a few years ago, sun ran a banner ad for their educational services (java, i think) saying "it's like learning about nuclear physics from einstein". i sent them a message pointing out that einsein wasn't a nuclear physicist, and asking if that meant that their courses were given by non-specialists. they did not reply.
that is amusing, as intended, but there is an important difference between it and the buzzword-speak the original article is about: it has meaning. it may be loaded with jargon, but how many of those words could be removed or replaced without losing the meaning? how many of the acronyms could be expanded without losing clarity?
jargon exists to ease communication in specialized subjects, buzzwords exist to give a false impression.
umbrello has my favourite error, shared with rational rose, even: in a sequence diagram, it is not possible (that i can find) to show one object creating another, even though that is part of the UML standard.
also, sequence diagrams don't mark the active period when one objects invokes another.
I am sure that a company cannot make you sign something in.001pt Times
the only company that can do that is the mafia.
if you don't like or can't read a contract, don't sign it.
Re:I doubt this will revolutionize anything...
on
Vision is a 'Reflex'
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· Score: 2
and when i went to the trouble to install a linux flash 6 player, i found that i couldn't follow the link to their lab info anyway. clicking it did nothing at all. the (commercial) link about their book worked fine.
bootstrap extraterrestrial habitation... can not possibly afford the delta-V to bring everything... But it's a while before we see a device like this replicate itself.
in particular, it must be able to work from local materials, else you still have to ship all the raw polymer to build from.
Film is well on its way to becoming a playing for history hobbyists and an art tool for retro artists
photographers may do their own film processing, but how many make their own film? when the manufacturers stop doing so it will be the end of film photography, except for real die-hards who ressurect the early technology.
Re:Cool, but mostly useless?
on
Got Sleep?
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· Score: 2
Yeah, it would be good for soldier folk and computer folk. Too bad it's useless to everyone else.
of course. all those other folks would just waste the extra time watching TV. better not to give them the choice.
With pgp, information is stored in the signature about _when_ I signed the message.
at best, you get info about the reading of the system clock at the time. and how do you convince a judge that you didn't use your own version of PGP that takes the purported current time as an argument?
i agree with you and the NIST that 12am and 12pm are poorly-chosen terms, but they are still used with standard, if not logical, definitions. they are easily remembered by noting that 12:01 am comes just after 12:00 am.
as for the court case, ambiguities are supposed to be resolved against the favour of the creator of the ambiguitiy, so as to discourage deliberate use. the parking case was decided against the city that put up the sign, as is proper. the case of the ticket buyer should go against the theatre which misinterpreted its own words.
it makes no sense to speak of the 12:00 that comes before or after that highest point
perhaps, but 12am and 12pm have well-defined meanings in english all the same, even if they don't make good physical sense. (that is not an unusual situation!)
12am is defined as the begining of a day. 12pm is defined as the middle of a day. in commerce, if not in nit-picking astronomy, that is what they mean.
note that midnight is a source of great confusion. it is defined as the begining of the day, not the end, so "tuesday at midnight" means the end of monday, but it is commonly used to mean the end of tuesday.
they are trying to screw you for their own convenience.
make a big noisy fuss right in the lobby at a time when there are lots of paying customers about. demand that they either refund your money or honour the tickets which you purchased in good faith. make sure everyone hears that the theater is not trustworthy.
don't make threats or swear a lot. you want the customers there to be sympathetic to you, so that the management looks bad to them, and you don't want to give them grounds to have you forcibly removed. don't let them lure you into some office out of public view; you want to give them bad publicity.
if you can't bring yourself to make a public fuss, then take the theater to small claims court for fraud. just suggesting that should make management decide that keeping your money isn't worth their time.
don't forget that they have cheated you. don't take it lying down.
Was Einstein's e=mc2 evil because it enabled the discovery of the atomic bomb?
i completely agree with your point that the goals of scientists are generally intellectual, not political.
however, your specific example is not correct. before einsteins's relativity it was already known that enourmous energy was bound up in atomic nuclei. what was not known was how to release it. E=mc2 showed that the potential was even greater than was suspected, but gave no clue as to how to realise it. and we still can get only a small fraction of that amount.
