I wouldn't mention SML;) OCaML is much better.
But neither of them is as expressive as LISP,
sorry. The OCaML optimizing compiler kicks ass,
but the language itself is not as expressive
as Lisp is. The sacrifices were mostly made
in the interest of speed. Plus, OCaML attempts
to expand it's expressiveness through
extra syntax, which is a fundamentally flawed
method. Read the introduction to R5RS for a
good reason why.
Doug Miller has made some good points, but the thing he's missing is that Linux was not created for the same reasons as Windows was. This especially is evident when he says things along the lines of "Linux should have one unified user interface". Linux was created to scratch an itch. It just so happens that this was an itch felt by millions of other people as well. It's not the best OS, technically, sure, and it doesn't have a "unified user interface". But Linux isn't out there to be one person's idea of what an OS should be. Linux is whatever you need it to be, letting you scratch whatever itch you may need to. That flexibility is its beauty, and main reason for success (brave readers may ponder that Be's failure might have been due to lack of flexibility, I'm just speculating here though).
We don't need your Windows because we can use GNOME, KDE, sawfish, blackbox, E, icewm, fvwm, twm, or whichever one you choose, on the wonderfully flexible X11 implementation XFree86, which may have its problems but also has many benefits (and there's always Berlin, for the adventurous).
We don't need your Word because we've got LaTeX, which is far superior to Word for creating quality documents, and the graphical front-end LyX. And if you don't like LaTeX then check out SGML docbook or the variety of (nasty imho:) manual typesetting programs available such as Kword, abiword, staroffice, or applixware.
We don't need Internet Explorer because we've got Mozilla, Galeon, Skipstone, Konqueror, Lynx, Links, and a few others. Sure, Mozilla may be somewhat slow and bloated right now (though it's holding up pretty well for me here), it's at least pointed in the right direction, and things will only improve.
But don't tell us that Linux needs to be what one person thinks it should be. Linux should be able to be whatever a person wishes to make of it.
On a side note, it also seems evident that Mr. Miller does not understand that GTK and QT are separate from GNOME and KDE, that one can have GTK and QT apps and not have GNOME or KDE. Microsoft could easily use GTK, QT, or even Xaw or some similar toolkit, and simply have their applications depend upon those libraries. That's how most Linux developers do it. Or they could write their own toolkit, if they feel like it.
No, its not supposed to be a Windows program. It just so happens that some people decided to port it. I have never used the Windows version and I don't have any plans to either. Not when I can just sit down at my Debian box, type "apt-get install lyx", and have it installed on my system for me. Considering that several of my friends and I use it extensively for doing papers and homework, I'd be a little more cautious in calling it "a joke" just because you are using an inferior platform.
Yes, I have used apt-get. It's a network installer. There's nothing innovative about it.
Certainly there are other systems, off-hand, such as the *BSD's ports tree, which has similarities (though only the newest APT has ability to build source packages and satisfy dependencies automatically). But this is what I was answering:
(The only thing even marginally innovative here is apt-get, a lame command line tool that works around the lack of
software packaging standards in Linux. It's not present on other systems only because they have no need for it.)
A statement which is blatantly misguided, as I have pointed out previously.
WYSIWYG is an innovative approach which has numerous advantages over forcing someone to learn a programming
language like troff or tex just to write a text document.
Obviously you didn't check up my links, or you would know that LyX, a graphical front-end to LaTeX, allows one to write documents using the LaTeX processor without having to know a single thing about LaTeX itself.
Now you may not agree that automated typesetting is superior to manual typesetting, but surely you must agree that automated typesetting with LaTeX or SGML fits the principles of good design better than manual typesetting. I'm talking about things such as abstraction, encapsulation, and modularity, for example:
Using "emphasize" instead of "italicize" so you can redefine it easily if style needs to change.
The "Section" environment that not only renumbers itself correctly but can allow generation of a table of contents easily.
Being able to use a provided document class to create documents that look exactly as they are supposed to but with a minimum of effort on the part of the writer.
