Seems to me... In line with the runway, on the far side from the plane. From that angle, a landing plane is "stationary." In other words, making a straight-on approach, minimal side-to-side motion, slow drop. Actually, probably the easiest way to hit a plane with a laser.
Fortunately, there's a restricted space where this approach will work, and that can be monitored and/or secured.
I'd really love to see some sort of mathematics applied to Gerrymandering. Something to the tune of limiting the perimeter of a district to 3 or 4 times the square root of its area. Some sort of allowances would need to be made for irregular state borders and natural features like rivers or mountains. For that matter, I'm not that hung up over the number 3 or 4, just some reasonable limit.
It would be really fun to look at some Congressional districts and find their Gerrymander-Factor=perimeter/sqrt(area).
It's not so much the tinfoil hat. It's that I'd like to see this stuff, too.
I heard one proposal that if they're going to put surveillance cameras all over covering public places, they should put the monitors in a public place, too.
Looking over the other comments, IMHO one more salient question can be derived:
One state (Wisconson?) is considering making its electoral votes divide in proportion to its popular vote. Since the Constitution confers the specifics and mechanics of voting to the states, it seems that they are fully within their rights to do this. What is your opinion in this type of reform?
Which could spur another:
The current voting methods favor, some would say entrench, the current two-party system. There are other votings methods, some of which have been used elsewhere in the world. It is within States' Rights to adopt an alternative method, such as Instant Runoff. What is your opinion on this?
For a while, the Cheap Seats theater in Burlington, VT had the *best* "courtesy leader" I've ever seen.
"The blondes... FAKE!!!" "The (this)... FAKE!!!" "The (that)... FAKE!!!"
Then they had a short, done with Barbie and Ken dolls about theater courtesy. The Barbie that was talking on her cell phone, disturbing other patrons, got a pair of jumper cables attached to her and shocked. (with special effects!!) The doll eating and throwing popcorn was sucked up into a shop-vac, etc.
At the end, they're all lounging together in a hot-tub, except it's a super-size soda.
I wish we could have more like this, instead of the thumpa-thumpa music and flying candy.
What does this say about Earth imaging?
on
Making Tracks on Mars
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
On the one hand, Mars does have a much thinner atmosphere, and I have no idea how low the Mars Global Surveyer orbit is. On the other hand, *anything* we ship to Mars is a design compromise in terms of weight and size. So I'm sure the camera is sophisticated, but isn't this one of those times when size matters, especially on the objective lens?
I've found my house on Terraserver, and I couldn't see features as small as this picture gives us. Makes me wonder what spy satellites can do, what commercial imaging satellites can do, and what DHS wants to let us have.
I know you meant to be funny, but take a slightly deeper look at this, for a moment.
Some of XP Starter Edition consists of stripping out features. But some of XP Starter Edition requires *adding new features and functionality* to the standard XP.
Just look at the silly 3-way multitasking, for a moment. You have to let the user run 3 tasks. You have to let the system run as many tasks as it wants. You have to also let the system run as many tasks as it wants, *on behalf of the user*, as the user. That last one is the kicker, separating user tasks that the user wanted from user tasks run by the system, so that you can *limit* how many the user runs of his/her own volition. Three is such a small number that it's darned easy to get something wrong, and have it drop to 0 because system is running tasks as the user.
By adding this 'cripple feature' they've taken on quite a tough job.
Of course maybe I've got it wrong. Windows has always been so eager to 'run as administrator' that maybe they don't run system-like tasks on behalf of the user, as the user. Maybe they just run them as system tasks. Maybe they limit 'user tasks' to 3, with no limit on 'system tasks'. In that case, how soon will the 'run as system task' hack take to emerge?
I thought that was the Milky Way shredding the Magellanic clouds, and that that was largely a 'gravitational' collision. I'm under the impression that we have an up-and-coming collision with the slightly-larger Andromeda galaxy, and that the Milky Way will get the shorter end of the stick on that one. Given that both galaxies are about the same size, I don't think either will feel too good, afterward.
