If a blank has already been played and is on the board, and you have the letter that the blank was used as, then you can pick up the blank and put your letter down. You get no score for the operation, but you do get the blank. (The overall game benefits because the blanks stay in-play more.)
There! Not only can we change the name, maybe change a few images, but we can even tweak the rules to make it a *different* game.
I've found it annoying that the command line is buried in menus, and one of the first things I like to do is make an xterm more readily available on the toolbar.
If there's either a Shaftoe or Waterhouse in there, forget it. I enjoyed Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon, even if as others have said, Stephenson has a rough time bringing a story to a close. But when I saw the "Baroque Cycle" with Shaftoe and Waterhouse characters, set before Cryptonomicon, I fled.
So since Anthem is after Cryptonomicon, I may well give it a try, even with Shaftoe and Waterhouse, though their presence would surely lower this book in my priority scheme of what I spend lifespan reading.
Naaah, not Superman. You need to read your Doc Smith. We're talking Valerians here, or those spies masquerading as circus performers from DesPlaines. Except both of those groups would thing a mere 1.7G was piddling.
If you REALLY want some gravity, talk to Hal Clement's Mesklinites.
Like I said, if "They" are out there, they're more likely taking bets on exactly how we're going to finish ourselves off, with a few taking the long position that we'll actually make it.
As for whiskers, you've just made some technological assumptions, the big one being some form of soldering. The truth is we know very little about reliability out past 100k or 200k POH. We don't design past there, we don't develop technologies past there. We've never even tried, so IMHO if we were to really try, I think we could do it. Think about things like no soldering, perhaps laser spot-welds, or perhaps different solders with no lead or tin, laser-heated. Heck, by the time we're thinking starship electronics, maybe we'll want to put the lead back in and get all of the tin out. I'm sure the materials problems have solutions shy of continual nano-repair, but we've never even considered the problem.
Sometimes I like to muse about the concept of starship electronics - stuff meant for thousands of years. I hadn't actually thought about the packaging - I was thinking more of circuit tricks, gate thickness, electromigration, and other more process, geometry and circuit related things. But you bring up a good point about the packaging. Plus I think a good stiff magnetic field will be in order, a miniature version of the Earth's magnetic field, etc.
One might also ascribe Intel's "luck" to a design team in Israel, sufficiently far from management in California. They were able to do things that made technical sense, instead of following the Company Line. As Intel's fan started getting very brown from NetBurst, someone realized that they had this thing called Banias that was actually pretty good, and might be usable in places other than niche laptops.
Seems like all too often success is snatched from the jaws of defeat by some "rogue group" in a company. I wonder in general how often such rogue groups have hurt the company and how often they have saved it. I wonder how often the "company line" puts companies in such bad shape, and how often the "company line" is "valuable discipline that focuses and directs execution properly." I wonder why companies can't figure this out, especially at the salaries executives get. Most of us had figured out that NetBurst was a nightmare far before Intel management did.
Assuming any sort of sensible and ordered interstellar exploration, and not some sort of, "Our sun's about to go supernova, we need out, NOW!" situation, the aliens will *know* where they're going. Long before, they would have launched robot explorers, using techniques not acceptable for life. I'm thinking railguns if they're in a hurry, ion engines or solar sails if they're not. There would already be quite a network out there in our solar system studying things, beginning in the Oort and moving inward as they learned more. They'd also have enough nanotech to be building new capabilities out of local materials as suitable ones were discovered.
Assuming post-singularity, the aliens might *be* the robots. There might be a thriving alien civilization out in our solar system, staying just beyond our reach, studying us. Who knows, we might be the minority life forms in our own solar system. If life is rare, there might be representatives of several civilizations looking at Earth, studying us, taking bets on whether we make contact, or take ourselves out, or maybe taking bets on whether war, environmental degradation, or crumbling civilization takes us out.
I've also heard 2 other ideas about a large moon, plus 1 science-fiction one:
1: Take a rocky planet that formed with a dense atmosphere, and a large moon helps draw some of the primordial atmosphere away, as things are forming. Supposedly this is one of the factors helping the Earth to not look like Venus.
