I think that it is currently believed that birds are born knowing how to fly already. They don't fly right away because their wing muscles aren't strong enough.
They do need to learn to fine tune their flying however, every birds body is going to be a bit different fo course.
Does that mean if you get sued for defamation of character, or slander, that they are responsible, since it's their intellectual property? Gee, wouldn't that be ironic?;-)
So if you slander or defame Radio Shack after leaving... they're to blame?;-)
I've seen the project plan. It doesn't seem unreasonable.
The 50 year estimate was from NASA. The NASA guy is more or less paid to say that it will take much longer than it could, because if the project is successful it could lead to the massive scaling back of NASA's budget. By NASA spreading FUD on the project, he can put off the day that this happens.
Whilst it could reduce NASAs budget, my take on it is that NASAs budget might go UP if this was successful; but this risk sits uneasily with NASA, NASA is not noted for bold plans to reduce costs.
Yeah, but they do sell stronger stuff for some limited applicability- I think you can buy the 35% stuff in small bottles for bleaching wood.
The 30+% H2O2 is not quite as bad as you say; it is better than most acids, but you don't mess around with it- it certainly can kill you. I heard of one guy that got covered with the stuff- he was hosed down, ripped off all his clothes and got hosed down some more; and he was completely OK, except he was a bit white for a few days (as was everyone else around him, but for a different reason!;-)
Nah. Stuff you get over the counter is at the very most 70%; probably more like 35%, but in any case its loaded with stabilisers and topped up with water. The stuff for rocketry has no stabilisers, and no water, it's also very difficult to get hold of- almost no one will sell it to you.
Anything below 72% has too much water in it to react well, it gives you damp steam with some O2 mixed in. It will burn Kero, but not well.
If not then it ought to be. Same goes for regular small model rockets available at hobby shops and other places. It's dangerous and should be outlawed.
The FAA has taken jurisdiction of the 'problem'. You can't launch anything without a license. That goes for aeroplanes too; and the commonality is pretty close, provided they are manned. The rocket community takes safety very seriously. Incidentally, the government has banned launches by American citizens anywhere in the world without a launch license; but launch licenses are available for people that can show they know what they are doing.
Bottom line- no it's not dangerous; the FAA are very paranoid.
Actually, Hydrogen Peroxide is an ok/poor fuel on its own, but mixed with a hydrocarbon like Kerosene it's probably capable of making orbit in a single stage.
In some ways it's better than LOX- it's 'specific impulse density' is slightly higher than LOX. This means you get more kick per unit volume of tank (although it is heavier too). However, since rockets are mostly tanks, it's not a silly fuel.
In normal applications HP ("HTP") is used for attitude jets because it is a 'storable propellent'. This means that you can put it in a tank and leave it there for over a year without any big issues. LOX evaporates. Also HTP is a monopropellent, so it's fairly easy to work with.
The Space Shuttle uses storable propellent for its OMS engines, although not HTP. Some russian rockets use HTP as a fuel to run their turbopumps IRC.
The saying about rocket science is true: "Rocket science ain't rocket science anymore".
Forget innovation. There's all the tech we need already worked. We need the economics to work out- launching a lot does wonders for the economics. Launch every day and twice on tuesdays and the costs come down- that's the big secret. That's why the Space Shuttle costs so much: they don't/can't launch enough.
Carmack is smart enough to do this stuff- he doesn't need professional engineers, but he can/will get them as he needs to. But rockets aren't hard.
No, you're assuming that the concept of leech makes sense. It only makes sense if:
a) AT&T have lost control of their own network so that users can take as much bandwidth as they want.
In that case, AT&T are in trouble and need to do something.
or:
b) they want to screw more money out of their existing customers.
In the normal way, the congestion protocols in the internet are quite good at ensuring fairness. If the users are actually fiddling with the protocols AT&T should exclude those users from the network. AT&T need to be able to throttle both upstream and downstream bandwidth usage. They need to manage their network.
10 megabyte is utterly tiny. I've downloaded more than that in the last 10 minutes.
