What the fuck is a piece of financial software doing even knowing that such things as 'boot sectors' even exist? It crunches numbers with dollar signs; since when does that require knowldege of file systems?
But these are Lagrange Points for systems with more than 2 bodies. They're extremely dynamic and move along some very convoluted and lengthy paths. If you stick your ship in one at the right time, then you basically get taken for a free ride courtesy of Gravity, Inc. But the "tens of thousands of years" needed for an Earth-Mars trip doesn't strike me as being particularly useful anytime soon. Maybe for moving large asteroids out amongst the gas giants, but in this neighborhood the free ride just isn't worth the wait.
Evidently the research is more immediately useful for the techniques learned in complex multi-body interacting systems problems, which fluid dynamics guys are also fascinated in.
The surrounding strata can be dated, true, but for carbon-14 you have to test something that was a bio-accumulator at one point. That is, something that consumed material from the environment (air, water, insufficiently agile herbivores...), including radioactive carbon isotopes. What makes it tough is that the levels of carbon-14 found at any given point is not constant. Dating the strata is used by itself if there isn't enough material to do a carbon-14 test, but the tech for that has gotten much better in recent years. They've had to go back and redo a lot of dating on items that they previously had to test only the strata found nearby.
Actually, it's not unheard of. For instance, I sit here at work (and reading/. no less!) where I perform monumental feats of ingenuity towards the problem of HIPAA compliance. If you want to read about the standards, you can get PDFs for free. But these tomes total something like 2 to 3 thousand pages for the 11 transaction sets and you have to enter all this in by hand (or risk a text parser on the pdf). Unless of course you would care to buy the exact same data stripped of all formatting and stored in a machine-readable structure, in which case you can expect to pay a few thousand bucks for it.
Is it just me or did all the characters but the Blues, the intelligent space-faring squid civilization, the asteroid and lunar colonization, the 'End of the World' analysis, the wormhole exploration of the future and alternate universes, and basically 80% of the book, have absolutely no bearing on how it all turned out? Manifold: Space was much better.
That high cost is to get stuff from earth to orbit. Lunar launches are much easier; railguns are a viable option and a lunar beanstalk could be built long before we were capable of it here. The expense would be in building and maintaining a mining facility; the costs in shipping stuff back are tiny in comparison.
Actually, reducing NASA to a LEO bus service would be ideal. As you say, they and the government beancounters have proven they have little or no interest in doing anything beyond justifying their own budget. "Do everything in our power to get to X"-type programs got us Apollo. A fantastic and stunning achievement with great potential, but it just turned into 'we came, we saw, we went back home and cut funding'. Putting a team on Mars for a year and getting them back will accomplish exactly the same thing. As long as a apathetic government bureaucracies are in charge and launch prices prohibit entry by anyone else, we'll never get anywhere. But if they can make it so that small corporations, universities, and even wealthy individuals can actually run their own projects, then we won't need NASA to study beer-brewing or tomato-growing in space as Anheuser Busch and agribusiness will do it for them. Rather than a bare handful of probes being sent across the void, the physics departments of every university in the nation will be itching to put one together themselves. Lockheed-Martin and the like will have incentive beyond government contracts to design space propulsion systems. The possibilities are endless.
Judging from the interview, they still have the idea of having vehicles launching from the ground actually doing stuff in space. That's stupid. It'll be a very long time before it's downright _simple_ to get to orbit. Tacking on extra requirements and abilities just makes the job harder, more expensive, more complicated, and more prone to failure. The launch vehicle should be able to go up, drop off a payload (docking abilities optional), and come back down. The only specialization needed is for varying types of cargo. Stuff that only gets done in space should be done by equipment that only stays in space.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Columbia was never able to dock with the ISS right? Then why's the article act as if it's a big deal that there's now _only_ 3 shuttles able to dock with it and keep it running. That's been the case since it was built, no?
I'm told that the average response rate for spam is much less than that, more like 5 per million. About 3 orders of magnitude less than what they get with snail-spam. Scams, on the other hand, might be more effective to begin with, but as word spreads about particularly sucessful ones, returns would fall off quickly.
Now if we could get some excellent and widely used spam filters to take the rate down another order of magnitude or two, we'd be getting somewhere. With only a few dozen responses per billion, they'd be hard pressed to pay the bandwidth bills.
