No the two main problems with the shuttle was the main engines had to be pulled rebuilt and tested after every flight.
Well, if I have my rocketry basics right, that's almost inevitable. Getting a reasonable amount of thrust from a rocket engine invariably means subjecting it to strong thermal and mechanical stresses. There aren't currently any materials that can take that much abuse without wearing out fast.
The wings and the fuse and all the rest were indeed a problem with the shuttle, because they amounted to dead weight and reduced the lifting capacity by quite a bit. i think from 75 tons to something like 25.
Many academics that I know engage in "civil disobediance" and post their papers publicly anyway. Some publishers (notably the ACM) actually permit this. But most do not.
I don't know what proportion of publishers does what, but the matter of fact is that many journals that matter allow self-archiving of preprints, and even of the revised version that is essentially identical with the version that goes into print, perhaps up to special fonts.They do not want the final publisher pdf to be public, though, (here is an example) and are quite emphatic about that. I don't understand why, but that's the way it is. A notable example of such a publisher is Springer. I like them a lot for that.
I know, however, researchers that do not use this feature, and are happy to bury their work behind paywalls. Believe it or not, not all researchers are happy to have other people be able to access their work. For them, paywalls are a feature.
... how's that 'representative democracy' working out for 'ya? Feel represented yet?
So, what do you suggest? Representative democracy might have its problems (which are fixable to some extent by tweaking its structure), but the alternatives are worse.
i.e. what was your point? Do you want monarchy?
I don't understand why you were modded up that much.
Obtaining material online, and learning to collaborate online, are skills that will carry over to the world of work, but the deep learning happens in periods of strong interest, and human interaction is what grabs our attention the most.
Yes, but there is a considerable friction on the producing end of those materials, which is where I expect the bottleneck to be. You can be a lot more sloppy with course materials if they are not online. I'm talking about the difference between hand-written and photocopied, with minor errata announced in class ("I missed a minus on page three"), and a properly copy-edited, finished product. It is a tremendous amount of work to go from there to there. Also, you must make sure copyrights, etc, are correctly stated, and figure out whatever licensing is necessary. In sum, while e-learning is very convenient for the student, it adds a significant burden on the professor and the university.
The advantage of being able to land on a boat is being able to land almost everywhere on the sea, which is quite large. This gives a lot of flexibility when planing trajectories.
It is a technology we should pursue with tremendous effort, and which should one day pay off in one form or another,
I disagree. Not everything is possible, and one can waste huge amounts of resources in things that will never happen. As it stands, there is no reason to believe fusion will ever happen in a halfway reasonable fashion within the next 500 years. Just like space elevators, warp drive, and so on.
There's a nice summary of the difficulties in this fine article, but unfortunately it is not for free:
I am glad you are a "Rabid lisper" -- though insulting other people is not a great way to win other people to your cause
Please enlighten me - where did I insult anyone? Except perhaps the Guile developers for saying that Guile sucks? Or do you just find Lisp insulting all by itself?
but even you have to admit that most people are not interested in learning Lisp.
There is nothing to admit there. That is a fact. How does that change anything? They would greatly benefit from learning it, that's also a fact.
I am not terribly interested in convincing people of my cause. If everybody programmed in Lisp, the huge rewards that come from using it would disappear. It is not a problem to state it so openly, because most people just don't like the parentheses at all and are willing to pay a ridiculous price to avoid them. They wouldn't like lisp no matter what. In fact, many people try lisp and when they witness the power, they hate it even more and start making up silly excuses. Out of spite, I presume.
They used it because they were experts, it was something they were very comfortable with, and thus could get things done very quickly.
They were about as expert in lisp as the others were in their stuff, but were still significantly faster. In particular in the discipline of getting things done, amazingly with rather small performance penalties. That's a property of lisp that lispers regularly observe.
Of course this also dramatically reduced the talent pool they had to draw on for new hires as well.
