If a small research firm invented a new drug that many people wanted they should be able to patent the idea and sell it to other large companies for production.
So if Bertram Hansen Inc made a cure for hiv *and* cancer, and wanted $200000 per cure in patent fees, you'd think that was right? Because it kept capitalism going?
Without protection for intellectual property, large companies would control everything and those small companies(who tend to do most of the innovation in this world) would have no chance to compete and therefore no motivation to create new products.
Small companies can rarely afford to go to court against big companies over a patent-dispute. As a result, the patent system only helps the big guys, because they big guys can steel freely, while the small guys must play by the book, or maybe even pay extortion money for patents they don't use, just to avoid going to court.
The reason large companies don't control everything is because large companies are often very inefficient. Small companies are able to compete with them because they avoid the large inefficient overhead, and can focus on the product and/or the customer.
Besides, it's not like innovation is completely unheard of within large companies either.
The market was not ready for what they were selling and they did not have the power to make it into something amazing.
Translation: What they created, wasn't really great, not even good enough for competing in a free market.
Just because they do not have the ability to compete in the market right now does not mean they should have to give up all of their work.
Ehrmm, yes it does. If you don't have the ability to compete in the market, you should go bankrupt like everyone else. Or do you want to have some sort of tax-sponsored welfare-plan for unsucessful businesses? Or that succesul businesses like Intel should sponsor less succesful businesses like transmeta to create "fairness"?
If you invented something, but didn't have the capital or even motivation to sell it, would you be okay with everyone else being able to make money from your invention?
Hell, yes! If I invented something, I would prefer that someone took advantage of the idea and made it reality, rather than that it should die as yet another half-baked idea that never saw reality. As for transmeta, well, their investors knew it was a high-risk investment. Both they and we know that you can't always win the lottery!
So essentially, he wants to be able to control fairness on a public network, without having any other ability to control it than all the other people on the public network? Sorry, but that can't be done. Cooperation is your best bet. Walk over to the guy running bittorrent, and ask him to throttle his bandwidth;-)
No, that is to convict someone (you know, the stuff they do on court-TV).
To arrest someone, the person must be a suspect in a crime, and there must be a danger of evidence (such as the suspect) disappearing unless the suspect is arrested (you know, the stuff they do in CSI).
this means the police have evidence that he *did* kill his wife.
No, it means the police suspects he *might* have killed his wife, or that he in some other way, have been involved in her sudden disappearance.
They're only now trying to get a confession or enough to convince a jury.
More likely, they are trying to get at least enough evidence to prosecute against him. Otherwise they would have to release him before the investigation was finished. Getting enough evidence to convince a jury is probably more than just a few months away...
The iPod solved the major problems of its predecessors. It enables me to take 3300+ songs with me (15GB) on a very small device. Of course, it's not perfect, but I don't see how the availability of new technology will change the perfect music player radically like it did before.
Well, I do! The perfect music player would be integrated directly into your nerves from the ear. Failing that, it could be operated into the ear canal. Failing that, it could be a set of headphones that didn't require a cord. For some reason, the latter is impossible to get, even though most mp3-players are small enough to fit on a pair of headphones.
As for your questions: Yes, gay people use macs more than straight people, just look at Steve Jobs! No, not all design professionals are gay, some design professionals use Windows. The wrong thing about using the same type of computer as gay people is that you get a slick looking, but expensive and useless slow-puter with only one mouse-button.
As for your other comments: Hey, even if you actually feel offended, and are not just faking it out of misplaced political correctness, don't be so gay about it! OK?
I don't know anyone who uses Linux who isn't a morbidly obese bearded fellow who stays inside except for conventions, or a scrawny dork with bad hair and no social skills. If any of them HAVE a girlfriend, she's extremely fat and heavily into Star Wars.
I agree, I don't know many "normal" linux-users. While I think you exaggerate a bit (whereas my gay-mac-stereotype was not exaggerated), you certainly have a point. Linux isn't exactly mainstream. The only reason there are more than one linux user, is because nerds, geeks, dorks, and loosers have slowly taken over the mainstream. Today, you are considered socially inept if you don't play WoW for at least 45 hours each day!