Is anyone else as impressed as I by the sheer number of "Well, what'll it do after 20 years?" posts? Certainly, it's a logical and obvious question given the original ozone depletion problem, but it's still very refreshing to see so many people asking about ill effects that might not manifest themselves without decades of prolonged use by every farmer in the first world.
The 120GB drives appear to be cheaper per GB than the 100's. Of course, if you're gonna drop a bundle on a project like this, you'd be better off spending a little extra dosh for the 7200 Western Digital or some such instead of the 5400 Samsung (and who the hell is Magnetic Data Technology? uber-generic, I guess...). Those are $126 each, so it
s probably more like $2300 but it's much faster and more reliable, even on top of whatever ATA RAID setup he used.
Uh, not quite. According to the DMGCA (Digital Millenium Gun Control Act), simply selling guns is illegal as they _could_ be used to commit crimes. And since the raison d'être for firearms is to put large holes in people (and occasionally wild animals), there is no good reason for having them. Fair use? You mean like self defense? Not important.
Depends on what you mean. "Having to rebuild the kernel" could definitely be a bad thing. I'm probably the only person in my entire extended family who could do it. "Being able to rebuild the kernel if I want to" is about the single most useful feature an operating system could possibly have.
That's funny, I thought that was the proportion of statistics that were made up on the spot...
No, no, you fool. Geez, don't you know anything? The percentage of statistics made up on the spot (also known as the Barrett-Gilmour-Waters Universal Non-Constant) is a hyper-transcendental quantum nonabsolute recipreversexcluson. Not only can it only be defined as being anything other than itself, the nonabsoluteness itself specifies the ever-changing conditions under which it can/cannot be be defined. The very act of declaring the percentage simultaneously makes the statement both true and false as quantum wave forms collapse to conform to and disprove the statistic, molding reality like so much wet clay. It is influenced slightly by the swarthiness of the speaker and heavily by the transmission medium (use of a blog, especially Slashdot, semi-automatically makes the statement more quasi-surreal).
Hope this clears things up for you.
[Tip o' the hat to Douglas Adams]
Re:Yep...recompilation of the kernel anyone..?
on
Microsoft At Middle Age
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Amen to that. It always slays me when people go on and on about how proprietary programs are just as configurable as anything open scource. I keep having to point out to them that with OSS, even the configurability is configurable!
Better yet was when Valenti was asked, "What does 2600 do?" and all he knew was that they make caricature t-shirts of him. The only thing this guy is even remotely competent at is schmoozing politicians. That any kind of national policy is made using his advice is simply terrifying.
Did you see his debate with Lessig a few years ago? That was a real trip. I don't understand why Jack's lawyers let him actually talk to the public; they have to know that anyone not actively being paid to enjoy his company will despise him.
Slashdot Mirror
What the fuck is a piece of financial software doing even knowing that such things as 'boot sectors' even exist? It crunches numbers with dollar signs; since when does that require knowldege of file systems?
Evidently the research is more immediately useful for the techniques learned in complex multi-body interacting systems problems, which fluid dynamics guys are also fascinated in.
The surrounding strata can be dated, true, but for carbon-14 you have to test something that was a bio-accumulator at one point. That is, something that consumed material from the environment (air, water, insufficiently agile herbivores...), including radioactive carbon isotopes. What makes it tough is that the levels of carbon-14 found at any given point is not constant. Dating the strata is used by itself if there isn't enough material to do a carbon-14 test, but the tech for that has gotten much better in recent years. They've had to go back and redo a lot of dating on items that they previously had to test only the strata found nearby.
Actually, it's not unheard of. For instance, I sit here at work (and reading /. no less!) where I perform monumental feats of ingenuity towards the problem of HIPAA compliance. If you want to read about the standards, you can get PDFs for free. But these tomes total something like 2 to 3 thousand pages for the 11 transaction sets and you have to enter all this in by hand (or risk a text parser on the pdf). Unless of course you would care to buy the exact same data stripped of all formatting and stored in a machine-readable structure, in which case you can expect to pay a few thousand bucks for it.
Pay more, get less. It's the Microsoft way!
That was such a lame plot device. A 20 MT bomb, no matter where you put it, wouldn't make a dent in the moon's orbit.
