And doing genetic research that's destructive to society because it has a possibilty of cheapening life.
"possibility of cheapening life". That's rich.
150 years ago in the US most people worked 16-hour grueling manufacturing shifts. Workers died and were mutilated on the job regularly, including children, and society was generally pretty callous to all this. The average lifespan wasn't a whole lot more than half of today's.
Even 50 years ago death was far more common, and the world wars killed a number of people that's almost incomprehensible.
Today, a few coal miners dying is national news, instead of a regular occurrence. People live 85+ years, and spend increasingly large amounts of their income protecting their health... and that of their children... and their pets... and their plants.
A developed nation losing 2000 people in a war is big news - and sparks a national debate. Not so long ago, that was peanuts.
Most nations have eliminated capital punishment. All but a handful have eliminated it for minors and the mentally ill. Nations spend buckets of money on their citizens' lifespans and health. In fact, developed nations spend more on that than on anything else.
Scientists and educators are progressively more careful and less wasteful about using animals in research and education. Even the venerable frog dissection is nearly eliminated in schools these days... too much death, especially since now we have computer graphics to pick up some of the slack.
No, we're not cheapening life, or even risking that. On the contrary, we're clinging to it with tenacity and desperation more every year.
Even 'moral values' issues like abortion are only becoming issues the last few decades because life has actually started to become a precious thing. 100 years ago people didn't spend much more time thinking about abortion than they did about animal testing.
A ban on "creating human-animal hybrids" is more debatable but we damn sure better get a line drawn somewhere and we better do it fast or science is going to race out ahead of ethics and make one hell of a mess for someone to clean up.
I call bullshit.
In 1985, genetic engineering would create monster hybrids. Real life: some GM crops have cross-pollination problems, but insulin and other GenE drugs save millions from painful early death or disability.
In 1980, VHS would give everyone private access to porn. The resulting moral oblivion would destroy worker productivity. Real life: a billion people a day look at porn on the net now... and both average and median wealth and health worldwide are at the highest points in history.
In 1975, IVF was going to create soulless babies and violate the sanctity of the womb. Real life: 50k couples/year can have happy, healthy children.
In 1960, nuclear power would turn the whole world into a toxic wasteland with mutated, deformed babies. Today: a few accidents, and storage is a political football, but billions have power and birth defects are down. Power in the winter saves lives, lots of them.
In 1930, The zipper would allow unfettered rapid access to self abuse, with the same effects predicted as for porn in 1980. Today - do you feel like undoing leather trouser laces just to take a leak?
In 1850, the blood transfusion violated the sanctity of the body. Putting one person's essence into another would create a soulless monstrosity. Today: No, really, that's what religious conservatives said at the time. I'm not kidding.
In 1800, The automatic loom would put everyone out of work and impoversh the world. Today: people from countries that underwent the industrial revolution - even the 'poor' - have A/C, TV, and automobiles, and work 8 or 10 hour service jobs instead of 16-hour manufacturing shifts. Very few factory workers die anymore.
This is an OLD freaking song and dance. Every technology or field of science is faced with fearmongers who predict the moral devastation that will result. And while accidents and evil doubtless happen and occasionally use technology as an instrument, no field of science or technology has ever killed or harmed more people than it has saved. Caution is warranted. Care is warranted. "science racing ahead of ethics and creating a hell of a mess"... Slashdot has a word for this: FUD. It has been predicted ten thousand times and has never materialized.
We are talking about using one or a few human genes in other animals to determine their biochemistry. Blocking this will only mean that we will be buying our biotechnology from China in 25 years (period... that's the only effect).
But frankly, if down the road some technology created actual intelligent hybrids... well, frankly the people in that time will simply adapt and learn to live in that world. As we always have. In 2150, this debate will look like the 1850 debate over blood transfusions.
So seriously...were these CalTech researchers purposed with finding one more way to discredit ID,
I know this is something of a lost cause, but the school's abbreviated name is spelled "Caltech", not "CalTech" or "Cal Tech". Really. Check out the institute's website to see how they use it in their own literature.
Usually, "Cal" separated from the rest of the name indicates a public school:
"Cal" (alone) = University of California, Berkeley (usually). Other UC schools are usually written "UC Irvine" or "UCI".
