I spent several minutes perusing the SOPHIA site without finding this information. Looking at the pictures, I'd just about convinced myself that there was a large pane of glass covering the opening, even though I knew that it would cause some distortion. No doubt about it, SOPHIA needs a FAQ.
So, I'm guessing that there's no one standing in the rear when they open the shutter?
The first time around, the fuel for the return needs to be sent from Earth, in case production on Mars doesn't work as planned. (Unless unmanned fuel production can be established and tested before sending humans, which seems unlikely.)
No, that's exactly the plan. First, you send living quarters, freeze-dried food, and a fuel distillery. Only after making sure that the quarters are air-tight, the food hasn't spoiled, and the fuel distillery has produced sufficient fuel to return to orbit do you allow humans to land, probably in a craft that only has a few hours of life support. If you want to shave some months off the schedule, you can send the people early, but you need to be prepared to do an Apollo 8 flyby in case something didn't work.
I was writing 3D engines at the same time that Quake came out. Mine were written in high level languages, because code reusability was very important to the project's sponsors. Quake was written to do one thing and do it as fast as possible. Carmack wanted a high frame rate, and was willing to sacrifice everything else to achieve it. It turned out that high frame rates translated into high sales, meaning high profits. Other people at that time had other priorities, and were willing to sacrifice frame rate to get them. They tried to get high profits by reducing the cost of development or by charging more for their product. It turns out that Carmack's approach led to the highest profits. So, was he brilliant, lucky, or some mix? I know which way I lean.
If you can get a Biosphere II up and running on Mars, bearing in mind you need it 2-3 times the size of the Biosphere II built on Earth to be stable, you could sensibly talk about people staying on Mars indefinitely/permanently.
Biosphere 2 was supposed to be a closed system. The biggest problem faced by the first mission was a steady decline in O2 levels, which was "fixed" by periodically injecting pure oxygen into the dome. On Mars, periodic O2 injections would be a normal occurrence, especially since the in situ fuel production systems would be creating large amounts of both oxygen and hydrogen.
Rather than having the LEM-like vehicle rendezvous with the cycler directly, it might dock with a CSM-like vehicle left in Mars orbit, and the combination might then rendezvous with the cycler. There's no point in dropping all the fuel needed for the cycler rendezvous to the surface of Mars and then launch it again.
That's only true if you're sending the fuel from Earth. If you're producing your fuel on Mars, then you might as well carry it up into orbit with you. See http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/propellant.html for more details.
"Perhaps closed cases are overrated in terms of the amount of "actual" protection they provide."
IME with customer machines, closed cases protect many interesting "dust bunny and (usually) dead insect" ecosystems. As for "pets", I've seen some machines with enough hair/dust/primordial "stuff" to build a small dog.
I used to work for a coal company. We had some ancient IBM PCs that interfaced to conveyor belts and such, and once a year I'd need to maintain the things. I quickly learned to unplug everything and carry the case outside before opening it up and dumping/blowing the quarter-inch of coal dust that had accumulated. I don't know why nothing ever shorted out; I always thought that pure carbon was a pretty good conductor, but the dust appeared to only be an aesthetic problem.
That's the case for me. At "work" (actually, a client site) running XP Pro, FF2 could never drill through the firewall, but FF3 did out of the box without problems. Chrome starts up and gives me the sick computer icon. At home on my Win2K laptop, Chrome started but had some problem; I don't recall the exact details right now, but I opened a bug report and noticed several other people with the same issue. I'll try it again in a few months.
I just looked at the legalese from 2006, and came up with the following:
Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require access to a central server as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or reproduction of published digital works by the original accessing entity. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine, system or service necessary to authorize the perceptible of a work stored in that format if a central server is no longer provided to authorize such perceptible./quote
The "artist" never saw a dime. The "artist" only created something vaguely similar. A pack of lazy useless family members and lawyers have been living off the income for the last hundred years contributing nothing to society while doing so and being nothing but a pain.>
So what's the problem? Just sing this instead, and rest easy knowing that the performance fees will support the widow of the original artist.