Problem is, traffic shaping throttles your peak or burst bandwidth.
Nonsense. Traffic shaping usually works by averaging your bandwidth usage over a period, say 1/2 an hour, and then if you have exceeded the average you've paid for, and there is congestion, then you get throttled back. But the details can vary, there's no exact definition.
The point is this:
I pay for a 576 Kb/s link, of which they guarantee I get only 1/50th guaranteed bandwidth to the internet. That means I am guaranteed 10 Kb/s all day every day.
That means that I should be able to download 108 MB/day; average- so far today I've download 84 MB in the last couple of hours... I just checked; and that's probably a heavy download day for me; but not like when I'm downloading Linux distros.
According to your approach I should have paid how much? I already paid for this much bandwidth... Without too much trouble I can go over 3 gig a month without ever going over my paid for allowance. In Australia I would be charged more for that. They charge 15.9c per megabyte over 300 megabytes. Not that's extortionate.
AT&T has started separating out the 'leeches' ("heavy users") from average users, and applying negative feedback (higher prices) to their leeching behavior. Again, you can see how it takes a centralized administration (AT&T) to bring the system back into balance.
No no. AT&T are very able to control the bandwidth available to anyone on their network, lookup up 'traffic shaping'; it's interesting that they have chosen not to do this. Apart from a few crackers there are no leeches.
The real point is that most people who buy a broadband contract off them don't understand what they have just signed, so when congestion occurs, they start moaning. AT&T aren't going to go "well you shouldn't have signed the contract if you didn't understand it", so they've created this fictitious 'leech' guy who is supposedly stealing all the bandwidth. Then AT&T realised that they could actually make money for bandwidth they had already sold, by charging over a certain download limit- but it's just profiteering, there's no real issue, or atleast not if AT&T are running their network well.
I don't agree with your 4 'hopes'. These do not cover all the options you have in designing these networks. There's no hoping- you design it to have certain properties. If you write the software, you have central control anyway, in your terms. Every node in a P2P network can be a policeman if necessary.
In a system like the gnutella network, where there is no 'central system' to enforce 'community-minded' behavior, the eventual collapse of the system can be predicted as a function of overall population, presuming that there are always a few people who are more selfish than the rest.
Sounds logical doesn't it? In fact it isn't necessarily so. Consider the internet, the IP infrastructure is P2P in fact; let's apply what you said to it:
"In a system like the internet, where there is no central system to enforce community-minded behaviour; the eventual collapse of the system can be predicted as a function of overall population, presuming that there are always a few people who are more selfish than the rest."
Doesn't sound so obvious anymore does it?
Actually, this is an example of iterated prisoners dilemma; there is no known solution to that in the general case. It all depends critically on the details. However, in the case of Gnutella, I think that Gnutella lacks some features that would have allowed it to weather situations that Kazaa seems to handle very much better.
There's always going to be some leeches. The point is to make sure that the leeches don't gain anything by abusing the mechanisms the network supplies- with Gnutella, and to some extent Kazaa, they do gain... if they end up abusing it too much- the network dies.
The peer-to-peer system pretends to be a virtual network over a real network using point-to-point links to establish proximity relationships between sets of peers, mostly ignoring physical proximity and bandwidth constraints.
Actually, you mostly don't want to ignore these constraints. The P2P should make use of closer servers (mostly, but not exclusively).
In order to get better performance for themselves, people play "the prisoners dilemma", and rat everyone else out with clients that gang up on requests to ensure disproportionately favorable service.
I don't see that this is necessarily a real issue. After all the server that has the file you want can keep a queue of requestors, and serve it in strict first come, first served order. 'Take a ticket and sit down over there.' It works. Asking more than once doesn't get you anywhere; and may even get you lower down the list.
The only real way to deal with this is to define a new protocol that is not virtual point-to-point linked.
Unclear. Very unclear.
Now take active attacks. "Automatic Karma" can deal with dummy files -- "poisoning"... at least until they start intermixing bad with good.
Yes, but users can usually play files before they've finished and cryptographic hashing of file contents can preclude people spoofing files, even when downloaded from multiple servers simultaneously.
