Lots of animals use tools. And not just use them but make them. I find corvids particularly spectacular in this regard because of their small brains and their evolutionary distance from us. They carefully select the right materials, trim them down, bend them, etc to meet their needs. They have been shown to use tools to make other tools, and have even been shown to invent tools not by a process of trial and error but by analyzing the problem and creating an appropriate tool for the problem on the first go. They also show "handedness", despite not having hands - they tend to gravitate toward using a tool balanced against one side of their head or the other
They however suffer from the problem that they're not good at communicating information about tool making and tool use to others. Even chimps aren't good at it. So you're never going to see a crow invent a machine gun or the like. Anything with more steps and background knowledge than one individual could reasonably acquire in their lifespan is pretty much ruled out.
Also: apparently my communication skills could use some improvement. "with a harder challenge harder challenge, they pausing, look back and forth"? I shuold porfraed betr...
You're one to talk, after decades of stealing our fish en masse.
You do realize that concerning Icesave you took us to the EFTA and the court ruled AGAINST you and found us in the right on all counts, don't you? No, of course you don't know that. Icesave accounts were backed by a private fund, not the Icelandic government. Go to the Wayback Machine and check out the Icesave page and click on the link for more information - just one click away from the main page it states that, and that the secondary insurer is the British government. If you don't like privately backed investment accounts, don't invest in privately backed investment accounts.
As for Kaupthing, the executives actually did intend to deceive investors in the al-Thani case. And guess what? We threw them in jail for it. What more do you want, should we rip their toenails out with pliers?
Unfortunately "violations for terms of service" is just as vulnerable to false positives. The other day I went to check out a video on Youtube and found out that it had been pulled for violation of the terms of service. Someone clearly glanced at it and saw screenshots all too familiar: a row of Daesh (ISIS) thugs in all black, their prisoners in orange jump suits before them forced to kneel, guns pointed to their head for an execution. Youtube has taken up a policy of banning such videos.
Except, that's not what the video was. The video was not from Daesh but Levant Front, an anti-Daesh coalition. The people in black were Levant Front members and the people in the orange jumpsuits Daesh solders that they had captured. And rather than execute them, they all holstered their guns, took off their face masks, and walked away, while an imam showed up and gave a sermon to the Daesh prisoners about forgiveness and being fair and just in life. In short, it was precisely the opposite of the Daesh videos that Youtube is supposed to ban.
Since when have Oz and NZ been pro-whaling states? They're both strong anti-whaling-voices - in fact, they've been leading the campaign against Japanese whaling. I can't think of a nation today that has a stronger anti-whaling position than New Zealand. Greenpeace is doing what your people support. Hence they support Greenpeace. How is this at all relevant to the reversed situation?
I imagine most of whatever opposition to environmental organization that you may encounter in Oz comes from the wealthier/conservative classes - parts of Australia have a rather anti-environmentalist bent due to the influence of the mining industry.
I have an issue with people just drawing these arbitrary lines between different mammal species, where metacognition clearly extends all the way down. For example, you look at mice studies: mice, when presented with a scenario wherein they're presented with a challenge whose answer is either A or B, and can choose:
A) If it's the correct answer, large reward; if wrong, nothing B) If it's the correct answer, large reward; if wrong, nothing C) Regardless of whether it's correct, small reward
-... will almost always immediately choose A or B when the challenge presented is easy. But when you present them with a harder challenge harder challenge, they pausing, look back and forth, act more hesitant, and are much more likely to choose option C. That is, they're assessing how confident they feel about whether they know the answer. They're thinking about their own thoughts. That's called metacognition. It's long been one of the main definitions of sentience.
We humans like to think of ourselves as "separate" because of some huge ability over all other animals to reason. But while human reasoning ability is quite good, it's not good to the point of being in some whole different category. Even birds like psittacines and corvids can best human children up to a certain age in logic tasks (the age depending on the task). The field where humans really excel over other species, the field that really allowed us to take off, is communication - the ability to share ideas and coordinate complex plans with others. No other species comes even close to our communicative abilities. But is communicative ability where one should base its morality grounds?
** The whole concept that it's okay for Alaskans to whale because it's "traditional" but it's not okay for Icelanders just stinks of racism - that because the Inuit and Yupik are american indian peoples then their culture and history matters, but Icelanders are just white devils, so who gives a rat's arse that Icelanders have been eating whale for over a thousand years on the island, and their ancestors in Scandinavia for thousands of years before that? Who cares that it was such an important part of Icelandic life that it's even part of the language, such as hvalreki - literally "beached whale", but also used as "godsend", because finding a beached whale used to be the difference between life and death for entire towns? Meh, Icelanders are just evil white people so their cultures don't count. Icelanders, Norwegians, Russians, Faroese, Japanese... all get put into the "modern peoples" category, but Alaskans are just "natives preserving their culture" - you know, those primitives who live in modern houses, ride around on snowmobiles and fly from town to town by bushplane. It's okay if they do it, their culture and history actually matters!
