I agree. For Java, the best IDE I've used is Visual J++ by far. The only problem is you can't debug Java 2 in it, but otherwise it is excellent. But MSDN resources on Java are (understandably) kind of lame/outdated and I think Sun's site (java.sun.com) is not that bad.
Your problem is that you don't have enough memory. If you had say, 128 megs or more, JDK1.3 would do native compile in memory and it runs pretty fast (the more free memory the more code it will compile). It is especially fast for 2D graphics stuff and they say they got scientific/math code to run withing 5% of C++ code. Swing is still kinda slow though, but not horrible. I use JBuilder at work and it is large and slow, but with a lot of RAM (256 recommended) it's not too bad.
I tried Star Office (on Windows) for one of my papers and found it much harder to use than MS Office. What would take 5 min to do in Office took me half an hour to figure out in Star Office and even then I had to settle for a simplified version of my charts. I also wanted to embed the charts in a text document, it worked but their positioning and formatting is really annoying to get right. The same goes for formatting paragraphs. I have since uninstalled Star, but might try using it again when I have forgotten the pain I had to go through with it.
Well that is why there is the World Food Program. These geekcorps people are not using any of your money so quit bitching. On the other hand the World Food Program is using your money (in the form of income tax payed to your country who pay their UN fees). Why don't people like you understand that you can't feed everyone in the world. There will always be poor and hungry people. Otherwise, it's called communism and we know it doesn't work.
Why is there always someone who will post along the "feed the hungry" lines when there is an article about space exploration, etc?
Or may be I am replying to a stupid troll. Oh well...
Goddamit how can you moderate this guy down? He is making a good point that Greenland is near the north pole so ice melting in the north pole could result in higher sea levels.
Yeah you're right, I think that the top on the Washington memorial in DC was made from aluminum because at the time it was even more expensive than gold and therefore more "precious".
Aluminum is not that cheap even now, because it is still extracted by electrolysis. That is why aluminum plants are usually built next to extra large hydroelectric power plants -- dirt cheap electricity. They still have steel cans in Europe too. I think the reason they make Al cans is more that steel rusts and is also heavier, not that aluminum is cheap (it will probably never be cheaper than steel).
They were going to crash Galileo (the same probe that took those Io pics) somewhere away from Europa, not Io. Europa supposedly has the subsurface water ocean. There will be a separate mission especially to Europa, I think, that will drill the surface. They didn't want any stuff from Galileo to contaminate Europa. It is a long shot anyway because Galileo has been exposed to so much radiation that it is unlikely there are any live bacteria on it, but NASA wanted to be safe.
Oxygen is not flammable. Burning is an oxidation reaction and there is no oxidizer that would oxidize oxygen. Unless you introduce large amounts of fluorine in the atmosphere.
If the sail is made of absorbing material, the incident forces would all be in the same direction -- away from the sun. So then it would just be spinning because the forces are not symmetric w.r.t. the center of mass. If the material is reflective (probably will because you get twice the thrust this way) then once the sail has rotated a little, it will change course. But on average over many rotations it will probably keep going in a straigh line direction. Also there woiuld be the danger of the sail getting stuck parallel to the sunlight and thus getting no impulse. It's solvable though.
The problem is that nowadays environmentalists get paid by one company to chain themselves to the equipment of the competitor. It's all "commerzialized". Also some of their campaigns are completely unsubstantiated and based on false data. Like Greenpeace want to ban PVC plastics because they contain chlorine which is poison. This is such bullshit, I can eat PVC and nothing bad will happen to me. You know that there is a Cobalt atom in vitamin B-12. I think they should fight to ban that too, because Cobalt is highly toxic. What a bunch of weenies.
Microwave radiation is not quite the same as gamma radiation. Gamma has much shorter wavelength than even x-rays, which means it's much more harmful - it will definitely ionize atoms in your body. You don't die a few days after you buy a cell phone... but you do if you were near a powerfull gamma burst. Of course alpha and beta radiation is much worse, it breaks up your DNA and shit and you get instant cancer. But those are no problem if you live in a brick house since they are particles and get stopped.
That's because France have some of the largest and richest uranium deposits and also state of the art enrichment plants. They are also one of the largest exporters of electricity as a direct consequence. And also people are not as paranoid there. Oh yeah and the French government doesn't give a damn either, remember they sank that pathetic Greenpeace ship.