2: Tide pools - a big assist/push in getting life out of the water and onto land. For that matter, tide pools might have been a key ingredient in life itself, separating small "experiments" from the pre-life soup in the oceans, allowing long enough for interesting things to happen. By this theory, life would have gotten its start in the tide pools, and then moved into the oceans.
3: Crust composition - this one is credited to Dr. A. in "Robots and Earth". (IIRC) As well as creating tides in water, the moon exerts tidal forces on the Earth's crust, itself. Supposedly this kept the crust plastic longer than it might have otherwise, and encouraged outward migration of elements/compounds that might have otherwise been more deeply buried. For Dr. A., this was most notably radioactives, giving the Earth a background radioactivity sufficient to help drive mutations and therefore evolution.
Did you ever read Jules Verne's "From Earth to the Moon"? Getting shot out of a cannon is probably about the worst-case situation for acceleration, at least for a given delta-vee. Verne went into quite a bit of detail about his techniques to make the launch survivable, though I suspect a rigorous analysis would still show a flat pool of pink jelly getting to the Moon.
Look through the discussion, and the term "man-rated" comes up, a lot. It's probably a good thing it does too, because it's generally a bad idea to lose life during launches, or any other time during the flight, for that matter.
But I question the path to man rating. For the US space program, as far as I can tell, only Mercury and Gemini turned previously designed boosters into man-rated. Everything else has been designed from the get-go as man-rated. It seems to me that though it can be done that way, it's a bit of a fallacy in the making. To some extent, parts is parts, and it should always be possible to tighten the specs on some number of parts to improve the reliability of an existing booster. For that matter, existing non-man-rated boosters likely have a much longer track record, more launches, etc. They really don't want to lose *any* of these things, because even if human life isn't on top of the stack, typically tens of millions of dollars are.
So I don't understand why we don't start with a non-man-rated booster with a large number of launches and study its track record, failure modes, etc. Then start work on a man-rated version of that same booster with the necessary spec and reliability tweaks. Seems to me that it would be faster and cheaper. It likely wouldn't have the launch capacity, but at the moment that's a separate issue. Even in the Aries program there's the Aries-I with relatively low launch capacity, and the Aries-V with much greater capacity. Better heavy launch programs would still need to go forward, but why have a new light-launch program?
Forget Lovecraft, has anyone told Bruce Schneier, yet?
As a matter of fact, before posting this I checked his web site, and he already knows. I guess you can't beat Bruce Schneier to a squid. Add that to his list of Chuck-Norris-isms.
But in the first half of 2017, Ubuntu will come out with "Zipping Zebra", and when the back half of 2017 comes around they'll be back into the 'A's, again. I guess as long as they choose different animals second time around, it'll be OK. What came before "Edgy Eft"?
What you're describing is called a "cycler", and I'm in favor of the concept, as well. Plus several well-respected people favor the Cycler concept - I believe Buzz Aldrin may be one of them.
As for "needing the velocity", the idea is that only a small rendezvous craft needs the velocity, the big craft with the living space is already in the cycler orbit. Similarly it's a small craft that does the cycler rendezvous at the moon. As for needing shielding, that's a reason for a permanently boosted craft, you can take the effort to put decent shielding on the thing, since it's only boosted once.
The cycler concept is also proposed for Mars, for the same reasons, only more so.
IMHO the ISS is valuable as an engineering experiment. Yes, we're having a really tough time making the thing run, so what makes people think that we can make some different space station run better? The ISS is barely above the tin-cans-bolted-together stage, so we're a LOOOOONG way away from Von Braun's wheels.
There is a rough maximum size we can launch from Earth, so if we want to do more, at some point we're going to have to be doing some serious construction in space. That's especially true if we want to quite sending everything up, and start using space-based resources, like asteroid mining. Maybe the ISS isn't much, but it's a first step, we're having a tough time doing it, and we have to master all of these things before we can do anything tougher. That said, I do wish the TransHab was still going to be attached.
Re:Clever new tools for kernel config
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No, he got it right. Keep in mind that as he structured it, it's practically an infinite loop. Step 4 was eliminated in the optimizer as "never executed."
I hate "it just works" as it is usually implemented, because when "it just works" that really means only 70/80/90% of the time. (I'll admit that it's a moving target, generally getting better.) But the real problem is when "it just works" doesn't, it gets in your way big-time and keeps you from: a-getting it working your self, b-figuring out what really happened, so you can fix it, etc. "It just works" can be done correctly - leaving the option of running commands and editing config files yourself - but it seems like it generally isn't. I also acknowledge the need for "it just works", I just wish they'd do it the right way, without turning the whole thing into "Windows Black Magic."
