I used to be a hard-SF junkie, and still read a few authors (Banks, Varley) religiously. But my enthusiasm for the genre has waned considerably over the last few decades. I think the main reason for this is that I'm too depressed by the state of our space program (and by 'our' I mean humanity's, not any particular nation) to be able to really enjoy an old-fashioned planet hopping yarn. The simple fact that we haven't been back to the moon since the Apollo program died with a whimper is enough to sour me on thinking about space at all.
If this is done, then the OS and app vendors will start offering versions that tunnel over the still-open ports. Or are we looking at a situation in which typical end-user machines won't be able to listen at any ports at all?
Re:Communications potential of space probes?
on
Goodbye, Galileo
·
· Score: 1
Galileo's terrible data rate is due to a failure to fully deploy its main (high-gain) antenna early in the mission (apparently a rib stuck on the umbrella-like unfolding dish). As a result, all probe communication has been done through the backup low-gain antenna. It's really astonishing that they've done as much with Galileo as they have; many people initially considered the loss of the HGA a mission-killer.
Interesting analogy. Let's extend it. Suppose your disease causes those who catch it to go into massive convulsions without any warning? They can be driving a car, flying a plane, doing surgery, whatever, and suddenly they begin flailing around violently. Obviously, you can't let these people drive cars and so forth; innocent bystanders are at huge risk of damage.
But how do you tell who is at risk and who isn't? Green eyed people can be trusted, and indeed you'll put critical jobs in their hands whenever possible. But everybody else? Quarantines and other ways of limiting otherwise normal behavior start to make a lot of sense.
I think it's a fairer comment than you're giving her credit for. Geeks tend to like games that involve a huge commitment in learning and practice before you begin to succeed. And they like lots of fine control. My wife calls my favorite computer game (Space Empires IV) "Spreadsheets in Spaaaaace!" because it's mostly about economic and logistical management rather than intense combat or stunning visuals. I can play it for hours at a time, but I'm well aware that I'm far from normal in this regard. For most people, it would be like doing tax returns as recreation.
The most effective base being e is not coincidental. Consider that the number of digits required to represent a number is proportional to the log to the base in use of that number. Since e is the base of the natural logarithms, with the property that the slope of the curve e^x equals e^x for all x, the product of a base and the logarithm of any number to that base will always reach a minimum for base = e.
Amen. Live shows are all about spontaneity and feedback. I've seen old bands put such new spins on their material that I didn't recognize what they were playing until a minute or two into the song; the sense of familiarity mixed with novelty is exhilirating. I've seen plenty of botched chords and lyrics, and as you say, it's all about the artist's reactions, how they recover.
At the last Yes concert I attended, Jon tripped over a cable while backing up to give Steve room for a solo, and fell flat on his back. You could hear the crowd gasp. He bounced right back to his feet, and was fine by the time the next vocals came around. When the song was done, he grinned and said "All I could think was 'thank god I'm among friends'". You'll never get that kind of immediacy and connection listening to a CD, or watching a meticulously hyper-engineered 'concert'.
I was rather appalled when I discovered that the Jesuit high school I attended was named after the cardinal who headed the Vatican's case against Galileo. I didn't believe the Jesuits at first that Galileo was basically a (very smart, and utterly correct) grandstanding asshole who intentionally goaded the Church into reluctantly taking action against him, which even then was (as the parent poster said) quite restrained. He had many friends among the Church hierarchy, though fewer with each passing year as he continued his bad politics.
To summarize, if Galileo had said "The Earth revolves around the Sun" and left it at that, he probably would have been ignored by the Church. Instead he said "The Earth revolves around the Sun, which contradicts Church doctrine, so the Church is full of idiots who are utterly, completely wrong about this, wow, look how stupid they are!" Big difference.
I love that so many people can't even conceive of the possibility that I intentionally set it up so that the "bad guys" (NV, USSR, SCO, MS) "win" in both cases, as that's my prediction. As distinct from my hope.
I never said any such thing, though that sounds like a fun thing to be.:) I merely thought it odd that a rather topical analogy got marked 'offtopic'. If someone disagrees with the analogy, I would imagine that arguing against it would be more productive than down-modding it. Ah, well, it all came out in the wash in any case.
Wow, guess I touched a nerve with that one...overrated *and* offtopic, for a simple analogy? Seemed a reasonable one to me, too. Ah, well, the collective wisdom (cough) has spoken.:)
I know that for me, the fact that there is no monthly fee is key. It's very convenient to pay as I play. If I go away on vacation I don't "loose" my monthly payment, and I don't feel cheated if I don't get a chance to listen to enough music one month.
