"Knowing where the pieces land" seems like a red herring.
If we detect an asteroid a long way out on a collision course with Earth, then altering its velocity by just a bit will push it off of course and it'll miss us. If you set off an explosion near an asteroid, it will indeed likely fragment, but the only way we're still getting hit is if a large chunk somehow gets *no* delta-v from the explosion, and if that chunk is big enough to survive reentry.
OTOH, if we detect a big asteroid close to us, there may not be time for these things, and we need a large impulse quickly.
Either way, "nuke it" seems like the most sensible thing. Yes, this is a drastic thing, but if it's a true doomsday asteroid then it's called for.
That's not how police work. When they run out of money they just raise fines and start going after non-crimes like parking offenses and jaywalking and fill up their coffers again.
So long as all of the steps involved are linear, does it matter?
If a linear signal processing procedure behaves a certain way for all sine wave signals in a frequency range, then it will behave in the same way for any sum of sine waves in that range as well.
Careful. I dunno about the 5xx series, but I use a cluster with 32 GTX480's in it at work. The damn thing is a stability nightmare. Thankfully I'm doing a Monte Carlo thing where I have the option of just rerunning the jobs that crash, but there are enough of those to make my life hard. OTOH the machine with the Tesla boards in it is stable.
I just ssh'd into my linux machine at work (which has a Gnome UI going) and ran top, and it says that 99.7% of the CPU is idle, with 0.25% used by top.
I'm on a Win 7 box right now (quad-core 2GHz Sandy Bridge laptop), with a gazillion Firefox etc. tabs open. The CPU may well not be running at its highest clock speed, but it reports about 10% CPU usage -- from "FlashPlayerPlugin.exe", presumably because I'm streaming 1080p video with no GPU assist on the decode. Firefox itself, along with "System", are using 1% CPU.
... other than battery life and better phone calls.
I've got a Galaxy Nexus, and the hardware is fine -- high-resolution screen, fast enough CPU, etc. The only real "lacking features" are software things, and since it's Android that's just my own fault for not finding a better app to do whatever it is.
What I seriously don't like, though, is its ability to MAKE PHONE CALLS. This is a device that people watch Netflix on, for fuck's sake. Why is it using a ~10kbps codec for voice calls with an acoustic bandpass of a few khz, and moreover one with some absolutely awful signal processing characteristics? For instance (and this is just one example), if I'm talking to someone in the wind, and there's a gust of wind on my end, the phone mutes the speaker so I can no longer hear what they're saying. Why should it do that, unless it's trying to squelch feedback, which is very much not the problem?
As for battery life, I appreciate them making the things slim, but if they'd make it another 5mm or even 8mm thicker with most of that extra volume given to battery, you'd get about four times as much life out of it. Does anyone make a phone like this?
If they'd let you, the thing to do would be to take a page from Korean starcraft players who don't want their handles recognizable, and do combinations of I's, l's, and 1's.
Can your mom figure out how to do this when she runs out of room to store her episodes of TV shows, and do it quickly?
Besides, what is with this "backup partition" thing? That's as dumb as putting a spare engine in a car in the trunk so when the one under the hood reaches its sell-by date you can just change 'em out.
Well, sure, but they serve the same purpose: a community-funded and free to use distribution mechanism for scholarly papers.
The physics community has gotten its shit together and created a friendly way for people (inside and outside the community) to read its papers. It looks like the JSTOR folks haven't accomplished the same thing.
Is JSTOR essentially to the humanities what arXiv is to physics etc.? It seems like arXiv is a far friendlier system: the only penalty for repeated automated downloads is "we will ban your subnet for a while to protect our CPU power, since each download requires some rendering from TeX source". The thought of arXiv seeking prosecution of someone is just absurd.
(It's also free to anyone, not just university users...)
these people have run out of big time criminals to prosecute, and so now the justify their existence by filling jails with poor saps who meet this criteria, or they would be laying off cops, judges and prisoners for lack of business:
This here is the problem: it is so hard to reduce the size or scope of any aspect of the government, because that means a loss of prestige for someone somewhere, that government workers lacking something of substance to do concoct things to expand the scope of their agency, like a rodent needing to file its teeth whether it has something constructive to gnaw or not. This is what's given us the TSA; this is what's given us this sort of prosecutorial nonsense; this is what has created the monster that is the DMV in any major city; and this is more broadly the problem with agencies like the Department of Agriculture. I've lived in other places and in Washington DC (a crime-riddled shithole); oddly enough, the police in DC are the least threatening, since there is so much real crime for them to worry about, they (generally) have their priorities in order and don't harangue people for stupid stuff.