By the way, I get to wonder why you are here on this site;-)
Nope. From my experience, here is what a "n00b developer" does:
Look at sourceforge, freshmeat, or somewhere you can find lots of different programming projects
Find something that every other "n00b developer" have started to work on, so there are about 200 non-functioning sourceforge projects trying to build the same kind of app
Start another project like the previous 200
Fail to do any better, and ask people to help contribute to your project instead of the 200 others
Forget about it after a few months, but never take down the webpage, so that this evil cycle can continue
The same computer that gay people use? You're an obese twelve year old in Nebraska, I hope. I hope.
As a matter of fact, I don't know anybody who uses a mac that aren't gay, or could be mistaken for one (such as a metrosexual, or anyone that puts appearance before functionality). As for your guess of who I am, you were wrong on all counts, I'm a reasonably fit 32 year old security guard from Norway (and I've got an education as a computer scientist).
When you have actual money someday, and you have the choice between fiddling for days getting your kernel recompiled to work with some $12 video card, or having sex, you'll probably opt for the Mac, too. That's what I did, anyway.
True enough, my work pays a lot less than what I got when I programmed for a living, but I get by. My $12 video card got autodetected by ubuntu, and runs just fine with accelerated 3d and the nvidia driver. (I tried windows once, and I had to download some random patches such as DirectX-somelargenumber just to be able to use the drivers on the included disk, which took a long time, and then I had to reboot three times before my drivers were installed, and about 270 reboots and a week later, I had a working windows installation...).
In ubuntu, I had none of this hassle, and everything runs fine. I don't recompile my kernel, because my distro provides perfectly adequate kernels for me, but if I had to, it would probably take me an hour or two of fiddling, not days. I fail to see why this should have anything to do with sex. Do you fuck your macintosh? I prefer women... computers and sex don't mix very well!
"I just finished watching 'Who Killed the Electric Car', and was quite impressed.
Ok, so you're easily impressed, then!
I'm too poor to buy anything but an old clunker, and not eager to pollute the atmosphere (or empty my wallet) with gasoline.
You can try walking, or biking. Preferably with environmentally friendly shoes and/or bike. Or take the bus. But if what you want is a cheap, environmentally friendly car, your best bet is to just get one that uses little gasoline. Morris Mini or 2CV?
The movie inspired me: I think I'd like to convert an old car (or perhaps a motorbike) to run on electricity.
Well, good luck. The marketplace has pretty much proven that electric cars aren't viable at this time. Huge companies have tried, and failed. Some electric cars have been produced, but they are mostly novelty items, like the Think Car.
But sure, go ahead, waste your money. Only don't claim it's environmentally friendly. The batteries and money you waste on this project will contribute more to global pollution than all the gasoline you would have burned in your car had you just driven it.
Have Slashdot readers attempted such a thing before? What experiences have you had, and what would you recommend or not recommend?"
There are so many idiots on/. that it is likely that someone here has probably already attempted to remove stains by using paint. I would recommend to get a small car with low mileage. Make sure its engine is tuned correctly. And just drive it.
Maybe you are not aware, but there is no free speech in Europe, at least not like in the US. It is not uncommon to get in trouble for written text or speech.
Maybe you're not aware, but there is no such thing as a country named Europe. Talking about "free speech in Europe" is like talking about "free speech in Asia" (from Iran to Japan). As for the members of the European Union, I can assure you that they all have legislation to ensure free speech.
But there is no country in the world where you have absolutely free speech. Every country has limitations in their free speech, which prohibits such things as calling your neighbour a paedophile (if he isn't), yelling "FIRE!" in a crammed theater, inciting crime, etc...
Different european countries have different tradeoffs, and USA also makes its own tradeoffs. These tradeoffs might differ in various respects (i.e. in USA you can create bestiality porn, but you can't show it on TV, and in Germany you can wear a T-shirt with arabic letters on a flight, but you can't claim to be a nazi).
Regardless of law, you can "get in trouble for written text or speech" anyway. The next time you see a big muscular guy together with a beautiful girl (even better if all of you are drunk), try to tell the girl loudly that you would like to nibble on her tits while pumping your dick up her ass. Or just publish some cartoons of Muhammed.
Riiight. Because tech-savvy people only work on the cheapest hardware they can find with open-source operating systems. Everyone else is just playing pretend.
Well, uhm, yeah. More or less. Being tech-savvy obviously means that you understand the tradeoffs involved in price/quality/performance for computer components. Since very little of it is of any quality (and if it is, it is purely by luck, and the manufacturer doesn't even realize he can charge more for it), and performance is getting better in two weeks anyway, you can just as well buy something cheap. And there should be no doubt that linux, with its programmer-friendly interface, and wide adaptility to everything from cell-phones to supercomputers, makes a popular OS among the tech-savvy crowd.