> It's like Ballmer said, "Applications! Applications! Applications"!
The rest of your post is just fine, but you got this excessively important quote wrong. The word was "Developers!" instead of "Applications!" BTW, that was the "Monkey Boy" speech, not the "chair-throwing" speech, just to be clear.
If I thought McCain were his own man, I wouldn't be so afraid, either. IMHO he sold out to the kingmakers who made Bush, and his "acceptance" was when he went to see Falwell.
So by that, while I may have mixed feelings about Obama, I *am* that afraid of McCain. The best thing that could happen if McCain won is that he could pull what Truman did to Pendergast.
I think more drumbeats would have exactly the effect you say. But to have a "War" handed to us on a platter, complete and in action, would shoe in McCain - as the more Commander-In-Chief candidate. Perhaps the "best" way to get this War handed to us, to best get McCain into office, would be to use covert channels to goad Iran into declaring it.
The other thought here, and this is the scary thought, is that eventually "The Boy Who Cried Wolf!" was correct, and when he finally was, nobody listened. Richard Clarke wasn't too fond of Iran either, and perhaps that's more telling.
> So while we may mutter about Obama or McCain, the fact is that it isn't going to make any difference.
People said the same thing about Gore vs Bush.
I think that there has been a difference.
To answer someone else, but on your topic... I'm no Obama fanbois, but I still think he's pretty clearly the better choice, in this case. Though I think the VP choice is going to be incredibly important in this race - on both sides.
I was speaking more of the difference between "perfect" and "still pretty good" hurting Obama. It's obvious that you don't have to be perfect, but Obama started bring a bunch of people to the game. At this point I don't know how many of them I expect to see sticking it out through November, and how many will stay home on election day - again.
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My mom has a little tweak to Scrabble...
If a blank has already been played and is on the board, and you have the letter that the blank was used as, then you can pick up the blank and put your letter down. You get no score for the operation, but you do get the blank. (The overall game benefits because the blanks stay in-play more.)
There! Not only can we change the name, maybe change a few images, but we can even tweak the rules to make it a *different* game.
You're not the Messiah! You're just a very naughty boy!
Makes you wonder if they have the original series of tubes somewhere, maybe in a museum in Alaska, or something.
I'M SPARTACUS!!!
I've found it annoying that the command line is buried in menus, and one of the first things I like to do is make an xterm more readily available on the toolbar.
If there's either a Shaftoe or Waterhouse in there, forget it. I enjoyed Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon, even if as others have said, Stephenson has a rough time bringing a story to a close. But when I saw the "Baroque Cycle" with Shaftoe and Waterhouse characters, set before Cryptonomicon, I fled.
So since Anthem is after Cryptonomicon, I may well give it a try, even with Shaftoe and Waterhouse, though their presence would surely lower this book in my priority scheme of what I spend lifespan reading.
Naaah, not Superman. You need to read your Doc Smith. We're talking Valerians here, or those spies masquerading as circus performers from DesPlaines. Except both of those groups would thing a mere 1.7G was piddling.
If you REALLY want some gravity, talk to Hal Clement's Mesklinites.
Like I said, if "They" are out there, they're more likely taking bets on exactly how we're going to finish ourselves off, with a few taking the long position that we'll actually make it.
As for whiskers, you've just made some technological assumptions, the big one being some form of soldering. The truth is we know very little about reliability out past 100k or 200k POH. We don't design past there, we don't develop technologies past there. We've never even tried, so IMHO if we were to really try, I think we could do it. Think about things like no soldering, perhaps laser spot-welds, or perhaps different solders with no lead or tin, laser-heated. Heck, by the time we're thinking starship electronics, maybe we'll want to put the lead back in and get all of the tin out. I'm sure the materials problems have solutions shy of continual nano-repair, but we've never even considered the problem.
Sometimes I like to muse about the concept of starship electronics - stuff meant for thousands of years. I hadn't actually thought about the packaging - I was thinking more of circuit tricks, gate thickness, electromigration, and other more process, geometry and circuit related things. But you bring up a good point about the packaging. Plus I think a good stiff magnetic field will be in order, a miniature version of the Earth's magnetic field, etc.
