Attacking the magnetic media is surprisingly hard. Doable, as other posters have said, but hard.
Let's stipulate that my solution to the literal question is let the pros do it (which also addresses the liability issues).
So I have another question. Heat is hard on magnetism. What if we hit the drive with an oxy-acetylene torch? Would you have to melt it (expensive), or would the hard drive stop being recoverably with an electron microscope long before then?
I'd prefer this be answered by someone with experience in the relevant materials science; I can pull an answer out of my ass, too.
Thank you for your answer. Unlike the AC, I understand you were answering my question, not directly trying to further critique the article. (Hint hint, Mr. AC.)
Honest question: Would you say anything about the more substantial plot criticisms? While THHGTTG has never had a strong plot, it was at least not pure nonsense. (Carefully read, even the IMHO excrable Mostly Harmless still makes sense, though I'll grant it takes careful reading.) I'll agree that taste can strongly differ about the nature of the jokes and "Douglas Adam's biographer" is an interesting source that still may not be safely taken at face value, the plot criticisms really resonated with me as I tend to notice such things, and even in what boils down to a series of comedy sketches, I still expect a coherent plot. (See also, the good vs. the bad Saturday Night Live-based movies.)
Are those criticisms off base, too, or is the plot shot full of holes?
LOTR wasn't Hollywood. Sure, Hollywood did the distro and their names are thus on it, but Peter Jackson was on the other side of the world, using local work as much as possible, and it shows. I don't think you can credit Hollywood, rather, it shows what can be done if they give money to good people, but don't demand to "Hollywood up" the resulting picture.
Having seen the Trilogy, it can be quite difficult to remember how bad it could have been; this HHGTTG movie review should serve as a reminder.
"We don't get this whole 'elf' thing; shouldn't they be singing, dancing, and drunk the whole movie?"
"Gandalf is a wizard, why doesn't he cast more spells? Oh, wouldn't it be cool if he took over the mind of the orc chieftan and made him slay his companions? And maybe he can teleport people, but only elves or something, or they get turned inside out. And..."
"OK, get this... what if when the hobbits are fleeing from the Black Rider, we make it a car chase? We could get sponserships from Ford and Chevy! Awe$ome!"
"People aren't going to understand this 'Ring' thing. Can we just do away with the Ring entirely? We'll turn the quest into one to stab the Eye of Sauron with a sharp, pointy stick. Uh, of magic."
"Shouldn't the orcs have a Jamaican accent and be sort of bumbling? Lots of slapstick there..."
"What if we get Samuel Jackson to play Frodo?"
(OK, that last one is kind of interesting, though probably not in a way that would make a good movie... get your hands off my ring, motherfucker!!!!)
Heh... that's my theory about where they came from too. 4 Time Zones + a heavy mix of paranoid schizophrenia, which sadly can affect even the brightest of us and turn the universe upside-down and inside out.
But I also think he really thinks that if it's midnight at GMT, than at -6GMT it "really is" 6p.m., as if it really is six hours disconnected and therefore unreachable... "out of phase", to borrow what I think the Star Trek term was trying to get at before it simply became a catch-all for invisibility.
Ultimately, as much fun as we poke at the guy, it's pretty sad; it could happen to any of us, just a few gene errors or the right chemical trauma away...
You don't seem to understand the current designs. The cable is small. In fact, the math works out that it can't be very big, because it needs to support itself. That recursive "supporting itself" is why it's been so problematic to get to the point where we can have materials that might be able to, but once we're there it works really well; there's a rather sharp dividing line.
Given that you don't understand current designs, I'd really rather you shut the fuck up about things you have no clue about. It's bad enough that nuclear energy has been FUD'ed nearly to death, do we really need half-cocked "technically educated" people running around, using their uneducated intuition in domains it is completely unsuited for, and scaring people with completely impossible scenarios?
Current designs have the space elevator designed as a ribbon of nano-tubules that are at mostmeters in width. A space elevator won't cast a shadow across a football field at that width, let alone "pretty much across the entire planet". Your intuition is guided by Science Fiction movies, where everything is always visible because it has to be to make good movies. But the space elevator is smaller than some satellites, and the shadows from satellites are hardly ruining our daytime, hmm?
Similarly for your extravagent claims about "altering weather". A small city will do more to alter the weather. An Elevator might have some localized electrical effects, but it's hardly going to change the climate. (Unless the elevator cars manage to exhaust things into the atmosphere and do something wacky, but even then, it'll just be another contrail-type of thing.)
Life is not a science fiction movie, where everything seems to take place in a universe where everything is just about the same size and in about ten or twenty cubic miles, total. The reality is, you won't be able to see the Space Elevator until you're nearly on top of it. It's small.
