Oh, I wouldn't worry. I'm not convinced they even have a world view. The Celts invented most of what is now called Socialism over 2,500 years ago and despite rulers having absolute power over most of the European continent at one point, it is self-evident that communism never took place. If you'd prefer a reverse example, Johnny Rotten was a possibility because of socialism. When he moved to the States, he transformed into a respectable Realtor, demonstrating the damaging, corrupting influence of a capitalist environment. (Damaging? Think about it - how many realtors does the world need? How many culturally-shaping groups are there out there right now? 'Nuff said.)
...communism with socialism is hardly an authority on definitions. England and France are socialist countries. China and North Korea are communist countries. You think maybe - just maybe - there's a difference that might be worthy of consideration?
Generally, the cost of running enough lines to be able to break even is so high that there is a substantial barrier to entering the market. I don't see how anyone would break even with less than multiple T3 lines on the back end, heavy-duty Cisco or Juniper routers and buckets of xDSL routers for the front. And this isn't one time round. This is for every five square mile block! This is no mom-and-pop shop, this is a serious investment by people who have a LOT of money to burn.
The drawback is that with cable operators able to distance themselves from telecos (making DSL the only way a startup can, well, start up), the very limited range of xDSL, and the reluctance of customers to switch, burning money is what you'll do.
Of course, once net neutrality goes away, it would be possible (and legal) for an upstream provider to throttle your bandwidth on request from a competitor. As most upstream providers ARE competitors, such requests can be expected.
Nobody can afford to go from zero to full tier-1 class provider, which means only tier-1 providers will mean anything at all the day net neutrality goes.
That was in the fine-print, along with Earth being destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. If you expand the full stops, they turn out to be microdots containing the entire Book of Revelation, the Mayan calendar theory, the short story "The Nine Billion Names of God", and the script for the nuke war movie "Threads".
I can guarantee you that in another hundred years, getting a replacement ROM for an obsolete car will be much much harder than getting some scrap metal that can be squished into the shape needed to replace some rusted connector.
This isn't to negate your main point, but some resources are held in as much secrecy as any nvidia driver - the code for the onboard computer being one, and there are probably other components considered "secret" in some way or other - if only in the exact formulation. Abandonware litters the software scene as it is, and the chances are painfully high that when automakers collapse (not if), or when entire lines are discarded, the information essential to maintain that vehicle will be lost. Permanently.
I'm not against technical advances, and I'm all for having more technologically advanced cars, but I am against the kind of paranoid secrecy and money-grubbing that has historically led to important skills being placed at risk or lost. Hell, I'm an avid follower of Formula 1 - there are few cars in this world more advanced - and I wish more of those innovations were in modern street cars. But my gripe remains the same - secrecy is a greater source of harm than sharing. I doubt any F1 car will ever be released under the GPL, but I do believe that the racing would be better and driver safety would be improved as a result.
Good works are not sufficient, but they ARE necessary. (Faith without works is dead - James.) Although the brain cannot prove or disprove an article of faith, it appears to function with a preference for good works. And, indeed, faith. (Another spot in the brain seems to concern itself with that.) This does not prove or disprove any specific religion or belief, but it does show that certain elements of the brain appear to be more active - and presumably in better condition - when some sort of belief/action system is in place. I would assume that this does NOT require any specific type of belief - An atheist with a solid compassionate lifestyle would presumably experience much the same benefit, and a person who was a devout follower of a religion but not of a belief would presumably get no benefit at all.
(I've met highly, fanatically, devout christians who were great at talking the talk - including in tounges, but who weren't so up on walking the walk, and who always seemed to me to be emotionally dead. I've seen a few Buddhists like that - it's truly weird, comparing those who actually have a belief and those who are simply good actors. All in all, I'm of the opinion that there is something that is a function of living a belief and believing the life that is wholly independent of the specifics of the life or belief.)
Ok, first everything in science is "theoretical" to some degree - we weren't around 4.5 billion years ago. However, it was recently (I seem to remember a Slashdot story on this in the last week or so) accepted by astronomers that this was the best of all currently proposed theories. It is also the only model that can account for the moon's momentum (it has escape velocity and this limits where it can originate from), it is the only model that can account for the moon's composition (it is composed of the same materials as the Earth's crust in about the same ratios), and it is the only model that can explain how the moon could still have a semi-liquid core (it's too small to retain a liquid core unless very young).
The Earth's orbit is relatively simple. Momentum in any collision is conserved. So is kinetic energy. The moon would have carried rotational momentum, but probably not much forward momentum. This means that the Earth's velocity is the resultant velocity of the collision. Since the orbits crossed, at least one of these bodies had an eccentric orbit. Since the result of the collision was not to leave the Earth on a wildly eccentric orbit, I would have to conclude that the Earth initially had a more eccentric orbit and that the collision reduced that.
