Ultimately whether a program has a security or other kind of bug in it; that's an equivalent level problem to Turing's halting problem, and we know that that is an NP complete problem.
Which isn't to say that this product is useless, it's entirely possible to have useful approximations or rules of thumb for checking programs out. Heck, that's how people mostly do it, and automating what people do is fair enough.
No, you can use it with water cooling. You always put thermal gunk goes between the water cooled plate and the processor anyway- this is just much better gunk.
Even more surprising was that America hadn't engaged in 'shock and awe' before the invasion; although latest good news from the Pentagon is that France has now been listed as an axis of evil country, thankfully.
First, the speed of light lag was only part of the landing on/orbit around Eros problem. I know, I've spoken with many of the mission scientists. And, no, it isn't trivial. You can't dismiss it that easily.
Yes, you very much can. When the vehicle has enormously more thrust than its weight it becomes just a control issue, and people are very good at control. I'm not belittling the Eros team in any way- it's just that the problem they solved is not the same issue as landing on Deimos or even Eros with a man in the loop. You don't have to orbit at all.
Volcanoes can't give water enough heat to escape the Earth.
That's only partly true. There are interactions with solar wind and magnetospheres and partial pressures and so on. The Sun's solar wind is quite capable of blowing away water vapour.
Look at Mercury and the Moon.
Oh please! Mercury is right next to the Sun and neither body has any significant atmosphere. Water vapour is just gone from these surfaces.
The best thing to do is to talk to someone who works in this field.
No. The only thing that matters is what is actually there. The only way to find out is to travel there and find out.
This semantics needs to include concurrency and how it works. I can think of half a dozen languages (Ada, C++, Java,...) in the last 20 years that decided this was just too hard, and eventually paid for it.
Do you know of any language or system that got this right?
Do you know how hard it is to land in that kind of gravity?
Yes. It's trivial.
It took a lot of careful effort to manuver NEAR/Shoemaker around Eros.
I wasn't born yesterday. That was because the speed of light made it really difficult to remote control the vehicle at that distance. Stick a man onboard and it's really, really easy.
Asteroids formed inside the "frost-line" in the protoplanetary disk.
True, kinda. But so did the Earth. The frost-line doesn't form until the protoplanetary disk gets blown away when the Sun lit up. The Earth lost most of its water because the Earth got very hot due to volcanic activity after forming, not because of its distance from the Sun. A smaller body wouldn't suffer then same fate (although the surface ice sublimes away within the radius of the asteroid belt.)
And, no, the densities do NOT tell you that they're made of ice. Who told you this?
See this (among many, many other places): Deimos and more particularly check out Phobos
(Or are you making this up as you go?) They're densities are low because they are probably fairly porous.
Really? Where did you get porosity from?
It's a not a very dense rock, so driving in an anchor (how would you do that, anyway?)
Explosives, blow a tubular hole and screw in a crampon. You don't need much strength anyway. Deimos is tidally locked, so using a tether out towards L1 or L2 is pretty simple. Alternatively, just using a free floating station at Deimos' general orbital radius works pretty well too.
If there were in zero-g, they could float. But there's enough gravity to make that annoying, but not nearly enough to walk.
Garbage. If the gravity is 1cm/s^2, then that is 1/1,000g. It takes about 14 seconds to fall down from a height of 1m and when you hit the deck, it's like you've fallen 1mm. That's zero-g in my book. No you can't walk- but you don't need to.
Also, they'd still need to do daily exercises to keep their bones and muscles from atrophying.
Yup. It would be possible to send a centrifuge there; but it isn't known whether there is enough gravity on Mars to stop atrophy anyway.
There probably isn't that much water to start with, given that these guys are a few kilometers across.
Both hydrogen and oxygen are very abundant in the universe; and H2O seems to be common too. Do you have any idea how much mass a 'few kilometer' body contains? Clearly not. Consider a 1 km cube. 1000m by 1000m by 1000m of which say 1% is ice. If the body has a density only twice that of water, then that is 2 billion tonnes. We only need a few thousand tonnes a year at most for the foreseeable future; and there would be millions of tonnes of ice in just a 1km cube- Phobos and Deimos are much, much bigger than that; and the density of these bodies indicates are that they are made of much more ice than that.
You're better off parking a space station in orbit on its own.
Yes, probably true, although anchoring it or orbiting it around Deimos is probably indicated.
Besides the fact that he's not an astronomer, he wants to put a base on Deimos?