With the standard WYSIWYG editor, you're gonna have a lot more trouble with these things. Typewriters were great, in their time, but we have computers now.
(The only thing even marginally innovative here is apt-get, a lame command line tool that works around the lack of
software packaging standards in Linux. It's not present on other systems only because they have no need for it.)
1.
You have no idea what APT does, do you? It handles the retrieval and installation of packages, all with minimal effort by the user. Don't like the command line? (Why would anyone not like the command line?:) Then there's gnome-apt, console-apt, aptitude, dselect, etc. The reason why APT is not present on other systems is because those systems are inferior, not because they don't have no need for it. Just remember that the next time you have to personally retrieve your software (even by going to the store, or downloading it from an FTP site) and all its dependencies.
2.
What is so "innovative" about the WYSIWYG word processor? It's an imitation of a typewriter! The WYSIWYG word processor is the biggest waste of time for someone using a computer. You have this awesome computing machine, it can do billions of instructions per second, and yet you are doing all the work required to manually typeset and format just like you were still using a typewriter? Fortunately there were some smarter people in this world than those who designed Microsoft Word. Check out LaTeX (using an implementation such as teTeX) and LyX, a graphical front-end for LaTeX that provides a different metaphor for word processing that I would argue is superior to the run of the mill WYSIWYG.
Last time I checked, Java was not a functional language. In fact, it doesn't even have decent support for closures! What kind of crappy language doesn't have closures! Why would any programmer worth his/her salt even consider Java. Ugh...
Last time I checked, even ordinary LANs are not that secure at all. Ethernet frames transmitted in the clear, and all, y'know. That's why they invented things like SSH, SSL, IPSec, among other fun encrypted protocols. Sure there's MITM attacks still to worry bout, and the like, but it still is much smarter to be using the encryption than not. Even if you're not on a wireless LAN.
Re:Sorry to hear, but the Software will Go On!
on
Stormix Bankruptcy
·
· Score: 1
Not only that, but it is possible to apt-get from Stormix to Progeny, without having to reinstall your whole system. Definitely something to look into for ex-Stormix users. Read this page for info.
First of all, I must say, Hemingway is mind-numbingly dull. Like Dickens, Melville, and others, his books are only read because a few stodgy english professors keep pushing them on poor students. And people have this funny idea that if a book is dry, mind-numbing, and convoluted, it must be a classic because they don't understand it. I remember having to read "For Whom The Bell Tolls" and going into it I was looking forward to an interesting story. By page 100, I was skipping and skimming over chapters. It was so incomprehensibly dull, I was incredibly disappointed. And Dickens, don't get me started! I really tried to read him... I did! But so convoluted and boring! I'd rather write Perl than read Dickens.
I've found that much of "classic" literature is just crap foisted upon generation upon generation by an elitist few who snub different styles of literature (such as science fiction) as being "trashy", without realizing that it is quite possible to write a "classic" piece in a genre not generally accepted as "classic".
Now as for your statement that "The Best Scientists Ever" should have been able to figure out matters quicker than the readers, managed to miss one crucial point. The "Best Scientists Ever" do not have the advantage of the omniscient third-person narrator, first. Second, it is not very obvious what the pygmies are doing or thinking, to the reader. Apparently it is not obvious to you either, because the pygmies didn't think there was life after death; they knew there was life after [their] death, if it can truely be called death anyway.
After saying all this, I don't want to give the impression that I think all "classic" literature is bad. There is quite a lot of good classic literature. It is just the elitist attitude that anything new or different can't be good that grates on me. A good science fiction writer also has more responsibilities than a good fiction writer, because there is always the temptation to use new technology to magically solve plot difficulties. A good science fiction writer has to keep a set of limitations in mind, or else the beings in the universe created can become nearly omnipotent. And that makes for a poor story. But there is no reason why science fiction cannot express the same depth of human emotions and social interaction that ordinary fiction can, it just does it in a different arena. Which brings me to the other extreme of opinion on science fiction, namely those people that hold the idea that science fiction containing human elements is sacriligeous. I have met people who believe that any science fiction that deviates from physics-textbook-style writing is bad, that human emotions and social interaction don't belong in science fiction. And I pity them, with their textbook-dry stories with purely scientific plots. I'm quite sure you can write an interesting book that is completely scientific, in fact I know you can. But it appeals to a different part of the mind, it really doesn't make for great fiction stories, for that you need some kind of human and social interaction.