In theory it is possible to move air around electrically- for example, you can turn the air into a plasma and then sweep the plasma backwards to give thrust. However air at STP does not ionise at all easily, so huge power sources would be needed, but then blimps can carry many tonnes, so it's not totally inconceivable to carry a nuclear reactor around.
However plasmas might appear on radar, and plasma would tend to be visible (if formed outside the vehicle).
Still, I'm not sure I buy any of this. In particular I wonder how easy it would be to hide a really huge vehicle like that during construction- satellites would tend to spot it for one thing.
An honest to goodness spammer led astray to the darkside of stock market manipulation, which happens to be very illegal...
Oh I shall be so upset when they are rotting in jail, or bankrupted for the rest of their natural life- I just don't know how I will manage to console myself...
Yeah, but the hard bit is to get a functioning design at all. If they have a design porting it to an Asic should be fairly straigtforward.
Besides, if you send the design to Altera, they can manufacture a whole bunch of Asics for you. In theory... whether the resulting ASIC would be fast enough is unclear. (Doubt it.)
How come they don't ask that when you visit America?
What so they could roll out the welcome mat?;-)
Well, they do ask you if you've been involved in war crimes, but if you're a Nazi that managed to avoid this; then you'd probably feel quite at home in modern totalitarian america.;-)
All kidding aside, (America is not totalitarian yet) it's probably just because Nazis haven't threatened to overthrow the American way lately (although WWII was a bit like that, but the Nazis lost.)
"Are you or have you ever been an Islamic extremist." would be a good replacement right now;-)
Well, obviously, part of the commons is Linux, and this is a Linux-related news feed. So to the extent that the commons is communism, then always.
Apparently some have a difficult time understanding the difference between libertarianism and communism (hard to believe). To explain using Linux as an example:
Apparently some anonymous cowards don't know that things can have things in common (no pun intended) without being at all the same thing. I said to the extent that that was true. Common property ownership is a part of communism, but it's also a part of government, or marriages; this does not mean that they are communistic either.
Well, obviously, part of the commons is Linux, and this is a Linux-related news feed. So to the extent that the commons is communism, then always.
The thing is though, I certainly don't agree that the concept of the 'commons' is the same as communism. One is a concept of resource that is for general consumption, the other is a form of social organisation. They are not the same thing at all.
Anyway, nice troll. One question though, are you or have you ever been a member of the Nazi party BTW?;-)
Incidentally, speeding is illegal because while you may own the car, you do not own the road. Build your own road on your own property and race on it as much as you like.
Precisely, precisely my point.
Incidentally, changing the IMEI is illegal because while you may own the phone, you do not own the network. Build your own network and change the identifier as much as you like.
In this case, it's about tinkering with a piece of electronics in my possession. If it's not mine, doing so is already illegal.
That's the point: it isn't illegal to do that.
If it is mine, there's utterly no reason why it should be illegal.
Really? So setting the ID to match someone else's phone is perfectly ok? Huh?
I'm against this law because it's my phone and that modifying it as I see fit is not wrong. Explain to me why it is wrong.
Listen dork, it's very simple. You live in a society that keeps its stability by following laws. The laws are semiarbitrary. Is speeding dangerous? Not necessarily, if you know what you are doing; does that mean that if I know what I am doing I can speed? Nope. You've lost that ability because its too much hassle to work out who can do it, and who can't.
Maybe there's some good reason for allowing people to change this number. I can't think of a single one; but perhaps there is. Big fucking deal; the number of illegimate uses of changing this number overwhelms the legimitate uses so much, I simply don't care. And if they managed to somehow cure cancer by changing this ID well, they can always change the law. Obviously you do care. Well, I don't care about that either.
You might like to grow up, you come over like a real spoilt brat. Go back to sucking your thumb after you've cried to your mommy about this law you hate so much, maybe that will help you feel better about how unfair it all is.
Well, legally the acid test is: did they understand what they were doing was wrong. If so then they're guilty. Whether they had any choice to feel that way isn't something that the law profession concerns themself with overly.
