A straight up nuclear rocket, is anywhere from 5-10x better than say the space shuttle. (Is that a good guess? someone correct me)
Weight for weight and payload for payload. That means you could from ground to the moon and back to earth orbit in one vehicle.
More sophisticated designs with higher specific impulse make the trip to mars in a matter of months.
They have no details about what they are planning to do, except that this would not be a launch vehicle, but something more like a interplanetary reusable shuttle. If you use a nuclear reactor to power a Ion thruster or VASMIR rocket your talking incredible specific impulse that is a healthy fraction of a hypothetical fusion rocket. A VASMIR drive could make it to Mars in 39 days, a reccent slashdot article pointed out. In which case something like neptune is possible within a year.
Fixed that fix for you, Eh never starts the sentence up here, it ends it. For starting we use "Hey" just like you do down south of the line. Oh and get off my lawn!
Fixed that for you. You know where your from, but remember where you are posting also.
The internet is really a collection of communications protocols. So what is meant by 'turning off the internet'?
The reality is all the worlds communication infrastructure could be considered "Teh Internets" with the exception of traditional systems, the postal service, telegraph, analog and early digital phone exchanges. At a fundatmental level these systems are information networks just the same.
So where do you draw the line?
Are we cutting out HTTP + HTML and friends?
Is this extending to international internet routing, BGP, etc etc? International links only? WAN? LAN? or...
...hypotheticall would we shut down any direct computer to computer communication? This would have to include modem communication, as this could be used for internet-like networking.
What no one has pointed out is how the postal service and telephony systems would collapse without internet. Since these services depend on on infromation services and connectivity to transport data, manage inventory, and other aspects of such operations.
So not only is switching off the internet possible, but we wouldn't have the faintest idea where to begin.
The radio software and SPL (second program loader) in a HTC Android phone are closed source, Android sits on top of this and is more analogous to a VM running on a light OS underneath. (As someone points out below, you may think have root on your droid, but you don't really have root). Thus it is not really harmful to have the Android code out there, as the low-level software that would do the most harm is proprietary and fairly well protected.
Microsoft doesn't even strictly adhere to their own APIs, leaving it full of quirks, ask any developer.
Microsoft follows their publised API's and published guidelines. Most other companies DO NOT. They take shortcuts to try and get things done quicker and almost always get it wrong.
There is some fault of MS, as developers come up with hacks to get things to work smoothly with API quirks. But just about every purveyor of bloatware including your list commits the sin of using undocumented features in unintended ways. Thus things break.
Software like iTunes and Google Toolbar make deep low level changes to the operating system, so I'm really not suprised that these have to be uninstalled before upgrading.
I wouldn't be suprised if most 3rd-party applications that install system services have to be uninstalled before the upgrade.
Many applications like these mess with things that really you really shouldn't be messing with, especially when many comparable applications seem to have no need to embed themselves so deeply, and likely have much less bloat.
As for upgrades breaking your old applications - running in compatibility mode for a older OS will solve 9/10 compatibility issues, but this feature seems to be ignored.
Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom
Yes we still have convienetly located exploding barrels, and crates.
Driving a 6-speed open-top sports car with unassisted steering, clutch etc is a religious experience. Modern cars insulate you from road, wind noise and have quiet engines that mask how much power (and how much carbon wasted) your using, and how fast your really traveling.
This is why people drive 80mph weaving all over the road, because they don't experience any sense of danger while driving a modern padded coffin.
SUVs are worse, they are even more softened so your unaware of the added inertia of a 3-ton vehicle.
Prepping my car for the trace track made me slow down, because I could sense speed again. It was also more effort, with a manual to speed up, where in a auto it will take off and accelerate past the speed limit with merely the weight of your foot resting on the pedal.
We all have seen the classic shop window accident, you know the one, driver puts the foot on the wrong pedal manoevouring in a car park, and modern automatic gearbox vehicles will take the command as maximum acceleration required. Thus the SUV ploughs through a shop window and halfway into the store. (How this doesn't generate lawsuits against the auto industry I don't know, I don't live in USA).
