I can't really decide if you're just trolling, but I'll bite:
designing rockets from scratch *is* rocket science, it's pretty hard and there are a lot of things you'll only find during real tests with real hardware. Failures are expected, even if everybody hopes they won't. SpaceX is pretty close, but not quite there yet, and all those 'bright people' that you mention will be working hard to figure out what went wrong instead of bitching about it. Think of it as another lesson learned and instead of being upset at not working flawlessly be impressed by all the stuff that did work, such as the brand new engine (all nine of them), that they pretty much got right the first time.
By the looks of it SpaceX will be a serious contender in the short run, and I highly doubt that even if another failure occured that 'funding would be pulled if another failure would occur'. The parties that invest in this sort of thing are not usually known for getting cold feet easily.
Furthermore, the Sun provides an incredible amount of energy. Off the top of my head I think it is near 400 watts per square meter or approximately 1.8*10^17 WATTS total at any given time.
Also, I did not reply to you but to the parent which responded to the 400 W estimate, stating that it was closer to 1 KW.
The so called 'solar constant' is actually 1.367 (that should be enough decimals) KW / square meter.
The actual power produced depends on the angle of incidence (lattitude) and the local weather (cloud cover).
The current crop of commercially available solar cells hovers around 16% efficiency when new, the best lab models do 40%+ ( http://www.doe.gov/news/4503.htm ).
Then of course there's concentration and all kinds of tricks to capture that power in a different form than electricity, and here the efficiencies can be considerably higher still. Electricity is the 'steak' of the power industry, but there are plenty of uses for 'burger' (heat).
They're all quoting some radiohead press release that I've yet to find, until then apologies are in order.
So, sorry for jumping the gun and not checking the press release first, but I just can't find the thing. I expect when - if - I do find it that we'll find that all those news articles that are out there will quote the press release word for word.
if you play mindgames with your kids don't look up all surprised to find out they've been playing mind games with you. You lose the moral high ground pretty quickly that way.
Radiohead is not distributing a single byte of code, open source or otherwise. They are giving out a dataset that you can use to play with using other software, which in fact is open source.
In other words, the summary title 'radiohead open sources music video' is absolutely misleading, there is no such thing as an 'open source music video', and radiohead didn't make one.
They made a music video using some artsy 3d scanner and then converted that to a format that allows you to view it in some open source viewer / analyzer.
It's a promotional gimmick, nothing else. It could have been pink elephants and it would have been just as relevant (not at all) to open source.
The better title would have read 'radiohead releases data you can play with using open source software', that at least would have been correct.
Yep. So, educate your kids, make sure they are independent and capable of critical thought. That means you'll also make them indpendent of you and capable of thinking critically about you.
Most parents have a hard time with that, I think the payoff of that strategy comes when your kids are out of sight. You may be older and wiser, but you're simply not going to be always there when stuff happens. If your child has the ability to hold their own in situations that you can not predict then chances are they'll be ok. If they can only operate by remote control then they'll be in deep shit the moment the remote stops working.
I was merely illustrating with a personal example what can happen if you ratchet down on the 'control' knob too far and you lose the trust factor.
I was in no way assuming that he's doing to his kids what my stepdad (thanks for the spelling correction by the way, I was thinking in dutch and writing in english...) was doing to me. Just what the possible consequences could be. My stepdad never even came in to the picture until I was 12, parent posters children are right now 7 and 9.
The instance I used to illustrate happened when I was 16.
There's a nice middle ground beteen 'overbearing, controling' and 'disinterested, weak'. It's called respectful, trusting. Treating your kids like that is going to go a long long way towards solving most of the issues that you can run into as a parent because your children wil not be afraid to talk to you about anything for fear of restrictions of their freedom. It will also be mirrored in the way they will respect you in turn, when you need it most (and when they're closest to getting themselves in to real trouble).
As someone else in this thread remarked that his mom was a firm believer in the teachings of the burned hand or something to that effect, I fully second that. You need to trust your children to make their own mistakes, you need to respect them as an individual, not treat them as property.
If you really think you need to bug your childrens computer, track their every whereabout and snoop/search their stuff then you are well underway to losing their respect, once lost you will probably *never* regain it. Which means that when they will need you they won't even think of approaching you.
second that... sorry, I missed your post before I wrote mine. Whoever built the system goofed, and to screw up with flight control systems at this level should be grounds for termination and never ever to get work in mission critical systems again. There really is no room for error in systems like this.
I've worked a bit in the aerospace industry, specifically on software that would estimate the amount of fuel required for a flight taking into account alternative landing areas, winds and so on.
The amount of checking I did on that code bordered on the paranoid but I really could not live with some plane going down somewhere because of a stupid error in design.
Come to think of it, mission critical software should probably be open source, *always* so you can see what you're entrusting your life to and so that the 'many eyes' out there can point out the flaws. (assuming they're not eyes that will use that knowledge to bring down your system...).
The problem is that kids will find ways around stuff that their parents restrict, no matter how clever you are with tech they'll be more clever than that. Kids today (and probably at any point in the past) can and will run rings around their parents, using their peers and technology to help them with that. Tracking their whereabouts is not going to help you one bit with this. (after all, all it tells you is where their cellphones were...)