Jon Katz moves to Silicon Valley, where he writes articles for Slashdot every day. The flames generated by the replies to his posts will heat the vapourware of the dot-coms and turn it into steam, which will be forcibly injected into the Californian politicians, causing them to expel hot air, which will spin the environmentalists around, and will cause them to generate yet more hot air, which heats up all political debates leading to more ballot initiatives and of course more manual recounts. Soon the public will become so tired of the constant news coverage of the manual recounts that they will all turn off their TV, computer, and stereo and go outside (some programmers will finally realize what binary trees are named after). This will greatly reduce the load on the power grid, making everyone happy. And if people ever go back into their homes and turning on their TV, computer, and stereo, then the Jon Katz machine will operate again and the whole process begins anew.
The problem is, are the higher level, "safe" language compilers/interpreters "safe" themselves? Or do they contain their own share of bugs that could lead to irregular behaviour and exploits? What would be a good idea is to write a compiler/interpreter for a safe language such as Scheme, CL, ML, or Haskell and audit it to the extreme. There are probably several efforts (such as a compiler written in ML that is provably correct), but I only know of one that depends so heavily on the compiler (Vapour, but its a bit more than just a compiler). As for Java, well Java doesn't have closures, so in my eyes it is crap.
You failed to realize that the post you replied to said, "It is scary how ignorant of radiation people really are." He/she is condemning the mass hysteria associated with radiation.
Space is filled with very deadly, very large amounts of radiation. There happens to be a rather large, open, fusion reactor only 150 million kilometers away. Therefore, hysteria over a little leaked radiation from a satellite is patently absurd. But people have patented absurdity:)
Also note that Orion, even if launched from the Earth, would have hardly affected the atmosphere compared to the nuclear tests done during the same period. And Orion, launched from orbit, would have been extremely safe (see above paragraph). Orion was probably (and may be still) the best feasible propulsion system as of the present. IIRC, the Isp values were much higher than the Plasma engines, and certainly any non-pulsed nuclear engines.
For those who don't know: Orion was a spacecraft design from the 1950's-60's that was to use Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. Basic idea of NPP is to explode many miniature nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft. This was further refined by Daedalus in the 70's, into fuel pellets ignited by lasers behind the spacecraft. Claims by those who worked on Orion were that it could have been built and reached Mars before the Apollo program had reached the Moon. I'm a bit skeptical, but it probably could have been done by the 70's or 80's if people hadn't been so hysterical about nuclear power in space.
Unless they actually dumped nuclear waste in my backyard (or any improper location), I think it would be rather cool to live next to one:)
The vast vast majority of nuclear plants are properly run, there's really no reason to worry. And the improperly run ones need to have their ass kicked, thats all. Nuclear power is quite safe.
Certainly beats coal fired, yuck. I live in NJ, near all the damn oil refineries and power plants in the Meadowlands. I'll take a nuclear plant over that any day. (when you drive down the NJ turnpike, remember to keep your windows closed)
Newton's Third Law of Motion (ok, Newton was wrong, but he's close enough for our purposes):
Every action has an equal and opposite re-action.
The fuel in a rocket is thrown out the back, the re-action is the rocket being pushed forward. The rocket being pushed forward pushes all the contents along with it, and the re-action is all the contents pushing back on the rocket. Plenty of forces working in there, and it has nothing to do with the presence of an atmosphere.
The MIR, ISS, and space shuttle do not travel in geo-stationary orbit. They all travel in a fairly low earth orbit, IIRC the space shuttle takes 90 minutes to circle the Earth. The only reason why objects in orbit do not experience gravitational effects is because, in fact, they are really in a constant free-fall. If you ever find yourself in a free-falling elevator (hopefully not) you will see what I mean. They are in constant free-fall, but are moving so fast tangentially that the Earth curves away beneath them as they fall.
