... to the idea of a star wars film beginning without John Williams conducting the LSO, playing the 20th Century Fox opening them that then leads into the main title.
Basic was my first programming language, and I actually spent almost 10 years using it before moving onto more structured languages like C, but it wasn't too long after I learned Basic that I found that my favorite features of the language were the ones that enabled me to extend it with my own customizations, which I would have to write in assembler. If I remember correctly, the relevant basic keywords in the implementation that I used were 'usr' and '&... practically turning it into another language with all of the extensions that I would throw in.
You don't have to necessarily go faster that the speed of light... just a significant fraction of it. Travelling at 99% of the speed of light, for example, it might take more than 500 actual years to get to a planet 500 light years away, but in that time, you will have only aged a few years yourself.
This news says absolutely nothing about the chance of life elsewhere in the universe... it only says something about our chance of being able to detect it as such.
Not really... you would still *have* to take it off every day, which you do not have to do with a conventional watch. Some people might, which is fine... but not everyone does. For myself, I wear my watch almost 24/7. The only time I take my watch off is when I'm having a shower.
When you an have that connectivity without making it less convenient to use as a watch, sure. Daily recharges are inconvenient. A watch powered by battery should not ever need to be recharged and should require no more than an annual battery replacement (which takes less time than a recharge) that can easily be performed by an end user with a common battery type such as CR2032. If they cannot get the power that they need to sustain that kind of life from such a common cell, then simply put, tech needs to improve before it is practical.
Simply put, we're not there yet.... And won't be for the foreseeable future. Maybe someday, perhaps... Even likely, I'd dare say. But not soon. Not without an unprecedented breakthrough in power consumption, anyways
One is that they do a pretty good job portraying various kinds of geeks. Since it is a comedy it makes light of unflattering and silly characteristics that those geeks have.
I have more than enough in common in my real with the character of Sheldon to be regularly compared to him in real life.... not only by my wife, but by other people who know me and also watch the show. At my last job, I had been there for only four days before somebody asked me if I watched BBT, saying that I reminded him a lot of Sheldon Cooper (except not quite as dickheaded). In all honesty, I probably would not have liked the character or the show when I was a lot younger, but I think I've mellowed out as I've gotten older and have learned to be able to find the humor in the things that I do that other people might find a bit... strange.
Another is jealousy. The characters on the show have generally had a good deal of success in love, despite being geeky, with very pretty women. This is something that many of the real life geeks on Slashdot do not share. Hence, there is jealousy of the characters.
If so, I think that may be a self-esteem and maturity issue... a sense that may be prevalent only among people who have not yet learned to accept themselves for who they are, and spend much of their lives thinking that there might be something wrong with them, rather than just embracing the kind of person they really are and making the most of that. Speaking from personal experience, that's exactly when love comes running right at you.... when you aren't in the least worrying about it, and are actually happy with who you are.
Finally there is the hipster-ish anti-pop culture thing.
That's seriously a lot of what I suspected it may be, actually. I'm not sure if there's a proper term for the phenomenon, but I do know quite a few people who are like that.
A big source of my aversion is that they are actors pretending to be geeks
You know what? I think that's the first objection to the show that I've seen which makes sense. And it's true... Parsons, Galecki, Helberg... Nayyar... none of them are particular geeky or nerdy. Ironically, of the original cast, Cuocco is probably the nerdiest of the bunch, and I wouldn't rank her as being that nerdy except in relation to those other four. Of the current cast, however, Mayim Bialik probably gives the show the most geek cred... an actress who actually has a real-life doctorate in the same field as her character.
And to be fair... the writers of the show certainly do their homework from a scientific point of view. Whenever they are talking about stuff that wouldn't make sense to most of the general populace, the stuff they are talking about isn't just technobabble. It's actual stuff relevant to real-world science. The scripts are written with the help of people with degrees in the appropriate fields, and in particular, the assorted formulae that you see on whiteboards or the like in the background of some shots are all completely genuine, and make sense to somebody who was literate in the appropriate fields.
