it takes a huge amount of energy to get to the moon and then to get back
You don't have to send much material to the moon: "just" some mining and processing robots. The real trick will be getting the resulting large quantities of rocket fuel from the moon to where it would be useful (i.e. other Earth orbits). The moon's gravity well is much shallower than Earth's, but I'm not sure if it's shallow enough to make such a venture profitable.
I mean what are we going to mine that has so much value? Water? Energy production uses a huge amount of water.
Rocket fuel, apparently. But to get rocket fuel (read: hydrogen and oxygen) you have to split the mined moon-water, which means you'll need some energy source to do the splitting. Where will that energy come from? Vast solar panel arrays? Nuclear? Geothermal? (does the moon have any geothermal energy to be tapped?)
This is a feature in need of an application and I can see very few applications.
I think you're right, but as long as we're adding features for the sake of having features... why limit the table to two dimensions? Perhaps the next version of Cassandra can support 3D-data-cubes, with each cell specified via a (row,column,level) triplet. And the version after that will allow hypercubes of data with any number of dimensions (up to 2 billion dimensions maximum, of course).
I doubt that a woman of her "intellectual prowess" has even heard of cosmic irony, let alone composed a song about it.
The woman managed to pen a pop song that people are still having tedious arguments about, more than 15 years later. Say what you will about Alanis' literary skills... as a troll, she is unsurpassed.
I think the most hilarious thing in the world is that most of the people that believe in Ghosts also believe in reincarnation. If that's not an Oxymoron, I don't know what is.
I don't see how it's an oxymoron... someone could (conceivably) die, wander around as a ghost for a while, then get reincarnated. Or perhaps coming back as a ghost counts as a type of reincarnation itself. Or am I missing something?
With the billions of people who have by now inhabited Earth and died here, we'd by up to our armpits in protoplasm if they really did exist.
No, you've got it wrong. While the number of ghosts is indeed increasing, the amount of protoplasm is constant. That's why modern ghosts are so much smaller than the old kind. In another few decades, ghosts will only be detectable under a microscope.
If yes, then "Radon gas, Rn-222 is a byproduct of Uranium decay and it takes a hair under 4.5 billion years for it to occur."
Yeah, but God created Radon (pre-aged for our convenience!) along with the rest of the Earth, 6000 years ago.
Or maybe he created the Earth last Tuesday, complete with 7 billion humans and their artificially constructed memories of their lives before then. Why not? No point in being omnipotent if you can't mess with people....:^)
In the 60 minute video, he goes on about saying something about how quite the machines are (exception being the air conditioning). Is there something I'm missing?
I'm not sure, but in the video the computers appear to be inside wire cages, in the center of a very large, warehouse-like room. I'd imagine that all the usually fan noise (etc) simply dissipates into the large space. In a lot of smaller "computer rooms", OTOH, the room is packed with computer equipment and thus the sound has nowhere to go and bounces off all of the walls. (By analogy, imagine a picnic in the middle of an otherwise-deserted soccer field, vs the same number of people packed into a small restaurant with glass/metal walls. Even if the people are making the same amount of noise in both cases, the restaurant will seem much louder)
The other thing I'm wondering about is the 65 micro (not milli) second times. What permits this incredibly fast trip time? Are they dealing with simply ethernet here or something else?
The fastest computer and networking equipment money can buy. I forget the exact name of it, but it's definitely not your standard gigabit ethernet from Frye's.
Eh? That [Wii selling well because it's slow] doesn't make any sense.
It made a little sense to me... because Nintendo decided to use non-state-of-the-art hardware, they were able to use older, cheaper, parts, and thus sell units at a lower price point than their competitors.
Their real secret was making a compelling gaming platform that didn't require the latest/fastest/most-expensive hardware to be fun.
How do we know we are not already living in one of these things? If so, this seems a bit redundant . ..
It would be, if we had access to the final output of the simulator we're running in. But as mere simulees, we don't, and therefore we have to spend billions of dollars developing our own system that will allow us to read the results in advance.
Spare us an accurate movie about the inner workings of a computer.
I'd settle for a plausible one. Watching T:L's special effects, I couldn't help thinking: Why are there dust/debris cyclones being kicked up by the Recognizer's landing rockets, inside a computer/software world? Why does the Recognizer need landing rockets in the first place? Why do those rockets sound like they are burning chemical fuel? Why would a software construct need to burn simulated fossil fuels in the first place? Why have light cycles regressed over the last 25 years, so that they can no longer do instant 90-degree-angle turns, but instead have to turn gradually like motorcycles in the real world? Etc.
The whole point (I would think) of creating a simulated world inside a computer is to do things that can't be done in the real world. So why spend so much time and energy limiting the simulated world to be just like the real one, except with blacklight decor?
Any votes on how long the policy lasts after someone 'transgendered' files a lawsuit requesting permission to live in the opposite-sex barracks and wear the opposite-sex uniform?
You realize that 'gay' and 'transgendered' are unrelated categories, don't you? Policy regarding gays is a separate issue from policy regarding transgendered people.