(Off topic to the story, but relevant to the thread: After being wrongfully arrested once, [...] I asked about suing for costs, stress etc., and was told I wouldn't have a chance.)
Sounds like you faced a criminal charge, not a civil suit. Suing a prosecutor is hard, because the justice system tends takes care of itself. Copyright claims, otoh, are a civil matter; the courts are much more balanced in those cases. The problem there is that you have to prove that the people whom you wish to sue knew ahead of time that their original suit was frivolous. In this case, Yoko would just have to testify that she honestly thought that she had a right to protect her dead husband's work.
There are other ways to approximate your location when you aren't using wi-fi. As an example, http://www.geobytes.com/ipLocator.htm will give you a location derived from your ISP's. Also, a way to set a location in your Firefox profile would be useful for desktop PCs that rarely move. And I should note that Ubiquity is currently using the MaxMind geo-api (http://www.maxmind.com/app/api) for very similar purposes.
My first response to this dribble was to Google "You cannot learn to give orders unless you first learn how to take orders", but it didn't show up a definite source for the phrase. It did, however, find this little gem: http://books.google.com/books?id=edpoFMjzD-IC&pg=PA185. Google won't easily let me copy and paste, so read the paragraph that starts with "Of course" and the two that follow for an examination of how American soldiers are trained to think for themselves.
Oh, you wanted something that runs on x86? Well, then you should have said so. Seriously, though, I've still got my old Palm III, which is perfect for taking notes, and it syncs with just about everything. A quick check of Ebay shows a "Palm III xe PDA" for $20, and a "Palm Pilot 3Com PDA Organizer - Palm III" for $15.
But unlike with SUV's, no one uses the size of the airplane they flew in on to compensate for their small dick (with the exception of Richard Branson, of course).
No, I was thinking expansively.;-) The "event" played out over 100 days, so I used that as a diameter for the sphere. Still, it's a useful number. Assuming the same resolution as the current supernova survey telescopes, instruments at that distance would allow direct parallax determination for objects out to 3e6 light-years; we could then make extremely accurate measurements of the distance to anything in the Andromeda Galaxy. The downside is that moving at the speed of the Voyager craft, the observatories would take ~2,500 years to get on station. That might be a bit hard to get Congressional approval for.
A sphere of instruments 1/25th that size would allow distance measurements of everything within the Milky Way, and would take less than a century to get on station. That would probably be a more feasible timeframe, especially since useful results would begin arriving long before.
I wonder if the Long Now foundation would be interested in this?
Amazon's S3 and ECC supply exactly the same products to every one of their customers. And the product never changes. And they only concern themselves with giving you a network connection, past which they have no concern. You have to hire separate support to deal with every change of your web server, database, or anything else that might change where and how much compute power you need. You just need someone who charges an hourly rate to come in and make changes to your systems as needed; when done they leave and don't charge you again until you want to make another change. Find someone who guarantees their work and will fix mistakes, but charge you for any changes that weren't part of the original agreement.
This points out the need for a dozen simple telescopes arranged 50-light-days from Earth. The next time something like this occurs, most of them could be used to get much better parallax information.
A lot of replies discuss the amount of data being generated, but that's different from the control systems. I'd expect that the mechanisms for controlling the beams don't generate a lot of data that needs to be stored. Hopefully, the design uses (or permits the retrofit of) two distinct networks, a small and very secure one for control and a large and open one for the generated data. Financial, health care, and other institutions publish lots of data to their customers without allowing the outside world access to the operators. LHC should have been designed similarly.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up!
I spent several minutes perusing the SOPHIA site without finding this information. Looking at the pictures, I'd just about convinced myself that there was a large pane of glass covering the opening, even though I knew that it would cause some distortion. No doubt about it, SOPHIA needs a FAQ.
So, I'm guessing that there's no one standing in the rear when they open the shutter?
The first time around, the fuel for the return needs to be sent from Earth, in case production on Mars doesn't work as planned. (Unless unmanned fuel production can be established and tested before sending humans, which seems unlikely.)