The danger of highly automated automobiles where minimal input is needed for acceleration is obvious. The danger of vehicles with hand operated throttles and automatic transmission is higher still. This is why automatic gearboxes on motorbikes haven't really taken off. This occured to me when I stepped off my motor scooter, leaving it in gear, and twisted the throttle as I was holding the handle bar. The big surged forward, this lead me to grip tighter, thus the bike shot off into the side of a car.
A joystick you can just lean on in a full size car? No thanks.
Your noobish innocence gives you a unfuddled untainted honesty.
You see, it is necessarily complex for two reasons.
One, we're paid by the hour, paid for support, and paid for the next upgrade, so things tend not to be as reducably simple and bulletproof as the could be.
Bugs & Bloatware = job security.
Two, if it was too clear and simple it would be very difficult to hid malicious code to rig the election.
It is also possible that a piece of innocent looking code, that is assessed as doing one thing can actually do something dastardly and nefarious. This is best hidden in bloatware.
Your too honest in your observation that such a straightforward single use system could be reduced to a very simple very easily verifiable piece of voting software....
If this really shows a causal link between cosmic rays and tree growth, you can bet it won't be long before it's pointed out that cosmic rays therefore impact the biospheres carbon absorbtion rate. Which is interesting. This will be misused by climate change denialists.
I have +1 anecdote. My employer has started providing flu shots to staff some years ago. There has been a dramatic reduction in time off due to illness in winter on the order of about half the number of sick days used accross the board. Interesting when there's a good third of staff that don't get the jab. Since I've had flu jabs myself I haven't had a serious flu in years other than mild symptoms that clear in a day or two.
Microsoft chose backslash, in particular a double backslash \\ to indicate a hostname. I don't know the origins of this decision, but it makes sense in a number of ways instead of using:// to seperate protocol from domain path. (Scarily) we could have had internet with \\slashdot.org\story\09\10\14\1219215\Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Glad-About-the-Slashes
This would make it markedly easier to pick out URLs in text, requiring no:// kludge since backslashes are not used commonly in text in the way colons and slashes are. Yet somehow I don't pine for this alternate destiny.
The thing is that popular TV is not designed to make you think. It is designed to entertain the masses who generally just want a bit of light bubbly stuff with some flesh and a bit of drama/action.
Go further, popular TV is designed to make money. The ammount of money that can be made by advertising is inversely proportional to the ammount of thinking the actual program inspires. If you can actually make the viewer stupider by the end of the show you're on to a winner. This is what Fringe seems to be doing.
And what most people actually want from their TV experience is much like eating preference, what we like and want is really based on what our palate is conditioned to liking, ie. 'comfort food'.
UAC still doesn't stop a user from clicking "okay" "okay" "okay" as they install a trojan.
And a admin password prompt wouldn't slow that kind of user down much either.
You'd be giving more time to think to a user who is adverse to thinking in the first place. They are not adverse to being annoyed.
If you run as a unprivledge user UAC will prompt for a password in *nix style. If your account is set to administrator, you can click 'ok' without entering an admin password.
So why didn't the problems Vista BETAs and RCs ring alarm bells?
I don't recall reading or hearing of anyone raising concerns at the time. Infact many people were saying how great Vista was, singing the praises of the pervasive search and other features. Also I guess if you had reasonable hardware you'd not be aware of the performance issues.
Were we overlooking problems because, after all, Beta testing is garunteed buggy unfinished code? Was it because beta testers are usually power users and therefore experience less problems generally?
Even though Windows 7 is better code fundamentally (Vistas problems being rooted in quality control), could we be looking at the same snafu with Windows 7?
The real test comes when mom and pop users without the skills to work through issues install RTM.
It's all about raw materials. Fuel. Water. Food. There are plenty of payload options would be useful even if you couldn't make a probe or satellitte withstand the G forces.