One might also ascribe Intel's "luck" to a design team in Israel, sufficiently far from management in California. They were able to do things that made technical sense, instead of following the Company Line. As Intel's fan started getting very brown from NetBurst, someone realized that they had this thing called Banias that was actually pretty good, and might be usable in places other than niche laptops.
Seems like all too often success is snatched from the jaws of defeat by some "rogue group" in a company.
I wonder in general how often such rogue groups have hurt the company and how often they have saved it.
I wonder how often the "company line" puts companies in such bad shape, and how often the "company line" is "valuable discipline that focuses and directs execution properly."
I wonder why companies can't figure this out, especially at the salaries executives get. Most of us had figured out that NetBurst was a nightmare far before Intel management did.
Assuming any sort of sensible and ordered interstellar exploration, and not some sort of, "Our sun's about to go supernova, we need out, NOW!" situation, the aliens will *know* where they're going. Long before, they would have launched robot explorers, using techniques not acceptable for life. I'm thinking railguns if they're in a hurry, ion engines or solar sails if they're not. There would already be quite a network out there in our solar system studying things, beginning in the Oort and moving inward as they learned more. They'd also have enough nanotech to be building new capabilities out of local materials as suitable ones were discovered.
Assuming post-singularity, the aliens might *be* the robots. There might be a thriving alien civilization out in our solar system, staying just beyond our reach, studying us. Who knows, we might be the minority life forms in our own solar system. If life is rare, there might be representatives of several civilizations looking at Earth, studying us, taking bets on whether we make contact, or take ourselves out, or maybe taking bets on whether war, environmental degradation, or crumbling civilization takes us out.
I've also heard 2 other ideas about a large moon, plus 1 science-fiction one:
1: Take a rocky planet that formed with a dense atmosphere, and a large moon helps draw some of the primordial atmosphere away, as things are forming. Supposedly this is one of the factors helping the Earth to not look like Venus.
2: Tide pools - a big assist/push in getting life out of the water and onto land. For that matter, tide pools might have been a key ingredient in life itself, separating small "experiments" from the pre-life soup in the oceans, allowing long enough for interesting things to happen. By this theory, life would have gotten its start in the tide pools, and then moved into the oceans.
3: Crust composition - this one is credited to Dr. A. in "Robots and Earth". (IIRC) As well as creating tides in water, the moon exerts tidal forces on the Earth's crust, itself. Supposedly this kept the crust plastic longer than it might have otherwise, and encouraged outward migration of elements/compounds that might have otherwise been more deeply buried. For Dr. A., this was most notably radioactives, giving the Earth a background radioactivity sufficient to help drive mutations and therefore evolution.
Good point, hadn't thought of that.
Did you ever read Jules Verne's "From Earth to the Moon"? Getting shot out of a cannon is probably about the worst-case situation for acceleration, at least for a given delta-vee. Verne went into quite a bit of detail about his techniques to make the launch survivable, though I suspect a rigorous analysis would still show a flat pool of pink jelly getting to the Moon.
Look through the discussion, and the term "man-rated" comes up, a lot. It's probably a good thing it does too, because it's generally a bad idea to lose life during launches, or any other time during the flight, for that matter.
But I question the path to man rating. For the US space program, as far as I can tell, only Mercury and Gemini turned previously designed boosters into man-rated. Everything else has been designed from the get-go as man-rated. It seems to me that though it can be done that way, it's a bit of a fallacy in the making. To some extent, parts is parts, and it should always be possible to tighten the specs on some number of parts to improve the reliability of an existing booster. For that matter, existing non-man-rated boosters likely have a much longer track record, more launches, etc. They really don't want to lose *any* of these things, because even if human life isn't on top of the stack, typically tens of millions of dollars are.
So I don't understand why we don't start with a non-man-rated booster with a large number of launches and study its track record, failure modes, etc. Then start work on a man-rated version of that same booster with the necessary spec and reliability tweaks. Seems to me that it would be faster and cheaper. It likely wouldn't have the launch capacity, but at the moment that's a separate issue. Even in the Aries program there's the Aries-I with relatively low launch capacity, and the Aries-V with much greater capacity. Better heavy launch programs would still need to go forward, but why have a new light-launch program?
