A good portion of quantum physics appears to fail the "logical impossibility test" as well, and yet quantum physics appears to be how the universe operates, Horatio.
See my post. From day 1, another way looks like it is a LOT cheaper and easier, both per launch and overall. Google for "ablative laser propulsion" : like a space elevator, but with more lasers, and no cable.
I think your method has one major drawback: You have to add the reaction mass to the vehicle, which makes the vehicle more massive, which means you need more reaction mass to lift it, and so on. So it has the same scaling problem that traditional rockets do.
whereas with the rail system the rail delivers the electricity to you.
Just a minor quibble -- in all the designs I've seen proposed, the power is delivered to the vehicle using one or more lasers aimed at PV cells on the bottom of the vehicle. Apparently the length of the cable would make its electrical resistance large enough that supplying power through the cable itself would be impractical. (Still, as long as we're dreaming, why not have someone invent a room-temperature superconductor that can be woven into the cable's fabric?;^))
Even just posting a couple random stills converted to.jpg onto 4chan would freak out the commercial customers into paying up.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it would freak out the paying customers into switching to the competition's product ASAP.
Intellectual property is what pays the legitimate customers' paychecks. Keeping it off of pirate sites until it reaches the intended (revenue-producing) venues is job one. When they hear that their video editor has code in it to automatically upload their work product to a pirate site, they will drop that program so quick it will dent the floor. The fact that the shenanigans are only "supposed to" happen to "pirates" won't matter -- all it takes is one user (legitimate or not) complaining about this on a support forum, and nobody would ever trust the software (or the company) again.
Pretty much, which is why real space battles are not on tv.
Have there ever been any real space battles? The only one I can think of was between China and their own (unarmed) satellite, but that hardly counts...
Not that Intel particularly cares about solar powered devices; they just use solar power to make the point that their experimental CPU can operate on a very limited amount of power.
4:3 is nice because it's closer to the square viewfield that most people actually have. I don't know whose vision is significantly wider than it is tall, or why that's a popular format for cinemas.
For cinema it makes sense, because you want to be immersed in the movie and (if you sit at the right distance) the sides of the movie screen will occupy your peripheral vision.
For computer monitors, OTOH, outside of games and video you are not usually using your peripheral vision much, so wide-screen displays don't make quite so much sense there. The main reason they are commonplace now is that manufacturers are making wide-screen LCD TV displays anyway, and this allows them to produce two different products from the same assembly line.
Where are the coal versions of Fukushima and Chernobyle? Surely you can point to tens of examples easily as coal has been in use much longer and on a larger scale.
Why yes, one can -- of course, the exact examples you are looking for depend on what aspects of "Fukushima and Chernobyle" you are asking for coal-mining versions of.
Are you asking about examples of sudden, unexpected disasters causing mass death or destruction of nearby cities? Okay, here are some:
Or perhaps you are asking about situations in which large numbers of industry workers were killed in an accident? Yep, we've got those too... thousands of coal workers die from accidents every year.
Or maybe you're wondering about if there are entire regions whose ecosystem has been destroyed by coal? Yes, there are.
Or perhaps you are asking about the slow-motion health and environmental damage caused by coal even when everything is working as designed? Yup, there's that as well.
Nuclear certainly has its problems, but coal is much, much, much worse.
And we sell a lot of [$34.99] fscking printer cables at my Best Buy... it makes no sense, you can't explain that...
Okay, Mr. O'Reilly, I'll give it a shot. Here's the cost breakdown:
$4.99 for the hardware $30.00 for having someone (allegedly) knowledgable to bring it back to and ask for help when you can't figure out how to make it work.
Still a pretty bad deal IMO, but nobody ever said ignorance was cheap...
That's why it would fit in a pretty niche role with the current sound level.
I wonder if there is a reason why it has to be so loud... are they running it on diesel or something? Perhaps they could replace its power source with something quieter, e.g. batteries or a fuel cell.
we're not going to see a Rosetta-style program available for the new families to run Intel code; rather, anything new will just work
What I'd really like to see is a processor-agnostic fat-binary flavor, based on LLVM. That way a single flavor could run on any CPU type, albeit with perhaps a slight delay the first time you run the app, as the LLVM byte-code gets converted into your CPU's native flavor. Given Apple's heavy involvement in the LLVM project, that seems like the obvious way to go if you're going to support more than one or two CPU types. (The alternative, e.g. executable downloads that contain 6 binary flavors, 5 of which each downloader is never going to use, would be a huge waste of bandwidth and disk space)
To be a flagship product, it only needs to be minimally functional.