2) Minke whales are not endangered. They are classified as LC (least concern) by the IUCN. The Antarctic stock alone is estimated at over 500k.
3) Whaling is legal in parts of the US ("traditional whaling" by Alaskan natives... but as if the whales end up any less dead, or as if people are actually going out in canoes, hunting with spears, and bringing them back ashore by manpower, rather than going out in motorboats, hunting with large guns and explosive harpoons, and hauling them ashore with backhoes)
#3 is the one that really gets me when the US sees fit to lecture Iceland (where I live, which like Alaska also has a long tradition of whaling** and consumes similar whale per-capita) about the evils of whaling. Clean up your own damned backyard before you start lecturing others. Not that we really need a lecture on morality in general from a country that tortures people, or specifically a lecture on food-production morality from a country that produces most of its meat in factory farms in squalid conditions. At least whales live their whole lives free in near idyllic conditions rather than crammed in cages where they can barely turn around.
It's also counterproductive. The anti-whaling people who run all of these protests, particularly the really high profile ones (economic sanctions, hacking, violence, etc), just encourage people to want to support whaling even more. Think about it: how would you feel if some other country came in and said, "look, pigs score as well or better than dogs on most intelligence tests, yet you stubbornly refuse to stop eating them or even raise them in humane conditions"? You might have a "we'll just agree to disagree" reaction. Now imagine that said country or people from said country decided to try to force you to stop eating pork by slapping sanctions on your whole country, launching hacking campaigns against your government and businesses, sinking ships in your harbors, etc. How would you feel? How would you react? Would it make you more or less likely to eat pork? Most people would be so ticked off they'd eat more of it. Now imagine that said country that was doing all of this actually consumed significant amounts of pork themselves in one region. How would you feel?
Full disclosure: I'm a vegetarian. I just don't like hypocrisy or counterproductive actions. Let me help you out: if you really want to stop people in nations where whale is consumed from eating it, there is one tactic that is actually quite effective: health. Whale meat contains dangerous levels of heavy metals and accumulative organic toxins (dangerous to everyone, but particularly to pregnant women). The more people are aware of this, the less they feel comfortable eating it. Hence, raising awareness of this fact should be your goal. Not morality lectures and a "big stick" approach that - every time - only causes a pro-whaling backlash. Also, target the tourists. Nearly half of the whale consumed here is consumed by tourists - a lot of whom would describe themselves as anti-whaling and would never dream of eating it at home. It's amazing but for some reason when people are on vacation they act as if the normal rules of their life don't apply, as if whatever they do on vacation "doesn't count", that either their actions are insignificant or that it's okay because they're just "being like locals". The irony being that locals don't actually consume whale that often (horse, on the other hand...)
It's interesting to look at why they were planning on such a big launch rate. NASA's operating assumptions were on the continuation of Apollo-era budgets. They were envisioning first reboosting, refursbishing, and expanding Skylab, then two new huge projects coming online: a permanent moon base, with rotating crews, and a huge, 50-man orbital space base, with the Shuttle in its proposed "space bus" configuration wherein the cargo bay would be converted to a people carrier, like a space jetliner. There would have been constant needs to ferry crew, supplies and huge numbers of modules and boosters for each of these projects
As soon as the budgets came crashing back to Earth (in part due to the Vietnam War, although it really was inevitable), the Shuttle concept was pretty much doomed. Even if everything technologically had worked out as hoped (unlike all of the difficulties that it actually faced), the combination of significantly reduced development budgets (meaning far less "flyback", having to take the USAF design compromises, and higher-maintenance design elements (for example, aluminum frame instead of titanium, meaning you have to be far better at getting rid of heat, meaning sensitive tiles)) and significantly reduced launch rates made it clear it was never going to be a cost-effective system. The original concept really wasn't bad. The Soviets felt it was an important enough of a system that they felt the need to copycat with Buran it so that the US wouldn't have a system that they didn't. But ultimately the assumptions that led to its construction were not to live up to reality.
Sun tracking is dominant in commercial solar power. First off, photovoltaics aren't dominant in commercial solar power, solar thermal is, wherein tracking is essential. But even on commercial PV plants, tracking is used more often than not.
For homeowners, no, sun tracking is rarely economical.
