Well, if it wasn't in a partition... it could (I suppose) have been in known absolute sectors on the hard drive, outside the partitioning system in the same way that the boot code in a BIOS knows to get the partition table from [device]/Sector0, then to read the partition table to find out where the boot code is located. So, one way that I could see it being done would be to have BIOS code that responds to the second power switch, and goes to [device]/Sector(BIOSmaxSectorNumber), then read a location from there with some boot code in it.
A guess : when you wrote your partition table and then made file systems on the partitions, you didn't clear the formatted partitions and overwrite everything with zeros. (Who does on the size of hard drives this decade?) So, even after writing your own partition table, and formatting the partitions, much of the Media Centre boot code could have survived. Second guess : the Media Centre hard drive had X sectors, but the partition scheme only covered X-[some] sectors. "some" could well be quite small (display a splash screen ; read some configuration file ; boot Windoze with certain parameters) ; conceivably just a few sectors. Just because writing compact code to the bare metal isn't exactly popular these days, doesn't mean that the Evil Empire couldn't hire Melto do it.
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier âoeaddâ instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
No, I still don't understand the "separate constants" bit ; at least not while I'm sober. Hail Mel!
since it reveals what underlying philosophy and values we stand for.
No, actually and overwhelmingly one's religion gives a window into the philosophy and values of the more dominant one of their parents, and in turn a window into the more dominant of their pairs of grandparents, and going back considerable generations in the past.
Most people get their religion from their parents, not from a free choice. The right to indoctrinate children is one of the things that the religious fight for vigorously, because any religious proselytizer knows for certain that if they lose control of the children, their religion is dead.
And that is what links what Prof.Dawkins was saying about the American fear of evolution ("biology / geology" in his words) in schools to the thousands of people who have died because of the orange-green segregation of schooling in Ulster, and the continuing wars of the monotheisms.
(Did the significance of putting the children in his thought experiment (which has really been carried out, repeatedly) into green and orange shirts carry across the Atlantic? In the War of Ulster, Orange = Loyalist = Protestant and Green = Republican = Catholic. Which is historically hilarious ; but this is ("was," hopefully) a war of religion and tribal dominance, and not really about politics or history.)
That's a feature, not a bug. It's not a feature that you want, probably, but it's a feature that the people who designed the system and think that they still own it wanted.
I'm a bit surprised that you got through putting a full-weight distro like Fedora on it and didn't notice the presence of peculiar partitioning schemes. Or was your "install" a matter of dropping the boot DVD into the drive and selecting the "unattended install" option. (It's been a long time since I did a Fedora myself - I don't know when / if it acquired such capabilities. Normally I like to know what is going onto my computers.
If you are intelligent, more intelligent than the dribbling idiot on the sports pitch, then surely you've got every right to be arrogant. If you've not got the intelligence to back it up, then the fact that Computing Science (science courses in general) are harder than most other courses will pretty soon give you a slap in the teeth to correct your misplaced arrogance. And if it's not misplaced... well, what's wrong with being right?
As for whining "normals"? Fuck 'em. Choose an orifice (or a protrusion, if that's your fancy) and fuck 'em.
6000â sale value. And it's value for knowledge? Hugely more.
Or, look at it the other way - what would be the cost of replicating it, complete with all it's information about (as one of my class-mates specialises in analysing) the provenance of the gold itself (trace elements and isotopic evidence), the provenance of any inclusions within it (mineralogy, bulk and trace elements and isotropic evidence, as well as the shape, size and location of each and every inclusion). The wear marks on the dies from which the coins were struck (there were four different emperors depicted in the hoard, so at least 4 sets of dies ; possibly 4 separate mints ; are other coins known from the same mints, or maybe even the same dies?)
Just the analytical work to determine what present techniques can reveal would cost more than your 6000â nominal value. Then to replicate it... start counting.
What measurement techniques will be available in a working lifetime... who could know?
Destroying an archaeological relic for mere money... it's barbarism. And that is precisely what the Portable Antiquities Sceme is intended to avoid, by keeping relics as relics, and within the system of traceable curation, so people can come back to them in the future with better, more sensitive (and often cheaper) analytical techniques.
This is ofc not for the real value as that can only be determined by auctioning it away.
That would only determine the monetary value, which is almost always utterly trivial. The only significant value is the archaeological value, and that is what the PAS (Portable Antiquities Scheme ; link up-thread) is intended to preserve.
Of course, if you only count money as important, what price do you put on your mind? Or, since you wouldn't be able to appreciate the loss of your mind, what price do you put on your nearest living relative's mind?