But go ahead, buy expensive gamer 3d-cards to get 0.2% higher framerate in tetris, put stickers with flames on the side of your cabinet and see if it boots any faster, go for the exclusive "mac" experience where you pay to use the same OS and computer as gay people do, or choose windows because you love your computer failing.
Instead of sitting back and waiving their hand hoping others would make their dreams come true. They thought of the future as a progressive change instead of a revolution of technology at every turn.
Well, I have really thought this true, and working to make it happen. Here's my vision of the future:
robots (uh, ehm, and fembots!)
colonization of the galaxy
the singularity
teleportation devices
free energy
a monkey with a typewriter that finally completes the collected works of shakespeare
the end of poverty
world peace
lots of cool alien civilizations that some future relative of president Bush starts a war against
and that scientists will finally succeed in creating a straight banana!
This is wrong. I have two friends who own PVRs. I'm quite sure neither of them know what it is. Neither did I, untill I read this article.
By the way, most people have a CRT in their living rooms. I believe that even if you expanded the TLA, most people would still not understand what a CRT was.
C++ in a kernel? Sweet mother of God! Please don't do it!:D
Why not? It's not like you have to use STL, MFC, multiple inheritance, and covariance just because you happen to use C++. C++ offers several advantages over C, and which features you decide to use, and where, is up to you. C is not perfect. There's little reason to stick to it, except tradition. C++ certainly isn't perfect either, but it has some advantages over C.
Unix succeded pretty much because it was one of the first OS-kernels that was not written in assembly (of course Multics, which did not succeed, was also written in a high-level language..). Personally, I think it's time that we started writing OS kernels in better languages. Computers based on Lisp and SmallTalk, have been influential and popular among their users. Just because they didn't become succesful commercially, doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea.
I'm not entirely sure about whether SmallTalk was ever used in the kernel at Xerox, but at least the Lisp-machines had kernels and compilers written in Lisp, and demonstrated that Lisp is an excellent language to write an OS-kernel in.
Today, we have an enormous choice of excellent computer languages to choose from. And new ones can be designed, if you are not happy with one of the existing ones. Even Microsofts research division is writing OS's in new high-level languages. Unfortunately, if it isn't windows (or unix, or one of the popular realtime OS's, such as VxWorks), it ain't going to sell. For all I know, maybe the perfect OS already exist, but nobody uses it because it fails to be windows (or unix).
Seriously, I've thought about what I'd do with a MythTV box. I've wanted it set it up to play my DVD collection according to a schedule, inserting promos for other upcoming shows between chapters and trailers for the next episode (some DVDs like The X-Files put the 10 and 30 second ads all on the last disk). Then some lower-third overlays for inserting severe weather information, caller-ID, and signaling of when someone's at the door.
My goodness! Get a life!
If I had a family, I'd get the kids involved with a camera to produce periodic news updates.
I'm afraid to tell you, but from what you wrote above, that will probably never happen! (you getting a family...)
Unfortunately I've been happily employed on other coding tasks and haven't had the time even to put together a system for basic recording tasks let alone learn the source tree of MythTV to gauge how feasible it would be to adapt it for 24-hour scripted network control.
Well, for your own sake, stay employed! If not elsewhere, at least at meetings, you have to talk to other people, and maybe around the coffee-machine. Talking to other people might help influence your interests in other directions than automated TV-watching!
Business, finance, transportation, communications, data management, entertainment, etc. are all incredibly enriched over what they were only 10 years ago because of...yes, software.
Definitely. At my workplace we can now sit behind our PCs and send these funny email-jokes to each other, while continuing to be even less productive than before. This is called improvement. Hopefully we can soon start working from home, so we can sit at home and send funny joke-emails to each other from there instead. I'm sure that would improve productivity even further!
Well, did you listen to it? It does not sound anything like a drum machine from Yamaha. And it serves a totally different purpose than a drum machine from Yamaha. And it sounds, and interacts with the user in a totally different way than the 1800-era machine. And it serves a totally different purpose than the 1800-era machine.