One is compelled to wonder what the aversion to the show is that I see so prevalently on slashdot. Rr is the antipathy based on a sentiment that seems generally opposed to anything that might be categorized as pop culture... a notion that in my observation seems most prevalent among nerds in the under-30 crowd.
For myself, I like the show... my wife introduced me to it in what I would discover was season 3, and she now routinely mentions to me that my "Sheldon is showing" whenever I start acting like a dick without really meaning to.
There's a big difference... since in your example, person C was actually *IN* country A while the law was being broken. In this case, the data servers reside in country B, and were never actually in A's jurisdiction.
If the servers are located in country B, and appear to be breaking a law in country A, how does country A get country B to confiscate the servers when no law is being broken in country B?
Unless they are going to reimburse customers for the extra bandwidth that the use because they are also transmitting, all this is going to do is inconvenience a lot of people as they hit their monthly caps a lot sooner... because they could now transmitting a lot of what they receive, which basically means that counting both uploading and downloading traffic, their usage will almost double.
no one's colonizing Mars and no one's mining asteroids. Ever.
Unless you believe the human race is going to be wiped out by some catastrophe, and are interested in being accurate, you should probably replace "ever" with "in the foreseeable future". Otherwise, all you're saying is that something won't ever happen which actually *COULD* happen someday, but will not happen for so sufficiently long from now that nobody in that future would ever hold it against you for believing that it never would.
You realize that such a beam, if sufficiently concentrated, could be positively catastrophic for anything to fly through, right? It's equally problematic for anyone living nearby if the aiming system on the satellite drifts by even the smallest amount, given the distance of transmission.
But hey... if you want something with obvious military application, just say so. Don't disguise it as something that's supposed to be used for an allegedly peaceful activity like power generation.
Also, even microwaves have some efficiency loss in transmission, and in particular can be heavily affected by things like rainclouds unless you propose having the thing be so powerful that it will basically cook anything that happens to be at higher altitudes, which could introduce additional efficiency losses as it superheats water vapor in the upper atmosphere.
1) In orbit, there's no attenuation of solar energy. On the ground, you have attenuation from the atmosphere,
I get that.... but unless you are just going to be using the energy *in* space, you are going to have to beam the energy to earth from orbit anyways, and so you're still dealing with atmospheric losses. You might get less losses with microwaves than you do with higher frequency radiation, but it's still going to exist... and unless the efficiency of conversion from solar energy to microwaves approaches 100%, I can't see it offering a significant savings.
2) Japan doesn't have a lot of open area to set up solar panels. Collecting it in orbit and beaming it in concentrated form to Japan is probably more feasible and efficient than trying to cover every building in Japan with PV panels.
Sure... but then how do you use the energy you've collected in space without building collectors on the ground anyways? Collectors that will take at least as much space as solar panels .
Collecting energy in space is fine for using the energy *IN* space... but as soon as you add the notion of transmitting it to earth, you are going to be dealing with most (but not all) of the same problems that you would be just trying to collect solar energy directly from the ground. The only significant difference is that you can collect energy from a geosync satellite almost 24/7/365 (with up to about 75 minutes or so of darkness every night for a period of about 8 weeks in the time surrounding the spring and autumn equinoxes). But in practice, I'm not so sure it would really be significantly better than using ground-based systems because of the other factors.
Well, this happened in California, where sobriety checkpoints are entirely legal.
In most states, the police do not ever even need a probable cause to suspect that a driver may have been drinking in order to stop them and ask if they have had anything to drink. If they hear of an allegation of an impaired driver, they are going to be obligated to stop the driver and confirm it, and it would be a tragedy if an impaired driving report were accurate and an accident occurred which took one or more other people's lives while the police did nothing, simply because they did not have any reasonable basis to suspect that the report was genuine beforehand.
I'm not contesing the notion that collecting energy in space is more efficient or that it would save real-estate, or avoid a lot of the problems you find with ground-based collection, but unless you are intending on actually *using* that energy in space, you are still going to have to beam it down to earth in some form. That is going to require ground-based collectors that will use no less real estate than solar collectors, and you'll be dealing with atmospheric efficiency losses anyways. Plus, you'll only be transmitting *some* of the energy that the sun provided... since the satellite's efficiency is not likely to be anywhere near a hundred percent. All of the additional hours of energy availability that you get from having a collector in space may simply not actually be worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Never" is a really really long time, just fyi...
