Imagine a world where the vast majority of skilled people live effectively forever. What opportunity will there be for the young, if the elders have had a centuries-long head start?
This is like saying there's no opportunity for a 5 year old because a 50 year old has a huge head start on experience. The answer, if we're all living to be 1000 years old, is that we'll be going to school for 120 years instead of 12 years. When you've got such an enormous lifespan, what's the rush to enter the workforce at age 20? Wait until you're 120, then you've got a chance of competing with the older folks.
Before you start waxing lyrical about that country: may I remind you about it's violent political past and present? Very few other countries conduct politics through assasinations and the ones that do usually don't have a very good name.
Now what the fuck does this have to do with anything?
The person you responded to was pointing out that just because there is at least one idiot in Israel, this does not imply that all Israeli research is worthless, and you bring up assassinations?
This is the very kind of article that belongs on Slashdot. The whole point of posting something like this is having it taken apart and scrutinized by the Slashdot community.
And the result of that would be... what exactly? It's called "preaching to the choir," a.k.a. navel gazing. Somebody posts some garbage, we all stand around poo-pooing and showing off our freshman-level physics knowledge, and you call this socially important?
How much fun would an article be was bullet proof? There would be nothing to say about it.
You mean, you don't want to be exposed to ideas which are far enough beyond you that you can't easily criticize them. Is "Tearing the researchers a new asshole" the only mode of discussion that entertains you?
It's not a file system, because it doesn't even closely implement any POSIX semantics.
Whoa. In nearly the words of Babbage, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind
of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement." Only POSIX filesystems are filesystems?
At current average energy prices (which are only increasing at this point), it costs about $7 a year for each 10 watts of continuous power. So if two processors' power consumptions differ by 50 watts, that's a savings of $35 a year. This might seem insignificant but it's enough to shift some of their results around.
As energy prices climb the effect will only become more pronounced. Selecting a processor which is cheaper and faster but also happens to consume as much power as a small city is NOT a cost effective solution. Why blind ourselves to this?
invest all time necessary to be fluent in the debugging facilities of ANY language you choose, and by that I don't mean learning "print" statements, they're totally useless, take too much time, and perturb code you think you're debugging.
No -- a programmer with real skill can debug without a debugger. It may not be the most efficient way to debug, but in some cases you just can't use one. If a print statement "perturbs" your code enough to alter a bug's behavior, that in itself gives you a lot of information about the bug.
Print statements and trace logs may seem antiquated, but they can get the job done. It sounds like you don't know how to use them and instead rely on a debugger as a crutch. A debugger is a useful tool but what if you didn't have one?
A lot of people immediately jump into a debugger whenever a problem occurs. Many times the correct course of action is to sit down and really think about the evidence presented, the structure of the code, and how the observed bug might have been caused. It's easy to waste time single-stepping through code that has nothing to do with the problem. It's also easy to confuse yourself by looking at too much data.
To admit that you rely on a debugger is basically to admit a lack of skill.
When the Space Elevator is used in the future as a lift system to get out of the atmosphere, at what point would one riding on it be weightless since it goes straight up and you're never in free-fall?
The answer is never, until you reach the destination. Your weight continually decreases as you move further away from Earth but you never experience weightlessness. This is because the elevator is continually pushing you into a higher orbit.
Another poster said "geosynchronous orbit," that person is just confused.
The broadcasters struck back with Bar complaints. One happy result of that is that The Bar's insurance carrier had to pay me money damages for The Bar's having taken the bait offered by the SLAPP bar complainants. [...] If The Bar proceeds with any of these, it does so at its own peril. The Bar paid me once. I am certainly willing it pay me again, along with others.
Nice. It appears that Jack's strategy is to threaten the Bar Association. I hope that works out for you, Jack.
OK... on thinking about it(!) it seems like some solenoid-like arrangement might offer the correct geometric properties. Still - what is "huge" when it comes to the current requirement? Thousands of amperes?
It's hard to calculate. It'd take several hours just to look up the necessary numbers to start with. But as a first guess I'd bet at least hundreds of amperes. The magnetic field of the earth is miniscule, and even moreso at a distance from the planet. One possibility would be a superconducting coil with a perpetual current -- essentially a permanent magnet, but with the advantage of not weighing too much. But this magnet would have to be aimed very carefully to provide force in the correct direction. The magnetic field of the earth is nowhere near symmetrical, and it changes constantly by small amounts. A computer could probably do this. Actually, I think this idea might not be crazy, but again, the calculation is difficult.