That's true, sure.
Lisp (and derivatives) is an amazing language and great for many problems, but it is far from mainstream. While it has it's fans (and they are rabid), it isn't a great general purpose solution.
Rabid lisper here. You are wrong on the point that it is not a general purpose solution. It has a mathematical completeness and reflection capabilities that are simply superior to that of other languages. Period. You can do it in X, you can do it in Lisp too, but not the other way around.
It's not for dunces, though, and I have no problem with that.
But the problem with Guile is [...]
No, the problem with Guile is that it sucks. That's the problem, plain and simple. Most lispers and schemers stay away from it. It is tragic that GNU took one of the more mediocre schemes around and decided to put their flag on it. I still appreciate the effort of doing something right, namely insisting that people learn some lisp.
Of course governments are composed of people like everyone else. That's why they can't be trusted!
Must be pretty horrible being you, unable to trust anyone.
The idea that life is a game, and the one who is richest (in money terms) when he dies wins is relatively primitive. It is mantained by people who end up hating their lives because it sucks. Many people in government work because they want a better world, and not for the money. Making the world a better place is a fantastic way of becoming rich, although perhaps not in numbers.
Yes, I am idealistic. I think it is that what it takes to be truly alive.
Unless exotic physics delivers some new way of getting around the light speed barrier, what we're going to need to send probes to even the nearest stars is a craft far more rugged than one we've built now. I'm thinking self-repairing, with lots of raw materials sent with it so it can manufacture spare parts as needed.
Which means - we won't be going anywhere near another star for the foreseeable future. We are, technologically speaking, like ancient Greeks thinking about sending someone to the moon. We cannot even lift from earth any amount of gear that comes even close to covering a useful setup for a mission like that.
IIUC, this is not exactly correct. You can patent software in conjunction with a technical process that is not purely data processing. I.e. a specific server app: no patent. A specific way of controlling a washing machine: patent, together with the contraption to excert control. This has been cemented in a recent final ruling by the german high court that handed a Siemens a nice painful defeat as they tried to patent software.
I wonder if the mp3 patents would be up for overturning under this new view.
I am a little bit optimistic wrt software patents. Almost everyone who understands the issue dislikes them, except of course the cynical lawyer$ who only think of money. Anyay: not a time to become complacent. Write to your congressmen/MEP, donate to the ffii, etc.
I just... don't even know what to say anymore. Companies have been pouring money down the drain trying to discover these materials and these guys figured out how to do it more quickly, more effectively, and at a fraction of the cost. Obviously this is a problem that has been looked at by hundreds of engineers and scientists, and this is the first group to successfully apply this technique; and all we can muster is a collective circle jerk trying to sound smart.
As someone who has looked into the issues, I can tell you that it is very unlikely for these claims to be true to the full extent of the summary. If they really solved the problem as thoroughly as the summary claims, then great. But frankly, I don't believe it. The Nature article seems to be unreachable now, and Nature is about high impact, not actual truth or quality.
I can find nothing which supports your conclusion. These languages only run on systems with support protected, read-only memory? If not, as originally stated multiple times, you're full of shit.
These languages are better designed, and can ensure safety without running on systems with only protected, read-only memory. I conclude that this possibility is simply beyond your grasp and imagination. It is unfortunate (for you) that you can only resort to swearing and insulting to compensate for your lack of understanding. Are you always like that?
Yes, it's a major weakness of GC that it is not compatible with RAII.
No idea where you get that from. Search for unwind-protect and with-open-file. GC is fully compatible with RAII. The additional possibility of using finalizers with GCs actually provides more flexibility than RAII.
GC 'enemies' are a lot like people who don't like vaccines or antibiotics.
It's sad that courts feel this need to qualify their rulings in such a ridiculous fashion, and ruin their value in the process. Do they fear the corporate and political party lynch mobs, or do they really lack confidence in the substance of the rulings themselves?
