Maybe there was a font in use at the time with an f that resemble(d/s) an s...
Exactly. Well, almost. Not so much a font, but a convention where an initial 's' (or all but the final 's') used a character that looked something like an 'f' and a little like an integral sign (or 'fign'). A lot of old documents use that. I have a 200-year old chemistry text (handed down from a great^n grandfather) which proclaims itself "A Complete Courfe in Chymiftry", except that the 'f' isn't quite.
History isn't what really happened, it's what got written down. Everything else is evanescent (well, except for what archaeologists can dig up and reconstruct, which isn't much and not necessarily accurate -- and it only counts if they write it down). Mind, I'd be more impressed if Google were also tracking the content of every hieroglyph and cuneiform tablet ever found.
It will ever be thus, unless someone invents a time machine (or at least a time viewer).
It's starting to happen with midlist authors too. Self- or indie pubbed books on Amazon or Smashwords may not sell as many copies as a mass-market paperback from a New York publisher, but the royalty difference (70% vs 10%, say) can more than make up for that. Freebies (to an extent) are advertising, which just helps. (Look at what the Baen Free Library has done for those authors.)
The difference between all that and movies is for the most part that movie making is still a high-budget operation. Writing books or writing and performing songs are small operations, taking one or a few people. Movies involve actors, directors, writers, artists, set builders, cinematographers, musicians, etc, etc. Less so for animation, of course, and modern tools make it easier for a small crew to do a professional-looking job with fewer resources. But even a low-budget movie like Moon cost $5 million. Primer, a great indie SF film, was shot using a single camera, cheap film stock (expired or short ends -- and yes, today it would probably be done direct to digital), not much in the way of sets or props (and much of what they did use was scrounged), etc, etc and cost $7000 to shoot. It doesn't cost anywhere near that to write and publish (epub or POD) a novel. (No idea what studio costs for recording might be; obviously cheaper done in a garage with good amateur gear.) Mind, that $7K was just shooting cost. To convert the film to 35mm stock (for Sundance, etc) cost $28,000. And again, with the advent of digital projection, that will go away to some degree.
To compare, movie-making today is still in the era that publishing was when writers had to use manual typewriters. Too many people and too much expensive equipment involved (who owns their own Linotype? or soundstage?) for individual-level players to have much influence. But that's changing.
Special Relativity is, as the name implies, a special case. It doesn't apply in the more general (ah!) case, and especially doesn't apply in a strong gravitational field.
Which is why General Relativity (a superset of Special Relativity) can come up with things like the Alcubierre warp and Tipler cylinders (the title of his paper is telling: "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation"), both of which involve highly bent space, ie strong gravitational fields.
I would restate the dogma that "FTL is impossible" to "FTL may be impossible, but at very least, it is very difficult".
The Alcubierre instability hypothesized by Finazzi et al was based on quantum analysis, and the radiation was Hawking radiation from the warp boundary. AFAIK, his analysis was of the relatively simple geometry of an Alcubierre bubble and not that of a Van Den Broek bubble (which is roughly two nested Alcubierre bubbles with about a Planck-length distance between them). There may be ways to resolve this problem. (I have a work in progress -- SF story -- where solving the Finazzi instability is the key secret to practical warp drives, guarded like nuclear secrets in the 1940s. But that's a subthread to the main story.)
I've seen several references to possible electromagnetic-gravity theories or theoretical devices, but I don't recall the details right now either. Sorry.
Relativity allows FTL travel too -- see the work of Alcubierre, Van Den Broek, and others -- but at first glance it appears to have some rather ridiculous energy requirements. (Alcubierre's initial work suggested energies on the order of mass-of-a-galaxy, later work has shown ways to reduce that to energies still large by our standards but not totally out of the question. There's still the minor detail of just how to reduce theory to practice -- which is where some kind of conversion between electromagnetism and gravity would come in handy. So far the only way we know to bend space (ie, generate gravity) is by accumulating a large amount of mass.)