Actually his way was better. As another non-rocket-physics-orbital-space-major, the original explanation creates an image I can grasp. You, on the other hand, lost me at "forces".
You don't understand what pushing or pulling is?
His explanation isn't even strictly correct. Just because an object happens to intersect the ground (otherwise known as "crashing") doesn't mean it wasn't in orbit. It's not a bad explanation, take what works for you, but I'm surprised.
Why does the ISS need to be boosted by external rockets rather then doing it itself?
The orbital correction is a perpetual process. Therefore, the ISS would require a perpetual supply of fuel if it had its own rockets. This infinitely massive space station would immediately suck in the Earth, become a black hole, and devour the solar system, followed by the universe.
Why don't they have ISS in a higher orbit that won't decay as fast/often?
Because then it would be in a higher orbit:-) Harder to reach, takes more fuel to carry heavy stuff up there, more interaction with the moon, etc. You typically want a human-occupied space station to be closer to the planet.
Then feed electrical power through the cable (up the center, down the outer jacket) so that the vector crossproduct of the current and the earth's magnetic field act to accelerate the ISS.
The magnetic field of the current flowing up the center would cancel the field of the current flowing down the outer jacket at any significant distance from the cable. You want a loop, not a coaxial cable. And the necessary current would be huge.
As I understand it, Orbit just means that your velocity forward is just compensating for the downward pull the Earth's gravity is imposing on you. So, you're actually falling constantly while you're in orbit, but you're moving away from the Earth horizontally fast enough so you stay at a fairly constant distance from the planet.
A better way to think about it is in terms of forces, not velocities. In order for an object to travel in a circle, there must be an inward-directed force, a centripetal force. Imagine you're swinging a ball on a string around your head. The ball travels in a circle because the string is continually applying an inward-directed force to it. For an object in orbit, this inward-directed force is gravity.
The image of the craft continually "missing" the Earth is not as useful, because the size of the Earth really isn't relevant to the question of orbit -- only its mass is. An object can orbit whenever its speed is less than the escape velocity. It's just that some orbits, unfortunately, intersect with the surface of the Earth.
Do you really want Iran, North Korea and China having a say in how DNS is administered? Yeah, let's give countries that filter words like "democracy" and "tiananmen square" and jail anti-government bloggers a say. What a joke.
So logically, you also agree that neo-Nazis, KKK members, and violent religious fundamentalists should be denied voting rights. These people also suck. Do we really want the KKK to have a say in our laws? You say this in the same sentence you try to defend your "democratic" ideals. You make me sick.
If there's a country that stands for defending freedom of speech, it sure isn't either of them. Perish the day when we can't even register domain names like "naziscansuckmyballs.com" because Europe is too afraid to deal with the realities of its own history.
You're ignorant. "Nazi" is not a banned word. Discussion of Nazism is not illegal. Glorification of the Third Reich is illegal. Goose stepping is illegal. As an American I don't really agree with these policies, either, but perhaps the Germans themselves are in a better position to judge the necessity of such laws.
The Americans helped to defeat the Nazis. The Germans, on the other hand, WERE the Nazis. As much as you wish that didn't make a difference, it does.
Again, I don't think these policies are constructive, but they are explainable. When I was in Greece recently, there was a scuffle in Athens between some anarchists and neo-Nazis. It occurred because the neo-Nazis came down to protest the fact that one of their conferences had been banned. The violence could have been avoided if they had simply allowed the conference to proceed. So outlawing the speech lead to violence in that case.
District Judge Edward Harrington.
I haven't been able to find who appointed him...
Oh COME ON. If we knew in advance exactly how a judge would rule on everything, there'd be no need to appoint him/her, would there? We could just run the issue through the computer program called "How Judge XYZ Would Rule" and be done with it.
Now, if this judge had made a string of one asinine decision after another, that's another thing.
Bah. My Sourceforge email address is simply "scott" which is pretty "impressive" considering the popularity of the name Scott but I have yet to become a zillionaire because of it. I don't think possessing a rare email address is going to get you far;-)
Besides, the way Google did this is to set the MX records for both gmail.com and googlemail.com to the same host. So everyone who has a gmail.com address already has a googlemail.com address.
I'm sorry you got rated Flamebait. I don't agree with you, but you're not flamebait. Moderator is dickless.
If they built an email service, and had millions of people relying on it, I'd understand, but if the trademark owner isn't doing anything with the name, I'd say give it to google.