Physically this is described: Gravity provides the force necessary to maintain the radial acceleration necessary to sustain the circular orbit (assuming a circular orbit).
The relevant equations are:
F = mv^2/r (radial acceleration to maintain circular motion)
F = GMm/r^2 (Newton's gravitational equation)
M is the mass of the earth, m is the mass of the spacecraft, G is the Gravitational constant 6.672*10^-11, r is the distance from the center of the Earth.
Putting them together in a system:
GMm/r^2 = mv^2/r
GM/r = v^2
v = sqrt(GM/r)
Which is the equation to calculate the velocity v required for a circular orbit at radius r around planet of mass M.
(sometimes I wish LaTeX, not HTML, was the language of the WWW:)
I do highly suggest picking up an elementary physics book, because many of your notions are easily correctable even by a basic text.
Why in the world would you use Redhat if you need a distribution that can auto-update? Debian's APT is far more versatile, and its been around longer. Let your Fortune 100 employer chew on that.
Or, they can use the lovely Secure Shell tool to remotely login to their *NIX shell accounts and run lynx or forward Netscape via X11... hrmm. I already have a friend of mine doing this from behind his school's crappy firewall (which fails to block port 21 of all things, so I run sshd on 21 for him) which only allows outgoing HTTP connections via a proxy (a Microsoft Proxy Server that is down more often than not... sigh, and if its down, he can't browse the web). Its easy to imagine this scenario being pulled off on censorware. My next goal is to establish a VPN tunnel between his computer and mine so that he can tunnel all of his traffic right by the firewall like it didn't exist. And I wonder about those Anonymizer-type services -- since the page is "coming from" Anonymizer or others, would censorware that matches based on URL fail to detect any "objectionable" sites viewed through one of those types of services?
. A lot of conversations I've had in the past with/. folks leads me to believe that majority of people here think that
children can be given, at an arbitrarily young age, the magical ability to discern what's right and wrong without fail. I
hate to break the news to those folks, but kids are as dumb as a sack of hammers, and almost everyone below the age of
18 has the common sense of cabbage. Having an "open mind" won't change this. The process of educating and
indoctrinating (in the non-perjorative sense) children to survive in the adult world is an on-going process that really
only ends when they are adults.
I'm afraid I'll have to disillusion you. No, there is nothing magical about the age of 18. Kids do not suddenly "grow up" after travelling around the sun 18 times. They do not "grow up" sometimes until after twice that many years, if they even ever do. At the other end of the spectrum, there are the people who are responsible individuals at ages much less than 18. Differentiating between right and wrong is not the sole province of the 18 and older crowd. I also dispute your assertion that the process of education ends when a person becomes an adult. As the saying goes, learning is lifelong. When you stop learning -- that is when you are dead. Liken education to adaption, and you can draw the evolutionary parallels.
While on the subject I'd also like to point out that while parents should take responsibility for their children's welfare, that welfare will not be enhanced by over-protectionism. The world is rough, dirty, and often crooked (to highlight some negative aspects...). Denying the existence of this reality is as harmful to a child as throwing them to the wolves of society. Ignorance is not a virtue. Fortunately, nature was wiser than parents or legislators and instilled in youth curiosity and a sense of adventure, certainly foolish and dangerous at times, but also an important ingredient in engendering change. Granted, the experience of elders is crucial and so long as they continue to recount it, we will continue to benefit from those lessons. Equally important, however, is the questioning curiosity that youth brings; without which society might stagnate. The relevance of the above to censorship and filtering software is twofold:
We should re-examine our motivations for censorship, remembering that education is superior to ignorance
So long as the elders pass down experience and the youth question the elders, we have nothing to fear from censorship.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't mention SML ;) OCaML is much better.