I'm a pacifist too, but I have no beef with private ownership of firearms. Do you believe in arming the police? Is that anti-pacifistic? It seems like police carrying guns to protect society from violent people is no different than society itself carrying guns to protect themselves from aggression.
Pacifism doesn't mean not being armed; it means not being aggressive.
If my neighbor carries loaded guns around I'm really not all that interested unless he is likely to shoot someone (not in self-defense etc.) with them.
I lived in Arizona for years, where gun laws are very liberal. Then I moved to Washington DC, and then we got an ALERT! email from campus: "There's a man with a GUN four blocks from campus!" My first thought was... okay, has he shot someone? Robbed someone? Why should I care?
Of course -- I was more wondering about the other part of my question: how much does my neighbor owning a gun (stored however way you want) protect me?
The question isn't "what happens when you break the law?" but "Which things are illegal?"
Granted, some things are illegal here that shouldn't be (mostly related to drug use). But most things that are crimes are crimes because they deprive others of life, liberty, or property. If I steal from someone the police will show up and arrest me, and I damn well hope they will. This isn't tyranny, it's my neighbors hiring a police force to protect them from thieves.
There is that statistic about the accessible loaded gun creating a risk for its owner, but I wonder if it decreases the risk (of crime victimization generally) of its owner's neighbor? I imagine that a whole block of armed people will have less crime than a block of unarmed people.
Slashdot Mirror
"Knowing where the pieces land" seems like a red herring.
If we detect an asteroid a long way out on a collision course with Earth, then altering its velocity by just a bit will push it off of course and it'll miss us. If you set off an explosion near an asteroid, it will indeed likely fragment, but the only way we're still getting hit is if a large chunk somehow gets *no* delta-v from the explosion, and if that chunk is big enough to survive reentry.
OTOH, if we detect a big asteroid close to us, there may not be time for these things, and we need a large impulse quickly.
Either way, "nuke it" seems like the most sensible thing. Yes, this is a drastic thing, but if it's a true doomsday asteroid then it's called for.
... whoosh.
No, that wasn't a drone.
That's not how police work. When they run out of money they just raise fines and start going after non-crimes like parking offenses and jaywalking and fill up their coffers again.
So long as all of the steps involved are linear, does it matter?
If a linear signal processing procedure behaves a certain way for all sine wave signals in a frequency range, then it will behave in the same way for any sum of sine waves in that range as well.
If they're robbing you, you're there. If you're not there, they're burgling you.
Don't do math for anything that counts, please.
Hint: 1 m^2 = 10^6 mm^2
Careful. I dunno about the 5xx series, but I use a cluster with 32 GTX480's in it at work. The damn thing is a stability nightmare. Thankfully I'm doing a Monte Carlo thing where I have the option of just rerunning the jobs that crash, but there are enough of those to make my life hard. OTOH the machine with the Tesla boards in it is stable.
Is there really that much overhead?
I just ssh'd into my linux machine at work (which has a Gnome UI going) and ran top, and it says that 99.7% of the CPU is idle, with 0.25% used by top.
I'm on a Win 7 box right now (quad-core 2GHz Sandy Bridge laptop), with a gazillion Firefox etc. tabs open. The CPU may well not be running at its highest clock speed, but it reports about 10% CPU usage -- from "FlashPlayerPlugin.exe", presumably because I'm streaming 1080p video with no GPU assist on the decode. Firefox itself, along with "System", are using 1% CPU.
They'll come out of it looking like giant trolls, which they are, and which some folks will find hilarious.
Nifty, thanks. Didn't know things like that existed.
swipe-down-from-top notification centre thing
If fucking bounce-back lists were worth a billion dollars, this thing that's actually useful? Google should sue Apple for $10 billion.
... other than battery life and better phone calls.
I've got a Galaxy Nexus, and the hardware is fine -- high-resolution screen, fast enough CPU, etc. The only real "lacking features" are software things, and since it's Android that's just my own fault for not finding a better app to do whatever it is.