No, he's right, or in orbit around it. It makes a lot of sense. There's probably ice on Deimos and/or Phobos. If so, that's rocket fuel; the space equivalent of oil. And Deimos is ideally placed for this- it's high up above Mars (but not so far that you can't go down), and close in delta-v terms to the Earth, ideal for sending fuel back to Earth orbit to fuel Mars and Lunar missions. It's also a great source for rock for use for radiation shielding in LEO. And don't imagine for a moment that a Deimos base precludes a Mars base- it enables a Mars base.
The surface gravity on those moons is virtually non-existant. (For Deimos, being smaller, it's under 1 cm/sec^2, I believe.) No one could even walk around properly.
Yes, it's saves a lot of money, because you can fiddle the election without spending a lot. Hmm. But both sides will be doing that, so it could escalate. Oh well either way, the result should appear to be fair whilst having nothing to do with the way the population actually voted; good job nobody trusts exit polls. It's called democracy I guess. Except maybe with an e infront.
Re:More Sustainable than Aluminum ??
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Bamboo Bike A Reality
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, but it's never found in its pure form. It takes a lot of energy to get workable aluminum out of the ore. You've got to heat it to 2300K, which takes a lot of energy. One report said that production of 1 kg of aluminum dumps 44 kg of CO2 into the air.
It's not the electricity or energy so much- aluminum is extracted via electrolysis- but the enormous amount of electricity for this is often taken from hydroelectric plants which doesn't generate much CO2 (except during construction of the dam).
However, the electrolysis uses carbon electrodes and they are used up by the process, they react with oxygen ions to produce CO2- and that's where a lot of the CO2 comes from.
But he didn't know that, on his particular setup, that a journalled disk operating systems (ext3) would turn out to be less reliable than another journalled disk operating system (reiserfs); when he installed it.
Actually, come to think of it, he still doesn't know that until he switches the root across- a journalled disk operating system doesn't usually guarantee the contents of the files, only the metadata (although you can sometimes configure it), so it may very well be that it doesn't make much difference.
Yes, but is viewing a web page violating the copyright on the web page? It is not. Neither is copying the information from RAM and displaying it on the screen. IF the data doesn't get held on harddisk then I think you have a fairly persuasive argument that you are merely cacheing the data at the user- but you would need to do reasonable efforts to ensure that the user can't keep the music- they are only renting it for a short while.
The closest thing US law has to a "library copy" for music is that nonprofits are allowed to lend music.
Ok, perhaps the term 'library' doesn't capture quite what I mean. Think video store- the video store buys a copy and gets first purchaser rights; and can then hire it out multiple times but only once per copy at a time.
Remember mp3.com? They bought 300,000 CDs and made one digital copy of each. That's perfectly legal, under fair use, for you and me. But when a corporation does it for profit (and by definition everything a corporation does is for profit), it's copyright infringement. MP3.com got pwn3ed by the major record labels for this.
Yeah, but cacheing has been ruled legal, so having a whole bunch of CDs in a dukebox system that pulls the song off the CD into ram and then spools it down to the customer is probably fair use. If it's already in the cache and they want it again- that's fair use too. It's probably not illegal until you write it onto a harddisk or something. There's nothing illegal there- it's just a virtualised digital library; so they'd need to pay for a library copy (I think they are more expensive to buy).
Uh, it wasn't a xenotransplant (a transplant from another species), it was just a transplant from a donor. And yes, he will have to take immunosuppressants.
No, free software is all about control of free software. The point is that BK is not free, but collaborates with free software; both benefit from the relationship. This guy is an ally.
Now, by developing a drop-in replacement you are stabbing the guy in the back. You don't do that to allies. Stabbing allies in the back means that less people end up helping, and contributing to free software and there's more chance that free software will get legally or practically stomped on by the enemy- the Gates of this world.
McVoy is NOT Gates. McVoy is not in a position to become Gates. The Free software organisation can stomp on McVoy at any time by producing a workalike project- but you just don't do that to your friends. Sure, in the fullness of time, when McVoy has recouped his investment, then you'd look at it, or if McVoy actually started putting terms and conditions in that attempt to lock Linux in to using a commercial product- sure then you attack. Right now- are you completely nuts?
No it doesn't. Look, the Linux community are getting a commercial product for free (i.e. no cost).
If the guy that spent money developing the product asks that you not make a direct, compatible, free software GPLd competitor then I think under the circumstances that that is only fair. I mean, he's trying to make some money here, and he's not making it from the Linux community. That's certainly not illegal, and it's not inherently immoral (unless you're Richard Stallman). I mean look at Red Hat, Mandrake or any of the distros; they make money. It's how you make money.