Assuming "environment" means the stuff around you on the moon then it is NOT radioactive. However, since there is no atmosphere, energetic particles and photons are not stopped by anything but your spacesuit. Of course if you are even slightly underground you're ok. The NASA site you point to says that there is a probability that there is ice on the moon, it is not definite. Even if there was, we don't know if it is in such a form that is easily usable. Might be all mixed with rocks or dust. When you send goods from Moon to Earth you need significant propulsive action to reduce speed in order to enter Earth orbit. Alternatively you can do direct reentry, but it is high-g and you need special capsule if the payload is gonna survive.
They are saying that the onboard thruster will be 450 Newtons, which is equal to about 100 lbf. That means the force on the spacecraft when the thruster is on will be 450 N. The total weight is 440 lb, but it doesn't matter, because the onboard thrusters are used once the spacecraft is in orbit, i.e. for moon transfer, so there is no gravity to pull it down. The launch from Earth will use an Ariane rocket booster (according to the same site) which provides many thousands of pounds of thrust at launch. Also, they mention using Ariane V, which sounds really like an overkill to me, because the Ariane 5 is huge and expensive. IMHO they didn't design this thing in detail, but just threw some approximate stuff on a sheet of paper.
I remember that there was a similar mission to map the moon back in 1994. It was called Clementine and was a joint project of NASA and the Air Force. The probe had all sorts of cameras in it (IR, UV, visible) plus a laser rangefinder, and it basically mapped the moon in extreme detail. The probe was to flyby an asteroid after it finished mapping but its engine failed during that latter stage. Anyway, that mission was extremely cheap and the probe was very small (about 200kg IIRC). In fact they launched it on an Air Force surplus Titan 2 ICBM. I don't remember the total cost, but it was less than $100M and the mission took pictures in many wavelengths plus it made a relief map of the moon using the laser rangefinder. I don't think this commercial mission will contribute anything new to science, it looks like it will just take pictures of company logos on a moon-Earth background. There was also the Lunar Prospector which had alpha, gamma and neutron spectrometers to study the materials that make up the moon. It cost even less than Clementine. So don't diss on NASA with the cost of Lunar missions. Unmanned small probes to the Moon are not too hard to make and considering those guys just have one video camera, hell, you could almost launch that thing on SCUD missile for a ridiculously low cost and hope to recoup the money by taking stupid ad photos that anyone can do in photoshop in like 5 minutes.
Actually in AI and machine learning, most algorithms are basically search algorithms that look for a particular function/hypothesis. The problem is that usually the problem they are trying to solve is NP complete, i.e. the search space of possible hypotheses is exponential. To get around this, learning algorithms make horrible (and I mean ridiuclously bad and wrong) assumptions and simplifications. An example would be the naive Bayes classifier which is one of the best learning algorithms and yet the assumption it is based on is just plain wrong, but it makes computation faster. Also neural networks are usually made only 2 or 3 layer deep, because of speed considerations. Having more layers would improve the "intelligence" of the algorithm a lot, but is computationally intractable. So, speed is currently a very important issue, while Godel's theorem is almost irrelevant (in practice, philosophy put aside).
Nobel physics committee tend to grant prizes to experimental physicists who prove an idea with experimentation, as opposed to a the scientist who came up with a new hypothesis. While this is mostly true for recent years, it is because physicists have not discovered too much new stuff lately. The latter part of the 20th century was spent mostly proving experimentally stuff from the first half of the 20th century. Also, the Nobel committee gave the prize to people like Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Einstein and Bohr who did little more than theoretical work. I guess with them things went the other way, because they explained experiments which were inconsistent with physics back then.
Diamond is not a molecule -- it's chemical formula is just C i.e. one carbon atom. It is a crystal with its crystal lattice organized in such a way that it makes it really really hard. You are right about big single molecules though, in plastic production plants, when something goes wrong all the liquid in the "reactor" polymerizes and you get one big molecule meters across. Those are extremely hard compared to normal plastics and extremely tough to break up.
I think that computers are really not THAT significant in the general picture. Sure, they are a very usefull tool, but positronic or not, they are just that. Yeah, some vast artificial intelligence would make a good character for a book, but its size probably doesn't matter in the general picture for a sci fi novel. Besides, man got to the moon without much computing power so see, it's not really that important. The internet may have changed the world by allowing instant communication and access to data, but in the sci fi books I've read people usually have something similar. Also, the internet is bound by the speed of light, and this is not much use for a novel talking about interstellar travel.
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I agree. For Java, the best IDE I've used is Visual J++ by far. The only problem is you can't debug Java 2 in it, but otherwise it is excellent. But MSDN resources on Java are (understandably) kind of lame/outdated and I think Sun's site (java.sun.com) is not that bad.