But neither of them is as expressive as LISP,
sorry. The OCaML optimizing compiler kicks ass,
but the language itself is not as expressive
as Lisp is. The sacrifices were mostly made
in the interest of speed. Plus, OCaML attempts
to expand it's expressiveness through
extra syntax, which is a fundamentally flawed
method. Read the introduction to R5RS for a
good reason why.
;)
And BTW, I'm at CMU too
Doug Miller has made some good points, but the thing he's missing is that Linux was not created for the same reasons as Windows was. This especially is evident when he says things along the lines of "Linux should have one unified user interface". Linux was created to scratch an itch. It just so happens that this was an itch felt by millions of other people as well. It's not the best OS, technically, sure, and it doesn't have a "unified user interface". But Linux isn't out there to be one person's idea of what an OS should be. Linux is whatever you need it to be, letting you scratch whatever itch you may need to. That flexibility is its beauty, and main reason for success (brave readers may ponder that Be's failure might have been due to lack of flexibility, I'm just speculating here though).
:) manual typesetting programs available such as Kword, abiword, staroffice, or applixware.
We don't need your Windows because we can use GNOME, KDE, sawfish, blackbox, E, icewm, fvwm, twm, or whichever one you choose, on the wonderfully flexible X11 implementation XFree86, which may have its problems but also has many benefits (and there's always Berlin, for the adventurous).
We don't need your Word because we've got LaTeX, which is far superior to Word for creating quality documents, and the graphical front-end LyX. And if you don't like LaTeX then check out SGML docbook or the variety of (nasty imho
We don't need Internet Explorer because we've got Mozilla, Galeon, Skipstone, Konqueror, Lynx, Links, and a few others. Sure, Mozilla may be somewhat slow and bloated right now (though it's holding up pretty well for me here), it's at least pointed in the right direction, and things will only improve.
But don't tell us that Linux needs to be what one person thinks it should be. Linux should be able to be whatever a person wishes to make of it.
On a side note, it also seems evident that Mr. Miller does not understand that GTK and QT are separate from GNOME and KDE, that one can have GTK and QT apps and not have GNOME or KDE. Microsoft could easily use GTK, QT, or even Xaw or some similar toolkit, and simply have their applications depend upon those libraries. That's how most Linux developers do it. Or they could write their own toolkit, if they feel like it.
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/progeny/
deb ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/progeny/ progeny main contrib non-free
and
ftp://emu.res.cmu.edu/progeny
deb ftp://emu.res.cmu.edu/progeny/ progeny main contrib non-free
Look under the images/current directory for rc1 ISO and read the RELNOTES.rc1 too!
No, its not supposed to be a Windows program. It just so happens that some people decided to port it. I have never used the Windows version and I don't have any plans to either. Not when I can just sit down at my Debian box, type "apt-get install lyx", and have it installed on my system for me. Considering that several of my friends and I use it extensively for doing papers and homework, I'd be a little more cautious in calling it "a joke" just because you are using an inferior platform.
Certainly there are other systems, off-hand, such as the *BSD's ports tree, which has similarities (though only the newest APT has ability to build source packages and satisfy dependencies automatically). But this is what I was answering:
(The only thing even marginally innovative here is apt-get, a lame command line tool that works around the lack of software packaging standards in Linux. It's not present on other systems only because they have no need for it.)
A statement which is blatantly misguided, as I have pointed out previously.
WYSIWYG is an innovative approach which has numerous advantages over forcing someone to learn a programming language like troff or tex just to write a text document.
Obviously you didn't check up my links, or you would know that LyX, a graphical front-end to LaTeX, allows one to write documents using the LaTeX processor without having to know a single thing about LaTeX itself.
Now you may not agree that automated typesetting is superior to manual typesetting, but surely you must agree that automated typesetting with LaTeX or SGML fits the principles of good design better than manual typesetting. I'm talking about things such as abstraction, encapsulation, and modularity, for example:
Using "emphasize" instead of "italicize" so you can redefine it easily if style needs to change.
The "Section" environment that not only renumbers itself correctly but can allow generation of a table of contents easily.
Being able to use a provided document class to create documents that look exactly as they are supposed to but with a minimum of effort on the part of the writer.