It doesn't make sense to base ownership on popularity. Just because Google's mail system has millions of users doesn't make the other guy's trademark any less important. How would you like to be forced to sell your house, because millions of people are interested in buying it? (Frighteningly, a recent US Supreme Court ruling implies almost exactly that. Sick and wrong.)
As much as I think people are going to hate it and find it inconvenient, it's nice to see Google handling this without any backstabbing and lawyers and the like.
Eh? Google said, essentially, "We tried to resolve this through negotiation, but that failed. We're not giving up, though." That pretty strongly implies that they're taking it to court.
It's funny that you consider a court of law to be a den of "backstabbing." I guess we should all settle our disputes the old fashioned way -- with a duel? Or are you advocating pussing out whenever anybody challenges you? I don't get it.
Why is the term for a space-going human different depending on the nationality of the person in question? U.S. space-farers are astronauts, Russians are cosmonauts, Chinese are taikonauts... This is stupid. What the hell does somebody's nationality have to do with anything?
If anything, space is the one place where everybody can be truly united -- political divisions don't seem to matter very much, when you're looking down at the entire Earth and see it for what it truly is -- a big rock in space that we all live on.
Leave this idiotic divisiveness down here. I think a great many wars could have been prevented if we'd shot the leaders of the opposing sides into space and let them look down on what they are really fighting over. So let's call it, in the interests of fairness, a taikosmastronaut, and leave it at that. No new terms. This is stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
This is like saying there's no opportunity for a 5 year old because a 50 year old has a huge head start on experience. The answer, if we're all living to be 1000 years old, is that we'll be going to school for 120 years instead of 12 years. When you've got such an enormous lifespan, what's the rush to enter the workforce at age 20? Wait until you're 120, then you've got a chance of competing with the older folks.
Being endothermic is not the same as being impossible. Dissolving salt in water is endothermic yet somehow it occurs.
Iron (and higher elements) are formed in stars, but in minute quantities compared to the much higher energy environment of a supernova.
Now what the fuck does this have to do with anything?
The person you responded to was pointing out that just because there is at least one idiot in Israel, this does not imply that all Israeli research is worthless, and you bring up assassinations?
And the result of that would be... what exactly? It's called "preaching to the choir," a.k.a. navel gazing. Somebody posts some garbage, we all stand around poo-pooing and showing off our freshman-level physics knowledge, and you call this socially important?
How much fun would an article be was bullet proof? There would be nothing to say about it.
You mean, you don't want to be exposed to ideas which are far enough beyond you that you can't easily criticize them. Is "Tearing the researchers a new asshole" the only mode of discussion that entertains you?
Whoa. In nearly the words of Babbage, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement." Only POSIX filesystems are filesystems?
Yes yes, and thermonuclear weapons were only invented to deter the Soviets.
Sorry, but moral questions DO come into this.
As energy prices climb the effect will only become more pronounced. Selecting a processor which is cheaper and faster but also happens to consume as much power as a small city is NOT a cost effective solution. Why blind ourselves to this?
No -- a programmer with real skill can debug without a debugger. It may not be the most efficient way to debug, but in some cases you just can't use one. If a print statement "perturbs" your code enough to alter a bug's behavior, that in itself gives you a lot of information about the bug.
Print statements and trace logs may seem antiquated, but they can get the job done. It sounds like you don't know how to use them and instead rely on a debugger as a crutch. A debugger is a useful tool but what if you didn't have one?
A lot of people immediately jump into a debugger whenever a problem occurs. Many times the correct course of action is to sit down and really think about the evidence presented, the structure of the code, and how the observed bug might have been caused. It's easy to waste time single-stepping through code that has nothing to do with the problem. It's also easy to confuse yourself by looking at too much data.
To admit that you rely on a debugger is basically to admit a lack of skill.
The answer is never, until you reach the destination. Your weight continually decreases as you move further away from Earth but you never experience weightlessness. This is because the elevator is continually pushing you into a higher orbit.
Another poster said "geosynchronous orbit," that person is just confused.
Nice. It appears that Jack's strategy is to threaten the Bar Association. I hope that works out for you, Jack.
It's hard to calculate. It'd take several hours just to look up the necessary numbers to start with. But as a first guess I'd bet at least hundreds of amperes. The magnetic field of the earth is miniscule, and even moreso at a distance from the planet. One possibility would be a superconducting coil with a perpetual current -- essentially a permanent magnet, but with the advantage of not weighing too much. But this magnet would have to be aimed very carefully to provide force in the correct direction. The magnetic field of the earth is nowhere near symmetrical, and it changes constantly by small amounts. A computer could probably do this. Actually, I think this idea might not be crazy, but again, the calculation is difficult.
