Then use Occam, the only language where the virtual machine has been formally proven to be correct and secure, and where the language is designed to be absolutely watertight, robust and certified for everything from flight dynamics to high-performance computing to embedded computing.
I've used JNI only when required to make a Java application directly access Fortran 77 codes that were closed. (It's not easy, either, as the F77 blobs were compiled using archaic compilers that didn't give a damn about portable ABIs.) However, that's the only method for reaching out of the sandbox to talk directly to other languages and since that was the requirement given then that's the method to use. If talking to something was what was important, straight sockets, SOAP or REST are better. I prefer straight sockets as I rarely trust other coders to do a decent job of anything.
Apache used Java because Java servlets were de rigour and virtually everything else had to tie into Java servlets. Java doesn't "get things done", it "makes things portable" but that's about it.
I use Java, but I don't like it. You're a C hacker and a C++ hacker. Oh good, same here. I also hack Eiffel, Pascal, Prolog, Lisp, Occam, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, Ruby, Fortran, Cobol, Ada, Forth,.... I don't pick a language that "gets shit done", I pick the BEST language for what I want done right now. I don't give a damn about whether language X -can- do the job, I want a language that will do the BEST job, produce the cleanest code with the ideal running profile. I don't pick second-best and treat one-size-fits-all coders with the derision they frankly deserve. The right tool for the job, each time, every time, or it's not worth my time.
It actually doesn't scale at all well, which is why Java has had massive rewrites of both the threading and garbage collection in the 1.6.x cycle. It was a complete mess.
C++ is a fully-featured language, whereas mobile Java is not. That makes a big difference. (Mobile Java and Pico Java were designed for tiny handheld devices long before memory became small OR cheap, and could even be crammed into a smallish FPGA. Back when Java was still called Oak, "smallish" meant 1980s era chip sizes, not 2011 era chip sizes.)
C++ also has full support for dynamic memory allocation (Java lacks pointers), true multi-threading (Java's threading model is very new and not very good), multiple templating models, a whole bunch of C functions in addition to their C++ counterparts, etc. In short, it's just not something you're going to be able to run on a 1980s intelligent toaster, which is precisely the kind of environment mobile Java can fit on and indeed was designed for.
This isn't a bad thing. Java was designed to run *everywhere*, even when there were no serious resources and the CPU was next to useless. C++ is designed to run real programs on real machines. The extra resources that it hogs isn't bloat - an aircraft carrier hogs more space than a dinghy but that space is actually needed and useful. Some things you just can't do without the extra tonnage, but it's only honest to admit the tonnage is there. Being justified and rational doesn't make it vanish.
* I've used Java since the alpha release. I've used it in more environments than you could possibly comprehend. I regard it with contempt, it's a C knock-off without any of the redeeming features of C and should have remained the province of toasters and vaccuum cleaners (the original purpose of the language for those who ACTUALLY bother with things like, oh, history).
* Tcl/Tk is actually a damn sight more solid as a platform - if only the API would settle down. The community for Tcl/Tk is considerably larger, which is no surprise as the language is considerably older.
* Perl is an amazingly stable platform and has a community beyond the comprehension of most mortals. It has plenty of GUIs (including Perl/Tk).
* Languages "that target the JVM" don't make any difference. Java Native Invocation makes it so any language can be accessed by the JVM, so it's a senseless concept in the first place. Secondly, having out-of-JVM code defeats the sandbox AND the run-anywhere concepts at the same time. Thirdly, there is no "Java Platform", there is only Java the language. Take away the language and all you have is a virtual machine -- and those are two-a-penny.
* Java's ability to run in a browser is perhaps the only facet of Java-the-language which distinguishes it from any other language. It's the only reason it gained popularity (it existed as Oak for years and only came to the public's attention when it entered the browser under the name of Java), it's the only reason phones use it (if you've already included a Java-enabled web browser on the phone, you already have Java so why have any other interpreter in there?) and the list of defects within the design is staggering, making mistakes most scripted, bytecode-compiled or native-compiled languages had resolved years earlier.
* Do you know, really know, just how many programming languages there are? And why none of them gained any kind of traction over the Internet? Look at the servlets - they're JVM-based, despite the fact that Java has the worst threading model of any language and the least ability to process text. Do you know why servlets exist at all? It's because fat clients became unpopular. So why was Java chosen? Because it was the "language of the web". Why was it the language of the web? Because Java applets existed and anyone with a web page could add one. This meant Java was used by a lot of people and THAT is why there was a community there to begin with. No applets, no community. Java is the single-worst language for what it is used for today, it is used because of that one historical facet and nothing else.