Intuition is not adequate for dealing with Space Elevators; it works almost nothing like you'd expect. (How many posters are still babbling on about crashing the Space Elevator by cutting it at the base, even though every time the topic comes up, it is completely correctly pointed out that an elevator cut at the base actually escapes into space? Earthly intuition does not cut it, and if such naysayers end up nixing a perfectly viable Space Elevator project in the future because of such ill-founded concerns, I will make it my life mission to seek them out and [violent threat deleted] for allowing such arrogant stupidity to prevent the best thing that could ever happen to Mankind from becoming a reality.)
Re:Melts in your space, not on your planet
on
Space Elevator Update
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· Score: 2, Funny
Actually, according to the report chronicled in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (should have gone ahead and taken the time to look this up in my initial post), he made it out into space just fine.
However, this is even more questionable scientifically than the already outrageous claims made in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If memory serves, while in space, Charlie and Mr. Wonka encounter an Alien Race bent on Mankind's destruction (The "Vermicious Knids", I think?), of which no independent corroborating evidence has ever been found, and at one point he claims to journey to a place where people of negative age reside, a very strange claim indeed.
Still, despite the lack of evidence, one can't argue that it is some of the best research to date on Space Elevators, as measured by the very popular "I wish, I wish, I wish this were true" metric. (See also: Cold Fusion, most (though, narrowly, not all) alternative fuel discussions, NATURE'S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE, the feasibility of FTL.)
Right now our biggest practical problem is working out how to include roughly 23.5 million buttons for floors in the elevator compartment.
Our previous best accomplishment in this domain, pioneered by the great elevator engineer Willy Wonka with his ground breaking, or rather sky-light breaking, Glass Elevator, is short by several orders of magnitude. (You can also see early Space Elevator technology there, but we've not been able to replicate his claimed performance without a tether; see the report in the sequel to the Chocolate Factory book.)
I am confident once we overcome that problem that everything else should be easy.
(If you're wondering where that number came from, that's geosync orbit at 22,241 miles, times two as I'm using the elevator variant that continues on out for counterweight and flinging ability, and estimating 10 feet per "floor", so 22241 * 2 * 528 = 23,486,496.)
With all due respect, that's not capitalism. Everything you did after hitting the other car suffers from the "broken window fallacy" (google it) and did not benefit the economy; on the whole you did great damage, and capitalism did what it could to minimize that damage.
Under capitalism, you destroyed (most likely) two cars, took a human life (and yes, even under capitalism that's a bad thing; you have prevented that human from ever producing value of any kind whatsoever), and consumed many, many resources put to better use than medical care. (Again, see "broken window fallacy".)
Capitalism minimizes that damage by trying to efficiently utilize resources to the repair, although the medical system is pretty broken in that regard right now.
If you're going to hate it, make sure you understand what it is, not a caricature of it. I can't explain it in a Slashdot post, but for starters you need to understand the idea of capital; it isn't the primary component of the word for show. You destroyed a lot of capital, of all kinds, in your example, for no gain at all. Capitalism doesn't promote that.
Capitalism has problems, but that is not where they lie.
(I've not had good luck with "metric"-based explanations. You can get people to mouth the words "space is not flat", but getting people out of Euclidean Geometry mode is damned hard. I don't blame them; I've had to work hard on it a lot and it's still not really intuitive; I might get there if I worked with it all the time, but I don't. Multidimensional, skewed, interrelated bases I can handle with my comp. sci. education, but the way space and time intertwine is still extra hard. I think I'm saying I can handle [1 1 1 1] space OK, but [1 1 1 -1] still boggles my mind, but I'm not 100% certain about that formulation as I've not actually formally studied tensors.)
Actually, you really start digging into it, and the post-TOS Federation starts looking pretty bad.
Go through everything starting with TNG, and the Federation shows every sign of being a totalitarian communist society... it looks like Paradise because we follow the elite military establishment around, but there seems no particular reason to believe that mere mortals are living anywhere near as well as the technology ought to be letting them live. You can find isolated indications to the contrary but the overwhelming body of evidence points in that direction; no useful money (note in DS9 how everything has to be done with latinum, a sign of a seriously broken money system; imagine if we used actual, physical gold every day), no privately and lawfully owned spaceships, Federation access to everything you do and limited/non-existant delineation of powers between lesser governments (i.e., federal/state/county/township etc), non-existant separation of military and government, no apparent private companies within the Federation (external to, yes, but inside everything seems to be Federation owned), all interstellar communication controlled by the Federation, all news controlled by the Federation, and exactly the kind of shoddy engineering that due to politics almost ignores safety entirely that history teaches us to expect from such regimes that don't need to care about the opinions of its members. Not to mention the new innovation of putting families aboard your flagship war machine. (Yes, Starfleet claims to not be a military organization, but when push comes to shove, who does the shooting?)