(momentum = m * v, kinetic energy = 0.5 * m * v^2, total momentum and kinetic energy must remain unchanged from start to finish, and the rest is Newton's second and third laws.)
Mercury is absurdly dense. Whether it lost lighter elements in a collision, or simply never had them because it's close to the sun is outside my knowledge of planetary physics. However, the argument concerning drag would certainly apply to Mercury, making that one easy.
Venus has no moon or belt, so is unlikely to have had any significant impacts. I'm going to accept the drag idea for that as well.
Mars - isn't that the one that was used to prove elliptical orbits? If so, I'm going to dispute that it has a fairly circular orbit, if it was measurable in the time of Tycho Brahms!
Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are gas giants. They most certainly experience brownian motion on a small scale, but average out to fairly circular orbits, which is exactly what I predicted. I hardly see the issue there. I say that small particles travel randomly, but that the net motion is circular. When you squish those particles into a gas giant, you get exactly that behaviour. How is this an enigma? It's simple statistics.
Mea culpa. I shall bow to the wisdom of the Great Minds.:) Seriously, now it's written out in both the parent and grandparent post to this, it's pretty clear-cut. (Being wrong is never fun, but it gives me a chance to learn from the experts.)
Hmmm. Wouldn't that be true only over a sufficiently long timeframe?
Since the collisions are down to chance, and planets probably don't form simultaneously, there must surely be a timeframe in which the probability of a high-speed collision that would destroy a planetary mass is low enough that the planets are traveling in a more-or-less random direction. As the timeframe increases, the number of significant masses would presumably increase, and the probability of any two masses colliding would also increase. Over a long enough timeframe, you eventually end up with something stable.
(Here, I'm picturing early systems to have criss-crossing orbits that would lead to a collision - eventually. We know the proto-Earth had such an orbit with a Mars-like planet, and we see exactly that today with Neptune and Pluto.)
As you're an astronomer, you can correct me on any misinterpretation on my point, but it would seem that a system must start brownian-like and evolve to the more stable system you describe using the mechanism you outline.
A circular (or near-circular) orbit should be extremely rare. It is the special case of an elliptical orbit where the speed is very very close to the theoretical speed required to orbit at that distance from the sun and the direction of motion is very close to being at right-angles to the sun.
The Earth is an intriguing case - the original third planet collided with a planet the size of Mars, resulting in part of the crust being blasted off into space forming a mass that is now our moon and a debris ring. A collision on that scale - two almost equally massive objects slamming at an angle - must have resulted in a change in velocity. Since Earth is now on a near-circular orbit, it would seem not unreasonable to assume it started off on a much more elliptical path.
Virtually all of the known objects in the Kepler Belt follow extreme orbits - some varying by 300+ AU in distance from the sun. However, these are all very old objects. They have not been subject to many collisions and are almost in their original state.
On the basis of our extrasolar observations to date, plus the Kepler Belt observations, plus the Earth enigma, I would conclude that elliptical orbits are the norm for younger solar systems and that more circular orbits become slightly more common in older systems where there is a chance that collisions will have averaged things out better.
They say their software has bugs and then later on recommend the use of supported software (implying that supported software is bug-free, or at least has bugs that support can resolve).
First, (almost) all software has bugs. It's like saying: "Warning: This car needs gasoline". The implication of making it a warning is that it is significantly less stable than other products. Nothing I've seen suggests that this is true. Second, Microsoft's support is expensive and hasn't been known to resolve anything, so recommending them as a better alternative in some way is plainly untrue. Lastly, most of the bugs users of either product are likely to encounter (crashes, freezes, etc) are not resolvable by phone or e-mail - it is simply dishonest to say that support will help those who suffer from bugs.
Odds are, their disclaimer is an attempt to avoid being sued. The consequence is that those who matter, those who need the product, will be too scared to use it. A userbase is essential for the long-term survival of software, the addition of important features and the elimination of errors. Scaring potential users away is harmful to the software and isn't being fair on those who do use the product.
The problem with gradual deployment is that Government staff (both politicians and civil servants) move around. Projects that take longer than one political season take too long and risk (a) being modified/updated to the point of being useless, (b) being cut in order to fund some other pet project, and/or (c) being slowed to the point of uselessness, as it clearly wasn't important in the first place.
The problem with fast deployment is that each and every mistake by ANYONE involved will immediately be blamed on both the software and the minister involved, no matter how trivial and no matter how much it was really the fault of the kid with the 44 oz. cup of soda who poured the drink down the back of the machine to see what would happen.