It's almost certainly Treasure, in the meaning of the 1996 Treasure Act. So it should be (and already has) reported under the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The finder will get a proportion of the assessed value.
Since a large part of the point of the PAS is to encourage finders to actually report their finds so that their archaeological value can be preserved by proper excavation, study and curation, the assessment of value is transparent and independent, and generally reckoned to be reasonably fair. It is, after all, the easiest way to avoid a criminal record once you've found a potentially valuable item over 300 years old.
One thing is, it requires another human to do it thoroughly. Which isn't a problem in a society based on slave labour. It's a bit more of a problem without the slaves.
Trebuchets came to Europe in the 11th or 12th century, well after the Western Roman empire had collapsed. The Romans had various types of catapult, but not trebuchets (at least, if you believe their "Being a General for Dummies" books).
2. I have a ton of computers running 24/7 at my house anyway (I never turn them off), so I might as well put those empty cycles to use.
Err, why do you have a number (a considerable number, by implication) of computers idling at home? To provide a base workload for your AC, to keep that in use?
I can see grounds for running a couple of machines 24x7 (a file server and authentication system, a firewall), but most other services (web server, mail server...) you should be able to run, virtualised if necessary, on one of those few machines.
Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf which is (probably) in distant (IIRC about 15000 AU?) orbit around the Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B stars (orbiting each other at about 300 AU separation).
There is a moderate possibility that Proxima Cent is not actually in orbit around Alpha Centauri A and B, but with around 10 other stars in the same area of the sky having similar proper motions, then they probably constitute a "moving group" of common origin.
Mars is a poor choice of places to go. Medium-size asteroids would be much simpler to colonise, multiple times. (Re-form the exterior to form a structural shell with adequate radiation shielding ; spin ; fill with gas ; inhabit. When living room gets tight, terraform another asteroid.) It wouldn't be Earth, it wouldn't be very Earth-like, but it'd be easier by several orders of magnitude than terraforming Mars (if that were possible without effectively rebuilding it completely, which as a geologist, I rather doubt).
Please describe the machinery required to traverse four light years of space, with absolutely no resources available from Earth once it's on its way,
With the currently plausible technology, it'd have to be a generation ship. We'd need them for exploring and fully utilising the Solar System, so by the time that we're in a position to seriously consider expanding to Alpha Centauri, we'll have generations of experience with them.
and is 100% fail safe
An unnecessary constraint. you only need to persuade the first generation of pilots, engineers, life-support specialists etc that they've got an adequate likelhood of surviving to their (natural) death on board. The offspring won't have any choice about it - they won't have the delta-V and energy to turn round without spending years in orbit near a star... i.e. the Alpha Centauri system.
and will get there either within a useful human lifespan,
See previous comment. If you're effectively taking your family and all you really care about with you, on a on-way trip, then it doesn't necessarily have to be completed in your life span. Just set up the system so that the next generation onboard have no option but to continue with the mission that you signed up to. It's as dirty a trick as that played on pretty much all the children of the (European) settlers of America and Australia. [SOB]
In reality, quite likely the appropriate crew for the first inter-stellar voyage will have been living on "generation ships" working the outer reaches of the Solar System for several generations. So, the shock of reaching adolescence and finding out that you really don't have the choice of taming horses on the Argentine Pampas won't exactly be a new situation.
or describe a way to (on top of the machine from step 1) slow down life processes reversibly and safely.
Unnecessary. It may not be impossible, but the absence of such a technology isn't exactly a show-stopper.
You can name it anything you want, but the people who get to decide the official name are the discoverers (with some restrictions, probably from IAU). So if you really want to name the (putative) planet "Tattoo Ine" like something out of Star Trek, you'd better get started on your post-doctoral work in planet discovery.
(I'm not sure what the actual naming rules for "popular" names for extra-solar planets are ; the formal names are the likes of "Alpha Cen Bb". It may be that there are no rules for "popular" names. I'm projecting from the rules for minor planets, which seems reasonable.)
I am a Nu-Scribe (driver), in Nu-Egypt. I use an electronic Nu-Pen (no easy analogy) to write on Nu-Papyrus (SSD). You, oh Pharaoh, instruct me to write upon the Nu-Papyrus, but I realise that the Nu-Papryrus is worn too thinly to write upon safely. I attempt to relocate to a less-used block of Nu-Papyrus, but none are available.
First question : Do I encounter the problem more often in a 10-sheet stack of Nu-Papyrus, or in a 100-sheet stack? "Doh!"
Second question : As a Nu-Scribe, do I
1- write, and damage the Nu-Papyrus, including other data on the Nu-Papyrus?