The importance this stuff will be lighten the load on a conventional launch vehicle elsewhere. Saving substantial ammount of money.
Check the event viewer for logged any errors or crashing drivers. It boggles my mind how many people don't know to check this, and how many nerds trying to help don't tell you to check this. Frankly many people don't know Windows even has such logs. It is essiential when trying to troubleshoot unexplained crashes on any platform that you RTFL (read the fricken LOGS).
Most crashes in windows are either hardware related or shitty drivers. Windows these days is resilient to crashing applications, but crappy drivers will lock your system right up, and faulty hardware will make it all go pear shaped. Stress test that system, if it locks up. Software to use:
CPU:
OCCT
Orthos
Intelburntest
GPU:
Furmark (app will seriously heat your GPU better than any game. In some rare cases too much, if it was running fine, it may not afterwards)
3DMark
Hard disks can also cause system crashes, even without a event being logged in event viewer. Run a surface scan of your HDD, use several different applications. Your hard drive may be coming back with healthy S.M.A.R.T data, but still be causing your system to crash and your data to be corrupted.
HDTach will nicely stress your HDD. Replace or at least re-seat your IDE and SATA cables. Unplug all USB devices, I can't believe how many systems have issues booting or running stable with dodgy USB devices.
Finally, use CoreTemp and SpeedFan and run the PC with the side panels off. Temperature is a huge cause of many system crashes, especially in hotter climates.
You could use this to insulate a crew capsule from the effects of acceleration. A more conventional starship could be accelerating at 10G, 100G or even more, and a onboard particle accelerator could be in turn pushing the crew habitat ahead of the starship by this means.
Slashdot Mirror
A good question. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse will give you some idea.
A straight up nuclear rocket, is anywhere from 5-10x better than say the space shuttle. (Is that a good guess? someone correct me) Weight for weight and payload for payload. That means you could from ground to the moon and back to earth orbit in one vehicle.
More sophisticated designs with higher specific impulse make the trip to mars in a matter of months.
They have no details about what they are planning to do, except that this would not be a launch vehicle, but something more like a interplanetary reusable shuttle. If you use a nuclear reactor to power a Ion thruster or VASMIR rocket your talking incredible specific impulse that is a healthy fraction of a hypothetical fusion rocket. A VASMIR drive could make it to Mars in 39 days, a reccent slashdot article pointed out. In which case something like neptune is possible within a year.
But who cares about Canada anyway.
Hey! Canada's not a joke, Eh!
Fixed that for you.
Fixed that fix for you, Eh never starts the sentence up here, it ends it. For starting we use "Hey" just like you do down south of the line. Oh and get off my lawn!
Fixed that for you. You know where your from, but remember where you are posting also.
I'm personally looking forward to being able to beam images into peoples retinas. I can imagine all sorts of delightful pranks.
You mean I'm going to have to pay for my beer coasters now?
The internet is really a collection of communications protocols. So what is meant by 'turning off the internet'?
...hypotheticall would we shut down any direct computer to computer communication? This would have to include modem communication, as this could be used for internet-like networking.
The reality is all the worlds communication infrastructure could be considered "Teh Internets" with the exception of traditional systems, the postal service, telegraph, analog and early digital phone exchanges. At a fundatmental level these systems are information networks just the same.
So where do you draw the line?
Are we cutting out HTTP + HTML and friends?
Is this extending to international internet routing, BGP, etc etc?
International links only? WAN? LAN? or...
What no one has pointed out is how the postal service and telephony systems would collapse without internet. Since these services depend on on infromation services and connectivity to transport data, manage inventory, and other aspects of such operations.
So not only is switching off the internet possible, but we wouldn't have the faintest idea where to begin.
The radio software and SPL (second program loader) in a HTC Android phone are closed source, Android sits on top of this and is more analogous to a VM running on a light OS underneath. (As someone points out below, you may think have root on your droid, but you don't really have root). Thus it is not really harmful to have the Android code out there, as the low-level software that would do the most harm is proprietary and fairly well protected.