This is one of the reasons I've stopped watching Star Trek; while I still like Captain Picard, and Data's cool, I'm rooting against the "good" guys as often as not. Example: I root for the Maquis (sp) whenever they come up (some humans with actual guts), and despite the writer's best efforts to demonize the Ferengi, I'd rather live in Ferengi controlled space than in the Federation. I bet the average Ferengi lives better in their free-market society than the average Federation citizen lives.
(People keep talking about Star Trek sequels set after TNG. As far as I'm concerned, based on history and the last hundred years, there are only two plausible ways forward: Either the Fed reforms after Voyager/DS9 and goes back to a free market economy, with the corresponding jump start in real innovation again (note how stagnant tech is in the TNG era), or about 25 years after the end of DS9, the Feds get brutally steamrolled after picking a fight with the capitalistic Ferengis, who after reforming their government and society a bit, burst forward in technology and industrial might. As an outside possibility, a capitalistic enclave of humans could take over the Feds forcibly. Either way, if such a sequel came out and the Fed was the same old pansy-ass Communist utopia wanna-be, I don't think I could ever root for the "heros", no matter what the premise. It may sound abstract, but it's really the little things that make or break attachments to characters and shows. (I'm not saying Capitalism is perfect, I'm just saying that historically, Communist-style governments can't stand up to them, unless they become them. I guess you could say it's more than I couldn't get into the Fed staying communist than I want to see capitalism per se.))
A sibling to this post calls the show propoganda, in jest; there may be more truth to that charge than intended.
Think of it as the space itself around your spaceship being pulled into the Black Hole faster than the speed of light. In order to escape, you have to be able to exceed the local speed of light just to stay still on the surface that is being pulled out from under you, which you're not allowed to do, no matter how you accelerate.
That's a simplified, strictly local picture of what's going on, and it'd be marked as "wrong" on a physics test. But without going into the details, it's probably the best you can do.
All the rest of your objections that you might have at this point, like "If space is being pulled into the hole, where is all that 'space' coming from?" stem from the fact that to really understand black holes, you have to understand relativity. A good online resource that covers what you need to know is here. Here's the first black hole section (although they come up again in later chapters), although you'll find it is radically out of context if read on its own I point to that for completeness, you won't be able to understand it properly without reading huge chunks of the book before it (and that's labelled in the TOC as page 413!). You will also find that it is really freaking hard to understand, though, if you really try, probably not impossible. But I should point out I've already dedicated over three weeks of evenings to that book and only really gotten to chapter three, and I probably need to go back and start from the beginning again to really nail things down in my head before trying to move on. If it's easy to understand, it's wrong. (Unless you're an absolute mathematical genious.)
You should try one of these dynamic languages sometime. You'd be surprised how easily Python or Ruby lets you roll your own messaging systems, simply because they are so easy to work with. You can often roll up a custom solution that exactly matches the domain in less time than it would take to set up a Massive All-Purpose Java solution. I know, I've done it at least twice now.
Does my custom solution do absolutely everything that the Massive All-Purpose Java solution does? No, and that's half the point. I can still add what I need faster than you'd believe.
Normally I'm all about using libraries, but there is a cost to them as well (bending your app to the library's assumptions), and these languages make some things so easy it's not worth it anymore.
You know, I've wanted to say this for a while, but this is one of the worst I've seen by far.
The whole point of that joke is that "in America", it's done the other way around by transposing the words. So... "In America, real bullets use games"?
Not funny.
(Yes, I know, it's a cliche. But correct usage is so not a cliche that I still laugh when I see it. Which is about once every three months.)
DougWebb covered half your problem. a2ps is the other half. That'll let you take a text file and convert it into a PostScript (printable) file, and if anything, it has too many options. Printing something nicely foldable with as small a font as your printer and eyes can handle is just fine.
I've used it for long walkthroughs for RPGs; most recently, FFX-2 100% completion. That squeezed a 120+ page document, printed naively, down to four sheets of paper (with a bit of manual editing to remove silly whitespaces in the walkthrough; the author accidentally left some form feeds in, I don't even know how they'd do that, but there it was...).
It's easy to use, it just takes a while to wade through the options.
In truth, a tool like this is impossible to actually write, but it would be cool since I never comment my code.
