when you look at Sam, you can get his bit of paper and see that he has a brother and you can find him in 9.
If you have another bit of paper that you hold in your hand, with "9, Oldest Sibling" on it you can get both brothers by looking at your in hand paper to find Joe, then looking at the paper you found with Joe to find Sam. This is called a "linked list" because each item (Teddy Bear) had a pointer (paper) to the next item.
Now lets say you want to give the teddy bear to somebody to play with for a bit, all we have to do is photocopy our little bit of paper that says "7, Teddy Bear" to the person and they can go and get the Teddy Bear themselves, without pointers we would have had to actually go get the teddy bear and hand them this whole teddy bear (since the bear is made from gold, weighs 1/2 a ton and has to go by air to your friend at the top of Mount Everest - sending the bear itself is pretty expensive, but we can just put the pointer-paper in an email).
A pointer doesn't store "real" data, but it stores the address where data is stored, you can use the pointer to get to the data (and change it), you can change a pointer to point to a different piece of data, and that data could infact include a pointer to yet another piece of data.
Hope that helps.
Hmm, so you're saying that in infinite time, one can only do a finite number of things (as you say, if a monkey can do an infinite number of things, but could not do all of those things in infinite time, this must mean the monkey could only do a finite number of the infinite things)?
I don't see how this can be correct - infinite is infinite, there is no "large infinity" or "small infinity", if something has no end, it is infinite, if something is infinite it has no end.
If time has no end, there is no end to the number of things a monkey can do out of the endless set of possible things a monkey can do.
Thus - in infinite time, a monkey can do all of the infinite things it can do, IF IT WISHES TO DO SO.
Just because a monkey CAN do all the things it could possibly do, doesn't mean is WILL do all those things, it might spend infinity sitting on it's ass. So just because in infinite time a monkey CAN write shakespeare, doesn't mean it WILL.
To get rid of all those nasty weapons of mass destruction he had stockpiled, the missiles poised for strike, the chemicals ready to unleash and lets not forget all that Anthrax he used to fight off the invaders!
Just as well GWB did invade, because there was obviously no time to waste on diplomacy - Saddam was going to make a deathly first strike on the world any day.
You leftist green commie, how dare you suggest that GWB wants Iraq's oil, he's only there for the good of thier country ! And his country. Mostly his country.
http://www.bartercard.co.nz/
:-)
Been around here for years..don't have one myself, but there you go, NZ leads the world again.
Kate Sheppard
Ernest Rutherford
Edmund Hillary
Bill Hamilton
and now Bartercard
Because I guess the casings are not exactly cheap or readily available.
The current shuttle is an inadequate poor solution to the problem for two reasons primarily (which are related) - COST and REUSABILITY.
The cost per kg for launching the shuttle is astronomical, far too expensive, far more expensive than is necessary, but using the current shuttle & booster design it's a cheap as it's gonna get.
And after every launch, so much has to be rebuilt/repaired that the reusability is pathetic, this also means that the turn-around time from launch to launch is absolutely hopeless.
Keeping the existing shuttle+booster design is a pointless waste of time, nothing can be done to solve the important problems that prevent the shuttle from being an economical, fast or efficient transportation device.
Is it just me or does this site seem a bit, well, scummy ? I mean, he's gota ton of audio books online, you can download them singly for free at 8kbps (yikes), not only does it cost you a heap for better versions but he'll charge you $2 just to zip them up, hell, it'll cost you $200 just to get them put on the mp3 player he's selling. He wants libraries, schools etc to give him free advertising.
:-)) to me.
The licence agreement prohibits redistribution of even the free versions, and cites the DMCA, and I'm willing to bet if he pays the narrators at all it's a pittance.
Just seems all a little antislashdot (that's a new word, you can use it if you like
The problem is though the arcane command names, and the availablility of information about - what commands are available and what they can do. Sure we've got the man pages (and the info system, I hate that klunky thing though), but they don't really help so much if you don't know the command name in the first place. We shouldn't have to do a web-search to find the name of something to do a job when it's already available.
Case in point... I've been using various unix & linux systems for the last 7 years both as my primary desktop machine and also at Uni. In that time I have never (not that I remember) come across xargs - until I read your post, and I have had situations where that would have been useful but I've solved with a perl script or suchlike. And I'm no noob to the command line, I can pipeline quite acceptably.
The problem isn't a lack of features, or feature overload, it's knowing what features are there in the first place. Even then - that's not going to help... the user wants to
'Search all files in dir D for the string "car", and save the result as a text file.', not 'build and execute command lines from standard input' (man xargs), how does the use know that using this, in conjunction with that, will solve the problem.
That is my main bone with Un*x systems in general - you shouldn't need to know about grep, xargs, redirection and pipelining to simply search for a file.
Why would you get memory loss as a result of inertia on a SOLID STATE device ??
Maybe correct 20 years ago, but you're a bit off on your phonetic alphabet no..
.. Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu).
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot
(the rest
Err, are not the names we give numbers independant of any notational system? i.e
The number we have given the name two and is written as "2" in decimal, in binary is written 10, but it's still called two, just the notation changed. In hexadecimal, the number we call sixteen is written 10, but it's still called sixteen.
Of course if you want say a number in a specific notation you'll need to not only spell it out but also state the system so as to avoid ambiguity ("the number `one-zero' in binary notation") as using the number's name implies the use of the decimal notation.
If you ask somebody to write down some numbers, and you read them out as "one, two, three, four", the subject should be perfectly able to use the binary notational system to write them down as "01, 10, 11, 100", they've recorded the numbers you spake correctly.
I have to me too. Often times when I'm coding, I'll get somebody interrupt me with a question, converstaion usually goes like this...
"Hey, can you answer a quick question"
"Sure"
"blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah, blah (1 minute of blah). So what do you think ?"
"Uh, sorry, I lost you at blah, you'll have to repeat the question."
HTML is a MARKUP language, not a programming language, it teaches nothing of programming only of markup. If you combine it, from the start, with something like ColdFusion, PHP or ASP that would be a good place to start, but HTML on it's own has no potential for teaching programming.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0201840
Best quote : "Don't talk to him, he's a loonie"