I think it's very kind of the Supremes to provide such a simple way out of this otherwise intrusive situation. If a police officer asks you for your name, simply inform him or her that, as you are wanted for another crime, you would prefer not to give your name. See how easy that is? I love this country!
The primary impact creates ejecta that goes into orbit. It turns out that the worst possible place to be other than near ground zero is the antipodes about 45 minutes later, as the orbiting ejecta cloud focuses and re-enters en masse there. Counterintuitive until you think about it a bit, but true.
Needless to say, other ejecta falls short or goes farther before re-entering, giving the whole world a good baking.
Yep, dead on. I had a friend who was agonizing over the choice between 2.2 and 2.5 GHz processors; when I asked him what he planned to do with the machine, he told me it was for web surfing and light bookkeeping. But he wouldn't believe that a reconditioned 500 MHz PII box would do those just fine.
In college, I was approached by one of my girlfriend's dormmates, a good-looking blonde poli-sci major who'd procrastinated on some statistical thing she needed to do on the campus computer system. She was in danger of failing a class if she didn't get it done over the weekend, and she literally didn't even know how to log into the system.
So, after much hinting and many awkward silences, she blurted out that she'd do anything I wanted if I bailed her out. Surely at that moment I achieved a permanent place in the Geek Hall of Fame, perhaps in the Absurd Fantasies wing.
But it gets better. You see, I was very happy with my girlfriend at the time (whom I later married), and I didn't want to mess that up by sleeping with someone she saw every day and whom I didn't trust to keep quiet. So I turned her down.
For the sex, anyway. I had her take me out to dinner instead. The stats thing she needed took me 20 minutes to run.
I was walking on air for some time after that, just based on the principle of the thing.
That's why certain people are so frenetic about using the term "Free Software" rather than "Open Source". What matters isn't seeing lines of code; it's what freedoms you have to work with them.
mainframen. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.
We often get review units of products, then don't review them because we can't get them to work.
Wouldn't this make the product more worthy of a brief review? As in "An entire office crammed with ubergeeks couldn't make this work. Don't touch it with a ten foot pole." Are you doing readers a service by not warning them?
Not really. If the drift rate is fixed, then a gate delay of (say) 1 millisecond should be wrong by the same absolute amount no matter how long the clock has been running.
Consider a clock that loses ten minutes a day. Within a week, it's off by more than an hour, making it pretty useless for measuring absolute time. But if you're timing something that only lasts a minute using that clock, you will always, reliably, actually measure 59.58 seconds.
Because you're measuring from an arbitrary start point, it doesn't matter that the clock says the start time is 0930 when it's really 0950; what you care about is the time elapsed between when the clock says 0930 and when it says 0931, and the error in *that* measurement isn't cumulative.
The article on the Patriot failure is interesting. However, I'm having trouble picturing how cumulative clock drift over days of operation could cause cumulatively increasing error in a range-gate check. After all, range-gating is done by taking t0 at the initial contact point, and then waiting delta-t before taking the t1 observation. Absolute time doesn't figure into it at all.
Off the top of my head? Einstein publishes his first paper on special relativity, James Joyce meets Nora Barnacle (setting the date later used for the events of Ulysses), and Aleister Crowley pens The Book of the Law. Quite a year, 1904.
Larry Wall is a god, his core Perl dev team are demigods, and I'm very excited by all the goodies in Perl 6. But I have to wonder...if 6 is going to break so much existing code that it needs a hack to be backward compatible, why not just release a new language? What's the point of holding onto the name Perl but not the reality of running existing Perl code?
Larry Niven, in his "Known Space" science fiction series, solved this problem for asteroid settlers by having one asteroid colony spun up to nearly a full G inside. Pregnant women and families with young children would live there until the basic developmental stages had been completed. Given that you can produce a full G on demand anywhere given enough mass and enough power to spin it up, this seems a viable solution, *if* in fact lower-gee development proves to be an insurmountable problem.
What I still haven't seen is a full, technical explanation of what went wrong in the first place, and (more importantly) why it wasn't caught in ground testing. One would imagine that flash-contention issues would be relatively easy to bench test.
As with Pathfinder, NASA seems to have run into testable software issues only after the hardware is on another planet. I'd like to see more morning-after analysis on this both so NASA can improve its process for future missions, and so that we can all learn something about software testing for our own projects.
Does anyone know of place (web page, mailing list, whatever) where this is being discussed on a deep technical level?
I'll echo the BofA recommendation, having had much the same experience. For payments to individuals (and to businesses not participating in e-transfers), they do indeed cut and mail a check.
Not only do I pay all but a couple of my bills through this system, I receive my phone bills through it, with no paper copies. All the same info is available, just no dead trees. I wish more businesses and government agencies would start participating in their e-billing system.
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere Douglas Hofstadter is smiling.
"Yields spam when quined" yields spam when quined.
I think it's very kind of the Supremes to provide such a simple way out of this otherwise intrusive situation. If a police officer asks you for your name, simply inform him or her that, as you are wanted for another crime, you would prefer not to give your name. See how easy that is? I love this country!
