A clinostat averages the pull of gravity around an axis. It does not eliminate gravity, as you seem to think it does. I didn't say it wasn't useful, but it certainly isn't the last word in micro or low gravity experiments.
Or to put it another way, if I put you on a wheel like that plant and rotated you around at 1 RPM, would you think you're in microgravity? There are many things that could potentially be affected by a force rotating around a body versus a lack of force entirely.
These guys, maybe? Ronald J. Anderson, Thomas M. Crabb, John G. Frank, Steven M. Guetschow, Jeffrey T Iverson, Olaf Meding, Robert C. Morrow, E. Don Peissig, Ross W Remiker, Robert C. Richter, David Smith, Jon D. Van Roo, Anton G. Vermaak, and John C. Vignali of Orbital Technologies Corp. for Kennedy Space Center.
That's microgravity, not low gravity. Different problem, and even if it was similar, we still don't have very much information.
Or anyone with access to a working clinostat, really.
Erm, that only works for cells, for obvious reasons.
That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well.
Whatever advantage there is to the raw material is more than overwhelmed by the practical difficulties of dust and the temperature swings, just for starters. The moon is an incredibly harsh environment -- much harsher than space itself.
The moon is not a perfect site but it seems like a reasonable baby step to me, before we look at building a space station somewhere useful, like the asteroid belt.
That's the problem... it's not a baby step, it's a gargantuan step. Doing a space station is the baby step. Why do you think we have an ISS (as pathetic as it is), and not a moon base at this point?
Hell, forget I-Beams. Send up an inflatable a la Bigelow (which is based on NASA technology that he bought). Why people think the moon is easy compared to the other options is beyond my understanding. It's the *hardest* option.
Settling in a gravity well is just stupid. I understand the romance of "living on another world", but just the health difficulties are incredibly hard to solve, along with Lunar nights (I know they want the north pole). The practical difficulties are insane. Will plants grow well in 1/6th gravity? Who knows?
If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station. Yes, the engineering is difficult, but nowhere near the problems of building on the moon, and you can build it closer to earth. You get perpetual, consistent sunlight for power, artificial gravity. You can do zero gravity experiments by setting up labs at the hub, which you can't do on the moon. And doing an emergency escape capsule would be way easier than having to launch off the moon.
Why NASA is still talking about going to the moon is beyond me. We should be doing missions to near-earth asteroids to see if the materials would be useful for building large space stations, and experimenting with robotically producing I-Beams.
Re:What is this crazy tags thing?
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1
By 'failure', I mean that the tags we see are generally ridiculously useless (like a "science" tag on a story in the Science section) or otherwise simply degenerate ("haha" seems to be the most common tag).
The tag thing is useless, but at least the old vote-based system was entertaining. I looked at it as a variation on the "from the [xxxx] department". Some of the tags were pretty funny sometimes.
What is this crazy tags thing?
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Considering the FAQ hasn't been updated in almost a year, could you explain exactly what tags do these days? At one time, it seemed to be a vote-based system, now I have no idea how tags show up on articles. Frankly, since I didn't understand it and my tags didn't seem to affect anything, I gave up on using the feature.
Could we get a definitive answer to how tags work?
If one believes God exists, it is a given than all things imaginable are possible.
That's just childish nonsense, of the same order as a child believing that his parents can do anything. God cannot make 1+1 = 3. Even if God exists, he has limits. We don't know what they are and he's unlikely to tell us, but he has limits. They may not be limits within our universe (just as a programmer would have no limits over an artificial world he programmed), but he has limits within the physical laws of his own universe.
THen on top of all the criticism of religion, you zealots ignore that scientist do their own share of politics, out right lies, and goofs.
No one denies that science is done by humans. The difference is that a science can be falsified and proven wrong, given sufficient evidence. Can you say the same? Are there any circumstances by which you would give up your belief in God?