If Apple wants to use it to differentiate their phones from the competition, then at a minimum it has to not suck -- which (given the sordid history of computer voice recognition) is a higher bar than you might think.
The article says that he told his colleagues to "blow away" the competition, so most likely it read as, "Blow them away." And it was misinterpreted.
Indeed -- but misinterpreted by whom? His colleagues, or by someone who was spying on his text messages? And if it was the latter, did they have a search warrant, or is this another case of the government conducting warrantless wiretaps?
Twice the strength of titanium and is able to be molded like plastic.
Do you really think that that material will be both (a) strong enough to keep from collapsing/imploding due to the air-pressure differential and (b) light enough to stay aloft, i.e. lighter than the equivalent volume of air?
It would be cool if it was, but I'll believe that when I see it.
Well, here is something you may not have considered; Whoever pays the bills makes the rules.
That's a good rule of thumb, but there's an even more important one that overrides it in this case: When you're sick, whomever has the power to provide (or deny) you health care makes the rules.
So previously, unless you are rich, that would be the insurance industry, which was free to deny you coverage, cancel your coverage, price coverage as high as possible to drive you into bankruptcy, and/or refuse to pay for needed services even if you had coverage, using whatever technicality they could dream up.
So while it's fun to imagine potential health care dystopias where faceless bureaucrats control your life through health care, let's not lose sight of the fact that we were already living in such a dystopia beforehand -- it's just that the bureaucrats' primary motivation was to "increase shareholder value". At least when the government is in control, non-rich people have a means to change unpopular policies through voting and political pressure. When it's a private company that's controlling your life, there is no democratic recourse. You take what you get and like it. The standard capitalist remedy of "don't like the service? Switch to a better competing company" doesn't work for health insurance, when you're already sick and no competing company is willing to cover you, and the insurance companies all know that.
I think the point should be to focus on the CANDIDATE instead of the party affiliation.
I don't think that's a good idea. Candidates don't come into office in a vacuum -- they are elected by their supporting party, and in the process of the election they make promises to their supporters that will hugely effect how they govern while in office.
Take Mr. Romney as a case in point. I think as a candidate he's a decent moderate, and if left to his own devices would govern as such. But in order to win the support of this year's Republican Party, he's had to swing far, far to the right, to the extend that he has publicly repudiated and condemned his own previous policies on health care, global warming, abortion, and a host of other issues. Do you really think that if elected, Romney will revert to his old, moderate self? Even if he wanted to, his Republican supporters would never allow it -- he'd either be impeached, or at best he'd become powerless after the Republicans turned on him.
So yes, the party a politician is affiliated with something to focus on. Even the best politician is not a dictator, and will have to defer to some extent to his party's positions, and it's folly to expect otherwise.
Consider Social Security. What did people do when they got old in the past? Did they die en masse in the streets? No. They generally had families support them or there were private charities that helped out.
This is only accurate for a subset of old people, who were fortunate enough to have had families or charities that were willing and able to support then.
Many, many people died quietly in their homes, due to lack of medical care, or chronic hunger, or both. The idea that old people received benefits equivalent to Social Security and Medicare through other means is quite simply wrong.
I'm like "Hey you bloody f***tards, don't you realize our country is falling apart. And all you care about is getting stoned. Can we please talk about real issue!"
I'm not a libertarian or a pot smoker, but I think legalization of marijuana is an important issue. Look at what's happening in Mexico right now -- the drug gangs are becoming more powerful than the government, decapitated bodies are left in the streets, and the whole country lives in fear.
Meanwhile, in the US, we spend billions a year in a futile effort to stem the tide of imported marijuana, we ruin the lives of thousands of harmless marijuana users by putting them in jail, and we are deeply in debt.
Legalizing marijuana would be a big step towards reducing all of those problems. The drug gangs would lose a lot of their income (and hence a lot of their power); the marijuana users (both recreational and medical) could live their lives without the constant fear of being thrown in jail, the money we spend on marijuana interdiction could be saved or spent in some other, more beneficial way, and a thriving, legal, domestic marijuana industry would provide jobs and tax revenue to the USA.
So even if you think smoking pot is a silly thing to do, there's still a lot of very good reasons to decriminalize marijuana.