Well, if you punt on the relevance issue, you could probably come pretty close with an old-style Dissociated Press-style Markov chain generator and a sufficient corpus of comments to draw from. (The other parameters would affect what comments are used for the corpus.)
This could be sort of interesting. But then, pretty much anything fed into such a Markov generator is "sort of interesting".
I suppose this would also be a punt on the "coherence" issue, but I think that would just be part of the joke.
orbiting the earth from pole to pole once every hour.
And that's impossible because...?
Creating an orbit that does what Google claims their satellite will be doing is a freshman physics problem, except that the window for North America wouldn't be 10am-11am for every time zone, it'd be like 10:20-10:23, maybe more, maybe less (not whipping out the math for this, but such a bird would be low enough that approximating the percentage of the US, North to South, is of the equatorial distance would be pretty good; this thing won't have a huge horizon).
The biggest reason that claimed performance isn't possible is I doubt they could process or transmit that much data that quickly. Other than that, somebody could, in theory, do something like that.
rm -rf / isn't good enough against the FBI; you need something like wipe, and you need to wipe the whole partition/hard drive. That will take some serious time, possibly on the order of weeks for a large modern hard drive.
I don't think there's any practical way to prevent the FBI from reading your computers based purely on commands you can issue to your computer, if you wait until they are smashing down your door. Hard drives are surpringly hard to completely destroy, and partially destroying them is just waving a red flag in front of a bull, if the FBI is busting down your door. Short of large quantites of thermite being used to literally completely melt all the platters, I wouldn't care to bet that all the data will be destroyed.
If you know in advance you might have trouble, I'd suggest encrypted partitions with a large passphrase requested at every boot up. Even so, if they manage to possess the machine without shutting off the power you might be out of luck, so work on that angle too.
I'd still not bet on being safe. I prefer to stay legal and hope for the best. (Y'all do secure your wireless connections, right?)
Why is it that the instant you sit a politician down with a copy of Grand Theft Auto, the first thing they do is seek out a prostitute, have sex with them, and then murder them for money?
I mean, I had my copy for months before I knew you could do that. (I like to avoid FAQ-style sites until I either really need them or I've finished the game.) Not these politicians, though; wham, within five minutes apparently they've nailed a whore and then run her down.
Missions? Cruising the town and admiring the graphics? Committing a crime and noticing that you actually get caught (unlike many games where it's just oblivious)? OK, I won't try to claim that GTA teaches you anything serious about consequences (though I'd point out the lack of Pay & Sprays in the Real World (TM)), but still, there's more to the game then blowing away women of the night after they service you.
I mean, come on, this is Grand Theft Auto, and that's all you can find to complain about? Yeesh, try a couple of missions or something. What about flying around the city without filing a flight plan and illegally littering on a grand scale by dumping out explicit pornographic fliers which flutter around for the remainder of the game? Just look at all those crimes!
For example, check out this CS program at Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts. It's designed specifically to transfer into a 4-year CS degree and includes such "hard and specialized" topics as Discrete Math, Linear Algebra, Digital Logic, and Data Structures.
Sorry to say, but your gut instinct is completely incorrect in this instance.
One example does not a trend make, but good point, I suppose. But I rather suspect that is the exception, not the rule. If the community college the question asker had that, he would have found it, no?
I can't imagine a community college computer science cirriculum of any kind. One of the first computer science courses you have to take is Discrete Math, covering basic boolean logic and set theory, and the university students I was with whined enough as it is; I suspect a community college would simply revolt.
Computer science is simply too hard and too specialized to fit into a "community college", and any community college teaching it is either out of its league and something you should stay well away from, or trying to transition away from "community college" to true University. I don't know if that ever happens, but it sounds plausible.
If you're lucky they may have one course that transfers, maybe two (intro to C++ and...?), but that'll be it. Of course you can find tons of courses that transfer to non-CS requirements, but I assume you knew that.
Of course, if you don't want to learn math, no sarcasm, stay where you are. If you're another person who's like, "Why should I learn more math, it's never useful anyways?", and you don't have any kind of open mind about the possibility of being wrong, then you are where you belong, again, no sarcasm. Personally, I find computer science courses highly and directly relevant to programming, especially programming in a high-powered and very abstract and useful way, but I am distinctly in the minority.
(And even so, a lot of it can be learned outside of school, though you will still miss a lot unless you have a lot of discipline... I've yet to meet someone online who truly grasps the computational complexity of algorithms who didn't learn some of it in school, for instance, though I've seen a lot of people who think they do but prove they don't within two or three sentences..)
Slashdot Mirror
Any thoughts on what that would be for magnetic media?
I'm think it might be both easier and more reliable than a degausser.