I think you proved his point. Moon wasn't exactly big budget ($5M). Nor was District 9 ($30M), but it could obviously afford more explosions. Both beat hell out of Avatar, or anything else with a 9-figure budget, in terms of story.
Yep. Things would be hell for a while (but possibly a lesser hell than what the drug war has given us) and then the problem would fix itself. "Think of it as evolution in action."
I like having the freedom to breathe air that isn't tainted by your smoke.
Then don't stand near me.
I figure if you're free to smoke around me then I'm free to carry a tank of pure O2 and stream it into the air around you. We'll see who catches fire first.
Hey, as taxpayers they (or more likely, their parents) paid for that pintle injector R&D. Nothing wrong with a government agency doing R&D, so long as results are made available to the taxpayers. It's when it gets into operations that its efficiency (and motives) becomes suspect.
Plenty of aircraft companies built on eg the airfoil work that NACA did back when, but we didn't need a government agency to create and run the airlines.
(OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around).
For that matter there's at least one still around that was never used. (Wouldn't be flightworthy, but it could be reverse engineered.) But while the Block II LMs were pretty darn good, I'd go with lighter electronics and lithium hydroxide canisters that matched the ones in the command module (ie Dragon) -- just in case.
How many Soviet combat troops were there in Vietnam again?
"Combat troops"!? The US and the USSR were facing each other down over the Iron Curtain with a few thousand nuclear bombs, and you're worried about troop counts? Vietnam was a skirmish in the Cold War. That's the war we won, and the only one we were ever worried about. It was a badly-run skirmish I'll grant, but still just a skirmish.
I'm inclined to believe we were actually "Winning" and lying about it.
Ding ding ding! Give the man a cigar.
The Vietnam war was, strategically, about stretching it out to siphon Soviet assets (military and otherwise) into that conflict and away from Eastern Europe. Yes it had secondary objectives more local to the region and much of the actual execution sucked donkey balls (although never as bad as portrayed in the media), The military defeat didn't happen until after the US and allied forces withdrew and Congress reneged on promised support to South Vietnam, leaving them twisting in the wind.
You're right, of course, I just knew the summary had it wrong. I should have said COTS != cheap access to space, except that commercial-off-the-shelf will hopefully lead to cheap access to space.
I just hope you're not involved with writing any software that I use.
Do you have a problem reaching for and grasping something when you're laying down vs standing up? The bot isn't depending on gravity for anything, it's movements are relative to the camera. Only an idiot would give the arm and the camera separate coordinate systems, and only a bigger idiot would do that and not take the coordinate transforms into account. Although I suppose there are a lot of those around, given the state of software these days.
When people talk about "the best", they mean the best, regardless of price.
Maybe so, but that's still a very subjective definition, encompassing a lot of variables. Different people weight those differently.
The best money can buy doesn't necessarily mean the most expensive. Marketeers know the value of an inflated price is entirely in the eye of the holder; ie, for some items one increases demand by increasing the price. Buying decisions are rarely completely rational.
That's one whale of a big "if". Why would anyone be so stupid as to design the algorithms that way, rather than, for example, take the position/orientation as parameters? For that matter, why worry about the ground at all when you're looking at the strawberries? Plants like strawberries don't grow perfectly upright and square to the ground either.
The reason for that that distinction is obvious. Price. Some people settle for second best.
Rarely. They settle for the best for their particular definition of best. That can include economic factors. To them the Android is best because it does everything they need at the price they're willing to pay.
Personally I wouldn't take an iPhone if you gave it to me.
feature that allows material to be copied onto thumb drives or other removable devices be disabled on its classified computer systems
Here's a question: Why the hell was that stuff ever enabled in the first place?
