What is the point of this story and 90% of the comments in it? As far as I can ascertain, lazy as I am, the story is something like this:
- Australian guy breaks US law. - US asks Australia for extradition. - Australia tries the case in a court like any normal country would do. - Court says no.
The whole point of the court system is to decide these things. So what if the US made a somewhat unreasonable request? They said no! It's not like they said, "Give him to us or we'll bomb your country."
Mr. President, there are more than 500 young American service men and servicewomen who fought and died in Iraq who won't ever be able to laugh at any jokes again. They went to Iraq because they believed your word about the WMDs, Mr. President.
I have no dispute with the rest of your post, but I just have to correct this. The American soldiers in Iraq didn't go there because they believed the President. They went there, because they're in the military, and in the military you follow orders that your commander gives you. First, because you are bound by your duty and honor as a soldier to do so, and second because they put you in jail if you don't. It has nothing to do with belief.
Easy to fix. Strap a dolphin to the ship. If it crashes, the dolphin is sure to die, so the flight then poses more of a risk to dolphins than to humans, even if launched from the middle of the desert.
OK, you're right about the asteroids not being ice. I was confused for a moment. Still, nickel-iron probably wouldn't make the investment worthwhile, you would need something a lot better. Now find that.
Just like on Earth, there will be impurities in the rock. Some of these impurities will take the form of things like platinum. According to this page, a 2 billion ton asteroid (1km diameter) would contain 7,500 tons of platinum. (http://science.howstuffworks.com/asteroid-mining1.htm) Also, we know what asteroids are made out of without having to go visit them, so finding an appropriate one means doing a survey with a telescope, not a lot of time consuming and expensive space missions.
Endangering the Earth: Yes, if it is too big it will cause climate changes. The moon is an asteroid, you know.
No, it isn't. An asteroid is a specific category of planetary bodies which does not include the Moon. There are differences in formation, composition, and most importantly size. The Moon is so large that its self gravitation effectively turns it into a smooth sphere. All asteroids are oddly-shaped and lumpy because they don't have enough self gravitation to overcome the structural strength of their component rock. To give some perspective, the Moon has a mass of about 7.4e22kg. Ceres, the largest known asteroid, is about 8.7e20kg, or 1% of the Moon. As quoted above, a 1km asteroid, which we might actually think about moving around, would have a mass of 2e9kg, or about thirty trillion times less mass. It will not cause any noticeable tides.
However, that was not what I was referring to. I meant, the bigger its mass, the harder it is too control -- and we wouldn't want to lose control of an asteroid that is approaching Earth and that won't burn up in the stratosphere, would we? I mean, space shuttles blow up, so it is not as if we have this technology licked, do we?
Totally different issue. Celestial mechanics mean we can predict the path of the asteroid. We know how to do this without major errors. The worst accident that could happen would be for the propulsion to partially fail, and it would be trivial to design a propulsion system in which a partial or complete failure would result in the asteroid failing to make orbit, and simply flying off into space again. It's hard to make rockets that don't fail, but it's easy to design a flight path for a free body where a rocket failure does not result in an impact.
Carving up an asteroid: you make it sound easy.
Well, it's just a bunch of rock.
Dropping pieces of it in the atmosphere (that must be able to survive re-entry) at the right time so they land wherever they are supposed to land. You probably know the space shuttle needs constant adjustment when descending. What are you going to do: also add jets to those pieces? And then add an astronaut to them to adjust things? Remember, dropping the pieces in the sea won't work, because they'll sink.
The space shuttle needs constant adjustment because it's a big unpowered (in the descent phase) airplane. Capsules, such as Soyuz and Apollo, did use any kind of active control during their reentry. Targeting is not perfect, but it can be close enough. Use some enormous uninhabited stretch of land, like wherever the Russians recover their capsules, or the nuclear testing sites in the American southwest and put them down there.
Finally: I think "using space technology to move stuff through the atmosphere to solve a real big problem we are having" is relevant to both asteroid mining and nuclear waste disposal in space. Only nuclear waste disposal is much more urgent.