God doesn't exist anymore than Odin existed or Zeus existed or name any other mythical God. There is absolutely nothing you can say about the Judeo-Christian God that is different from any Olympian God, except that current culture likes the Judeo-Christian God (well, those old cultures believed in superstition, dontcha know). If you lived 2,500 years ago in Greece, you'd believe in Zeus just as strongly. Doesn't that tell you something?
Who said that it would be English that would win? How many more Chinese speakers are there?
And how many of those Chinese speakers also speak English? Almost all of them? (I'm not sure if they teach English as a second language in China as a matter of course).
What makes you assume that it would be English that would win?
Because if English isn't someone's first language, it's almost always their second language, and in fact is required in many (most?) countries to be learned by children. And don't underestimate the fact that English is the standard language of the Internet, and is the one used when communication between cultures is necessary. English is incredibly dominant.
abolish DST! It was silly in the early 1900s when the majority of workers worked in factories, mills, or on farms. It's sillier in 2007. Get rid of that stupidity once and for all.
Clearly you don't live on a schedule, or you prefer the night (or you're just a pedantic nut who can't tolerate having the sun overhead at 1pm). As for the rest of us, you can pry my extra evening hour of daylight during the summer out of my cold dead hand (so to speak).
That's the only model that died on me. It did last 20+ years, so it wasn't that bad. My HP-16C is still going strong, and only on its second set of batteries.
My 16C is still fine, though that's in part because I rarely use it these days. It's probably been 15 years since I've done any serious assembly programming.:(
I prefer the keys on the 41C though, so it gets the "quick calculation" work.
40 years and I still can't find one with a backlight. I can't be the only one who codes in a dimly lit cave.
Ha ha, I never thought about it before, but you're right. I've never seen a calculator with a back light. But in the age of the web, it is possible to find such a beast. But it is surprising that it's not more common.
You do good XML documentation the way you do good documentation of any kind...
1) Examples.
2) Functional examples.
3) More examples.
People learn best when they have a skeleton of knowledge to hang the meaty details on. By all means, have a detailed description of each element in the XML, but give lots of examples so people can get a sense of the big picture of what's going on. And make sure your example are real-world enough to cut/paste and modify for people who need to get something up and running in a hurry.
There's a reason that K&R is considered one of the best language books every written. It has tons of examples, and also has a lot of the formal stuff in a useful format.
Steve Jobs apologized for it. Apple recinded to the tune of $100 store credit faster than new Coke was pulled. There's very little to debate here. I'm on the same side as Apple and Steve Jobs.
Well, you appear to be on the side that it was an unethical move by Apple. You know him better than I do, but I don't get the impression that Steve Jobs woke up one morning and said to himself, "Good God! I see the error of my ways! I did a wrong, and I need to make it right!"
I more get the impression that he woke up one morning to a P.R. disaster, and decided to write a check to calm the firestorm.
By the way! Speaking of the iPhone, you replied to a post of mine about how I had set my old digital watch to the Telephone Time, and it ended up being way off. You then made a comment about how accurate time is available to everyone in the age of cell phones.
Well, I just bought a clock that sets itself automatically to WWV, and guess what? The good ol' iPhone via AT&T is 11 seconds off. Even in 2007, you STILL can't trust the phone company to have the right time!:D
What I don't understand is how it could possibly be off in the age of self-setting time daemons.
Legally, the government has recognized the consumer's right to unlock a cellphone. The FCC is big on phone portability and number portability.
That's true, but there is no consumer right for the company to have to *support* your right to unlock your cellphone. They have no obligation at all to make it easy on you. It's your phone, modify it as you will, but you take responsibility if you kill it.
So by this logic you consider that we should not do any environmental impact analysis of fossil fuel usage at all...
No, that's you're logic, not my logic. The only that we can say accurately about fossil fuels is that "less is (probably) good". We can't quantify that to any sort of usefulness. Hell, it's entirely possible, even believing the worst-case warming trends, that it may actually save lives (because of fewer cold-related deaths) and make things better overall. People fear change, hence the assumption that all change is bad. Of course, more pollution is generally bad, but it's difficult to weight the positives versus negatives.
Poisons into the environment, on the other hand, is fairly unambiguously bad.