Well, since all politicians succumb to bribes, the name doesn't really help. The only political party on the planet is "Money Pot", so the shell entity created to represent it doesn't make any difference, and location only makes a difference if politicians care about the people in it (and you can guess my opinion on that score).
Perhaps, but journals are well-known for either being pressured (or sometimes believing themselves pressured) to publish only what their sponsors want published and in the manner the sponsors want it published in. That means that hypothetical abilities to waive restrictions may not actually exist in practice. The only way you can guarantee such freedoms is if the Feds intervene at least to the point of prohibiting abuse of position.
However, it's extremely safe to say that if the Feds are themselves being whipped into submission via corporate sponsorship of politicians that abuse of position is not going to be going away any time soon.
Java's API is more stable than Tcl/Tk, the mobile version of it is less of a memory hog than C++, it's easier to learn than Erlang, and easier to port across OS' than Visual Basic. Java applets will also run on web browsers for your PC, whereas there aren't applet containers for any of the other languages I've listed other than Tcl/Tk (and that is not only unmaintained, it wasn't very good when it was maintained).
With the exception of Visual Basic, the other languages are superior to Java in absolutely every respect other than the couple of things Java does better, but the point of marketing is not to present reality for a fair and honest debate of merits but to promote one option over others.
Java is actually a really bad language in many respects, but it IS runnable in any web browser and it DOES have a good marketing team. Other languages which are actually superior overall are unmarketed and often not runnable in environments you need them in to make them useful in this kind of hybrid market.
I'll also point out that when Java was released, the only serious rival as a ubiquitous platform-independent language at the time (Python) was maintained by one person and that scared a lot of people. Python also had a lot of limitations back then, long-since overcome. Unfortunately, Python 3's lack of serious traction (Python 2 is still the interpreter of choice for most new Python apps) and design quirks resulted in a lot of people moving to Ruby. I say "unfortunately" because although Python and Ruby are great languages, there's a lot of insularism. Communities don't fragment through the presence of choice, they fragment when those choosing do so with an exclusive and elitist air.
The problem with HP is that they use high-power automatic weapons to shoot themselves in the foot that also take out everyone else's feet, the floor, part of the walls, some of the landscape and a perfectly innocent asteroid.
No, it's got some speed improvements from JRockit and other tweaks that don't exist in the open source code and are unlikely to ever be published. They may well port over other bits from JRockit and other JVMs they've bought or have heavy control over, with the intent of vendor lock-in. You can't move to the free version because Oracle won't let the free version support the enhancements (such as real-time support, better debugging and profiling, etc) that projects actually use.
Bad science to have multiple variables in a study, unless there's a broad enough range of conditions to make sure you can isolate the effects of each variable. Test tube babies only cover a certain percentage of gestation and transplants in space are an unknown. There's got to be a statistically useful sample where no transplant is required.
People can wear multiple hats, but generally only one hat at a time. Donald Knuth was very obviously not thinking as a programmer when designing TeX (it's a great system, I write almost exclusively in TeX for everything other than web postings, but it violates a lot of good programming practices).
GOOD programmers know to keep I/O isolated from functionality. This is an example of WHY that is what good programmers do. The underlying code should NOT dictate the display. Seriously, the best that modern industry can do these days is to repeat the errors of the 70s and 80s?
The GUI, if properly and coherently designed using standard software engineering practices of any merit, should be designed by people who are experts in typography and HCI. In a few, rare, cases these will also be people who are also programmers but they will NOT be thinking or acting as programmers when they design the interface in those cases, they will be thinking as typography experts or HCI experts.
I'm not disputing free will, but I am disputing that you can truly control your own destiny if, in the political chess matches of the world, you can be sacrificed at a moment's notice for the benefit of others. I have a hard time reconciling the idea that anyone, anywhere, in any country, can be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency (a blood cult if ever there was one) with the idea that a person can decide how things are going to end.
If you liken your life to a book, then free will is everything between the second to the second-to-last page. Destiny, the very last page of all, is something some people get a hand in writing, though not all, and I would seriously question if anybody can honestly claim that even one person has ever written it in its entirety.
It is the "not all" part that gives me greatest concern with my previous post. Way too many people don't get any say in that final page at all, often because of some outside interest or other finding it more expedient for the person to have no say in it.
Now, what other people mean by "Destiny" may be very different. That's fine, and from your reply I'm guessing that you do indeed use a different definition of Destiny. That would obviously change the nature of the argument, so if I'm correct then simply ignore that piece as it only applies to a very specific definition.