In the end, I am in favour of rapid deployment, IF AND ONLY IF that deployment is carried out by people who are knowledgeable about what they are deploying. As IPv6 demonstrates only too well, give people an inch and they'll take a mile, along with 99 other miles and at least three or four decades.
Parallel programming is indeed hard. The standard approach these days is to decompose the parallel problem into a definite set of serial problems. The serial problems (applets) can then be coded more-or-less as normal, usually using message-passing rather than direct calls to communicate with other applets. Making sure that everything is scheduled correctly does indeed take managerial skills. The same techniques used to schedule projects (critical path analysis) can be used to minimize time overheads. The same techniques used to minimize the use of physical resources (SIMPLEX aka Operational Research) works just as well on software for physical resources there.
The first problem is that people who make good managers make lousy coders. The second problem is that people who make good coders make lousy managers. The third problem is that plenty of upper management types (unfortunately, I regard the names I could mention as genuinely dangerous and unpredictable) simply have no understanding of programming in general, never mind the intricacies of parallelism.
However, resource management and coding is not enough. These sorts of problems are typically either CPU-bound and not heavy on the networks, or light on the CPU but are network-killers. (Look at any HPC paper on cascading network errors for an example.) Typically, you get hardware which isn't ideally suited to either extreme, so the problem must be transformed into one that is functionally identical but within the limits of what equipment there is. (There is no such thing as a generic parallel app for a generic parallel architecture. There are headaches and there are high-velocity exploding neurons, but that's the range of choices.)
Well, the British Library draws the line at whatever they can buy and warehouse. (They're supposed to be keeping copies of everything printed, IIRC.) The University of Manchester owns over a dozen huge warehouses, plus two gigantic libraries, for their current storage. Not all of these are the height of academia. Trust me - many are not even close.
Hay on Wye is another matter. In amongst their stores, you will find three storey barns absolutely packed floor-to-ceiling with books. If it's printed, it's likely to be there. (Last time I went, I picked up a book on hypnosis for dentists, dated 1910. Books a good century or so older lined many a shelf, along with modern pop paperbacks.)
Yes, but does this answer your question on what is worth preserving? Aside from the fact that someone is likely to want almost anything, and will pay. No, not really. For that, I will need to dig a little deeper than any store that exists today, right into the earliest writings from different cultures.
Britain's oldest known true book was Beowulf. Not a world-class masterpiece, but very respectable. More so than many fantasy novels published today. In terms of value at the time, it was probably pretty worthless. The country was being invaded from all sides and the Saxons were faring badly. They didn't have time to really enjoy sagas, however good. They would much have preferred DIY handbooks on building fully-automatic longbows or something. However, one copy of Beowulf survived. Mostly. A few pages were badly burned in a fire. Other than that, a few fragments of poems have made it, but that's really it for Saxon-age writings.
In Babylon and Sumer, things are a little better. Not a lot, but better all the same. There we have thousands of fragments - enough to get a clearer understanding of society as a whole (in AD&D-speak, it was Lawful Evil) but there are no complete books. Interestingly, we have two partial books, one that describes a terrible flood in which a Sumerian was forced to load a boat with pairs of male and female animals. (There is archaeological evidence of a bad flood that dumped fifteen feet of mud and clay on Sumerian cities.) The tale of the Deluge describes it lasting about a week. I shall leave the inferences to others.:)
The second book that survives from that time is again partial, but was evidently a school textbook, as it seems to have been used to teach people to write in cuneform.
At the time, the first was nothing more than a fable based off a half-remembered event from a forgotten past. The second was a use-once-and-dispose product. It had no value to them, beyond helping the instructor see who needed help with what skill. The laws, the records of major treaties, the records of anything major at all - all these exist only in tiny fragments. What we know of the earliest technological civilization in the world we know purely through the eyes of children.
(There are many ancient and even relatively modern societies whose writing is so fragmentary and so badly damaged for all kinds of reasons that decypherment may never be possible.)
How does this relate? Am I expecting a major disaster to overtake western civilization? No, we've been electing disasters for decades now and it's not been a problem in terms of what is knowable. My point is far less that there's going to be a repeat performance (although it's not an impossibility), and far more that if history has taught us anything it is that however good we are at judging importance right now, we are utter failures at judging importance in future times. Our ability to predict is so close to zero as to not be worth the effort of trying.
"Translation for us humans, please!" Instead of burning books, seal them in a totally 100% corrosion-proof, water-proof container that is compressible. A few hundred tonne containers should make for an admirable false reef. There are also monstrous caves in England and America, hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet deep. The average number of
My understanding from the article is that he did try to give them away but nobody would take them. Which, if true, is indeed a sad reflection on our times. That this is occurring at the same time the Hay on Wye Festival is taking place (one of the largest and most important literary festivals, in a town where you can't move for book stores) makes it positively sick and twisted.