Personally I'm not sure.
It's a bit like, if a lion eats someone whether they are guilty of murder or not. Do you shoot the lion? Historically they have done so. There are moves afoot now to say- that's the kind of behaviour we expect of lions, we shouldn't have got in its way.
Perhaps if people were tested to find out whether they were lions or not, and people get ample chances to avoid prodding these aggressive lions among us, then we might consider the context of any provocation more carefully. Ultimately though, the law would still have to draw a line somewhere- you'd want to lock up people that are sufficiently dangerous in any case.
It's for reducing the number of people doing this; thicko, either because the cost/benefit ratio will be worse, or because they'll make less profit after having to pay more to the people willing to do this change to a phone, so the thieves will make less profit. Sure, they can try to steal more, but then the chances of getting caught goes up in proportion...
Anyway, why the heck are you so bothered? Been making money off this scam have we? Scared you'll get caught and banged up? What possible legitimate reason would you have for fiddling with this number- you'll note the law does not stop you fiddling with any other parts of the phone, or perhaps you haven't actually read the law, or perhaps you don't understand it.
but is instead going after 'reasonably legal' businesses?
Yeah, well they won't be after this. Good riddance to the leeching scumbags I say. They only exist to support criminal acts.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like he's at "pg@paulgraham.com"; have fun.
They do need to learn to fine tune their flying however, every birds body is going to be a bit different fo course.
So if you slander or defame Radio Shack after leaving... they're to blame? ;-)
The 50 year estimate was from NASA. The NASA guy is more or less paid to say that it will take much longer than it could, because if the project is successful it could lead to the massive scaling back of NASA's budget. By NASA spreading FUD on the project, he can put off the day that this happens.
Whilst it could reduce NASAs budget, my take on it is that NASAs budget might go UP if this was successful; but this risk sits uneasily with NASA, NASA is not noted for bold plans to reduce costs.
The 30+% H2O2 is not quite as bad as you say; it is better than most acids, but you don't mess around with it- it certainly can kill you. I heard of one guy that got covered with the stuff- he was hosed down, ripped off all his clothes and got hosed down some more; and he was completely OK, except he was a bit white for a few days (as was everyone else around him, but for a different reason! ;-)
Anything below 72% has too much water in it to react well, it gives you damp steam with some O2 mixed in. It will burn Kero, but not well.
The FAA has taken jurisdiction of the 'problem'. You can't launch anything without a license. That goes for aeroplanes too; and the commonality is pretty close, provided they are manned. The rocket community takes safety very seriously. Incidentally, the government has banned launches by American citizens anywhere in the world without a launch license; but launch licenses are available for people that can show they know what they are doing.
Bottom line- no it's not dangerous; the FAA are very paranoid.
In some ways it's better than LOX- it's 'specific impulse density' is slightly higher than LOX. This means you get more kick per unit volume of tank (although it is heavier too). However, since rockets are mostly tanks, it's not a silly fuel.
In normal applications HP ("HTP") is used for attitude jets because it is a 'storable propellent'. This means that you can put it in a tank and leave it there for over a year without any big issues. LOX evaporates. Also HTP is a monopropellent, so it's fairly easy to work with.
The Space Shuttle uses storable propellent for its OMS engines, although not HTP. Some russian rockets use HTP as a fuel to run their turbopumps IRC.
Forget innovation. There's all the tech we need already worked. We need the economics to work out- launching a lot does wonders for the economics. Launch every day and twice on tuesdays and the costs come down- that's the big secret. That's why the Space Shuttle costs so much: they don't/can't launch enough.
Carmack is smart enough to do this stuff- he doesn't need professional engineers, but he can/will get them as he needs to. But rockets aren't hard.
a) AT&T have lost control of their own network so that users can take as much bandwidth as they want. In that case, AT&T are in trouble and need to do something.
or:
b) they want to screw more money out of their existing customers.
