I'm pretty sure that was also a Forward story. The cool thing about Forward's book was that there were only 2 bits of technology featured that hadn't already been developed, specifically the microrobotic "christmas bush" and the metabolism-slowing drug. All the other technology exists, and could be applied if we wanted to spend enough money.
The ship was driven out of the solar system by an array of lasers orbiting Mercury, and braked as it approached its destination star by jettisoning(sp?) part of its mirror and using it for reaction mass. It was a decidedly one-way trip, but damn near possible with today's technology.
What happens if you tell bad news inside a small Italian restaurant? Anybody know about the interaction of bad news and bistromathics? Some nice Italian food might also offset the displeasure which usually accompanies the arrival of a conventional bad news powered ship.
Sorry. I'm too used to American spelling. I'm sure there are plenty of online entomology resoruces, though you'd probably be more interested in etymology, since entomology is the study of insects, not words.
Interesting... I just did a Google search for "entymology," and it returned a mix of pages about etymology and entomology.
I know this is kinda redundant, but...
When talking about Turing machines, no assumptions are made about efficiency. Just because any real, physical computer has restrictions on the number of operations it can perform in a given period of time doesn't mean that you have to place the same restriction on a theoretical Turing machine. Yes, quantum mechanical Turing machines can do some things in fewer steps than their classical equivalents, but the number of steps is usually not a consideration. For the purpose of theoretical discussion, classical Turing machines do just fine. While quantum computing is an extremely important development for the people talking about how fast you can calculate something, they're pretty much irrelevant for the people talking about whether or not you can calculate something.
I don't remember much about the specific design of the Bomb, but it was definitely not a Turing machine in the usual sense. It was designed mostly by Alan Turing, though.
OT question: Does anybody know how the hell the Bomb got its name? Seems a rather odd way to describe a computer...
Does anybody know about any legal precedent concerning self-ownership vs. eminent domain? I know that (at least in the US of A) you don't really own land, as the government can take it from you at any time. They are required to provide some kind of compensation, but there's nothing to prevent them from saying, "We're going to buy your house. Under eminent domain laws, you're required to sell it to us. Here's a nickel, now give me the deed and get off the government's property. If you have any complaints, please direct them to the man holding the M-16."
What I'm wondering is if this sort of thing has already been legally applied to a person's body, or if there's any general consensus in the legal world on if such action is possible. The government does own the body of anyone enlisted in the military, so the general principle of the government owning a person is alive and well in modern America. I just want to know how hard it would be for the government to apply the same ideas to civilians.
Am I incorrect in remembering somewhere else that the same book described some large circular vessel as being 10 cubits across and 30 cubits around the rim, thereby setting pi to exactly 3? I can't quite remember where in the book it was, though. Damn lossy cerebral data compression...
Much less than a meter, actually. The nearest star to our sun (I thought it was Proxima Centauri, not Alpha) is something like 4 light years away.
4 light years=3.7842e16 m
C=2*pi*r
so differential C with respect to pi=2*r*d(pi)
If we take d(pi) to be 1e-49 (50 total digits of precision), dC = 7.5684e-33 m. So 50 digits of pi gets you about 10^-32 meter of precision at 4 light years. For reference, a proton is about 2.4e-15 m across. Any calculation of pi beyond a few dozen digits is purely academic, but it's fun to see how far we can go.
This is kinda OT, but it sounds like you could use some help. A convergent series is one in which the sum approaches some definite number. In order for a series to be convergent, the value of each term has to become small faster than the number of terms becomes large(or some terms could cancel, as is the case sometimes), so the total remains finite. A divergent series is one in which the sum approaches infinity, i.e. the limit doesn't exist. But remember that just because the limit of one term approaches zero doesn't mean the series is convergent.
Be very careful with Taylor series, though. They can be quite useful sometimes, but in Calc II, they are a huge pain in the ass. Just memorize the formula (sum over n of [(nth derivative of f(a))*(x-a)^n / n!], IIRC), and practice expressing the nth derivitave of various functions as some function of n. That should help, but you also have to figure out what your specific teacher will test you on.