Hell, why didn't he just ship the books to Hay? I'm sure they have room for Yet Another bookstore - there must be something there they can convert. A cafe or a pub, perhaps. (Anyone going there goes for one reason and one reason alone, and it ain't the food.) The idea that he couldn't give the books away is all fine and dandy, but is clear evidence of not trying very hard.
(There are even anonymous book clubs, where you go online and list all the places you've hidden books, and other members can go find them. Apparently, it's not just information but entire books that like to be free.)
Don't forget that some of these "smoky" cars were all-electric, and that the condensers would likely have been far more environmentally-friendly than modern rechargeable batteries, from a manufacturing and recycling standpoint. Sure, the modern car is safer. Well, usually. Reports of some modern cars spontaneously switching on their cruise control do bother me some. And your other points are well-made.
Having said that, I do wish sensible, widely-available mass transmit were in place. No matter what the benefits of a modern car, it cannot compare at all to the benefits of a quality (emphasis on quality) train or bus service. What's quality? Quality is being able to meet 90% of your travel needs at least 90% of the time. You may well want/need a car for the rest, but the point is that "the rest" then becomes a much smaller quantity. The result should be improved safety, reduced pollution, reduced costs, and reduced stress.
There's a race in England, the Brighton Run, in which cars dating no later than 1905 street-race for something like 100 miles. From what I understand, two-thirds make the distance. At Goodwood, they have some amazing historic cars which are seriously put to the test - flat-out on one of Britain's oldest (and probably most dangerous) racing circuits. So, no, I'm not the least bit surprised that a historic Ford could have its original engine and be put through its paces. Modern cars are complex systems, and no matter what technical manual says what, when you increase complexity you WILL reduce reliability. Modern cars are not designed with 100-year-warranties in mind - they are designed to be cheap and disposable. If you check, even the cars just off the assembly line and placed straight into show rooms will have rust spots (ie: not sealed correctly) and other signs of deterioration.
Possibly something drummed up by the GAO. Virtually every single Federal department has failed security audits year after year, with some of the military ones getting worse. It would not surprise me if someone came up with the idea of scaring the Feds into finally taking this seriously. (Same with corporate security. A few million credit cards stolen here or there don't seem to bother the online stores much, they still have lousy safeguards and probably retain data on a machine directly connected to the Internet. If they won't take customers' security seriously, then maybe someone in Government has had the bright idea of terrifying them into doing better.)
Hey, I can dream that there is intelligent life in Washington DC.
Seriously, this seems designed to provoke a reaction, and those are the two major groups who are not only the most likely targets in a cyberwar, but also the least secure against such an attack. Since nobody has ever successfully persuaded them to do the work needed - to the point that the Internet Czar has been a vacant position for many years - scare tactics would be a reasonable next step. (The last Internet Czar quit in frustration, precisely because none of the big players pay attention to good practices, no matter who is doing the talking.)
Lots of things occur naturally that are toxic at ANY concentration. Mercury is a perfectly natural substance but I don't recommend drinking any.
Lots of things occur naturally that are toxic above a critical threshold but are safe below it. Those who drink any kind of drink made from the leaves of the tea plant are drinking all kinds of weird stuff, including arsenic. Not only is it perfectly safe at that concentration, it is actually good for you. Tea also contains aluminium, which replaces the calcium in bones and the iron in haemoglobin at very high concentrations, but does not appear to have any impact whatsoever on healthy people who drink tea.
Aspartame does not occur naturally and is only worthy of mention in that it is certainly known to have adverse neurological effects.
Sodium Benzoate is a weird one. It is certainly safe at the concentrations found in fruit, but the concentrations used in soft drinks will be substantially higher. Interactions are also possible, and are very hard to chart. I doubt there has been much study there - vitamin C's interactions are much better known, for just about everything, although a recent (as in a week or so ago) conference in Portland, Oregon, on food science suggests that our understanding of extreme concentrations is actually very bad.
Dihydrogen monoxide is no different. Very safe at normal concentrations, but deadly when mixed with radio gameshows or taken at excessive levels. It's all about ratios.
To assume that something has property X at level Y means that it will also have property X at level Z is naive in the extreme.
Oh, and modern additives are not the reason we live longer. In fact, the maximum age of a human has not changed substantially over the entire of recorded history. The average age before death has changed, but that's it, and that is more down to better availability of clean water and better healthcare. Healthy eating on top of that MIGHT improve life-expectancy, but if it does, it won't be by the trivial amount suggested. Laboratory mammals fed on a healthy, restricted calorie diet have almost doubled their life expectancy. It is unclear if this would work the same way on humans, but it is likely to have a dramatic impact regardless.
