Don't mean to turn this into a thing, but if you're only taking your son to a martial arts class for a total of 2 hours a day, you're really not doing him a favor.
The CPU hogging is definitely real, at least on a Mac. I haven't seen it go past 40%, but if I have more than 10+ sites loaded on taps, I get slow memory hogging, usually plateauing around 20-25%. With all pages loaded.
The only two extensions I'm using right now are TabMixPlus and NoScript.
The simple answers to your question are 1) the early history of the universe and 2) to a lesser degree, the subject of this article, black holes.
You're right - usually, of the fundamental forces, quantum mechanicists can safely ignore gravity and relativists can ignore the other three because the difference in scales is so vast. Usually, mass doesn't exist in enough quantity in a small enough amount of space to generate sufficient gravity to even begin to rival the strength of the electromagnetic/strong/weak forces. Then we have black holes - a lot of mass packed into a very small amount of space. The affect of gravity on subatomic interactions within the black hole would quickly become nontrivial.
You have to understand that with solar power in nanite groups, you're not just generating electricity, but also heat which causes convection etc and nanites could control this force among others naturally present in the environment.
And where does the heat come from? Does it magically appear? Or have the nanites figured out a way to create a 2nd Law violation?
I enjoy science fiction just as much as the next guy, but don't spend too much time trying to justify the FICTION part of the science in a Crichton novel.
This is what annoys me about the arguments like this. They don't take into account that science is evolving all around them that will render the limitations they are planning on obsolete at the same time. So the 'smart' scientists push forward and screw things up...they've done it before. Nanotech is scary shit...to deny that is arrogant and short-sited.
The difference between statements made in history limiting man's abilities and those made by Dyson in the book review are that Dyson's are based on absolute physical law. Previous assertions such as man never being able to fly faster than the speed of sound had nothing to do with physical laws so much as underestimating mankind's engineering ability.
Even when curmudgeons were declaring that a craft heavier than air would never get off the ground you only had to look in the sky every time a bird, or an insect or a piece of paper flew by to know that it had to be possible. We knew back before the days of the Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1 that objects could break the sound barrier. Bullets did it all the time and it was just a matter of engineering to get past the hurdle.
OTOH, the increasing effect of viscosity on smaller objects in a fluid media is a known physical law. More energy might mean faster movement but that leads us to the problems of the amount of the maximum amount of energy contained in sunlight. Like Dyson stated, the energy is just not there - there's no engineering problem to solve. It would be like trying to get 5 gallons of gasoline out of a 1 gallon container.
That is what annoys me about arguments such as yours. They don't take into account what we know about the physical universe versus what people in the past thought they knew about man's engineering limitations.
The ivy league label is overrated. My alma mater (Johns Hopkins) has repeatedly refused to join the ivy league, mostly for finacial reasons.
Thats a load of hooey. The Ivy League is an informal association. If anything formal, its more or less a collegiate sporting league. I think this is a myth started at schools like Hopkins which, while prestigous, don't quite have the public brand cachet that the Ivies do.
I'd be the happiest man if a decent distribution was put together with the FreeBSD world and the linux kernel. Why would you want the opposite? I guess I can see it, but not really. make world + linux kernel == wahooO!
The Leaning Tower of Pisa [duomo.pisa.it] was actually quite terrifying before they put up the railings!! (Think about walking, 10 meters up, on wet, smooth-as-glass marble at like a 15 degree angle)
The Tower is pretty trippy, period. Walking up a tilted spiral staircase (deep foot grooves worn into marble steps!) with no outside reference except for the occasional patch of light can be pretty disorienting. One of the first things I noticed as a kid when I got to the belltop level was that there were a few ambulances station around the corner. This was before they installed railings so I'm guessing that they weren't just there for show.
Plus there's a lot of geek history there. Galileo did his rolling ball gravity experiments there and some of the original attempts at "fixing" the lean can be education from an engineering-mistakes-to-be-learned standpoint.
Unfortunately, the Three Gorges were an artistic inspiration for centuries of Chinese artists. They will be flooded, and their beauty lost. You can still see them pretty well now, but that won't be true for long.
