Agreed, it's a bit hokey. I think a better explanation/rationalization would be: given that a hyperspace drive works not by traversing through space more quickly, but rather by warping spacetime so that the space between start-point and end-point doesn't have to be traversed at all (cue analogy of an ant on a folded piece of paper here), then Han's customized, more powerful/efficient hyperspace drive would be able to "fold more space" than a regular one. Therefore Han can complete the Kessel Run while traversing only 12 parsecs of actual space, while other, inferior ships have to travel farther.
But then again, it's George Lucas, so this particular crime against common sense is only the tip of the iceberg compared to his subsequent atrocities.:^P
A good rule of thumb is that every issue is more complicated that everybody thinks [...]
Excellent post. This (or something like it) should be required reading for anyone who is about to post a thoughtless "shoot from the hip" political reply.
"Mint a trillion dollar platinum coin." "That may sound crazy, but let's seriously consider this proposal."
I agree with the parent poster, minting a trillion dollar coin is a crazy/stupid idea; even if it is technically legal (which is debatable), actually doing it as a "solution" would make the USA look like they are playing silly lawyer-ball games rather than seriously dealing with their debt problem. First-world superpowers should be above such shenanigans.
That said, the only reason such a stupid idea is being debated is as a last-ditch alternative to what would (arguably) be even worse -- having the US government default on its debts. It's one thing to cut spending, but it's quite another for the US Congress to decide it's simply going to refuse pay the bills for money it has already spent. If the Republicans succeed in making that happen, the consequences for the nation will be similar to the consequences for anyone else who decides to simply stop paying their bills: disruption of vital services, a precipitous drop in their credit rating, endless legal red tape, and higher interest rates for the foreseeable future. Even the threat of that happening last year was enough to drop the nation's credit rating. Holding the nation's full faith and credit hostage to promote a political agenda is unacceptable behavior, and any legislators who stoop to such tactics should be summarily tossed out by the voters ASAP.
It wont work, so the chance they actually protect something by a patent which does not work is verly low. They just wasted their money.
That depends on what you mean by "work".
If we define work as "gives the rider more leverage per leg-stroke", then it's true, it won't work.
If, OTOH, we think about this the American way and define work as "provides us with additional income from people who don't understand basic physics", then it may work quite well. Never underestimate the power of marketing combined with ignorance:^)
Back in college (when Java was the new thing) one of its big touted features was security -- all applets would run in a sandbox, Java would be written in bytecode that would be automatically verified before it was executed, array access indices would be bounds-checked, etc etc. This all made Java execute more slowly than the alternatives (er, ActiveX?), but the (expected) upside was that Java would be super-secure and we wouldn't have to worry about our computers getting exploited by evil web pages that we accidentally loaded.
Now it's 2013 and Java (at least in the context of a web browser) is turning into an unreliable bug-fest.
So, what happened? Is it just a matter of incompetence at Oracle (and/or Sun)? Or is Java's security model fundamentally broken in some way that other in-web-browser languages (particularly JavaScript) are not? Where are all these security holes coming from?
An interesting claim, but Mac's OS 7.2 was a perfectly decent single-tasking OS (on a Mac II). I can't really comment about OS 9, as I never used it.
I can comment on both -- Classic MacOS' lack of memory protection was a real problem. Any buggy program (and that technically includes all of them, although some were much buggier than others) could crash the entire OS, costing you all of your unsaved work and possibly corrupting the filesystem on your mounted drives. Truly a painful experience.
No handshaking at all. Just Assembly loops and the data sitting on the pins for precisely the necessary clock cycle duration for the two loops running on the two CPUs on separate devices connected only by serial. Good times.
Sounds exciting, especially if the data is something important.:^) Wouldn't clock drift cause problems after a while? (My understanding is that there is no such thing as a perfect clock; so even if the 6502 cpu and the floppy drive's cpu were nominally running at the same speed, in actuality one would be slightly faster than the other, and the difference might vary slightly with temperature, etc)
That only helps if you simultaneously vote in somebody else who will do better. Based on the results of the 2010 election, it's clear that simply replacing Bozo A with Bozo B doesn't improve things. It may make them worse, since now Bozo B will spend his freshman year making all the same freshman mistakes that Bozo A had (perhaps) finally learned to avoid.
"Doesn't work" is a bit harsh; Apple Maps works pretty well for me. Granted I'm in Los Angeles so maybe I'm a special case, but "doesnt work reliably" is probably a better description. It's not like its completely useless, it's just not as good as the Google Maps app it replaced.
And we can of course trust that the manufacturing quality is 100% on these -- that the UV light isn't leaking out. There are health problems with certain wavelengths. However, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about...
People are so delicate, it's a wonder the human race has survived this long. I hope you don't ever go outside during the day, sunlight is full of nasty UV wavelengths.
Ah, Slashdot... where a post about the importance of "people skills" can't go for more than a sentence without calling someone a "moron" or an "asshole".
I get the feeling that Anonymous Coward was actually this guy.
I call it a black ops program using my US tax dollars to attack Iran's nuclear weapons program.
