True story: An elderly gentleman walked into an electronics store in Toronto looking to buy speakers. The salesman showed him a couple of different models. The customer pointed at another set on the shelves and asked about them. The salesman said "Oh, those are Bose, they're crap." The customer was Amar Bose.
Sorry, your facts are reversed. NASA's budget is $17 billion. China's space budget is $1.3 billion. Russia's space budget is $2.4 billion.
For eight times the money, the US manages to reach approximate parity with the Russians. This is the result of the badly designed Space Shuttle program which over its lifetime has cost $1.5 billion per launch.
Looking forward, SpaceX is on track to cut US launch costs by a factor of ten. That will make the US the #1 place to launch rockets -- for the first time since the 1970s.
I agree completely that the X-37 makes no apparent sense. The only argument I can come up with is that returning is just a nice side effect of its real purpose: inclination changes. Chaning altitude and period and phase is all relatively easy with onboard thrusters (and X-37 has an orbital maneuvering engine almost as big as the Space Shuttle's). But the amount of thurst needed to change oribal inclination from, say equatorial to ISS, is vast. I calculated it recently as being equivalent to the delta-v provided by an earth to LEO launch.
What X-37 might be capable of is dipping into the atmosphere, banking, then thrusting back up to orbit. That's exactly what the Air Force's previous space plane was designed to do, the Dyna-soar. Once one has this capability, returning from orbit to a runway landing is a freebie since you already have the wings.
The recently concluded X-37 test flight did not show an inclination change. But look for it on a future flight. This would allow extreme flexability in imaging enemy action at completely unpredictable times.
Docking of course is just the first step. One also needs agreement on the atmosphere. American spacecraft (Apollo, Skylab) used 100% oxygen at 5 psi. Soviet spacecraft (Soyuz, Salut, Mir) used 20% oxygen 80% nitrogen at 14.7 psi. Neither side could change this easilly. Thus even though Apollo and Soyuz were able to physically dock in 1975, they had to use an airlock between the two spacecraft. Otherwise the cosmonauts would have gotten the bends from decompression and Apollo could have ruptured from overpressure.
Fortunately this is no longer much of an issue. As a result of the Apollo 1 fire and the deaths of Grissom, White and Chaffee, American spacecraft (starting with the Space Shuttle) adopted the Soviet approach.
Even in a battlefield devoid of both enemy and non-combatants, when to shoot or not can be extremely difficult. Consider the case (which occurred in Iraq) where one group of soldiers are fired upon by another group from the same side. Yes, that's a tragic blue-on-blue action. But the interesting question is what should the soldiers on the receiving end do? Assuming communications aren't working, do they:
a) Sit back and get slaughtered.
b) Fire back and take out the aggressors.
One consideration is the size of the forces involved. Another consideration is the importance of the missions each side is involved in.
Making a robot handle these cases would be interesting.
When carrying a pager for one of Google's farms I occasionally get messages from unknown numbers saying things like "WHERES THE STUFF YOU DIDNT SHOW". So obviously some people still use them.
I'm sometimes tempted to text back "Double dumbass on you" or something else inflammatory -- then sit back and watch the 6 o'clock news. But that would be evil.
Totally agreed. I see that someone learned his homonyms via an online course.
I concur. Someone learned their vocabulary via an online course. Their/There/They're are homophones (same sound). Polish/polish and read/read are homographs (same spelling). Bank/bank and stalk/stalk are homonyms (same sound and same spelling). Homonyms are both homographs and homophones.
I attended my university linguistics courses in person.
So are both of the rovers, to a certain extent. Both rovers contain slugs of plutonium which keep the electronics boxes warm and reduce the amount of solar power needed for heating.
Viking 2 lasted 1281 sols and died when its batteries failed. Although the RTGs would have produced usable power for another ten years, the power levels were too low for 70s electronics. So the RTGs would slowly charge the batteries then the batteries would power up the lander for short durations.