Yah, it sucks, Three Gorges is a beautiful place, I would go back before they flood the area if I had the chance. OTOH, compared to how high the cliffs are, I'm not sure how much of an impact 135 meters is going to have on the view. The environmental and social/cultural damage sucks more, I think.
I don't know if you can still do it but back when I went you could hire these old boatmen to take you out and give you a better tour with more local flavor than the mass tourists groups.
I love technology museums but the Great Wall of China would be a good thing to stroll down with my lady(plus you geeks could get some choice hentai).
For the Great Wall, go during the winter. It will be cold, but the mountains surrounding the Wall doesn't have quite the same sense of majesty or history during the summers when there is no snow. Besides, the air will be that much more refreshing. And if you're lazy, you can get these guys to carry you up to the Wall itself for pretty cheap on sedan chairs.
And hentai is Japanese.
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 1
The Fanwing is a new name on an old concept: It's called an autogyro. And yes, there are many folks reexaming the autogyro as a less expensive and more reliable alternative to the helicopter. Unfortunately, many don't realize why the autogyro isn't more popular until they look more closely at the performance envelope.
At least read the descriptions before making a comment. The Fanwing uses a completely different operating principle. It is essentally a long cylindrical paddlewheel that spins around a horizontal axis. An autogyro is a rotor that spins around a vertical one.
Re:This year's once-in-a-lifetime event
on
Meet The Leonids
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· Score: 1
Well, the location and circumstances were different for me but for me this year's was much better even with the full moon. I counted a few hundred in the hour I was out - better than last year.
Last year, I ended up driving around southern Pennsylvania looking for openings in the patches of fog. The girl I was with kept nagging me about the entire deal until I got her drunk on the bottle of wine and she passed out in the back of the car. This year, I was in Dallas and drove south by myself a bit on I-35, took an empty looking exit and got a decent view. MUCH better than last year. No fog and no annoying, unappreciative bubblehead.
...just use the freekin' Hubble to take pictures of the landing sites and shut these idiots up?
There has to be enough resolution.
Actually, no there isn't. Hubble's resolution at that range is something like 90 meters. Not to mention the fact that the Hubble is designed for looking at extremely dim objects - the Moon is the second (apparent) brightest object in sky. The damage would be similiar to you walking out of a darkened theatre and staring directly into a spotlight at close range.
As for cancelling the book, I'm not sure I agreed with the idea of writing the book but once they started, NASA should have gone through with it. This will only give Moon conspiracy theorists more ammunition.
Funny thing - I was over at my uncle's place and left the original Slashdot story open and my cousin read it. Turns out that he had watched the FOX special and bought into the hoax theory. After he asked me what the story on/. was trying to say, I spent almost an hour debunking the hoax. Guess/. actually performed a useful education funtion for once!
Interesting points. Could be junk science [junkscience.com]. Personally, I never believe headlines and I won't even pay attention until there have been several studies from independant sources.
I would be wary of anything I read on junkscience.com in the same way I'd be wary of the speculative Reuters medicine story. Its interesting to note who the author/editor of that web page is (Steven Miller) and who pays his salary (Cato Institute) and who the large contributors that particular think tank is (RJ Reynolds & Philip Morris tobacco companies).
While the Cato Institute does occasionally produce good research, its interests lay in the direction that its big business contributors take it. As for Steven Miller, I believe that his book and his website do bring up good counterpoints for the sensationilistic scaremongering of some media outlets and academic institutions but I've read his book and its pretty obvious to me what his agenda and interests are - take those articles on JunkScience.com with a grain of salt.
Unfortuneately the NASA spokeman was not cast in a good light at all. He was evasive on a lot of the issues and came across as someone who was trying to hide something. Now whether this was the producers' fault or whether this guy was just weasley in real life, I dont know.
Given the laughable 'journalists standards' that even the so-called 'respectable' hour long newsmagazine shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20 adhere to and the sensational nature of the FOX program, I'm very much inclined to believe its the producers fault.