I mean, if he starts charging or putting really unreasonable restrictions on this commercial product then the Linux community can always decant Linux and put it into another incompatible source control system in pretty short order- we are NOT locked in.
This McVeigh guy is pretty OK in my book, he's got to protect his product though otherwise he will go bankrupt; and then the software development will stop; and the product won't necessarily be GPLd. So it's in the communities interest to help keep his business going and not create a workalike product which would cut his legs from under him.
Not only something you've never thought of though- GAs are also good at optimising things. How about a car gearbox that works out whether you are in a sporty mood or not, and shifts automatically? How about a car tailored to your body size and shape? How about one that designs the engine characteristics and matches it to your prefered driving style. Perhaps you like cruising, or perhaps you like accelerating upto 65 and then cruising, how about it gears the car for that, and ignores top speed. etc. etc.
Re:Don't always need an intact DNA
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Cloning Mammoths
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· Score: 1
Oh, I don't know, compared to the cost of some things, it's not so much.
After all, it's endangered; you don't get much more endangered than the woolly mammoth;-)
Re:Too many egg-heads spoil the idea.
on
Inkblot Passwords
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· Score: 1
BTW your middle example really doesn't belong because the space shuttle wasn't ment to be a business venture with a coresponding balance sheet, and shareholders.
That's at best half true. The Shuttle was sold to congress on the idea that it would pay back from a cost accounting angle. It just hasn't turned out that way; it costs about twice as much as the other American launchers per kg, most noteably the manrated Saturn V that it replaced. With hindsight NASA would very probably have been much better served scaling down the Saturn V.
Re:Microsoft Research?
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Inkblot Passwords
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They hire very bright people and pay them a lot. But bright people's great ideas and great research doesn't mean that any of that good stuff will ever make it into production code.
Yes, but on the other side of the coin, bright people and their great ideas don't necessarily deserve to be made into a product.
Before everyone jumps down my throat, all I mean is that a bright idea, something that can be made to work, that's cool, that 'egg' head people like (speaking as atleast a quasiegg head myself), don't necessarily make for a great product.
I mean look at 3G, what's it for? Look at the Space Shuttle; cool as hell, but not a profitable thing. Segway?
At their best marketing drones actually work out how the product can sell, they position it so people actually want to buy it. Segway makes a great toy for rich kids for example; but as a transport tool for getting to work, it may well not be that great; that's the kind of thing that marketing, at their best, sort out. At their worst they completely fuck it all up of course;-)
Re:Don't always need an intact DNA
on
Cloning Mammoths
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· Score: 1
Also, you won't know what part goes where. It would be like piecing together a shredded picture of a page of random dots. You don't know what a certain peice "says" until you have it in the context of the sequence around it. Even then, it takes a lot of work to figure it out.
Yes, but that's what the human genome project did- they took the genome, deliberately chopped it up into fragments, and then sequenced each fragment. You then solve the giant jigsaw on a computer.
Re:Don't always need an intact DNA
on
Cloning Mammoths
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· Score: 1
No, no. You would fix up the chromosomes before cloning them.
Don't always need an intact DNA
on
Cloning Mammoths
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· Score: 4, Interesting
You can probably take two different, damaged copies of the DNA and PCR amplify them up, and generate a protein to stick them back together in the right way. It would be fiddly as hell, but in principle you can do it perfectly.
Once you have an intact copy of the DNA you can clone with it.
Alternatively, take the fragments of mammoth DNA and sequence them, then run the sequenced DNA through a DNA 'printer'. These machines exist- you feed in the DNA sequence on CD rom and out pops the actual DNA you want. It might take years or even decades(!) but it would certainly be possible in principle.
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Which isn't to say that this product is useless, it's entirely possible to have useful approximations or rules of thumb for checking programs out. Heck, that's how people mostly do it, and automating what people do is fair enough.
No, you can use it with water cooling. You always put thermal gunk goes between the water cooled plate and the processor anyway- this is just much better gunk.
Even more surprising was that America hadn't engaged in 'shock and awe' before the invasion; although latest good news from the Pentagon is that France has now been listed as an axis of evil country, thankfully.
Yes, you very much can. When the vehicle has enormously more thrust than its weight it becomes just a control issue, and people are very good at control. I'm not belittling the Eros team in any way- it's just that the problem they solved is not the same issue as landing on Deimos or even Eros with a man in the loop. You don't have to orbit at all.
Volcanoes can't give water enough heat to escape the Earth.