Plain methane is completely odorless. In commercial uses, tiny quantities of methylmercaptan are added to give it a distinctive, unpleasant odor. I've always wanted to obtain a very small quantity of pure methylmercaptan and release it in, oh let's say some random high school, and watch them evacuate the place for fear of a non-existant gas leak. But that's probably tremendously illegal. Damn laws won't let anybody have fun.
The Detroit Science Center has a concave-IMAX theater. The image is a bit distorted, since the films are designed for a flat projection screen, but it's worth it for the fact that the movie extends far into your peripheral vision. The camera shots from a low-flying helicopter create a really impressive sensation of movement, since your entire field of view is covered by the screen and you have no visual reference to tell you that you're not actually moving. I can only imagine what that would be like with some 3D technology thrown in...
Damn I gotta read more before I post. The Reality Center Room is pretty much exactly what that university I mentioned in a previous post had. I'm not sure the whole thing was from SGI, though. I'm pretty sure that there are other people who will build something like that for you, if you have close to a hundred grand to blow. (It just might be worth it if somebody ports Half Life and Counter-Strike to it.)
Been done already, though with projection screens instead of flat-panel LCDs. A friend of mine showed me a university's Virtual Reality Cave a while back. It consists of 4 projection screens (front wall, side walls, floor) onto which are projected whatever image you want. Combine this with those LCD goggles which only allow you to see out of one eye at a time and hook the whole thing up to an SGI Onyx, and you have one hell of a 3D gaming machine. Some guy even wrote a port of Quake 2 for the cave. Though the game itself is a little clumsy, it's amazingly immersive.
You can do multiplayer, though only with other Cave Quake players (not too many of those around). When an enemy sneaks up behind you, they really are behind you. The best part, though, is the position sensors on the goggles and your control wand. When you see a rocket coming straight for your head, you don't just hit a key to dodge, you instinctively duck off to the side, just in time to see the rocket blast by your head. If any computer game can scare the living shit out of you, this is it. It's also a hell of a lot more fun to point your arm at an enemy (from your viewpoint, your gun is sort of superimposed over your arm.) to aim, rather than moving a mouse.
The whole cave thing could get a lot smaller and more affordable with large flat panel displays, since they currently cost in the range of $70,000 for just the display system. The floor display would still be a problem, though it would be easier to do a 360 degree display than with the projectors. Even with flat panel displays, you're still gonna need a hell of a lot of cash to get one.
Margaret Sanger's Birth Control League made no secret that its intention was to eliminate the "teaming, swarming" minorities and create a society of "thoroughbreds," and it was catching on in the 20's and 30's, until a disciple named Adolph Hitler carried her doctrines to their logical conclusions.
Trying to discredit an entire idea (that of birth control being a good thing) by citing one psychopath who subscribed to that idea is idiocy. By that logic, I could argue that Christianity should be illegal because of all the people who have comitted, murder, rape, and even genocide in the name of God. Obviously, that line of reasoning is flawed.
If you're wondering why so many ads for malt liquour, sterilization, and birth control are in minority neighborhoods, ask the (overwhelmingly republican) owners and advertising executives of the companies selling the products. (Yes I think the drug company execs are mostly republican, despite the fact that they're selling something most republicans consider abhorrent. You'd be amazed how hypocritical people can be.) They are the ones who target their advertising to specific areas, not the Democratic party. Sure the elites want to destroy the poor. The majority of the wealthy, whether Republican or Democrat, want one thing: to keep themselves in power. The thing is, the average income of Republicans is significantly higher than that of Democrats (no I don't have a study to cite, but it seems pretty obvious to me. If you can show me trustworthy data indicating otherwise, I'll admit my mistake.). Some of the rich Democrats, though, seem to show some compassion for the less fortunate. A few Republicans do too, but not as many.
The trouble with overpopulation is that only the smart people will see a problem and try to help correct it, maybe by not having kids, maybe by arranging to have themselves shot. So the dumbasses keep on churning out kids, and pretty soon the world is populated exclusively by people with the intelligence of your average jock or/. troll. "I've been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding / The cretins cloning and feeding..." But it's plainly immoral to say to some random couple, "You can't have kids, you're too dumb." (Though you have to admit it's tempting sometimes. Just ask anyone in tech support.) As usual, there's no easy solution, so nobody does anything.