Just because there have been other mechanical and/or electronic contraptions that serve the purpose of (or have part of their purpose to be) providing drum-like sounds, doesn't mean that all of these contraptions are equivalent, and that any new such contraption must just be a rehash of the same old thing. Such a view would be equally stupid as to say that all mechanical and/or biological contraptions for human transportation are equivalent, and that any such new contraptions must just be a rehash of the same old thing. Therefore, we don't need cars, jet-planes, submarines, or bicycles, since they all serve the same purpose as the donkey.
Probably never. Because when a human uses a computer to create music, it's not "computer-generated", but "computer-assisted". On the other hand, the thought of a computer using a human to create music, is something we are not willing to accept. So it would be called "computer-assisted" as well. So, basically, our unique perspective makes us always win over the machines.
By the way, if a future society someday becomes ruled by compuers (or robots), I'm pretty sure we would call it "computer-assisted government", or "computer-assisted administration". It sure sounds a lot better than simply "ruled over by computers".
Look, a rocket is a fuel tank and an oxygen tank, connected to a chamber where they burn, and at the back of this chamber is a nozzle that releases high-pressure exhaust in a controlled direction. There is no magic involved here. Whether you prefer to calculate with force or momentum doesn't matter. If you are able to calculate at all, either you get the right answer, or your calculations are wrong.
There's a difference between energy and momentum - you're confusing the two.
Nope, I'm not. You were the one talking about kinetic energy. But it doesn't work very well with these kind of calculations. And the reason is obvious, kinetic energy is a scalar value, you can't do vector calculations with them, and therefore they are useless for doing armchair rocket science.
Since kinetic energy goes as velocity (and thus momentum) squared, I stand by my previous statement: a given amount of speeding up costs more energy if you're already moving fast.
This is true only when you are approaching lightspeed. But I doubt that was what you were talking about. Please review your highschool physics.
When you're going slowly (compared with the exhaust velocity), most of the energy goes into the moving exhaust, not your space ship. If you're moving faster than the exhaust velocity, you actually get *more* than the energy of combustion of the fuel added to your kinetic energy - this is possible since the fuel has lost so much energy because it's moving slower now.
Yes, and magnets can cure cancer! Just as well as crystals does!
If you don't believe me, please check out that "high school physics" yourself before posting back.
Ok. A rocket engine produces thrust. Thrust is the same as force. We can measure the thrust F produced by burning the rocket on the ground. Because of Newtons 3rd law, the same force that is applied to rocket, will be applied the exhaust (but with opposite sign). By measuring the mass M of the rocket we can calculate its acceleration. Similarly, if we work over 1 second, m kilogram fuel will have been burned, been subjected to an average force of F newton, and will therefore throughout that second have an average acceleration througout that second of -F/m. The rocket will similarly have an acceleration of F/M. By multiplying both results by 1 second, you will get their new speed, relative to the speed they had 1 second ago (before combustion). The rocket speed relative to the ground, atmosphere, or the andromeda galaxy doesn't matter.
Using momentum, instead of Newtons 3rd law, you use the law of conservation of momentum. The system of rocket and fuel has mass M, and velocity V. After 1 second, the rocket is m kilogram lighter and moving at speed W. The exhaust will now move at average speed w (remember to use correct sign, all speeds are relative to our coordinate system here). The rocket will now have mass M-m and velocity W. The law of conservation of momentum, says that: MV = (M-m)W + mw. In other words, to have high W, we must have low (e.g. negative) w (or to make it clear, fast exhaust relative to the rocket). A large m also helps, but then we will soon go out of fuel. As with force, mw is something we can measure (well, at least we can measure m, and we get V-w by fastening the rocket to a large object such as the earth, so that V=W). Again, the speed of the rocket relative to the ground, atmosphere, or andromeda galaxy doesn't matter.
Incidentally, I love the ring idea, but it could only ever launch pretty specialized cargo due to the g forces needed.
That's ok. After all, it's not like we have a tendency to send ordinary items into space today either.
and rockets have high efficiency only when they're already moving fast (otherwise, most kinetic energy goes into making the exhaust, and not the payload, go fast
So, with your ideas of physics, newton's third law is no longer valid? At low speed the exhaust will receive higher force than the rocket, and at high speed the rocket will receive higher force than the exhaust. Please explain.
although some of these problems are less of an issue if you can accelerate the rocket to faster than the fuel's exhaust velocity before it reaches the muzzle of the EM launcher - then your shiny equipmetn doesn't get burned.)