Sun-tracking systems can get higher capacity factors than 25%, you're being pessimistic with your earth figures and optimistic with your space figures;)
There's tons of reasons for private industry to go to LEO: satellite launches. Now, as for ISS.... that's a bigger question. If it were low cost to free I imagine Bigelow might have interest in it as a space hotel module; it has a lot of hardware that could be useful even if it's not as roomy as his ultimate plans call for. But Bigelow is still waiting on crewed Dragon and Falcon Heavy. They are planning to use ISS shortly to test a prototype of one of their inflatable modules. So maybe there's someone who'd be willing to keep it stocked and reboosted...
If nobody is interested and NASA really is keen on abandoning it, I'd hope that they'd launch a final mission to boost it into a high orbit before doing so so that it doesn't reenter any time soon. There's a lot of good hardware up there.
I will remove this post from Slashdot by means of closing my browsing tab. You're free to repost a new copy of it with a hacked timestamp when I return.
Your second guess was "Fedora Elephant Lolliop"? You have some interesting guesses;)
That brings up another interesting point. If people do get a wrong guess., 2/3rds of the time it will be out in the ocean. Even on land you'll hit a lot of places where virtually nobody lives, like Antarctica and such. And even where people do live... "Hmm, why do I suspect that what appears to be Yupic natives illegally living in ANWR aren't ordering commemorative NASCAR coins and an electric weed eater"? You know, it just seems that the odds of a misheard shipment resolving into a real, believable location are extremely low.
Bananas aren't really trees; they're monocots more related to grasses than what one usually considers "trees". Their stems don't even deserve to be called trunks - they're not woody, and they grow from a corm that sends up multiple shoots, like grasses. The only reason some people call them trees is because they're big and their stems are thick.
There actually is one grouping of woody monocot "trees" - the palms - but their "wood" is very different from that of dicots (there's no heartwood, no growth rings, or anything of that nature). You can see a closeup of a chopped-down coconut tree here - while it's clearly "woody", it's also clearly not a normal wood - just lignin-toughened vascular bundles. Still very useful for most wood purposes though, and IMHO rather attractive. Eco-friendly, too, because trees old on coconut plantations have to be chopped down and replanted (they stop bearing fruit), and they produce copious amongs of wood during their lifespan that has long been considered more of a waste product than a resource.
That means that they're being picked too immature. Tomatoes maximize flavour when allowed to ripen on the plant as long as possible. But producers prefer to pick them as close to the "hard green" stage as possible to minimize damage in transit/processing and maximize shelf life (they can make them red and soft with ethylene gas right before delivery to stores but they can't give them flavour). So there's a conflict between these two competing interests.
There's really an amazing difference between a vine-ripened tomato like you might grow in your garden and a green-picked/artificially ripened store tomato. I dare say there's not another common crop around that has such a dramatic difference. Even the texture is different - the thickness of the skin, how they "squish" under pressure, etc.
I've seen that referred to as the "Captain Kirk" test. If the Enterprise were to approach a large body in space, and Captain Kirk would look at it and say, "Scotty, beam us down to that planet" (rather than "asteroid" or "comet" or whatever else), then a definition for what's a planet should ideally encompass it. That is, to say, it matches peoples' expectations of what a planet is vs. what an asteroid is - big enough that it's pulled itself into a sphere and in the process released heat causing differentiation and such, rather than a lumpy, undifferentiated body of primordial materials. One never sees Captain Kirk go, "Scotty, beam us down to that... hmm, wait a second.... Mr. Spock, can you run a scan on this star system? We need to know if this object has "cleared its neighborhood"... wait a minute, we're not in orbit around the sun, so by definition it can't be considered a planet..."
It's not that "Captain Kirk" defines a standard for scientific rigor - actually the "standard" is based on precisely the opposite, how the general public expects to see the word "planet" used. The scientific community is free to define terms however they want, but they should in general not coopt common terms to mean things in contradiction with how the word is generally used. "Planet" is a term wherein the general usage describes its size and shape, not "whatever other things cross its orbit". It's perfectly fine to want to have a term for bodies that have other large bodies cross their orbit - but since that's not how the word "planet" is used, they should have picked a new term.
It is a good point. And with any sort of programming language that supports lambda-style functions it's no more difficult to write inline callbacks (for example, as WHERE clauses) that a database library could use when parsing through its database than it is to write an SQL statement. For example in C++ it could be like:
That would of course let you implement basic queries in a standard SQL style but without any actual execution of strings. But you could extend it to far greater capabilities - for example, selecting direct into STL structures. You could even make the tables themselves look like STL objects:
for (auto& row : db["widget1"]) {
if (row.baz == 3)
{
foobar = row.foo + row.bar;
db["foobars"].emplace(foobar, row.baz);
} }
And so on. I've not spent enough time investigating what options are out there at present for such a database, but I see no obvious impediments to such a system. Heck, it's not even a database so much as an interface - you could wrap such an interface class around any extant SQL database if you wanted.