If you want, but when something wipes out all the files on your computer, be sure to refer to it as "someone attacking the USA's nuclear weapons program". Sauce for the gander and all that.
Re:I don't believe 1% of computers give wrong answ
on
Whose Bug Is This Anyway?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think this is bull. I just don't believe 1% of computers give wrong answers
1% of all computers? Probably not.
1% of gamers' computers, in an era when PC gaming technology was progressing very quickly, and so gamers were often running overclocked (or otherwise poorly set up) hardware? Sounds plausible enough.
Those X-Wings weren't flying very fast and the targeting couldn't hit them with lasers!
To be fair, all sides seemed to be using some special frequency of light whose photons only moved at a few hundred miles per hour (and could be seen from the side, and sounded like "pew! pew!" even across a vacuum).
Yeah, it's just so hard to drive an ammonium nitrate bomb up to a building.
Driving is easy. Building your own bomb is harder.
Why did McVeigh have to build his own bomb? Because bombs aren't sold in bomb stores, or at bomb shows. Because society recognizes that bombs are too dangerous to sell to the general public.
Why do so few other crazy people follow McVeigh's example? Because it's a lot of work. Buying a gun and shooting people with it, on the other hand, is relatively easy to do.
There have been spree killings all over the world, even in countries with more restrictive gun laws than the USA. Most of these killings were done with firearms, but many were done with other weapons.
In a remarkable coincidence, a nut-case went on a spree of violence with a knife at a school in China just a few hours ago. Said nut-case stabbed 22 children and 1 adult with his knife. All 23 victims survived and are expected to recover.
Our American nut-case, on the other hand, was armed with a gun and was able to kill at least 27 people.
The lesson one might draw is that a nut-case with a gun is significantly more deadly than a nut-case with a knife.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this seems quite the hokey explanation.
Agreed, it's a bit hokey. I think a better explanation/rationalization would be: given that a hyperspace drive works not by traversing through space more quickly, but rather by warping spacetime so that the space between start-point and end-point doesn't have to be traversed at all (cue analogy of an ant on a folded piece of paper here), then Han's customized, more powerful/efficient hyperspace drive would be able to "fold more space" than a regular one. Therefore Han can complete the Kessel Run while traversing only 12 parsecs of actual space, while other, inferior ships have to travel farther.
But then again, it's George Lucas, so this particular crime against common sense is only the tip of the iceberg compared to his subsequent atrocities. :^P
A good rule of thumb is that every issue is more complicated that everybody thinks [...]
Excellent post. This (or something like it) should be required reading for anyone who is about to post a thoughtless "shoot from the hip" political reply.
"Mint a trillion dollar platinum coin." "That may sound crazy, but let's seriously consider this proposal."
I agree with the parent poster, minting a trillion dollar coin is a crazy/stupid idea; even if it is technically legal (which is debatable), actually doing it as a "solution" would make the USA look like they are playing silly lawyer-ball games rather than seriously dealing with their debt problem. First-world superpowers should be above such shenanigans.
That said, the only reason such a stupid idea is being debated is as a last-ditch alternative to what would (arguably) be even worse -- having the US government default on its debts. It's one thing to cut spending, but it's quite another for the US Congress to decide it's simply going to refuse pay the bills for money it has already spent. If the Republicans succeed in making that happen, the consequences for the nation will be similar to the consequences for anyone else who decides to simply stop paying their bills: disruption of vital services, a precipitous drop in their credit rating, endless legal red tape, and higher interest rates for the foreseeable future. Even the threat of that happening last year was enough to drop the nation's credit rating. Holding the nation's full faith and credit hostage to promote a political agenda is unacceptable behavior, and any legislators who stoop to such tactics should be summarily tossed out by the voters ASAP.
It wont work, so the chance they actually protect something by a patent which does not work is verly low. They just wasted their money.
That depends on what you mean by "work".
If we define work as "gives the rider more leverage per leg-stroke", then it's true, it won't work.
If, OTOH, we think about this the American way and define work as "provides us with additional income from people who don't understand basic physics", then it may work quite well. Never underestimate the power of marketing combined with ignorance :^)
Back in college (when Java was the new thing) one of its big touted features was security -- all applets would run in a sandbox, Java would be written in bytecode that would be automatically verified before it was executed, array access indices would be bounds-checked, etc etc. This all made Java execute more slowly than the alternatives (er, ActiveX?), but the (expected) upside was that Java would be super-secure and we wouldn't have to worry about our computers getting exploited by evil web pages that we accidentally loaded.
Now it's 2013 and Java (at least in the context of a web browser) is turning into an unreliable bug-fest.
So, what happened? Is it just a matter of incompetence at Oracle (and/or Sun)? Or is Java's security model fundamentally broken in some way that other in-web-browser languages (particularly JavaScript) are not? Where are all these security holes coming from?
Guns don't kill people, linux does.
Yeah, but this model is safer -- you don't pull a trigger, you type "sudo kill -9 ".
Please be careful when entering the target's social security number.
