One thing I've always wondered is why nobody has tried some good old fashioned (Founding Fathers style) Deism. Its pretty simple, God sets the initial conditions at t=0 and he sets the system. By doing this He (or She) knows how things will happen in the future of this timeline. Everything after t=0 is governed by physics leading up to and through evolutionary processes. Its not Intelligent Design, since life on Earth is created by natural processes, but the fundamental laws of the universe are of God/God himself.
I'm an engineer for a company that writes some of the signal analysis for robots, mostly military. They are designed to look for people, noise, or something easily sensible and train their guns on that location and await further instruction. Its a de facto law for military robot design that a human makes every firing decision, but the robot is allowed to aim and ask if it can fire. If a US soldier did something loud (shoot a gun, slam a door, yell) theres a good chance thats what set off the targeting routine. There was never any chance of a weapon being fired, except of course if there was a malicious operator. I have not worked on this type of robot, so I can't be sure of the process. There might be a user command that says "go look for target". If the robot looked for a target without ever being commanded that'd be a pretty horrendous software error.
As I recall there was talk 15-20 years ago of doing this in the US at a cost of $400-500 billion. Seems to be a tad too expensive for Russia, in fact for anyone. Its much cheaper to send up everything you need for one mission. The biggest cost is putting things into Earth orbit, so unless they have a plan to get raw materials to the assembly station without launching them off Earth first, it seems like they just want to build a giant space station for the hell of it when there is a cheaper way of doing things. I doubt this ever gets past the planning stage.
I went to high school with this kid
on
The DIY Tank
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· Score: 5, Informative
This guy's been doing things like that for awhile. He and I went to the same high school for 2 years. He loved making stuff by hand and engineering things. He had this humongous truck, probably bigger than that tank that he constantly added stuff to. Will liked to bounce some of his crazy ideas off of us, potato guns and the like. Alot of crazy prank ideas too. I'm glad to see that he's still at it.
At this point telecom companies are utilities, so they shouldn't be able to restrict usage like that. Everyone expects their tap water to be of a good quality no matter where you live. However, I don't think that the government should force them to lease infrastructure to competitors. I think bell could probably make quite a bit of money leasing infrastructure though.
What this is basically saying is that instead of operating a quantum computer with 2 levels, 0 and 1, they are operating with 3, 0,1,2 lets say. According to my computer architecture prof 3 levels is the most efficient way of making computers, from a number of components standpoint. Its hard thinking in base-3, because things like inverters become meaningless. AND and OR gates still work with a reasonable amount of understanding. Things like multiplexers and decoders make sense. If you can get into the macroscopic level of design its pretty understandable. You can use 3 trit words to do base-27 in a similar way to using 4 bit words and hex.
If you think the law is silly, here is why it exists: A government contractor develops a product, on their own(w/o being paid directly by the government), that has classified applications, the government can give you a contract to work more with it, but in the process classify the product. So you can still get a patent but its for classified work. An important note is that if you are under contract from the government, nothing you do for that contract can be work done towards a patent. This is so the government isn't funding the development of patents, and so the government can facilitate movement of ideas easily throughout contractors.
Unfortunately, whenever politicians start talking about "the will of the people" (see 2000,2002,2004,2006 election results) thats a sign we're moving away from a Republic. When candidates want 51% of the country to rule over the 49% thats a sign we're moving from a Republic to a demagogy. That's what scares me the most about the Obama/Edwards populism is that they are trying to use the power of the mob to gain power. The one thing that makes me fear the end of American dominance is the rise of a demagogue, and the attitude that we can't move forward until everyone else catches up. The one example I can really think of for this is that Obama wants to "delay" the manned spaceflight plans by 5 years in order to increase funding to education. To me that's no better than Caesar buying bread for all the paupers in Rome.
They are saying box office revenues increased. Piracy most likely hurts DVD sales and rentals more than going to a theater. There is a big difference between a movie theater and a DIVX movie on you 17 inch LCD monitor, or if you are more crafty, a bigger TV. Its the equivalent of saying "box office revenues went up despite the rampant use of recordable media in the home". From my experience, a movie you go and spend $10 on plus refreshments, and gas (plus potentially someone else's ticket and refreshments) is not something you would download instead.