The interviewees that happen to be at odds with that particular segment's agendas, for whatever reason, usually walk out of 2 or 3 hour interviews believing they gave a reasonable defense and accounting for themselves. When the segment actually airs, the shows tend to cut out the good answers and go out of the way to make whomever their target is look incompetent, evasive, and/or nervous.
Pretty much every single segment on these shows has to be taken with a grain of salt. What made me realize the assinine behaviour of these shows was a particular 60 minutes segment where a particular WHO official was made to look like a bureaucratic jackass for not providing US Army surplus cholera vaccines to Rwandan refugees during a massive outbreak in Goma, Zaire. Given the facts, any first year epidemiology student could tell you why this was not only ill advised but dangerous. He went in and gave a well reasoned and complete defense during the 2-hour long interview but 60 Minutes only aired the little takes that made him seem evasive and incompetent. The crowning glory was when they did a close up on the racks and racks of vaccines being "wasted" in storage - in one of the zoom shots, you can make out the expiration date to be WEEKS before the outbreak even started.
NEVER take anything a television newsmagazine airs at face vale.
However, if you take an F15 and turn off the engines, it does effectively drop out of the sky, in the sense that the speed rapidly falls below the minimum speed required for its tiny wings to provide any lift
Dude, the F-15 has a HUGE wingspan to weight/ surface area ratio that effectively provides it with an almost delta wing effect. Military fighter aircraft generally have a much higher amount of lift per weight than commercial jetliners. The amount of lift provided by the wings on fighters is why you need such a long landing strips on airfields that will support them.
Well I guess we could compare a V10 Viper and a V8 Ram then just to keep the numbers in line.
Okay, but I think the number of cylinders in a car vs MHz analogy is flawed. A much more illustrative analogy involving car engines to clock speed would be RPMs or HP.
But I guess if we're going to talk about towing.....
However, I think it would be pretty safe to say that the Viper would not be able to pull as much as a Ram because the Viper isn't designed to pull like a Ram is.
Well, number one, the Viper transmission and suspension isn't set up for it, so I owned one, I wouldn't try it. But:
And one of the most notable set of numbers I see is the weight of the vehicle itself. The Viper weighs in at 3,460 lb and the Ram weighs in at 5,979 lb - an extra 2,500 pounds. This weight is important in towing because although the Viper can get 490 lb*ft of torque, more than the 345 lb*ft from the Ram, it does not have as much weight to put that torque to the ground in order to pull something. It could prolly pull any small item like a jet ski, or mid size boat. But, if you try load up a 2,000 lb trailer with 8,000 lb of gravel, you aren't gonna get as far in the Viper as you will in the Ram.
Okay, I suppose now we're getting into fairly off the wall hypotheticals, so here goes. Yes, due to gearing and weight loading, the Viper would spin its wheels. Would it be impossible? No, because you probably COULD forward weight bias the trailer to add weight to the rear wheels of the Viper AND accelerate slowly enough to get the load started at which point the massive grip of the Viper's could keep it rolling. You'd probably kill the suspension, but it wouldn't be impossible.
You'd be surprised what you can tow safely in a 3500lb vehicle - much more than a pair of jetskis. And I've seen owners of exotic sports cars do insane things to them. I once went shooting with a friend of mine, who belongs to one of the most wealthy and exclusive shooting clubs in the US. We get to the end of a fairly rough and bumpy mile-long dirt road and pull into the parking lot of the clubhouse when I have a serious "WTF?!?" moment when I see a muddy Ferrari 456M. My friend's blase' reply: "Yeah, he probably didn't want to ruin his good car."
It would be like suing Dodge because the V12 in a Viper can't pull the same amount of weight that the V10 in a Ram can, even though 12 is a higher number than 10 so you thought you should be able to pull more, it doesn't work that way.
I know this was meant to be just an analogy, but its flawed.
The engine in a Viper is a 8.0L V-10, not a V-12. Pretty much the SAME engine is available on the Ram 2500 and 3500 with pretty much the same torque and HP, tweaked for different applications.
In fact, the Viper frame is actually based off of a truck frame so if push came to shove, you could probably attach a towing hitch to a Viper and pull some serious tonnage.
Stargate SG1
Perhaps it is just a throw-back to those days in my youth watching McGyver, but this is a good show, scientifically plausable, interesting plot, and compelling characters.