"Cal State" = CSU = California State University (many campuses abound).
OTOH, private universities like University of Southern California or the California Institute of Technology generally don't prefix their abbreviated names with "Cal" as a separate word. So, "Caltech" is one word. And like anything else, once you've grown used to seeing it written correctly, everything else looks Really Wrong (tm).
In the case of the Bible, the license... prohibits one from changing the source to help prevent bugs from creeping in. A lot folks have ignored this restriction, resulting in much chaos, but that's another story.
How is it this stupid rumor persists? I've been using the built-in contextual menus and other right-click functions in the Mac OS with a two-button mouse since Mac OS 8. The Mac OS has had built-in uses for multi-button for as long as I've used it, which is about fourteen years... even before scrollwheels were invented.
Mac OS X was a lovely improvement to the Mac universe, but two-button mice have been supported since long before then.
Larger bandwidth will drive the creation of new applications and content that can make use of that content. Consider the complexity and attractiveness of websites today as compared to 1999. (And don't give me the "simple websites are better - look at all this crappy flash stuff. I fundamentally agree with you, but people shop at attractive websites for the same reason they buy designer clothing. It's where the money is, so business will go there. Nerds like us can deal).
Meanwhile, have you ever used Second Life? There's as a clear demonstration I've ever seen that existing broadband throughput is not high enough.
If we want customizable virtual worlds -- and any geek who has read Snow Crash does -- we will need a couple orders of magnitude fatter pipes.
Does it bother anyone else that they express the amount of energy generated by this thing in units of power? From TFA:
Depending on the weight of the vehicle passing overhead, between five and 50kW can be generated.
Between five and 50 kilowatts? For how long? If it produces that much power for only a couple of milliseconds as the plate depresses, that's not actually very much energy. You have to wonder how much network energy you could buy with the amount of money it costs to manufacture/purchase these ramps.
But (to the naysayers that complain this is a gas tax), if you put these anywhere cars need to brake, not just downhills but also in front of stopsigns, they would be saving you money by sparing your brakes while also doing something useful with your excess kinetic energy instead of just turning it into heat.
Basically, I would have to see the math (both electrical and economic) to see if this really makes any sense one way or the other.
What drives me crazy is how trivially easy it would be to provide a widget on every page that said "static link to this revision" that would provide a link the current most revent version. You shouldn't *have* to go hunting through the history.
One programmer with access to the database could add this feature to wikipedia in about fifteen minutes.
"When Kehoe isn't blowing bubbles for businessmen, he's at home inventing again, coming up with new uses for the disappearing dye, the importance of which is hard to overstate. For decades, the color industry has been focused entirely on color fastness. No one has really thought about the potential of temporary color. That the dye was created for children's bubbles may turn out to be just a footnote, a funny story Sabnis tells at color-chemist conventions.
Among the ideas Kehoe has already mocked up are a finger paint that fades from every surface except a special paper, a hair dye that vanishes in a few hours, and disappearing-graffiti spray paint. There's a toothpaste that would turn kids' mouths a bright color until they had brushed for the requisite 30 seconds, and a soap that would do the same for hand washing.
He's also thinking outside the toy chest, mucking around in the lab on weekends making things like a Swiffer that leaves a momentary trace showing where you've Swiffered and a temporary wall paint that would let you spend a few hours with a color before committing to it. The dye's reach is so great that there are even biotech and industrial uses being discussed. "We've got stuff in the works I can't talk about that'll blow bubbles away," he says excitedly. It might take years, but, knowing Tim Kehoe, we'll see them eventually. After all, it's only a little extra work."
But anyone who thinks entertainment and fun are not important and/or not business-worthy is living a lonely, sad life on a different planet from this one.
Not so easily. First off, large heads will require proportionately broad hips at least, else the species will run into severe difficulties reproducing itself.
Only in bipeds. Quadriped hips, and even those of knuckle-walkers like most apes, allow for a wider birth canal. Extreme difficulty passing the head during birth is a pretty uniquely human phenomenon.