You know, I think that goatse.cx link (just the 'u' in truth) might actually bear some relevance to a discussion of this election. Sort of a suggestion of what to do if Bush gets elected. Funny that the other letters of "truth" link to a pro-Bush site.
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Dammit! I even previewed that. Didn't see the type until it was on the "Comment Submitted" page. Oh well. The username and password are both supposed to be abe_froman (Yes that's the right spelling. No typos this time. I promise.).
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Try afe_froman, abe_froman. I just created that one for this story. (Now let's see who recognizes that name.)
What a novel concept! Adults taking responsibility for their actions and not bitching and whining to the government to protect them? Naaahhh.... It'll never happen.
BTW, about protecting the weak:
A legal precedent such as this will never be used to protect the weak. The weak (translated: ignorant) will probably never hear about this. If they get taken in by some scheme involving anonymous posts, they'll probably never even consider taking legal action. This ruling is really only useful to large, powerful entities (usually corporations) who wish to punish people who piss them off by exercising their constutional rights. The exact sequence of events for this was already posted, so I'll avoid being overly redundant too much. (yes that was intentional, you idiot)
What the hell? I tried to mod this down, but the damn thing modded it +1. Now I have to post to reverse it. Shit. BTW, go troll where somebody will listen, asshole.
Here's my take on the second amendment:
The second amendment refers to the necessity of a militia to the security of a free state. The militia in question was supposed to be free from federal control. This is part of that whole states' rights thing that kinda disappeared with the Civil War. Anyway, the militia was supposed to be composed of average joes, maybe controlled by the state government, maybe not. But it was never supposed to be controlled by the federal government. The National Guard fulfilled this role for some time, until the 1950's when Truman placed it under federal control to facilitate school integration in unwilling areas. Had he not done so, at least one state governor (damn.. can't remember the guy's name now. I think he was governor of Alabama.) would have used his state's National Guard units to keep blacks out of white schools, Truman probably would have been forced to use Federal troops to counter them, and violence would hav been inevitable. But I digress. The point is, the National Guard is no longer under control of the sates, rather it is an extention of the (unconstitutional) standing military.
Without the National Guard, there is no longer a militia as provided for in the second amendment. The only organizations which come close are a few citizen militias. No, I'm not talking about the survivalist nutcases who have 200 rifles sitting in their basements next to the two year food and water supply. I'm talking about the people who organize, train periodically for emergence situations, train every now and then for combat, and generally do what a militia should do. I once saw an excellent example of this on TV.. Discovery channel I think. IIRC, they were talking about the Kansas civilian militia. They had a typical military structure, all members swore an oath to protect the constitutions of America and their state, to obey their superiors' orders, etc. They trained something like one or two days a month, mostly for natural disaster response or search-and-rescue type things. They had helped several communities look for missing persons and helped people survive floods, rebuild after tornadoes, and so on. They had a standing offer to the state and local governments to assist in any time of need, an offer that was never officially accepted. I'm pretty sure that they have never fired a shot in anger. That's about my idea of what a militia should be, and I really wish that Michigan had a militia as sane and well-intentioned as that, because I would be a member. The reason I would never join the national guard goes back to that federal control thing. The biggest reason I stay the hell away from military recruiters (definitely not the only reason, though) is the fact that the military is under the control of whatever pathalogically lying, corporation-ass-kissing fuckoff who gets elected President.
I just previewed this comment, and it's way too long already so I'll stop now.
We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live
by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it. - Max Lerner
> All these dyno-mite subject lines are also a little forced.
The dyno-mite subject line was on a story about a Nobel prize winner. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and eventually used the profits to start the Nobel prize competition. So if you know your scientific history, it makes perfect sense (though it is a really bad joke). Sure this is tremendously OT, but I thought that could use explanation.
If so, I would like to submit the following patents:
I first claim:
A number (hereafter known as e) such that:
(A) A function can be defined as e raised to the power of a variable quantity (hereafter known as x)
(B) A function as in part (A) is equal to its own derivative taken with respect to the variable quantity x
(C) A function as in part (A) is equal to its own indefinite integral taken with respect to the variable quantity x
Since you can patent the shape of a bottle, I don't think patenting a geometric figure is too far-fetched, so...