With the standard WYSIWYG editor, you're gonna have a lot more trouble with these things. Typewriters were great, in their time, but we have computers now.
Just wondering why you don't use LaTeX (possibly with LyX) or SGML or one of the many other good typesetting languages available. Sure beats MS Word.
(The only thing even marginally innovative here is apt-get, a lame command line tool that works around the lack of software packaging standards in Linux. It's not present on other systems only because they have no need for it.)
:) Then there's gnome-apt, console-apt, aptitude, dselect, etc. The reason why APT is not present on other systems is because those systems are inferior, not because they don't have no need for it. Just remember that the next time you have to personally retrieve your software (even by going to the store, or downloading it from an FTP site) and all its dependencies.
1.
You have no idea what APT does, do you? It handles the retrieval and installation of packages, all with minimal effort by the user. Don't like the command line? (Why would anyone not like the command line?
2.
What is so "innovative" about the WYSIWYG word processor? It's an imitation of a typewriter! The WYSIWYG word processor is the biggest waste of time for someone using a computer. You have this awesome computing machine, it can do billions of instructions per second, and yet you are doing all the work required to manually typeset and format just like you were still using a typewriter? Fortunately there were some smarter people in this world than those who designed Microsoft Word. Check out LaTeX (using an implementation such as teTeX) and LyX, a graphical front-end for LaTeX that provides a different metaphor for word processing that I would argue is superior to the run of the mill WYSIWYG.
Thank you :)
Why, isn't that :)
apt-get install task-kde
and
apt-get upgrade
need I say more?
And unlike a 'KDE installer' or a 'Ximian installer' this functionality isn't limited to one piece of software. Check out Debian or Progeny.
Not being able to play your favorite video game in jail is probably sufficient deterrent for most addicts.
Last time I checked, Java was not a functional language. In fact, it doesn't even have decent support for closures! What kind of crappy language doesn't have closures! Why would any programmer worth his/her salt even consider Java. Ugh...
Last time I checked, even ordinary LANs are not that secure at all. Ethernet frames transmitted in the clear, and all, y'know. That's why they invented things like SSH, SSL, IPSec, among other fun encrypted protocols. Sure there's MITM attacks still to worry bout, and the like, but it still is much smarter to be using the encryption than not. Even if you're not on a wireless LAN.
Foo bar, of course.
:)
(cheesy, but had to be said
Not only that, but it is possible to apt-get from Stormix to Progeny, without having to reinstall your whole system. Definitely something to look into for ex-Stormix users. Read this page for info.
First of all, I must say, Hemingway is mind-numbingly dull. Like Dickens, Melville, and others, his books are only read because a few stodgy english professors keep pushing them on poor students. And people have this funny idea that if a book is dry, mind-numbing, and convoluted, it must be a classic because they don't understand it. I remember having to read "For Whom The Bell Tolls" and going into it I was looking forward to an interesting story. By page 100, I was skipping and skimming over chapters. It was so incomprehensibly dull, I was incredibly disappointed. And Dickens, don't get me started! I really tried to read him... I did! But so convoluted and boring! I'd rather write Perl than read Dickens.
I've found that much of "classic" literature is just crap foisted upon generation upon generation by an elitist few who snub different styles of literature (such as science fiction) as being "trashy", without realizing that it is quite possible to write a "classic" piece in a genre not generally accepted as "classic".
Now as for your statement that "The Best Scientists Ever" should have been able to figure out matters quicker than the readers, managed to miss one crucial point. The "Best Scientists Ever" do not have the advantage of the omniscient third-person narrator, first. Second, it is not very obvious what the pygmies are doing or thinking, to the reader. Apparently it is not obvious to you either, because the pygmies didn't think there was life after death; they knew there was life after [their] death, if it can truely be called death anyway.