What I seriously don't like, though, is its ability to MAKE PHONE CALLS. This is a device that people watch Netflix on, for fuck's sake. Why is it using a ~10kbps codec for voice calls with an acoustic bandpass of a few khz, and moreover one with some absolutely awful signal processing characteristics? For instance (and this is just one example), if I'm talking to someone in the wind, and there's a gust of wind on my end, the phone mutes the speaker so I can no longer hear what they're saying. Why should it do that, unless it's trying to squelch feedback, which is very much not the problem?
As for battery life, I appreciate them making the things slim, but if they'd make it another 5mm or even 8mm thicker with most of that extra volume given to battery, you'd get about four times as much life out of it. Does anyone make a phone like this?
Uncredited BSD Unix with a GUI on top that somehow manages to be even worse than Unity.
If they'd let you, the thing to do would be to take a page from Korean starcraft players who don't want their handles recognizable, and do combinations of I's, l's, and 1's.
There's actually a decent reason for all the bits to run a computer to take up 26625 bytes.
There is no good reason for the stuff to make a tablet go to take up 44023414784 bytes.
Can your mom figure out how to do this when she runs out of room to store her episodes of TV shows, and do it quickly?
Besides, what is with this "backup partition" thing? That's as dumb as putting a spare engine in a car in the trunk so when the one under the hood reaches its sell-by date you can just change 'em out.
Well, sure, but they serve the same purpose: a community-funded and free to use distribution mechanism for scholarly papers.
The physics community has gotten its shit together and created a friendly way for people (inside and outside the community) to read its papers. It looks like the JSTOR folks haven't accomplished the same thing.
Is JSTOR essentially to the humanities what arXiv is to physics etc.? It seems like arXiv is a far friendlier system: the only penalty for repeated automated downloads is "we will ban your subnet for a while to protect our CPU power, since each download requires some rendering from TeX source". The thought of arXiv seeking prosecution of someone is just absurd.
(It's also free to anyone, not just university users...)
these people have run out of big time criminals to prosecute, and so now the justify their existence by filling jails with poor saps who meet this criteria, or they would be laying off cops, judges and prisoners for lack of business:
This here is the problem: it is so hard to reduce the size or scope of any aspect of the government, because that means a loss of prestige for someone somewhere, that government workers lacking something of substance to do concoct things to expand the scope of their agency, like a rodent needing to file its teeth whether it has something constructive to gnaw or not. This is what's given us the TSA; this is what's given us this sort of prosecutorial nonsense; this is what has created the monster that is the DMV in any major city; and this is more broadly the problem with agencies like the Department of Agriculture. I've lived in other places and in Washington DC (a crime-riddled shithole); oddly enough, the police in DC are the least threatening, since there is so much real crime for them to worry about, they (generally) have their priorities in order and don't harangue people for stupid stuff.
I'm a pacifist too, but I have no beef with private ownership of firearms. Do you believe in arming the police? Is that anti-pacifistic? It seems like police carrying guns to protect society from violent people is no different than society itself carrying guns to protect themselves from aggression.
Pacifism doesn't mean not being armed; it means not being aggressive.
If my neighbor carries loaded guns around I'm really not all that interested unless he is likely to shoot someone (not in self-defense etc.) with them.
I lived in Arizona for years, where gun laws are very liberal. Then I moved to Washington DC, and then we got an ALERT! email from campus: "There's a man with a GUN four blocks from campus!" My first thought was ... okay, has he shot someone? Robbed someone? Why should I care?
Of course -- I was more wondering about the other part of my question: how much does my neighbor owning a gun (stored however way you want) protect me?
The question isn't "what happens when you break the law?" but "Which things are illegal?"
Granted, some things are illegal here that shouldn't be (mostly related to drug use). But most things that are crimes are crimes because they deprive others of life, liberty, or property. If I steal from someone the police will show up and arrest me, and I damn well hope they will. This isn't tyranny, it's my neighbors hiring a police force to protect them from thieves.
The original poster was speaking specifically about the context of legally shooting another person.
There is that statistic about the accessible loaded gun creating a risk for its owner, but I wonder if it decreases the risk (of crime victimization generally) of its owner's neighbor? I imagine that a whole block of armed people will have less crime than a block of unarmed people.