Most of us can pretty readily block out ads, provided they are like the ones at slashdot. There is alot of sidebar space for ads, maybe at the bottom of the page. I don't know what revenue rates are for ads, but when there is a page viewed for every American - per day, assuming 1/10th cent per page, which is probably low, the ad revenue works out to be $109 million. I think less obtrusive ads might just do the trick. 1/200th of a cent would give them over the $5 million they need. Therefore it seems that they can make very small ads and still cover their budget.
The moon goes around the Earth, one face always faces the Earth. Over the course of 28 days the dark side of the moon will see the entire sky with a giant ball of rock in between the observatory and Earth
I love PKD as much as the next guy, but I think you're date where we are in terms of Roman Imperialism is on. To the extent of the status of our political system, look to the Reign of Sulla, a demagogue who confiscated all of the property of thousands of wealthy Romans (and killed them), and used the money to support social programs (gladiatorial games and bread, not to mention outfitting Sulla's house). This rhetoric seems similar to some of today's politics, especially with John Edwards, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee. They all advocate punishing the rich and using the money on entitlements (Huckabee is more subtle, since he also happens to be in the party with higher-income voters). The weakness here is using the power of the mob to gain power for yourself. Once this happens, democracy will fail as leaders put their own pursuit of power above the good of the country. Forcing equality and happiness on everyone only destroys the ability of a nation to innovate. If there is any societal reason for our decline in intellectual capital, its that theres a huge government safety net that says "We're sorry textile workers who lose their jobs because they must get paid by law 100 times more than someone in Thailand, you shouldn't make an effort to learn new skills, the government will make sure you never have to know anything new after you turn 16." That's all ridiculous remember, having freedom means having the freedom to fail, the freedom to screw up your life, the freedom to be unsuccessful. Remember the lessons from Brave New World
I had a chat with my grandfather who works on attitude control systems for commercial satellites about hydrazine. Hydrazine is used for attitude control and orbit stabilization. Since contact was never made with this USA 193, the hydrazine tank should be full. The ignition for hydrazine is heat, so all they do to fire it is have a little toaster that ignites a little bit of fuel at a time. Because the ignition source is heat, the hydrazine tank has to be incredibly well insulated to maintain a constant temperature. If the tank were to survive reentry, by being shielded by other components melting off, it would most likely rupture when it hit the ground at terminal velocity. Hydrazine is a pretty serious hazmat, and even a small concentration of that into your system will do serious, potentially permanent or even fatal damage to your lungs. Even worse, the hydrazine could ignite upon hitting the Earth and cause a small explosion, though the gas leak is more likely. If you took the surface of the earth and divided it into 1 acre chunks, I doubt more than 5% of those acres would have people in them( figure 10% of the Earth is inhabited, and large portions of that are farm) Nevertheless, a 1/20 chance of killing/permanently damaging anywhere from 1(hits near Bear Grylls in the desert) to 10,000 people(hits Rio), it certainly seems like a politically influenced decision to get rid of a potential disaster.
Doesn't necessarily have to be big business/ gov't
on
WikiLeaks Under Fire
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You know it could always be some 14 year old prankster who figured out how to DDOS a server, and correctly thought "Hey, if I can effectively shut off WikiLeaks, everyone will assume that groups which suffer from WikiLeaks were responsible." I mean it takes alot of brains to maintain a big business, I doubt the CTO or CIO of a giant firm suggested DDOSing a fairly well-known website in order to prevent access to content.
I know you've been lobbying for years to get me to move up north. The nice people, clean air, beautiful outdoors, universal healthcare, and now apparently a somewhat more laissez-faire approach to copyright law. Look, maybe if you rig the election to put Hillary Clinton in the White House, I might consider moving.