Forget Lovecraft, has anyone told Bruce Schneier, yet?
As a matter of fact, before posting this I checked his web site, and he already knows. I guess you can't beat Bruce Schneier to a squid. Add that to his list of Chuck-Norris-isms.
But in the first half of 2017, Ubuntu will come out with "Zipping Zebra", and when the back half of 2017 comes around they'll be back into the 'A's, again. I guess as long as they choose different animals second time around, it'll be OK. What came before "Edgy Eft"?
Oh, for mod points.
What you're describing is called a "cycler", and I'm in favor of the concept, as well. Plus several well-respected people favor the Cycler concept - I believe Buzz Aldrin may be one of them.
As for "needing the velocity", the idea is that only a small rendezvous craft needs the velocity, the big craft with the living space is already in the cycler orbit. Similarly it's a small craft that does the cycler rendezvous at the moon. As for needing shielding, that's a reason for a permanently boosted craft, you can take the effort to put decent shielding on the thing, since it's only boosted once.
The cycler concept is also proposed for Mars, for the same reasons, only more so.
> The ISS prolongs that boondoggle.
IMHO the ISS is valuable as an engineering experiment. Yes, we're having a really tough time making the thing run, so what makes people think that we can make some different space station run better? The ISS is barely above the tin-cans-bolted-together stage, so we're a LOOOOONG way away from Von Braun's wheels.
There is a rough maximum size we can launch from Earth, so if we want to do more, at some point we're going to have to be doing some serious construction in space. That's especially true if we want to quite sending everything up, and start using space-based resources, like asteroid mining. Maybe the ISS isn't much, but it's a first step, we're having a tough time doing it, and we have to master all of these things before we can do anything tougher. That said, I do wish the TransHab was still going to be attached.
No, he got it right. Keep in mind that as he structured it, it's practically an infinite loop. Step 4 was eliminated in the optimizer as "never executed."
I hate "it just works" as it is usually implemented, because when "it just works" that really means only 70/80/90% of the time. (I'll admit that it's a moving target, generally getting better.) But the real problem is when "it just works" doesn't, it gets in your way big-time and keeps you from: a-getting it working your self, b-figuring out what really happened, so you can fix it, etc. "It just works" can be done correctly - leaving the option of running commands and editing config files yourself - but it seems like it generally isn't. I also acknowledge the need for "it just works", I just wish they'd do it the right way, without turning the whole thing into "Windows Black Magic."
> It's like Ballmer said, "Applications! Applications! Applications"!
The rest of your post is just fine, but you got this excessively important quote wrong. The word was "Developers!" instead of "Applications!" BTW, that was the "Monkey Boy" speech, not the "chair-throwing" speech, just to be clear.
If I thought McCain were his own man, I wouldn't be so afraid, either. IMHO he sold out to the kingmakers who made Bush, and his "acceptance" was when he went to see Falwell.
So by that, while I may have mixed feelings about Obama, I *am* that afraid of McCain. The best thing that could happen if McCain won is that he could pull what Truman did to Pendergast.
I think more drumbeats would have exactly the effect you say. But to have a "War" handed to us on a platter, complete and in action, would shoe in McCain - as the more Commander-In-Chief candidate. Perhaps the "best" way to get this War handed to us, to best get McCain into office, would be to use covert channels to goad Iran into declaring it.
The other thought here, and this is the scary thought, is that eventually "The Boy Who Cried Wolf!" was correct, and when he finally was, nobody listened. Richard Clarke wasn't too fond of Iran either, and perhaps that's more telling.
> So while we may mutter about Obama or McCain, the fact is that it isn't going to make any difference.
People said the same thing about Gore vs Bush.
I think that there has been a difference.
To answer someone else, but on your topic... I'm no Obama fanbois, but I still think he's pretty clearly the better choice, in this case. Though I think the VP choice is going to be incredibly important in this race - on both sides.
I was speaking more of the difference between "perfect" and "still pretty good" hurting Obama. It's obvious that you don't have to be perfect, but Obama started bring a bunch of people to the game. At this point I don't know how many of them I expect to see sticking it out through November, and how many will stay home on election day - again.