That's only partly true. There are interactions with solar wind and magnetospheres and partial pressures and so on. The Sun's solar wind is quite capable of blowing away water vapour.
Look at Mercury and the Moon.
Oh please! Mercury is right next to the Sun and neither body has any significant atmosphere. Water vapour is just gone from these surfaces.
The best thing to do is to talk to someone who works in this field.
No. The only thing that matters is what is actually there. The only way to find out is to travel there and find out.
No weight, no pushing in.
Newton would be shocked to hear you say that.
Do you know of any language or system that got this right?
Yes. It's trivial.
It took a lot of careful effort to manuver NEAR/Shoemaker around Eros.
I wasn't born yesterday. That was because the speed of light made it really difficult to remote control the vehicle at that distance. Stick a man onboard and it's really, really easy.
Asteroids formed inside the "frost-line" in the protoplanetary disk.
True, kinda. But so did the Earth. The frost-line doesn't form until the protoplanetary disk gets blown away when the Sun lit up. The Earth lost most of its water because the Earth got very hot due to volcanic activity after forming, not because of its distance from the Sun. A smaller body wouldn't suffer then same fate (although the surface ice sublimes away within the radius of the asteroid belt.)
And, no, the densities do NOT tell you that they're made of ice. Who told you this?
See this (among many, many other places): Deimos and more particularly check out Phobos
(Or are you making this up as you go?) They're densities are low because they are probably fairly porous.
Really? Where did you get porosity from?
It's a not a very dense rock, so driving in an anchor (how would you do that, anyway?)
Explosives, blow a tubular hole and screw in a crampon. You don't need much strength anyway. Deimos is tidally locked, so using a tether out towards L1 or L2 is pretty simple. Alternatively, just using a free floating station at Deimos' general orbital radius works pretty well too.
Garbage. If the gravity is 1cm/s^2, then that is 1/1,000g. It takes about 14 seconds to fall down from a height of 1m and when you hit the deck, it's like you've fallen 1mm. That's zero-g in my book. No you can't walk- but you don't need to.
Also, they'd still need to do daily exercises to keep their bones and muscles from atrophying.
Yup. It would be possible to send a centrifuge there; but it isn't known whether there is enough gravity on Mars to stop atrophy anyway.
There probably isn't that much water to start with, given that these guys are a few kilometers across.
Both hydrogen and oxygen are very abundant in the universe; and H2O seems to be common too. Do you have any idea how much mass a 'few kilometer' body contains? Clearly not. Consider a 1 km cube. 1000m by 1000m by 1000m of which say 1% is ice. If the body has a density only twice that of water, then that is 2 billion tonnes. We only need a few thousand tonnes a year at most for the foreseeable future; and there would be millions of tonnes of ice in just a 1km cube- Phobos and Deimos are much, much bigger than that; and the density of these bodies indicates are that they are made of much more ice than that.
You're better off parking a space station in orbit on its own.
Yes, probably true, although anchoring it or orbiting it around Deimos is probably indicated.
No, he's right, or in orbit around it. It makes a lot of sense. There's probably ice on Deimos and/or Phobos. If so, that's rocket fuel; the space equivalent of oil. And Deimos is ideally placed for this- it's high up above Mars (but not so far that you can't go down), and close in delta-v terms to the Earth, ideal for sending fuel back to Earth orbit to fuel Mars and Lunar missions. It's also a great source for rock for use for radiation shielding in LEO. And don't imagine for a moment that a Deimos base precludes a Mars base- it enables a Mars base.
The surface gravity on those moons is virtually non-existant. (For Deimos, being smaller, it's under 1 cm/sec^2, I believe.) No one could even walk around properly.
Yeah right, real important, no walking.
Yes, it's saves a lot of money, because you can fiddle the election without spending a lot. Hmm. But both sides will be doing that, so it could escalate. Oh well either way, the result should appear to be fair whilst having nothing to do with the way the population actually voted; good job nobody trusts exit polls. It's called democracy I guess. Except maybe with an e infront.
It's not the electricity or energy so much- aluminum is extracted via electrolysis- but the enormous amount of electricity for this is often taken from hydroelectric plants which doesn't generate much CO2 (except during construction of the dam).
However, the electrolysis uses carbon electrodes and they are used up by the process, they react with oxygen ions to produce CO2- and that's where a lot of the CO2 comes from.
Actually, come to think of it, he still doesn't know that until he switches the root across- a journalled disk operating system doesn't usually guarantee the contents of the files, only the metadata (although you can sometimes configure it), so it may very well be that it doesn't make much difference.