Where were you taught this and on what grounds was it based? Look up the sednoids** - one of the three leading theories to explain their orbits is that there's a large (~inner planet sized) body orbiting out there. The other two include a close pass with another star or other large object (although this has fallen out of favor), and other large bodies being near the sun during the formation of the solar system that have since moved apart. But a planet seems to offer the most explanatory value.
** The short of it is that the closest that they ever get to the sun is well too far away for any large known body in our solar system to have scattered them, yet they have highly elliptical orbits. Yet both of the sednoids with established arguments of perihelion (there's a third, V774104, for which it's as of yet unknown) curiously have the same argument of perihelion, which makes single-pass scattering events unlikely, and even ancient scattering events unlikely, as their arguments of perihelion should have been randomized by the weak interactions with the gas giants since then.
There's also the possibility of much larger objects further out - we're not very good at detecting objects in our solar system at 100+ AU. WISE effectively ruled out Jupiter and Saturn sized bodies a good way out toward the Oort Cloud, but there could be Mars-sized bodies as near as 100-200 AU and Earth-sized bodies as near as a few hundred AU, and potentially Uranus/Neptune sized bodies further than that.
I really look forward to the LSST coming online in a few years - the number of discoveries it should make should be incredible.:) Its not the largest telescope under construction but it's designed to be a data flood - its 3,2 gigapixel camera will produce up to 30 TB of data per night. Virtually anything of significant size that moves in the solar system, it's going to see it. It's expected to, for example, detect 100% of all KBOs larger than 100km, whereas we only know of an estimated 1% of them today.
I think the whole term "learn programming" leads people to think in the wrong direction. One semester should be enough for a person to learn the "basics of programming". If they can't get the basics down in that time, they're never going to. Most of the time spent on programming education needs to be not on basics or learning languages, but on getting your future-programmers to avoid the giant list of common pitfalls that programmers make in every field of programming. Teach them O(N) notation. Teach them data structures. Teach them of buffer overflow. Teach them of injection. Teach them how and when to optimize and to recognize what optimizations actually help versus just making the code confusing. Teach them to avoid directly overwriting important files, rather to write the data to a temporary and then move it to the ultimate destination to prevent data corruption during crashes. Teach them refactoring. Teach them threading and race conditions. Teach them the importance of server-side checks on data validity rather than just client side. Etc. Basically one should take a survey of people working professionally as programmers and ask them, "What lack of knowledge or bad programming habits have frustrated you the most about any of your coworkers, past or present?" - the most common answers should form the basis of a good programming education, along with whatever teaching about tools and principles that will increase their productivity.
I really don't have too much to complain about with how my college taught CS, although some things could have been improved. I have more of an issue with some of the maths courses that were required which really had nothing to do with programming except in very specialized fields. I actually got a lot more out of my elective math courses than I did out of my required ones.
Have you actually verified that this is a real problem? Try punching in any random three words. I just tried 10 combinations, not a single one existed.
I think you're worried about a problem that does not exist. A mishearing is almost certain to lead to no address, not a wrong address, let alone a believable wrong address. In fact, the search space seems to be so significantly larger than the actual space that it should be possible to add suggestions for if a person searches for an address that doesn't exist.
They use labels like "Objective C (iOS)", which the article is just shortening to "iOS". Also they report errors as "number of errors per megabyte of source code".
Wish they'd broken down C and C++, they're very different languages in terms of how people typically develop them (non-automated vs. automated memory management). Instead they grouped them together and called them just "C++".
Sad that injection bugs are still so prevalent. Kind of makes me wish that standards for different languages would refuse to accept normal strings as arguments to anything that "executes a statement" (SQL, shell commands, etc), and instead require a custom command-string type/class which does not allow straightforward concatenation (making developers explicitly have to convert types if they want to concatenate, maybe with a conversion function name like "useUntrustedString" or somesuch), with the error message if they try to concatenate without explicit conversion pointing out not just that concatenation is banned, but stating why it's banned. Maybe something like that would finally get people to start using proper parameter substitution...