Attacking the magnetic media is surprisingly hard. Doable, as other posters have said, but hard.
Let's stipulate that my solution to the literal question is let the pros do it (which also addresses the liability issues).
So I have another question. Heat is hard on magnetism. What if we hit the drive with an oxy-acetylene torch? Would you have to melt it (expensive), or would the hard drive stop being recoverably with an electron microscope long before then?
I'd prefer this be answered by someone with experience in the relevant materials science; I can pull an answer out of my ass, too.
Thank you for your answer. Unlike the AC, I understand you were answering my question, not directly trying to further critique the article. (Hint hint, Mr. AC.)
:-)
I guess I'll just have to see it for myself
It's not an anti-Lucas rant; you can't bastardize original material, and that's what I was getting at. And that seems quite on topic to me.
(Yes, Star Wars has influences. Show me what doesn't.)
Honest question: Would you say anything about the more substantial plot criticisms? While THHGTTG has never had a strong plot, it was at least not pure nonsense. (Carefully read, even the IMHO excrable Mostly Harmless still makes sense, though I'll grant it takes careful reading.) I'll agree that taste can strongly differ about the nature of the jokes and "Douglas Adam's biographer" is an interesting source that still may not be safely taken at face value, the plot criticisms really resonated with me as I tend to notice such things, and even in what boils down to a series of comedy sketches, I still expect a coherent plot. (See also, the good vs. the bad Saturday Night Live-based movies.)
Are those criticisms off base, too, or is the plot shot full of holes?
LOTR wasn't Hollywood. Sure, Hollywood did the distro and their names are thus on it, but Peter Jackson was on the other side of the world, using local work as much as possible, and it shows. I don't think you can credit Hollywood, rather, it shows what can be done if they give money to good people, but don't demand to "Hollywood up" the resulting picture.
Having seen the Trilogy, it can be quite difficult to remember how bad it could have been; this HHGTTG movie review should serve as a reminder.
"We don't get this whole 'elf' thing; shouldn't they be singing, dancing, and drunk the whole movie?"
"Gandalf is a wizard, why doesn't he cast more spells? Oh, wouldn't it be cool if he took over the mind of the orc chieftan and made him slay his companions? And maybe he can teleport people, but only elves or something, or they get turned inside out. And..."
"OK, get this... what if when the hobbits are fleeing from the Black Rider, we make it a car chase? We could get sponserships from Ford and Chevy! Awe$ome!"
"People aren't going to understand this 'Ring' thing. Can we just do away with the Ring entirely? We'll turn the quest into one to stab the Eye of Sauron with a sharp, pointy stick. Uh, of magic."
"Shouldn't the orcs have a Jamaican accent and be sort of bumbling? Lots of slapstick there..."
"What if we get Samuel Jackson to play Frodo?"
(OK, that last one is kind of interesting, though probably not in a way that would make a good movie... get your hands off my ring, motherfucker!!!!)
Heh... that's my theory about where they came from too. 4 Time Zones + a heavy mix of paranoid schizophrenia, which sadly can affect even the brightest of us and turn the universe upside-down and inside out.
But I also think he really thinks that if it's midnight at GMT, than at -6GMT it "really is" 6p.m., as if it really is six hours disconnected and therefore unreachable... "out of phase", to borrow what I think the Star Trek term was trying to get at before it simply became a catch-all for invisibility.
Ultimately, as much fun as we poke at the guy, it's pretty sad; it could happen to any of us, just a few gene errors or the right chemical trauma away...
You don't seem to understand the current designs. The cable is small. In fact, the math works out that it can't be very big, because it needs to support itself. That recursive "supporting itself" is why it's been so problematic to get to the point where we can have materials that might be able to, but once we're there it works really well; there's a rather sharp dividing line.
Given that you don't understand current designs, I'd really rather you shut the fuck up about things you have no clue about. It's bad enough that nuclear energy has been FUD'ed nearly to death, do we really need half-cocked "technically educated" people running around, using their uneducated intuition in domains it is completely unsuited for, and scaring people with completely impossible scenarios?
Current designs have the space elevator designed as a ribbon of nano-tubules that are at most meters in width. A space elevator won't cast a shadow across a football field at that width, let alone "pretty much across the entire planet". Your intuition is guided by Science Fiction movies, where everything is always visible because it has to be to make good movies. But the space elevator is smaller than some satellites, and the shadows from satellites are hardly ruining our daytime, hmm?
Similarly for your extravagent claims about "altering weather". A small city will do more to alter the weather. An Elevator might have some localized electrical effects, but it's hardly going to change the climate. (Unless the elevator cars manage to exhaust things into the atmosphere and do something wacky, but even then, it'll just be another contrail-type of thing.)