If we could combine all the constants in all the formulars together . ..
it is common to define the constants particular to one discipline such that they are all equal to 1, this allowing one to leave them out of equations. for example, using geometrized units one expresses all quantities in term of centimeters, and G, c, k, and h are all set to 1.
And if you Read the article, this is about Manned, commercial space flight.
the article was indeed about manned space flight. however, the posting you were commenting on was not. it was on one aspect of postings about the article, namely continuing use of WWII technology, and the reasons for it in one, unmanned, vehicle.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but There aren't 'hundreds of Gs on rentry.' Anything over 5 Gs is pretty dangerous, with anything over 10 Gs meaning Certain Death.
what bubble is that? 10g is trouble for humans, but he was talking about ICBMs. would you ride one of those?
cars matured at fifty years because they are fairly limited in scope and simple in design. computers, and the programs they run, have a far greater range of application, and greater complexity of design. new kinds of hardware and software design are still emerging, unlike the situation with cars. that is why i say that computer technology is still near the beginning of the learning curve.
How different is you car now than from 50 years ago?
so we are near the top of the curve for cars. i think it is unrealistically pessimistic to believe that we are anywhere near the top for computers. rather, we are near the bottom. if things seem to have been changing fast already, then you aren't going to like what's coming!
The same is true with guns. Making guns illegal doesn't exactly do much to people who don't obey the laws which are, afaik, the ones you're worried about. See the problem here?
there is an important difference between software cheats and guns. you can't download an illegal gun, you have to steal it, so banning them reduces the supply.
at a guess, they calculated the size from the apparent brightness, the distance, and a guesstimated albedo (reflectivity). that last is the hard part! the estimated size of pluto varied substantially over the years with different albedo guesstimates. it all depends of what you figure the thing is made out of.
Slashdot Mirror
a few years ago, sun ran a banner ad for their educational services (java, i think) saying "it's like learning about nuclear physics from einstein". i sent them a message pointing out that einsein wasn't a nuclear physicist, and asking if that meant that their courses were given by non-specialists.
they did not reply.
that is amusing, as intended, but there is an important difference between it and the buzzword-speak the original article is about: it has meaning. it may be loaded with jargon, but how many of those words could be removed or replaced without losing the meaning? how many of the acronyms could be expanded without losing clarity?
jargon exists to ease communication in specialized subjects, buzzwords exist to give a false impression.
A Cray is a supercomputer. Hense "Desktop Cray" is a joke.
actually, the once-planned Cray3 would have fit on a desktop. it had to be small, because path lengths are the ultimate speed limit.
umbrello has my favourite error, shared with rational rose, even: in a sequence diagram, it is not possible (that i can find) to show one object creating another, even though that is part of the UML standard.
also, sequence diagrams don't mark the active period when one objects invokes another.
a much easier way is to use spamgourmet.com. once registered, you can create limited-use email addresses on the fly.
I am sure that a company cannot make you sign something in .001pt Times
the only company that can do that is the mafia.
if you don't like or can't read a contract, don't sign it.
and when i went to the trouble to install a linux flash 6 player, i found that i couldn't follow the link to their lab info anyway. clicking it did nothing at all. the (commercial) link about their book worked fine.
bootstrap extraterrestrial habitation...
can not possibly afford the delta-V to bring everything...
But it's a while before we see a device like this replicate itself.
in particular, it must be able to work from local materials, else you still have to ship all the raw polymer to build from.
Film is well on its way to becoming a playing for history hobbyists and an art tool for retro artists
photographers may do their own film processing, but how many make their own film? when the manufacturers stop doing so it will be the end of film photography, except for real die-hards who ressurect the early technology.
Yeah, it would be good for soldier folk and computer folk. Too bad it's useless to everyone else.
of course. all those other folks would just waste the extra time watching TV. better not to give them the choice.