2- Humbly beg my Pharaoh to be given new sheets of Nu-Papyrus?
3- Pull a sheet of hidden Nu-Papyrus out of my loincloth and write upon that, without indicating to my Pharaoh that there is a problem looming in the future?
(Other strategies may be available.)
Probably, the best all-round solution would be to go read-only, "Oh Pharaoh! forgive me but I need more Nu-Papyrus!!"
And if I recall correctly, that is pretty much what happened when the Galileo probe had a tape-memory problem. Which was managed by a firmware update from the ground. "Write less, oh Nu-Scribe, upon the Nu-Papyrus, for thou wilt get none more!"
According to the advertising that is sent to the outside world, made in America, by Americans, and probably for American consumption, if you survive being shot on sight by a police office (in justifiable fear of her/his life on account of the freedom of guns), then you go into a SuperMax jail until you die, then you fertilze the (infertile) soil.
But that is advertising by Americans, about Americans, for Americans. You claim to be na American, so why is it wrong?
(Oh, what, advertisers tell lies, and don't expect consequences? Meh.)
Slashdot Mirror
Have you considered "rouge" or some other form of "slap" from yo' beatch's make-up bucket?
A guess : when you wrote your partition table and then made file systems on the partitions, you didn't clear the formatted partitions and overwrite everything with zeros. (Who does on the size of hard drives this decade?) So, even after writing your own partition table, and formatting the partitions, much of the Media Centre boot code could have survived. Second guess : the Media Centre hard drive had X sectors, but the partition scheme only covered X-[some] sectors. "some" could well be quite small (display a splash screen ; read some configuration file ; boot Windoze with certain parameters) ; conceivably just a few sectors. Just because writing compact code to the bare metal isn't exactly popular these days, doesn't mean that the Evil Empire couldn't hire Melto do it.
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier âoeaddâ instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
No, I still don't understand the "separate constants" bit ; at least not while I'm sober. Hail Mel!
No, actually and overwhelmingly one's religion gives a window into the philosophy and values of the more dominant one of their parents, and in turn a window into the more dominant of their pairs of grandparents, and going back considerable generations in the past.
Most people get their religion from their parents, not from a free choice. The right to indoctrinate children is one of the things that the religious fight for vigorously, because any religious proselytizer knows for certain that if they lose control of the children, their religion is dead.
And that is what links what Prof.Dawkins was saying about the American fear of evolution ("biology / geology" in his words) in schools to the thousands of people who have died because of the orange-green segregation of schooling in Ulster, and the continuing wars of the monotheisms.
(Did the significance of putting the children in his thought experiment (which has really been carried out, repeatedly) into green and orange shirts carry across the Atlantic? In the War of Ulster, Orange = Loyalist = Protestant and Green = Republican = Catholic. Which is historically hilarious ; but this is ("was," hopefully) a war of religion and tribal dominance, and not really about politics or history.)
I'm a bit surprised that you got through putting a full-weight distro like Fedora on it and didn't notice the presence of peculiar partitioning schemes. Or was your "install" a matter of dropping the boot DVD into the drive and selecting the "unattended install" option. (It's been a long time since I did a Fedora myself - I don't know when / if it acquired such capabilities. Normally I like to know what is going onto my computers.
As for whining "normals"? Fuck 'em. Choose an orifice (or a protrusion, if that's your fancy) and fuck 'em.
OK ; perhaps I'm being a bit over-cynical. Three hours.
The STI clinic called with your results.
Why do you think that she shaves as well as feeding forms?
Or, look at it the other way - what would be the cost of replicating it, complete with all it's information about (as one of my class-mates specialises in analysing) the provenance of the gold itself (trace elements and isotopic evidence), the provenance of any inclusions within it (mineralogy, bulk and trace elements and isotropic evidence, as well as the shape, size and location of each and every inclusion). The wear marks on the dies from which the coins were struck (there were four different emperors depicted in the hoard, so at least 4 sets of dies ; possibly 4 separate mints ; are other coins known from the same mints, or maybe even the same dies?)
Just the analytical work to determine what present techniques can reveal would cost more than your 6000â nominal value. Then to replicate it ... start counting.
What measurement techniques will be available in a working lifetime ... who could know?
Destroying an archaeological relic for mere money ... it's barbarism. And that is precisely what the Portable Antiquities Sceme is intended to avoid, by keeping relics as relics, and within the system of traceable curation, so people can come back to them in the future with better, more sensitive (and often cheaper) analytical techniques.