An interesting claim, but Mac's OS 7.2 was a perfectly decent single-tasking OS (on a Mac II). I can't really comment about OS 9, as I never used it.
I can comment on both -- Classic MacOS' lack of memory protection was a real problem. Any buggy program (and that technically includes all of them, although some were much buggier than others) could crash the entire OS, costing you all of your unsaved work and possibly corrupting the filesystem on your mounted drives. Truly a painful experience.
Could you imagine the outcry if the CBN bought the BBC?
Current TV was America's BBC?
No handshaking at all. Just Assembly loops and the data sitting on the pins for precisely the necessary clock cycle duration for the two loops running on the two CPUs on separate devices connected only by serial. Good times.
Sounds exciting, especially if the data is something important. :^) Wouldn't clock drift cause problems after a while? (My understanding is that there is no such thing as a perfect clock; so even if the 6502 cpu and the floppy drive's cpu were nominally running at the same speed, in actuality one would be slightly faster than the other, and the difference might vary slightly with temperature, etc)
I'm sure there is a lot of wasted money in administrative overhead.
"I'm sure", in this case, translates to "I don't know and I can't be bothered to find out, but that won't stop me from making an unfounded assertion".
Untaxed diesel is dyed red and if someone is caught with red diesel on a public road it's a ridiculously large fine.
Interesting... but how does anyone ever get caught this way? Do the police dunk a dipstick into people's gas tanks to check the color?
The treasury should immediately mint a $1 quadrillion platinum coin and deposit to the fed, using the proceeds to pay off ALL obligations.
... and then, step two, we sneak into the Mint and steal this coin! We'll all be rich! Rich I say!
Hint: Vote them out.
That only helps if you simultaneously vote in somebody else who will do better. Based on the results of the 2010 election, it's clear that simply replacing Bozo A with Bozo B doesn't improve things. It may make them worse, since now Bozo B will spend his freshman year making all the same freshman mistakes that Bozo A had (perhaps) finally learned to avoid.
So which of the major spending by the government are you ready to do away with? Defense spending, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid?
I think I'd start with Defense spending, which could easily be cut in half, and we'd still have by far the largest military on the planet.
Limited government creates economic prosperity. Government largesse stifles it.
Which is why Somalia and Afghanistan are the most prosperous nations in the world, while Norway and Canada are hopeless dystopian nightmares. Right?
"Doesn't work" is a bit harsh; Apple Maps works pretty well for me. Granted I'm in Los Angeles so maybe I'm a special case, but "doesnt work reliably" is probably a better description. It's not like its completely useless, it's just not as good as the Google Maps app it replaced.
And we can of course trust that the manufacturing quality is 100% on these -- that the UV light isn't leaking out. There are health problems with certain wavelengths. However, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about...
People are so delicate, it's a wonder the human race has survived this long. I hope you don't ever go outside during the day, sunlight is full of nasty UV wavelengths.
We may be improving energy efficiency, but we're actually creating health hazards in doing so -- because people assume all light is equal. It isn't.
On the plus side, a 12-pack of Jolt cola is no longer necessary for your all-night coding sessions. Good riddance too, that stuff was insipid.
Ah, Slashdot... where a post about the importance of "people skills" can't go for more than a sentence without calling someone a "moron" or an "asshole".
I get the feeling that Anonymous Coward was actually this guy.
I call it a black ops program using my US tax dollars to attack Iran's nuclear weapons program.
If you want, but when something wipes out all the files on your computer, be sure to refer to it as "someone attacking the USA's nuclear weapons program". Sauce for the gander and all that.
I think this is bull. I just don't believe 1% of computers give wrong answers
1% of all computers? Probably not.
1% of gamers' computers, in an era when PC gaming technology was progressing very quickly, and so gamers were often running overclocked (or otherwise poorly set up) hardware? Sounds plausible enough.
Those X-Wings weren't flying very fast and the targeting couldn't hit them with lasers!
To be fair, all sides seemed to be using some special frequency of light whose photons only moved at a few hundred miles per hour (and could be seen from the side, and sounded like "pew! pew!" even across a vacuum).
Or they could just respond with "no".
Yeah, it's just so hard to drive an ammonium nitrate bomb up to a building.
Driving is easy. Building your own bomb is harder.
Why did McVeigh have to build his own bomb? Because bombs aren't sold in bomb stores, or at bomb shows. Because society recognizes that bombs are too dangerous to sell to the general public.
Why do so few other crazy people follow McVeigh's example? Because it's a lot of work. Buying a gun and shooting people with it, on the other hand, is relatively easy to do.
There have been spree killings all over the world, even in countries with more restrictive gun laws than the USA. Most of these killings were done with firearms, but many were done with other weapons.
In a remarkable coincidence, a nut-case went on a spree of violence with a knife at a school in China just a few hours ago. Said nut-case stabbed 22 children and 1 adult with his knife. All 23 victims survived and are expected to recover.
Our American nut-case, on the other hand, was armed with a gun and was able to kill at least 27 people.
The lesson one might draw is that a nut-case with a gun is significantly more deadly than a nut-case with a knife.