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Lots of animals use tools. And not just use them but make them. I find corvids particularly spectacular in this regard because of their small brains and their evolutionary distance from us. They carefully select the right materials, trim them down, bend them, etc to meet their needs. They have been shown to use tools to make other tools, and have even been shown to invent tools not by a process of trial and error but by analyzing the problem and creating an appropriate tool for the problem on the first go. They also show "handedness", despite not having hands - they tend to gravitate toward using a tool balanced against one side of their head or the other
They however suffer from the problem that they're not good at communicating information about tool making and tool use to others. Even chimps aren't good at it. So you're never going to see a crow invent a machine gun or the like. Anything with more steps and background knowledge than one individual could reasonably acquire in their lifespan is pretty much ruled out.
Also: apparently my communication skills could use some improvement. "with a harder challenge harder challenge, they pausing, look back and forth"? I shuold porfraed betr...
You're one to talk, after decades of stealing our fish en masse.
You do realize that concerning Icesave you took us to the EFTA and the court ruled AGAINST you and found us in the right on all counts, don't you? No, of course you don't know that. Icesave accounts were backed by a private fund, not the Icelandic government. Go to the Wayback Machine and check out the Icesave page and click on the link for more information - just one click away from the main page it states that, and that the secondary insurer is the British government. If you don't like privately backed investment accounts, don't invest in privately backed investment accounts.
As for Kaupthing, the executives actually did intend to deceive investors in the al-Thani case. And guess what? We threw them in jail for it. What more do you want, should we rip their toenails out with pliers?
Unfortunately "violations for terms of service" is just as vulnerable to false positives. The other day I went to check out a video on Youtube and found out that it had been pulled for violation of the terms of service. Someone clearly glanced at it and saw screenshots all too familiar: a row of Daesh (ISIS) thugs in all black, their prisoners in orange jump suits before them forced to kneel, guns pointed to their head for an execution. Youtube has taken up a policy of banning such videos.
Except, that's not what the video was. The video was not from Daesh but Levant Front, an anti-Daesh coalition. The people in black were Levant Front members and the people in the orange jumpsuits Daesh solders that they had captured. And rather than execute them, they all holstered their guns, took off their face masks, and walked away, while an imam showed up and gave a sermon to the Daesh prisoners about forgiveness and being fair and just in life. In short, it was precisely the opposite of the Daesh videos that Youtube is supposed to ban.
False positives are a real thing.
Since when have Oz and NZ been pro-whaling states? They're both strong anti-whaling-voices - in fact, they've been leading the campaign against Japanese whaling. I can't think of a nation today that has a stronger anti-whaling position than New Zealand. Greenpeace is doing what your people support. Hence they support Greenpeace. How is this at all relevant to the reversed situation?
I imagine most of whatever opposition to environmental organization that you may encounter in Oz comes from the wealthier/conservative classes - parts of Australia have a rather anti-environmentalist bent due to the influence of the mining industry.
I have an issue with people just drawing these arbitrary lines between different mammal species, where metacognition clearly extends all the way down. For example, you look at mice studies: mice, when presented with a scenario wherein they're presented with a challenge whose answer is either A or B, and can choose:
A) If it's the correct answer, large reward; if wrong, nothing
B) If it's the correct answer, large reward; if wrong, nothing
C) Regardless of whether it's correct, small reward
-... will almost always immediately choose A or B when the challenge presented is easy. But when you present them with a harder challenge harder challenge, they pausing, look back and forth, act more hesitant, and are much more likely to choose option C. That is, they're assessing how confident they feel about whether they know the answer. They're thinking about their own thoughts. That's called metacognition. It's long been one of the main definitions of sentience.
We humans like to think of ourselves as "separate" because of some huge ability over all other animals to reason. But while human reasoning ability is quite good, it's not good to the point of being in some whole different category. Even birds like psittacines and corvids can best human children up to a certain age in logic tasks (the age depending on the task). The field where humans really excel over other species, the field that really allowed us to take off, is communication - the ability to share ideas and coordinate complex plans with others. No other species comes even close to our communicative abilities. But is communicative ability where one should base its morality grounds?
** The whole concept that it's okay for Alaskans to whale because it's "traditional" but it's not okay for Icelanders just stinks of racism - that because the Inuit and Yupik are american indian peoples then their culture and history matters, but Icelanders are just white devils, so who gives a rat's arse that Icelanders have been eating whale for over a thousand years on the island, and their ancestors in Scandinavia for thousands of years before that? Who cares that it was such an important part of Icelandic life that it's even part of the language, such as hvalreki - literally "beached whale", but also used as "godsend", because finding a beached whale used to be the difference between life and death for entire towns? Meh, Icelanders are just evil white people so their cultures don't count. Icelanders, Norwegians, Russians, Faroese, Japanese... all get put into the "modern peoples" category, but Alaskans are just "natives preserving their culture" - you know, those primitives who live in modern houses, ride around on snowmobiles and fly from town to town by bushplane. It's okay if they do it, their culture and history actually matters!