That would only determine the monetary value, which is almost always utterly trivial. The only significant value is the archaeological value, and that is what the PAS (Portable Antiquities Scheme ; link up-thread) is intended to preserve.
Of course, if you only count money as important, what price do you put on your mind? Or, since you wouldn't be able to appreciate the loss of your mind, what price do you put on your nearest living relative's mind?
Since a large part of the point of the PAS is to encourage finders to actually report their finds so that their archaeological value can be preserved by proper excavation, study and curation, the assessment of value is transparent and independent, and generally reckoned to be reasonably fair. It is, after all, the easiest way to avoid a criminal record once you've found a potentially valuable item over 300 years old.
One thing is, it requires another human to do it thoroughly. Which isn't a problem in a society based on slave labour. It's a bit more of a problem without the slaves.
Trebuchets came to Europe in the 11th or 12th century, well after the Western Roman empire had collapsed. The Romans had various types of catapult, but not trebuchets (at least, if you believe their "Being a General for Dummies" books).
Err, why do you have a number (a considerable number, by implication) of computers idling at home? To provide a base workload for your AC, to keep that in use?
I can see grounds for running a couple of machines 24x7 (a file server and authentication system, a firewall), but most other services (web server, mail server ...) you should be able to run, virtualised if necessary, on one of those few machines.
There is a moderate possibility that Proxima Cent is not actually in orbit around Alpha Centauri A and B, but with around 10 other stars in the same area of the sky having similar proper motions, then they probably constitute a "moving group" of common origin.
I sit corrected. It was Alpha Centauri.
You want to colonize a star. Fine. Go ahead. Don't forget to leave the mike on "transmit" as you land, I'd like a soundtrack for the nursery.
It's been a few years since I last read that one ; I don't think that the pink elephants in platform-soled shoes came from the Centauris.
But the techniques are getting better. And the "transit" method (OGLE, Kepler projects) has different constraints.
Mars is a poor choice of places to go. Medium-size asteroids would be much simpler to colonise, multiple times. (Re-form the exterior to form a structural shell with adequate radiation shielding ; spin ; fill with gas ; inhabit. When living room gets tight, terraform another asteroid.) It wouldn't be Earth, it wouldn't be very Earth-like, but it'd be easier by several orders of magnitude than terraforming Mars (if that were possible without effectively rebuilding it completely, which as a geologist, I rather doubt).
With the currently plausible technology, it'd have to be a generation ship. We'd need them for exploring and fully utilising the Solar System, so by the time that we're in a position to seriously consider expanding to Alpha Centauri, we'll have generations of experience with them.
An unnecessary constraint. you only need to persuade the first generation of pilots, engineers, life-support specialists etc that they've got an adequate likelhood of surviving to their (natural) death on board. The offspring won't have any choice about it - they won't have the delta-V and energy to turn round without spending years in orbit near a star ... i.e. the Alpha Centauri system.
See previous comment. If you're effectively taking your family and all you really care about with you, on a on-way trip, then it doesn't necessarily have to be completed in your life span. Just set up the system so that the next generation onboard have no option but to continue with the mission that you signed up to. It's as dirty a trick as that played on pretty much all the children of the (European) settlers of America and Australia. [SOB]
In reality, quite likely the appropriate crew for the first inter-stellar voyage will have been living on "generation ships" working the outer reaches of the Solar System for several generations. So, the shock of reaching adolescence and finding out that you really don't have the choice of taming horses on the Argentine Pampas won't exactly be a new situation.
Unnecessary. It may not be impossible, but the absence of such a technology isn't exactly a show-stopper.
Paul Wiegert (http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/) did some of the work 15-odd years ago. Some of the earlier work is online at http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/papers/1997AJ.113.1445.pdf.
(I'm not sure what the actual naming rules for "popular" names for extra-solar planets are ; the formal names are the likes of "Alpha Cen Bb". It may be that there are no rules for "popular" names. I'm projecting from the rules for minor planets, which seems reasonable.)
First question : Do I encounter the problem more often in a 10-sheet stack of Nu-Papyrus, or in a 100-sheet stack? "Doh!"
Second question : As a Nu-Scribe, do I
(Other strategies may be available.)
Probably, the best all-round solution would be to go read-only, "Oh Pharaoh! forgive me but I need more Nu-Papyrus!!"
And if I recall correctly, that is pretty much what happened when the Galileo probe had a tape-memory problem. Which was managed by a firmware update from the ground. "Write less, oh Nu-Scribe, upon the Nu-Papyrus, for thou wilt get none more!"
(Oh, what, advertisers tell lies, and don't expect consequences? Meh.)