... to the idea of a star wars film beginning without John Williams conducting the LSO, playing the 20th Century Fox opening them that then leads into the main title.
Basic was my first programming language, and I actually spent almost 10 years using it before moving onto more structured languages like C, but it wasn't too long after I learned Basic that I found that my favorite features of the language were the ones that enabled me to extend it with my own customizations, which I would have to write in assembler. If I remember correctly, the relevant basic keywords in the implementation that I used were 'usr' and '&... practically turning it into another language with all of the extensions that I would throw in.
You don't have to necessarily go faster that the speed of light... just a significant fraction of it. Travelling at 99% of the speed of light, for example, it might take more than 500 actual years to get to a planet 500 light years away, but in that time, you will have only aged a few years yourself.
This news says absolutely nothing about the chance of life elsewhere in the universe... it only says something about our chance of being able to detect it as such.
Not really... you would still *have* to take it off every day, which you do not have to do with a conventional watch. Some people might, which is fine... but not everyone does. For myself, I wear my watch almost 24/7. The only time I take my watch off is when I'm having a shower.
So if I understand you correctly, a dweeb is just a geek who has actually matured since high school. Got it.
When you an have that connectivity without making it less convenient to use as a watch, sure. Daily recharges are inconvenient. A watch powered by battery should not ever need to be recharged and should require no more than an annual battery replacement (which takes less time than a recharge) that can easily be performed by an end user with a common battery type such as CR2032. If they cannot get the power that they need to sustain that kind of life from such a common cell, then simply put, tech needs to improve before it is practical.
Simply put, we're not there yet.... And won't be for the foreseeable future. Maybe someday, perhaps... Even likely, I'd dare say. But not soon. Not without an unprecedented breakthrough in power consumption, anyways
I have more than enough in common in my real with the character of Sheldon to be regularly compared to him in real life.... not only by my wife, but by other people who know me and also watch the show. At my last job, I had been there for only four days before somebody asked me if I watched BBT, saying that I reminded him a lot of Sheldon Cooper (except not quite as dickheaded). In all honesty, I probably would not have liked the character or the show when I was a lot younger, but I think I've mellowed out as I've gotten older and have learned to be able to find the humor in the things that I do that other people might find a bit... strange.
If so, I think that may be a self-esteem and maturity issue... a sense that may be prevalent only among people who have not yet learned to accept themselves for who they are, and spend much of their lives thinking that there might be something wrong with them, rather than just embracing the kind of person they really are and making the most of that. Speaking from personal experience, that's exactly when love comes running right at you.... when you aren't in the least worrying about it, and are actually happy with who you are.
That's seriously a lot of what I suspected it may be, actually. I'm not sure if there's a proper term for the phenomenon, but I do know quite a few people who are like that.
You know what? I think that's the first objection to the show that I've seen which makes sense. And it's true... Parsons, Galecki, Helberg... Nayyar... none of them are particular geeky or nerdy. Ironically, of the original cast, Cuocco is probably the nerdiest of the bunch, and I wouldn't rank her as being that nerdy except in relation to those other four. Of the current cast, however, Mayim Bialik probably gives the show the most geek cred... an actress who actually has a real-life doctorate in the same field as her character.
And to be fair... the writers of the show certainly do their homework from a scientific point of view. Whenever they are talking about stuff that wouldn't make sense to most of the general populace, the stuff they are talking about isn't just technobabble. It's actual stuff relevant to real-world science. The scripts are written with the help of people with degrees in the appropriate fields, and in particular, the assorted formulae that you see on whiteboards or the like in the background of some shots are all completely genuine, and make sense to somebody who was literate in the appropriate fields.
One is compelled to wonder what the aversion to the show is that I see so prevalently on slashdot. Rr is the antipathy based on a sentiment that seems generally opposed to anything that might be categorized as pop culture... a notion that in my observation seems most prevalent among nerds in the under-30 crowd.