1) Whales are not a single species
2) Minke whales are not endangered. They are classified as LC (least concern) by the IUCN. The Antarctic stock alone is estimated at over 500k.
3) Whaling is legal in parts of the US ("traditional whaling" by Alaskan natives... but as if the whales end up any less dead, or as if people are actually going out in canoes, hunting with spears, and bringing them back ashore by manpower, rather than going out in motorboats, hunting with large guns and explosive harpoons, and hauling them ashore with backhoes)
#3 is the one that really gets me when the US sees fit to lecture Iceland (where I live, which like Alaska also has a long tradition of whaling** and consumes similar whale per-capita) about the evils of whaling. Clean up your own damned backyard before you start lecturing others. Not that we really need a lecture on morality in general from a country that tortures people, or specifically a lecture on food-production morality from a country that produces most of its meat in factory farms in squalid conditions. At least whales live their whole lives free in near idyllic conditions rather than crammed in cages where they can barely turn around.
It's also counterproductive. The anti-whaling people who run all of these protests, particularly the really high profile ones (economic sanctions, hacking, violence, etc), just encourage people to want to support whaling even more. Think about it: how would you feel if some other country came in and said, "look, pigs score as well or better than dogs on most intelligence tests, yet you stubbornly refuse to stop eating them or even raise them in humane conditions"? You might have a "we'll just agree to disagree" reaction. Now imagine that said country or people from said country decided to try to force you to stop eating pork by slapping sanctions on your whole country, launching hacking campaigns against your government and businesses, sinking ships in your harbors, etc. How would you feel? How would you react? Would it make you more or less likely to eat pork? Most people would be so ticked off they'd eat more of it. Now imagine that said country that was doing all of this actually consumed significant amounts of pork themselves in one region. How would you feel?
Full disclosure: I'm a vegetarian. I just don't like hypocrisy or counterproductive actions. Let me help you out: if you really want to stop people in nations where whale is consumed from eating it, there is one tactic that is actually quite effective: health. Whale meat contains dangerous levels of heavy metals and accumulative organic toxins (dangerous to everyone, but particularly to pregnant women). The more people are aware of this, the less they feel comfortable eating it. Hence, raising awareness of this fact should be your goal. Not morality lectures and a "big stick" approach that - every time - only causes a pro-whaling backlash. Also, target the tourists. Nearly half of the whale consumed here is consumed by tourists - a lot of whom would describe themselves as anti-whaling and would never dream of eating it at home. It's amazing but for some reason when people are on vacation they act as if the normal rules of their life don't apply, as if whatever they do on vacation "doesn't count", that either their actions are insignificant or that it's okay because they're just "being like locals". The irony being that locals don't actually consume whale that often (horse, on the other hand...)
It's interesting to look at why they were planning on such a big launch rate. NASA's operating assumptions were on the continuation of Apollo-era budgets. They were envisioning first reboosting, refursbishing, and expanding Skylab, then two new huge projects coming online: a permanent moon base, with rotating crews, and a huge, 50-man orbital space base, with the Shuttle in its proposed "space bus" configuration wherein the cargo bay would be converted to a people carrier, like a space jetliner. There would have been constant needs to ferry crew, supplies and huge numbers of modules and boosters for each of these projects
As soon as the budgets came crashing back to Earth (in part due to the Vietnam War, although it really was inevitable), the Shuttle concept was pretty much doomed. Even if everything technologically had worked out as hoped (unlike all of the difficulties that it actually faced), the combination of significantly reduced development budgets (meaning far less "flyback", having to take the USAF design compromises, and higher-maintenance design elements (for example, aluminum frame instead of titanium, meaning you have to be far better at getting rid of heat, meaning sensitive tiles)) and significantly reduced launch rates made it clear it was never going to be a cost-effective system. The original concept really wasn't bad. The Soviets felt it was an important enough of a system that they felt the need to copycat with Buran it so that the US wouldn't have a system that they didn't. But ultimately the assumptions that led to its construction were not to live up to reality.
Sun tracking is dominant in commercial solar power. First off, photovoltaics aren't dominant in commercial solar power, solar thermal is, wherein tracking is essential. But even on commercial PV plants, tracking is used more often than not.
For homeowners, no, sun tracking is rarely economical.
Do you have a source on this that I could read?