No, that's exactly the plan. First, you send living quarters, freeze-dried food, and a fuel distillery. Only after making sure that the quarters are air-tight, the food hasn't spoiled, and the fuel distillery has produced sufficient fuel to return to orbit do you allow humans to land, probably in a craft that only has a few hours of life support. If you want to shave some months off the schedule, you can send the people early, but you need to be prepared to do an Apollo 8 flyby in case something didn't work.
I was writing 3D engines at the same time that Quake came out. Mine were written in high level languages, because code reusability was very important to the project's sponsors. Quake was written to do one thing and do it as fast as possible. Carmack wanted a high frame rate, and was willing to sacrifice everything else to achieve it. It turned out that high frame rates translated into high sales, meaning high profits. Other people at that time had other priorities, and were willing to sacrifice frame rate to get them. They tried to get high profits by reducing the cost of development or by charging more for their product. It turns out that Carmack's approach led to the highest profits. So, was he brilliant, lucky, or some mix? I know which way I lean.
If you can get a Biosphere II up and running on Mars, bearing in mind you need it 2-3 times the size of the Biosphere II built on Earth to be stable, you could sensibly talk about people staying on Mars indefinitely/permanently.
Biosphere 2 was supposed to be a closed system. The biggest problem faced by the first mission was a steady decline in O2 levels, which was "fixed" by periodically injecting pure oxygen into the dome. On Mars, periodic O2 injections would be a normal occurrence, especially since the in situ fuel production systems would be creating large amounts of both oxygen and hydrogen.
I remember hearing that proposed lunar bases would shield themselves from cosmic rays by burying the modules in a thick coating of lunar soil.
The same could be done with anything sent to mars.
No need to do that, Mars has caves! See http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070402_mm_mars_caves.html for details.
Rather than having the LEM-like vehicle rendezvous with the cycler directly, it might dock with a CSM-like vehicle left in Mars orbit, and the combination might then rendezvous with the cycler. There's no point in dropping all the fuel needed for the cycler rendezvous to the surface of Mars and then launch it again.
That's only true if you're sending the fuel from Earth. If you're producing your fuel on Mars, then you might as well carry it up into orbit with you. See http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/propellant.html for more details.
"Perhaps closed cases are overrated in terms of the amount of "actual" protection they provide."
IME with customer machines, closed cases protect many interesting "dust bunny and (usually) dead insect" ecosystems. As for "pets", I've seen some machines with enough hair/dust/primordial "stuff" to build a small dog.
I used to work for a coal company. We had some ancient IBM PCs that interfaced to conveyor belts and such, and once a year I'd need to maintain the things. I quickly learned to unplug everything and carry the case outside before opening it up and dumping/blowing the quarter-inch of coal dust that had accumulated. I don't know why nothing ever shorted out; I always thought that pure carbon was a pretty good conductor, but the dust appeared to only be an aesthetic problem.
That's the case for me. At "work" (actually, a client site) running XP Pro, FF2 could never drill through the firewall, but FF3 did out of the box without problems. Chrome starts up and gives me the sick computer icon. At home on my Win2K laptop, Chrome started but had some problem; I don't recall the exact details right now, but I opened a bug report and noticed several other people with the same issue. I'll try it again in a few months.
I just looked at the legalese from 2006, and came up with the following:
Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require access to a central server as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or reproduction of published digital works by the original accessing entity. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine, system or service necessary to authorize the perceptible of a work stored in that format if a central server is no longer provided to authorize such perceptible./quote
The "artist" never saw a dime.
The "artist" only created something vaguely similar.
A pack of lazy useless family members and lawyers have been living off the income for the last hundred years contributing nothing to society while doing so and being nothing but a pain.>
So what's the problem? Just sing this instead, and rest easy knowing that the performance fees will support the widow of the original artist.
(Off topic to the story, but relevant to the thread: After being wrongfully arrested once, [...] I asked about suing for costs, stress etc., and was told I wouldn't have a chance.)