Chinese communications officials saw Army of Darkness and decided that if a single American could travel back in time, make himself a prosthetic arm, defeat an army of his little clones, defeat his evil self, unite 2 warring factions in medieval England, then defeat an army of skeletons, the Chinese are in major trouble from our super-store employees. There's no way the general populace could see that. Also included in the ban are any movies containing an ex-Vietnam special forces agent who makes prolific use of exploding arrows.
A Republican representative, I forget who, was giving a speech, and basically said: "I'm tired of the democrat's grandstanding, I call on my fellow Republicans, and any Democrats who wish to join me, I'm leaving." The idea behind doing this was to make a big fuss so that what was going on in Congress yesterday would be covered by the news. Essentially, they felt that by making sure they got on CNN saying the Democrat's were busy sticking their tongues out at the Bush administration, when there was an important bill to pass. The bill in question, on granting immunity to companies helping the federal government, has enough support to pass the House, but not enough to force a vote on it if Nancy Pelosi doesn't want there to be. I think its fine, don't punish companies for doing what the NSA asks them to do, corporations are not responsible for upholding the rights of individuals. That is the job of the executive and judicial branch. (Executive enforces laws, judicial makes sure the laws are fair, legislative writes them) . A company in this case would not want to be found disobeying proper government authority if they said no. Even though a judge should have been involved.
This satellite was never able to communicate to the ground. Its orbit was never finished off, which is why it decayed so much as to reenter the atmosphere after 15 months after launch. If they shoot this satellite down, the pieces will still almost all re-enter. The main reason for shooting it down, more than likely is to make sure the fuel doesn't make it past the very upper atmosphere, as well as to ensure that no one unscrupulous gets any technology. The kinetic energy delivered by the missile won't overcome the energy needed to kick the debris back into orbit, so there won't be a debris field.
If you think about it manned space stations are rather unpractical (especially today). Photographic surveillance can be done just fine now with remote controlled, or even robotic systems. The US government has tracking stations all over the world, so that at no time is a satellite out of contact with America. I would be surprised if the US had any weapons on ships today. Weapons, ammo, and a remote firing mechanism take up precious space that could be used for better spying. Theres no threat of a Moonraker-esque space battle in the future, so having short range weapons seems kinda pointless.
The more voltage the more power, old computers and logic used 5V, 0.3V will be very hard to use because noise in the computer and in chips may reach 0.15 Volts, the absolute minimum resolution for the circuitry to distinguish between high and low voltage at 0.3 volts.
I'm 19, so I'm relatively young, the first game I played was Duck Hunt, at a friends house, when I was about 4. My parents didn't care if I occasionally played SNES or Genesis at my friends houses, but they were apprehensive for me to have my own system. My parents decided to see if I would go bonkers playing games and ignoring everything else if I had a system, so we borrowed my uncle's Genesis, put it in my bedroom with an old tv, that wasn't hooked up to cable or anything. I played a few hours a week, so that Christmas I had a brand new N64('96, I was 8, almost 9) with Shadows of the Empire. I'd consider myself a gamer now, I still play less than 10 hours a week on average, its a healthy diversion, and it sure beats TV.
I think that as long as kids consider that games are a fun thing to do, but don't let it consume them, theres nothing wrong with having them play. I had Shadows at 8, which these days would probably be rated M, but I knew it was fake, and I was just controlling a guy kinda like Han. As long as someone is mature enough to be able to play games without letting it become the only thing they want to do it is just fine.
I'm anxious to see what develops from this. The 700 Mhz band should have a fairly large range (greater than normal wi-fi), but less than a radio station for example, given the same power. I'm interested in what each of the bidders wants to use the band for, most likely for providing wireless internet. At first connection speed might be a problem though, but still acceptable for casual browsing and e-mail. maybe not fast enough for real-time youtube.