(America also has acute problems with alzeimers, obesity, and other diet-related diseases - far more so than other western industrialized nations.)
Which means that we love longer IN SPITE of food additives, not because of them. If we produced and ate healthier food, and less of it, diet-related diseases would diminish, quality of life would improve, and possibly life-expectancy would increase.
Personally, I would welcome insurance companies refusing to pay out on lifestyle-created conditions and diseases. Healthcare would become a lot cheaper and those who deny the problem would be removed from the gene pool.
There is a lot of evidence suggesting Aspartame is unsafe, and there's considerable suspicion about corn syrup these days. Fructose in too high a concentration is probably unsafe, but fruit (such as apples) have a strong enough reputation for health and are consumed by too wide a range of mammals for me to believe the body is harmed by moderate levels. There, it almost has to be concentration rather than content.
Which is why it is important to use the addition of the term "pure", in this case. Yes, general-purpose computers can do most things adequately for most people. We use home computers that have x86-based processors, for the most part, because although they're trashy, they're good enough. We don't need a POWER6. We generally don't even need 16-way SMP systems using x86 processors - if you need a 16 processor system, a pile-of-pcs cluster or a grid are perfectly adequate and a fraction of the cost.
The "purist" systems are important, though. When doing medical or scientific 3D, the biggest complaint is that the networks aren't fast enough. You can't do the collective operations, the scatter/gather stuff, nearly fast enough to get the results these people want. This type of work is not CPU-bound, but IO-bound, and is the focus of a lot of attention as networking is where the big money is to be made - if you have a good solution.
Of course, this is about as interesting to Joe Average as a Pure Perl module. Joe Average wants to play Torcs, not brain surgery. Well, I hope, at least. Average systems are, well, for Joe Average, and do an OK job of it on the whole. It would be hard to imagine how one could improve on an average system significantly without adding in a huge overhead of cost, putting it out of reach of the average user. Of course, someone will imagine such an add-on eventually and get very rich from it, but I can't see that being me. Pity.
We from the Free Countries call it "self-censorship". And I seriously doubt any spin-doctor (be they from the worst regime to the most enlightened) would be willing to associated with a geek who calls things for what they truly are.
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Oh, I wouldn't worry. I'm not convinced they even have a world view. The Celts invented most of what is now called Socialism over 2,500 years ago and despite rulers having absolute power over most of the European continent at one point, it is self-evident that communism never took place. If you'd prefer a reverse example, Johnny Rotten was a possibility because of socialism. When he moved to the States, he transformed into a respectable Realtor, demonstrating the damaging, corrupting influence of a capitalist environment. (Damaging? Think about it - how many realtors does the world need? How many culturally-shaping groups are there out there right now? 'Nuff said.)
...communism with socialism is hardly an authority on definitions. England and France are socialist countries. China and North Korea are communist countries. You think maybe - just maybe - there's a difference that might be worthy of consideration?
The drawback is that with cable operators able to distance themselves from telecos (making DSL the only way a startup can, well, start up), the very limited range of xDSL, and the reluctance of customers to switch, burning money is what you'll do.
Of course, once net neutrality goes away, it would be possible (and legal) for an upstream provider to throttle your bandwidth on request from a competitor. As most upstream providers ARE competitors, such requests can be expected.
Nobody can afford to go from zero to full tier-1 class provider, which means only tier-1 providers will mean anything at all the day net neutrality goes.
That was in the fine-print, along with Earth being destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. If you expand the full stops, they turn out to be microdots containing the entire Book of Revelation, the Mayan calendar theory, the short story "The Nine Billion Names of God", and the script for the nuke war movie "Threads".
Damn, I thought it said Muppets.
This isn't to negate your main point, but some resources are held in as much secrecy as any nvidia driver - the code for the onboard computer being one, and there are probably other components considered "secret" in some way or other - if only in the exact formulation. Abandonware litters the software scene as it is, and the chances are painfully high that when automakers collapse (not if), or when entire lines are discarded, the information essential to maintain that vehicle will be lost. Permanently.
I'm not against technical advances, and I'm all for having more technologically advanced cars, but I am against the kind of paranoid secrecy and money-grubbing that has historically led to important skills being placed at risk or lost. Hell, I'm an avid follower of Formula 1 - there are few cars in this world more advanced - and I wish more of those innovations were in modern street cars. But my gripe remains the same - secrecy is a greater source of harm than sharing. I doubt any F1 car will ever be released under the GPL, but I do believe that the racing would be better and driver safety would be improved as a result.