Your problem is that you don't have enough memory. If you had say, 128 megs or more, JDK1.3 would do native compile in memory and it runs pretty fast (the more free memory the more code it will compile). It is especially fast for 2D graphics stuff and they say they got scientific/math code to run withing 5% of C++ code. Swing is still kinda slow though, but not horrible. I use JBuilder at work and it is large and slow, but with a lot of RAM (256 recommended) it's not too bad.
I thought Swing was free and an integral part of JDK 1.2 and later, not an extension... It was an extension back with 1.1, not anymore.
I tried Star Office (on Windows) for one of my papers and found it much harder to use than MS Office. What would take 5 min to do in Office took me half an hour to figure out in Star Office and even then I had to settle for a simplified version of my charts. I also wanted to embed the charts in a text document, it worked but their positioning and formatting is really annoying to get right. The same goes for formatting paragraphs. I have since uninstalled Star, but might try using it again when I have forgotten the pain I had to go through with it.
Well that is why there is the World Food Program. These geekcorps people are not using any of your money so quit bitching. On the other hand the World Food Program is using your money (in the form of income tax payed to your country who pay their UN fees).
Why don't people like you understand that you can't feed everyone in the world. There will always be poor and hungry people. Otherwise, it's called communism and we know it doesn't work.
Why is there always someone who will post along the "feed the hungry" lines when there is an article about space exploration, etc?
Or may be I am replying to a stupid troll. Oh well...
True, no yellow sticky, but you basically print your password on anything you touch! For example your coffee mug...
Goddamit how can you moderate this guy down? He is making a good point that Greenland is near the north pole so ice melting in the north pole could result in higher sea levels.
Yeah you're right, I think that the top on the Washington memorial in DC was made from aluminum because at the time it was even more expensive than gold and therefore more "precious".
Aluminum is not that cheap even now, because it is still extracted by electrolysis. That is why aluminum plants are usually built next to extra large hydroelectric power plants -- dirt cheap electricity. They still have steel cans in Europe too. I think the reason they make Al cans is more that steel rusts and is also heavier, not that aluminum is cheap (it will probably never be cheaper than steel).
They were going to crash Galileo (the same probe that took those Io pics) somewhere away from Europa, not Io. Europa supposedly has the subsurface water ocean. There will be a separate mission especially to Europa, I think, that will drill the surface. They didn't want any stuff from Galileo to contaminate Europa. It is a long shot anyway because Galileo has been exposed to so much radiation that it is unlikely there are any live bacteria on it, but NASA wanted to be safe.
They are going to use old Pentiums (no MMX) with Win95 on the new space station.
Spain is not in. It is Italy. Also G8 includes Russia. (G7 doesn't)
Oxygen is not flammable. Burning is an oxidation reaction and there is no oxidizer that would oxidize oxygen. Unless you introduce large amounts of fluorine in the atmosphere.
If the sail is made of absorbing material, the incident forces would all be in the same direction -- away from the sun. So then it would just be spinning because the forces are not symmetric w.r.t. the center of mass. If the material is reflective (probably will because you get twice the thrust this way) then once the sail has rotated a little, it will change course. But on average over many rotations it will probably keep going in a straigh line direction. Also there woiuld be the danger of the sail getting stuck parallel to the sunlight and thus getting no impulse. It's solvable though.
Is that why they say that neutron bombs are so nasty? Because neutrons are so bad?
The problem is that nowadays environmentalists get paid by one company to chain themselves to the equipment of the competitor. It's all "commerzialized".
Also some of their campaigns are completely unsubstantiated and based on false data. Like Greenpeace want to ban PVC plastics because they contain chlorine which is poison. This is such bullshit, I can eat PVC and nothing bad will happen to me. You know that there is a Cobalt atom in vitamin B-12. I think they should fight to ban that too, because Cobalt is highly toxic. What a bunch of weenies.
Microwave radiation is not quite the same as gamma radiation. Gamma has much shorter wavelength than even x-rays, which means it's much more harmful - it will definitely ionize atoms in your body. You don't die a few days after you buy a cell phone... but you do if you were near a powerfull gamma burst. Of course alpha and beta radiation is much worse, it breaks up your DNA and shit and you get instant cancer. But those are no problem if you live in a brick house since they are particles and get stopped.
That's because France have some of the largest and richest uranium deposits and also state of the art enrichment plants. They are also one of the largest exporters of electricity as a direct consequence. And also people are not as paranoid there. Oh yeah and the French government doesn't give a damn either, remember they sank that pathetic Greenpeace ship.