Ok, but it's still a philosophical argument? No, not with the definition I'm using. The definition I'm using has nothing to do with abstractions, it has to do with the concrete notion that if player A can offer person P as a sacrificial victim to player B, and if P has no say in the actions of A or B, then for all P so offered to B there exists no instance of P who has a say over what happens next. They are hostages of fortune, closer to the thralls of Nordic times in terms of their power to influence events than free and independent citizens.
We don't know what Iranian intel said, they may well have been confirming something they'd been given.
We don't know what US intel said, we have no reason to believe that any of the prisoners were being held to confirm anything. That the CIA defied a court order to preserve the video tape sessions of interrogations -- well, I don't regard that as being in the US' favour when it comes to their claims about anything. Nobody destroys evidence of their own innocence, after all. We don't know what the US does in regards to escalation - without the tapes, we have nothing to go on. And, again, nobody destroys evidence of their own innocence.
(The only things we do know is that Iraqi prisoners were subjected to 48-hour sessions of the Barney song on continuous repeat, to "soften them up" before interrogation. This was step 1. If there was any gradual escalation, it started at the nuclear option. Even to western ears, that would be bad, but to middle eastern ears - they aren't used to music with those frequencies - it would have been as painful as scratching a chalk board for the same length of time.)
The British prisoner held at Gitmo was cleared for release in 2007/8 after being shown to have no links to extremism of any kind. He won't be released until after 2012 at the earliest, if he is ever released at all. Before anyone starts on about American care and attention, I would want to know precisely why. No why, then no excuse. If you can't explain why a wholly innocent person was in prison for 6-7 years without trial and without any evidence against him, and THEN held a further 3-4 years after being found by tribunal to be wholly innocent, with no prospect of being released for many many years to come, then you have absolutely no legs to stand on.
Re:Why is /. repeating Iran's propaganda for them?
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Video Games As Propaganda
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Of course it is torture. Indeed, that was part of the basis of the appeals by the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. The fraudulent "confessions" sealed the fate of the prosecution's case (the statements were shown to have been tampered with afterwards with the signatures of the defendants edited in) but the courts were utterly horrified by the police treatment - which was no different from what you're describing.
Indeed, even in a prior appeal that failed, heard by the late Lord Denning, it failed because Lord Denning ruled that torture and abuse on such a scale was too horrific to contemplate, too savage to imagine. And, no, I'm not exaggerating his remarks. He really did say that what you're describing for police behaviour was too horrific to contemplate. Lord Denning naively concluded that it was better to refuse the appeal than to even think about police cruelty. With all respect, I disagree. It is better to imagine the unimaginable so that you can stop it, or - if it's not taking place - then at least be sure that the safeguards exist to ensure it never does.
Given that torture does take place, I am of the opinion that confessions should never be allowed in court at all. Evidence collected as a result of a confession, sure, but not the confession itself. If the police can't maintain conduct of a standard better than "too horrific to contemplate", then they should not be able to directly use in trial anything that is likely tainted by such conduct. Simple as that. Eliminate the incentive. That should go for any evidence involving methods established to have suspect credibility. Dubious crime labs get the press from time to time, for example. When standards improve, remove the bar. It is the only way you will ever get the police motivated to operate in a clean manner.
If they aren't, why does so much of the world rely on them? Yes, America included, though they're hardly the only ones.
And if they aren't reliable (they aren't reliable, but in the interests of neutrality I'll pretend otherwise) then every nation that carries out torture, or sponsors other nations to carry it out for them, is guilty of serious crimes against humanity. Strangely, a number of these nations are not signatories to the International Court of Justice (you may even be living in one) and thus outside any legal framework for protecting the victims of torture or abuse. Also strangely, a number of nations with strong laws protecting victims of governmental abuse have also passed laws exempting those the government wants to victimize in this way from any protection of the legal system. Which defeats the purpose of there being laws in the first place, but there ya go.
In other words, most nations are guilty of extra-judicial killings and other abuses of individuals who have zero involvement in any activity that is hostile to, well, pretty much anyone. Singling out one is stupid and ignores the reality of the real issue. The real issue is that zealots and paranoid schizophrenics rule most of the world because otherwise sane, rational people voted the zealots and paranoid schizophrenics into office.
I'm not even going to blame those in office - they're ill and they need treatment, their actions are not meaningful choices but merely symptoms of their disease. The blame goes entirely to the healthy people who regard it as amusing to torture the mentally ill in this way. It *is* torture, it is cruelty and it is abuse, just as much as the abuse that the ill then mete out to the innocent is.