Nuclear waste disposal isn't urgent at all. We have a variety of decent solutions to the problem, including using the 'waste' as fuel in reactors designed for it or burying it in a bunch of rock. The waste issue is political, like so many othe
Wow, this is just so wrong. Let's take it point by point.
You must find such an astroid (usually they are ice).
No, most asteroids are nickel-iron. Comets are made out of ice.
You must find one that is big enough to make the investment worthwhile, yet small enough not to endanger the Earth.
"Endanger the Earth"? Is its mere presence in orbit going to cause destructive tides or something? This statement makes no sense.
You must build those jets onto it and navigate it.
The jets are a bit hard. Navigation is a solved problem. We did harder stuff in the 70s.
Then, when it is close to Earth, you must mine it and transfer the ores down -- which is a bit of a problem since they will burn up in the stratosphere if you do not do that in a capsule.
This is easy; carve the asteroid up into pieces that are small enough not to destroy too large of an area when they land, but large enough to survive the reentry. (Such sizes do exist, as evidenced by meteors which arrive on the ground without destroying large sections of territory.) Drop them into the atmosphere at the right time so they land wherever they are supposed to land. You lose some material on the way down, but who cares?
Remember, it is much easier to send up our nuclear waste and shoot it into the Sun.
What is this statement even doing in your post? You might have well say, "Remember, it is much easier to search for the magical portal that would take us into Candy-Land." It has as much to do with the subject at hand.
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
Professor: The sun will expand into a red giant and destroy the Earth in 5 billion years. Student: What?! Oh my god! What did you say? Professor: I said, the sun will expand into a red giant and destroy the Earth in 5 billion years. Student: Oh. Whew. I thought you said 5 million years.
*** joe has joined channel #heaven <stpeter> hi joe <joe> wtf? * stpeter looks joe up in his book <stpeter> sorry, you're not on the list, off to hell with you *** joe has been kicked off channel #heaven by stpeter (damned)
*** God has joined channel #heaven <God> Peter, you moron! <God> Engineers don't go to hell, you idiot! * God zaps Peter with a giant lightning bolt. <stpeter> sorry boss:( *** God has left channel #heaven (I am surrounded by morons!)
*** God has joined channel #hell <lucifer> sup <God> Remember that engineer we sent down a while back? <lucifer> yeah, hes great! <lucifer> a genius * lucifer basks in the a/c <lucifer> furnace efficeincy is up 50%, too <lucifer> wanna beer? joe hooked up a tap in my office <God> Look, engineers aren't supposed to get damned. I want him back. <lucifer> your out of ur mind <lucifer> why would i give him back? he's getting us hooked up with digital cable next week <God> You'd better give him back, or else I'll sue! * lucifer rotfl <lucifer> yeah right, where r u going to find a lawyer haha
My apologies to anyone who is adversely affected by this version.
A megacorp that will be losing enormous amounts of money for every minute of web site downtime will not be running their site on a single server. They most likely have a physically distributed cluster which can't all be compromised in the same attack, and hot swaps ready to go in case they all somehow get compromised as well. They don't have to take their site down because of an attack, whereas a comparatively small nonprofit effort has no choice.
They can think whatever they want, you are not responsible for their deranged minds. They will only succeed in changing laws to the point that backlash makes representatives change their minds; no matter how much money an organization like the RIAA can throw at politicians, in the end those politicians still need votes to get elected.
I've never read anything by Stirling, and I was going to skip the review until I saw who wrote the review. There's something oddly ironic about reading a review just because it was written by one of your favorite authors.
Yeah, basic raytracing is certainly an embarrassingly-parallel problem. I wrote a basic parallel raytracer using straight TCP to communicate between the nodes. Using 15 computers, located all over the place (several in the same room, several across campus, one on the other side of the country) resulted in basically a 15 times speedup with no noticeable overhead. Of course, the raytracer itself was very simple (no fancy effects, just shadows, reflection, refraction, etc.) and very slow, which helps make it parallelize better.
Jeez, you need to find some new APIs, they did get more powerful, you just somehow missed the boat!