The primary impact creates ejecta that goes into orbit. It turns out that the worst possible place to be other than near ground zero is the antipodes about 45 minutes later, as the orbiting ejecta cloud focuses and re-enters en masse there. Counterintuitive until you think about it a bit, but true.
Needless to say, other ejecta falls short or goes farther before re-entering, giving the whole world a good baking.
Yep, dead on. I had a friend who was agonizing over the choice between 2.2 and 2.5 GHz processors; when I asked him what he planned to do with the machine, he told me it was for web surfing and light bookkeeping. But he wouldn't believe that a reconditioned 500 MHz PII box would do those just fine.
I was 19 at the time. My ethics have advanced somewhat since then. Thank God.
In college, I was approached by one of my girlfriend's dormmates, a good-looking blonde poli-sci major who'd procrastinated on some statistical thing she needed to do on the campus computer system. She was in danger of failing a class if she didn't get it done over the weekend, and she literally didn't even know how to log into the system.
So, after much hinting and many awkward silences, she blurted out that she'd do anything I wanted if I bailed her out. Surely at that moment I achieved a permanent place in the Geek Hall of Fame, perhaps in the Absurd Fantasies wing.
But it gets better. You see, I was very happy with my girlfriend at the time (whom I later married), and I didn't want to mess that up by sleeping with someone she saw every day and whom I didn't trust to keep quiet. So I turned her down.
For the sex, anyway. I had her take me out to dinner instead. The stats thing she needed took me 20 minutes to run.
I was walking on air for some time after that, just based on the principle of the thing.
That's why certain people are so frenetic about using the term "Free Software" rather than "Open Source". What matters isn't seeing lines of code; it's what freedoms you have to work with them.
As all the Tim Powers fans engage in a collective shudder...
If she's flexible enough to get into a puppeteer costume, I bet it's fun being her husband.
mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.
- The Devil's IT Dictionary
How so?
I agree that redistributing the results would be both unethical and illegal. But last I hear prior restraint was still frowned on by the courts.
That would make sense, but it's not what the article said was happening; that was described as a constant drift over time. Go figure...
Not really. If the drift rate is fixed, then a gate delay of (say) 1 millisecond should be wrong by the same absolute amount no matter how long the clock has been running.
Consider a clock that loses ten minutes a day. Within a week, it's off by more than an hour, making it pretty useless for measuring absolute time. But if you're timing something that only lasts a minute using that clock, you will always, reliably, actually measure 59.58 seconds.
Because you're measuring from an arbitrary start point, it doesn't matter that the clock says the start time is 0930 when it's really 0950; what you care about is the time elapsed between when the clock says 0930 and when it says 0931, and the error in *that* measurement isn't cumulative.
The article on the Patriot failure is interesting. However, I'm having trouble picturing how cumulative clock drift over days of operation could cause cumulatively increasing error in a range-gate check. After all, range-gating is done by taking t0 at the initial contact point, and then waiting delta-t before taking the t1 observation. Absolute time doesn't figure into it at all.
Does anyone have any insight on this?
Who wants a net connection that drops every time there's a power failure?
Oh, wait.
Off the top of my head? Einstein publishes his first paper on special relativity, James Joyce meets Nora Barnacle (setting the date later used for the events of Ulysses), and Aleister Crowley pens The Book of the Law . Quite a year, 1904.
Romper Room had this in the 1960s!
like hiram abif?
/." list.
A new record-setting entry on my "Similes I never expected to see on
I knew I'd really become a software manager when I gained the ability to cause code to fail by standing behind the person trying to demo it.
Larry Wall is a god, his core Perl dev team are demigods, and I'm very excited by all the goodies in Perl 6. But I have to wonder...if 6 is going to break so much existing code that it needs a hack to be backward compatible, why not just release a new language? What's the point of holding onto the name Perl but not the reality of running existing Perl code?
Larry Niven, in his "Known Space" science fiction series, solved this problem for asteroid settlers by having one asteroid colony spun up to nearly a full G inside. Pregnant women and families with young children would live there until the basic developmental stages had been completed. Given that you can produce a full G on demand anywhere given enough mass and enough power to spin it up, this seems a viable solution, *if* in fact lower-gee development proves to be an insurmountable problem.
What I still haven't seen is a full, technical explanation of what went wrong in the first place, and (more importantly) why it wasn't caught in ground testing. One would imagine that flash-contention issues would be relatively easy to bench test.
As with Pathfinder, NASA seems to have run into testable software issues only after the hardware is on another planet. I'd like to see more morning-after analysis on this both so NASA can improve its process for future missions, and so that we can all learn something about software testing for our own projects.
Does anyone know of place (web page, mailing list, whatever) where this is being discussed on a deep technical level?
I'll echo the BofA recommendation, having had much the same experience. For payments to individuals (and to businesses not participating in e-transfers), they do indeed cut and mail a check.
Not only do I pay all but a couple of my bills through this system, I receive my phone bills through it, with no paper copies. All the same info is available, just no dead trees. I wish more businesses and government agencies would start participating in their e-billing system.