In the normal way, the congestion protocols in the internet are quite good at ensuring fairness. If the users are actually fiddling with the protocols AT&T should exclude those users from the network. AT&T need to be able to throttle both upstream and downstream bandwidth usage. They need to manage their network.
Problem is, traffic shaping throttles your peak or burst bandwidth.
Nonsense. Traffic shaping usually works by averaging your bandwidth usage over a period, say 1/2 an hour, and then if you have exceeded the average you've paid for, and there is congestion, then you get throttled back. But the details can vary, there's no exact definition.
The point is this:
I pay for a 576 Kb/s link, of which they guarantee I get only 1/50th guaranteed bandwidth to the internet. That means I am guaranteed 10 Kb/s all day every day.
That means that I should be able to download 108 MB/day; average- so far today I've download 84 MB in the last couple of hours... I just checked; and that's probably a heavy download day for me; but not like when I'm downloading Linux distros.
According to your approach I should have paid how much? I already paid for this much bandwidth... Without too much trouble I can go over 3 gig a month without ever going over my paid for allowance. In Australia I would be charged more for that. They charge 15.9c per megabyte over 300 megabytes. Not that's extortionate.
No no. AT&T are very able to control the bandwidth available to anyone on their network, lookup up 'traffic shaping'; it's interesting that they have chosen not to do this. Apart from a few crackers there are no leeches.
The real point is that most people who buy a broadband contract off them don't understand what they have just signed, so when congestion occurs, they start moaning. AT&T aren't going to go "well you shouldn't have signed the contract if you didn't understand it", so they've created this fictitious 'leech' guy who is supposedly stealing all the bandwidth. Then AT&T realised that they could actually make money for bandwidth they had already sold, by charging over a certain download limit- but it's just profiteering, there's no real issue, or atleast not if AT&T are running their network well.
I don't agree with your 4 'hopes'. These do not cover all the options you have in designing these networks. There's no hoping- you design it to have certain properties. If you write the software, you have central control anyway, in your terms. Every node in a P2P network can be a policeman if necessary.
Sounds logical doesn't it? In fact it isn't necessarily so. Consider the internet, the IP infrastructure is P2P in fact; let's apply what you said to it:
"In a system like the internet, where there is no central system to enforce community-minded behaviour; the eventual collapse of the system can be predicted as a function of overall population, presuming that there are always a few people who are more selfish than the rest."
Doesn't sound so obvious anymore does it?
Actually, this is an example of iterated prisoners dilemma; there is no known solution to that in the general case. It all depends critically on the details. However, in the case of Gnutella, I think that Gnutella lacks some features that would have allowed it to weather situations that Kazaa seems to handle very much better.
There's always going to be some leeches. The point is to make sure that the leeches don't gain anything by abusing the mechanisms the network supplies- with Gnutella, and to some extent Kazaa, they do gain... if they end up abusing it too much- the network dies.
Actually, you mostly don't want to ignore these constraints. The P2P should make use of closer servers (mostly, but not exclusively).
In order to get better performance for themselves, people play "the prisoners dilemma", and rat everyone else out with clients that gang up on requests to ensure disproportionately favorable service.
I don't see that this is necessarily a real issue. After all the server that has the file you want can keep a queue of requestors, and serve it in strict first come, first served order. 'Take a ticket and sit down over there.' It works. Asking more than once doesn't get you anywhere; and may even get you lower down the list.
The only real way to deal with this is to define a new protocol that is not virtual point-to-point linked.
Unclear. Very unclear.
Now take active attacks. "Automatic Karma" can deal with dummy files -- "poisoning"... at least until they start intermixing bad with good.
Yes, but users can usually play files before they've finished and cryptographic hashing of file contents can preclude people spoofing files, even when downloaded from multiple servers simultaneously.
However plasmas might appear on radar, and plasma would tend to be visible (if formed outside the vehicle).
Still, I'm not sure I buy any of this. In particular I wonder how easy it would be to hide a really huge vehicle like that during construction- satellites would tend to spot it for one thing.
Oh I shall be so upset when they are rotting in jail, or bankrupted for the rest of their natural life- I just don't know how I will manage to console myself...