The science fiction author Alistair Reynolds has a series of books that is partly driven by the impending collision. ("Revelation Space", "Redemption Ark", forgot the third. "Chasm City" shares the setting.)
But what typically seems to happen is that parties move toward the center as they campaign, then move back after elected. Don't have a Democratic example at the moment, (more later) but look at all of the moderates the Republicans trotted out at their covention. During the 2000 campaign, Bush was a 'uniter, not a divider' and a 'compassionate conservative'. But the Republicans have run things as if they have a mandate, since.
(more later) Others have said it. The United States is all pretty far to the right. I suspect the Democrats are just slightly left of center, and that their current politics resemble more closely Republican politics of the 60s and 70s.
But I bought my R8500LE for about $80 almost two years ago, and from what I can see on the benching sites, it beats the R9200SE, R9200, R9600SE, and even the no-suffix (The XT and Pro beat it.) 9600, at least at Quake3. It also beats them on the "FBucks" scale.
As mentioned earlier, I expected more progress across the board, not just above $100.
Almost two years back, I picked up a Radeon 8500LE for under $100. (actually, about $80) At the time, the Radeon 9700 and 9500 were top and second tier DX9 cards. The 8500 was a third-tier DX8.1 card. While it didn't have the latest features, it *was* feature-complete to the previous set.
These are good $200 cards, no doubt. But it looks to me as if the sub-$100 cards haven't made as much *relative* progress as the more expensive ones.
This part I knew, I just hadn't gone into your detail. I hadn't realized that until relatively recently, the avionics couldn't do the rest of the landing, excluding the doors.
The other thing I heard is that the switch to open the doors is completely isolated from the computers, so it must be tripped manually.
In Vermont the Progressives are a party. Whether or not they're liberal socialists/communists or not, the act like a political party, file the papers, and hold significant offices *as* a political party.
Maybe not other places.
(I don't think I've ever voted for one, but I can observe.)
Actually, your 'predictable copout,' is exactly WHY liberals have introduced the Draft. Today's all volunteer army is disporportionately made up of the lower income classes. The idea was to get a draft with fewer loopholes, so that *everyone's* kids would be at risk. It really has little to do with chilren of liberals vs children of conservatives. It has to do with putting some risk in it for the higher-income classes, when they start beating the War Drums. In that light, you can see why the Black caucus is behind the bill. Others get the idea to go to war, but a disporportionate number of Blacks pay the ultimate price.
OTOH, military service is certainly a way for lower income people to bootstrap their way into a better economic class.
Can't RTFA, since it's Slashdotted. Can't run the code, since my Win-machine at home is a dual-boot with only Win98SE. Can't run it on my work laptop, since even though it's Win2k, it doesn't meet the other requirements.
Even if I could get to the web site, I don't know that the information is readily available there *and* on Terraserver to really compare the two.
I've found my house on Terraserver, though the image was several years old. The field wasn't that tight, and got a bit more than our whole neighborhood. Resolution aside, is there any information about the age of the pictures?
There are Progressives pretty well entrenched at the City level, and some penetration at the state level. But I don't even know if there is a national-level Progressive party affiliated.
Why don't you want to change the voting scheme? I'd like to get rid of the need for 'strategic' voting, and express my true will.
The shuttle not being able to land was a conscious decision. Opening the landing gear doors is one of those actions that cannot be undone except in the service bay. When the Shuttle was being designed, they were quite frightened about the way computers had to be integrated, and their dependence on them. Hence the fabled 5-way, multiple fail system. The thing was designed to be recoverable from just about *any* computer glitch. But a glitch that opened the doors too early would cause a bad day, with no chance of recovery. They left the decision to open the landing gear up to a human.
Other than that, the shuttle can land automatically, too.
That's why I suggest that what we really need for alternative parties to grow is an alternative voting scheme. That way, even though you think it highly likely that one of the two major party candidates will win, you can vote for the alternative party without it acting like an effective vote for the major party you candidate you dislike more.
There are many alternative voting schemes, and they've been discussed on/. before. The difficulty is getting them into use, because the two major parties both have a vested interest in the current voting scheme. But the method of voting is left up to each state, so it may be possible to see the camel's nose under then tent in places like Vermont or the midwest state where they're contemplating splitting their electoral votes.