A place I worked a while back -- we did QA for voting systems and for games -- was a lot more secure than that. Only one system on the LAN had a CD burner, and that was passworded and the media use logged. Cameras everywhere. Firing offense to have your own thumb drives (or to plug in a device like an MP3 player), etc. Cell phones forbidden without express authorization. Everything logged. Air-gap -- and you had to know the passwords, including to the cypherlock on the door -- on the machine that could access customers' code servers. Defeatable? Sure, but not without leaving a trail a mile wide. And this was on the voting side of the company, security on the gaming side was even tougher. (Hey, now we're talking about real money!)
Apparently the government doesn't take security as seriously as game software companies do.
Locomotion and selection are two distinct problems. Presumably the selection/picking components could be added to a suitable chassis designed for navigation real fields (which could support a host of other picking and crop-tending apps).
If not, then they still don't need a track for each row, just a track that can be moved from one row to another. Perhaps make the fields circular with a radial track, like some irrigation systems.
Get the price of such robots down enough and there'll be little incentive to pay sub-par wages to migrant field workers. (Regardless of immigration status, but illegals are more exploitable.)
Conversely it could be because we've long had a source of cheap field labor that the US agricultural machinery business hasn't made such advances in robotics. Pity, really -- many of the issues a robotic strawberry picker has to deal with are common to the activity of a whole range of other robots. Build a general purpose agricultural field worker robot and have alternate software loads (and perhaps interchangeable picker mechanisms) for blueberries, tomatoes, whatever.
(Such picker robots, with appropriate sensors, could also be adapted to tasks like minefield clearing. Although that might lead to a scenario like that in the TV adaptation of Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man".)
Seriously. She quit her job as governor. Who wants a quitter in the White House?
The Dem's are holding back. They have plenty to use in campaigns against her if she does get the nomination (which may be why Big Media loves her), but expect to see other GOP candidates seeking nomination to use it first.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe there was a font in use at the time with an f that resemble(d/s) an s...
Exactly. Well, almost. Not so much a font, but a convention where an initial 's' (or all but the final 's') used a character that looked something like an 'f' and a little like an integral sign (or 'fign'). A lot of old documents use that. I have a 200-year old chemistry text (handed down from a great^n grandfather) which proclaims itself "A Complete Courfe in Chymiftry", except that the 'f' isn't quite.
History isn't what really happened, it's what got written down. Everything else is evanescent (well, except for what archaeologists can dig up and reconstruct, which isn't much and not necessarily accurate -- and it only counts if they write it down). Mind, I'd be more impressed if Google were also tracking the content of every hieroglyph and cuneiform tablet ever found.
It will ever be thus, unless someone invents a time machine (or at least a time viewer).
It's starting to happen with midlist authors too. Self- or indie pubbed books on Amazon or Smashwords may not sell as many copies as a mass-market paperback from a New York publisher, but the royalty difference (70% vs 10%, say) can more than make up for that. Freebies (to an extent) are advertising, which just helps. (Look at what the Baen Free Library has done for those authors.)
The difference between all that and movies is for the most part that movie making is still a high-budget operation. Writing books or writing and performing songs are small operations, taking one or a few people. Movies involve actors, directors, writers, artists, set builders, cinematographers, musicians, etc, etc. Less so for animation, of course, and modern tools make it easier for a small crew to do a professional-looking job with fewer resources. But even a low-budget movie like Moon cost $5 million. Primer, a great indie SF film, was shot using a single camera, cheap film stock (expired or short ends -- and yes, today it would probably be done direct to digital), not much in the way of sets or props (and much of what they did use was scrounged), etc, etc and cost $7000 to shoot. It doesn't cost anywhere near that to write and publish (epub or POD) a novel. (No idea what studio costs for recording might be; obviously cheaper done in a garage with good amateur gear.) Mind, that $7K was just shooting cost. To convert the film to 35mm stock (for Sundance, etc) cost $28,000. And again, with the advent of digital projection, that will go away to some degree.