You don't need to worry about the environmental impact of cadmium, but rather the environmental impact of cadmium versus the environmental impact of current energy production from fossil fuels, etc.
The environmental impact of fossil fuels is not calculable in any sort of useful way, whereas with a specific environmental poison, you can more directly trace them to their health effects.
I'm enthusiastically in favor of advertising, because something to has to pay the bills, and if a bit of screen real estate (within reason) that doesn't cost me anything buys the cornacopia of free content that's out there, then I like it.
I actually prefer Flash ads, because they seem to be smaller and faster loading than gifs or jpgs.
I only really get annoyed when some ad starts blasting sound at me. Those people should definitely be brought out in the public square and beaten.
You'll note that your first quote makes it clear that the CUE shot down a proposal which would have cut costs for the Coop.
Yes, it might've cut costs, but they shot it down because it would have cost a LOT more money in potentially lost sales from people going elsewhere for their books.
What is your explanation for why they wouldn't publish the ISBN numbers for all the coursebooks when that so obviously benfits the students? It's simple: The "Committee on Undergraduate Education" doesn't give a damn about undergraduate education.
I know my school's bookstore was taken over by B&N a couple of years ago and ever since the price has skyrocketed.
Do you really think the school isn't getting a kickback from that?
This is exactly why there needs to be a total separation between the two. The school publishes a list of books, and the students buy them wherever they want to. A *total* separation.
This company DID care about the bottom line. And books were marked up a little bit more to compensate.
"Companies" don't raise price willy-nilly just to make more money, because they are subject to competition. University-owned bookstores have traditionally been monopolies, hence the reason they try and charge such outrageous amounts of money.
Again, if you think the universities (and professors) don't care about money, you are sadly naive.
Slashdot Mirror
Care to list your obvious reasons?
A clinostat averages the pull of gravity around an axis. It does not eliminate gravity, as you seem to think it does. I didn't say it wasn't useful, but it certainly isn't the last word in micro or low gravity experiments.
Or to put it another way, if I put you on a wheel like that plant and rotated you around at 1 RPM, would you think you're in microgravity? There are many things that could potentially be affected by a force rotating around a body versus a lack of force entirely.
These guys, maybe? Ronald J. Anderson, Thomas M. Crabb, John G. Frank, Steven M. Guetschow, Jeffrey T Iverson, Olaf Meding, Robert C. Morrow, E. Don Peissig, Ross W Remiker, Robert C. Richter, David Smith, Jon D. Van Roo, Anton G. Vermaak, and John C. Vignali of Orbital Technologies Corp. for Kennedy Space Center.
That's microgravity, not low gravity. Different problem, and even if it was similar, we still don't have very much information.
Or anyone with access to a working clinostat, really.
Erm, that only works for cells, for obvious reasons.
That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well.
Whatever advantage there is to the raw material is more than overwhelmed by the practical difficulties of dust and the temperature swings, just for starters. The moon is an incredibly harsh environment -- much harsher than space itself.
The moon is not a perfect site but it seems like a reasonable baby step to me, before we look at building a space station somewhere useful, like the asteroid belt.
That's the problem... it's not a baby step, it's a gargantuan step. Doing a space station is the baby step. Why do you think we have an ISS (as pathetic as it is), and not a moon base at this point?
Hell, forget I-Beams. Send up an inflatable a la Bigelow (which is based on NASA technology that he bought). Why people think the moon is easy compared to the other options is beyond my understanding. It's the *hardest* option.
Settling in a gravity well is just stupid. I understand the romance of "living on another world", but just the health difficulties are incredibly hard to solve, along with Lunar nights (I know they want the north pole). The practical difficulties are insane. Will plants grow well in 1/6th gravity? Who knows?
If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station. Yes, the engineering is difficult, but nowhere near the problems of building on the moon, and you can build it closer to earth. You get perpetual, consistent sunlight for power, artificial gravity. You can do zero gravity experiments by setting up labs at the hub, which you can't do on the moon. And doing an emergency escape capsule would be way easier than having to launch off the moon.