That sets you up for a bit of a problem in the long term because they'll already have a habit of going around your back by the time it will really matter.
Better to get your kids to trust you, and for you to trust them. That way if something comes up that they don't know how to deal with they'll come to you first, instead of going to the 'peer' group (I use the world loosely) and hiding it from you because you're going to restrict it.
Forbidden fruits and all that...
The problems won't really start until they're in their teens, for your daughter somewhere around age 13, for your boy 14 or 15. That's when it matters that there is a huge bond of trust between you and them, basically you need to be able to let them go at that age and *know* they'll make the right decisions, even if you're not there.
It'll make you sleep better too:)
Right now you can control your kids but that time will be over sooner than you can possibly imagine, but the kind of relationship that you make with them now will persist long past that point and trust once gained is hard to lose.
Just for a small example from my own life:
I wasn't allowed to have a moped, but I was crazy about engines and anything associated with it, so a friend of mine who lived about 5 miles from my house housed my moped in his garage box... nobody, and I mean really nobody, including my control freak of a steph father, had any idea of what was going on. So much for all that control... (and believe me, you look like an angel in comparision, your intentions are clearly good).
So, when I had a kid myself I decided that control was not going to cut it, assuming that history would repeat itself. Give your kid repect and trust, get the same in return. Control your kids and sooner or later they'll slip the leash and you won't be the wiser until it's much too late.
Funny, I figured out the ex-military bit before you mentioned it.
House != barracks... if you want your kids to succeed in life and not just house them until they're 18 or something like that you'll have to allow them a lot of independence, otherwise they'll always be looking to you for their everyday decisions and one day you won't be there.
It's like bicycling with training wheels, at some point they have to come off, best if your parent is still around so they can catch you when you fall (or console you if they didn't catch you):)
Good luck there, it sounds like you are in a pretty difficult situation and you're doing the best you can.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't really decide if you're just trolling, but I'll bite:
designing rockets from scratch *is* rocket science, it's pretty hard and there are a lot of things you'll only find during real tests with real hardware. Failures are expected, even if everybody hopes they won't. SpaceX is pretty close, but not quite there yet, and all those 'bright people' that you mention will be working hard to figure out what went wrong instead of bitching about it. Think of it as another lesson learned and instead of being upset at not working flawlessly be impressed by all the stuff that did work, such as the brand new engine (all nine of them), that they pretty much got right the first time.
By the looks of it SpaceX will be a serious contender in the short run, and I highly doubt that even if another failure occured that 'funding would be pulled if another failure would occur'. The parties that invest in this sort of thing are not usually known for getting cold feet easily.
on the contrary, it will teach you to preview ;)
use freedos...
you do realize the AC id is '0' do you ?
also, he said: "--I'm new here.", I think the joke is on you.
yes, even less evil than google.
That's a pretty good slogan for cuil actually.
maybe you should try lowering the barrier between the sides ?
hm, yes, that does detract from it somewhat. I hadn't seen those though, so it was new to me :)
cool ! I hope you like it.
From your posting:
Furthermore, the Sun provides an incredible amount of energy. Off the top of my head I think it is near 400 watts per square meter or approximately 1.8*10^17 WATTS total at any given time.
Also, I did not reply to you but to the parent which responded to the 400 W estimate, stating that it was closer to 1 KW.
hehe, whoever modded you down has no sense of humor.
because someone is pulling your leg. take a bunch of random facts, string them together with a halfway plausible story line.
can't be too hard to run a power line over some moose. The deep water and big mountains are more of a problem.
The so called 'solar constant' is actually 1.367 (that should be enough decimals) KW / square meter.
The actual power produced depends on the angle of incidence (lattitude) and the local weather (cloud cover).
The current crop of commercially available solar cells hovers around 16% efficiency when new, the best lab models do 40%+ ( http://www.doe.gov/news/4503.htm ).
Then of course there's concentration and all kinds of tricks to capture that power in a different form than electricity, and here the efficiencies can be considerably higher still. Electricity is the 'steak' of the power industry, but there are plenty of uses for 'burger' (heat).
F. Pohl is one of the great masters of SF, if you haven't heard of him go read 'the space merchants', then check when it was written...
I have a new way to deal with Roland Piquepaille spam, every time I see an article by him I go away for 3 days.
So, see you on the 24th...
it's pretty much all over the web:
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/radiohead-embrace-open-source-426545
They're all quoting some radiohead press release that I've yet to find, until then apologies are in order.
So, sorry for jumping the gun and not checking the press release first, but I just can't find the thing. I expect when - if - I do find it that we'll find that all those news articles that are out there will quote the press release word for word.
well, 18 or not you're on my friends list for that
not that it will buy you lunch or something like that but I'll take an 18 year old with a responsible attitude any day over a 50 year old loudmouth :)
if you play mindgames with your kids don't look up all surprised to find out they've been playing mind games with you. You lose the moral high ground pretty quickly that way.
Radiohead is not distributing a single byte of code, open source or otherwise. They are giving out a dataset that you can use to play with using other software, which in fact is open source.