The closest thing US law has to a "library copy" for music is that nonprofits are allowed to lend music.
Ok, perhaps the term 'library' doesn't capture quite what I mean. Think video store- the video store buys a copy and gets first purchaser rights; and can then hire it out multiple times but only once per copy at a time.
Yeah, but cacheing has been ruled legal, so having a whole bunch of CDs in a dukebox system that pulls the song off the CD into ram and then spools it down to the customer is probably fair use. If it's already in the cache and they want it again- that's fair use too. It's probably not illegal until you write it onto a harddisk or something. There's nothing illegal there- it's just a virtualised digital library; so they'd need to pay for a library copy (I think they are more expensive to buy).
Uh, it wasn't a xenotransplant (a transplant from another species), it was just a transplant from a donor. And yes, he will have to take immunosuppressants.
"Apples" probably more what the user wanted.
Sigh. You want to rule the world then. Boring!
No, free software is all about control of free software. The point is that BK is not free, but collaborates with free software; both benefit from the relationship. This guy is an ally.
Now, by developing a drop-in replacement you are stabbing the guy in the back. You don't do that to allies. Stabbing allies in the back means that less people end up helping, and contributing to free software and there's more chance that free software will get legally or practically stomped on by the enemy- the Gates of this world.
McVoy is NOT Gates. McVoy is not in a position to become Gates. The Free software organisation can stomp on McVoy at any time by producing a workalike project- but you just don't do that to your friends. Sure, in the fullness of time, when McVoy has recouped his investment, then you'd look at it, or if McVoy actually started putting terms and conditions in that attempt to lock Linux in to using a commercial product- sure then you attack. Right now- are you completely nuts?
If the guy that spent money developing the product asks that you not make a direct, compatible, free software GPLd competitor then I think under the circumstances that that is only fair. I mean, he's trying to make some money here, and he's not making it from the Linux community. That's certainly not illegal, and it's not inherently immoral (unless you're Richard Stallman). I mean look at Red Hat, Mandrake or any of the distros; they make money. It's how you make money.
I mean, if he starts charging or putting really unreasonable restrictions on this commercial product then the Linux community can always decant Linux and put it into another incompatible source control system in pretty short order- we are NOT locked in.
This McVeigh guy is pretty OK in my book, he's got to protect his product though otherwise he will go bankrupt; and then the software development will stop; and the product won't necessarily be GPLd. So it's in the communities interest to help keep his business going and not create a workalike product which would cut his legs from under him.
Not only something you've never thought of though- GAs are also good at optimising things. How about a car gearbox that works out whether you are in a sporty mood or not, and shifts automatically? How about a car tailored to your body size and shape? How about one that designs the engine characteristics and matches it to your prefered driving style. Perhaps you like cruising, or perhaps you like accelerating upto 65 and then cruising, how about it gears the car for that, and ignores top speed. etc. etc.
Reproductive pornography? You pervert!
After all, it's endangered; you don't get much more endangered than the woolly mammoth ;-)
That's at best half true. The Shuttle was sold to congress on the idea that it would pay back from a cost accounting angle. It just hasn't turned out that way; it costs about twice as much as the other American launchers per kg, most noteably the manrated Saturn V that it replaced. With hindsight NASA would very probably have been much better served scaling down the Saturn V.
Yes, but on the other side of the coin, bright people and their great ideas don't necessarily deserve to be made into a product.
Before everyone jumps down my throat, all I mean is that a bright idea, something that can be made to work, that's cool, that 'egg' head people like (speaking as atleast a quasiegg head myself), don't necessarily make for a great product.
I mean look at 3G, what's it for? Look at the Space Shuttle; cool as hell, but not a profitable thing. Segway?
At their best marketing drones actually work out how the product can sell, they position it so people actually want to buy it. Segway makes a great toy for rich kids for example; but as a transport tool for getting to work, it may well not be that great; that's the kind of thing that marketing, at their best, sort out. At their worst they completely fuck it all up of course ;-)
Yes, but that's what the human genome project did- they took the genome, deliberately chopped it up into fragments, and then sequenced each fragment. You then solve the giant jigsaw on a computer.
No, no. You would fix up the chromosomes before cloning them.
Once you have an intact copy of the DNA you can clone with it.
Alternatively, take the fragments of mammoth DNA and sequence them, then run the sequenced DNA through a DNA 'printer'. These machines exist- you feed in the DNA sequence on CD rom and out pops the actual DNA you want. It might take years or even decades(!) but it would certainly be possible in principle.