To compare, movie-making today is still in the era that publishing was when writers had to use manual typewriters. Too many people and too much expensive equipment involved (who owns their own Linotype? or soundstage?) for individual-level players to have much influence. But that's changing.
Special Relativity is, as the name implies, a special case. It doesn't apply in the more general (ah!) case, and especially doesn't apply in a strong gravitational field.
Which is why General Relativity (a superset of Special Relativity) can come up with things like the Alcubierre warp and Tipler cylinders (the title of his paper is telling: "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation"), both of which involve highly bent space, ie strong gravitational fields.
I would restate the dogma that "FTL is impossible" to "FTL may be impossible, but at very least, it is very difficult".
The Alcubierre instability hypothesized by Finazzi et al was based on quantum analysis, and the radiation was Hawking radiation from the warp boundary. AFAIK, his analysis was of the relatively simple geometry of an Alcubierre bubble and not that of a Van Den Broek bubble (which is roughly two nested Alcubierre bubbles with about a Planck-length distance between them). There may be ways to resolve this problem. (I have a work in progress -- SF story -- where solving the Finazzi instability is the key secret to practical warp drives, guarded like nuclear secrets in the 1940s. But that's a subthread to the main story.)
I've seen several references to possible electromagnetic-gravity theories or theoretical devices, but I don't recall the details right now either. Sorry.
Relativity allows FTL travel too -- see the work of Alcubierre, Van Den Broek, and others -- but at first glance it appears to have some rather ridiculous energy requirements. (Alcubierre's initial work suggested energies on the order of mass-of-a-galaxy, later work has shown ways to reduce that to energies still large by our standards but not totally out of the question. There's still the minor detail of just how to reduce theory to practice -- which is where some kind of conversion between electromagnetism and gravity would come in handy. So far the only way we know to bend space (ie, generate gravity) is by accumulating a large amount of mass.)
I think you proved his point. Moon wasn't exactly big budget ($5M). Nor was District 9 ($30M), but it could obviously afford more explosions. Both beat hell out of Avatar, or anything else with a 9-figure budget, in terms of story.
Yep. Things would be hell for a while (but possibly a lesser hell than what the drug war has given us) and then the problem would fix itself. "Think of it as evolution in action."
I like having the freedom to breathe air that isn't tainted by your smoke.
Then don't stand near me.
I figure if you're free to smoke around me then I'm free to carry a tank of pure O2 and stream it into the air around you. We'll see who catches fire first.
Or perhaps pyrite treasure chests...
Hey, as taxpayers they (or more likely, their parents) paid for that pintle injector R&D. Nothing wrong with a government agency doing R&D, so long as results are made available to the taxpayers. It's when it gets into operations that its efficiency (and motives) becomes suspect.
Plenty of aircraft companies built on eg the airfoil work that NACA did back when, but we didn't need a government agency to create and run the airlines.
(OK, to do an actual lunar mission, we need a LEM, but there, exact duplicates of the original, flawless design would do - let's hope the Gruman design sheets are still around).
For that matter there's at least one still around that was never used. (Wouldn't be flightworthy, but it could be reverse engineered.) But while the Block II LMs were pretty darn good, I'd go with lighter electronics and lithium hydroxide canisters that matched the ones in the command module (ie Dragon) -- just in case.
How many Soviet combat troops were there in Vietnam again?
"Combat troops"!? The US and the USSR were facing each other down over the Iron Curtain with a few thousand nuclear bombs, and you're worried about troop counts? Vietnam was a skirmish in the Cold War. That's the war we won, and the only one we were ever worried about. It was a badly-run skirmish I'll grant, but still just a skirmish.
I'm inclined to believe we were actually "Winning" and lying about it.
Ding ding ding! Give the man a cigar.
The Vietnam war was, strategically, about stretching it out to siphon Soviet assets (military and otherwise) into that conflict and away from Eastern Europe. Yes it had secondary objectives more local to the region and much of the actual execution sucked donkey balls (although never as bad as portrayed in the media), The military defeat didn't happen until after the US and allied forces withdrew and Congress reneged on promised support to South Vietnam, leaving them twisting in the wind.