Why NASA is still talking about going to the moon is beyond me. We should be doing missions to near-earth asteroids to see if the materials would be useful for building large space stations, and experimenting with robotically producing I-Beams.
By 'failure', I mean that the tags we see are generally ridiculously useless (like a "science" tag on a story in the Science section) or otherwise simply degenerate ("haha" seems to be the most common tag).
The tag thing is useless, but at least the old vote-based system was entertaining. I looked at it as a variation on the "from the [xxxx] department". Some of the tags were pretty funny sometimes.
Considering the FAQ hasn't been updated in almost a year, could you explain exactly what tags do these days? At one time, it seemed to be a vote-based system, now I have no idea how tags show up on articles. Frankly, since I didn't understand it and my tags didn't seem to affect anything, I gave up on using the feature.
Could we get a definitive answer to how tags work?
If one believes God exists, it is a given than all things imaginable are possible.
That's just childish nonsense, of the same order as a child believing that his parents can do anything. God cannot make 1+1 = 3. Even if God exists, he has limits. We don't know what they are and he's unlikely to tell us, but he has limits. They may not be limits within our universe (just as a programmer would have no limits over an artificial world he programmed), but he has limits within the physical laws of his own universe.
THen on top of all the criticism of religion, you zealots ignore that scientist do their own share of politics, out right lies, and goofs.
No one denies that science is done by humans. The difference is that a science can be falsified and proven wrong, given sufficient evidence. Can you say the same? Are there any circumstances by which you would give up your belief in God?
God doesn't exist anymore than Odin existed or Zeus existed or name any other mythical God. There is absolutely nothing you can say about the Judeo-Christian God that is different from any Olympian God, except that current culture likes the Judeo-Christian God (well, those old cultures believed in superstition, dontcha know). If you lived 2,500 years ago in Greece, you'd believe in Zeus just as strongly. Doesn't that tell you something?
Who said that it would be English that would win? How many more Chinese speakers are there?
And how many of those Chinese speakers also speak English? Almost all of them? (I'm not sure if they teach English as a second language in China as a matter of course).
What makes you assume that it would be English that would win?
Because if English isn't someone's first language, it's almost always their second language, and in fact is required in many (most?) countries to be learned by children. And don't underestimate the fact that English is the standard language of the Internet, and is the one used when communication between cultures is necessary. English is incredibly dominant.
abolish DST! It was silly in the early 1900s when the majority of workers worked in factories, mills, or on farms. It's sillier in 2007. Get rid of that stupidity once and for all.
Clearly you don't live on a schedule, or you prefer the night (or you're just a pedantic nut who can't tolerate having the sun overhead at 1pm). As for the rest of us, you can pry my extra evening hour of daylight during the summer out of my cold dead hand (so to speak).
Daylight savings time rocks!
ATT& is pure, unadulterated evil.
AT&T doesn't exist anymore, except in name only. They were purchased by SBC about six(?) months ago. SBC then changed their name to AT&T.
That's the only model that died on me. It did last 20+ years, so it wasn't that bad. My HP-16C is still going strong, and only on its second set of batteries.
My 16C is still fine, though that's in part because I rarely use it these days. It's probably been 15 years since I've done any serious assembly programming. :(
I prefer the keys on the 41C though, so it gets the "quick calculation" work.
Of all the ones that I've owned, only one has failed.
My 41C of 1980 vintage is still going strong. :)
Oops, never mind. The boneheads on that web site messed up their description... it's for a digital watch.
I still use both my TI-55 and TI-30.
TI sucks! HP Rules!
(Most people on Slashdot won't get this joke)
40 years and I still can't find one with a backlight. I can't be the only one who codes in a dimly lit cave.
Ha ha, I never thought about it before, but you're right. I've never seen a calculator with a back light. But in the age of the web, it is possible to find such a beast. But it is surprising that it's not more common.
So what's the minimum bid that the nerds need to come up with to get near the girls? Oh wait...
You do good XML documentation the way you do good documentation of any kind...
1) Examples.