That is true and that would reduce the costs somewhat. I would be interested in actually seeing real numbers put to the variables and an actual equation drawn up for what would be the break-even point per voyage in terms of mass carried and volume carried. (More mass = more fuel for accelerating and decelerating, more volume = more heat-shielding needed and more superstructure to handle off-center forces.)
Since the density of various substances is known, you can then determine what substances can stay within bounds of what is profitable given both these constraints.
If the difficulties aren't hard-wired into the equation, but are values you can plug in, you can then adapt the equation as technology improves and also run estimates on what variables are the most cost-effective to tweak that would also make a big difference to space mining.
Such an equation probably exists somewhere in the halls of various space agencies, but I haven't the foggiest what it is. But that equation should be what guides the agencies and the private ventures if space mining is to be a serious proposition at any time.
Oversized pebbles are not "significant moons". They would not be capable of generating tidal forces large enough to gouge through rock. They're also modern captures, so are completely irrelevant as the oceans on Mars existed only for the first few hundred million years. 4 billion years ago, neither was there and therefore neither did anything.
...as sympathetic as I am to the guy, since he was there to see his grandmother, he's going to have a hell of a time persuading anyone he was not working for the CIA if indeed the CIA was funding the company he worked for, and that he was aware the company was involved in psy ops*. Doesn't matter if the company wasn't part of the CIA, we know the CIA runs companies as fronts (from previous CIA scandals) and since the CIA would have to be incredibly stupid to reveal all the companies that were fronts.
Iran, therefore, is in a difficult position. The guy is essentially being paid CIA money for carrying out CIA-commissioned tasks, which is not going to go down well there no matter what. Psy ops also require some form of feedback - you can't manipulate in a vaccuum, which is a major factor in North Korea's isolation - and that means feet on the ground at some point. It must have been obvious to everyone involved (except for the poor guy involved) as to what would happen next.
I honestly doubt he really is a spy, they're generally not stupid enough to be that obvious, but I do believe he's "collateral damage" that the US considers wholly acceptable for intelligence-gathering purposes.**
*Manipulating the perception of another, rather than giving them information and free choice, is a "psychological operation" of the kind believed to be used in covert ops. Doesn't matter if it's merely the opinion of a boss or the opinion of a sponsor that's being expressed, with no military or intelligence involvement at all, it is still a psy op because it is still about manipulation and not choice. Had I not put in an explanation, but relied entirely on emotive description, that would also be psy op/manipulation. Because I am stating what is meant and why the choice of words, there is information and therefore freedom of choice and therefore it is not manipulative.
**Intelligence gathering will always involve collateral damage. You can't avoid it. Totally innocent people will inevitably be sacrificed, which is why this idea that you control your destiny is such a laugh. All nations gather intelligence from all nations (themselves as much as anyone else), all nations need to at this point in history, and therefore all nations will have wholly innocent victims. The British have been investigating a whole host of scandals and "collateral damage" from internal investigation by the police recently, after a couple of undercover operatives defected to the organizations they were spying on and blew the lid on some very shady dealings.
Look, your complete lack of comprehension of my posts is getting stale. Admit that you're too stupid to comprehend either the history of science or the practice of it and move on.
A nuclear reactor will produce -specific- isotopes. Each type of reactor will produce a given set of isotopes, the ratio of which is unique to that reactor.
Reactors that specifically produce Plutonium-238 (not all forms of plutonium are useful) aren't common, since plutonium-239 is what is wanted for 99.9% of all terrestrial plutonium usage, and separating something with equal charge and very very nearly equal mass would be hard. The Curiosity rover, recently launched, has one of the most powerful Pu-238 batteries ever produced, at a whopping 110 watts. For climbing vertical walls, this is useless. There is also a well-known and well-publicized global shortage of Pu-238. Fast breeder reactors produced Plutonium (which is why they were popular in the Cold War) but modern reactors produce little or none, giving them zero weapons proliferation risk (which is why they can be safely exported to non-signatory nations).
For serious energy density, you'd have to go to Polonium-210. US reactors do not produce Polonium. The only source is in Russia, which is why when the former Soviet spy was poisoned with Polonium in Britain, it took scientists around 5 seconds to figure out where that would have come from. Do you seriously, seriously imagine the Russians are going to sell NASA a whole bunch of Polonium? Especially with all the political battles over anti-missile systems, etc?
As for the number of reactors, several nations started shuttering theirs after the disaster in Japan. Those that remain open are being scrutinized over safety. Jerry-rigging them to produce Polonium would produce a political nightmare that the nuclear industry is not going to want right now.