We implemented term limits in California, and it didn't help matters. The main effects of term limits have been:
1) More gridlock and inefficiency, as the people who know how to do things go away, and the legislature fills with newbie legislators who don't have any experience with how the system works and don't know how to write legislation or get it passed.
2) Politicians playing musical chairs so that they can remain in politics. (Termed out as a legislator? No problem, run for some other position!)
I think the real problem with term limits is the assumption that newbies (or "outsiders" as the populists like to call them) will on average do a better job for their constituents than long-time incumbents, because the newbies haven't been "corrupted by the system" yet. I don't think reality bears that out -- while experience may corrupt some legislators, it also makes legislators more effective in their job. A seasoned legislator benefits both from personal experience about what works and what doesn't, and also from building up a network of contacts that s/he can call on to help get things done.
In what other profession would it be seen as reasonable to demand inexperience? Would you demand that your dentist be fired after 4 years so that you can have the benefit of a fresh-out-of-dental-school graduate? Would you fire your veteran programmers because you expect that hiring some newbie college students (at the same salary) will result in better code? I think "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" may have been a little too influential on people's views about government.;^)
What good are you "closer to home issues" if the inalienable right to defend your very life and possibly defend your country and constitution from tyranny if your right to arms are severely curtailed or outright banned?
Without getting into the merits of the 2nd Amendment, let me just point out that no major politician (Republican, Democrat, or otherwise) has proposed to "severely curtail or outright ban" your right to bear arms.
The NRA, however, does raise a lot of money by scaring people with the idea that the evil liberals are secretly plotting to take away their guns.
Slashdot Mirror
No FTL ever: it is a logical impossibility.
A good portion of quantum physics appears to fail the "logical impossibility test" as well, and yet quantum physics appears to be how the universe operates, Horatio.
See my post. From day 1, another way looks like it is a LOT cheaper and easier, both per launch and overall. Google for "ablative laser propulsion" : like a space elevator, but with more lasers, and no cable.
I think your method has one major drawback: You have to add the reaction mass to the vehicle, which makes the vehicle more massive, which means you need more reaction mass to lift it, and so on. So it has the same scaling problem that traditional rockets do.
whereas with the rail system the rail delivers the electricity to you.
Just a minor quibble -- in all the designs I've seen proposed, the power is delivered to the vehicle using one or more lasers aimed at PV cells on the bottom of the vehicle. Apparently the length of the cable would make its electrical resistance large enough that supplying power through the cable itself would be impractical. (Still, as long as we're dreaming, why not have someone invent a room-temperature superconductor that can be woven into the cable's fabric? ;^))
Even just posting a couple random stills converted to .jpg onto 4chan would freak out the commercial customers into paying up.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it would freak out the paying customers into switching to the competition's product ASAP.
Intellectual property is what pays the legitimate customers' paychecks. Keeping it off of pirate sites until it reaches the intended (revenue-producing) venues is job one. When they hear that their video editor has code in it to automatically upload their work product to a pirate site, they will drop that program so quick it will dent the floor. The fact that the shenanigans are only "supposed to" happen to "pirates" won't matter -- all it takes is one user (legitimate or not) complaining about this on a support forum, and nobody would ever trust the software (or the company) again.
Pretty much, which is why real space battles are not on tv.
Have there ever been any real space battles? The only one I can think of was between China and their own (unarmed) satellite, but that hardly counts...
Who wants a solar powered cpu or gpu? Pretty sure it's a dark and dusty place in my computer, not the sort of place the sun shines.
Cell phone towers, outdoor electronic signs, drones, satellites, navigation equipment, weather monitors, wi-fi base stations...
Not that Intel particularly cares about solar powered devices; they just use solar power to make the point that their experimental CPU can operate on a very limited amount of power.
You big meanie! For every extra pixel over 2106000, a young Chinese worker cries himself to sleep every night.
Nonsense. Chinese workers aren't allowed to sleep at night, that's when they work their third 10-hour shift.
4:3 is nice because it's closer to the square viewfield that most people actually have. I don't know whose vision is significantly wider than it is tall, or why that's a popular format for cinemas.
For cinema it makes sense, because you want to be immersed in the movie and (if you sit at the right distance) the sides of the movie screen will occupy your peripheral vision.