With pgp, information is stored in the signature about _when_ I signed the message.
at best, you get info about the reading of the system clock at the time. and how do you convince a judge that you didn't use your own version of PGP that takes the purported current time as an argument?
i agree with you and the NIST that 12am and 12pm are poorly-chosen terms, but they are still used with standard, if not logical, definitions. they are easily remembered by noting that 12:01 am comes just after 12:00 am.
as for the court case, ambiguities are supposed to be resolved against the favour of the creator of the ambiguitiy, so as to discourage deliberate use. the parking case was decided against the city that put up the sign, as is proper. the case of the ticket buyer should go against the theatre which misinterpreted its own words.
some antennae's and solar panels
trying to turn an already plural word into a plural by making it possessive!
that is true talent.
it makes no sense to speak of the 12:00 that comes before or after that highest point
perhaps, but 12am and 12pm have well-defined meanings in english all the same, even if they don't make good physical sense. (that is not an unusual situation!)
12am is defined as the begining of a day. 12pm is defined as the middle of a day. in commerce, if not in nit-picking astronomy, that is what they mean.
note that midnight is a source of great confusion. it is defined as the begining of the day, not the end, so "tuesday at midnight" means the end of monday, but it is commonly used to mean the end of tuesday.
they are trying to screw you for their own convenience.
make a big noisy fuss right in the lobby at a time when there are lots of paying customers about. demand that they either refund your money or honour the tickets which you purchased in good faith. make sure everyone hears that the theater is not trustworthy.
don't make threats or swear a lot. you want the customers there to be sympathetic to you, so that the management looks bad to them, and you don't want to give them grounds to have you forcibly removed. don't let them lure you into some office out of public view; you want to give them bad publicity.
if you can't bring yourself to make a public fuss, then take the theater to small claims court for fraud. just suggesting that should make management decide that keeping your money isn't worth their time.
don't forget that they have cheated you. don't take it lying down.
Was Einstein's e=mc2 evil because it enabled the discovery of the atomic bomb?
i completely agree with your point that the goals of scientists are generally intellectual, not political.
however, your specific example is not correct. before einsteins's relativity it was already known that enourmous energy was bound up in atomic nuclei. what was not known was how to release it. E=mc2 showed that the potential was even greater than was suspected, but gave no clue as to how to realise it. and we still can get only a small fraction of that amount.
If we could combine all the constants in all the formulars together . . .
it is common to define the constants particular to one discipline such that they are all equal to 1, this allowing one to leave them out of equations. for example, using geometrized units one expresses all quantities in term of centimeters, and G, c, k, and h are all set to 1.
Can this be exploited by a rouge shell script?
i don't think so, but a big blue one could do the job.
And if you Read the article, this is about Manned, commercial space flight.
the article was indeed about manned space flight. however, the posting you were commenting on was not. it was on one aspect of postings about the article, namely continuing use of WWII technology, and the reasons for it in one, unmanned, vehicle.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but There aren't 'hundreds of Gs on rentry.' Anything over 5 Gs is pretty dangerous, with anything over 10 Gs meaning Certain Death.
what bubble is that? 10g is trouble for humans, but he was talking about ICBMs. would you ride one of those?
cars matured at fifty years because they are fairly limited in scope and simple in design. computers, and the programs they run, have a far greater range of application, and greater complexity of design. new kinds of hardware and software design are still emerging, unlike the situation with cars. that is why i say that computer technology is still near the beginning of the learning curve.
How different is you car now than from 50 years ago?
so we are near the top of the curve for cars. i think it is unrealistically pessimistic to believe that we are anywhere near the top for computers. rather, we are near the bottom. if things seem to have been changing fast already, then you aren't going to like what's coming!
The same is true with guns. Making guns illegal doesn't exactly do much to people who don't obey the laws which are, afaik, the ones you're worried about. See the problem here?
there is an important difference between software cheats and guns. you can't download an illegal gun, you have to steal it, so banning them reduces the supply.
How do they get these statistics?
at a guess, they calculated the size from the apparent brightness, the distance, and a guesstimated albedo (reflectivity). that last is the hard part! the estimated size of pluto varied substantially over the years with different albedo guesstimates. it all depends of what you figure the thing is made out of.
Planet X is as good a name as any. At the least 99% of people can pronounce it.
99% of what people? half of all people only speak chinese.