Viking 1 lasted 2245 sols and lost contact with Earth when a bad command was sent which instructed Viking to point its antenna in a different direction (sort of like typing "shutdown -h now" on the command line of a remote server, there's no recovery short of a house-call).
"Although the name of Microsoft's Office Open XML suggests that it would match the requirement, it is in fact a proprietary format that would fail the open standards test."
Microsoft's "Office Open XML" name reminds me of a lot of country names. Whenever one hears a country called "The People's Democratic Republic of [Somewhere]", one instantly knows it is communist. Likewise, anything "open" from Microsoft is invariably closed. Microsoft does develop open formats (like RTF) but they are never advertised as such.
> How do they categorise what is collected in their database as child porn? I have yet to see an automated system that can look at a photo and describe what it is (although several have been promoted over the years) I imagine that the decision as to what category the pics falls under must be made by a human. So my question is whose standard do they apply for the process?
Indeed. And it gets even murkier when one considers famous images such as this (SFW).
The article indicates that hashes of the images will be kept, not the images themselves. This is dangerous since there's no accountability for what image "TSxnWMoHpb9QY" is. Without reversability there's no way to clean the database if it gets subverted.
Speaking of hosting, there's this server which is falling apart, causing multiple crashes per day. Can't seem to get any response from the guys onsite. Shall I come take a tour of the facilities?
If an engineer makes a mistake, it's the job of the manager to have in place a system whereby the mistake is caught. Engineering failures which reach the light of day are also managment failures. Management failures are management failures. If something happens, no matter how it happened, it's always going to be a managment failure.
So yes, you are right. It's always the manager's fault. By definition.
> California has (had?) the fairest system where property was taxed at 1% on the original buying price. If people decided to reap the profit on property going sky high, the government would also benefit from the NEW owners who knew what they were getting into, but people wouldn't be forced from their homes simply because suddenly the land became valuable.
Still not a foolproof system. I buy a house for half a million. Sometime later I sell it to my spouse for $1. Thus illustrating the need for assessors. That example is extreme enough that it is clearly fraudulent; devising subtler scenarios is left as an exercise.
"Shooting through the fabric walls accomplishes nothing but putting holes in them,..."
This was conclusively demonstrated a couple of years ago when a helium-filled weather balloon floated out of control into the air traffic lanes over the Atlantic. The Royal Canadian Air Force sent up a couple of CF-18 fighters to shoot it down. They emptied more than 1,000 rounds of cannon shells into it and there was absolutely no effect. The Canadian "Air Farce" were the laughing stock of the world for a while. Eventually the balloon drifted across the Atlantic, where the British air force went up and showed how it was supposed to be done. They had no effect on the balloon either.
> Your satellite would orbit Earth once a day, backwards.
My mistake; twice a day (plus 1/365ths of an orbit). It would also be a huge menace since it would be plowing through the geosync belt, crashing into the world's most densely packed satellite constalations. Once it hit one unlucky bird, the debris from the collision would polute the entire belt with high speed projectiles, causing further destruction. Potentially ending in a chain reaction which leaves the entire orbit unusable for thousands of years. Please don't do this.
> A similar-to-geosynchronous orbit (equatorial, same distance)
> in the opposite direction should keep you close to permanent
> daylight if the satellite starts in the proper position, yes?
What you describe won't work. Your satellite would orbit Earth once a day, backwards.
What you are looking for is to position your satellite at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point (hard-core space geeks will gripe that it should be orbiting L1, but let's keep it simple). That's much further away than geo-sync, so you won't get very good views of specific targets on Earth.
However you'll get one heck of a good view of the whole Earth. That's what Triana was suposed to do. A webcam for our planet, streaming live 24h/day. Unfortunately Triana was Al Gore's pet project. The spacecraft was designed, built and tested when the Democrats were in power. Then George Bush 'won' the election. Out of spite, Triana was ordered removed from the launch schedule. Due to politics, it is quietly rusting in a storage container.
BTW, the launch which Triana was scheduled to ride was STS 107, Columbia's final flight.
What's your take on language choice for large-scale web applications?