Microsoft follows their publised API's and published guidelines. Most other companies DO NOT. They take shortcuts to try and get things done quicker and almost always get it wrong.
There is some fault of MS, as developers come up with hacks to get things to work smoothly with API quirks. But just about every purveyor of bloatware including your list commits the sin of using undocumented features in unintended ways. Thus things break.
Software like iTunes and Google Toolbar make deep low level changes to the operating system, so I'm really not suprised that these have to be uninstalled before upgrading.
I wouldn't be suprised if most 3rd-party applications that install system services have to be uninstalled before the upgrade.
Many applications like these mess with things that really you really shouldn't be messing with, especially when many comparable applications seem to have no need to embed themselves so deeply, and likely have much less bloat.
As for upgrades breaking your old applications - running in compatibility mode for a older OS will solve 9/10 compatibility issues, but this feature seems to be ignored.
Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom
Yes we still have convienetly located exploding barrels, and crates.
Driving a 6-speed open-top sports car with unassisted steering, clutch etc is a religious experience. Modern cars insulate you from road, wind noise and have quiet engines that mask how much power (and how much carbon wasted) your using, and how fast your really traveling.
This is why people drive 80mph weaving all over the road, because they don't experience any sense of danger while driving a modern padded coffin.
SUVs are worse, they are even more softened so your unaware of the added inertia of a 3-ton vehicle.
Prepping my car for the trace track made me slow down, because I could sense speed again. It was also more effort, with a manual to speed up, where in a auto it will take off and accelerate past the speed limit with merely the weight of your foot resting on the pedal.
We all have seen the classic shop window accident, you know the one, driver puts the foot on the wrong pedal manoevouring in a car park, and modern automatic gearbox vehicles will take the command as maximum acceleration required. Thus the SUV ploughs through a shop window and halfway into the store. (How this doesn't generate lawsuits against the auto industry I don't know, I don't live in USA).
The danger of highly automated automobiles where minimal input is needed for acceleration is obvious. The danger of vehicles with hand operated throttles and automatic transmission is higher still. This is why automatic gearboxes on motorbikes haven't really taken off. This occured to me when I stepped off my motor scooter, leaving it in gear, and twisted the throttle as I was holding the handle bar. The big surged forward, this lead me to grip tighter, thus the bike shot off into the side of a car.
A joystick you can just lean on in a full size car? No thanks.
Your noobish innocence gives you a unfuddled untainted honesty.
You see, it is necessarily complex for two reasons.
One, we're paid by the hour, paid for support, and paid for the next upgrade, so things tend not to be as reducably simple and bulletproof as the could be.
Bugs & Bloatware = job security.
Two, if it was too clear and simple it would be very difficult to hid malicious code to rig the election.
It is also possible that a piece of innocent looking code, that is assessed as doing one thing can actually do something dastardly and nefarious. This is best hidden in bloatware.
Your too honest in your observation that such a straightforward single use system could be reduced to a very simple very easily verifiable piece of voting software....
But there are profits at stake here.
grep and find who should have won the election?
If this really shows a causal link between cosmic rays and tree growth, you can bet it won't be long before it's pointed out that cosmic rays therefore impact the biospheres carbon absorbtion rate. Which is interesting. This will be misused by climate change denialists.
I have +1 anecdote. My employer has started providing flu shots to staff some years ago. There has been a dramatic reduction in time off due to illness in winter on the order of about half the number of sick days used accross the board. Interesting when there's a good third of staff that don't get the jab. Since I've had flu jabs myself I haven't had a serious flu in years other than mild symptoms that clear in a day or two.
Microsoft chose backslash, in particular a double backslash \\ to indicate a hostname. I don't know the origins of this decision, but it makes sense in a number of ways instead of using :// to seperate protocol from domain path. (Scarily) we could have had internet with \\slashdot.org\story\09\10\14\1219215\Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Glad-About-the-Slashes
:// kludge since backslashes are not used commonly in text in the way colons and slashes are. Yet somehow I don't pine for this alternate destiny.