I can't wait until the code is out! I'm really excited by this one:
Most superfluous output
Francois Boutines - XML Voronoi diagrams generator Toulouse, France
I've been wanting to write a voronoi generator for a game-map-development project (maps for a Risk clone). But I could only find mathematical definitions, not any good code that clearly laid out the algorithm. Hopefully this program will be nice and clear (and well-documented!) so that I can reproduce the algorithm from it.
And the usual answer to that is that your self-determined slow, painful death costs the rest of us a crapload of money. By raising everyone's premiums to cover the cost if you have health insurance, or raising everyone's taxes if you don't.
Unless we had a truly 100% libertarian society that was content to let you die in pain without any intervention other than what you could pay for out of pocket. But we don't have such a society, we're not likely to anytime soon, and few of us would want to live in such a callous culture.
The grandparent: mac has always been about people who dont care enough about computers to want to swap around parts, or learn how they work.
Oh puh-lease. I have been using computers and coding pretty much daily for about twenty years. I have quite a solid understanding how computers work. I even finally built my own PC last summer, to see what the fuss was about.
I won't do that again. At my hourly consulting/coding rates, the amount of time it took to me to shop for all the parts, assemble the thing, send back the parts that weren't *quite* compatible and get replacements, test, retest, check thermal tolerances and retest that damn box could have bought me three top-of-the line G5 macintoshes. And while I did get the thing working, it still is nowhere near as stable as either of the macs I do 95% of my work on. Next time, I buy a Dell.
Time is money, friend. Some of us who do understand how computers work would nonetheless rather buy them from someone who is better at building them than we are. It's called "trade", and is a concept from the second day of Economics 101.
On the desktop I'd probably pick the Intel box, simply because of the computer's easy upgradability
I certainly wouldn't prefer an intel box because it's "upgradeable". Nevermind that nearly everything in Macs can be upgraded with third-party replacements, upgrading is just rarely worth it on any machine, aside from storage if you run out, and, occasionally, RAM. By the time there's a new processor enough speedier to justify a purchase, the best one usually fits in a different socket on a new mobo with a faster bus, better memory throughput, improved optical drives, faster graphics card, and better cooling system. I just buy a new system every 18 months instead.
A couple of questions: (1) how often do you use your computer for work? (2) how often do you upgrade you computer? Usually #1 is a lot more frequent. So I'd pick whichever computer is easier for the things you do the most often; in my case, that's the mac. YMMV. It's worth trading off ease of upgrade for ease of use. (Though I still don't get the upgrading thing. People really spend time and money "upgrading" a box that's just about obsolete?)
Quite frankly, it doesn't unless you're either extremely stupid or even more so insane. Even soft magnetics like Cast Iron don't work harden until extremely high temperatures are reached.
Okay, so you work in a metal shop, and I'm working as a developer - it's been ten years since my materials engineering courses in college. Point taken. But I refuse to believe my memory of materials class is as bad as all that. Heating is not the only known method to achieve hardening. Cold work can also harden.
I clearly remember that applying deformation will cause hardening to most metals, even (especially) at cold temperatures, because crystalline irregularities drop to lower-energy states during deformation. This is the principle behind shot peening, for example, which hardens the surface of an object by repeatedly blasting it with high-velocity ball bearings, causing zillions of little dents.
I remember cutting a pen cap longitudinally with a diamond say and using a hardness tester to demonstrate that the metal had been hardened by cold work near where the thread had been cut.
Now I agree that polishing probably does not harder a surface significantly because it primarily abrades a material rather than deforms it.
This process only works on materials with metallic properties. You can't peen-harden wood or glass, for example. So I'm very skeptical about it working on this aluminum material, which is an oxide described as a ceramic.
So Zope is easy to learn, huh? And I'd been holding off because people had told me it's fairly difficult to learn.
Repeat after me, everyone: a learning curve is a graph of Knowledge or Skill (independent/vertical axis) vs. Time or Effort (horizontal, dependant access). A "steep" learning curve means you gain knowledge quickly given little effort. A "steep learning curve" is a good thing.
If you mean it takes forever to learn the damn thing, the term you want is "shallow learning curve".
Your constraints vary a lot from languange to languange.
But any class needs to start with a good, solid constructor. It's your foundation.