A couple of weeks ago, I got back from a trip and had a bunch of digital photos I wanted to sort out. None of the program I have did exactly what I wanted; I just wanted to be able to quickly go through all the photos and delete the ones I didn't like, and be able to rotate them. So I wrote a program to do it for me. Using Cocoa on Mac OS X, it took about 40 minutes. Cocoa is very well designed and extensible, so it doesn't suffer nearly as much from the problem you describe where wanting to do something different puts you back to square one. It certainly makes it easier to do things "the right way" (i.e. the way Apple intends you to do it) but it has plenty of facilities for doing things the wrong way, too.
Cocoa is somewhat unique in this aspect, but not completely; I don't think it is the only API that doesn't suck, by far.
Astronauts have been dying in accidents since the 60s. One shuttle blew up in 1986, before Hubble was put up. You think the mission to put Hubble in orbit was risk-free? The repair missions? Of course not. And it was known then that they were risky. Nothing has changed except the identification of a new flaw in a field where errors can mean instant death.
Actually, the Mindstorms was conceived and marketed for kids. Lego was quite surprised that they ended up selling so many of them, and that so many of the buyers ended up being men in their 20s buying for themselves. (No, I don't have a cite.)
"Has lived" normally indicates that the person lived for 10 years and continues to do so today. If the patient died, the quote has a bad (because it causes misunderstanding) grammar problem.
I rather doubt it. A plot to use airliners as bombs was foiled in 1994, around the same time that Debt of Honor was released, so that specific idea is hardly new. And of course the technique of destroying things by ramming into them with airplanes dates back at least sixty years.
The short summary: He did a study using a Windows shareware program. Upon installation, it randomly chose whether to be crippleware or simply remind the user to pay when starting and quitting the program, with a 50% chance of each. It did this in such a way that reinstalling wouldn't randomly choose again, so most people didn't even realize there were two "versions". The crippled version sold over five times as many copies.
Granted, this is a single example and may not be representative of all situations, but it's the best study I'm aware of so far. It puts the "people who will buy it will pay for it anyway, don't piss people off by crippling the product" position in serious doubt, at least in my mind.
As it stands now, nobody can force you to vote for a particular candidate. You leave the polling place, and are immediately accosted by two large thugs who pull you into their car. "Did you vote for our candidate?" "Yeah," you lie. They have no way to know if you're telling the truth. This is a good thing.
If you can prove your vote to exit pollers, you can be forced to prove your vote to Big Louie's hired goons.
You don't have to be running an open-source project to keep good backups. My important source code is saved in six different places in three separate physical locations on two continents. It would probably take a nuclear war to get it all.
Do you want to play games? Don't get a Mac. That should be obvious.
Do you want to do heavy-duty photoshopping? A cheap PC will probably be better than a cheap Mac.
Do you want to do light photoshopping, browse the web, get your mail, do some programming and UNIX hacking, and edit movies? An $800 eMac will be great. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars to get a really nice Mac.
This is a portable which I turn off every night. It's ready to go (and can check my mail) in less time than an average PC takes to do its startup memory check.
I must have been a mathematician in a previous life.
I read your comment, boggled appropriately. Thought about the problem for a moment, figured out how to solve it, smiled, moved on. I still don't know what the answer is.
The odd thing that most people don't really get about math is that, the more math you know, the less you deal with actual numbers, and heaven forbid you should ever do any arithmetic. The best math professors I had all had trouble doing extremely easy multiplication. There's a reason computers grew out of math; they math guys wanted machines to take care of all the messy numbers for them.
Strangely, physics people seem to be the opposite; where math people end up constructing a kind of universe of math which abstracts away all of the numbers, physicists are forced to exist in the real world and they end up getting pretty good at silly arithmetic tricks.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the point of this story and 90% of the comments in it? As far as I can ascertain, lazy as I am, the story is something like this:
- Australian guy breaks US law.
- US asks Australia for extradition.
- Australia tries the case in a court like any normal country would do.
- Court says no.
The whole point of the court system is to decide these things. So what if the US made a somewhat unreasonable request? They said no! It's not like they said, "Give him to us or we'll bomb your country."