This would make it markedly easier to pick out URLs in text, requiring no
The thing is that popular TV is not designed to make you think. It is designed to entertain the masses who generally just want a bit of light bubbly stuff with some flesh and a bit of drama/action.
Go further, popular TV is designed to make money. The ammount of money that can be made by advertising is inversely proportional to the ammount of thinking the actual program inspires. If you can actually make the viewer stupider by the end of the show you're on to a winner. This is what Fringe seems to be doing.
And what most people actually want from their TV experience is much like eating preference, what we like and want is really based on what our palate is conditioned to liking, ie. 'comfort food'.
UAC still doesn't stop a user from clicking "okay" "okay" "okay" as they install a trojan.
And a admin password prompt wouldn't slow that kind of user down much either.
You'd be giving more time to think to a user who is adverse to thinking in the first place. They are not adverse to being annoyed.
If you run as a unprivledge user UAC will prompt for a password in *nix style. If your account is set to administrator, you can click 'ok' without entering an admin password.
So why didn't the problems Vista BETAs and RCs ring alarm bells?
I don't recall reading or hearing of anyone raising concerns at the time. Infact many people were saying how great Vista was, singing the praises of the pervasive search and other features. Also I guess if you had reasonable hardware you'd not be aware of the performance issues.
Were we overlooking problems because, after all, Beta testing is garunteed buggy unfinished code? Was it because beta testers are usually power users and therefore experience less problems generally?
Even though Windows 7 is better code fundamentally (Vistas problems being rooted in quality control), could we be looking at the same snafu with Windows 7?
The real test comes when mom and pop users without the skills to work through issues install RTM.
It's all about raw materials. Fuel. Water. Food. There are plenty of payload options would be useful even if you couldn't make a probe or satellitte withstand the G forces.
The importance this stuff will be lighten the load on a conventional launch vehicle elsewhere. Saving substantial ammount of money.
What, they arrested some CERN scientist for wearing a thinkgeek.com product to the office?
What next a Tevatron researcher waterboarded for having al-Qaeda cuff-links?
Check the event viewer for logged any errors or crashing drivers. It boggles my mind how many people don't know to check this, and how many nerds trying to help don't tell you to check this. Frankly many people don't know Windows even has such logs. It is essiential when trying to troubleshoot unexplained crashes on any platform that you RTFL (read the fricken LOGS).
Most crashes in windows are either hardware related or shitty drivers. Windows these days is resilient to crashing applications, but crappy drivers will lock your system right up, and faulty hardware will make it all go pear shaped. Stress test that system, if it locks up. Software to use:
CPU: OCCT
Orthos
Intelburntest
GPU: Furmark (app will seriously heat your GPU better than any game. In some rare cases too much, if it was running fine, it may not afterwards) 3DMark
Hard disks can also cause system crashes, even without a event being logged in event viewer. Run a surface scan of your HDD, use several different applications. Your hard drive may be coming back with healthy S.M.A.R.T data, but still be causing your system to crash and your data to be corrupted.
HDTach will nicely stress your HDD. Replace or at least re-seat your IDE and SATA cables. Unplug all USB devices, I can't believe how many systems have issues booting or running stable with dodgy USB devices.
Finally, use CoreTemp and SpeedFan and run the PC with the side panels off. Temperature is a huge cause of many system crashes, especially in hotter climates.
Hold on a momment guys, my cat is sending me binary telepathic messages.
01100110011011110110111101100100001000000110...
F...o...o..d......b...o...w..l.......e..m...p...t...y
So it installs linux?
Yes, and kills problem users.
Those users are not bugs they are a feature
You could use this to insulate a crew capsule from the effects of acceleration. A more conventional starship could be accelerating at 10G, 100G or even more, and a onboard particle accelerator could be in turn pushing the crew habitat ahead of the starship by this means.
The occupants would experience freefall.