Fair point. For me, the ten buck a month charge for Rhapsody is below my financial radar; I spend more on that having one Thai lunch or buying two magazines. And my listening mode is mostly using their streaming system rather than burning, so I figure I usually get my ten bucks worth within a day or two and everything else is icing. People more interested in mobility, especially using the iPod, are obviously going to like iTunes better.
...Apple's music service, the closest yet to a system that users feel is fair and usable.
I've been using Listen Rhapsody for many months, and find it eminently fair, extremely usable, and generally kick-ass. I stream what I want to hear on a whim, and can burn most tracks for the same price as iTunes if I need a portable copy. Why are people treating iTunes as something new when Rhapsody has been doing it successfully for a year or more?
I hope you didn't interpret my post as a call to boycott RIAA. Deciding that you personally don't care to do business with an entity is very different from organizing a boycott. I don't buy food at the supermarket nearest my home because I think their prices are too high, and I can get a better deal by going three more blocks. But I'm not 'boycotting' the nearer market.
I feel like I'm in Wonderland, sometimes. The RIAA does not control your food or water supply. They aren't your landlord. Their sole power is to offer a certain subset of music for sale, and to decide on the terms under which it will be sold. If they decided not to sell any of their music to anyone at any price, what would be the net effect? A lot of pissed off artists and consumers, sure, but everyone would live right through it.
Hate the RIAA? Don't like their business model and practices? Then don't do business with them! If you're a music consumer, go to clubs, buy microlabel and band-pressing CDs, swap non-RIAA mp3s, and enjoy. If you're a music producer, release your tunes through some other channel.
I was on a tour at JPL where our guide was discussing this shift. Apparently, the internal slang for the old mega-missions was "Battlestar class", as in "Cassini was the last Battlestar class mission". I thought that was a vivid way to put it.
Red Queen is a much earlier book than Genome
on
The Red Queen
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The review (while otherwise good) implies that Genome predates Red Queen, when in fact the former came out in 2000 and the latter in 1995.
By the way, I echo the recommendation -- reading this book profoundly changed how I think about evolution and genetics. The only comparably assumption-shattering biology book I can think of is Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.
The thing is, your parents are right. File "sharing" is wrong. It's the RIAA's intellectual property, and they can decide how it's used. If you don't like it, make some music of your own and give it away. Don't steal from other people.
Slashdot Mirror
It can actually exceed 50% in some scenarios. For example:
1. Trojan fakes from address of 'joe@foo.com', sends email to 'sue@bar.com' with infected attachment.
2. Filter at 'bar.com' detects infected attachment, sends rejection email from 'sue@bar.com' to 'joe@foo.com'.
3. It turns out that 'joe@foo.com' is no longer a valid address. 'foo.com' mail agent sends a delivery failure email to 'sue@bar.com'.
Thus we get two pointless administrative emails generated by a single infected email.
I am seeing this happening quite commonly, by the way.
I used to be a hard-SF junkie, and still read a few authors (Banks, Varley) religiously. But my enthusiasm for the genre has waned considerably over the last few decades. I think the main reason for this is that I'm too depressed by the state of our space program (and by 'our' I mean humanity's, not any particular nation) to be able to really enjoy an old-fashioned planet hopping yarn. The simple fact that we haven't been back to the moon since the Apollo program died with a whimper is enough to sour me on thinking about space at all.
If this is done, then the OS and app vendors will start offering versions that tunnel over the still-open ports. Or are we looking at a situation in which typical end-user machines won't be able to listen at any ports at all?
Galileo's terrible data rate is due to a failure to fully deploy its main (high-gain) antenna early in the mission (apparently a rib stuck on the umbrella-like unfolding dish). As a result, all probe communication has been done through the backup low-gain antenna. It's really astonishing that they've done as much with Galileo as they have; many people initially considered the loss of the HGA a mission-killer.
Interesting analogy. Let's extend it. Suppose your disease causes those who catch it to go into massive convulsions without any warning? They can be driving a car, flying a plane, doing surgery, whatever, and suddenly they begin flailing around violently. Obviously, you can't let these people drive cars and so forth; innocent bystanders are at huge risk of damage.
But how do you tell who is at risk and who isn't? Green eyed people can be trusted, and indeed you'll put critical jobs in their hands whenever possible. But everybody else? Quarantines and other ways of limiting otherwise normal behavior start to make a lot of sense.
The world constantly proves itself to be far, far stranger than I imagine. And my imagination keeps stretching, too.
I think it's a fairer comment than you're giving her credit for. Geeks tend to like games that involve a huge commitment in learning and practice before you begin to succeed. And they like lots of fine control. My wife calls my favorite computer game (Space Empires IV) "Spreadsheets in Spaaaaace!" because it's mostly about economic and logistical management rather than intense combat or stunning visuals. I can play it for hours at a time, but I'm well aware that I'm far from normal in this regard. For most people, it would be like doing tax returns as recreation.