The songs get a bunch of free exposure, and most of the songs on Guitar Hero are pretty good songs to begin with. Unfortunately for the music biz, I already own all the songs legally that I want from Guitar Hero, so no bump in sales from me, I haven't paid for any of the packs yet, though I do like the Halo Mix.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I've always wondered is why nobody has tried some good old fashioned (Founding Fathers style) Deism. Its pretty simple, God sets the initial conditions at t=0 and he sets the system. By doing this He (or She) knows how things will happen in the future of this timeline. Everything after t=0 is governed by physics leading up to and through evolutionary processes. Its not Intelligent Design, since life on Earth is created by natural processes, but the fundamental laws of the universe are of God/God himself.
I'm an engineer for a company that writes some of the signal analysis for robots, mostly military. They are designed to look for people, noise, or something easily sensible and train their guns on that location and await further instruction. Its a de facto law for military robot design that a human makes every firing decision, but the robot is allowed to aim and ask if it can fire. If a US soldier did something loud (shoot a gun, slam a door, yell) theres a good chance thats what set off the targeting routine. There was never any chance of a weapon being fired, except of course if there was a malicious operator. I have not worked on this type of robot, so I can't be sure of the process. There might be a user command that says "go look for target". If the robot looked for a target without ever being commanded that'd be a pretty horrendous software error.
As I recall there was talk 15-20 years ago of doing this in the US at a cost of $400-500 billion. Seems to be a tad too expensive for Russia, in fact for anyone. Its much cheaper to send up everything you need for one mission. The biggest cost is putting things into Earth orbit, so unless they have a plan to get raw materials to the assembly station without launching them off Earth first, it seems like they just want to build a giant space station for the hell of it when there is a cheaper way of doing things. I doubt this ever gets past the planning stage.
This guy's been doing things like that for awhile. He and I went to the same high school for 2 years. He loved making stuff by hand and engineering things. He had this humongous truck, probably bigger than that tank that he constantly added stuff to. Will liked to bounce some of his crazy ideas off of us, potato guns and the like. Alot of crazy prank ideas too. I'm glad to see that he's still at it.
At this point telecom companies are utilities, so they shouldn't be able to restrict usage like that. Everyone expects their tap water to be of a good quality no matter where you live. However, I don't think that the government should force them to lease infrastructure to competitors. I think bell could probably make quite a bit of money leasing infrastructure though.
What this is basically saying is that instead of operating a quantum computer with 2 levels, 0 and 1, they are operating with 3, 0,1,2 lets say. According to my computer architecture prof 3 levels is the most efficient way of making computers, from a number of components standpoint. Its hard thinking in base-3, because things like inverters become meaningless. AND and OR gates still work with a reasonable amount of understanding. Things like multiplexers and decoders make sense. If you can get into the macroscopic level of design its pretty understandable. You can use 3 trit words to do base-27 in a similar way to using 4 bit words and hex.
If you think the law is silly, here is why it exists: A government contractor develops a product, on their own(w/o being paid directly by the government), that has classified applications, the government can give you a contract to work more with it, but in the process classify the product. So you can still get a patent but its for classified work. An important note is that if you are under contract from the government, nothing you do for that contract can be work done towards a patent. This is so the government isn't funding the development of patents, and so the government can facilitate movement of ideas easily throughout contractors.
Unfortunately, whenever politicians start talking about "the will of the people" (see 2000,2002,2004,2006 election results) thats a sign we're moving away from a Republic. When candidates want 51% of the country to rule over the 49% thats a sign we're moving from a Republic to a demagogy. That's what scares me the most about the Obama/Edwards populism is that they are trying to use the power of the mob to gain power. The one thing that makes me fear the end of American dominance is the rise of a demagogue, and the attitude that we can't move forward until everyone else catches up. The one example I can really think of for this is that Obama wants to "delay" the manned spaceflight plans by 5 years in order to increase funding to education. To me that's no better than Caesar buying bread for all the paupers in Rome.
They are saying box office revenues increased. Piracy most likely hurts DVD sales and rentals more than going to a theater. There is a big difference between a movie theater and a DIVX movie on you 17 inch LCD monitor, or if you are more crafty, a bigger TV. Its the equivalent of saying "box office revenues went up despite the rampant use of recordable media in the home". From my experience, a movie you go and spend $10 on plus refreshments, and gas (plus potentially someone else's ticket and refreshments) is not something you would download instead.