Whoooohhooo! Yes! Going dowwwwwwn! ;-)
Besides, if you send the design to Altera, they can manufacture a whole bunch of Asics for you. In theory... whether the resulting ASIC would be fast enough is unclear. (Doubt it.)
What so they could roll out the welcome mat? ;-)
Well, they do ask you if you've been involved in war crimes, but if you're a Nazi that managed to avoid this; then you'd probably feel quite at home in modern totalitarian america. ;-)
All kidding aside, (America is not totalitarian yet) it's probably just because Nazis haven't threatened to overthrow the American way lately (although WWII was a bit like that, but the Nazis lost.)
"Are you or have you ever been an Islamic extremist." would be a good replacement right now ;-)
Yes the parent post. I'll help you, he said:
"BTW, since when did Slashdot start openly shilling for Communism?"
Are you saying that doesn't equate the commons with communism? It's pretty blatant.
Apparently some have a difficult time understanding the difference between libertarianism and communism (hard to believe). To explain using Linux as an example:
Apparently some anonymous cowards don't know that things can have things in common (no pun intended) without being at all the same thing. I said to the extent that that was true. Common property ownership is a part of communism, but it's also a part of government, or marriages; this does not mean that they are communistic either.
The thing is though, I certainly don't agree that the concept of the 'commons' is the same as communism. One is a concept of resource that is for general consumption, the other is a form of social organisation. They are not the same thing at all.
Anyway, nice troll. One question though, are you or have you ever been a member of the Nazi party BTW? ;-)
Precisely, precisely my point.
Incidentally, changing the IMEI is illegal because while you may own the phone, you do not own the network. Build your own network and change the identifier as much as you like.
That's the point: it isn't illegal to do that.
If it is mine, there's utterly no reason why it should be illegal.
Really? So setting the ID to match someone else's phone is perfectly ok? Huh?
I'm against this law because it's my phone and that modifying it as I see fit is not wrong. Explain to me why it is wrong.
Listen dork, it's very simple. You live in a society that keeps its stability by following laws. The laws are semiarbitrary. Is speeding dangerous? Not necessarily, if you know what you are doing; does that mean that if I know what I am doing I can speed? Nope. You've lost that ability because its too much hassle to work out who can do it, and who can't.
Maybe there's some good reason for allowing people to change this number. I can't think of a single one; but perhaps there is. Big fucking deal; the number of illegimate uses of changing this number overwhelms the legimitate uses so much, I simply don't care. And if they managed to somehow cure cancer by changing this ID well, they can always change the law. Obviously you do care. Well, I don't care about that either.
You might like to grow up, you come over like a real spoilt brat. Go back to sucking your thumb after you've cried to your mommy about this law you hate so much, maybe that will help you feel better about how unfair it all is.
Personally I'm not sure.
It's a bit like, if a lion eats someone whether they are guilty of murder or not. Do you shoot the lion? Historically they have done so. There are moves afoot now to say- that's the kind of behaviour we expect of lions, we shouldn't have got in its way.
Perhaps if people were tested to find out whether they were lions or not, and people get ample chances to avoid prodding these aggressive lions among us, then we might consider the context of any provocation more carefully. Ultimately though, the law would still have to draw a line somewhere- you'd want to lock up people that are sufficiently dangerous in any case.
It's for reducing the number of people doing this; thicko, either because the cost/benefit ratio will be worse, or because they'll make less profit after having to pay more to the people willing to do this change to a phone, so the thieves will make less profit. Sure, they can try to steal more, but then the chances of getting caught goes up in proportion...
Anyway, why the heck are you so bothered? Been making money off this scam have we? Scared you'll get caught and banged up? What possible legitimate reason would you have for fiddling with this number- you'll note the law does not stop you fiddling with any other parts of the phone, or perhaps you haven't actually read the law, or perhaps you don't understand it.
but is instead going after 'reasonably legal' businesses?
Yeah, well they won't be after this. Good riddance to the leeching scumbags I say. They only exist to support criminal acts.
Are you ignorant, crooked or stupid- which?