After that, correctly-privileged members, comprehensible method names, and solid documentation will ensure that you're well on your way to a solid class.
If my aging memory serves correct, one of the key issues that killed off America's SST project was potential damage to the Ozone layer. Has this problem been solved, or simply ignored?
I'm not certain which SST program you mean (SST just means supersonic transport, and includes the Concorde)... perhaps one of the more aggressive ideas like the National Aerospace Plane concept of the 1980's.
People were worried about ozone damage, but unless it was really catastrophic an environmental concern like that would never stop a major project if there was money to be made, short of a major international treaty.
No, economic and engineering factors killed the NASP and similar projects. It was cold-war thinking that wasn't even doable on a military budget at the time, and is questionable if it's doable now. It certainly had no chance of producing a profitable civilian commercial venture. Sure, NY to Tokyo in 2 hours is great, but not if you have to play 1.5 million for a ticket.
Agreed. All these concerns about people living longer or eternally are false, poorly reasoned, and/or overinflated. The benefits of curing aging far, far outweigh any conceivable drawbacks.
Futurist/biotechnologist Aubrey DeGrey has an excellent deconstruction of all the usual arguments on his website. I could repeat them, but not better than the original:
The Hyperion story is the most extreme example I know of Sci Fi's most common problem. The man wrote an incredibly rich story with fascinating charaters, incredible intrigue, sweeping creative vistas... the most compelling page-turner I have read in a decade.
With a sucky ending. Didn't make sense, and the merged resolution of the two most interesting particular characters was, I thought, both nonsensical and unsatisfying. The plot crux of the series... the tombs and the shrike... had very little to do with the ending, which was about a literal deux ex machina. I absolutely hate it when authors write a fascinating plot about one thing, and then end it by bringing in an entirely different issue... which SF does frequently and of which Simmons is entirely guilty.
(Note - I only read the Hyperion books, not the Endymion books. I was too disappointed in the ending of The Fall to be inspired to read on.)
That said... all the writing, plot, characterization, setiing up until the end is so fantastically good that I would still recommend reading them, even with a bad ending. It's worth it for the rest of the story. Particularly the first book, which is entirely devoid of an ending.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that you voted for this guy, twice!
Oh give us a break. Fewer than half of us did, the first time.
The second time, he'd had four years to brainwash the sheeple. Them's not fair fighting.
EVERY human who ever received an injection of embryonic stem cells had terminal cancer 18 months later resulting from the injection.
There's a bold statement of fact. Reference, please?
And doing genetic research that's destructive to society because it has a possibilty of cheapening life.
... and that of their children ... and their pets ... and their plants.
... too much death, especially since now we have computer graphics to pick up some of the slack.
"possibility of cheapening life". That's rich.
150 years ago in the US most people worked 16-hour grueling manufacturing shifts. Workers died and were mutilated on the job regularly, including children, and society was generally pretty callous to all this. The average lifespan wasn't a whole lot more than half of today's.
Even 50 years ago death was far more common, and the world wars killed a number of people that's almost incomprehensible.
Today, a few coal miners dying is national news, instead of a regular occurrence. People live 85+ years, and spend increasingly large amounts of their income protecting their health
A developed nation losing 2000 people in a war is big news - and sparks a national debate. Not so long ago, that was peanuts.
Most nations have eliminated capital punishment. All but a handful have eliminated it for minors and the mentally ill. Nations spend buckets of money on their citizens' lifespans and health. In fact, developed nations spend more on that than on anything else.
Scientists and educators are progressively more careful and less wasteful about using animals in research and education. Even the venerable frog dissection is nearly eliminated in schools these days
No, we're not cheapening life, or even risking that. On the contrary, we're clinging to it with tenacity and desperation more every year.
Even 'moral values' issues like abortion are only becoming issues the last few decades because life has actually started to become a precious thing. 100 years ago people didn't spend much more time thinking about abortion than they did about animal testing.
A ban on "creating human-animal hybrids" is more debatable but we damn sure better get a line drawn somewhere and we better do it fast or science is going to race out ahead of ethics and make one hell of a mess for someone to clean up.
... and both average and median wealth and health worldwide are at the highest points in history.