2) Functional examples.
3) More examples.
People learn best when they have a skeleton of knowledge to hang the meaty details on. By all means, have a detailed description of each element in the XML, but give lots of examples so people can get a sense of the big picture of what's going on. And make sure your example are real-world enough to cut/paste and modify for people who need to get something up and running in a hurry.
There's a reason that K&R is considered one of the best language books every written. It has tons of examples, and also has a lot of the formal stuff in a useful format.
Steve Jobs apologized for it. Apple recinded to the tune of $100 store credit faster than new Coke was pulled. There's very little to debate here. I'm on the same side as Apple and Steve Jobs.
Well, you appear to be on the side that it was an unethical move by Apple. You know him better than I do, but I don't get the impression that Steve Jobs woke up one morning and said to himself, "Good God! I see the error of my ways! I did a wrong, and I need to make it right!"
I more get the impression that he woke up one morning to a P.R. disaster, and decided to write a check to calm the firestorm.
By the way! Speaking of the iPhone, you replied to a post of mine about how I had set my old digital watch to the Telephone Time, and it ended up being way off. You then made a comment about how accurate time is available to everyone in the age of cell phones.
Well, I just bought a clock that sets itself automatically to WWV, and guess what? The good ol' iPhone via AT&T is 11 seconds off. Even in 2007, you STILL can't trust the phone company to have the right time! :D
What I don't understand is how it could possibly be off in the age of self-setting time daemons.
Legally, the government has recognized the consumer's right to unlock a cellphone. The FCC is big on phone portability and number portability.
That's true, but there is no consumer right for the company to have to *support* your right to unlock your cellphone. They have no obligation at all to make it easy on you. It's your phone, modify it as you will, but you take responsibility if you kill it.
So by this logic you consider that we should not do any environmental impact analysis of fossil fuel usage at all...
No, that's you're logic, not my logic. The only that we can say accurately about fossil fuels is that "less is (probably) good". We can't quantify that to any sort of usefulness. Hell, it's entirely possible, even believing the worst-case warming trends, that it may actually save lives (because of fewer cold-related deaths) and make things better overall. People fear change, hence the assumption that all change is bad. Of course, more pollution is generally bad, but it's difficult to weight the positives versus negatives.
Poisons into the environment, on the other hand, is fairly unambiguously bad.
You don't need to worry about the environmental impact of cadmium, but rather the environmental impact of cadmium versus the environmental impact of current energy production from fossil fuels, etc.
The environmental impact of fossil fuels is not calculable in any sort of useful way, whereas with a specific environmental poison, you can more directly trace them to their health effects.
I'm enthusiastically in favor of advertising, because something to has to pay the bills, and if a bit of screen real estate (within reason) that doesn't cost me anything buys the cornacopia of free content that's out there, then I like it.
I actually prefer Flash ads, because they seem to be smaller and faster loading than gifs or jpgs.
I only really get annoyed when some ad starts blasting sound at me. Those people should definitely be brought out in the public square and beaten.
You'll note that your first quote makes it clear that the CUE shot down a proposal which would have cut costs for the Coop.
Yes, it might've cut costs, but they shot it down because it would have cost a LOT more money in potentially lost sales from people going elsewhere for their books.
What is your explanation for why they wouldn't publish the ISBN numbers for all the coursebooks when that so obviously benfits the students? It's simple: The "Committee on Undergraduate Education" doesn't give a damn about undergraduate education.
I know my school's bookstore was taken over by B&N a couple of years ago and ever since the price has skyrocketed.
Do you really think the school isn't getting a kickback from that?
This is exactly why there needs to be a total separation between the two. The school publishes a list of books, and the students buy them wherever they want to. A *total* separation.
This company DID care about the bottom line. And books were marked up a little bit more to compensate.
"Companies" don't raise price willy-nilly just to make more money, because they are subject to competition. University-owned bookstores have traditionally been monopolies, hence the reason they try and charge such outrageous amounts of money.
Again, if you think the universities (and professors) don't care about money, you are sadly naive.