Running Gentoo on:
Old hand-me-down Compaq Presario - 333MHz Mendecino
Old, but in-use desktop - K6-3-400 homebrew
Recent-ish laptop - P3-700
It can be done, but it takes a little patience. I just noticed the other day that the Presario is running "-O3" which I should probably change to "-O2" or "-Os". (considering the small Celeron L2 cache)
...that is utterly invisible to virtually all programmers, except compiler writers. Not to detract from the truth of what you said at all, only from it's applicability to the real world.
So you want to jump to the future... You can craft a new 64-bit instruction set, (IA-64) or you can add 64-bitness onto what you've got in a minimal way (X86-64) and put your innovation into the memory controller and NUMA. Guess which approach is being better recieved in the market, though it's not clear from the outset that IA-64 is really a 'better' ISA than X86-64. It's has its own unique problems, and is hampered by other issues.
Compilers have gotten just about good enough to make the instruction set irrelevant. Not that there isn't room there. IMHO, someone should redo the original experiments that led to RISC, with modern compilers and processors. That type of experimentation should be redone periodically, because all of this is with respect to a snapshot of semiconductor, processor, compiler, and operating system technology.
Maybe he really didn't want to vote for the winner, maybe he just didn't want Dole in the office. In that sense, he may have felt that a vote for Perot was a vote for Dole, because it took away from Clinton. Just like in 2000 a vote for Nader was ironically a vote for Bush.
We need a more sophisticated voting scheme, which has often been a topic on/. There has been at least one try in recent Vermont history to get Instant Runoff, though it failed. The Progressives are a strong third party in Vermont, and the Libertarians have a presence, too. Perhaps an 'unholy alliance' between these two could get Instant Runoff through. I would think in this matter, the Democrats might join in, because normally Progressive votes take from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me...
In line with the runway, on the far side from the plane.
From that angle, a landing plane is "stationary." In other words, making a straight-on approach, minimal side-to-side motion, slow drop.
Actually, probably the easiest way to hit a plane with a laser.
Fortunately, there's a restricted space where this approach will work, and that can be monitored and/or secured.
I'd really love to see some sort of mathematics applied to Gerrymandering. Something to the tune of limiting the perimeter of a district to 3 or 4 times the square root of its area. Some sort of allowances would need to be made for irregular state borders and natural features like rivers or mountains. For that matter, I'm not that hung up over the number 3 or 4, just some reasonable limit.
It would be really fun to look at some Congressional districts and find their Gerrymander-Factor=perimeter/sqrt(area).
It's not so much the tinfoil hat. It's that I'd like to see this stuff, too.
I heard one proposal that if they're going to put surveillance cameras all over covering public places, they should put the monitors in a public place, too.
No, I haven't. YET.
Looking over the other comments, IMHO one more salient question can be derived:
One state (Wisconson?) is considering making its electoral votes divide in proportion to its popular vote. Since the Constitution confers the specifics and mechanics of voting to the states, it seems that they are fully within their rights to do this. What is your opinion in this type of reform?
Which could spur another:
The current voting methods favor, some would say entrench, the current two-party system. There are other votings methods, some of which have been used elsewhere in the world. It is within States' Rights to adopt an alternative method, such as Instant Runoff. What is your opinion on this?
For a while, the Cheap Seats theater in Burlington, VT had the *best* "courtesy leader" I've ever seen.
"The blondes... FAKE!!!"
"The (this)... FAKE!!!"
"The (that)... FAKE!!!"
Then they had a short, done with Barbie and Ken dolls about theater courtesy. The Barbie that was talking on her cell phone, disturbing other patrons, got a pair of jumper cables attached to her and shocked. (with special effects!!) The doll eating and throwing popcorn was sucked up into a shop-vac, etc.
At the end, they're all lounging together in a hot-tub, except it's a super-size soda.
I wish we could have more like this, instead of the thumpa-thumpa music and flying candy.