... Slashdot has a word for this: FUD. It has been predicted ten thousand times and has never materialized.
... that's the only effect).
... well, frankly the people in that time will simply adapt and learn to live in that world. As we always have. In 2150, this debate will look like the 1850 debate over blood transfusions.
I call bullshit.
In 1985, genetic engineering would create monster hybrids. Real life: some GM crops have cross-pollination problems, but insulin and other GenE drugs save millions from painful early death or disability.
In 1980, VHS would give everyone private access to porn. The resulting moral oblivion would destroy worker productivity. Real life: a billion people a day look at porn on the net now
In 1975, IVF was going to create soulless babies and violate the sanctity of the womb. Real life: 50k couples/year can have happy, healthy children.
In 1960, nuclear power would turn the whole world into a toxic wasteland with mutated, deformed babies. Today: a few accidents, and storage is a political football, but billions have power and birth defects are down. Power in the winter saves lives, lots of them.
In 1930, The zipper would allow unfettered rapid access to self abuse, with the same effects predicted as for porn in 1980. Today - do you feel like undoing leather trouser laces just to take a leak?
In 1850, the blood transfusion violated the sanctity of the body. Putting one person's essence into another would create a soulless monstrosity. Today: No, really, that's what religious conservatives said at the time. I'm not kidding.
In 1800, The automatic loom would put everyone out of work and impoversh the world. Today: people from countries that underwent the industrial revolution - even the 'poor' - have A/C, TV, and automobiles, and work 8 or 10 hour service jobs instead of 16-hour manufacturing shifts. Very few factory workers die anymore.
This is an OLD freaking song and dance. Every technology or field of science is faced with fearmongers who predict the moral devastation that will result. And while accidents and evil doubtless happen and occasionally use technology as an instrument, no field of science or technology has ever killed or harmed more people than it has saved. Caution is warranted. Care is warranted. "science racing ahead of ethics and creating a hell of a mess"
We are talking about using one or a few human genes in other animals to determine their biochemistry. Blocking this will only mean that we will be buying our biotechnology from China in 25 years (period
But frankly, if down the road some technology created actual intelligent hybrids
The sky is NOT falling. And it isn't gonna.
I don't see liberals supporting the Constitutional protection of property rights against eminent domain abuse.
This liberal does.
You're making quite an assumption. Not every "liberal" agrees with every position Souter takes.
I know this is something of a lost cause, but the school's abbreviated name is spelled "Caltech", not "CalTech" or "Cal Tech". Really. Check out the institute's website to see how they use it in their own literature.
Usually, "Cal" separated from the rest of the name indicates a public school:
OTOH, private universities like University of Southern California or the California Institute of Technology generally don't prefix their abbreviated names with "Cal" as a separate word. So, "Caltech" is one word. And like anything else, once you've grown used to seeing it written correctly, everything else looks Really Wrong (tm).
Thanks for listening...
In the case of the Bible, the license ... prohibits one from changing the source to help prevent bugs from creeping in. A lot folks have ignored this restriction, resulting in much chaos, but that's another story.
Indeed, at this point the project's archive contains more branches than a burning bush!
How is it this stupid rumor persists? I've been using the built-in contextual menus and other right-click functions in the Mac OS with a two-button mouse since Mac OS 8. The Mac OS has had built-in uses for multi-button for as long as I've used it, which is about fourteen years ... even before scrollwheels were invented.
Mac OS X was a lovely improvement to the Mac universe, but two-button mice have been supported since long before then.
Larger bandwidth will drive the creation of new applications and content that can make use of that content. Consider the complexity and attractiveness of websites today as compared to 1999. (And don't give me the "simple websites are better - look at all this crappy flash stuff. I fundamentally agree with you, but people shop at attractive websites for the same reason they buy designer clothing. It's where the money is, so business will go there. Nerds like us can deal).
Meanwhile, have you ever used Second Life? There's as a clear demonstration I've ever seen that existing broadband throughput is not high enough.
If we want customizable virtual worlds -- and any geek who has read Snow Crash does -- we will need a couple orders of magnitude fatter pipes.
Does it bother anyone else that they express the amount of energy generated by this thing in units of power? From TFA:
Depending on the weight of the vehicle passing overhead, between five and 50kW can be generated.