In other words, the summary title 'radiohead open sources music video' is absolutely misleading, there is no such thing as an 'open source music video', and radiohead didn't make one.
They made a music video using some artsy 3d scanner and then converted that to a format that allows you to view it in some open source viewer / analyzer.
It's a promotional gimmick, nothing else. It could have been pink elephants and it would have been just as relevant (not at all) to open source.
The better title would have read 'radiohead releases data you can play with using open source software', that at least would have been correct.
It's a clear case of using open source as a buzz word to get publicity, and /. has fallen nicely for it.
Yep. So, educate your kids, make sure they are independent and capable of critical thought. That means you'll also make them indpendent of you and capable of thinking critically about you.
Most parents have a hard time with that, I think the payoff of that strategy comes when your kids are out of sight. You may be older and wiser, but you're simply not going to be always there when stuff happens. If your child has the ability to hold their own in situations that you can not predict then chances are they'll be ok. If they can only operate by remote control then they'll be in deep shit the moment the remote stops working.
I was merely illustrating with a personal example what can happen if you ratchet down on the 'control' knob too far and you lose the trust factor.
I was in no way assuming that he's doing to his kids what my stepdad (thanks for the spelling correction by the way, I was thinking in dutch and writing in english...) was doing to me. Just what the possible consequences could be. My stepdad never even came in to the picture until I was 12, parent posters children are right now 7 and 9.
The instance I used to illustrate happened when I was 16.
There's a nice middle ground beteen 'overbearing, controling' and 'disinterested, weak'. It's called respectful, trusting. Treating your kids like that is going to go a long long way towards solving most of the issues that you can run into as a parent because your children wil not be afraid to talk to you about anything for fear of restrictions of their freedom. It will also be mirrored in the way they will respect you in turn, when you need it most (and when they're closest to getting themselves in to real trouble).
As someone else in this thread remarked that his mom was a firm believer in the teachings of the burned hand or something to that effect, I fully second that. You need to trust your children to make their own mistakes, you need to respect them as an individual, not treat them as property.
If you really think you need to bug your childrens computer, track their every whereabout and snoop/search their stuff then you are well underway to losing their respect, once lost you will probably *never* regain it. Which means that when they will need you they won't even think of approaching you.
second that... sorry, I missed your post before I wrote mine. Whoever built the system goofed, and to screw up with flight control systems at this level should be grounds for termination and never ever to get work in mission critical systems again. There really is no room for error in systems like this.
I've worked a bit in the aerospace industry, specifically on software that would estimate the amount of fuel required for a flight taking into account alternative landing areas, winds and so on.
The amount of checking I did on that code bordered on the paranoid but I really could not live with some plane going down somewhere because of a stupid error in design.
Come to think of it, mission critical software should probably be open source, *always* so you can see what you're entrusting your life to and so that the 'many eyes' out there can point out the flaws. (assuming they're not eyes that will use that knowledge to bring down your system...).
The problem is that kids will find ways around stuff that their parents restrict, no matter how clever you are with tech they'll be more clever than that. Kids today (and probably at any point in the past) can and will run rings around their parents, using their peers and technology to help them with that. Tracking their whereabouts is not going to help you one bit with this. (after all, all it tells you is where their cellphones were...)
That sets you up for a bit of a problem in the long term because they'll already have a habit of going around your back by the time it will really matter.
Better to get your kids to trust you, and for you to trust them. That way if something comes up that they don't know how to deal with they'll come to you first, instead of going to the 'peer' group (I use the world loosely) and hiding it from you because you're going to restrict it.
Forbidden fruits and all that...
The problems won't really start until they're in their teens, for your daughter somewhere around age 13, for your boy 14 or 15. That's when it matters that there is a huge bond of trust between you and them, basically you need to be able to let them go at that age and *know* they'll make the right decisions, even if you're not there.
It'll make you sleep better too :)
Right now you can control your kids but that time will be over sooner than you can possibly imagine, but the kind of relationship that you make with them now will persist long past that point and trust once gained is hard to lose.
Just for a small example from my own life:
I wasn't allowed to have a moped, but I was crazy about engines and anything associated with it, so a friend of mine who lived about 5 miles from my house housed my moped in his garage box... nobody, and I mean really nobody, including my control freak of a steph father, had any idea of what was going on. So much for all that control... (and believe me, you look like an angel in comparision, your intentions are clearly good).
So, when I had a kid myself I decided that control was not going to cut it, assuming that history would repeat itself. Give your kid repect and trust, get the same in return. Control your kids and sooner or later they'll slip the leash and you won't be the wiser until it's much too late.
Funny, I figured out the ex-military bit before you mentioned it.
House != barracks... if you want your kids to succeed in life and not just house them until they're 18 or something like that you'll have to allow them a lot of independence, otherwise they'll always be looking to you for their everyday decisions and one day you won't be there.
It's like bicycling with training wheels, at some point they have to come off, best if your parent is still around so they can catch you when you fall (or console you if they didn't catch you) :)
Good luck there, it sounds like you are in a pretty difficult situation and you're doing the best you can.
Jacques.