Life is not a science fiction movie, where everything seems to take place in a universe where everything is just about the same size and in about ten or twenty cubic miles, total. The reality is, you won't be able to see the Space Elevator until you're nearly on top of it. It's small.
Intuition is not adequate for dealing with Space Elevators; it works almost nothing like you'd expect. (How many posters are still babbling on about crashing the Space Elevator by cutting it at the base, even though every time the topic comes up, it is completely correctly pointed out that an elevator cut at the base actually escapes into space? Earthly intuition does not cut it, and if such naysayers end up nixing a perfectly viable Space Elevator project in the future because of such ill-founded concerns, I will make it my life mission to seek them out and [violent threat deleted] for allowing such arrogant stupidity to prevent the best thing that could ever happen to Mankind from becoming a reality.)
Actually, according to the report chronicled in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (should have gone ahead and taken the time to look this up in my initial post), he made it out into space just fine.
However, this is even more questionable scientifically than the already outrageous claims made in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If memory serves, while in space, Charlie and Mr. Wonka encounter an Alien Race bent on Mankind's destruction (The "Vermicious Knids", I think?), of which no independent corroborating evidence has ever been found, and at one point he claims to journey to a place where people of negative age reside, a very strange claim indeed.
Still, despite the lack of evidence, one can't argue that it is some of the best research to date on Space Elevators, as measured by the very popular "I wish, I wish, I wish this were true" metric. (See also: Cold Fusion, most (though, narrowly, not all) alternative fuel discussions, NATURE'S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE, the feasibility of FTL.)
Right now our biggest practical problem is working out how to include roughly 23.5 million buttons for floors in the elevator compartment.
Our previous best accomplishment in this domain, pioneered by the great elevator engineer Willy Wonka with his ground breaking, or rather sky-light breaking, Glass Elevator, is short by several orders of magnitude. (You can also see early Space Elevator technology there, but we've not been able to replicate his claimed performance without a tether; see the report in the sequel to the Chocolate Factory book.)
I am confident once we overcome that problem that everything else should be easy.
(If you're wondering where that number came from, that's geosync orbit at 22,241 miles, times two as I'm using the elevator variant that continues on out for counterweight and flinging ability, and estimating 10 feet per "floor", so 22241 * 2 * 528 = 23,486,496.)
With all due respect, that's not capitalism. Everything you did after hitting the other car suffers from the "broken window fallacy" (google it) and did not benefit the economy; on the whole you did great damage, and capitalism did what it could to minimize that damage.
Under capitalism, you destroyed (most likely) two cars, took a human life (and yes, even under capitalism that's a bad thing; you have prevented that human from ever producing value of any kind whatsoever), and consumed many, many resources put to better use than medical care. (Again, see "broken window fallacy".)
Capitalism minimizes that damage by trying to efficiently utilize resources to the repair, although the medical system is pretty broken in that regard right now.
If you're going to hate it, make sure you understand what it is, not a caricature of it. I can't explain it in a Slashdot post, but for starters you need to understand the idea of capital; it isn't the primary component of the word for show. You destroyed a lot of capital, of all kinds, in your example, for no gain at all. Capitalism doesn't promote that.
Capitalism has problems, but that is not where they lie.
(I've not had good luck with "metric"-based explanations. You can get people to mouth the words "space is not flat", but getting people out of Euclidean Geometry mode is damned hard. I don't blame them; I've had to work hard on it a lot and it's still not really intuitive; I might get there if I worked with it all the time, but I don't. Multidimensional, skewed, interrelated bases I can handle with my comp. sci. education, but the way space and time intertwine is still extra hard. I think I'm saying I can handle [1 1 1 1] space OK, but [1 1 1 -1] still boggles my mind, but I'm not 100% certain about that formulation as I've not actually formally studied tensors.)
Actually, you really start digging into it, and the post-TOS Federation starts looking pretty bad.
Go through everything starting with TNG, and the Federation shows every sign of being a totalitarian communist society... it looks like Paradise because we follow the elite military establishment around, but there seems no particular reason to believe that mere mortals are living anywhere near as well as the technology ought to be letting them live. You can find isolated indications to the contrary but the overwhelming body of evidence points in that direction; no useful money (note in DS9 how everything has to be done with latinum, a sign of a seriously broken money system; imagine if we used actual, physical gold every day), no privately and lawfully owned spaceships, Federation access to everything you do and limited/non-existant delineation of powers between lesser governments (i.e., federal/state/county/township etc), non-existant separation of military and government, no apparent private companies within the Federation (external to, yes, but inside everything seems to be Federation owned), all interstellar communication controlled by the Federation, all news controlled by the Federation, and exactly the kind of shoddy engineering that due to politics almost ignores safety entirely that history teaches us to expect from such regimes that don't need to care about the opinions of its members. Not to mention the new innovation of putting families aboard your flagship war machine. (Yes, Starfleet claims to not be a military organization, but when push comes to shove, who does the shooting?)