(I've met highly, fanatically, devout christians who were great at talking the talk - including in tounges, but who weren't so up on walking the walk, and who always seemed to me to be emotionally dead. I've seen a few Buddhists like that - it's truly weird, comparing those who actually have a belief and those who are simply good actors. All in all, I'm of the opinion that there is something that is a function of living a belief and believing the life that is wholly independent of the specifics of the life or belief.)
The Earth's orbit is relatively simple. Momentum in any collision is conserved. So is kinetic energy. The moon would have carried rotational momentum, but probably not much forward momentum. This means that the Earth's velocity is the resultant velocity of the collision. Since the orbits crossed, at least one of these bodies had an eccentric orbit. Since the result of the collision was not to leave the Earth on a wildly eccentric orbit, I would have to conclude that the Earth initially had a more eccentric orbit and that the collision reduced that.
(momentum = m * v, kinetic energy = 0.5 * m * v^2, total momentum and kinetic energy must remain unchanged from start to finish, and the rest is Newton's second and third laws.)
Mercury is absurdly dense. Whether it lost lighter elements in a collision, or simply never had them because it's close to the sun is outside my knowledge of planetary physics. However, the argument concerning drag would certainly apply to Mercury, making that one easy.
Venus has no moon or belt, so is unlikely to have had any significant impacts. I'm going to accept the drag idea for that as well.
Mars - isn't that the one that was used to prove elliptical orbits? If so, I'm going to dispute that it has a fairly circular orbit, if it was measurable in the time of Tycho Brahms!
Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are gas giants. They most certainly experience brownian motion on a small scale, but average out to fairly circular orbits, which is exactly what I predicted. I hardly see the issue there. I say that small particles travel randomly, but that the net motion is circular. When you squish those particles into a gas giant, you get exactly that behaviour. How is this an enigma? It's simple statistics.
Mea culpa. I shall bow to the wisdom of the Great Minds. :) Seriously, now it's written out in both the parent and grandparent post to this, it's pretty clear-cut. (Being wrong is never fun, but it gives me a chance to learn from the experts.)
...that the suspend operation worked flawlessly and throttling handled by hardware monitoring was handled to perfection.
I believe it was also in relation to a problem with a Barrier.
Since the collisions are down to chance, and planets probably don't form simultaneously, there must surely be a timeframe in which the probability of a high-speed collision that would destroy a planetary mass is low enough that the planets are traveling in a more-or-less random direction. As the timeframe increases, the number of significant masses would presumably increase, and the probability of any two masses colliding would also increase. Over a long enough timeframe, you eventually end up with something stable.
(Here, I'm picturing early systems to have criss-crossing orbits that would lead to a collision - eventually. We know the proto-Earth had such an orbit with a Mars-like planet, and we see exactly that today with Neptune and Pluto.)
As you're an astronomer, you can correct me on any misinterpretation on my point, but it would seem that a system must start brownian-like and evolve to the more stable system you describe using the mechanism you outline.
A circular (or near-circular) orbit should be extremely rare. It is the special case of an elliptical orbit where the speed is very very close to the theoretical speed required to orbit at that distance from the sun and the direction of motion is very close to being at right-angles to the sun.
The Earth is an intriguing case - the original third planet collided with a planet the size of Mars, resulting in part of the crust being blasted off into space forming a mass that is now our moon and a debris ring. A collision on that scale - two almost equally massive objects slamming at an angle - must have resulted in a change in velocity. Since Earth is now on a near-circular orbit, it would seem not unreasonable to assume it started off on a much more elliptical path.
Virtually all of the known objects in the Kepler Belt follow extreme orbits - some varying by 300+ AU in distance from the sun. However, these are all very old objects. They have not been subject to many collisions and are almost in their original state.
On the basis of our extrasolar observations to date, plus the Kepler Belt observations, plus the Earth enigma, I would conclude that elliptical orbits are the norm for younger solar systems and that more circular orbits become slightly more common in older systems where there is a chance that collisions will have averaged things out better.
First, (almost) all software has bugs. It's like saying: "Warning: This car needs gasoline". The implication of making it a warning is that it is significantly less stable than other products. Nothing I've seen suggests that this is true. Second, Microsoft's support is expensive and hasn't been known to resolve anything, so recommending them as a better alternative in some way is plainly untrue. Lastly, most of the bugs users of either product are likely to encounter (crashes, freezes, etc) are not resolvable by phone or e-mail - it is simply dishonest to say that support will help those who suffer from bugs.
Odds are, their disclaimer is an attempt to avoid being sued. The consequence is that those who matter, those who need the product, will be too scared to use it. A userbase is essential for the long-term survival of software, the addition of important features and the elimination of errors. Scaring potential users away is harmful to the software and isn't being fair on those who do use the product.
The problem with fast deployment is that each and every mistake by ANYONE involved will immediately be blamed on both the software and the minister involved, no matter how trivial and no matter how much it was really the fault of the kid with the 44 oz. cup of soda who poured the drink down the back of the machine to see what would happen.