Between five and 50 kilowatts? For how long? If it produces that much power for only a couple of milliseconds as the plate depresses, that's not actually very much energy. You have to wonder how much network energy you could buy with the amount of money it costs to manufacture/purchase these ramps.
But (to the naysayers that complain this is a gas tax), if you put these anywhere cars need to brake, not just downhills but also in front of stopsigns, they would be saving you money by sparing your brakes while also doing something useful with your excess kinetic energy instead of just turning it into heat.
Basically, I would have to see the math (both electrical and economic) to see if this really makes any sense one way or the other.
RTFA: it was a blind review. The experts were given printouts of the text of both articles, and weren't told what the source was.
What drives me crazy is how trivially easy it would be to provide a widget on every page that said "static link to this revision" that would provide a link the current most revent version. You shouldn't *have* to go hunting through the history.
One programmer with access to the database could add this feature to wikipedia in about fifteen minutes.
...and wanted to destabilize it before it beame a threat. What better way than to strike at a likely pivotal figure
I figure one of those crabship slicer beams would have been a more efficient method to eliminate the threat. Not so good for plot, though.
Um, from TFA:
But anyone who thinks entertainment and fun are not important and/or not business-worthy is living a lonely, sad life on a different planet from this one.
Not so easily. First off, large heads will require proportionately broad hips at least, else the species will run into severe difficulties reproducing itself.
Only in bipeds. Quadriped hips, and even those of knuckle-walkers like most apes, allow for a wider birth canal. Extreme difficulty passing the head during birth is a pretty uniquely human phenomenon.
I can't wait until the code is out! I'm really excited by this one:
Most superfluous output
Francois Boutines - XML Voronoi diagrams generator
Toulouse, France
I've been wanting to write a voronoi generator for a game-map-development project (maps for a Risk clone). But I could only find mathematical definitions, not any good code that clearly laid out the algorithm. Hopefully this program will be nice and clear (and well-documented!) so that I can reproduce the algorithm from it.
And the usual answer to that is that your self-determined slow, painful death costs the rest of us a crapload of money. By raising everyone's premiums to cover the cost if you have health insurance, or raising everyone's taxes if you don't.
Unless we had a truly 100% libertarian society that was content to let you die in pain without any intervention other than what you could pay for out of pocket. But we don't have such a society, we're not likely to anytime soon, and few of us would want to live in such a callous culture.
The grandparent:
mac has always been about people who dont care enough about computers to want to swap around parts, or learn how they work.
Oh puh-lease. I have been using computers and coding pretty much daily for about twenty years. I have quite a solid understanding how computers work. I even finally built my own PC last summer, to see what the fuss was about.
I won't do that again. At my hourly consulting/coding rates, the amount of time it took to me to shop for all the parts, assemble the thing, send back the parts that weren't *quite* compatible and get replacements, test, retest, check thermal tolerances and retest that damn box could have bought me three top-of-the line G5 macintoshes. And while I did get the thing working, it still is nowhere near as stable as either of the macs I do 95% of my work on. Next time, I buy a Dell.
Time is money, friend. Some of us who do understand how computers work would nonetheless rather buy them from someone who is better at building them than we are. It's called "trade", and is a concept from the second day of Economics 101.
On the desktop I'd probably pick the Intel box, simply because of the computer's easy upgradability
I certainly wouldn't prefer an intel box because it's "upgradeable". Nevermind that nearly everything in Macs can be upgraded with third-party replacements, upgrading is just rarely worth it on any machine, aside from storage if you run out, and, occasionally, RAM. By the time there's a new processor enough speedier to justify a purchase, the best one usually fits in a different socket on a new mobo with a faster bus, better memory throughput, improved optical drives, faster graphics card, and better cooling system. I just buy a new system every 18 months instead.
A couple of questions: (1) how often do you use your computer for work? (2) how often do you upgrade you computer? Usually #1 is a lot more frequent. So I'd pick whichever computer is easier for the things you do the most often; in my case, that's the mac. YMMV. It's worth trading off ease of upgrade for ease of use. (Though I still don't get the upgrading thing. People really spend time and money "upgrading" a box that's just about obsolete?)