Is it just me or did all the characters but the Blues, the intelligent space-faring squid civilization, the asteroid and lunar colonization, the 'End of the World' analysis, the wormhole exploration of the future and alternate universes, and basically 80% of the book, have absolutely no bearing on how it all turned out? Manifold: Space was much better.
That high cost is to get stuff from earth to orbit. Lunar launches are much easier; railguns are a viable option and a lunar beanstalk could be built long before we were capable of it here. The expense would be in building and maintaining a mining facility; the costs in shipping stuff back are tiny in comparison.
Judging from the interview, they still have the idea of having vehicles launching from the ground actually doing stuff in space. That's stupid. It'll be a very long time before it's downright _simple_ to get to orbit. Tacking on extra requirements and abilities just makes the job harder, more expensive, more complicated, and more prone to failure. The launch vehicle should be able to go up, drop off a payload (docking abilities optional), and come back down. The only specialization needed is for varying types of cargo. Stuff that only gets done in space should be done by equipment that only stays in space.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Columbia was never able to dock with the ISS right? Then why's the article act as if it's a big deal that there's now _only_ 3 shuttles able to dock with it and keep it running. That's been the case since it was built, no?
Now if we could get some excellent and widely used spam filters to take the rate down another order of magnitude or two, we'd be getting somewhere. With only a few dozen responses per billion, they'd be hard pressed to pay the bandwidth bills.
You need to work a beowulf cluster into there somewhere.
I don't suppose I could convince you to describe it? If it's really that embarassing, then never mind.
And then they complain about the US not using the metric standard!
Pretty good deal, considering you were at 51% to begin with, right?
Is anyone else as impressed as I by the sheer number of "Well, what'll it do after 20 years?" posts? Certainly, it's a logical and obvious question given the original ozone depletion problem, but it's still very refreshing to see so many people asking about ill effects that might not manifest themselves without decades of prolonged use by every farmer in the first world.
The 120GB drives appear to be cheaper per GB than the 100's. Of course, if you're gonna drop a bundle on a project like this, you'd be better off spending a little extra dosh for the 7200 Western Digital or some such instead of the 5400 Samsung (and who the hell is Magnetic Data Technology? uber-generic, I guess...). Those are $126 each, so it s probably more like $2300 but it's much faster and more reliable, even on top of whatever ATA RAID setup he used.
Uh, not quite. According to the DMGCA (Digital Millenium Gun Control Act), simply selling guns is illegal as they _could_ be used to commit crimes. And since the raison d'être for firearms is to put large holes in people (and occasionally wild animals), there is no good reason for having them. Fair use? You mean like self defense? Not important.
I have absofuckinglutely got to get out of this country as fast as is humanly possible.
Depends on what you mean. "Having to rebuild the kernel" could definitely be a bad thing. I'm probably the only person in my entire extended family who could do it. "Being able to rebuild the kernel if I want to" is about the single most useful feature an operating system could possibly have.
No, no, you fool. Geez, don't you know anything? The percentage of statistics made up on the spot (also known as the Barrett-Gilmour-Waters Universal Non-Constant) is a hyper-transcendental quantum nonabsolute recipreversexcluson. Not only can it only be defined as being anything other than itself, the nonabsoluteness itself specifies the ever-changing conditions under which it can/cannot be be defined. The very act of declaring the percentage simultaneously makes the statement both true and false as quantum wave forms collapse to conform to and disprove the statistic, molding reality like so much wet clay. It is influenced slightly by the swarthiness of the speaker and heavily by the transmission medium (use of a blog, especially Slashdot, semi-automatically makes the statement more quasi-surreal).
Hope this clears things up for you.
[Tip o' the hat to Douglas Adams]
Amen to that. It always slays me when people go on and on about how proprietary programs are just as configurable as anything open scource. I keep having to point out to them that with OSS, even the configurability is configurable!
Ahhh, the upside to featurcide.
That's easy enough to do. What you're looking for is a band whose sales go nowhere but up and yet they still make no money from it. Any takers?
Did you see his debate with Lessig a few years ago? That was a real trip. I don't understand why Jack's lawyers let him actually talk to the public; they have to know that anyone not actively being paid to enjoy his company will despise him.
Hey, you just described my apartment perfectly!