As many as possible. Use PHP for the front end, Perl for input parsing, Euphoria for the graphics, JavaScript on the client-side, Moo for the database and Python for the glue to hold things together.
Every language has strengths and weaknesses. There is no killer language. A good carpenter has lots of tools and uses the most suitable tool(s) for each task. Likewise a programmer should be skilled in many languages and should pick the most appropriate one for each task. Learn as many programming languages as you can, and when you've done that, learn a few more.
[The feeling of job security is also rather nice.]
Slashdot Mirror
thisisauniqueid, could you ping my email address? Thanks.
Basically it's a two-bit finite state machine and a pair of lookup tables.
"Can you list all the 16 countries of which her majesty is the queen?"
True story: An elderly gentleman walked into an electronics store in Toronto looking to buy speakers. The salesman showed him a couple of different models. The customer pointed at another set on the shelves and asked about them. The salesman said "Oh, those are Bose, they're crap." The customer was Amar Bose.
Sorry, your facts are reversed. NASA's budget is $17 billion. China's space budget is $1.3 billion. Russia's space budget is $2.4 billion.
For eight times the money, the US manages to reach approximate parity with the Russians. This is the result of the badly designed Space Shuttle program which over its lifetime has cost $1.5 billion per launch.
Looking forward, SpaceX is on track to cut US launch costs by a factor of ten. That will make the US the #1 place to launch rockets -- for the first time since the 1970s.
Here's what the predecessor of the iPad looked like, it was called the PADD:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/File:PADD_2370s.jpg
Rectangular with rounded corners.
I agree completely that the X-37 makes no apparent sense. The only argument I can come up with is that returning is just a nice side effect of its real purpose: inclination changes. Chaning altitude and period and phase is all relatively easy with onboard thrusters (and X-37 has an orbital maneuvering engine almost as big as the Space Shuttle's). But the amount of thurst needed to change oribal inclination from, say equatorial to ISS, is vast. I calculated it recently as being equivalent to the delta-v provided by an earth to LEO launch.
What X-37 might be capable of is dipping into the atmosphere, banking, then thrusting back up to orbit. That's exactly what the Air Force's previous space plane was designed to do, the Dyna-soar. Once one has this capability, returning from orbit to a runway landing is a freebie since you already have the wings.
The recently concluded X-37 test flight did not show an inclination change. But look for it on a future flight. This would allow extreme flexability in imaging enemy action at completely unpredictable times.
Docking of course is just the first step. One also needs agreement on the atmosphere. American spacecraft (Apollo, Skylab) used 100% oxygen at 5 psi. Soviet spacecraft (Soyuz, Salut, Mir) used 20% oxygen 80% nitrogen at 14.7 psi. Neither side could change this easilly. Thus even though Apollo and Soyuz were able to physically dock in 1975, they had to use an airlock between the two spacecraft. Otherwise the cosmonauts would have gotten the bends from decompression and Apollo could have ruptured from overpressure.
Fortunately this is no longer much of an issue. As a result of the Apollo 1 fire and the deaths of Grissom, White and Chaffee, American spacecraft (starting with the Space Shuttle) adopted the Soviet approach.
a) Sit back and get slaughtered.
b) Fire back and take out the aggressors.
One consideration is the size of the forces involved. Another consideration is the importance of the missions each side is involved in.
Making a robot handle these cases would be interesting.
I'm sometimes tempted to text back "Double dumbass on you" or something else inflammatory -- then sit back and watch the 6 o'clock news. But that would be evil.
Their two different beasts.
Totally agreed. I see that someone learned his homonyms via an online course.
I concur. Someone learned their vocabulary via an online course. Their/There/They're are homophones (same sound). Polish/polish and read/read are homographs (same spelling). Bank/bank and stalk/stalk are homonyms (same sound and same spelling). Homonyms are both homographs and homophones.
I attended my university linguistics courses in person.