Mr. President, there are more than 500 young American service men and servicewomen who fought and died in Iraq who won't ever be able to laugh at any jokes again. They went to Iraq because they believed your word about the WMDs, Mr. President.
I have no dispute with the rest of your post, but I just have to correct this. The American soldiers in Iraq didn't go there because they believed the President. They went there, because they're in the military, and in the military you follow orders that your commander gives you. First, because you are bound by your duty and honor as a soldier to do so, and second because they put you in jail if you don't. It has nothing to do with belief.
Easy to fix. Strap a dolphin to the ship. If it crashes, the dolphin is sure to die, so the flight then poses more of a risk to dolphins than to humans, even if launched from the middle of the desert.
OK, you're right about the asteroids not being ice. I was confused for a moment. Still, nickel-iron probably wouldn't make the investment worthwhile, you would need something a lot better. Now find that.
.htm) Also, we know what asteroids are made out of without having to go visit them, so finding an appropriate one means doing a survey with a telescope, not a lot of time consuming and expensive space missions.
Just like on Earth, there will be impurities in the rock. Some of these impurities will take the form of things like platinum. According to this page, a 2 billion ton asteroid (1km diameter) would contain 7,500 tons of platinum. (http://science.howstuffworks.com/asteroid-mining1
Endangering the Earth: Yes, if it is too big it will cause climate changes. The moon is an asteroid, you know.
No, it isn't. An asteroid is a specific category of planetary bodies which does not include the Moon. There are differences in formation, composition, and most importantly size. The Moon is so large that its self gravitation effectively turns it into a smooth sphere. All asteroids are oddly-shaped and lumpy because they don't have enough self gravitation to overcome the structural strength of their component rock. To give some perspective, the Moon has a mass of about 7.4e22kg. Ceres, the largest known asteroid, is about 8.7e20kg, or 1% of the Moon. As quoted above, a 1km asteroid, which we might actually think about moving around, would have a mass of 2e9kg, or about thirty trillion times less mass. It will not cause any noticeable tides.
However, that was not what I was referring to. I meant, the bigger its mass, the harder it is too control -- and we wouldn't want to lose control of an asteroid that is approaching Earth and that won't burn up in the stratosphere, would we? I mean, space shuttles blow up, so it is not as if we have this technology licked, do we?
Totally different issue. Celestial mechanics mean we can predict the path of the asteroid. We know how to do this without major errors. The worst accident that could happen would be for the propulsion to partially fail, and it would be trivial to design a propulsion system in which a partial or complete failure would result in the asteroid failing to make orbit, and simply flying off into space again. It's hard to make rockets that don't fail, but it's easy to design a flight path for a free body where a rocket failure does not result in an impact.
Carving up an asteroid: you make it sound easy.
Well, it's just a bunch of rock.
Dropping pieces of it in the atmosphere (that must be able to survive re-entry) at the right time so they land wherever they are supposed to land. You probably know the space shuttle needs constant adjustment when descending. What are you going to do: also add jets to those pieces? And then add an astronaut to them to adjust things? Remember, dropping the pieces in the sea won't work, because they'll sink.
The space shuttle needs constant adjustment because it's a big unpowered (in the descent phase) airplane. Capsules, such as Soyuz and Apollo, did use any kind of active control during their reentry. Targeting is not perfect, but it can be close enough. Use some enormous uninhabited stretch of land, like wherever the Russians recover their capsules, or the nuclear testing sites in the American southwest and put them down there.
Finally: I think "using space technology to move stuff through the atmosphere to solve a real big problem we are having" is relevant to both asteroid mining and nuclear waste disposal in space. Only nuclear waste disposal is much more urgent.
Nuclear waste disposal isn't urgent at all. We have a variety of decent solutions to the problem, including using the 'waste' as fuel in reactors designed for it or burying it in a bunch of rock. The waste issue is political, like so many othe
I'm not sure, but I think you are supposed to think for yourself and decide which position you support.
Wow, this is just so wrong. Let's take it point by point.