Sounds like you faced a criminal charge, not a civil suit. Suing a prosecutor is hard, because the justice system tends takes care of itself. Copyright claims, otoh, are a civil matter; the courts are much more balanced in those cases. The problem there is that you have to prove that the people whom you wish to sue knew ahead of time that their original suit was frivolous. In this case, Yoko would just have to testify that she honestly thought that she had a right to protect her dead husband's work.
There are other ways to approximate your location when you aren't using wi-fi. As an example, http://www.geobytes.com/ipLocator.htm will give you a location derived from your ISP's. Also, a way to set a location in your Firefox profile would be useful for desktop PCs that rarely move. And I should note that Ubiquity is currently using the MaxMind geo-api (http://www.maxmind.com/app/api) for very similar purposes.
My room was littered with papers printed off to read on the bus or at work.
A good reason to buy an Amazon Kindle/Apple iPhone/Sony Reader.
It's half-a-million. CmdrTaco doesn't deal with such large numbers very often.
The CEO is giving a speech at a board meeting: "And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit."
http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?mscssid=G41AMWKD2J779JFDMBDRM9CAKAKJ63T5&sitetype=1&did=4&sid=52630&pid=&keyword=end+of+the+world§ion=cartoons&title=undefined&whichpage=1&sortBy=popular
This is what I thought of as soon as I read the summary.
Lessons on how to obey without question.
What could possibly go wrong?
My first response to this dribble was to Google "You cannot learn to give orders unless you first learn how to take orders", but it didn't show up a definite source for the phrase. It did, however, find this little gem: http://books.google.com/books?id=edpoFMjzD-IC&pg=PA185. Google won't easily let me copy and paste, so read the paragraph that starts with "Of course" and the two that follow for an examination of how American soldiers are trained to think for themselves.
Oh, you wanted something that runs on x86? Well, then you should have said so. Seriously, though, I've still got my old Palm III, which is perfect for taking notes, and it syncs with just about everything. A quick check of Ebay shows a "Palm III xe PDA" for $20, and a "Palm Pilot 3Com PDA Organizer - Palm III" for $15.
But unlike with SUV's, no one uses the size of the airplane they flew in on to compensate for their small dick (with the exception of Richard Branson, of course).
You forgot about John Travolta.
No, I was thinking expansively. ;-) The "event" played out over 100 days, so I used that as a diameter for the sphere. Still, it's a useful number. Assuming the same resolution as the current supernova survey telescopes, instruments at that distance would allow direct parallax determination for objects out to 3e6 light-years; we could then make extremely accurate measurements of the distance to anything in the Andromeda Galaxy. The downside is that moving at the speed of the Voyager craft, the observatories would take ~2,500 years to get on station. That might be a bit hard to get Congressional approval for.
A sphere of instruments 1/25th that size would allow distance measurements of everything within the Milky Way, and would take less than a century to get on station. That would probably be a more feasible timeframe, especially since useful results would begin arriving long before.
I wonder if the Long Now foundation would be interested in this?
Amazon's S3 and ECC supply exactly the same products to every one of their customers. And the product never changes. And they only concern themselves with giving you a network connection, past which they have no concern. You have to hire separate support to deal with every change of your web server, database, or anything else that might change where and how much compute power you need. You just need someone who charges an hourly rate to come in and make changes to your systems as needed; when done they leave and don't charge you again until you want to make another change. Find someone who guarantees their work and will fix mistakes, but charge you for any changes that weren't part of the original agreement.
This points out the need for a dozen simple telescopes arranged 50-light-days from Earth. The next time something like this occurs, most of them could be used to get much better parallax information.
You can copy the game and play it.
Sounds DRM-free to me. Or do you have some other definition of DRM that the rest of use aren't aware of?
DRM Lite. You need Impulse to patch it, and validate it after patches.
Then don't patch it. The game itself has no copy protection. Period.
A lot of replies discuss the amount of data being generated, but that's different from the control systems. I'd expect that the mechanisms for controlling the beams don't generate a lot of data that needs to be stored. Hopefully, the design uses (or permits the retrofit of) two distinct networks, a small and very secure one for control and a large and open one for the generated data. Financial, health care, and other institutions publish lots of data to their customers without allowing the outside world access to the operators. LHC should have been designed similarly.