Still going on about this? Sorry, but can you please go back and review your high-school physics? Using an EM launching system to assist a rocket is a good idea, for at least two obvious reasons (1: less fuel needed to be carried with the rocket, 2: rocket can be hurled past the lower atmosphere). But not because Newtons third law doesn't apply for rockets!
Slashdot Mirror
So if Bertram Hansen Inc made a cure for hiv *and* cancer, and wanted $200000 per cure in patent fees, you'd think that was right? Because it kept capitalism going?
Small companies can rarely afford to go to court against big companies over a patent-dispute. As a result, the patent system only helps the big guys, because they big guys can steel freely, while the small guys must play by the book, or maybe even pay extortion money for patents they don't use, just to avoid going to court.
The reason large companies don't control everything is because large companies are often very inefficient. Small companies are able to compete with them because they avoid the large inefficient overhead, and can focus on the product and/or the customer.
Besides, it's not like innovation is completely unheard of within large companies either.
Translation: What they created, wasn't really great, not even good enough for competing in a free market.
Ehrmm, yes it does. If you don't have the ability to compete in the market, you should go bankrupt like everyone else. Or do you want to have some sort of tax-sponsored welfare-plan for unsucessful businesses? Or that succesul businesses like Intel should sponsor less succesful businesses like transmeta to create "fairness"?
Hell, yes! If I invented something, I would prefer that someone took advantage of the idea and made it reality, rather than that it should die as yet another half-baked idea that never saw reality. As for transmeta, well, their investors knew it was a high-risk investment. Both they and we know that you can't always win the lottery!
So essentially, he wants to be able to control fairness on a public network, without having any other ability to control it than all the other people on the public network? Sorry, but that can't be done. Cooperation is your best bet. Walk over to the guy running bittorrent, and ask him to throttle his bandwidth ;-)
No, that is to convict someone (you know, the stuff they do on court-TV).
To arrest someone, the person must be a suspect in a crime, and there must be a danger of evidence (such as the suspect) disappearing unless the suspect is arrested (you know, the stuff they do in CSI).
No, it means the police suspects he *might* have killed his wife, or that he in some other way, have been involved in her sudden disappearance.
More likely, they are trying to get at least enough evidence to prosecute against him. Otherwise they would have to release him before the investigation was finished. Getting enough evidence to convince a jury is probably more than just a few months away...
Put your wireless interface between a router that allows you to throttle bandwidth. An old linux box is perfectly equipped for the task. man tc.
Well, I do! The perfect music player would be integrated directly into your nerves from the ear. Failing that, it could be operated into the ear canal. Failing that, it could be a set of headphones that didn't require a cord. For some reason, the latter is impossible to get, even though most mp3-players are small enough to fit on a pair of headphones.
As for your questions: Yes, gay people use macs more than straight people, just look at Steve Jobs! No, not all design professionals are gay, some design professionals use Windows. The wrong thing about using the same type of computer as gay people is that you get a slick looking, but expensive and useless slow-puter with only one mouse-button.
As for your other comments: Hey, even if you actually feel offended, and are not just faking it out of misplaced political correctness, don't be so gay about it! OK?
I agree, I don't know many "normal" linux-users. While I think you exaggerate a bit (whereas my gay-mac-stereotype was not exaggerated), you certainly have a point. Linux isn't exactly mainstream. The only reason there are more than one linux user, is because nerds, geeks, dorks, and loosers have slowly taken over the mainstream. Today, you are considered socially inept if you don't play WoW for at least 45 hours each day!
By the way, I get to wonder why you are here on this site ;-)
As a matter of fact, I don't know anybody who uses a mac that aren't gay, or could be mistaken for one (such as a metrosexual, or anyone that puts appearance before functionality). As for your guess of who I am, you were wrong on all counts, I'm a reasonably fit 32 year old security guard from Norway (and I've got an education as a computer scientist).
True enough, my work pays a lot less than what I got when I programmed for a living, but I get by. My $12 video card got autodetected by ubuntu, and runs just fine with accelerated 3d and the nvidia driver. (I tried windows once, and I had to download some random patches such as DirectX-somelargenumber just to be able to use the drivers on the included disk, which took a long time, and then I had to reboot three times before my drivers were installed, and about 270 reboots and a week later, I had a working windows installation...).