In the end, I am in favour of rapid deployment, IF AND ONLY IF that deployment is carried out by people who are knowledgeable about what they are deploying. As IPv6 demonstrates only too well, give people an inch and they'll take a mile, along with 99 other miles and at least three or four decades.
The first problem is that people who make good managers make lousy coders. The second problem is that people who make good coders make lousy managers. The third problem is that plenty of upper management types (unfortunately, I regard the names I could mention as genuinely dangerous and unpredictable) simply have no understanding of programming in general, never mind the intricacies of parallelism.
However, resource management and coding is not enough. These sorts of problems are typically either CPU-bound and not heavy on the networks, or light on the CPU but are network-killers. (Look at any HPC paper on cascading network errors for an example.) Typically, you get hardware which isn't ideally suited to either extreme, so the problem must be transformed into one that is functionally identical but within the limits of what equipment there is. (There is no such thing as a generic parallel app for a generic parallel architecture. There are headaches and there are high-velocity exploding neurons, but that's the range of choices.)
Hay on Wye is another matter. In amongst their stores, you will find three storey barns absolutely packed floor-to-ceiling with books. If it's printed, it's likely to be there. (Last time I went, I picked up a book on hypnosis for dentists, dated 1910. Books a good century or so older lined many a shelf, along with modern pop paperbacks.)
Yes, but does this answer your question on what is worth preserving? Aside from the fact that someone is likely to want almost anything, and will pay. No, not really. For that, I will need to dig a little deeper than any store that exists today, right into the earliest writings from different cultures.
Britain's oldest known true book was Beowulf. Not a world-class masterpiece, but very respectable. More so than many fantasy novels published today. In terms of value at the time, it was probably pretty worthless. The country was being invaded from all sides and the Saxons were faring badly. They didn't have time to really enjoy sagas, however good. They would much have preferred DIY handbooks on building fully-automatic longbows or something. However, one copy of Beowulf survived. Mostly. A few pages were badly burned in a fire. Other than that, a few fragments of poems have made it, but that's really it for Saxon-age writings.
In Babylon and Sumer, things are a little better. Not a lot, but better all the same. There we have thousands of fragments - enough to get a clearer understanding of society as a whole (in AD&D-speak, it was Lawful Evil) but there are no complete books. Interestingly, we have two partial books, one that describes a terrible flood in which a Sumerian was forced to load a boat with pairs of male and female animals. (There is archaeological evidence of a bad flood that dumped fifteen feet of mud and clay on Sumerian cities.) The tale of the Deluge describes it lasting about a week. I shall leave the inferences to others. :)
The second book that survives from that time is again partial, but was evidently a school textbook, as it seems to have been used to teach people to write in cuneform.
At the time, the first was nothing more than a fable based off a half-remembered event from a forgotten past. The second was a use-once-and-dispose product. It had no value to them, beyond helping the instructor see who needed help with what skill. The laws, the records of major treaties, the records of anything major at all - all these exist only in tiny fragments. What we know of the earliest technological civilization in the world we know purely through the eyes of children.
(There are many ancient and even relatively modern societies whose writing is so fragmentary and so badly damaged for all kinds of reasons that decypherment may never be possible.)
How does this relate? Am I expecting a major disaster to overtake western civilization? No, we've been electing disasters for decades now and it's not been a problem in terms of what is knowable. My point is far less that there's going to be a repeat performance (although it's not an impossibility), and far more that if history has taught us anything it is that however good we are at judging importance right now, we are utter failures at judging importance in future times. Our ability to predict is so close to zero as to not be worth the effort of trying.
"Translation for us humans, please!" Instead of burning books, seal them in a totally 100% corrosion-proof, water-proof container that is compressible. A few hundred tonne containers should make for an admirable false reef. There are also monstrous caves in England and America, hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet deep. The average number of
Hell, why didn't he just ship the books to Hay? I'm sure they have room for Yet Another bookstore - there must be something there they can convert. A cafe or a pub, perhaps. (Anyone going there goes for one reason and one reason alone, and it ain't the food.) The idea that he couldn't give the books away is all fine and dandy, but is clear evidence of not trying very hard.
(There are even anonymous book clubs, where you go online and list all the places you've hidden books, and other members can go find them. Apparently, it's not just information but entire books that like to be free.)
Having said that, I do wish sensible, widely-available mass transmit were in place. No matter what the benefits of a modern car, it cannot compare at all to the benefits of a quality (emphasis on quality) train or bus service. What's quality? Quality is being able to meet 90% of your travel needs at least 90% of the time. You may well want/need a car for the rest, but the point is that "the rest" then becomes a much smaller quantity. The result should be improved safety, reduced pollution, reduced costs, and reduced stress.