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Then use Occam, the only language where the virtual machine has been formally proven to be correct and secure, and where the language is designed to be absolutely watertight, robust and certified for everything from flight dynamics to high-performance computing to embedded computing.
I've used JNI only when required to make a Java application directly access Fortran 77 codes that were closed. (It's not easy, either, as the F77 blobs were compiled using archaic compilers that didn't give a damn about portable ABIs.) However, that's the only method for reaching out of the sandbox to talk directly to other languages and since that was the requirement given then that's the method to use. If talking to something was what was important, straight sockets, SOAP or REST are better. I prefer straight sockets as I rarely trust other coders to do a decent job of anything.
Apache used Java because Java servlets were de rigour and virtually everything else had to tie into Java servlets. Java doesn't "get things done", it "makes things portable" but that's about it.
I use Java, but I don't like it. You're a C hacker and a C++ hacker. Oh good, same here. I also hack Eiffel, Pascal, Prolog, Lisp, Occam, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, Ruby, Fortran, Cobol, Ada, Forth, .... I don't pick a language that "gets shit done", I pick the BEST language for what I want done right now. I don't give a damn about whether language X -can- do the job, I want a language that will do the BEST job, produce the cleanest code with the ideal running profile. I don't pick second-best and treat one-size-fits-all coders with the derision they frankly deserve. The right tool for the job, each time, every time, or it's not worth my time.
It actually doesn't scale at all well, which is why Java has had massive rewrites of both the threading and garbage collection in the 1.6.x cycle. It was a complete mess.
C++ is a fully-featured language, whereas mobile Java is not. That makes a big difference. (Mobile Java and Pico Java were designed for tiny handheld devices long before memory became small OR cheap, and could even be crammed into a smallish FPGA. Back when Java was still called Oak, "smallish" meant 1980s era chip sizes, not 2011 era chip sizes.)
C++ also has full support for dynamic memory allocation (Java lacks pointers), true multi-threading (Java's threading model is very new and not very good), multiple templating models, a whole bunch of C functions in addition to their C++ counterparts, etc. In short, it's just not something you're going to be able to run on a 1980s intelligent toaster, which is precisely the kind of environment mobile Java can fit on and indeed was designed for.
This isn't a bad thing. Java was designed to run *everywhere*, even when there were no serious resources and the CPU was next to useless. C++ is designed to run real programs on real machines. The extra resources that it hogs isn't bloat - an aircraft carrier hogs more space than a dinghy but that space is actually needed and useful. Some things you just can't do without the extra tonnage, but it's only honest to admit the tonnage is there. Being justified and rational doesn't make it vanish.
* I've used Java since the alpha release. I've used it in more environments than you could possibly comprehend. I regard it with contempt, it's a C knock-off without any of the redeeming features of C and should have remained the province of toasters and vaccuum cleaners (the original purpose of the language for those who ACTUALLY bother with things like, oh, history).
* Tcl/Tk is actually a damn sight more solid as a platform - if only the API would settle down. The community for Tcl/Tk is considerably larger, which is no surprise as the language is considerably older.
* Perl is an amazingly stable platform and has a community beyond the comprehension of most mortals. It has plenty of GUIs (including Perl/Tk).
* Languages "that target the JVM" don't make any difference. Java Native Invocation makes it so any language can be accessed by the JVM, so it's a senseless concept in the first place. Secondly, having out-of-JVM code defeats the sandbox AND the run-anywhere concepts at the same time. Thirdly, there is no "Java Platform", there is only Java the language. Take away the language and all you have is a virtual machine -- and those are two-a-penny.
* Java's ability to run in a browser is perhaps the only facet of Java-the-language which distinguishes it from any other language. It's the only reason it gained popularity (it existed as Oak for years and only came to the public's attention when it entered the browser under the name of Java), it's the only reason phones use it (if you've already included a Java-enabled web browser on the phone, you already have Java so why have any other interpreter in there?) and the list of defects within the design is staggering, making mistakes most scripted, bytecode-compiled or native-compiled languages had resolved years earlier.
* Do you know, really know, just how many programming languages there are? And why none of them gained any kind of traction over the Internet? Look at the servlets - they're JVM-based, despite the fact that Java has the worst threading model of any language and the least ability to process text. Do you know why servlets exist at all? It's because fat clients became unpopular. So why was Java chosen? Because it was the "language of the web". Why was it the language of the web? Because Java applets existed and anyone with a web page could add one. This meant Java was used by a lot of people and THAT is why there was a community there to begin with. No applets, no community. Java is the single-worst language for what it is used for today, it is used because of that one historical facet and nothing else.