Secondly, I claim:
1) A figure, composed of the locus of all points which exist at a specified distance (hereafter known as the "radius") from a certain point (hereafter known as the "center")
2) A figure, composed of the locus of all points which satisfy the requirements of the first part and exist in a single, flat, two-dimentional region of space (hereafter known as a "plane"), specifically a plane which includes the center as defined the first part.
3) A number (hereafter known as p) which satisfies the following conditions:
(A) The total length of the curve necessary to represent the second part is equal to twice the radius multiplied by the number p.
(B) The area of the finite section of the plane as defined in 2(A), bounded by the figure in 2(A), is equal to the radius multiplied by itself multiplied by the number p.
If nothing else, my threats of patent infringement will get many students out of doing their geometry homework.
But what if I don't just put foot A in front of foot B?
Say I put foot A in front of and to the right of foot B, then put foot B next to foot A, then swing the leg attached to foot A around in an irregular pattern, with foot A eventually landing to the left and slightly in front of foot B. Then lift foot B off the surface, pivot 270 degrees on foot A,... (continue ad nauseam)
If I work on this a bit more, I could just send it straight to the Ministry of Silly Walks, rather than the USPTO.
Slashdot Mirror
The ship was driven out of the solar system by an array of lasers orbiting Mercury, and braked as it approached its destination star by jettisoning(sp?) part of its mirror and using it for reaction mass. It was a decidedly one-way trip, but damn near possible with today's technology.
What happens if you tell bad news inside a small Italian restaurant? Anybody know about the interaction of bad news and bistromathics? Some nice Italian food might also offset the displeasure which usually accompanies the arrival of a conventional bad news powered ship.
Interesting... I just did a Google search for "entymology," and it returned a mix of pages about etymology and entomology.
I know this is kinda redundant, but...
When talking about Turing machines, no assumptions are made about efficiency. Just because any real, physical computer has restrictions on the number of operations it can perform in a given period of time doesn't mean that you have to place the same restriction on a theoretical Turing machine. Yes, quantum mechanical Turing machines can do some things in fewer steps than their classical equivalents, but the number of steps is usually not a consideration. For the purpose of theoretical discussion, classical Turing machines do just fine. While quantum computing is an extremely important development for the people talking about how fast you can calculate something, they're pretty much irrelevant for the people talking about whether or not you can calculate something.
OT question: Does anybody know how the hell the Bomb got its name? Seems a rather odd way to describe a computer...
What I'm wondering is if this sort of thing has already been legally applied to a person's body, or if there's any general consensus in the legal world on if such action is possible. The government does own the body of anyone enlisted in the military, so the general principle of the government owning a person is alive and well in modern America. I just want to know how hard it would be for the government to apply the same ideas to civilians.
It's good to see, though, that at least one judge doesn't have his head completely up his ass. Now if we could only find more like that...
Am I incorrect in remembering somewhere else that the same book described some large circular vessel as being 10 cubits across and 30 cubits around the rim, thereby setting pi to exactly 3? I can't quite remember where in the book it was, though. Damn lossy cerebral data compression...
Much less than a meter, actually. The nearest star to our sun (I thought it was Proxima Centauri, not Alpha) is something like 4 light years away.
4 light years=3.7842e16 m
C=2*pi*r
so differential C with respect to pi=2*r*d(pi)
If we take d(pi) to be 1e-49 (50 total digits of precision), dC = 7.5684e-33 m. So 50 digits of pi gets you about 10^-32 meter of precision at 4 light years. For reference, a proton is about 2.4e-15 m across. Any calculation of pi beyond a few dozen digits is purely academic, but it's fun to see how far we can go.
Be very careful with Taylor series, though. They can be quite useful sometimes, but in Calc II, they are a huge pain in the ass. Just memorize the formula (sum over n of [(nth derivative of f(a))*(x-a)^n / n!], IIRC), and practice expressing the nth derivitave of various functions as some function of n. That should help, but you also have to figure out what your specific teacher will test you on.
Plain methane is completely odorless. In commercial uses, tiny quantities of methylmercaptan are added to give it a distinctive, unpleasant odor. I've always wanted to obtain a very small quantity of pure methylmercaptan and release it in, oh let's say some random high school, and watch them evacuate the place for fear of a non-existant gas leak. But that's probably tremendously illegal. Damn laws won't let anybody have fun.