Most of us can pretty readily block out ads, provided they are like the ones at slashdot. There is alot of sidebar space for ads, maybe at the bottom of the page. I don't know what revenue rates are for ads, but when there is a page viewed for every American - per day, assuming 1/10th cent per page, which is probably low, the ad revenue works out to be $109 million. I think less obtrusive ads might just do the trick. 1/200th of a cent would give them over the $5 million they need. Therefore it seems that they can make very small ads and still cover their budget.
What really made those feelings of relief was that every time they died, it was one death closer to not having to play 007:Nightfire anymore.
The moon goes around the Earth, one face always faces the Earth. Over the course of 28 days the dark side of the moon will see the entire sky with a giant ball of rock in between the observatory and Earth
I love PKD as much as the next guy, but I think you're date where we are in terms of Roman Imperialism is on. To the extent of the status of our political system, look to the Reign of Sulla, a demagogue who confiscated all of the property of thousands of wealthy Romans (and killed them), and used the money to support social programs (gladiatorial games and bread, not to mention outfitting Sulla's house). This rhetoric seems similar to some of today's politics, especially with John Edwards, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee. They all advocate punishing the rich and using the money on entitlements (Huckabee is more subtle, since he also happens to be in the party with higher-income voters). The weakness here is using the power of the mob to gain power for yourself. Once this happens, democracy will fail as leaders put their own pursuit of power above the good of the country. Forcing equality and happiness on everyone only destroys the ability of a nation to innovate. If there is any societal reason for our decline in intellectual capital, its that theres a huge government safety net that says "We're sorry textile workers who lose their jobs because they must get paid by law 100 times more than someone in Thailand, you shouldn't make an effort to learn new skills, the government will make sure you never have to know anything new after you turn 16." That's all ridiculous remember, having freedom means having the freedom to fail, the freedom to screw up your life, the freedom to be unsuccessful. Remember the lessons from Brave New World
I had a chat with my grandfather who works on attitude control systems for commercial satellites about hydrazine. Hydrazine is used for attitude control and orbit stabilization. Since contact was never made with this USA 193, the hydrazine tank should be full. The ignition for hydrazine is heat, so all they do to fire it is have a little toaster that ignites a little bit of fuel at a time. Because the ignition source is heat, the hydrazine tank has to be incredibly well insulated to maintain a constant temperature. If the tank were to survive reentry, by being shielded by other components melting off, it would most likely rupture when it hit the ground at terminal velocity. Hydrazine is a pretty serious hazmat, and even a small concentration of that into your system will do serious, potentially permanent or even fatal damage to your lungs. Even worse, the hydrazine could ignite upon hitting the Earth and cause a small explosion, though the gas leak is more likely. If you took the surface of the earth and divided it into 1 acre chunks, I doubt more than 5% of those acres would have people in them( figure 10% of the Earth is inhabited, and large portions of that are farm) Nevertheless, a 1/20 chance of killing/permanently damaging anywhere from 1(hits near Bear Grylls in the desert) to 10,000 people(hits Rio), it certainly seems like a politically influenced decision to get rid of a potential disaster.
You know it could always be some 14 year old prankster who figured out how to DDOS a server, and correctly thought "Hey, if I can effectively shut off WikiLeaks, everyone will assume that groups which suffer from WikiLeaks were responsible." I mean it takes alot of brains to maintain a big business, I doubt the CTO or CIO of a giant firm suggested DDOSing a fairly well-known website in order to prevent access to content.
I know you've been lobbying for years to get me to move up north. The nice people, clean air, beautiful outdoors, universal healthcare, and now apparently a somewhat more laissez-faire approach to copyright law. Look, maybe if you rig the election to put Hillary Clinton in the White House, I might consider moving.