Hey, how many Stargate teams are there? I watch this show occasionally and don't understand. Are there multiple "SG teams" or is there just the SG-1?
Law and Order
There is just something about the consistent style, interesting plots, and slightly sick humor that makes this the best Cop show since "The Bill" (it's a Brit thing - Yanks need not worry).
No way. Best cop show in the past decade would have to be Homicide. Better writing, better stories, better chracters and characterizations.
Re:System Prices are so cheap right now
on
The New Athlons
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· Score: 1
Yeah, but computer show prices outside of the west coast are never as low as Pricewatch or even shopper.cnet for that matter. Add a 10-15% to all of those prices and you get an accurate read on most computer show prices. You're still looking around the 1k neighborhood.
I had the very same setup as a kid, too. I think I got my Commodore Colt around 5th grade because AAFES was having a sale on them.
The best thing to come out of that package Commodore was selling was the monitor. That monitor served long past the usefulness of the computer itself. It had a nice, twelve year run serving me first as a monitor, then a video game screen, pseudo TV through the VCR, and eventually service as a security monitor in my pop's store before the thing finally burned down. I almost cried tears the day I came home from college, saw a brand new - proper - security monitor where the monitor had been and my old man told me it had just started to smoke one day.
I have played all 3 Tomb Raider games, and I can say Katz is correct.
There are actually 5 official Tomb Raider games.
Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider II
Tomb Raider III
Tomb Raider: Last Revelation
Tomb Raider: Chronicles
Re:High Warp Restriction?
on
Voyager Eulogy
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· Score: 1
The original poster had it right, the classic example being if you are on a train going at just under the speed of light and you run towards the front of the train, relative to the universe you just moved faster than the speed of light, but relative to the train you did not so it's all ok.
Somebody obviously doesn't understand physics and what c represents.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't mean to turn this into a thing, but if you're only taking your son to a martial arts class for a total of 2 hours a day, you're really not doing him a favor.
Not in automatics transmissions you don't, which the overwhelming majority of US cars are. Most are 4-speed.
The CPU hogging is definitely real, at least on a Mac. I haven't seen it go past 40%, but if I have more than 10+ sites loaded on taps, I get slow memory hogging, usually plateauing around 20-25%. With all pages loaded.
The only two extensions I'm using right now are TabMixPlus and NoScript.
The simple answers to your question are 1) the early history of the universe and 2) to a lesser degree, the subject of this article, black holes.
You're right - usually, of the fundamental forces, quantum mechanicists can safely ignore gravity and relativists can ignore the other three because the difference in scales is so vast. Usually, mass doesn't exist in enough quantity in a small enough amount of space to generate sufficient gravity to even begin to rival the strength of the electromagnetic/strong/weak forces. Then we have black holes - a lot of mass packed into a very small amount of space. The affect of gravity on subatomic interactions within the black hole would quickly become nontrivial.
Or at least, that how I understand it.
And where does the heat come from? Does it magically appear? Or have the nanites figured out a way to create a 2nd Law violation?
I enjoy science fiction just as much as the next guy, but don't spend too much time trying to justify the FICTION part of the science in a Crichton novel.
The difference between statements made in history limiting man's abilities and those made by Dyson in the book review are that Dyson's are based on absolute physical law. Previous assertions such as man never being able to fly faster than the speed of sound had nothing to do with physical laws so much as underestimating mankind's engineering ability.
Even when curmudgeons were declaring that a craft heavier than air would never get off the ground you only had to look in the sky every time a bird, or an insect or a piece of paper flew by to know that it had to be possible. We knew back before the days of the Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1 that objects could break the sound barrier. Bullets did it all the time and it was just a matter of engineering to get past the hurdle.
OTOH, the increasing effect of viscosity on smaller objects in a fluid media is a known physical law. More energy might mean faster movement but that leads us to the problems of the amount of the maximum amount of energy contained in sunlight. Like Dyson stated, the energy is just not there - there's no engineering problem to solve. It would be like trying to get 5 gallons of gasoline out of a 1 gallon container.