Sun-tracking systems can get higher capacity factors than 25%, you're being pessimistic with your earth figures and optimistic with your space figures ;)
There's tons of reasons for private industry to go to LEO: satellite launches. Now, as for ISS.... that's a bigger question. If it were low cost to free I imagine Bigelow might have interest in it as a space hotel module; it has a lot of hardware that could be useful even if it's not as roomy as his ultimate plans call for. But Bigelow is still waiting on crewed Dragon and Falcon Heavy. They are planning to use ISS shortly to test a prototype of one of their inflatable modules. So maybe there's someone who'd be willing to keep it stocked and reboosted...
If nobody is interested and NASA really is keen on abandoning it, I'd hope that they'd launch a final mission to boost it into a high orbit before doing so so that it doesn't reenter any time soon. There's a lot of good hardware up there.
I will remove this post from Slashdot by means of closing my browsing tab. You're free to repost a new copy of it with a hacked timestamp when I return.
Your second guess was "Fedora Elephant Lolliop"? You have some interesting guesses ;)
That brings up another interesting point. If people do get a wrong guess., 2/3rds of the time it will be out in the ocean. Even on land you'll hit a lot of places where virtually nobody lives, like Antarctica and such. And even where people do live... "Hmm, why do I suspect that what appears to be Yupic natives illegally living in ANWR aren't ordering commemorative NASCAR coins and an electric weed eater"? You know, it just seems that the odds of a misheard shipment resolving into a real, believable location are extremely low.
Bananas aren't really trees; they're monocots more related to grasses than what one usually considers "trees". Their stems don't even deserve to be called trunks - they're not woody, and they grow from a corm that sends up multiple shoots, like grasses. The only reason some people call them trees is because they're big and their stems are thick.
There actually is one grouping of woody monocot "trees" - the palms - but their "wood" is very different from that of dicots (there's no heartwood, no growth rings, or anything of that nature). You can see a closeup of a chopped-down coconut tree here - while it's clearly "woody", it's also clearly not a normal wood - just lignin-toughened vascular bundles. Still very useful for most wood purposes though, and IMHO rather attractive. Eco-friendly, too, because trees old on coconut plantations have to be chopped down and replanted (they stop bearing fruit), and they produce copious amongs of wood during their lifespan that has long been considered more of a waste product than a resource.
That means that they're being picked too immature. Tomatoes maximize flavour when allowed to ripen on the plant as long as possible. But producers prefer to pick them as close to the "hard green" stage as possible to minimize damage in transit/processing and maximize shelf life (they can make them red and soft with ethylene gas right before delivery to stores but they can't give them flavour). So there's a conflict between these two competing interests.
There's really an amazing difference between a vine-ripened tomato like you might grow in your garden and a green-picked/artificially ripened store tomato. I dare say there's not another common crop around that has such a dramatic difference. Even the texture is different - the thickness of the skin, how they "squish" under pressure, etc.
I've seen that referred to as the "Captain Kirk" test. If the Enterprise were to approach a large body in space, and Captain Kirk would look at it and say, "Scotty, beam us down to that planet" (rather than "asteroid" or "comet" or whatever else), then a definition for what's a planet should ideally encompass it. That is, to say, it matches peoples' expectations of what a planet is vs. what an asteroid is - big enough that it's pulled itself into a sphere and in the process released heat causing differentiation and such, rather than a lumpy, undifferentiated body of primordial materials. One never sees Captain Kirk go, "Scotty, beam us down to that... hmm, wait a second.... Mr. Spock, can you run a scan on this star system? We need to know if this object has "cleared its neighborhood"... wait a minute, we're not in orbit around the sun, so by definition it can't be considered a planet..."
It's not that "Captain Kirk" defines a standard for scientific rigor - actually the "standard" is based on precisely the opposite, how the general public expects to see the word "planet" used. The scientific community is free to define terms however they want, but they should in general not coopt common terms to mean things in contradiction with how the word is generally used. "Planet" is a term wherein the general usage describes its size and shape, not "whatever other things cross its orbit". It's perfectly fine to want to have a term for bodies that have other large bodies cross their orbit - but since that's not how the word "planet" is used, they should have picked a new term.
It is a good point. And with any sort of programming language that supports lambda-style functions it's no more difficult to write inline callbacks (for example, as WHERE clauses) that a database library could use when parsing through its database than it is to write an SQL statement. For example in C++ it could be like:
db.select({{"A.foo", "B.bar"}).from("widget1", "A").from("widget2, "B").where([](db::condition& c){ return c["A.baz"] == c["B.baz"]; }).order_by("A.foo");
That would of course let you implement basic queries in a standard SQL style but without any actual execution of strings. But you could extend it to far greater capabilities - for example, selecting direct into STL structures. You could even make the tables themselves look like STL objects:
for (auto& row : db["widget1"])
{
if (row.baz == 3)
{
foobar = row.foo + row.bar;
db["foobars"].emplace(foobar, row.baz);
}
}
And so on. I've not spent enough time investigating what options are out there at present for such a database, but I see no obvious impediments to such a system. Heck, it's not even a database so much as an interface - you could wrap such an interface class around any extant SQL database if you wanted.