Assuming "environment" means the stuff around you on the moon then it is NOT radioactive. However, since there is no atmosphere, energetic particles and photons are not stopped by anything but your spacesuit. Of course if you are even slightly underground you're ok.
The NASA site you point to says that there is a probability that there is ice on the moon, it is not definite. Even if there was, we don't know if it is in such a form that is easily usable. Might be all mixed with rocks or dust.
When you send goods from Moon to Earth you need significant propulsive action to reduce speed in order to enter Earth orbit. Alternatively you can do direct reentry, but it is high-g and you need special capsule if the payload is gonna survive.
They are saying that the onboard thruster will be 450 Newtons, which is equal to about 100 lbf. That means the force on the spacecraft when the thruster is on will be 450 N. The total weight is 440 lb, but it doesn't matter, because the onboard thrusters are used once the spacecraft is in orbit, i.e. for moon transfer, so there is no gravity to pull it down. The launch from Earth will use an Ariane rocket booster (according to the same site) which provides many thousands of pounds of thrust at launch. Also, they mention using Ariane V, which sounds really like an overkill to me, because the Ariane 5 is huge and expensive. IMHO they didn't design this thing in detail, but just threw some approximate stuff on a sheet of paper.
I remember that there was a similar mission to map the moon back in 1994. It was called Clementine and was a joint project of NASA and the Air Force. The probe had all sorts of cameras in it (IR, UV, visible) plus a laser rangefinder, and it basically mapped the moon in extreme detail. The probe was to flyby an asteroid after it finished mapping but its engine failed during that latter stage.
Anyway, that mission was extremely cheap and the probe was very small (about 200kg IIRC). In fact they launched it on an Air Force surplus Titan 2 ICBM. I don't remember the total cost, but it was less than $100M and the mission took pictures in many wavelengths plus it made a relief map of the moon using the laser rangefinder. I don't think this commercial mission will contribute anything new to science, it looks like it will just take pictures of company logos on a moon-Earth background.
There was also the Lunar Prospector which had alpha, gamma and neutron spectrometers to study the materials that make up the moon. It cost even less than Clementine.
So don't diss on NASA with the cost of Lunar missions. Unmanned small probes to the Moon are not too hard to make and considering those guys just have one video camera, hell, you could almost launch that thing on SCUD missile for a ridiculously low cost and hope to recoup the money by taking stupid ad photos that anyone can do in photoshop in like 5 minutes.
Actually in AI and machine learning, most algorithms are basically search algorithms that look for a particular function/hypothesis. The problem is that usually the problem they are trying to solve is NP complete, i.e. the search space of possible hypotheses is exponential. To get around this, learning algorithms make horrible (and I mean ridiuclously bad and wrong) assumptions and simplifications. An example would be the naive Bayes classifier which is one of the best learning algorithms and yet the assumption it is based on is just plain wrong, but it makes computation faster. Also neural networks are usually made only 2 or 3 layer deep, because of speed considerations. Having more layers would improve the "intelligence" of the algorithm a lot, but is computationally intractable. So, speed is currently a very important issue, while Godel's theorem is almost irrelevant (in practice, philosophy put aside).
Nobel physics committee tend to grant prizes to experimental physicists who prove an idea with experimentation, as opposed to a the scientist who came up with a new hypothesis.
While this is mostly true for recent years, it is because physicists have not discovered too much new stuff lately. The latter part of the 20th century was spent mostly proving experimentally stuff from the first half of the 20th century. Also, the Nobel committee gave the prize to people like Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Einstein and Bohr who did little more than theoretical work. I guess with them things went the other way, because they explained experiments which were inconsistent with physics back then.
Diamond is not a molecule -- it's chemical formula is just C i.e. one carbon atom. It is a crystal with its crystal lattice organized in such a way that it makes it really really hard. You are right about big single molecules though, in plastic production plants, when something goes wrong all the liquid in the "reactor" polymerizes and you get one big molecule meters across. Those are extremely hard compared to normal plastics and extremely tough to break up.
I think that computers are really not THAT significant in the general picture. Sure, they are a very usefull tool, but positronic or not, they are just that. Yeah, some vast artificial intelligence would make a good character for a book, but its size probably doesn't matter in the general picture for a sci fi novel. Besides, man got to the moon without much computing power so see, it's not really that important. The internet may have changed the world by allowing instant communication and access to data, but in the sci fi books I've read people usually have something similar. Also, the internet is bound by the speed of light, and this is not much use for a novel talking about interstellar travel.