You must find such an astroid (usually they are ice).
No, most asteroids are nickel-iron. Comets are made out of ice.
You must find one that is big enough to make the investment worthwhile, yet small enough not to endanger the Earth.
"Endanger the Earth"? Is its mere presence in orbit going to cause destructive tides or something? This statement makes no sense.
You must build those jets onto it and navigate it.
The jets are a bit hard. Navigation is a solved problem. We did harder stuff in the 70s.
Then, when it is close to Earth, you must mine it and transfer the ores down -- which is a bit of a problem since they will burn up in the stratosphere if you do not do that in a capsule.
This is easy; carve the asteroid up into pieces that are small enough not to destroy too large of an area when they land, but large enough to survive the reentry. (Such sizes do exist, as evidenced by meteors which arrive on the ground without destroying large sections of territory.) Drop them into the atmosphere at the right time so they land wherever they are supposed to land. You lose some material on the way down, but who cares?
Remember, it is much easier to send up our nuclear waste and shoot it into the Sun.
What is this statement even doing in your post? You might have well say, "Remember, it is much easier to search for the magical portal that would take us into Candy-Land." It has as much to do with the subject at hand.
Professor: The sun will expand into a red giant and destroy the Earth in 5 billion years.
Student: What?! Oh my god! What did you say?
Professor: I said, the sun will expand into a red giant and destroy the Earth in 5 billion years.
Student: Oh. Whew. I thought you said 5 million years.
This is just begging for some "modernization".
:(
*** joe has joined channel #heaven
<stpeter> hi joe
<joe> wtf?
* stpeter looks joe up in his book
<stpeter> sorry, you're not on the list, off to hell with you
*** joe has been kicked off channel #heaven by stpeter (damned)
*** God has joined channel #heaven
<God> Peter, you moron!
<God> Engineers don't go to hell, you idiot!
* God zaps Peter with a giant lightning bolt.
<stpeter> sorry boss
*** God has left channel #heaven (I am surrounded by morons!)
*** God has joined channel #hell
<lucifer> sup
<God> Remember that engineer we sent down a while back?
<lucifer> yeah, hes great!
<lucifer> a genius
* lucifer basks in the a/c
<lucifer> furnace efficeincy is up 50%, too
<lucifer> wanna beer? joe hooked up a tap in my office
<God> Look, engineers aren't supposed to get damned. I want him back.
<lucifer> your out of ur mind
<lucifer> why would i give him back? he's getting us hooked up with digital cable next week
<God> You'd better give him back, or else I'll sue!
* lucifer rotfl
<lucifer> yeah right, where r u going to find a lawyer haha
My apologies to anyone who is adversely affected by this version.
A megacorp that will be losing enormous amounts of money for every minute of web site downtime will not be running their site on a single server. They most likely have a physically distributed cluster which can't all be compromised in the same attack, and hot swaps ready to go in case they all somehow get compromised as well. They don't have to take their site down because of an attack, whereas a comparatively small nonprofit effort has no choice.
They can think whatever they want, you are not responsible for their deranged minds. They will only succeed in changing laws to the point that backlash makes representatives change their minds; no matter how much money an organization like the RIAA can throw at politicians, in the end those politicians still need votes to get elected.
I've never read anything by Stirling, and I was going to skip the review until I saw who wrote the review. There's something oddly ironic about reading a review just because it was written by one of your favorite authors.
Yeah, basic raytracing is certainly an embarrassingly-parallel problem. I wrote a basic parallel raytracer using straight TCP to communicate between the nodes. Using 15 computers, located all over the place (several in the same room, several across campus, one on the other side of the country) resulted in basically a 15 times speedup with no noticeable overhead. Of course, the raytracer itself was very simple (no fancy effects, just shadows, reflection, refraction, etc.) and very slow, which helps make it parallelize better.
Jeez, you need to find some new APIs, they did get more powerful, you just somehow missed the boat!