This is one of the reasons I've stopped watching Star Trek; while I still like Captain Picard, and Data's cool, I'm rooting against the "good" guys as often as not. Example: I root for the Maquis (sp) whenever they come up (some humans with actual guts), and despite the writer's best efforts to demonize the Ferengi, I'd rather live in Ferengi controlled space than in the Federation. I bet the average Ferengi lives better in their free-market society than the average Federation citizen lives.
(People keep talking about Star Trek sequels set after TNG. As far as I'm concerned, based on history and the last hundred years, there are only two plausible ways forward: Either the Fed reforms after Voyager/DS9 and goes back to a free market economy, with the corresponding jump start in real innovation again (note how stagnant tech is in the TNG era), or about 25 years after the end of DS9, the Feds get brutally steamrolled after picking a fight with the capitalistic Ferengis, who after reforming their government and society a bit, burst forward in technology and industrial might. As an outside possibility, a capitalistic enclave of humans could take over the Feds forcibly. Either way, if such a sequel came out and the Fed was the same old pansy-ass Communist utopia wanna-be, I don't think I could ever root for the "heros", no matter what the premise. It may sound abstract, but it's really the little things that make or break attachments to characters and shows. (I'm not saying Capitalism is perfect, I'm just saying that historically, Communist-style governments can't stand up to them, unless they become them. I guess you could say it's more than I couldn't get into the Fed staying communist than I want to see capitalism per se.))
A sibling to this post calls the show propoganda, in jest; there may be more truth to that charge than intended.
Think of it as the space itself around your spaceship being pulled into the Black Hole faster than the speed of light. In order to escape, you have to be able to exceed the local speed of light just to stay still on the surface that is being pulled out from under you, which you're not allowed to do, no matter how you accelerate.
That's a simplified, strictly local picture of what's going on, and it'd be marked as "wrong" on a physics test. But without going into the details, it's probably the best you can do.
All the rest of your objections that you might have at this point, like "If space is being pulled into the hole, where is all that 'space' coming from?" stem from the fact that to really understand black holes, you have to understand relativity. A good online resource that covers what you need to know is here. Here's the first black hole section (although they come up again in later chapters), although you'll find it is radically out of context if read on its own I point to that for completeness, you won't be able to understand it properly without reading huge chunks of the book before it (and that's labelled in the TOC as page 413!). You will also find that it is really freaking hard to understand, though, if you really try, probably not impossible. But I should point out I've already dedicated over three weeks of evenings to that book and only really gotten to chapter three, and I probably need to go back and start from the beginning again to really nail things down in my head before trying to move on. If it's easy to understand, it's wrong. (Unless you're an absolute mathematical genious.)
You should try one of these dynamic languages sometime. You'd be surprised how easily Python or Ruby lets you roll your own messaging systems, simply because they are so easy to work with. You can often roll up a custom solution that exactly matches the domain in less time than it would take to set up a Massive All-Purpose Java solution. I know, I've done it at least twice now.
Does my custom solution do absolutely everything that the Massive All-Purpose Java solution does? No, and that's half the point. I can still add what I need faster than you'd believe.
Normally I'm all about using libraries, but there is a cost to them as well (bending your app to the library's assumptions), and these languages make some things so easy it's not worth it anymore.
You know, I've wanted to say this for a while, but this is one of the worst I've seen by far.
The whole point of that joke is that "in America", it's done the other way around by transposing the words. So... "In America, real bullets use games"?
Not funny.
(Yes, I know, it's a cliche. But correct usage is so not a cliche that I still laugh when I see it. Which is about once every three months.)
DougWebb covered half your problem. a2ps is the other half. That'll let you take a text file and convert it into a PostScript (printable) file, and if anything, it has too many options. Printing something nicely foldable with as small a font as your printer and eyes can handle is just fine.
I've used it for long walkthroughs for RPGs; most recently, FFX-2 100% completion. That squeezed a 120+ page document, printed naively, down to four sheets of paper (with a bit of manual editing to remove silly whitespaces in the walkthrough; the author accidentally left some form feeds in, I don't even know how they'd do that, but there it was...).
It's easy to use, it just takes a while to wade through the options.
In truth, a tool like this is impossible to actually write, but it would be cool since I never comment my code.