For myself, I like the show... my wife introduced me to it in what I would discover was season 3, and she now routinely mentions to me that my "Sheldon is showing" whenever I start acting like a dick without really meaning to.
In Canada, you can watch last week's episode on CTV's website.
[nt]
There's a big difference... since in your example, person C was actually *IN* country A while the law was being broken. In this case, the data servers reside in country B, and were never actually in A's jurisdiction.
If the servers are located in country B, and appear to be breaking a law in country A, how does country A get country B to confiscate the servers when no law is being broken in country B?
Unless they are going to reimburse customers for the extra bandwidth that the use because they are also transmitting, all this is going to do is inconvenience a lot of people as they hit their monthly caps a lot sooner... because they could now transmitting a lot of what they receive, which basically means that counting both uploading and downloading traffic, their usage will almost double.
Unless you believe the human race is going to be wiped out by some catastrophe, and are interested in being accurate, you should probably replace "ever" with "in the foreseeable future". Otherwise, all you're saying is that something won't ever happen which actually *COULD* happen someday, but will not happen for so sufficiently long from now that nobody in that future would ever hold it against you for believing that it never would.
That doesn't make you right, however.
Which asshole are you referring to?
You realize that such a beam, if sufficiently concentrated, could be positively catastrophic for anything to fly through, right? It's equally problematic for anyone living nearby if the aiming system on the satellite drifts by even the smallest amount, given the distance of transmission.
But hey... if you want something with obvious military application, just say so. Don't disguise it as something that's supposed to be used for an allegedly peaceful activity like power generation.
Also, even microwaves have some efficiency loss in transmission, and in particular can be heavily affected by things like rainclouds unless you propose having the thing be so powerful that it will basically cook anything that happens to be at higher altitudes, which could introduce additional efficiency losses as it superheats water vapor in the upper atmosphere.
Needs to be about one tenth of the price before it will make much sense for anyone but people with money to burn to get one
I get that.... but unless you are just going to be using the energy *in* space, you are going to have to beam the energy to earth from orbit anyways, and so you're still dealing with atmospheric losses. You might get less losses with microwaves than you do with higher frequency radiation, but it's still going to exist... and unless the efficiency of conversion from solar energy to microwaves approaches 100%, I can't see it offering a significant savings.
Sure... but then how do you use the energy you've collected in space without building collectors on the ground anyways? Collectors that will take at least as much space as solar panels .
Collecting energy in space is fine for using the energy *IN* space... but as soon as you add the notion of transmitting it to earth, you are going to be dealing with most (but not all) of the same problems that you would be just trying to collect solar energy directly from the ground. The only significant difference is that you can collect energy from a geosync satellite almost 24/7/365 (with up to about 75 minutes or so of darkness every night for a period of about 8 weeks in the time surrounding the spring and autumn equinoxes). But in practice, I'm not so sure it would really be significantly better than using ground-based systems because of the other factors.
Straight out of alt.conspiracy.jfk, and other similar newsgroups.
Thanks for the entertaining read.
Well, this happened in California, where sobriety checkpoints are entirely legal.
In most states, the police do not ever even need a probable cause to suspect that a driver may have been drinking in order to stop them and ask if they have had anything to drink. If they hear of an allegation of an impaired driver, they are going to be obligated to stop the driver and confirm it, and it would be a tragedy if an impaired driving report were accurate and an accident occurred which took one or more other people's lives while the police did nothing, simply because they did not have any reasonable basis to suspect that the report was genuine beforehand.
I'm not contesing the notion that collecting energy in space is more efficient or that it would save real-estate, or avoid a lot of the problems you find with ground-based collection, but unless you are intending on actually *using* that energy in space, you are still going to have to beam it down to earth in some form. That is going to require ground-based collectors that will use no less real estate than solar collectors, and you'll be dealing with atmospheric efficiency losses anyways. Plus, you'll only be transmitting *some* of the energy that the sun provided... since the satellite's efficiency is not likely to be anywhere near a hundred percent. All of the additional hours of energy availability that you get from having a collector in space may simply not actually be worth it.
Not a terribly useful link if one does not subscribe to new scientist. Only the first paragraph is readable. The rest requires a subscription.