There's a race in England, the Brighton Run, in which cars dating no later than 1905 street-race for something like 100 miles. From what I understand, two-thirds make the distance. At Goodwood, they have some amazing historic cars which are seriously put to the test - flat-out on one of Britain's oldest (and probably most dangerous) racing circuits. So, no, I'm not the least bit surprised that a historic Ford could have its original engine and be put through its paces. Modern cars are complex systems, and no matter what technical manual says what, when you increase complexity you WILL reduce reliability. Modern cars are not designed with 100-year-warranties in mind - they are designed to be cheap and disposable. If you check, even the cars just off the assembly line and placed straight into show rooms will have rust spots (ie: not sealed correctly) and other signs of deterioration.
Hey, I can dream that there is intelligent life in Washington DC.
Seriously, this seems designed to provoke a reaction, and those are the two major groups who are not only the most likely targets in a cyberwar, but also the least secure against such an attack. Since nobody has ever successfully persuaded them to do the work needed - to the point that the Internet Czar has been a vacant position for many years - scare tactics would be a reasonable next step. (The last Internet Czar quit in frustration, precisely because none of the big players pay attention to good practices, no matter who is doing the talking.)
Lots of things occur naturally that are toxic above a critical threshold but are safe below it. Those who drink any kind of drink made from the leaves of the tea plant are drinking all kinds of weird stuff, including arsenic. Not only is it perfectly safe at that concentration, it is actually good for you. Tea also contains aluminium, which replaces the calcium in bones and the iron in haemoglobin at very high concentrations, but does not appear to have any impact whatsoever on healthy people who drink tea.
Aspartame does not occur naturally and is only worthy of mention in that it is certainly known to have adverse neurological effects.
Sodium Benzoate is a weird one. It is certainly safe at the concentrations found in fruit, but the concentrations used in soft drinks will be substantially higher. Interactions are also possible, and are very hard to chart. I doubt there has been much study there - vitamin C's interactions are much better known, for just about everything, although a recent (as in a week or so ago) conference in Portland, Oregon, on food science suggests that our understanding of extreme concentrations is actually very bad.
Dihydrogen monoxide is no different. Very safe at normal concentrations, but deadly when mixed with radio gameshows or taken at excessive levels. It's all about ratios.
To assume that something has property X at level Y means that it will also have property X at level Z is naive in the extreme.
Oh, and modern additives are not the reason we live longer. In fact, the maximum age of a human has not changed substantially over the entire of recorded history. The average age before death has changed, but that's it, and that is more down to better availability of clean water and better healthcare. Healthy eating on top of that MIGHT improve life-expectancy, but if it does, it won't be by the trivial amount suggested. Laboratory mammals fed on a healthy, restricted calorie diet have almost doubled their life expectancy. It is unclear if this would work the same way on humans, but it is likely to have a dramatic impact regardless.
(America also has acute problems with alzeimers, obesity, and other diet-related diseases - far more so than other western industrialized nations.)
Which means that we love longer IN SPITE of food additives, not because of them. If we produced and ate healthier food, and less of it, diet-related diseases would diminish, quality of life would improve, and possibly life-expectancy would increase.
Personally, I would welcome insurance companies refusing to pay out on lifestyle-created conditions and diseases. Healthcare would become a lot cheaper and those who deny the problem would be removed from the gene pool.
There is a lot of evidence suggesting Aspartame is unsafe, and there's considerable suspicion about corn syrup these days. Fructose in too high a concentration is probably unsafe, but fruit (such as apples) have a strong enough reputation for health and are consumed by too wide a range of mammals for me to believe the body is harmed by moderate levels. There, it almost has to be concentration rather than content.
The "purist" systems are important, though. When doing medical or scientific 3D, the biggest complaint is that the networks aren't fast enough. You can't do the collective operations, the scatter/gather stuff, nearly fast enough to get the results these people want. This type of work is not CPU-bound, but IO-bound, and is the focus of a lot of attention as networking is where the big money is to be made - if you have a good solution.
Of course, this is about as interesting to Joe Average as a Pure Perl module. Joe Average wants to play Torcs, not brain surgery. Well, I hope, at least. Average systems are, well, for Joe Average, and do an OK job of it on the whole. It would be hard to imagine how one could improve on an average system significantly without adding in a huge overhead of cost, putting it out of reach of the average user. Of course, someone will imagine such an add-on eventually and get very rich from it, but I can't see that being me. Pity.
We from the Free Countries call it "self-censorship". And I seriously doubt any spin-doctor (be they from the worst regime to the most enlightened) would be willing to associated with a geek who calls things for what they truly are.