Don't be too sad. I think most judges do not really understand the issues, so are ruling from their interpretation of text of law and a more or less vague idea of what is going on. This isn't really their fault, as they are not programmers and software engineers. So I think the judgements are reasonably good. They are a precedent in the right direction.
That said, reference counting - as long as you have zeroing weak references - is good enough for 99% of cases.
You know, I am really glad to hear that, true to the C++ tradition, the committee has agreed to a 99% solution that will break in mysterious and irreproducible ways every now and then, leaving you few if any options when it does.[/sarcasm]
The truth is that a GC was not added because it is fundamentally incompatible with the semantics of the language. This is a major weakness.
Oh noes! You actually have to be smart to be a C++ programmer. Oh the horror!!! THE HORROR!!!!!!!! Wait, why is that a bad thing?
It becomes wrong the moment that you spend your brain power caring for superfluous bullshit. Well, at least I don't like that. That's why I use languages with GC, parsable syntax, and sound semantics.
We have enough incompetents writing software as it is. We don't possibly need to lower the bar any further, do we?
What we definitively have is too many people without any sense of taste or elegance developing software. It's easy to spot them: they love C++.
Please, do not confuse your incompetence or ignorance for an hypotetical C++ weakness.
Well, that's typical sectarian. "If it doesn't work for you, it is you who did something wrong".
C++ imposes a massive burden on the programmer. You have to be a lot smarter than with other, better programming languages just to get something done reasonably well. There are a million rules with a million exceptions, and things keeps constantly going wrong. Of course, it is your fault every time they go wrong.
Since I do not program in C++ anymore, that's fine with me. I can live with it being your fault. It is your fault that you cannot see what a bad language C++ actually is.
The loop macro is, in essence, part of the compiler or the standard library. It is code that processes code during compilation. I'm not surprised that it's nontrivial.
The problem isn't that it's notrivial. The problem is that when something goes wrong, the end user has to debug it by interpreting the mysterious error messages that are emitted by whatever part of its implementation finally ended up failing. That wouldn't be the case if it were part of the compiler. The compiler could detect errors in how it was USED and issue succinct error messages about that, rather than exposing how it is IMPLEMENTED.
Lisp programmer here.
The loop macro actually has access to all the innards of the compiler and gives reasonably useful error messages, at least when compared with standard issue C++ error messages. The loop macro is in fact a lisp program with full access to everything. It can and does produce error messages through the same mechanism than the compiler. C++ templates is a horrendously perverted shadow of what lisp macros are.
Try Common Lisp some day. It so superior to C++ - it is amazing.
- After over a decade of a government whose priority was "education, education, education", we have reports that 20% of kids in London leave primary school unable to read
That is interesting. Anyway, over here in continental europe, we have been wondering for ages why you destroyed your own university system so thoroughly (as measured by competitiveness of English researchers in an international setting). It is a complete mystery to us why your school system is so miserable, etc. Maybe the ruling class is not actually interested in helping the people?
- Burglary, Assault, etc are generally not punished in any meaningful way - people get community sentence upon community sentence, instead of a visible, clear, deterring punishment
I don't know what you are talking about. The british system is extremely opressive and repressive. Ever heard of ASBOs?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if I have my rocketry basics right, that's almost inevitable. Getting a reasonable amount of thrust from a rocket engine invariably means subjecting it to strong thermal and mechanical stresses. There aren't currently any materials that can take that much abuse without wearing out fast.
The wings and the fuse and all the rest were indeed a problem with the shuttle, because they amounted to dead weight and reduced the lifting capacity by quite a bit. i think from 75 tons to something like 25.
I don't know what proportion of publishers does what, but the matter of fact is that many journals that matter allow self-archiving of preprints, and even of the revised version that is essentially identical with the version that goes into print, perhaps up to special fonts.They do not want the final publisher pdf to be public, though, (here is an example) and are quite emphatic about that. I don't understand why, but that's the way it is. A notable example of such a publisher is Springer. I like them a lot for that.