In ubuntu, I had none of this hassle, and everything runs fine. I don't recompile my kernel, because my distro provides perfectly adequate kernels for me, but if I had to, it would probably take me an hour or two of fiddling, not days. I fail to see why this should have anything to do with sex. Do you fuck your macintosh? I prefer women... computers and sex don't mix very well!
Ok, so you're easily impressed, then!
You can try walking, or biking. Preferably with environmentally friendly shoes and/or bike. Or take the bus. But if what you want is a cheap, environmentally friendly car, your best bet is to just get one that uses little gasoline. Morris Mini or 2CV?
Well, good luck. The marketplace has pretty much proven that electric cars aren't viable at this time. Huge companies have tried, and failed. Some electric cars have been produced, but they are mostly novelty items, like the Think Car.
But sure, go ahead, waste your money. Only don't claim it's environmentally friendly. The batteries and money you waste on this project will contribute more to global pollution than all the gasoline you would have burned in your car had you just driven it.
There are so many idiots on /. that it is likely that someone here has probably already attempted to remove stains by using paint. I would recommend to get a small car with low mileage. Make sure its engine is tuned correctly. And just drive it.
Maybe you're not aware, but there is no such thing as a country named Europe. Talking about "free speech in Europe" is like talking about "free speech in Asia" (from Iran to Japan). As for the members of the European Union, I can assure you that they all have legislation to ensure free speech.
But there is no country in the world where you have absolutely free speech. Every country has limitations in their free speech, which prohibits such things as calling your neighbour a paedophile (if he isn't), yelling "FIRE!" in a crammed theater, inciting crime, etc...
Different european countries have different tradeoffs, and USA also makes its own tradeoffs. These tradeoffs might differ in various respects (i.e. in USA you can create bestiality porn, but you can't show it on TV, and in Germany you can wear a T-shirt with arabic letters on a flight, but you can't claim to be a nazi).
Regardless of law, you can "get in trouble for written text or speech" anyway. The next time you see a big muscular guy together with a beautiful girl (even better if all of you are drunk), try to tell the girl loudly that you would like to nibble on her tits while pumping your dick up her ass. Or just publish some cartoons of Muhammed.
Well, uhm, yeah. More or less. Being tech-savvy obviously means that you understand the tradeoffs involved in price/quality/performance for computer components. Since very little of it is of any quality (and if it is, it is purely by luck, and the manufacturer doesn't even realize he can charge more for it), and performance is getting better in two weeks anyway, you can just as well buy something cheap. And there should be no doubt that linux, with its programmer-friendly interface, and wide adaptility to everything from cell-phones to supercomputers, makes a popular OS among the tech-savvy crowd.
But go ahead, buy expensive gamer 3d-cards to get 0.2% higher framerate in tetris, put stickers with flames on the side of your cabinet and see if it boots any faster, go for the exclusive "mac" experience where you pay to use the same OS and computer as gay people do, or choose windows because you love your computer failing.
Well, I have really thought this true, and working to make it happen. Here's my vision of the future:
So, what is your prediction again?
By the way, most people have a CRT in their living rooms. I believe that even if you expanded the TLA, most people would still not understand what a CRT was.
Why not? It's not like you have to use STL, MFC, multiple inheritance, and covariance just because you happen to use C++. C++ offers several advantages over C, and which features you decide to use, and where, is up to you. C is not perfect. There's little reason to stick to it, except tradition. C++ certainly isn't perfect either, but it has some advantages over C.
Unix succeded pretty much because it was one of the first OS-kernels that was not written in assembly (of course Multics, which did not succeed, was also written in a high-level language..). Personally, I think it's time that we started writing OS kernels in better languages. Computers based on Lisp and SmallTalk, have been influential and popular among their users. Just because they didn't become succesful commercially, doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea.
I'm not entirely sure about whether SmallTalk was ever used in the kernel at Xerox, but at least the Lisp-machines had kernels and compilers written in Lisp, and demonstrated that Lisp is an excellent language to write an OS-kernel in.
Today, we have an enormous choice of excellent computer languages to choose from. And new ones can be designed, if you are not happy with one of the existing ones. Even Microsofts research division is writing OS's in new high-level languages. Unfortunately, if it isn't windows (or unix, or one of the popular realtime OS's, such as VxWorks), it ain't going to sell. For all I know, maybe the perfect OS already exist, but nobody uses it because it fails to be windows (or unix).