You're right, of course, I just knew the summary had it wrong. I should have said COTS != cheap access to space, except that commercial-off-the-shelf will hopefully lead to cheap access to space.
COTS is cheap (or commercial) off the shelf, not as the summary has it cheap access to space, which would be CATS.
Huge congrats to SpaceX on their achievements in both, though.
I just hope you're not involved with writing any software that I use.
Do you have a problem reaching for and grasping something when you're laying down vs standing up? The bot isn't depending on gravity for anything, it's movements are relative to the camera. Only an idiot would give the arm and the camera separate coordinate systems, and only a bigger idiot would do that and not take the coordinate transforms into account. Although I suppose there are a lot of those around, given the state of software these days.
When people talk about "the best", they mean the best, regardless of price.
Maybe so, but that's still a very subjective definition, encompassing a lot of variables. Different people weight those differently.
The best money can buy doesn't necessarily mean the most expensive. Marketeers know the value of an inflated price is entirely in the eye of the holder; ie, for some items one increases demand by increasing the price. Buying decisions are rarely completely rational.
That's one whale of a big "if". Why would anyone be so stupid as to design the algorithms that way, rather than, for example, take the position/orientation as parameters? For that matter, why worry about the ground at all when you're looking at the strawberries? Plants like strawberries don't grow perfectly upright and square to the ground either.
The reason for that that distinction is obvious. Price. Some people settle for second best.
Rarely. They settle for the best for their particular definition of best. That can include economic factors. To them the Android is best because it does everything they need at the price they're willing to pay.
Personally I wouldn't take an iPhone if you gave it to me.
feature that allows material to be copied onto thumb drives or other removable devices be disabled on its classified computer systems
Here's a question: Why the hell was that stuff ever enabled in the first place?
A place I worked a while back -- we did QA for voting systems and for games -- was a lot more secure than that. Only one system on the LAN had a CD burner, and that was passworded and the media use logged. Cameras everywhere. Firing offense to have your own thumb drives (or to plug in a device like an MP3 player), etc. Cell phones forbidden without express authorization. Everything logged. Air-gap -- and you had to know the passwords, including to the cypherlock on the door -- on the machine that could access customers' code servers. Defeatable? Sure, but not without leaving a trail a mile wide. And this was on the voting side of the company, security on the gaming side was even tougher. (Hey, now we're talking about real money!)
Apparently the government doesn't take security as seriously as game software companies do.
Locomotion and selection are two distinct problems. Presumably the selection/picking components could be added to a suitable chassis designed for navigation real fields (which could support a host of other picking and crop-tending apps).
If not, then they still don't need a track for each row, just a track that can be moved from one row to another. Perhaps make the fields circular with a radial track, like some irrigation systems.
Get the price of such robots down enough and there'll be little incentive to pay sub-par wages to migrant field workers. (Regardless of immigration status, but illegals are more exploitable.)
Conversely it could be because we've long had a source of cheap field labor that the US agricultural machinery business hasn't made such advances in robotics. Pity, really -- many of the issues a robotic strawberry picker has to deal with are common to the activity of a whole range of other robots. Build a general purpose agricultural field worker robot and have alternate software loads (and perhaps interchangeable picker mechanisms) for blueberries, tomatoes, whatever.
(Such picker robots, with appropriate sensors, could also be adapted to tasks like minefield clearing. Although that might lead to a scenario like that in the TV adaptation of Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man".)
trading the next decade's earnings for the next quarter's
Lovely turn of phrase, and far too true.
Seriously. She quit her job as governor. Who wants a quitter in the White House?
The Dem's are holding back. They have plenty to use in campaigns against her if she does get the nomination (which may be why Big Media loves her), but expect to see other GOP candidates seeking nomination to use it first.