And it's true. That said, once the size of "everything" is at least 10 times larger than your appetite for movies, you can still go through life without ever seeing a crappy film. (Assuming you have a reliable process for selecting which movies to watch, of course).
So how do you explain that fucking bearded cunt in a suit saying stuff like `the holocaust didn't happen` and `we have no homosexuals in Iran`?
He's saying things his constituents want to hear, just like other fucking cunts say things like "we don't torture" or "the US government does not spy on American citizens without a warrant". In both cases it's not ignorance, it's deliberate deception.
Well, if you automatize every menial job away, there won't me much to do for a lot of the population than sucking the owning classes' dicks and licking their boots. You want to go there?
Right, but on the other hand, the commodities necessary for basic survival (strawberries, etc) will be manufactured so efficiently that even the underemployed and unemployed will be able to afford them.
So there you have it: the future, where all the menial work is done by robots, and the majority of non-highly-specialized/educated humans live comfortably on the dole. Utopia or dystopia?
Everything becomes quiet...then silence. Peace at last.
That's incorrect -- death is not peaceful silence. Peaceful silence is something people have experienced and are familiar with. Death is your own non-existence, which by definition it is impossible for you to experience.
(You might get some moments of peaceful silence just before you die.... but that's not death, that's dying. And depending on how you die, you might not even get that)
They fear the rule of law more than death and Government is their God.
Yes, and they also kidnap infants and drink their blood at their Satanic gatherings.
Can we stop with the hysteria yet? People in the US government are like people anywhere else -- some good, some bad, most just trying to pay their bills and keep out of trouble. Just because it's in the political interest of certain right-wing media organizations to regularly vilify them doesn't mean you have to mindlessly play along.
Our society is addicted to the convenience of vehicles.
True, but that doesn't mean society is addicted to gasoline. If and when non-gasoline-powered vehicles become cheaper than gas vehicles to purchase and run, people will switch. It's not as if people care (much) what their car is running on under the hood, what they care about is that it gets them where they want to go.
Slashdot Mirror
it takes a huge amount of energy to get to the moon and then to get back
You don't have to send much material to the moon: "just" some mining and processing robots. The real trick will be getting the resulting large quantities of rocket fuel from the moon to where it would be useful (i.e. other Earth orbits). The moon's gravity well is much shallower than Earth's, but I'm not sure if it's shallow enough to make such a venture profitable.
I mean what are we going to mine that has so much value? Water? Energy production uses a huge amount of water.
Rocket fuel, apparently. But to get rocket fuel (read: hydrogen and oxygen) you have to split the mined moon-water, which means you'll need some energy source to do the splitting. Where will that energy come from? Vast solar panel arrays? Nuclear? Geothermal? (does the moon have any geothermal energy to be tapped?)
Or maybe just breaking things. Glass, wood, rocks, pumpkins. Who doesn't like smashing a pumpkin?
Agreed. I think AB appeals to people for the same reasons bowling does.
This is a feature in need of an application and I can see very few applications.
I think you're right, but as long as we're adding features for the sake of having features... why limit the table to two dimensions? Perhaps the next version of Cassandra can support 3D-data-cubes, with each cell specified via a (row,column,level) triplet. And the version after that will allow hypercubes of data with any number of dimensions (up to 2 billion dimensions maximum, of course).
They should have gone with the uint32_t counter, then they could support up to 4 billion!
Gee Loopy, didn't you read the part in the article about how Stucnet was developed by the current Administration and its allies?
I doubt that a woman of her "intellectual prowess" has even heard of cosmic irony, let alone composed a song about it.
The woman managed to pen a pop song that people are still having tedious arguments about, more than 15 years later. Say what you will about Alanis' literary skills... as a troll, she is unsurpassed.
I think the most hilarious thing in the world is that most of the people that believe in Ghosts also believe in reincarnation. If that's not an Oxymoron, I don't know what is.
I don't see how it's an oxymoron... someone could (conceivably) die, wander around as a ghost for a while, then get reincarnated. Or perhaps coming back as a ghost counts as a type of reincarnation itself. Or am I missing something?
With the billions of people who have by now inhabited Earth and died here, we'd by up to our armpits in protoplasm if they really did exist.
No, you've got it wrong. While the number of ghosts is indeed increasing, the amount of protoplasm is constant. That's why modern ghosts are so much smaller than the old kind. In another few decades, ghosts will only be detectable under a microscope.
If yes, then "Radon gas, Rn-222 is a byproduct of Uranium decay and it takes a hair under 4.5 billion years for it to occur."
Yeah, but God created Radon (pre-aged for our convenience!) along with the rest of the Earth, 6000 years ago.
Or maybe he created the Earth last Tuesday, complete with 7 billion humans and their artificially constructed memories of their lives before then. Why not? No point in being omnipotent if you can't mess with people.... :^)
In the 60 minute video, he goes on about saying something about how quite the machines are (exception being the air conditioning). Is there something I'm missing?