On the one hand, Mars does have a much thinner atmosphere, and I have no idea how low the Mars Global Surveyer orbit is.
On the other hand, *anything* we ship to Mars is a design compromise in terms of weight and size. So I'm sure the camera is sophisticated, but isn't this one of those times when size matters, especially on the objective lens?
I've found my house on Terraserver, and I couldn't see features as small as this picture gives us. Makes me wonder what spy satellites can do, what commercial imaging satellites can do, and what DHS wants to let us have.
I know you meant to be funny, but take a slightly deeper look at this, for a moment.
Some of XP Starter Edition consists of stripping out features.
But some of XP Starter Edition requires *adding new features and functionality* to the standard XP.
Just look at the silly 3-way multitasking, for a moment. You have to let the user run 3 tasks. You have to let the system run as many tasks as it wants. You have to also let the system run as many tasks as it wants, *on behalf of the user*, as the user. That last one is the kicker, separating user tasks that the user wanted from user tasks run by the system, so that you can *limit* how many the user runs of his/her own volition. Three is such a small number that it's darned easy to get something wrong, and have it drop to 0 because system is running tasks as the user.
By adding this 'cripple feature' they've taken on quite a tough job.
Of course maybe I've got it wrong. Windows has always been so eager to 'run as administrator' that maybe they don't run system-like tasks on behalf of the user, as the user. Maybe they just run them as system tasks. Maybe they limit 'user tasks' to 3, with no limit on 'system tasks'. In that case, how soon will the 'run as system task' hack take to emerge?
With or without a heat shield for reentry?
I thought that was the Milky Way shredding the Magellanic clouds, and that that was largely a 'gravitational' collision. I'm under the impression that we have an up-and-coming collision with the slightly-larger Andromeda galaxy, and that the Milky Way will get the shorter end of the stick on that one. Given that both galaxies are about the same size, I don't think either will feel too good, afterward.
The science fiction author Alistair Reynolds has a series of books that is partly driven by the impending collision. ("Revelation Space", "Redemption Ark", forgot the third. "Chasm City" shares the setting.)
Last I heard we were due to collide with the Andromeda galaxy. It must be around the hundred million or billion year range, though.
But what typically seems to happen is that parties move toward the center as they campaign, then move back after elected. Don't have a Democratic example at the moment, (more later) but look at all of the moderates the Republicans trotted out at their covention. During the 2000 campaign, Bush was a 'uniter, not a divider' and a 'compassionate conservative'. But the Republicans have run things as if they have a mandate, since.
(more later) Others have said it. The United States is all pretty far to the right. I suspect the Democrats are just slightly left of center, and that their current politics resemble more closely Republican politics of the 60s and 70s.
But I bought my R8500LE for about $80 almost two years ago, and from what I can see on the benching sites, it beats the R9200SE, R9200, R9600SE, and even the no-suffix (The XT and Pro beat it.) 9600, at least at Quake3. It also beats them on the "FBucks" scale.
As mentioned earlier, I expected more progress across the board, not just above $100.
Almost two years back, I picked up a Radeon 8500LE for under $100. (actually, about $80) At the time, the Radeon 9700 and 9500 were top and second tier DX9 cards. The 8500 was a third-tier DX8.1 card. While it didn't have the latest features, it *was* feature-complete to the previous set.
These are good $200 cards, no doubt. But it looks to me as if the sub-$100 cards haven't made as much *relative* progress as the more expensive ones.
This part I knew, I just hadn't gone into your detail. I hadn't realized that until relatively recently, the avionics couldn't do the rest of the landing, excluding the doors.
The other thing I heard is that the switch to open the doors is completely isolated from the computers, so it must be tripped manually.
In Vermont the Progressives are a party. Whether or not they're liberal socialists/communists or not, the act like a political party, file the papers, and hold significant offices *as* a political party.
Maybe not other places.
(I don't think I've ever voted for one, but I can observe.)