People have been blowing up conventional electricity pylons for decades. They make great targets because a single tower collapse takes out the whole circuit. Of course we call them 'heroes' not 'terrorists', but the principle is the same: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501EFDC1330F935A15757C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=
Obama has been very clear about support for major increases in science and technology:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/14/barack-obamas-google-friendly-technology-platform/
But the media hardly mentions it; focusing instead on Hillary's tear.
Microsoft's "Office Open XML" name reminds me of a lot of country names. Whenever one hears a country called "The People's Democratic Republic of [Somewhere]", one instantly knows it is communist. Likewise, anything "open" from Microsoft is invariably closed. Microsoft does develop open formats (like RTF) but they are never advertised as such.
> How do they categorise what is collected in their database as child porn? I have yet to see an automated system that can look at a photo and describe what it is (although several have been promoted over the years) I imagine that the decision as to what category the pics falls under must be made by a human. So my question is whose standard do they apply for the process?
Indeed. And it gets even murkier when one considers famous images such as this (SFW).
The article indicates that hashes of the images will be kept, not the images themselves. This is dangerous since there's no accountability for what image "TSxnWMoHpb9QY" is. Without reversability there's no way to clean the database if it gets subverted.
Speaking of hosting, there's this server which is falling apart, causing multiple crashes per day. Can't seem to get any response from the guys onsite. Shall I come take a tour of the facilities?
So yes, you are right. It's always the manager's fault. By definition.
> Why do one chromosone have more genes than others?
Same reason some source code files contain more lines of code than others. They do different things.
Still not a foolproof system. I buy a house for half a million. Sometime later I sell it to my spouse for $1. Thus illustrating the need for assessors. That example is extreme enough that it is clearly fraudulent; devising subtler scenarios is left as an exercise.
But vacuum is "definitely" dangerous. Besides, it just plain sucks. Literally.
This was conclusively demonstrated a couple of years ago when a helium-filled weather balloon floated out of control into the air traffic lanes over the Atlantic. The Royal Canadian Air Force sent up a couple of CF-18 fighters to shoot it down. They emptied more than 1,000 rounds of cannon shells into it and there was absolutely no effect. The Canadian "Air Farce" were the laughing stock of the world for a while. Eventually the balloon drifted across the Atlantic, where the British air force went up and showed how it was supposed to be done. They had no effect on the balloon either.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/161148.s tm
My mistake; twice a day (plus 1/365ths of an orbit). It would also be a huge menace since it would be plowing through the geosync belt, crashing into the world's most densely packed satellite constalations. Once it hit one unlucky bird, the debris from the collision would polute the entire belt with high speed projectiles, causing further destruction. Potentially ending in a chain reaction which leaves the entire orbit unusable for thousands of years. Please don't do this.
> in the opposite direction should keep you close to permanent
> daylight if the satellite starts in the proper position, yes?
What you describe won't work. Your satellite would orbit Earth once a day, backwards.
What you are looking for is to position your satellite at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point (hard-core space geeks will gripe that it should be orbiting L1, but let's keep it simple). That's much further away than geo-sync, so you won't get very good views of specific targets on Earth.
However you'll get one heck of a good view of the whole Earth. That's what Triana was suposed to do. A webcam for our planet, streaming live 24h/day. Unfortunately Triana was Al Gore's pet project. The spacecraft was designed, built and tested when the Democrats were in power. Then George Bush 'won' the election. Out of spite, Triana was ordered removed from the launch schedule. Due to politics, it is quietly rusting in a storage container.
BTW, the launch which Triana was scheduled to ride was STS 107, Columbia's final flight.
Here we go again.
As many as possible. Use PHP for the front end, Perl for input parsing, Euphoria for the graphics, JavaScript on the client-side, Moo for the database and Python for the glue to hold things together.
Every language has strengths and weaknesses. There is no killer language. A good carpenter has lots of tools and uses the most suitable tool(s) for each task. Likewise a programmer should be skilled in many languages and should pick the most appropriate one for each task. Learn as many programming languages as you can, and when you've done that, learn a few more.
[The feeling of job security is also rather nice.]