Btw, there is a central database for finding the policies of journals here.
I know, however, researchers that do not use this feature, and are happy to bury their work behind paywalls. Believe it or not, not all researchers are happy to have other people be able to access their work. For them, paywalls are a feature.
So, what do you suggest? Representative democracy might have its problems (which are fixable to some extent by tweaking its structure), but the alternatives are worse.
i.e. what was your point? Do you want monarchy?
I don't understand why you were modded up that much.
Not really. What kind of crazy assertion is that? Your warped logic is typical of dictators and tyrants, btw, and their accolytes and apologists.
So, what the hell is wrong with you?
Yes, but there is a considerable friction on the producing end of those materials, which is where I expect the bottleneck to be. You can be a lot more sloppy with course materials if they are not online. I'm talking about the difference between hand-written and photocopied, with minor errata announced in class ("I missed a minus on page three"), and a properly copy-edited, finished product. It is a tremendous amount of work to go from there to there. Also, you must make sure copyrights, etc, are correctly stated, and figure out whatever licensing is necessary. In sum, while e-learning is very convenient for the student, it adds a significant burden on the professor and the university.
FSU has pretty nice research and education in some areas, in particular scientific computing: http://www.sc.fsu.edu/
OTOH, the political science faculty used to be a wingnut asylum of the worst kind. Seems to have improved, though.
The advantage of being able to land on a boat is being able to land almost everywhere on the sea, which is quite large. This gives a lot of flexibility when planing trajectories.
Well, it is not as if there weren't any alternatives before.
I disagree. Not everything is possible, and one can waste huge amounts of resources in things that will never happen. As it stands, there is no reason to believe fusion will ever happen in a halfway reasonable fashion within the next 500 years. Just like space elevators, warp drive, and so on.
There's a nice summary of the difficulties in this fine article, but unfortunately it is not for free:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fusions-false-dawn
Please enlighten me - where did I insult anyone? Except perhaps the Guile developers for saying that Guile sucks? Or do you just find Lisp insulting all by itself?
There is nothing to admit there. That is a fact. How does that change anything? They would greatly benefit from learning it, that's also a fact.
I am not terribly interested in convincing people of my cause. If everybody programmed in Lisp, the huge rewards that come from using it would disappear. It is not a problem to state it so openly, because most people just don't like the parentheses at all and are willing to pay a ridiculous price to avoid them. They wouldn't like lisp no matter what. In fact, many people try lisp and when they witness the power, they hate it even more and start making up silly excuses. Out of spite, I presume.
They were about as expert in lisp as the others were in their stuff, but were still significantly faster. In particular in the discipline of getting things done, amazingly with rather small performance penalties. That's a property of lisp that lispers regularly observe.
That's true, sure.
Rabid lisper here. You are wrong on the point that it is not a general purpose solution. It has a mathematical completeness and reflection capabilities that are simply superior to that of other languages. Period. You can do it in X, you can do it in Lisp too, but not the other way around.
It's not for dunces, though, and I have no problem with that.
No, the problem with Guile is that it sucks. That's the problem, plain and simple. Most lispers and schemers stay away from it. It is tragic that GNU took one of the more mediocre schemes around and decided to put their flag on it. I still appreciate the effort of doing something right, namely insisting that people learn some lisp.
Must be pretty horrible being you, unable to trust anyone.
The idea that life is a game, and the one who is richest (in money terms) when he dies wins is relatively primitive. It is mantained by people who end up hating their lives because it sucks. Many people in government work because they want a better world, and not for the money. Making the world a better place is a fantastic way of becoming rich, although perhaps not in numbers.
Yes, I am idealistic. I think it is that what it takes to be truly alive.
Which means - we won't be going anywhere near another star for the foreseeable future. We are, technologically speaking, like ancient Greeks thinking about sending someone to the moon. We cannot even lift from earth any amount of gear that comes even close to covering a useful setup for a mission like that.