Well, if you punt on the relevance issue, you could probably come pretty close with an old-style Dissociated Press-style Markov chain generator and a sufficient corpus of comments to draw from. (The other parameters would affect what comments are used for the corpus.)
This could be sort of interesting. But then, pretty much anything fed into such a Markov generator is "sort of interesting".
I suppose this would also be a punt on the "coherence" issue, but I think that would just be part of the joke.
orbiting the earth from pole to pole once every hour.
And that's impossible because...?
Creating an orbit that does what Google claims their satellite will be doing is a freshman physics problem, except that the window for North America wouldn't be 10am-11am for every time zone, it'd be like 10:20-10:23, maybe more, maybe less (not whipping out the math for this, but such a bird would be low enough that approximating the percentage of the US, North to South, is of the equatorial distance would be pretty good; this thing won't have a huge horizon).
The biggest reason that claimed performance isn't possible is I doubt they could process or transmit that much data that quickly. Other than that, somebody could, in theory, do something like that.
Read much?
rm -rf / isn't good enough against the FBI; you need something like wipe, and you need to wipe the whole partition/hard drive. That will take some serious time, possibly on the order of weeks for a large modern hard drive.
I don't think there's any practical way to prevent the FBI from reading your computers based purely on commands you can issue to your computer, if you wait until they are smashing down your door. Hard drives are surpringly hard to completely destroy, and partially destroying them is just waving a red flag in front of a bull, if the FBI is busting down your door. Short of large quantites of thermite being used to literally completely melt all the platters, I wouldn't care to bet that all the data will be destroyed.
If you know in advance you might have trouble, I'd suggest encrypted partitions with a large passphrase requested at every boot up. Even so, if they manage to possess the machine without shutting off the power you might be out of luck, so work on that angle too.
I'd still not bet on being safe. I prefer to stay legal and hope for the best. (Y'all do secure your wireless connections, right?)
Why is it that the instant you sit a politician down with a copy of Grand Theft Auto, the first thing they do is seek out a prostitute, have sex with them, and then murder them for money?
I mean, I had my copy for months before I knew you could do that. (I like to avoid FAQ-style sites until I either really need them or I've finished the game.) Not these politicians, though; wham, within five minutes apparently they've nailed a whore and then run her down.
Missions? Cruising the town and admiring the graphics? Committing a crime and noticing that you actually get caught (unlike many games where it's just oblivious)? OK, I won't try to claim that GTA teaches you anything serious about consequences (though I'd point out the lack of Pay & Sprays in the Real World (TM)), but still, there's more to the game then blowing away women of the night after they service you.
I mean, come on, this is Grand Theft Auto, and that's all you can find to complain about? Yeesh, try a couple of missions or something. What about flying around the city without filing a flight plan and illegally littering on a grand scale by dumping out explicit pornographic fliers which flutter around for the remainder of the game? Just look at all those crimes!
I am not a number, I am a free man !
Sincerely, #171not-6not-6.
For example, check out this CS program at Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts. It's designed specifically to transfer into a 4-year CS degree and includes such "hard and specialized" topics as Discrete Math, Linear Algebra, Digital Logic, and Data Structures.
Sorry to say, but your gut instinct is completely incorrect in this instance.
One example does not a trend make, but good point, I suppose. But I rather suspect that is the exception, not the rule. If the community college the question asker had that, he would have found it, no?
I can't imagine a community college computer science cirriculum of any kind. One of the first computer science courses you have to take is Discrete Math, covering basic boolean logic and set theory, and the university students I was with whined enough as it is; I suspect a community college would simply revolt.
...?), but that'll be it. Of course you can find tons of courses that transfer to non-CS requirements, but I assume you knew that.
Computer science is simply too hard and too specialized to fit into a "community college", and any community college teaching it is either out of its league and something you should stay well away from, or trying to transition away from "community college" to true University. I don't know if that ever happens, but it sounds plausible.
If you're lucky they may have one course that transfers, maybe two (intro to C++ and
Of course, if you don't want to learn math, no sarcasm, stay where you are. If you're another person who's like, "Why should I learn more math, it's never useful anyways?", and you don't have any kind of open mind about the possibility of being wrong, then you are where you belong, again, no sarcasm. Personally, I find computer science courses highly and directly relevant to programming, especially programming in a high-powered and very abstract and useful way, but I am distinctly in the minority.
(And even so, a lot of it can be learned outside of school, though you will still miss a lot unless you have a lot of discipline... I've yet to meet someone online who truly grasps the computational complexity of algorithms who didn't learn some of it in school, for instance, though I've seen a lot of people who think they do but prove they don't within two or three sentences..)