Chinese communications officials saw Army of Darkness and decided that if a single American could travel back in time, make himself a prosthetic arm, defeat an army of his little clones, defeat his evil self, unite 2 warring factions in medieval England, then defeat an army of skeletons, the Chinese are in major trouble from our super-store employees. There's no way the general populace could see that. Also included in the ban are any movies containing an ex-Vietnam special forces agent who makes prolific use of exploding arrows.
A Republican representative, I forget who, was giving a speech, and basically said: "I'm tired of the democrat's grandstanding, I call on my fellow Republicans, and any Democrats who wish to join me, I'm leaving." The idea behind doing this was to make a big fuss so that what was going on in Congress yesterday would be covered by the news. Essentially, they felt that by making sure they got on CNN saying the Democrat's were busy sticking their tongues out at the Bush administration, when there was an important bill to pass. The bill in question, on granting immunity to companies helping the federal government, has enough support to pass the House, but not enough to force a vote on it if Nancy Pelosi doesn't want there to be. I think its fine, don't punish companies for doing what the NSA asks them to do, corporations are not responsible for upholding the rights of individuals. That is the job of the executive and judicial branch. (Executive enforces laws, judicial makes sure the laws are fair, legislative writes them) . A company in this case would not want to be found disobeying proper government authority if they said no. Even though a judge should have been involved.
Will children of aliens born in this system react when they leave the red sun of OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, and grow up with the Yellow sun of Earth?
This satellite was never able to communicate to the ground. Its orbit was never finished off, which is why it decayed so much as to reenter the atmosphere after 15 months after launch. If they shoot this satellite down, the pieces will still almost all re-enter. The main reason for shooting it down, more than likely is to make sure the fuel doesn't make it past the very upper atmosphere, as well as to ensure that no one unscrupulous gets any technology. The kinetic energy delivered by the missile won't overcome the energy needed to kick the debris back into orbit, so there won't be a debris field.
If you think about it manned space stations are rather unpractical (especially today). Photographic surveillance can be done just fine now with remote controlled, or even robotic systems. The US government has tracking stations all over the world, so that at no time is a satellite out of contact with America. I would be surprised if the US had any weapons on ships today. Weapons, ammo, and a remote firing mechanism take up precious space that could be used for better spying. Theres no threat of a Moonraker-esque space battle in the future, so having short range weapons seems kinda pointless.
The more voltage the more power, old computers and logic used 5V, 0.3V will be very hard to use because noise in the computer and in chips may reach 0.15 Volts, the absolute minimum resolution for the circuitry to distinguish between high and low voltage at 0.3 volts.
I'm 19, so I'm relatively young, the first game I played was Duck Hunt, at a friends house, when I was about 4. My parents didn't care if I occasionally played SNES or Genesis at my friends houses, but they were apprehensive for me to have my own system. My parents decided to see if I would go bonkers playing games and ignoring everything else if I had a system, so we borrowed my uncle's Genesis, put it in my bedroom with an old tv, that wasn't hooked up to cable or anything. I played a few hours a week, so that Christmas I had a brand new N64('96, I was 8, almost 9) with Shadows of the Empire. I'd consider myself a gamer now, I still play less than 10 hours a week on average, its a healthy diversion, and it sure beats TV.
I think that as long as kids consider that games are a fun thing to do, but don't let it consume them, theres nothing wrong with having them play. I had Shadows at 8, which these days would probably be rated M, but I knew it was fake, and I was just controlling a guy kinda like Han. As long as someone is mature enough to be able to play games without letting it become the only thing they want to do it is just fine.
I'm anxious to see what develops from this. The 700 Mhz band should have a fairly large range (greater than normal wi-fi), but less than a radio station for example, given the same power. I'm interested in what each of the bidders wants to use the band for, most likely for providing wireless internet. At first connection speed might be a problem though, but still acceptable for casual browsing and e-mail. maybe not fast enough for real-time youtube.
The songs get a bunch of free exposure, and most of the songs on Guitar Hero are pretty good songs to begin with. Unfortunately for the music biz, I already own all the songs legally that I want from Guitar Hero, so no bump in sales from me, I haven't paid for any of the packs yet, though I do like the Halo Mix.