After saying all this, I don't want to give the impression that I think all "classic" literature is bad. There is quite a lot of good classic literature. It is just the elitist attitude that anything new or different can't be good that grates on me. A good science fiction writer also has more responsibilities than a good fiction writer, because there is always the temptation to use new technology to magically solve plot difficulties. A good science fiction writer has to keep a set of limitations in mind, or else the beings in the universe created can become nearly omnipotent. And that makes for a poor story. But there is no reason why science fiction cannot express the same depth of human emotions and social interaction that ordinary fiction can, it just does it in a different arena. Which brings me to the other extreme of opinion on science fiction, namely those people that hold the idea that science fiction containing human elements is sacriligeous. I have met people who believe that any science fiction that deviates from physics-textbook-style writing is bad, that human emotions and social interaction don't belong in science fiction. And I pity them, with their textbook-dry stories with purely scientific plots. I'm quite sure you can write an interesting book that is completely scientific, in fact I know you can. But it appeals to a different part of the mind, it really doesn't make for great fiction stories, for that you need some kind of human and social interaction.
Jon Katz moves to Silicon Valley, where he writes articles for Slashdot every day. The flames generated by the replies to his posts will heat the vapourware of the dot-coms and turn it into steam, which will be forcibly injected into the Californian politicians, causing them to expel hot air, which will spin the environmentalists around, and will cause them to generate yet more hot air, which heats up all political debates leading to more ballot initiatives and of course more manual recounts. Soon the public will become so tired of the constant news coverage of the manual recounts that they will all turn off their TV, computer, and stereo and go outside (some programmers will finally realize what binary trees are named after). This will greatly reduce the load on the power grid, making everyone happy. And if people ever go back into their homes and turning on their TV, computer, and stereo, then the Jon Katz machine will operate again and the whole process begins anew.
The problem is, are the higher level, "safe" language compilers/interpreters "safe" themselves? Or do they contain their own share of bugs that could lead to irregular behaviour and exploits? What would be a good idea is to write a compiler/interpreter for a safe language such as Scheme, CL, ML, or Haskell and audit it to the extreme. There are probably several efforts (such as a compiler written in ML that is provably correct), but I only know of one that depends so heavily on the compiler (Vapour, but its a bit more than just a compiler). As for Java, well Java doesn't have closures, so in my eyes it is crap.
You failed to realize that the post you replied to said, "It is scary how ignorant of radiation people really are." He/she is condemning the mass hysteria associated with radiation.
:)
Space is filled with very deadly, very large amounts of radiation. There happens to be a rather large, open, fusion reactor only 150 million kilometers away. Therefore, hysteria over a little leaked radiation from a satellite is patently absurd. But people have patented absurdity
Also note that Orion, even if launched from the Earth, would have hardly affected the atmosphere compared to the nuclear tests done during the same period. And Orion, launched from orbit, would have been extremely safe (see above paragraph). Orion was probably (and may be still) the best feasible propulsion system as of the present. IIRC, the Isp values were much higher than the Plasma engines, and certainly any non-pulsed nuclear engines.
For those who don't know: Orion was a spacecraft design from the 1950's-60's that was to use Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. Basic idea of NPP is to explode many miniature nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft. This was further refined by Daedalus in the 70's, into fuel pellets ignited by lasers behind the spacecraft. Claims by those who worked on Orion were that it could have been built and reached Mars before the Apollo program had reached the Moon. I'm a bit skeptical, but it probably could have been done by the 70's or 80's if people hadn't been so hysterical about nuclear power in space.
Unless they actually dumped nuclear waste in my backyard (or any improper location), I think it would be rather cool to live next to one :)
The vast vast majority of nuclear plants are properly run, there's really no reason to worry. And the improperly run ones need to have their ass kicked, thats all. Nuclear power is quite safe. Certainly beats coal fired, yuck. I live in NJ, near all the damn oil refineries and power plants in the Meadowlands. I'll take a nuclear plant over that any day. (when you drive down the NJ turnpike, remember to keep your windows closed)
Newton's Third Law of Motion (ok, Newton was wrong, but he's close enough for our purposes):
:)
Every action has an equal and opposite re-action.