Where were you taught this and on what grounds was it based? Look up the sednoids** - one of the three leading theories to explain their orbits is that there's a large (~inner planet sized) body orbiting out there. The other two include a close pass with another star or other large object (although this has fallen out of favor), and other large bodies being near the sun during the formation of the solar system that have since moved apart. But a planet seems to offer the most explanatory value.
** The short of it is that the closest that they ever get to the sun is well too far away for any large known body in our solar system to have scattered them, yet they have highly elliptical orbits. Yet both of the sednoids with established arguments of perihelion (there's a third, V774104, for which it's as of yet unknown) curiously have the same argument of perihelion, which makes single-pass scattering events unlikely, and even ancient scattering events unlikely, as their arguments of perihelion should have been randomized by the weak interactions with the gas giants since then.
Are you an "average American"? Then the answer is "less than $2".
It's okay, the New Horizons team still calls it a planet.
There's also the possibility of much larger objects further out - we're not very good at detecting objects in our solar system at 100+ AU. WISE effectively ruled out Jupiter and Saturn sized bodies a good way out toward the Oort Cloud, but there could be Mars-sized bodies as near as 100-200 AU and Earth-sized bodies as near as a few hundred AU, and potentially Uranus/Neptune sized bodies further than that.
I really look forward to the LSST coming online in a few years - the number of discoveries it should make should be incredible. :) Its not the largest telescope under construction but it's designed to be a data flood - its 3,2 gigapixel camera will produce up to 30 TB of data per night. Virtually anything of significant size that moves in the solar system, it's going to see it. It's expected to, for example, detect 100% of all KBOs larger than 100km, whereas we only know of an estimated 1% of them today.
I think the whole term "learn programming" leads people to think in the wrong direction. One semester should be enough for a person to learn the "basics of programming". If they can't get the basics down in that time, they're never going to. Most of the time spent on programming education needs to be not on basics or learning languages, but on getting your future-programmers to avoid the giant list of common pitfalls that programmers make in every field of programming. Teach them O(N) notation. Teach them data structures. Teach them of buffer overflow. Teach them of injection. Teach them how and when to optimize and to recognize what optimizations actually help versus just making the code confusing. Teach them to avoid directly overwriting important files, rather to write the data to a temporary and then move it to the ultimate destination to prevent data corruption during crashes. Teach them refactoring. Teach them threading and race conditions. Teach them the importance of server-side checks on data validity rather than just client side. Etc. Basically one should take a survey of people working professionally as programmers and ask them, "What lack of knowledge or bad programming habits have frustrated you the most about any of your coworkers, past or present?" - the most common answers should form the basis of a good programming education, along with whatever teaching about tools and principles that will increase their productivity.
I really don't have too much to complain about with how my college taught CS, although some things could have been improved. I have more of an issue with some of the maths courses that were required which really had nothing to do with programming except in very specialized fields. I actually got a lot more out of my elective math courses than I did out of my required ones.
Have you actually verified that this is a real problem? Try punching in any random three words. I just tried 10 combinations, not a single one existed.
I think you're worried about a problem that does not exist. A mishearing is almost certain to lead to no address, not a wrong address, let alone a believable wrong address. In fact, the search space seems to be so significantly larger than the actual space that it should be possible to add suggestions for if a person searches for an address that doesn't exist.
They use labels like "Objective C (iOS)", which the article is just shortening to "iOS". Also they report errors as "number of errors per megabyte of source code".
Wish they'd broken down C and C++, they're very different languages in terms of how people typically develop them (non-automated vs. automated memory management). Instead they grouped them together and called them just "C++".
Sad that injection bugs are still so prevalent. Kind of makes me wish that standards for different languages would refuse to accept normal strings as arguments to anything that "executes a statement" (SQL, shell commands, etc), and instead require a custom command-string type/class which does not allow straightforward concatenation (making developers explicitly have to convert types if they want to concatenate, maybe with a conversion function name like "useUntrustedString" or somesuch), with the error message if they try to concatenate without explicit conversion pointing out not just that concatenation is banned, but stating why it's banned. Maybe something like that would finally get people to start using proper parameter substitution...