For computer monitors, OTOH, outside of games and video you are not usually using your peripheral vision much, so wide-screen displays don't make quite so much sense there. The main reason they are commonplace now is that manufacturers are making wide-screen LCD TV displays anyway, and this allows them to produce two different products from the same assembly line.
Where are the coal versions of Fukushima and Chernobyle? Surely you can point to tens of examples easily as coal has been in use much longer and on a larger scale.
Why yes, one can -- of course, the exact examples you are looking for depend on what aspects of "Fukushima and Chernobyle" you are asking for coal-mining versions of.
Are you asking about examples of sudden, unexpected disasters causing mass death or destruction of nearby cities? Okay, here are some:
Ok Tedi disaster
Buffalo Creek Flood
Or perhaps you are asking about situations in which large numbers of industry workers were killed in an accident? Yep, we've got those too... thousands of coal workers die from accidents every year.
Or maybe you're wondering about if there are entire regions whose ecosystem has been destroyed by coal? Yes, there are.
Or perhaps you are asking about the slow-motion health and environmental damage caused by coal even when everything is working as designed? Yup, there's that as well.
Nuclear certainly has its problems, but coal is much, much, much worse.
As I said earlier... Apple Stores are not technology stores. They are fashion stores. Period.
Surely they are both? It's not like people go to an Apple store to buy clothes.
(Although come to think of it, a rack of black turtlenecks probably would sell like hotcakes)
And we sell a lot of [$34.99] fscking printer cables at my Best Buy... it makes no sense, you can't explain that...
Okay, Mr. O'Reilly, I'll give it a shot. Here's the cost breakdown:
$4.99 for the hardware
$30.00 for having someone (allegedly) knowledgable to bring it back to and ask for help when you can't figure out how to make it work.
Still a pretty bad deal IMO, but nobody ever said ignorance was cheap...
That's why it would fit in a pretty niche role with the current sound level.
I wonder if there is a reason why it has to be so loud... are they running it on diesel or something? Perhaps they could replace its power source with something quieter, e.g. batteries or a fuel cell.
As how meany big apps will want to change architecture on apple yet again?
Not a whole lot, but Apple's done the Rosetta thing before, they could probably do it again if they felt it was worth the effort.
we're not going to see a Rosetta-style program available for the new families to run Intel code; rather, anything new will just work
What I'd really like to see is a processor-agnostic fat-binary flavor, based on LLVM. That way a single flavor could run on any CPU type, albeit with perhaps a slight delay the first time you run the app, as the LLVM byte-code gets converted into your CPU's native flavor. Given Apple's heavy involvement in the LLVM project, that seems like the obvious way to go if you're going to support more than one or two CPU types. (The alternative, e.g. executable downloads that contain 6 binary flavors, 5 of which each downloader is never going to use, would be a huge waste of bandwidth and disk space)
To be a flagship product, it only needs to be minimally functional.
If Apple wants to use it to differentiate their phones from the competition, then at a minimum it has to not suck -- which (given the sordid history of computer voice recognition) is a higher bar than you might think.
Maybe they did.
The article says that he told his colleagues to "blow away" the competition, so most likely it read as, "Blow them away." And it was misinterpreted.
Indeed -- but misinterpreted by whom? His colleagues, or by someone who was spying on his text messages? And if it was the latter, did they have a search warrant, or is this another case of the government conducting warrantless wiretaps?
(1) That quote is 17 years old.
(2) That quote isn't a proposal to ban guns, it is an admission of the political impossibility of banning guns.
Twice the strength of titanium and is able to be molded like plastic.
Do you really think that that material will be both (a) strong enough to keep from collapsing/imploding due to the air-pressure differential and (b) light enough to stay aloft, i.e. lighter than the equivalent volume of air?
It would be cool if it was, but I'll believe that when I see it.
Well, here is something you may not have considered; Whoever pays the bills makes the rules.
That's a good rule of thumb, but there's an even more important one that overrides it in this case: When you're sick, whomever has the power to provide (or deny) you health care makes the rules.
So previously, unless you are rich, that would be the insurance industry, which was free to deny you coverage, cancel your coverage, price coverage as high as possible to drive you into bankruptcy, and/or refuse to pay for needed services even if you had coverage, using whatever technicality they could dream up.