Well, since all politicians succumb to bribes, the name doesn't really help. The only political party on the planet is "Money Pot", so the shell entity created to represent it doesn't make any difference, and location only makes a difference if politicians care about the people in it (and you can guess my opinion on that score).
Perhaps, but journals are well-known for either being pressured (or sometimes believing themselves pressured) to publish only what their sponsors want published and in the manner the sponsors want it published in. That means that hypothetical abilities to waive restrictions may not actually exist in practice. The only way you can guarantee such freedoms is if the Feds intervene at least to the point of prohibiting abuse of position.
However, it's extremely safe to say that if the Feds are themselves being whipped into submission via corporate sponsorship of politicians that abuse of position is not going to be going away any time soon.
The usual grant applications would be more readable in Perl, so maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing.
Java's API is more stable than Tcl/Tk, the mobile version of it is less of a memory hog than C++, it's easier to learn than Erlang, and easier to port across OS' than Visual Basic. Java applets will also run on web browsers for your PC, whereas there aren't applet containers for any of the other languages I've listed other than Tcl/Tk (and that is not only unmaintained, it wasn't very good when it was maintained).
With the exception of Visual Basic, the other languages are superior to Java in absolutely every respect other than the couple of things Java does better, but the point of marketing is not to present reality for a fair and honest debate of merits but to promote one option over others.
Java is actually a really bad language in many respects, but it IS runnable in any web browser and it DOES have a good marketing team. Other languages which are actually superior overall are unmarketed and often not runnable in environments you need them in to make them useful in this kind of hybrid market.
I'll also point out that when Java was released, the only serious rival as a ubiquitous platform-independent language at the time (Python) was maintained by one person and that scared a lot of people. Python also had a lot of limitations back then, long-since overcome. Unfortunately, Python 3's lack of serious traction (Python 2 is still the interpreter of choice for most new Python apps) and design quirks resulted in a lot of people moving to Ruby. I say "unfortunately" because although Python and Ruby are great languages, there's a lot of insularism. Communities don't fragment through the presence of choice, they fragment when those choosing do so with an exclusive and elitist air.
The problem with HP is that they use high-power automatic weapons to shoot themselves in the foot that also take out everyone else's feet, the floor, part of the walls, some of the landscape and a perfectly innocent asteroid.
No, it's got some speed improvements from JRockit and other tweaks that don't exist in the open source code and are unlikely to ever be published. They may well port over other bits from JRockit and other JVMs they've bought or have heavy control over, with the intent of vendor lock-in. You can't move to the free version because Oracle won't let the free version support the enhancements (such as real-time support, better debugging and profiling, etc) that projects actually use.
If it's designed to make sure an exec dropping an iPad out the window of a Virgin Galactic can retrieve it later, there's no point in reaching orbit.
If it was running telnet, then all velocities would be terminal.
Bad science to have multiple variables in a study, unless there's a broad enough range of conditions to make sure you can isolate the effects of each variable. Test tube babies only cover a certain percentage of gestation and transplants in space are an unknown. There's got to be a statistically useful sample where no transplant is required.
People can wear multiple hats, but generally only one hat at a time. Donald Knuth was very obviously not thinking as a programmer when designing TeX (it's a great system, I write almost exclusively in TeX for everything other than web postings, but it violates a lot of good programming practices).
GOOD programmers know to keep I/O isolated from functionality. This is an example of WHY that is what good programmers do. The underlying code should NOT dictate the display. Seriously, the best that modern industry can do these days is to repeat the errors of the 70s and 80s?
The GUI, if properly and coherently designed using standard software engineering practices of any merit, should be designed by people who are experts in typography and HCI. In a few, rare, cases these will also be people who are also programmers but they will NOT be thinking or acting as programmers when they design the interface in those cases, they will be thinking as typography experts or HCI experts.
I'm not disputing free will, but I am disputing that you can truly control your own destiny if, in the political chess matches of the world, you can be sacrificed at a moment's notice for the benefit of others. I have a hard time reconciling the idea that anyone, anywhere, in any country, can be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency (a blood cult if ever there was one) with the idea that a person can decide how things are going to end.
If you liken your life to a book, then free will is everything between the second to the second-to-last page. Destiny, the very last page of all, is something some people get a hand in writing, though not all, and I would seriously question if anybody can honestly claim that even one person has ever written it in its entirety.
It is the "not all" part that gives me greatest concern with my previous post. Way too many people don't get any say in that final page at all, often because of some outside interest or other finding it more expedient for the person to have no say in it.