My goodness! Get a life!
I'm afraid to tell you, but from what you wrote above, that will probably never happen! (you getting a family...)
Well, for your own sake, stay employed! If not elsewhere, at least at meetings, you have to talk to other people, and maybe around the coffee-machine. Talking to other people might help influence your interests in other directions than automated TV-watching!
Apart from the funny grammar, no! Just remove the word "will", and you'll feel ok again.
Definitely. At my workplace we can now sit behind our PCs and send these funny email-jokes to each other, while continuing to be even less productive than before. This is called improvement. Hopefully we can soon start working from home, so we can sit at home and send funny joke-emails to each other from there instead. I'm sure that would improve productivity even further!
I'm pretty sure a robot drummer would eat all the efood. Probably drink all the edrinks as well, at least if they contained ealcohol.
Well, did you listen to it? It does not sound anything like a drum machine from Yamaha. And it serves a totally different purpose than a drum machine from Yamaha. And it sounds, and interacts with the user in a totally different way than the 1800-era machine. And it serves a totally different purpose than the 1800-era machine.
Just because there have been other mechanical and/or electronic contraptions that serve the purpose of (or have part of their purpose to be) providing drum-like sounds, doesn't mean that all of these contraptions are equivalent, and that any new such contraption must just be a rehash of the same old thing. Such a view would be equally stupid as to say that all mechanical and/or biological contraptions for human transportation are equivalent, and that any such new contraptions must just be a rehash of the same old thing. Therefore, we don't need cars, jet-planes, submarines, or bicycles, since they all serve the same purpose as the donkey.
By the way, if a future society someday becomes ruled by compuers (or robots), I'm pretty sure we would call it "computer-assisted government", or "computer-assisted administration". It sure sounds a lot better than simply "ruled over by computers".
Thanks, wikipedia is probably more correct than me in this case ;-)
Nope, I'm not. You were the one talking about kinetic energy. But it doesn't work very well with these kind of calculations. And the reason is obvious, kinetic energy is a scalar value, you can't do vector calculations with them, and therefore they are useless for doing armchair rocket science.
This is true only when you are approaching lightspeed. But I doubt that was what you were talking about. Please review your highschool physics.
Yes, and magnets can cure cancer! Just as well as crystals does!
Ok. A rocket engine produces thrust. Thrust is the same as force. We can measure the thrust F produced by burning the rocket on the ground. Because of Newtons 3rd law, the same force that is applied to rocket, will be applied the exhaust (but with opposite sign). By measuring the mass M of the rocket we can calculate its acceleration. Similarly, if we work over 1 second, m kilogram fuel will have been burned, been subjected to an average force of F newton, and will therefore throughout that second have an average acceleration througout that second of -F/m. The rocket will similarly have an acceleration of F/M. By multiplying both results by 1 second, you will get their new speed, relative to the speed they had 1 second ago (before combustion). The rocket speed relative to the ground, atmosphere, or the andromeda galaxy doesn't matter.
Using momentum, instead of Newtons 3rd law, you use the law of conservation of momentum. The system of rocket and fuel has mass M, and velocity V. After 1 second, the rocket is m kilogram lighter and moving at speed W. The exhaust will now move at average speed w (remember to use correct sign, all speeds are relative to our coordinate system here). The rocket will now have mass M-m and velocity W. The law of conservation of momentum, says that: MV = (M-m)W + mw. In other words, to have high W, we must have low (e.g. negative) w (or to make it clear, fast exhaust relative to the rocket). A large m also helps, but then we will soon go out of fuel. As with force, mw is something we can measure (well, at least we can measure m, and we get V-w by fastening the rocket to a large object such as the earth, so that V=W). Again, the speed of the rocket relative to the ground, atmosphere, or andromeda galaxy doesn't matter.
That's ok. After all, it's not like we have a tendency to send ordinary items into space today either.
So, with your ideas of physics, newton's third law is no longer valid? At low speed the exhaust will receive higher force than the rocket, and at high speed the rocket will receive higher force than the exhaust. Please explain.
Still going on about this? Sorry, but can you please go back and review your high-school physics? Using an EM launching system to assist a rocket is a good idea, for at least two obvious reasons (1: less fuel needed to be carried with the rocket, 2: rocket can be hurled past the lower atmosphere). But not because Newtons third law doesn't apply for rockets!