That is what annoys me about arguments such as yours. They don't take into account what we know about the physical universe versus what people in the past thought they knew about man's engineering limitations.
Thats a load of hooey. The Ivy League is an informal association. If anything formal, its more or less a collegiate sporting league. I think this is a myth started at schools like Hopkins which, while prestigous, don't quite have the public brand cachet that the Ivies do.
Its called gentoo linux.
Hey, whatever happened to Largo? Where is he?
The Tower is pretty trippy, period. Walking up a tilted spiral staircase (deep foot grooves worn into marble steps!) with no outside reference except for the occasional patch of light can be pretty disorienting. One of the first things I noticed as a kid when I got to the belltop level was that there were a few ambulances station around the corner. This was before they installed railings so I'm guessing that they weren't just there for show.
Plus there's a lot of geek history there. Galileo did his rolling ball gravity experiments there and some of the original attempts at "fixing" the lean can be education from an engineering-mistakes-to-be-learned standpoint.
Yah, it sucks, Three Gorges is a beautiful place, I would go back before they flood the area if I had the chance. OTOH, compared to how high the cliffs are, I'm not sure how much of an impact 135 meters is going to have on the view. The environmental and social/cultural damage sucks more, I think.
I don't know if you can still do it but back when I went you could hire these old boatmen to take you out and give you a better tour with more local flavor than the mass tourists groups.
And hentai is Japanese.
Last year, I ended up driving around southern Pennsylvania looking for openings in the patches of fog. The girl I was with kept nagging me about the entire deal until I got her drunk on the bottle of wine and she passed out in the back of the car. This year, I was in Dallas and drove south by myself a bit on I-35, took an empty looking exit and got a decent view. MUCH better than last year. No fog and no annoying, unappreciative bubblehead.
Actually, no there isn't. Hubble's resolution at that range is something like 90 meters. Not to mention the fact that the Hubble is designed for looking at extremely dim objects - the Moon is the second (apparent) brightest object in sky. The damage would be similiar to you walking out of a darkened theatre and staring directly into a spotlight at close range.
As for cancelling the book, I'm not sure I agreed with the idea of writing the book but once they started, NASA should have gone through with it. This will only give Moon conspiracy theorists more ammunition.
Funny thing - I was over at my uncle's place and left the original Slashdot story open and my cousin read it. Turns out that he had watched the FOX special and bought into the hoax theory. After he asked me what the story on
I would be wary of anything I read on junkscience.com in the same way I'd be wary of the speculative Reuters medicine story. Its interesting to note who the author/editor of that web page is (Steven Miller) and who pays his salary (Cato Institute) and who the large contributors that particular think tank is (RJ Reynolds & Philip Morris tobacco companies).
While the Cato Institute does occasionally produce good research, its interests lay in the direction that its big business contributors take it. As for Steven Miller, I believe that his book and his website do bring up good counterpoints for the sensationilistic scaremongering of some media outlets and academic institutions but I've read his book and its pretty obvious to me what his agenda and interests are - take those articles on JunkScience.com with a grain of salt.
Given the laughable 'journalists standards' that even the so-called 'respectable' hour long newsmagazine shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20 adhere to and the sensational nature of the FOX program, I'm very much inclined to believe its the producers fault.
The interviewees that happen to be at odds with that particular segment's agendas, for whatever reason, usually walk out of 2 or 3 hour interviews believing they gave a reasonable defense and accounting for themselves. When the segment actually airs, the shows tend to cut out the good answers and go out of the way to make whomever their target is look incompetent, evasive, and/or nervous.
Pretty much every single segment on these shows has to be taken with a grain of salt. What made me realize the assinine behaviour of these shows was a particular 60 minutes segment where a particular WHO official was made to look like a bureaucratic jackass for not providing US Army surplus cholera vaccines to Rwandan refugees during a massive outbreak in Goma, Zaire. Given the facts, any first year epidemiology student could tell you why this was not only ill advised but dangerous. He went in and gave a well reasoned and complete defense during the 2-hour long interview but 60 Minutes only aired the little takes that made him seem evasive and incompetent. The crowning glory was when they did a close up on the racks and racks of vaccines being "wasted" in storage - in one of the zoom shots, you can make out the expiration date to be WEEKS before the outbreak even started.