The fuel in a rocket is thrown out the back, the re-action is the rocket being pushed forward. The rocket being pushed forward pushes all the contents along with it, and the re-action is all the contents pushing back on the rocket. Plenty of forces working in there, and it has nothing to do with the presence of an atmosphere.
The MIR, ISS, and space shuttle do not travel in geo-stationary orbit. They all travel in a fairly low earth orbit, IIRC the space shuttle takes 90 minutes to circle the Earth. The only reason why objects in orbit do not experience gravitational effects is because, in fact, they are really in a constant free-fall. If you ever find yourself in a free-falling elevator (hopefully not) you will see what I mean. They are in constant free-fall, but are moving so fast tangentially that the Earth curves away beneath them as they fall.
Physically this is described: Gravity provides the force necessary to maintain the radial acceleration necessary to sustain the circular orbit (assuming a circular orbit).
The relevant equations are:
F = mv^2/r (radial acceleration to maintain circular motion)
F = GMm/r^2 (Newton's gravitational equation)
M is the mass of the earth, m is the mass of the spacecraft, G is the Gravitational constant 6.672*10^-11, r is the distance from the center of the Earth.
Putting them together in a system:
GMm/r^2 = mv^2/r
GM/r = v^2
v = sqrt(GM/r)
Which is the equation to calculate the velocity v required for a circular orbit at radius r around planet of mass M.
(sometimes I wish LaTeX, not HTML, was the language of the WWW
I do highly suggest picking up an elementary physics book, because many of your notions are easily correctable even by a basic text.
HTTP mirror and FTP mirror
Why in the world would you use Redhat if you need a distribution that can auto-update? Debian's APT is far more versatile, and its been around longer. Let your Fortune 100 employer chew on that.
dit-dittee-dit-dit-deet dept, wtf?
the dah-dit-dah-dit-dah-dah-dit-dah dept makes much more sense.
Or, they can use the lovely Secure Shell tool to remotely login to their *NIX shell accounts and run lynx or forward Netscape via X11... hrmm. I already have a friend of mine doing this from behind his school's crappy firewall (which fails to block port 21 of all things, so I run sshd on 21 for him) which only allows outgoing HTTP connections via a proxy (a Microsoft Proxy Server that is down more often than not... sigh, and if its down, he can't browse the web). Its easy to imagine this scenario being pulled off on censorware. My next goal is to establish a VPN tunnel between his computer and mine so that he can tunnel all of his traffic right by the firewall like it didn't exist. And I wonder about those Anonymizer-type services -- since the page is "coming from" Anonymizer or others, would censorware that matches based on URL fail to detect any "objectionable" sites viewed through one of those types of services?
I'm afraid I'll have to disillusion you. No, there is nothing magical about the age of 18. Kids do not suddenly "grow up" after travelling around the sun 18 times. They do not "grow up" sometimes until after twice that many years, if they even ever do. At the other end of the spectrum, there are the people who are responsible individuals at ages much less than 18. Differentiating between right and wrong is not the sole province of the 18 and older crowd. I also dispute your assertion that the process of education ends when a person becomes an adult. As the saying goes, learning is lifelong. When you stop learning -- that is when you are dead. Liken education to adaption, and you can draw the evolutionary parallels.
While on the subject I'd also like to point out that while parents should take responsibility for their children's welfare, that welfare will not be enhanced by over-protectionism. The world is rough, dirty, and often crooked (to highlight some negative aspects...). Denying the existence of this reality is as harmful to a child as throwing them to the wolves of society. Ignorance is not a virtue. Fortunately, nature was wiser than parents or legislators and instilled in youth curiosity and a sense of adventure, certainly foolish and dangerous at times, but also an important ingredient in engendering change. Granted, the experience of elders is crucial and so long as they continue to recount it, we will continue to benefit from those lessons. Equally important, however, is the questioning curiosity that youth brings; without which society might stagnate. The relevance of the above to censorship and filtering software is twofold:
We should re-examine our motivations for censorship, remembering that education is superior to ignorance
So long as the elders pass down experience and the youth question the elders, we have nothing to fear from censorship.