IIUC, this is not exactly correct. You can patent software in conjunction with a technical process that is not purely data processing. I.e. a specific server app: no patent. A specific way of controlling a washing machine: patent, together with the contraption to excert control. This has been cemented in a recent final ruling by the german high court that handed a Siemens a nice painful defeat as they tried to patent software.
I wonder if the mp3 patents would be up for overturning under this new view.
I am a little bit optimistic wrt software patents. Almost everyone who understands the issue dislikes them, except of course the cynical lawyer$ who only think of money. Anyay: not a time to become complacent. Write to your congressmen/MEP, donate to the ffii, etc.
As someone who has looked into the issues, I can tell you that it is very unlikely for these claims to be true to the full extent of the summary. If they really solved the problem as thoroughly as the summary claims, then great. But frankly, I don't believe it. The Nature article seems to be unreachable now, and Nature is about high impact, not actual truth or quality.
These languages are better designed, and can ensure safety without running on systems with only protected, read-only memory. I conclude that this possibility is simply beyond your grasp and imagination. It is unfortunate (for you) that you can only resort to swearing and insulting to compensate for your lack of understanding. Are you always like that?
No idea where you get that from. Search for unwind-protect and with-open-file. GC is fully compatible with RAII. The additional possibility of using finalizers with GCs actually provides more flexibility than RAII.
GC 'enemies' are a lot like people who don't like vaccines or antibiotics.
Don't be too sad. I think most judges do not really understand the issues, so are ruling from their interpretation of text of law and a more or less vague idea of what is going on. This isn't really their fault, as they are not programmers and software engineers. So I think the judgements are reasonably good. They are a precedent in the right direction.
You know, I am really glad to hear that, true to the C++ tradition, the committee has agreed to a 99% solution that will break in mysterious and irreproducible ways every now and then, leaving you few if any options when it does.[/sarcasm]
The truth is that a GC was not added because it is fundamentally incompatible with the semantics of the language. This is a major weakness.
You can have the former without the latter. I don't know, try ada, ocaml, haskel, etc.
Here, a napkin. You are foaming at the mouth.
It becomes wrong the moment that you spend your brain power caring for superfluous bullshit. Well, at least I don't like that. That's why I use languages with GC, parsable syntax, and sound semantics.
What we definitively have is too many people without any sense of taste or elegance developing software. It's easy to spot them: they love C++.
Hm, no. There are significantly better languages that get this kind of thing (and many others) right.
Actually, the guy you replied to showed critical thinking and the ability to adequately judge a claim. What was your contribution again?
Well, that's typical sectarian. "If it doesn't work for you, it is you who did something wrong".
C++ imposes a massive burden on the programmer. You have to be a lot smarter than with other, better programming languages just to get something done reasonably well. There are a million rules with a million exceptions, and things keeps constantly going wrong. Of course, it is your fault every time they go wrong.
Since I do not program in C++ anymore, that's fine with me. I can live with it being your fault. It is your fault that you cannot see what a bad language C++ actually is.
Lisp programmer here.
The loop macro actually has access to all the innards of the compiler and gives reasonably useful error messages, at least when compared with standard issue C++ error messages. The loop macro is in fact a lisp program with full access to everything. It can and does produce error messages through the same mechanism than the compiler. C++ templates is a horrendously perverted shadow of what lisp macros are.
Try Common Lisp some day. It so superior to C++ - it is amazing.
(...and there goes my karma)
That is interesting. Anyway, over here in continental europe, we have been wondering for ages why you destroyed your own university system so thoroughly (as measured by competitiveness of English researchers in an international setting). It is a complete mystery to us why your school system is so miserable, etc. Maybe the ruling class is not actually interested in helping the people?
I don't know what you are talking about. The british system is extremely opressive and repressive. Ever heard of ASBOs?