Now, what other people mean by "Destiny" may be very different. That's fine, and from your reply I'm guessing that you do indeed use a different definition of Destiny. That would obviously change the nature of the argument, so if I'm correct then simply ignore that piece as it only applies to a very specific definition.
Ok, but it's still a philosophical argument? No, not with the definition I'm using. The definition I'm using has nothing to do with abstractions, it has to do with the concrete notion that if player A can offer person P as a sacrificial victim to player B, and if P has no say in the actions of A or B, then for all P so offered to B there exists no instance of P who has a say over what happens next. They are hostages of fortune, closer to the thralls of Nordic times in terms of their power to influence events than free and independent citizens.
We don't know what Iranian intel said, they may well have been confirming something they'd been given.
We don't know what US intel said, we have no reason to believe that any of the prisoners were being held to confirm anything. That the CIA defied a court order to preserve the video tape sessions of interrogations -- well, I don't regard that as being in the US' favour when it comes to their claims about anything. Nobody destroys evidence of their own innocence, after all. We don't know what the US does in regards to escalation - without the tapes, we have nothing to go on. And, again, nobody destroys evidence of their own innocence.
(The only things we do know is that Iraqi prisoners were subjected to 48-hour sessions of the Barney song on continuous repeat, to "soften them up" before interrogation. This was step 1. If there was any gradual escalation, it started at the nuclear option. Even to western ears, that would be bad, but to middle eastern ears - they aren't used to music with those frequencies - it would have been as painful as scratching a chalk board for the same length of time.)
The British prisoner held at Gitmo was cleared for release in 2007/8 after being shown to have no links to extremism of any kind. He won't be released until after 2012 at the earliest, if he is ever released at all. Before anyone starts on about American care and attention, I would want to know precisely why. No why, then no excuse. If you can't explain why a wholly innocent person was in prison for 6-7 years without trial and without any evidence against him, and THEN held a further 3-4 years after being found by tribunal to be wholly innocent, with no prospect of being released for many many years to come, then you have absolutely no legs to stand on.
Of course it is torture. Indeed, that was part of the basis of the appeals by the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. The fraudulent "confessions" sealed the fate of the prosecution's case (the statements were shown to have been tampered with afterwards with the signatures of the defendants edited in) but the courts were utterly horrified by the police treatment - which was no different from what you're describing.
Indeed, even in a prior appeal that failed, heard by the late Lord Denning, it failed because Lord Denning ruled that torture and abuse on such a scale was too horrific to contemplate, too savage to imagine. And, no, I'm not exaggerating his remarks. He really did say that what you're describing for police behaviour was too horrific to contemplate. Lord Denning naively concluded that it was better to refuse the appeal than to even think about police cruelty. With all respect, I disagree. It is better to imagine the unimaginable so that you can stop it, or - if it's not taking place - then at least be sure that the safeguards exist to ensure it never does.
Given that torture does take place, I am of the opinion that confessions should never be allowed in court at all. Evidence collected as a result of a confession, sure, but not the confession itself. If the police can't maintain conduct of a standard better than "too horrific to contemplate", then they should not be able to directly use in trial anything that is likely tainted by such conduct. Simple as that. Eliminate the incentive. That should go for any evidence involving methods established to have suspect credibility. Dubious crime labs get the press from time to time, for example. When standards improve, remove the bar. It is the only way you will ever get the police motivated to operate in a clean manner.
If they aren't, why does so much of the world rely on them? Yes, America included, though they're hardly the only ones.
And if they aren't reliable (they aren't reliable, but in the interests of neutrality I'll pretend otherwise) then every nation that carries out torture, or sponsors other nations to carry it out for them, is guilty of serious crimes against humanity. Strangely, a number of these nations are not signatories to the International Court of Justice (you may even be living in one) and thus outside any legal framework for protecting the victims of torture or abuse. Also strangely, a number of nations with strong laws protecting victims of governmental abuse have also passed laws exempting those the government wants to victimize in this way from any protection of the legal system. Which defeats the purpose of there being laws in the first place, but there ya go.
In other words, most nations are guilty of extra-judicial killings and other abuses of individuals who have zero involvement in any activity that is hostile to, well, pretty much anyone. Singling out one is stupid and ignores the reality of the real issue. The real issue is that zealots and paranoid schizophrenics rule most of the world because otherwise sane, rational people voted the zealots and paranoid schizophrenics into office.
I'm not even going to blame those in office - they're ill and they need treatment, their actions are not meaningful choices but merely symptoms of their disease. The blame goes entirely to the healthy people who regard it as amusing to torture the mentally ill in this way. It *is* torture, it is cruelty and it is abuse, just as much as the abuse that the ill then mete out to the innocent is.