So while it's fun to imagine potential health care dystopias where faceless bureaucrats control your life through health care, let's not lose sight of the fact that we were already living in such a dystopia beforehand -- it's just that the bureaucrats' primary motivation was to "increase shareholder value". At least when the government is in control, non-rich people have a means to change unpopular policies through voting and political pressure. When it's a private company that's controlling your life, there is no democratic recourse. You take what you get and like it. The standard capitalist remedy of "don't like the service? Switch to a better competing company" doesn't work for health insurance, when you're already sick and no competing company is willing to cover you, and the insurance companies all know that.
I think the point should be to focus on the CANDIDATE instead of the party affiliation.
I don't think that's a good idea. Candidates don't come into office in a vacuum -- they are elected by their supporting party, and in the process of the election they make promises to their supporters that will hugely effect how they govern while in office.
Take Mr. Romney as a case in point. I think as a candidate he's a decent moderate, and if left to his own devices would govern as such. But in order to win the support of this year's Republican Party, he's had to swing far, far to the right, to the extend that he has publicly repudiated and condemned his own previous policies on health care, global warming, abortion, and a host of other issues. Do you really think that if elected, Romney will revert to his old, moderate self? Even if he wanted to, his Republican supporters would never allow it -- he'd either be impeached, or at best he'd become powerless after the Republicans turned on him.
So yes, the party a politician is affiliated with something to focus on. Even the best politician is not a dictator, and will have to defer to some extent to his party's positions, and it's folly to expect otherwise.
Consider Social Security. What did people do when they got old in the past? Did they die en masse in the streets? No. They generally had families support them or there were private charities that helped out.
This is only accurate for a subset of old people, who were fortunate enough to have had families or charities that were willing and able to support then.
Many, many people died quietly in their homes, due to lack of medical care, or chronic hunger, or both. The idea that old people received benefits equivalent to Social Security and Medicare through other means is quite simply wrong.
I'm like "Hey you bloody f***tards, don't you realize our country is falling apart. And all you care about is getting stoned. Can we please talk about real issue!"
I'm not a libertarian or a pot smoker, but I think legalization of marijuana is an important issue. Look at what's happening in Mexico right now -- the drug gangs are becoming more powerful than the government, decapitated bodies are left in the streets, and the whole country lives in fear.
Meanwhile, in the US, we spend billions a year in a futile effort to stem the tide of imported marijuana, we ruin the lives of thousands of harmless marijuana users by putting them in jail, and we are deeply in debt.
Legalizing marijuana would be a big step towards reducing all of those problems. The drug gangs would lose a lot of their income (and hence a lot of their power); the marijuana users (both recreational and medical) could live their lives without the constant fear of being thrown in jail, the money we spend on marijuana interdiction could be saved or spent in some other, more beneficial way, and a thriving, legal, domestic marijuana industry would provide jobs and tax revenue to the USA.
So even if you think smoking pot is a silly thing to do, there's still a lot of very good reasons to decriminalize marijuana.
Term limits need to be implemented.
We implemented term limits in California, and it didn't help matters. The main effects of term limits have been:
1) More gridlock and inefficiency, as the people who know how to do things go away, and the legislature fills with newbie legislators who don't have any experience with how the system works and don't know how to write legislation or get it passed.
2) Politicians playing musical chairs so that they can remain in politics. (Termed out as a legislator? No problem, run for some other position!)
I think the real problem with term limits is the assumption that newbies (or "outsiders" as the populists like to call them) will on average do a better job for their constituents than long-time incumbents, because the newbies haven't been "corrupted by the system" yet. I don't think reality bears that out -- while experience may corrupt some legislators, it also makes legislators more effective in their job. A seasoned legislator benefits both from personal experience about what works and what doesn't, and also from building up a network of contacts that s/he can call on to help get things done.
In what other profession would it be seen as reasonable to demand inexperience? Would you demand that your dentist be fired after 4 years so that you can have the benefit of a fresh-out-of-dental-school graduate? Would you fire your veteran programmers because you expect that hiring some newbie college students (at the same salary) will result in better code? I think "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" may have been a little too influential on people's views about government. ;^)
What good are you "closer to home issues" if the inalienable right to defend your very life and possibly defend your country and constitution from tyranny if your right to arms are severely curtailed or outright banned?
Without getting into the merits of the 2nd Amendment, let me just point out that no major politician (Republican, Democrat, or otherwise) has proposed to "severely curtail or outright ban" your right to bear arms.
The NRA, however, does raise a lot of money by scaring people with the idea that the evil liberals are secretly plotting to take away their guns.