I finally got it, though. Someone had their iPod in their suit, which managed to scratch their results.
I thought it meant somebody's nano scratched the word "RESULT" into the back of their suit.
Quite frankly, it doesn't unless you're either extremely stupid or even more so insane. Even soft magnetics like Cast Iron don't work harden until extremely high temperatures are reached.
Okay, so you work in a metal shop, and I'm working as a developer - it's been ten years since my materials engineering courses in college. Point taken. But I refuse to believe my memory of materials class is as bad as all that. Heating is not the only known method to achieve hardening. Cold work can also harden.
I clearly remember that applying deformation will cause hardening to most metals, even (especially) at cold temperatures, because crystalline irregularities drop to lower-energy states during deformation. This is the principle behind shot peening, for example, which hardens the surface of an object by repeatedly blasting it with high-velocity ball bearings, causing zillions of little dents.
I remember cutting a pen cap longitudinally with a diamond say and using a hardness tester to demonstrate that the metal had been hardened by cold work near where the thread had been cut.
See Shot peening and
Cold work.
Now I agree that polishing probably does not harder a surface significantly because it primarily abrades a material rather than deforms it.
This process only works on materials with metallic properties. You can't peen-harden wood or glass, for example. So I'm very skeptical about it working on this aluminum material, which is an oxide described as a ceramic.
Zope has a quite a steep learning curve,
So Zope is easy to learn, huh? And I'd been holding off because people had told me it's fairly difficult to learn.
Repeat after me, everyone: a learning curve is a graph of Knowledge or Skill (independent/vertical axis) vs. Time or Effort (horizontal, dependant access). A "steep" learning curve means you gain knowledge quickly given little effort. A "steep learning curve" is a good thing.
If you mean it takes forever to learn the damn thing, the term you want is "shallow learning curve".
HTH.
Your constraints vary a lot from languange to languange.
But any class needs to start with a good, solid constructor. It's your foundation.
After that, correctly-privileged members, comprehensible method names, and solid documentation will ensure that you're well on your way to a solid class.
If my aging memory serves correct, one of the key issues that killed off America's SST project was potential damage to the Ozone layer. Has this problem been solved, or simply ignored?
... perhaps one of the more aggressive ideas like the National Aerospace Plane concept of the 1980's.
I'm not certain which SST program you mean (SST just means supersonic transport, and includes the Concorde)
People were worried about ozone damage, but unless it was really catastrophic an environmental concern like that would never stop a major project if there was money to be made, short of a major international treaty.
No, economic and engineering factors killed the NASP and similar projects. It was cold-war thinking that wasn't even doable on a military budget at the time, and is questionable if it's doable now. It certainly had no chance of producing a profitable civilian commercial venture. Sure, NY to Tokyo in 2 hours is great, but not if you have to play 1.5 million for a ticket.
Agreed. All these concerns about people living longer or eternally are false, poorly reasoned, and/or overinflated. The benefits of curing aging far, far outweigh any conceivable drawbacks.
Futurist/biotechnologist Aubrey DeGrey has an excellent deconstruction of all the usual arguments on his website. I could repeat them, but not better than the original:
http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/concerns.htm
The Hyperion story is the most extreme example I know of Sci Fi's most common problem. The man wrote an incredibly rich story with fascinating charaters, incredible intrigue, sweeping creative vistas ... the most compelling page-turner I have read in a decade.
... the tombs and the shrike ... had very little to do with the ending, which was about a literal deux ex machina. I absolutely hate it when authors write a fascinating plot about one thing, and then end it by bringing in an entirely different issue ... which SF does frequently and of which Simmons is entirely guilty.
... all the writing, plot, characterization, setiing up until the end is so fantastically good that I would still recommend reading them, even with a bad ending. It's worth it for the rest of the story. Particularly the first book, which is entirely devoid of an ending.
With a sucky ending. Didn't make sense, and the merged resolution of the two most interesting particular characters was, I thought, both nonsensical and unsatisfying. The plot crux of the series
(Note - I only read the Hyperion books, not the Endymion books. I was too disappointed in the ending of The Fall to be inspired to read on.)
That said