NEVER take anything a television newsmagazine airs at face vale.
Dude, the F-15 has a HUGE wingspan to weight/ surface area ratio that effectively provides it with an almost delta wing effect. Military fighter aircraft generally have a much higher amount of lift per weight than commercial jetliners. The amount of lift provided by the wings on fighters is why you need such a long landing strips on airfields that will support them.
Okay, but I think the number of cylinders in a car vs MHz analogy is flawed. A much more illustrative analogy involving car engines to clock speed would be RPMs or HP.
But I guess if we're going to talk about towing.....
However, I think it would be pretty safe to say that the Viper would not be able to pull as much as a Ram because the Viper isn't designed to pull like a Ram is.
Well, number one, the Viper transmission and suspension isn't set up for it, so I owned one, I wouldn't try it. But:
And one of the most notable set of numbers I see is the weight of the vehicle itself. The Viper weighs in at 3,460 lb and the Ram weighs in at 5,979 lb - an extra 2,500 pounds. This weight is important in towing because although the Viper can get 490 lb*ft of torque, more than the 345 lb*ft from the Ram, it does not have as much weight to put that torque to the ground in order to pull something. It could prolly pull any small item like a jet ski, or mid size boat. But, if you try load up a 2,000 lb trailer with 8,000 lb of gravel, you aren't gonna get as far in the Viper as you will in the Ram.
Okay, I suppose now we're getting into fairly off the wall hypotheticals, so here goes. Yes, due to gearing and weight loading, the Viper would spin its wheels. Would it be impossible? No, because you probably COULD forward weight bias the trailer to add weight to the rear wheels of the Viper AND accelerate slowly enough to get the load started at which point the massive grip of the Viper's could keep it rolling. You'd probably kill the suspension, but it wouldn't be impossible. You'd be surprised what you can tow safely in a 3500lb vehicle - much more than a pair of jetskis. And I've seen owners of exotic sports cars do insane things to them. I once went shooting with a friend of mine, who belongs to one of the most wealthy and exclusive shooting clubs in the US. We get to the end of a fairly rough and bumpy mile-long dirt road and pull into the parking lot of the clubhouse when I have a serious "WTF?!?" moment when I see a muddy Ferrari 456M. My friend's blase' reply: "Yeah, he probably didn't want to ruin his good car."
I know this was meant to be just an analogy, but its flawed.
The engine in a Viper is a 8.0L V-10, not a V-12. Pretty much the SAME engine is available on the Ram 2500 and 3500 with pretty much the same torque and HP, tweaked for different applications.
In fact, the Viper frame is actually based off of a truck frame so if push came to shove, you could probably attach a towing hitch to a Viper and pull some serious tonnage.
Hey, how many Stargate teams are there? I watch this show occasionally and don't understand. Are there multiple "SG teams" or is there just the SG-1?
Law and Order There is just something about the consistent style, interesting plots, and slightly sick humor that makes this the best Cop show since "The Bill" (it's a Brit thing - Yanks need not worry).
No way. Best cop show in the past decade would have to be Homicide. Better writing, better stories, better chracters and characterizations.
Yeah, but computer show prices outside of the west coast are never as low as Pricewatch or even shopper.cnet for that matter. Add a 10-15% to all of those prices and you get an accurate read on most computer show prices. You're still looking around the 1k neighborhood.
The best thing to come out of that package Commodore was selling was the monitor. That monitor served long past the usefulness of the computer itself. It had a nice, twelve year run serving me first as a monitor, then a video game screen, pseudo TV through the VCR, and eventually service as a security monitor in my pop's store before the thing finally burned down. I almost cried tears the day I came home from college, saw a brand new - proper - security monitor where the monitor had been and my old man told me it had just started to smoke one day.
There are actually 5 official Tomb Raider games.
Tomb Raider Tomb Raider II Tomb Raider III Tomb Raider: Last Revelation Tomb Raider: Chronicles
Somebody obviously doesn't understand physics and what c represents.