Actually, your 'predictable copout,' is exactly WHY liberals have introduced the Draft. Today's all volunteer army is disporportionately made up of the lower income classes. The idea was to get a draft with fewer loopholes, so that *everyone's* kids would be at risk. It really has little to do with chilren of liberals vs children of conservatives. It has to do with putting some risk in it for the higher-income classes, when they start beating the War Drums. In that light, you can see why the Black caucus is behind the bill. Others get the idea to go to war, but a disporportionate number of Blacks pay the ultimate price.
OTOH, military service is certainly a way for lower income people to bootstrap their way into a better economic class.
Can't RTFA, since it's Slashdotted.
Can't run the code, since my Win-machine at home is a dual-boot with only Win98SE.
Can't run it on my work laptop, since even though it's Win2k, it doesn't meet the other requirements.
Even if I could get to the web site, I don't know that the information is readily available there *and* on Terraserver to really compare the two.
I've found my house on Terraserver, though the image was several years old. The field wasn't that tight, and got a bit more than our whole neighborhood. Resolution aside, is there any information about the age of the pictures?
Thanks. I'd always heard that the doors were the only issue.
There are Progressives pretty well entrenched at the City level, and some penetration at the state level. But I don't even know if there is a national-level Progressive party affiliated.
Why don't you want to change the voting scheme? I'd like to get rid of the need for 'strategic' voting, and express my true will.
The shuttle not being able to land was a conscious decision. Opening the landing gear doors is one of those actions that cannot be undone except in the service bay. When the Shuttle was being designed, they were quite frightened about the way computers had to be integrated, and their dependence on them. Hence the fabled 5-way, multiple fail system. The thing was designed to be recoverable from just about *any* computer glitch. But a glitch that opened the doors too early would cause a bad day, with no chance of recovery. They left the decision to open the landing gear up to a human.
Other than that, the shuttle can land automatically, too.
That's why I suggest that what we really need for alternative parties to grow is an alternative voting scheme. That way, even though you think it highly likely that one of the two major party candidates will win, you can vote for the alternative party without it acting like an effective vote for the major party you candidate you dislike more.
/. before. The difficulty is getting them into use, because the two major parties both have a vested interest in the current voting scheme. But the method of voting is left up to each state, so it may be possible to see the camel's nose under then tent in places like Vermont or the midwest state where they're contemplating splitting their electoral votes.
There are many alternative voting schemes, and they've been discussed on
Running Gentoo on:
Old hand-me-down Compaq Presario - 333MHz Mendecino
Old, but in-use desktop - K6-3-400 homebrew
Recent-ish laptop - P3-700
It can be done, but it takes a little patience. I just noticed the other day that the Presario is running "-O3" which I should probably change to "-O2" or "-Os". (considering the small Celeron L2 cache)
...that is utterly invisible to virtually all programmers, except compiler writers. Not to detract from the truth of what you said at all, only from it's applicability to the real world.
So you want to jump to the future...
You can craft a new 64-bit instruction set, (IA-64) or you can add 64-bitness onto what you've got in a minimal way (X86-64) and put your innovation into the memory controller and NUMA. Guess which approach is being better recieved in the market, though it's not clear from the outset that IA-64 is really a 'better' ISA than X86-64. It's has its own unique problems, and is hampered by other issues.
Compilers have gotten just about good enough to make the instruction set irrelevant. Not that there isn't room there. IMHO, someone should redo the original experiments that led to RISC, with modern compilers and processors. That type of experimentation should be redone periodically, because all of this is with respect to a snapshot of semiconductor, processor, compiler, and operating system technology.
What's bad is our system of voting.
/. There has been at least one try in recent Vermont history to get Instant Runoff, though it failed. The Progressives are a strong third party in Vermont, and the Libertarians have a presence, too. Perhaps an 'unholy alliance' between these two could get Instant Runoff through. I would think in this matter, the Democrats might join in, because normally Progressive votes take from them.
Maybe he really didn't want to vote for the winner, maybe he just didn't want Dole in the office. In that sense, he may have felt that a vote for Perot was a vote for Dole, because it took away from Clinton. Just like in 2000 a vote for Nader was ironically a vote for Bush.
We need a more sophisticated voting scheme, which has often been a topic on