The Detroit Science Center has a concave-IMAX theater. The image is a bit distorted, since the films are designed for a flat projection screen, but it's worth it for the fact that the movie extends far into your peripheral vision. The camera shots from a low-flying helicopter create a really impressive sensation of movement, since your entire field of view is covered by the screen and you have no visual reference to tell you that you're not actually moving. I can only imagine what that would be like with some 3D technology thrown in...
Damn I gotta read more before I post. The Reality Center Room is pretty much exactly what that university I mentioned in a previous post had. I'm not sure the whole thing was from SGI, though. I'm pretty sure that there are other people who will build something like that for you, if you have close to a hundred grand to blow. (It just might be worth it if somebody ports Half Life and Counter-Strike to it.)
You can do multiplayer, though only with other Cave Quake players (not too many of those around). When an enemy sneaks up behind you, they really are behind you. The best part, though, is the position sensors on the goggles and your control wand. When you see a rocket coming straight for your head, you don't just hit a key to dodge, you instinctively duck off to the side, just in time to see the rocket blast by your head. If any computer game can scare the living shit out of you, this is it. It's also a hell of a lot more fun to point your arm at an enemy (from your viewpoint, your gun is sort of superimposed over your arm.) to aim, rather than moving a mouse.
The whole cave thing could get a lot smaller and more affordable with large flat panel displays, since they currently cost in the range of $70,000 for just the display system. The floor display would still be a problem, though it would be easier to do a 360 degree display than with the projectors. Even with flat panel displays, you're still gonna need a hell of a lot of cash to get one.
Trying to discredit an entire idea (that of birth control being a good thing) by citing one psychopath who subscribed to that idea is idiocy. By that logic, I could argue that Christianity should be illegal because of all the people who have comitted, murder, rape, and even genocide in the name of God. Obviously, that line of reasoning is flawed.
If you're wondering why so many ads for malt liquour, sterilization, and birth control are in minority neighborhoods, ask the (overwhelmingly republican) owners and advertising executives of the companies selling the products. (Yes I think the drug company execs are mostly republican, despite the fact that they're selling something most republicans consider abhorrent. You'd be amazed how hypocritical people can be.) They are the ones who target their advertising to specific areas, not the Democratic party. Sure the elites want to destroy the poor. The majority of the wealthy, whether Republican or Democrat, want one thing: to keep themselves in power. The thing is, the average income of Republicans is significantly higher than that of Democrats (no I don't have a study to cite, but it seems pretty obvious to me. If you can show me trustworthy data indicating otherwise, I'll admit my mistake.). Some of the rich Democrats, though, seem to show some compassion for the less fortunate. A few Republicans do too, but not as many.
The trouble with overpopulation is that only the smart people will see a problem and try to help correct it, maybe by not having kids, maybe by arranging to have themselves shot. So the dumbasses keep on churning out kids, and pretty soon the world is populated exclusively by people with the intelligence of your average jock or /. troll. "I've been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding / The cretins cloning and feeding..." But it's plainly immoral to say to some random couple, "You can't have kids, you're too dumb." (Though you have to admit it's tempting sometimes. Just ask anyone in tech support.) As usual, there's no easy solution, so nobody does anything.
Now what was my point here?
You know, I think that goatse.cx link (just the 'u' in truth) might actually bear some relevance to a discussion of this election. Sort of a suggestion of what to do if Bush gets elected. Funny that the other letters of "truth" link to a pro-Bush site.
Dammit! I even previewed that. Didn't see the type until it was on the "Comment Submitted" page. Oh well. The username and password are both supposed to be abe_froman (Yes that's the right spelling. No typos this time. I promise.).
Try afe_froman, abe_froman. I just created that one for this story. (Now let's see who recognizes that name.)
BTW, about protecting the weak:
A legal precedent such as this will never be used to protect the weak. The weak (translated: ignorant) will probably never hear about this. If they get taken in by some scheme involving anonymous posts, they'll probably never even consider taking legal action. This ruling is really only useful to large, powerful entities (usually corporations) who wish to punish people who piss them off by exercising their constutional rights. The exact sequence of events for this was already posted, so I'll avoid being overly redundant too much. (yes that was intentional, you idiot)
What the hell? I tried to mod this down, but the damn thing modded it +1. Now I have to post to reverse it. Shit. BTW, go troll where somebody will listen, asshole.