You don't understand what pushing or pulling is?
His explanation isn't even strictly correct. Just because an object happens to intersect the ground (otherwise known as "crashing") doesn't mean it wasn't in orbit. It's not a bad explanation, take what works for you, but I'm surprised.
The orbital correction is a perpetual process. Therefore, the ISS would require a perpetual supply of fuel if it had its own rockets. This infinitely massive space station would immediately suck in the Earth, become a black hole, and devour the solar system, followed by the universe.
No, I think that's not gonna work.
Because then it would be in a higher orbit :-) Harder to reach, takes more fuel to carry heavy stuff up there, more interaction with the moon, etc. You typically want a human-occupied space station to be closer to the planet.
The magnetic field of the current flowing up the center would cancel the field of the current flowing down the outer jacket at any significant distance from the cable. You want a loop, not a coaxial cable. And the necessary current would be huge.
A better way to think about it is in terms of forces, not velocities. In order for an object to travel in a circle, there must be an inward-directed force, a centripetal force. Imagine you're swinging a ball on a string around your head. The ball travels in a circle because the string is continually applying an inward-directed force to it. For an object in orbit, this inward-directed force is gravity.
The image of the craft continually "missing" the Earth is not as useful, because the size of the Earth really isn't relevant to the question of orbit -- only its mass is. An object can orbit whenever its speed is less than the escape velocity. It's just that some orbits, unfortunately, intersect with the surface of the Earth.
Well, I didn't mean it in an absolute sense.
So logically, you also agree that neo-Nazis, KKK members, and violent religious fundamentalists should be denied voting rights. These people also suck. Do we really want the KKK to have a say in our laws? You say this in the same sentence you try to defend your "democratic" ideals. You make me sick.
You're ignorant. "Nazi" is not a banned word. Discussion of Nazism is not illegal. Glorification of the Third Reich is illegal. Goose stepping is illegal. As an American I don't really agree with these policies, either, but perhaps the Germans themselves are in a better position to judge the necessity of such laws.
The Americans helped to defeat the Nazis. The Germans, on the other hand, WERE the Nazis. As much as you wish that didn't make a difference, it does.
Again, I don't think these policies are constructive, but they are explainable. When I was in Greece recently, there was a scuffle in Athens between some anarchists and neo-Nazis. It occurred because the neo-Nazis came down to protest the fact that one of their conferences had been banned. The violence could have been avoided if they had simply allowed the conference to proceed. So outlawing the speech lead to violence in that case.
Oh COME ON. If we knew in advance exactly how a judge would rule on everything, there'd be no need to appoint him/her, would there? We could just run the issue through the computer program called "How Judge XYZ Would Rule" and be done with it.
Now, if this judge had made a string of one asinine decision after another, that's another thing.
Besides, the way Google did this is to set the MX records for both gmail.com and googlemail.com to the same host. So everyone who has a gmail.com address already has a googlemail.com address.
If they built an email service, and had millions of people relying on it, I'd understand, but if the trademark owner isn't doing anything with the name, I'd say give it to google.
It doesn't make sense to base ownership on popularity. Just because Google's mail system has millions of users doesn't make the other guy's trademark any less important. How would you like to be forced to sell your house, because millions of people are interested in buying it? (Frighteningly, a recent US Supreme Court ruling implies almost exactly that. Sick and wrong.)
Eh? Google said, essentially, "We tried to resolve this through negotiation, but that failed. We're not giving up, though." That pretty strongly implies that they're taking it to court.
It's funny that you consider a court of law to be a den of "backstabbing." I guess we should all settle our disputes the old fashioned way -- with a duel? Or are you advocating pussing out whenever anybody challenges you? I don't get it.
If anything, space is the one place where everybody can be truly united -- political divisions don't seem to matter very much, when you're looking down at the entire Earth and see it for what it truly is -- a big rock in space that we all live on.
Leave this idiotic divisiveness down here. I think a great many wars could have been prevented if we'd shot the leaders of the opposing sides into space and let them look down on what they are really fighting over. So let's call it, in the interests of fairness, a taikosmastronaut, and leave it at that. No new terms. This is stupid.
He stated that Penny Arcade are extortionists. They should sue him for libel.