I'm not sure, but in the video the computers appear to be inside wire cages, in the center of a very large, warehouse-like room. I'd imagine that all the usually fan noise (etc) simply dissipates into the large space. In a lot of smaller "computer rooms", OTOH, the room is packed with computer equipment and thus the sound has nowhere to go and bounces off all of the walls. (By analogy, imagine a picnic in the middle of an otherwise-deserted soccer field, vs the same number of people packed into a small restaurant with glass/metal walls. Even if the people are making the same amount of noise in both cases, the restaurant will seem much louder)
The other thing I'm wondering about is the 65 micro (not milli) second times. What permits this incredibly fast trip time? Are they dealing with simply ethernet here or something else?
The fastest computer and networking equipment money can buy. I forget the exact name of it, but it's definitely not your standard gigabit ethernet from Frye's.
Eh? That [Wii selling well because it's slow] doesn't make any sense.
It made a little sense to me... because Nintendo decided to use non-state-of-the-art hardware, they were able to use older, cheaper, parts, and thus sell units at a lower price point than their competitors.
Their real secret was making a compelling gaming platform that didn't require the latest/fastest/most-expensive hardware to be fun.
How do we know we are not already living in one of these things? If so, this seems a bit redundant . . .
It would be, if we had access to the final output of the simulator we're running in. But as mere simulees, we don't, and therefore we have to spend billions of dollars developing our own system that will allow us to read the results in advance.
Curse you, memory protection!
The center's purpose isn't clear, but it apparently sports many catwalks, large video displays, and exercise facilities.
You're right, the purpose of the facility is usability and acceptance testing for their new OS. Here's some footage from inside:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYN3_EA1XM8&feature=related
Spare us an accurate movie about the inner workings of a computer.
I'd settle for a plausible one. Watching T:L's special effects, I couldn't help thinking: Why are there dust/debris cyclones being kicked up by the Recognizer's landing rockets, inside a computer/software world? Why does the Recognizer need landing rockets in the first place? Why do those rockets sound like they are burning chemical fuel? Why would a software construct need to burn simulated fossil fuels in the first place? Why have light cycles regressed over the last 25 years, so that they can no longer do instant 90-degree-angle turns, but instead have to turn gradually like motorcycles in the real world? Etc.
The whole point (I would think) of creating a simulated world inside a computer is to do things that can't be done in the real world. So why spend so much time and energy limiting the simulated world to be just like the real one, except with blacklight decor?
Either way the rest of us [...] are pointing and laughing at you.
Actually, the rest of us grew up and left childish things like "pointing and laughing" back at the playground.
It sounds like something The Dude might say,
Right, that's what makes it a reference. That, and the fact that it is said by the same actor.
but it's not in there.
Reference != direct quote.
Any votes on how long the policy lasts after someone 'transgendered' files a lawsuit requesting permission to live in the opposite-sex barracks and wear the opposite-sex uniform?
You realize that 'gay' and 'transgendered' are unrelated categories, don't you? Policy regarding gays is a separate issue from policy regarding transgendered people.
It's been said that 90% of everything is crap.
And it's true. That said, once the size of "everything" is at least 10 times larger than your appetite for movies, you can still go through life without ever seeing a crappy film. (Assuming you have a reliable process for selecting which movies to watch, of course).
I am sitting very close to a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, how do I make it be unreliable / make it crash?
Cut the power cables to the cooling fans...
So how do you explain that fucking bearded cunt in a suit saying stuff like `the holocaust didn't happen` and `we have no homosexuals in Iran`?
He's saying things his constituents want to hear, just like other fucking cunts say things like "we don't torture" or "the US government does not spy on American citizens without a warrant". In both cases it's not ignorance, it's deliberate deception.
Well, if you automatize every menial job away, there won't me much to do for a lot of the population than sucking the owning classes' dicks and licking their boots. You want to go there?
Right, but on the other hand, the commodities necessary for basic survival (strawberries, etc) will be manufactured so efficiently that even the underemployed and unemployed will be able to afford them.
So there you have it: the future, where all the menial work is done by robots, and the majority of non-highly-specialized/educated humans live comfortably on the dole. Utopia or dystopia?
Everything becomes quiet...then silence. Peace at last.
That's incorrect -- death is not peaceful silence. Peaceful silence is something people have experienced and are familiar with. Death is your own non-existence, which by definition it is impossible for you to experience.
(You might get some moments of peaceful silence just before you die.... but that's not death, that's dying. And depending on how you die, you might not even get that)
They fear the rule of law more than death and Government is their God.
Yes, and they also kidnap infants and drink their blood at their Satanic gatherings.
Can we stop with the hysteria yet? People in the US government are like people anywhere else -- some good, some bad, most just trying to pay their bills and keep out of trouble. Just because it's in the political interest of certain right-wing media organizations to regularly vilify them doesn't mean you have to mindlessly play along.
Our society is addicted to the convenience of vehicles.
True, but that doesn't mean society is addicted to gasoline. If and when non-gasoline-powered vehicles become cheaper than gas vehicles to purchase and run, people will switch. It's not as if people care (much) what their car is running on under the hood, what they care about is that it gets them where they want to go.
or the gov't will bail GM out with more loans until GM is profitable again