The second amendment refers to the necessity of a militia to the security of a free state. The militia in question was supposed to be free from federal control. This is part of that whole states' rights thing that kinda disappeared with the Civil War. Anyway, the militia was supposed to be composed of average joes, maybe controlled by the state government, maybe not. But it was never supposed to be controlled by the federal government. The National Guard fulfilled this role for some time, until the 1950's when Truman placed it under federal control to facilitate school integration in unwilling areas. Had he not done so, at least one state governor (damn.. can't remember the guy's name now. I think he was governor of Alabama.) would have used his state's National Guard units to keep blacks out of white schools, Truman probably would have been forced to use Federal troops to counter them, and violence would hav been inevitable. But I digress. The point is, the National Guard is no longer under control of the sates, rather it is an extention of the (unconstitutional) standing military.
Without the National Guard, there is no longer a militia as provided for in the second amendment. The only organizations which come close are a few citizen militias. No, I'm not talking about the survivalist nutcases who have 200 rifles sitting in their basements next to the two year food and water supply. I'm talking about the people who organize, train periodically for emergence situations, train every now and then for combat, and generally do what a militia should do. I once saw an excellent example of this on TV.. Discovery channel I think. IIRC, they were talking about the Kansas civilian militia. They had a typical military structure, all members swore an oath to protect the constitutions of America and their state, to obey their superiors' orders, etc. They trained something like one or two days a month, mostly for natural disaster response or search-and-rescue type things. They had helped several communities look for missing persons and helped people survive floods, rebuild after tornadoes, and so on. They had a standing offer to the state and local governments to assist in any time of need, an offer that was never officially accepted. I'm pretty sure that they have never fired a shot in anger. That's about my idea of what a militia should be, and I really wish that Michigan had a militia as sane and well-intentioned as that, because I would be a member. The reason I would never join the national guard goes back to that federal control thing. The biggest reason I stay the hell away from military recruiters (definitely not the only reason, though) is the fact that the military is under the control of whatever pathalogically lying, corporation-ass-kissing fuckoff who gets elected President.
I just previewed this comment, and it's way too long already so I'll stop now.
We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it. - Max Lerner
The dyno-mite subject line was on a story about a Nobel prize winner. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and eventually used the profits to start the Nobel prize competition. So if you know your scientific history, it makes perfect sense (though it is a really bad joke). Sure this is tremendously OT, but I thought that could use explanation.
I first claim:
A number (hereafter known as e) such that:
(A) A function can be defined as e raised to the power of a variable quantity (hereafter known as x)
(B) A function as in part (A) is equal to its own derivative taken with respect to the variable quantity x
(C) A function as in part (A) is equal to its own indefinite integral taken with respect to the variable quantity x
Since you can patent the shape of a bottle, I don't think patenting a geometric figure is too far-fetched, so...
Secondly, I claim:
1) A figure, composed of the locus of all points which exist at a specified distance (hereafter known as the "radius") from a certain point (hereafter known as the "center")
2) A figure, composed of the locus of all points which satisfy the requirements of the first part and exist in a single, flat, two-dimentional region of space (hereafter known as a "plane"), specifically a plane which includes the center as defined the first part.
3) A number (hereafter known as p) which satisfies the following conditions:
(A) The total length of the curve necessary to represent the second part is equal to twice the radius multiplied by the number p.
(B) The area of the finite section of the plane as defined in 2(A), bounded by the figure in 2(A), is equal to the radius multiplied by itself multiplied by the number p.
If nothing else, my threats of patent infringement will get many students out of doing their geometry homework.
Say I put foot A in front of and to the right of foot B, then put foot B next to foot A, then swing the leg attached to foot A around in an irregular pattern, with foot A eventually landing to the left and slightly in front of foot B. Then lift foot B off the surface, pivot 270 degrees on foot A,
If I work on this a bit more, I could just send it straight to the Ministry of Silly Walks, rather than the USPTO.
* Patent pending