That is true and that would reduce the costs somewhat. I would be interested in actually seeing real numbers put to the variables and an actual equation drawn up for what would be the break-even point per voyage in terms of mass carried and volume carried. (More mass = more fuel for accelerating and decelerating, more volume = more heat-shielding needed and more superstructure to handle off-center forces.)
Since the density of various substances is known, you can then determine what substances can stay within bounds of what is profitable given both these constraints.
If the difficulties aren't hard-wired into the equation, but are values you can plug in, you can then adapt the equation as technology improves and also run estimates on what variables are the most cost-effective to tweak that would also make a big difference to space mining.
Such an equation probably exists somewhere in the halls of various space agencies, but I haven't the foggiest what it is. But that equation should be what guides the agencies and the private ventures if space mining is to be a serious proposition at any time.
Oversized pebbles are not "significant moons". They would not be capable of generating tidal forces large enough to gouge through rock. They're also modern captures, so are completely irrelevant as the oceans on Mars existed only for the first few hundred million years. 4 billion years ago, neither was there and therefore neither did anything.
...as sympathetic as I am to the guy, since he was there to see his grandmother, he's going to have a hell of a time persuading anyone he was not working for the CIA if indeed the CIA was funding the company he worked for, and that he was aware the company was involved in psy ops*. Doesn't matter if the company wasn't part of the CIA, we know the CIA runs companies as fronts (from previous CIA scandals) and since the CIA would have to be incredibly stupid to reveal all the companies that were fronts.
Iran, therefore, is in a difficult position. The guy is essentially being paid CIA money for carrying out CIA-commissioned tasks, which is not going to go down well there no matter what. Psy ops also require some form of feedback - you can't manipulate in a vaccuum, which is a major factor in North Korea's isolation - and that means feet on the ground at some point. It must have been obvious to everyone involved (except for the poor guy involved) as to what would happen next.
I honestly doubt he really is a spy, they're generally not stupid enough to be that obvious, but I do believe he's "collateral damage" that the US considers wholly acceptable for intelligence-gathering purposes.**
*Manipulating the perception of another, rather than giving them information and free choice, is a "psychological operation" of the kind believed to be used in covert ops. Doesn't matter if it's merely the opinion of a boss or the opinion of a sponsor that's being expressed, with no military or intelligence involvement at all, it is still a psy op because it is still about manipulation and not choice. Had I not put in an explanation, but relied entirely on emotive description, that would also be psy op/manipulation. Because I am stating what is meant and why the choice of words, there is information and therefore freedom of choice and therefore it is not manipulative.
**Intelligence gathering will always involve collateral damage. You can't avoid it. Totally innocent people will inevitably be sacrificed, which is why this idea that you control your destiny is such a laugh. All nations gather intelligence from all nations (themselves as much as anyone else), all nations need to at this point in history, and therefore all nations will have wholly innocent victims. The British have been investigating a whole host of scandals and "collateral damage" from internal investigation by the police recently, after a couple of undercover operatives defected to the organizations they were spying on and blew the lid on some very shady dealings.
Look, your complete lack of comprehension of my posts is getting stale. Admit that you're too stupid to comprehend either the history of science or the practice of it and move on.
A nuclear reactor will produce -specific- isotopes. Each type of reactor will produce a given set of isotopes, the ratio of which is unique to that reactor.
Reactors that specifically produce Plutonium-238 (not all forms of plutonium are useful) aren't common, since plutonium-239 is what is wanted for 99.9% of all terrestrial plutonium usage, and separating something with equal charge and very very nearly equal mass would be hard. The Curiosity rover, recently launched, has one of the most powerful Pu-238 batteries ever produced, at a whopping 110 watts. For climbing vertical walls, this is useless. There is also a well-known and well-publicized global shortage of Pu-238. Fast breeder reactors produced Plutonium (which is why they were popular in the Cold War) but modern reactors produce little or none, giving them zero weapons proliferation risk (which is why they can be safely exported to non-signatory nations).
For serious energy density, you'd have to go to Polonium-210. US reactors do not produce Polonium. The only source is in Russia, which is why when the former Soviet spy was poisoned with Polonium in Britain, it took scientists around 5 seconds to figure out where that would have come from. Do you seriously, seriously imagine the Russians are going to sell NASA a whole bunch of Polonium? Especially with all the political battles over anti-missile systems, etc?
As for the number of reactors, several nations started shuttering theirs after the disaster in Japan. Those that remain open are being scrutinized over safety. Jerry-rigging them to produce Polonium would produce a political nightmare that the nuclear industry is not going to want right now.