A couple of weeks ago, I got back from a trip and had a bunch of digital photos I wanted to sort out. None of the program I have did exactly what I wanted; I just wanted to be able to quickly go through all the photos and delete the ones I didn't like, and be able to rotate them. So I wrote a program to do it for me. Using Cocoa on Mac OS X, it took about 40 minutes. Cocoa is very well designed and extensible, so it doesn't suffer nearly as much from the problem you describe where wanting to do something different puts you back to square one. It certainly makes it easier to do things "the right way" (i.e. the way Apple intends you to do it) but it has plenty of facilities for doing things the wrong way, too.
Cocoa is somewhat unique in this aspect, but not completely; I don't think it is the only API that doesn't suck, by far.
Astronauts have been dying in accidents since the 60s. One shuttle blew up in 1986, before Hubble was put up. You think the mission to put Hubble in orbit was risk-free? The repair missions? Of course not. And it was known then that they were risky. Nothing has changed except the identification of a new flaw in a field where errors can mean instant death.
Actually, the Mindstorms was conceived and marketed for kids. Lego was quite surprised that they ended up selling so many of them, and that so many of the buyers ended up being men in their 20s buying for themselves. (No, I don't have a cite.)
"Has lived" normally indicates that the person lived for 10 years and continues to do so today. If the patient died, the quote has a bad (because it causes misunderstanding) grammar problem.
Apple has more bandwidth than God. I think they'll be ok.
I rather doubt it. A plot to use airliners as bombs was foiled in 1994, around the same time that Debt of Honor was released, so that specific idea is hardly new. And of course the technique of destroying things by ramming into them with airplanes dates back at least sixty years.
There is a fascinating article about the effectiveness of crippling shareware versus relying on goodwill at http://www.scrawlsoft.com/products/common/hardnose .html.
The short summary: He did a study using a Windows shareware program. Upon installation, it randomly chose whether to be crippleware or simply remind the user to pay when starting and quitting the program, with a 50% chance of each. It did this in such a way that reinstalling wouldn't randomly choose again, so most people didn't even realize there were two "versions". The crippled version sold over five times as many copies.
Granted, this is a single example and may not be representative of all situations, but it's the best study I'm aware of so far. It puts the "people who will buy it will pay for it anyway, don't piss people off by crippling the product" position in serious doubt, at least in my mind.
-1 Completely Clueless.
As it stands now, nobody can force you to vote for a particular candidate. You leave the polling place, and are immediately accosted by two large thugs who pull you into their car. "Did you vote for our candidate?" "Yeah," you lie. They have no way to know if you're telling the truth. This is a good thing.
If you can prove your vote to exit pollers, you can be forced to prove your vote to Big Louie's hired goons.
You don't have to be running an open-source project to keep good backups. My important source code is saved in six different places in three separate physical locations on two continents. It would probably take a nuclear war to get it all.
It all depends on what you want to do.
Do you want to play games? Don't get a Mac. That should be obvious.
Do you want to do heavy-duty photoshopping? A cheap PC will probably be better than a cheap Mac.
Do you want to do light photoshopping, browse the web, get your mail, do some programming and UNIX hacking, and edit movies? An $800 eMac will be great. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars to get a really nice Mac.
Rhetoric:~ mikeash$ uptime
15:37 up 13 days, 14:18, 5 users, load averages: 0.62 0.97 1.03
This is a portable which I turn off every night. It's ready to go (and can check my mail) in less time than an average PC takes to do its startup memory check.
What has Blizzard ever produced that was revolutionary? Their business is taking existing ideas and perfecting them.
I must have been a mathematician in a previous life.
I read your comment, boggled appropriately. Thought about the problem for a moment, figured out how to solve it, smiled, moved on. I still don't know what the answer is.
The odd thing that most people don't really get about math is that, the more math you know, the less you deal with actual numbers, and heaven forbid you should ever do any arithmetic. The best math professors I had all had trouble doing extremely easy multiplication. There's a reason computers grew out of math; they math guys wanted machines to take care of all the messy numbers for them.
Strangely, physics people seem to be the opposite; where math people end up constructing a kind of universe of math which abstracts away all of the numbers, physicists are forced to exist in the real world and they end up getting pretty good at silly arithmetic tricks.