Cool! I'll just incorporate a few anti-RFID tags into my tinfoil hat, and then let's see the CIA try their thought-control lasers on me!
The most effective base being e is not coincidental. Consider that the number of digits required to represent a number is proportional to the log to the base in use of that number. Since e is the base of the natural logarithms, with the property that the slope of the curve e^x equals e^x for all x, the product of a base and the logarithm of any number to that base will always reach a minimum for base = e.
Amen. Live shows are all about spontaneity and feedback. I've seen old bands put such new spins on their material that I didn't recognize what they were playing until a minute or two into the song; the sense of familiarity mixed with novelty is exhilirating. I've seen plenty of botched chords and lyrics, and as you say, it's all about the artist's reactions, how they recover.
At the last Yes concert I attended, Jon tripped over a cable while backing up to give Steve room for a solo, and fell flat on his back. You could hear the crowd gasp. He bounced right back to his feet, and was fine by the time the next vocals came around. When the song was done, he grinned and said "All I could think was 'thank god I'm among friends'". You'll never get that kind of immediacy and connection listening to a CD, or watching a meticulously hyper-engineered 'concert'.
They meant to enact a new property tax, i.e., a tax on land, but somebody dropped the 'd'.
Of course, another sense of property taxation would be pretty hard on enterprise Java developers.
In his Dialog Concerning Two World Systems, he named the fictional representative of traditional (Church) views "Simplicio". Just for example.
I was rather appalled when I discovered that the Jesuit high school I attended was named after the cardinal who headed the Vatican's case against Galileo. I didn't believe the Jesuits at first that Galileo was basically a (very smart, and utterly correct) grandstanding asshole who intentionally goaded the Church into reluctantly taking action against him, which even then was (as the parent poster said) quite restrained. He had many friends among the Church hierarchy, though fewer with each passing year as he continued his bad politics.
To summarize, if Galileo had said "The Earth revolves around the Sun" and left it at that, he probably would have been ignored by the Church. Instead he said "The Earth revolves around the Sun, which contradicts Church doctrine, so the Church is full of idiots who are utterly, completely wrong about this, wow, look how stupid they are!" Big difference.
I love that so many people can't even conceive of the possibility that I intentionally set it up so that the "bad guys" (NV, USSR, SCO, MS) "win" in both cases, as that's my prediction. As distinct from my hope.
I never said any such thing, though that sounds like a fun thing to be. :) I merely thought it odd that a rather topical analogy got marked 'offtopic'. If someone disagrees with the analogy, I would imagine that arguing against it would be more productive than down-modding it. Ah, well, it all came out in the wash in any case.
Wow, guess I touched a nerve with that one...overrated *and* offtopic, for a simple analogy? Seemed a reasonable one to me, too. Ah, well, the collective wisdom (cough) has spoken. :)
Brings to mind an interesting analogy:
IBM = USA
Microsoft = USSR
Red Hat = South Viet Nam
SCO = North Viet Nam
Doesn't bode well for anybody concerned...
I hope you didn't interpret my post as a call to boycott RIAA. Deciding that you personally don't care to do business with an entity is very different from organizing a boycott. I don't buy food at the supermarket nearest my home because I think their prices are too high, and I can get a better deal by going three more blocks. But I'm not 'boycotting' the nearer market.
I feel like I'm in Wonderland, sometimes. The RIAA does not control your food or water supply. They aren't your landlord. Their sole power is to offer a certain subset of music for sale, and to decide on the terms under which it will be sold. If they decided not to sell any of their music to anyone at any price, what would be the net effect? A lot of pissed off artists and consumers, sure, but everyone would live right through it.
Hate the RIAA? Don't like their business model and practices? Then don't do business with them! If you're a music consumer, go to clubs, buy microlabel and band-pressing CDs, swap non-RIAA mp3s, and enjoy. If you're a music producer, release your tunes through some other channel.
Why is this so hard for people to deal with?
I was on a tour at JPL where our guide was discussing this shift. Apparently, the internal slang for the old mega-missions was "Battlestar class", as in "Cassini was the last Battlestar class mission". I thought that was a vivid way to put it.
By the way, I echo the recommendation -- reading this book profoundly changed how I think about evolution and genetics. The only comparably assumption-shattering biology book I can think of is Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.
The thing is, your parents are right. File "sharing" is wrong. It's the RIAA's intellectual property, and they can decide how it's used. If you don't like it, make some music of your own and give it away. Don't steal from other people.